Showing papers in "Mln in 1990"

A poetics of postmodernism : history, theory, fiction

Abstract: Postmodernisme membawa berbagai efek terhadap kehidupan. Salah satunya dalam karya sastra termasuk puisi. Dimulai dengan modernisme tahun 1960an. Buku ini berisi permasalahan sejarah postmodernisme dan kritik-kritik tentang postmodernisme terhadap puisi, juga model postmodernisme terhadap parodi dan politik. Selain memberikan fokus terhadap kesejarahan metafiksi.

L'Homme de Parole

Abstract: "Moins comme un long bavardage que comme un recit de reve d'une ampleur demesuree, tel m'apparalt l'ensemble de mes ecrits. . .".; cette confidence, murmuree comme en passant, avec un sourire desabuse que l'on croit voir s'esquisser au coin des levres, suffirait 'a m'interdire toute glose, necessairement seconde, sinon bavarde, sur ces ecrits en effet si longs, quoique pas plus, somme toute que la Recherche du temps perdu 'a quoi ils s'apparentent par bien des traits, si, par un ricochet imprevisible, ne m'etait revenue la phrase placee en tete des recits de reve intitules Nuits sans nuit (et quelquesjours sans jour), phrase qui ouvre l'Aurelia de Gerard de Nerval: "Le reve est une seconde vie." D'ordinaire, ces deux vies sont strictement separees, et Nerval decrit bien l'effroi qui le saisit 'a chaque fois qu'il lui arrive de franchir "ces portes d'ivoire ou de corne qui nous separent du monde invisible" (l'ivoire evoque d'abord la tour d'ivoire, image consacree pour la solitude poetique, mais convient aussi bien au monde "propre"-idios, dit Heraclite -du reve, comme, par sa paleur jaunie, il est deja' couleur de mort, au reste obtenu par la tuerie, le plus souvent illegale, de ces nobles pachydermes aux somptueuses defenses). Mais Aurelia-et toute la folie de Nerval-est comme un long recit de reve, oui les limites entre les deux mondes se sont effacees, parce que le reve, comme un fleuve qui sort de son lit ou une porte de ses gonds, a deborde et inonde "la vie reelle,"2 de sorte

The Limits of theory

Abstract: This collection of eight essays by some of today's most innovative and seminal thinkers argues that there is a limit beyond which the enterprise of literary theory becomes something different from what it presents itself as being. These writers ask, in different ways, how theory functions and how it might preserve within its own practices and effects the freedom of reading, the presence of the real, and the challenge of a voice speaking outside the rhetorics of mastery.

Erotic Susceptibility and Tuberculosis: Literary Images of a Pathology

Abstract: What is striking about tuberculosis as a disease-in contrast to other important disease representations-syphilis, let's say, or leprosy-is that tuberculosis gets remarkably good press from writers of belles lettres-especially in the first two-thirds of the 19th century. Rene and Jean Dubos characterize this literary treatment as "perverted sentimentalism," and indeed, considering the nastiness of the disease and its ubiquity, it is hard to imagine at first why permanent diarrhea, ceaseless coughing, spitting up of yellow phlegm then bright red blood, having a grotesquely swollen neck after the lymph nodes have bagged a few of the circulating bacilli, not to mention the night sweats, fever, sleeplessness, opium addiction, emaciation, sunken chest, and clawlike hands-it is hard to imagine how the disease could have been romanticized at all.' Nor was it exactly the privilege of the few to have it. In the 19th century, according to Dubos, one-half of the population of England suffered from it with varying degrees of severity (9). At the beginning of the 20th century, practically all Americans were tuberculin positive, that is, had been exposed at one time or another to the

Discourse as Event: Foucault, Writing, and Literature

Abstract: In the second Preface to what he claimed was his first book (having disavowed his chronologically first book), Michel Foucault writes: "I would like that this object-event [by which he means Madness and Civilization], almost imperceptible among so many others, re-copy, fragment, repeat, simulate and double itself, [and] disappear finally without ever allowing the one who happened to produce it to be able to claim mastery over it, to impose what he meant, to say what he had to say." In the same Preface, however, Foucault also states that he wants his book to be "simultaneously battle and arms, strategy and shock, struggle and trophy (or wound), conjuncture and vestige, irregular encounter and repeatable scene."1 While these two desires are not exactly contradictory, it is not immediately clear how they are related. I would like to suggest that they reflect or at least anticipate two distinguishable aspects of a theorization of writing Foucault will pursue until at least midway through his career: the first assumes a highly self-conscious modernist conception of writing as a self-reflexive activity that displaces the writer and dispossesses him or her of a coherent identity; the second yields a more combative image of writing as a transitive intervention, a means by which the hardly visible coercive powers of discourse are confronted, wrestled with, even subverted, thereby revealing the ultimate inadequacy of discursive knowl-

