Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2001"

Scientia Potestas Est – Knowledge is Power: Francis Bacon to Michel Foucault

Abstract: The now-famous equation, “knowledge is power” (“scientia potestas est”), was coined by Francis Bacon in 1597. Since then it has been rephrased in a wide variety of contexts from Thomas Hobbes to Michel Foucault. In recent years, this elusive topos has in fact proved essential to the poststructuralist critique of the humanist subject. Acknowledging the impossibility of doing justice, in this essay, to the complexities of Bacon’s and the poststructuralists’ respective articulations of knowledge and power, I will focus primarily on a selection of significant aphorisms that encapsulate Bacon’s main ideas on science and the state. In the second half of the essay I also assess Michel Foucault’s immensely influential “knowledge/power” (“pouvoir/savoir”) binomial. Both Bacon’s and Foucault’s ideas will be filtered through Pierre Bourdieu’s restatement of hierarchically organized structures of knowledge and power. In the last few pages I bring into my discussion Foucault’s later writings on ethics and disciplinarity – the so-called “final Foucault” or “1980s Foucault” – which allow the self both a greater degree of freedom and larger room for maneuver in organizing its resistance to the coercion of dominant powers. Whereas Foucault moves from his earlier suspicion of public forms of learning and their attending institutions (e.g., existing hierarchies, discursive conventions) to an instrumental appropriation by the self of that learning for the purposes of self-cultivation, both Bacon and Bourdieu seem to agree that power and knowledge are most clearly seen in the creation and self-reproduction of a professional class of experts in science and communication whose main interest is to keep control over official institutions of learning.

Confronting Globalization: Cultural Studies Versus Comparative Literature Studies?

Abstract: In the current era, why is everybody talking about globalization? Will globalization bring us a happier life, or will it bring us better opportunities to develop our production and academic research? The answer is both yes and no For as far as scholars of the humanities, or more specifically, comparatists are concerned, globalization is not necessarily a good thing It has raised severe challenges against our intellectual life and literary scholarship Of course, some of us do welcome the advent of globalization viewing it as a rare opportunity to develop East-West comparative literature and cultural studies This is perhaps one of the reasons why talking a lot about globalization has become an academic fashion within and without our discipline, especially in China in recent years But why are there so many people talking about globalization, especially those of the humanities and social sciences? Because there is indeed a lot to say about this hot topic: economic globalization, financial globalization, political globalization, cultural globalization and even mass media globalization, all of which are influencing our mode of thinking and penetrating our academic life in varying degrees

The Gothic as Maternal Legacy in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle

Abstract: Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle is a novel extremely rich in Gothic resonances, making numerous approaches to the Gothicness of the book possible. My analysis will focus on the roots of protagonist Joan Foster’s fascination with the Gothic. What I intend to argue is that, in contrast with most analyses of the novel, the Gothic is present not only in the form of cliches which Joan (wrongfully) imposes on real people and real situations; in fact, it is not by mere chance that Joan turns to writing Costume Gothics in order to satisfy her desire for romance. The roots of her fascination with the genre lie with the two most influential people of her life: her mother Frances Delacourt and her surrogate mother Aunt Lou who educate her early into the female/maternal legacy of Gothic thinking which manifests itself in Joan’s views on all aspects of life: problems of selfhood, personal relationships as well as personal aspirations. Moreover, the fact that the Gothic permeates the lives and thoughts of all the significant female characters of the novel indicates that female existence as a whole is presented by Atwood as essentially and inevitably Gothic. I will pursue this line of argument by first discussing the significance of the two mother figures in Joan’s life as well as the process of Joan’s education into patterns of female existence that bear a striking resemblance to such patterns common enough in the Gothic. I will also show how the creative process of writing her Gothic novels as well as her “Lady Oracle” poems contributes to Joan’s understanding that the bonds that connect her with her mother are primarily bonds of love and not of hate as she thought before, and that under the disguise of apparent differences they do share whatever is essential about womanhood. It is through this realization that Joan can set herself free from the past – by coming to terms with it rather than discarding it – and may, thus, actually start working on her present.