Golden Age Satire: Transformations of Genre

Abstract: The term satire is generally construed as a modal category. It was, and still is, used to describe certain thematic constants, criticism of social or moral conditions, as well as a specific tone, in works of a given period. As a mode, in the sense Northrop Frye or, lately, Claudio Guillen, understood it, satire was studied in narrative works-from the Picaresque to Cervantine fiction and in poetic and dramatic compositions.' This conception of satire informs the well-known studies of K. Scholberg on medieval and sixteenth century satirical works. Following Hodgart, Scholberg claims in his "nota preliminar" to Algunos aspectos de la satira en el siglo XVI:

Pleberio's Lost Investment: The Worldly Perspective of Celestina, Act 21

Abstract: Pleberio's lament for Melibea, which occupies virtually all of Celestina's last act, invites the scrutiny of readers who, in the absence of third-person authorial guidance within the text of this engimatic novel-in-dialogue, hope to find a trustworthy spokesman for the author. Their hopes are not fulfilled. Although Marcel Bataillon's reasons for rejecting Pleberio as the author's mouthpiece have not inspired general agreement, the critical consensus now accepts his conclusion:

Blanchot and Mallarme

Abstract: Maurice Blanchot is undoubtedly one of France's most fascinating and influential literary figures, and it is for these qualities that his work as a critic is perhaps best known. In this paper I want to look more closely at one small, but nonetheless significant aspect of Blanchot's writing, his reading of the work of the poet Stephane Mallarm6. Indeed, to read Blanchot's literary essays or non-fiction, if I may be allowed the naive terms at this stage, is repeatedly to encounter not so much a repertoire of critical concepts as a configuration of proper names. The names are familiar ones: Kafka, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Rene Char, and, perhaps best known of all, Mallarm6 himself.' What these names have in common is that they recur in Blanchot's work with a certain force of repetition and excess. Each signs, for Blanchot, a text or a writing that enacts a moment of crisis in the exploration of the space of literature. But literature is not so much challenged as constituted in such moments of aesthetic questioning and doubt, and the source of the crisis lies less in the individual works of the authors Blanchot cites than in the exorbitant logic of literature itself, which such texts serve to exemplify or instantiate. Yet while the texts Blanchot names are in this respect paradigmatic, they display essential traits of literature without being themselves constituted as examples of anything other than themselves. As names in Blanchot's writing, they do not represent models to be emulated or norms to be followed. They are constituted rather as a series of singular protagonists in the

Body, Soul, and Immortality: Some Readings in Dante's Commedia

Abstract: I want to examine Dante's handling in the Commedia of several themes that center around the relation between body and soul. I begin with Inferno XIII because it offers interesting access to ideas that recur significantly throughout the poem. These ideas, although they are found in intellectual contexts that deal with poetry, philosophy, and theology, reveal a passionate concern for "body" that has not, I think, been sufficiently recognized. The figure of Pier delle Vigne-chancellor for Frederick 11, renowned writer in the aureate style, suicide whose otherworldly body is a tree that bleeds when its branches are snapped-will open most of the questions of allegory, corporeal life, and immortality to be pursued in this discussion. The pathless wood of Inferno XIII is something of a paradox: there is actually a bewildering array of paths leading out of this canto, and I have had rigorously to abstain from pursuing several obvious connections-e.g., with Brunetto Latini, Cato, and even Virgil himself-and some not so obvious ones, in order to keep the paper to a manageable length. A sense of Dante's conception of Pier perhaps best emerges from studying his transformation of the Polydorus material of Aeneid 111, which "Virgil" himself identifies with the fate of the suicides. In the Polydorus episode, Aeneas becomes frozen in horror as he uproots some myrtle shoots for the purpose of making a sacrificial wreath, both because of their oozing blood and

Sublimity and Theatricality: Romantic "Pre-Postmodernism" in Schiller and Coleridge