Minimalism vs. Postmodernism in Contemporary American Fiction

Abstract: The essay constructs minimalism in contemporary American fiction as both an extension of postmodernism and a revolt against it, a new development It means that minimalism is a response to the same (ie, postmodernist) view of the world, but the same philosophical conclusions regarding the postmodern nature of the world result in a radically different ars poetica In the minimalist writer’s aesthetic decisions, the postmodernist habit is the real generative factor – it is the hidden ideological core of the postmodernist worldview that plays the really decisive role in the postmodernist-convictions-and-minimalist-aesthetic- program dynamic

How to Reform Comparative Literature’s Paradigms in the age of Globalization

Abstract: The basic paradigms of Comparative Literature studies still presuppose the unity of literature(s), which allows the study of literary differences. Those paradigms do not disassociate that unity of literature(s) from an obsession with the past and an inability to set up a vital relation with it whereas the future seems to remain as untouched as the past. That structure of the discipline is inherited from the 19th century, whatever the current changes in the practices of Comparative Literature appear to be. Contrary to that structure of Comparative Literature and the view of history it presupposes, the current tenets about globalization point out the ambiguities of history and offer the opportunity to alter Comparative Literature’s paradigms. Literary works of art should no longer be defined as philological pieces, which are both their own manifestation and the manifestation of historical continuity, whatever the definition of continuity may be. They exhibit the paradoxical conjunction that globalization makes in history. Three main characterizations of globalization can be offered. First characterization. From a historical, economic and sociological angle, and considering the current state of economic and political international relations, globalization can be defined as the overall interdependence of countries. Specifically, that interdependence does not suppose a negation of the current hierarchy of power among states and nations. But it characterizes the economic and political international relations, on the one hand, as ‘top down relations’ – from the dominant to the dominated culture or nation – and, on the other hand, as ‘reciprocal relations’ between dominant and dominated. Suffice it to refer to one commonplace exemplification of those reciprocal relations: the political and economic crises of the dominated endanger the dominant’s political stability and prosperity. That interdependence suggests a distinct view of history. The historical process supposes that the dominated belong to dominant’s world, in one way or another. A structure of economic, social or political power always generates its own difference and makes any dominated the token of that difference and a part of the dominant’s world at large. The concept of

Comparative Literature, the Transnational, and the Global

Abstract: I would like to essay what might be a plausible definition of Comparative Literature in the year 2000. I shall do so as a function of the five propositions posited below, propositions that are based on certain historical commonplaces of our threshold epoch between the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. First the definition: Comparative Literature is the systematic practice of discerning, examining, and theorizing symbolic processes as they affect the material and aesthetic enablements in the production, valuation, and dissemination of literary culture at and through transnational and transcultural sites.

The Arrested Moment in Benjamin's “Theses”: Epistemology vs. Politics, Image vs. Story

Abstract: Walter Benjamin's (WB) final important work, left untitled andusually called “[Theses] On the Concept of History” (CH) is an attempt ata philosophy of history, which is constituted by a refusal of systematicconceptuality and a great reliance on images such as the figural tableauxof the Angel of (catastrophic) History and the Chess-Player. Its foundingmove is to transfer the arrested epistemological moment to politics, whichis of a piece with the absence of any positive Subject, of the future, andof narrative. This article discusses then “1. Intellectuals and Politics, Images and Structure”, identifying WB's root experience of life underthe bourgeoisie as the Modernist topos of lay Hell. The dialectic of long-range understanding vs. short-range militancy of the anti-bourgeois intelligentsiaunderlies the strengths and gaps in CH. Its genre is seen as nearer to acompressed tractate than to theses. Its central method is the reliance onstriking images as architectonic bearers of meanings, in a Surrealist braidingwith some new or revalued concepts: WB is perhaps the Magritte of criticaltheory. CH focusses on the Chess-Player, the Angel, and the absent but necessaryMessiah, but the precise meaning and the figural status of these key mentionsare debatable. Based on this, “2. A Pointer Toward Analyzing ‘CH’”puts forth a counter-proposal to G. Kaiser's analysis of its thematics(how is history to be understood as happening?) and its structure by meansof a new grouping of its 18 sections, arguing that the ending may be readas the place where the incompleteness emerges. “3. Time and History, Image and Story” focusses on WB's refusals of the future and of story-telling, which prefigure most attempts today to understand catastrophic history. They culminate in WB's privileging of the arrested moment. It seems to confuseepiste- mology of cognition with ontology of history: if so, the price ofWB's brilliant devices may prove too high.

Comparative Literature, Globalization, and Heterotopia

Abstract: It seems that there is no end to the challenges faced by Comparative Literature from the numerous methodological positions which succeed one another with increasing frequency. In fact, the challenges have never been slight. Rather, they have always called into question the very right of Comparative Literature to exist as a field of literary studies.