Abstract: In a crusty response to the fashionable new concept called "aesthetics," Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1798: "One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art."' Ironically, Schlegel's facetious demand that aesthetics encompass both discursive and imaginative endeavor has acquired prescriptive status for criticism today, at a time when it appears that one can no more do philosophy without taking into accout the premises of art than one can practice or consider art without, at least to some extent, doing philosophy. Art exists today, or it takes its place in the "artworld," as Arthur Danto writes, only if it is constituted as "art" by philosophical theory.2 Philosophy is done today, as thinkers ranging from Derrida to Hacking have recognized, only by acknowledging its own foundation in the arts. Even science, notes Paul Feyerabend,3 has acknowledged its aesthetic ground. Thus physicists speak of the "big bang," of "quarks" and "black holes," cognizant of the figurative nature of their language. The aestheticism occurring across the disciplines has prompted Virgil Nemoianu, in a recent essay subtitled "The Growth of Aesthetic Power,"4 to propose what he calls "neo-aestheticism" as the only approach to interdisciplinary study sufficiently flexible and "open" to be able to accommodate its seemingly irreconcilable diversity. Distinct from the "aestheticism" char-

Renaissance Dialogue Into Novel: Cervantes's Coloquio

Abstract: In her book on Renaissance genre theory, The Resources of Kind, Rosalie Colie observes that "the Renaissance is rich in uncanonical kinds" (76). In Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, as in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, "the principal kinds exploited are non-poetic: they carry an early humanist preoccupation into a later age, insisting on elevating to belletristic status kinds which had slipped below the level of artistic attention. In the literature of the late Renaissance there are many examples of such elevation" (82). One example that Colie might have cited is El coloquio de los perros. Cervantes's novel in dialogue form is one of the many indications that Marcel Bataillon was right in asserting that "La obra de Cervantes es la de un hombre que permanece, hasta lo uitimo, fiel a ideas de su juventud, a habitos de pensamiento que la epoca de Felipe II habia recibido de la del Emperador" (Erasmo y Esparia 2: 401). For a modern reader the title Coloquio de los perros is likely to recall Erasmus's Colloquia, as the momentary doubt over whether the de in the title is to be taken as subjective or objective genitive recalls his Moriae Encomium or its alternative title Laus stultitiae. The Moria, as Erasmus usually called it, is an oration on the subject of folly delivered by Folly herself; the participants in Cervantes's Coloquio are dogs and its subject-one of its many subjects-is a dog's life in a world controlled by men. The first readers of the Novelas ejemplares, however, were probably less inclined to associate Cervantes's title with Erasmus. In 1613, when the Novelas ejemplares were first published, many of Erasmus's works had been for more

Complicity and Forgetting

Abstract: There is no escaping the political, for culture itself is profoundly political. It is not merely a matter of the social versus the individual, of ideologies to be analyzed and criticized, of extra-textual determinants of the text to be delimited and defined. It is not even a question of evaluating literature and art according to political criteria. The political cannot be reduced to a category of intelligibility or to a principle of judgment. Prior to these, there is a politics already immanent to, and implicated within, the movement of writing itself. My starting point for this essay is an embarrassing and very specific question: what is the relationship between the young Paul De Man's intellectual and literary collaboration (at the very least) with the Nazi occupation of Belgium, and his mature intellectual work, produced long after the War, and which continues to have so massive a presence, and so profound an influence, in the American academy today? Many people-De Man's colleagues and students in particular-would like to avoid this question. They would not like to see their memories of Paul De Man, their regard for him as critic and teacher, tarnished by references to a shady and forgotten political past. They do not want to consider that such a model of intellectual lucidity, rigor, and insight was himself, at one point, touched by the most fatal blindness. They would like to see De Man's own work, at least, preserved from the ideological selfmystification, the loss of intentional control, the "repetition of ...

"Work in Progress": The Poetic Creativity of three Seventeenth-Century Poets

Abstract: En abril pasado, teniendo yo decidido titular un probable diario poetico, que es este, OBRA EN MARCHA-indicacion que define bien mi inquieto trabajo incesantemente aumentativo-vi que James Joyce utilizaba WORK IN PROGRESS para los trozos que viene publicando de su nuevo libro en TRANSITION de Paris. Me gusto pero me fastidio-no hay cosa que me moleste mas que un parecido-la coincidencia. Y no puedo, no quiero que el encuentro ague mi fiesta (Jimenez 4).