(per)Chance: Joyce and Cage

Abstract: In his later career, John Cage came to be increasingly interested in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. His admiration has resulted in setting parts of Joyce’s dream myth into music. The author of this paper argues that Cage’s The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, setting a passage from page 556 of Finnegans Wake, has, as it were, “elongated”, crystallized and condensed the inherent musicality of Joyce’s text, whereas Cage’s later recompositions ofthe Wake, adopting Postmodern procedures, have substituted chance for Joyce’s structure.

Allah n'est pas obligé d'Ahmadou Kouroumaou la romance de la vérité

Abstract: En 1999, Ahmadou Kourouma a recu le prix Inter pour sa satire, son chef d'œuvre satirique et caustique des dictatures africaines, En attendant le vote des betes sauvages. C'est avec la memeverve, le meme chatoiement de langue empreint d'aphorismes, d'adages, de proverbes spectaculairement traduits en francais, de petit negreet de geste de conteur rompu que le romancier Ivoirien nous livre avec Allah n'est pas oblige, l'histoire hallucinante et «abracadabrantesque » d'un massacre dont les enfants sont les heros,les tristes heros a la gâchette facile ; ces enfants-guerriers des guerres civiles et tribales en Afrique dans la lutte sans merci que se livrent les seigneurs de guerre. Des les premieres lignes de ce texte epineux et dissonant, le lecteur se sent comme pris en chargeet s'abandonne a la lecture du roman comme a celle d'un classique. C'est une satire de la guerre, une satire qui saute a pieds joints et raconte les scenes effroyables de torture, de viol et de massacre, la folie des chefs de guerre et la demence des enfants soldats, atravers le regard de marbre d'un enfant-soldat. Les journaux ont tout dit puisqu'il s'agit d'un sujet d'actualite : la guerre qui a seviau Liberia et qui n'est pas encore completement eteinte en Sierra Leone. Si tout ceci reste un ensemble de faits indeniables, quelle est la part de fiction dans cette œuvre ou les scenesde carnage, de cannibalisme et de viol se succedent a un train d'enfer ? La part de fiction n'est que la maniere de presenterdes faits deja connus de tout le monde. Ce qu'il nous plairait de montrer dans cet article, c'est l'adaptation spectaculaire de l'actualiteen œuvre d'art et le souci d'un ecrivain de montrer la bonne voie aux politiques egares dans les sentiers ehontesdes richesses et privileges.

Ritual and the Quest for Selfhood in Okigbo’s Labyrinths and Brathwaite’s Masks

Abstract: Christopher Okigbo (Nigeria) and Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados)are two poets of the African post-colonial experience who, in their works,display a keen awareness of the intricate histories of their people. Theycombine the autobiographical, social, and vatic dimensions of poetry to evokedeep historical and imaginative perspectives in their studied allegorizationof the predicament of the black race through their individual journeys ofself-discovery. They are the cultural and spiritual exiles who, on the onehand, engage in a ritual search for the recovery of a communal African authenticityand, on the other, who undertake what would seem to the reader as an ambiguousadventure, in which the poetic soul attempts a discovery and understandingof itself as it simultaneously examines the flaws inherent in Africa and theAfricans to which one could attribute the continent’s historical predicament.

Gegen Kulturdifferenzen? Der Begriff des, Universalbildes'als analytischeKategorie für die Literaturwissenschaft

Abstract: This paper focuses on a new category of images which I have coined“Universalbilderl”. These kinds of images express holisitic norms of humanity; for this reason, they cannot be distinguished in images of “the self” and “the other”. The term “Universalbilder”has its foundation in the disciplines of “Komparatistische Imagologie”and “Interkulturelle Germanistik”. The methodological approach examines “how” and “why” these images exist in literary texts. The literary texts to which the “Universalbilder” refer stem from the German and Greek Migration Literature.

Alterität und Identität in der Literatur

Abstract: Da im Zuge des Historismus die Andersheit des zeitlich und kulturellFernen eher uberbe- tont wird, soll hier als Gegengewicht auch dem ubergeschichtlichGleichbleibenden in der Literatur zu seinem Recht verholfen werden. Nach einemUberblick uber Ursprunge und Auswirkungen des historisierendenDenkens werden drei Argumente gegen den extremen Historismus vorgebracht,dem gegenuber einer Dialektik von Alteritat und Identitat dasWort geredet wird, indem vier verschiedene Formen dieses Ineinanders vorgestelltwerden. Konkret wird aufgezeigt, wie bestimmte, geschichtlich je verschiedenbetonte literarasthetische Forderungen sowie geschichtlich variierendeliterarische Mittel auf funf ubergeschichtliche Arten des Asthetischenzuruckgefuhrt werden konnen und wie selbst diese Zwecke selberim Laufe der Geschichte verschiedene Hierarchisierungen erfahren.

Rousseau the Philosophe as Anti-philosophe: The Testimony of theCorrespondence

Abstract: Rousseau is generally associated with the eighteenth century French philosophes in what Peter Gay called “The Party of Humanity.”While it is true that Rousseau shared many of the progressive political and philosophical ideas of that group of enlightened figures, he parted company with them on basic issues of theology and religion.

Perilous Journeys and Archetypal Encounters: Critical Observations on Chinese Travel Literature

Abstract: Travel literature has long and complex traditions. In the European context, Homer’s Odyssey constitutes the earliest representative masterpiece, followed by countless variations and modifications of the genre in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish literary practice over the centuries, including the realm of music as for example Schubert’s Winterreise and in more recent times the film as Wim Wender’s memorable depictions of the wasteland of capitalism in the American West. Travels in mysterious uncharted terri- tory as powerful metaphors of self-exploration also form an integral part of Australian literary consciousness (e.g. Patrick White’s Voss). Chinese literature also has a long and rich tradition of travel literature with its origins dating back well before its Western counterparts. The travel-motif as determining structural and thematic feature appears in numerous variations ranging from flying shamans, journeys in search of paradise or immortality, dangerous sea-journeys as for example Tang Ao’s miraculous adventures reminiscent of Gulliver’s travels, the life of the vagrant monks and robbers in popular literary works, the journeys of scholars to India in search of the Buddhist Scriptures, Kang Youwei’s utopian journeys to heaven, Mao Zedong’s Long March and his ritualistic crossing of the Yangtze in 1956 and 1966 and symbolic journeys in contemporary Chinese literature. The paper will focus specifically on exemplary works of Chinese literature and identify hallmarks of the genre.

“Globalisation” and “Individuation” in Comparative Literature Studies

Abstract: Globalisation is decidedly a treacherous word. To a comparatist especially,it offers the shimmering hope of a state of affairs in which there is or mightbe understanding, communication, equivalence among contemporaneous civilisationsthe world over, and human control over the state of the world. But, immediately,a darker reality manifests itself, one which signals uniformisation and lossof control to economic forces defying not only the will of individuals butthe rule of entire states. These forces often identified with multinationalcorporations override the social and environmental interests of these states,a situation which calls for a supranational authority capable of reestablishingor establishing for the first time a world order governed by just and transparentlaws rather than unregulated economic impulses. In other words, globalisationhas the potential to betray its avowed purpose which is the development ofan effective world community. I am not trying here to make a political pointputting blame, for example, on the World Trade organization though personallyI see many reasons to blame it for distorting internationalization. RatherI should like to use the concrete phenomenon of globalisation as a metaphoror correlate for the manner in which the universalizing tendency in literarystudies, and generally in the humanities, can go wrong, when unconsciouslyor just carelessly it imposes certain patterns and suppresses others.

Die Kleinstadt der Monarchie als Kulturelles und/oder Literarisches Gedächtnis in Ostmitteleuropa

Abstract: In der literarisch-kulturellen Diskussion des “Zentrums” undder “Peripherie” spielt die Darstellung der Kleinstadt eine wichtigeRolle. Die literarische Erinnerung an die Klein- stadte der ehemaligenk.u.k. Monarchie (anders gesagt: an die ostmitteleuropaischen Kleinstadte)artikuliert sich als Wechselspiel einer sprachlichen Form und einer Romanhandlung(die Beispiele stammen aus der serbischen und kroatischen bzw. aus der polnischenLiteratur). Diese Romane bewahren das Gedachtnis des einstigen Pluralis-mus, mit anderen Worten: der Dialogizitat der mehrsprachigen, plurikulturellenKlein- stadten.

Empirical science of literature as a scientific therapy

Abstract: This thesis aims at offering solutions for the present structuralist and hermeneutic anomalies of literary science. Relying on the epistemology of empirical literary science, radical constructivism and the constructivist theory of language, it asserts the view that meaning is not to be considered as part of the text. Its primary goal is to eliminate the anomalies of meaning, evaluation and historicity from the discourse of literary science. It introduces the theory of autopoietic systems and presents the non-conservative approach to literary science. Finally, it outlines the meta-and object theories of non-conservative literary historiography, and thoroughly argues for a perception of the past as an intellectual construction made by communities of historiographers.