The Discourse of the "Whore": An Economy of Sacrifice

Abstract: In her first letter to Abelard, a letter which opens the epistolary exchange now known as the Correspondance, Heloise tells us a surprising story. Although addressed to an anonymous friend, the Historia Calamitatum, a letter in which Abelard narrates "the story of his misfortunes," accidentally reached Heloise, who decided to respond to it in place of its original and probably fictive adressee. But this decision poses a problem: from what position can Heloise respond to Abelard's text? Heloise is indeed both Abelard's wife and the Mother Superior of the oratory he founded, the Paraclete. She can therefore address him from a secular or a religious position. Surprisingly, however, she refuses both, and instead chooses a much more provocative mode of address. In the course of her letter, she first exchanges her monastic title of "Mother Superior" for the still honorable title of "wife," then for the more dubious title of "lover," and finally for the shameful title of "whore"; she shockingly declares that she prefers the name of "whore" to the name of "wife." It is therefore a "whore" who addresses Abelard in the Correspondance, a "whore" who forces us, the belated addressees of her letters, to read anew the word "whore" itself. Although this word usually refers to a woman who puts sexual relations on the most overtly economic basis possible, Heloise's first letter will not, as we will see, allow us to remain within this

Historical Situations in Borges

Abstract: Much of the critical work on Borges has been blinded by the notion that "Borges" is synonymous with irrealidad.1 The frequency and density of references to politics, history and everyday life have been glossed over or, even worse, neutralized by the common assertion that such references are part of a literary game. Borges's complex discussions of time have been reduced in much of the criticism to notions of circularity, though his major writings on the subject (including "Nueva refutacion del tiempo," "El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan" and "El milagro secreto") assert that ideas of circular and nonlinear time are pleasant metaphysical diversions but that those who interest themselves in these notions are themselves mortal.2 Similarly, the constant references by Borges to

Antonomasia: Leibniz and the Baroque

Abstract: Leibniz knows no antinomies, only antonomasia. Neither a law nor a principle stands in conflict with another equally valid one; rather, a name takes the place of a concept and a concept replaces a name. Language and thought-not reason and intuition-find themselves at odds. Yet antonomasia, unlike antinomia, never comes down to a critical decision. Although the labyrinth of freedom to which Leibniz refers throughout his writings has often been seen as a prefiguration of the third antinomy of pure reason, it not only does not bring to light an essential conflict of human reason with itself; it, like all labyrinths, aims at the avoidance of conflict altogether. Not without reason, then, does the The'odide, although always engaged in the refutation of contrary doctrines, eschew not only polemics but also a general critique of every possible adversarial position. An antinomy interrupts the progress of reason on its way towards a conception of the whole; antonomasia, on the other hand, disrupts the continuity of denomination such that the relation of language to conceptuality appears as a problem, the solution to which demands ever more complex alterations in both linguistic and conceptual structures. Yet these alterations never evince an ineluctable-Kant says fated-conflict. Canonized not only in the definition common to Greek rhetoricians and Quintilian-Antonomasia, quae aliquid pro nomine partbut also in various revisions, including its exact inverse,1 antonomasia itself demonstrates the arbitrariness of definition and

Narrative of Narrative (Tristram Shandy)

Abstract: Tristram Shandy presents an extreme in novelistic interpretation, since the presumed events of the narrative, of Tristram's autobiography and the Shandy family history, are not only told out of order, but are frequently cut off and fragmentary. At times, the suggestion of a word causes the narrative to jump from an event in 1718, say, to Toby's battle experience at Namur in 1695. The plot is peculiar in its appearance of non-linearity and disorder. Also, related to this, Tristram frequently interrupts the narrated events and reflexively calls attention to the question of narration itself. We will here propose that the attendant interpretive problems of this odd narrative are, for the most part, due to a confusion over the concept of plot. The tendency of much of the criticism is to take the events that the narrator says he is narrating unquestioningly as the plot of the novel. The narrator's statements about narrating (as journey, line, digression, etc.) and his recounting of what he is doing and when he is doing it are then seen as somehow above or beyond the plot, as if' these were outside the domain of the narrative proper. Even recent critically sophisticated readings -for instance, Hillis Miller's using Shandy as an exemplar of the deconstruction of linear plot, and Dennis Allen's attending to the linguistic play of the novel-seem to privilege the comments of the narrator, distancing them from the rest of the narrative, and almost taking them as if they were literal, as critical comments on narrative rather than as part of the narrative itself.'