Conquered Non-Knowledge: Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush

Abstract: This analysis of Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrushemploys philosophical categories borrowed from the works of Herbert Spencer and Karl Jaspers. Thomas Hardy, although he did not attempt to base his poetry on a systematic philosophy, was well-versed in eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism, positivism, liberalism and evolutionism. He was familiar with Herbert Spencer's philosophy of the Unknowable. Herbert in the 1860scriticised religious theories for the assumption that ultimate reality can be known. He conceived the Unknowable as a constituent part of the universe. Spencer's category was echoed in Hardy's frequent use of the privative prefix, as in the titles Unknowing, The Self-Unseeing, Self-Unconscious., Similarly, The Darkling Thrush concludes with the word “unaware”. The existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, though from an antagonistic stance, used a similar category when in the 1930s he claimed that “In not-knowing, absolute consciousness becomes a kind of certainty.” The poem was written and published on the very last days of the 19th century, and thus not only records but also represents what Jaspers called a “boundary situation”. Hardy deals with transcendental hope contradicting human reason. The analysis points out that the metrical form of the poem is responsible for certain religious inference. Hardy used the so-called hymnal stanza, the form of popular church hymns by Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, William Cowper, and John Keeble, all known to Hardy. The effect is further enhanced by the religious connotations of the word “evensong”in stanza four. However, the contrapuntal structure of the poem carefully counterbalances any easy pathos. In the last verse-sentence the subordinate clause in which the word “Hope” occurs is modified by a non-restrictive adverbial clause. The word “unaware”, left nakedly in the final position, challenges the positive note of “Hope” So, although the vigour of the frail bird defies the emptiness of godless existence, the poem ends on a vacuum-effect. Hardy refuses to deify Nature's defiance, but does not deny the chance of Hope. This “conquered nonknowledge”is his reply to unreasoned hope.

La « prostitution » comme thème de révolte dans la littérature féminine contemporaine en Afrique Noire

Abstract: L"image de la femme a considerablement evolue au cours des annees dans les ecrits litteraires. A la veille et au lendemain des independances, les ecrits qui se focalisent sur cette image etaient encore la chasse gardee des hommes. Par consequent, l"image de la femme libre, en l"occurrence de la prostituee dans la litterature africaine pourrait se resumer comme suit : Dans une Afrique encore tres conservatrice et dont la litterature est le porte-parole, la femme prostituee decrite de la plume de l"homme n"est qu"une immorale, une debauchee, victime des abus de la civilisation europeenne. Dans la realite tout comme dans la fiction, l"image de la prostituee est consideree comme negative par rapport a la tradition africaine. En tant que personnage de roman, la femme prostituee est rarement heroine. Comme pour la ramener a son rang dans sa vie normale de femme, elle joue aussi les seconds roles dans les œuvres de fiction. Cela ne pouvait etre autrement pour une litterature qui se voulait une litterature de realite, de denonciation, pas surrealiste, ni futuriste. En fait, si en realite la prostitution a fait emergence en Afrique avec la colonisation et l"urbanisation et que la femme, la principale concernee fut contrainte de se livrer au plus vieux metier du monde, la litterature de l"epoque, de tendance anticoloniale et purement de production masculine n"a pu justifier l"existence du plus vieux metier du monde de facon objective, sans couvrir d"invectives les femmes qui s"y resignent. L"image de la prostitution comme acte immoral et deboires exclusifs de la femme se projette integralement sur la litterature, qui ce faisant garde ses caracteristiques de litterature de temoignages. Mais au regard accusateur porte par la societe sur la femme qui decide choisir son mode de vie, s"oppose graduellement la parole des femmes ecrivains qui se fait de plus en plus agressive, revendicatrice sur un mode d"autorepresentation plus elabore. C"est cet effort de rehabilitation de l"image de la femme victime des contraintes sociales par les femmes ecrivains qu"il nous plairait d"examiner dans cet article.

Mythologization of Characters in the Autobiographies of Camara Laye,Wole Soyinka and Ezekiel Mphahlele

Abstract: This essay argues that the beauty of Laye, Soyinka and Mphahlele as artistic autobiographers derives from their use of mythologized characters to heighten meaning and to elevate their autobiographies as works of art.