Showing papers in "New Literary History in 2013"

In Defense of Paraphrase

Abstract: This essay notes initially an assumption underlying much of the criticism addressing ethics and literaturethe belief that if there is something especially ethically significant about literature, it results from the peculiar nature of the relationship between the aesthetic text and its reader. Readings relying on this assumption often seek to outperform each other in emphasizing their attention to the ineffable features of literary texts, while criticizing rivals as inappropriately reading for a paraphrasable “message” commendable on philosophical grounds. I suggest that an alternative approach, one that sees the paraphrasable ideas such texts express as part of what makes them worthwhile, would be promising. The essay goes on to defend this account from two objections: an aesthetic objection, which suggests that it is mistaken to see literary texts as making theoretical assertions at all; and an objection from the history of literary criticism, which points out that it is debatable whether this approach is really new. I respond to the first by arguing that in fact moral-philosophical ideas are a necessary element of the artistic form of narratives, especially that of realist novels. Insofar as narratives necessarily involve the depiction of persons who make decisions and subsequently act, they cannot help but present at least an implicit view of the nature of human agency. Moreover, when narrators describe and reflect upon the decisions and actions of such characters, their articulations bring the implicit philosophical claims to a level of awareness. I draw out these ideas through a brief reading of George Eliot’s Middlemarch . The reply to the second objection depends on a genealogy of interpretative theory, one that draws out how an opposition to critical emphasis on ideas in literature developed within formalist theories of the novel, a process culminating in the New Critical insistence that literary ideas matter only insofar as they create an aesthetic structure. The genealogy shows then how deconstruction and the hermeneutics of suspicion share this fundamental opposition through their insistence that one must go beyond the mere ideas in a text to something more fundamental—either its reliance upon a fundamental instability or its repression of a non-normative political entity. Against this opposition, I propose a “content formalism”: an approach that openly admits its primary attention to the intellectual content of the literary work while accompanying this attitude with a non-reductive recognition of the importance of literary form.

The Use Values of Narrativity in Digital Cultures

Abstract: This article investigates the changing use values of narrativity in the early twenty-first century by focusing on the frenetic expansion of narrative universes. Popular narratives continue to have the power to mesmerize, but now they also serve another function—they exist to be made use of, to be taken up and extended by professionals and amateurs alike. This article looks at two parallel dimensions of this expansion--narrative “world building” and quality serial television. How do we develop a better understanding of how narrativity moves across media when books, films, and television programs are all MP3 files which “play” on the same screens on our personal digital devices? How does it change the way we tell stories? How does it change how we encounter culture and make it our own? Those questions must be pursued in tandem, because if “narrative theory” is to become relevant again in the twenty-first century, it has to account for how narrative texts—whether they be novels, films, television programs, or web series—are shaped by how we acquire, curate, and “play” them across ever more diversified formats within the devices which are the repositories of all our cultural stuff.

What's "New Critical" about "Close Reading"?: I. A. Richards and His New Critical Reception

Abstract: Within the United States, debates about “close reading” often proceed as if the method were first developed by the New Critics. Indeed, the association between the two has sometimes been used as a stick with which to beat “close reading”: if the method is seen as having its origins in the New Criticism, then the suspicion arises that it is somehow at root a creature of Kantian aesthetics, decontextualising, dehistoricising and depoliticising—in a word, conservative. But what if “close reading” were originally developed by a very different intellectual formation—one with more liberal sensibilities, and, as a consequence, a very different account of the aesthetic? Taking a closer look at the history of the method allows us to see that “close reading” is now being critiqued on the grounds of its purported origins in the very kinds of views it was built to oppose.

Reading for Recognition

Abstract: In the past decades the topic of recognition has moved to the center of critical theories and philosophical debates. Can these theories be of use for literary studies? This essay discusses the relation between literature and recognition in five parts: first, a comparison of two different perspectives on recognition that are especially suggestive for possible uses of the concept in literary studies; second, a discussion of the question of identity, since, in current debates, recognition is inextricably linked with questions of identity formation; third, an overview of some of the dominant motifs and patterns in narratives of recognition in order to highlight the amazing centrality of the theme in a wide range of literary texts and literary genres and to regain an awareness of an imaginary core of literature that has often been forgotten in the professionalization of literary studies; fourth, a discussion to what extent recognition can also be understood and described as an effect of the reading experience (and of aesthetic experience more generally); and fifth, a return to the starting question of the relation between literature and recognition, focusing on the issue of reciprocity and on the challenge provided by normative theories of recognition.

Recognition and Receptivity: Forms of Normative Response in the Lives of the Animals We Are

Abstract: Much of what has driven recent developments in political theories of recognition has been the attempt to diagnose recognition failures as particularly salient forms of injustice – be they distributive or cultural. If we wish to bring literary theory into dialogue with political theory around questions of recognition, as Rita Felski has proposed, perhaps the case of Elizabeth Costello in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals is a particularly good, because particularly difficult, place to start. Not least because the failure of recognition at issue here is the failure to recognize—in some full-blooded sense of the word—the life and death concerns of a fictional person. What kind of failure is that? Does anything much hang on it? If so, what? What does such a failure tell us about the subject of recognition? What does it tell us about ourselves? What would it tell us about ourselves if this sort of failure, concerning the life of a fictional person were a failure to which we could be indifferent or unaccountable? Is there another form of normative response that does what recognition cannot? Is there something that political theorists can learn about their own concerns from the way they are figured in literature? How must literature mean for political theorists if they are to learn from it what they cannot learn from political philosophy or political theory?”

Spatial Memory, Historiographic Fantasy, and the Touch of the Past in St. Erkenwald

Abstract: This article reads the anonymous Middle English alliterative poem St. Erkenwald as a historiographic exemplum germane to contemporary scholars' concerns about the mandate to "always historicize." The poem stages upon London's polytemporal cityscape a physical encounter between the present—conversion-era Anglo-Saxon London—and an unfamiliar pagan British past embodied in the undecayed (and eventually revivified) corpse of a long-buried judge. Using Maurice Halbwach's theories of collective identity and Michel de Certeau's insights on historiography, I consider the poem's critique of the processes of recuperating, erasing, and incorporating the civic past. This reading lays out interrelations among the operations of memory, desire, and malleable corporate identity that are relevant to contemporary discussions about historicism, revealing the limitations of different historiographic and commemorative processes while insisting upon their necessity, and their potential, for (re)constituting both civic identity and scholarly endeavor.

Civilizing societies : recognition and respect in a global world

Abstract: The essay discusses the terms “recognition” and “respect” as new transcultural candidates for our post-ideological age Although intimately connected with each other, the two terms have different genealogies, historical baggage, and ranges of application The essay begins with eighteenth-century England, introducing the important bourgeois concepts of politeness and civility as new enlightened norms for social and transcultural behaviour In the second part, the focus of the discussion is the anthropological concept of recognition as a vital resource for individual and collective identity construction The last part introduces “respect” as a complementary term to “recognition,” offering a distinction between different forms of respect It is the aim of this historical and conceptual analysis to reframe some of the crucial problems of our current social, political, and literary debates Without disregarding differences, new global forms of respect simultaneously create and strengthen social ties that overcome the divisive aspects of difference through assertions of solidarity and similarity In spite of, across, and underneath differences, civility is the practical response to the important recognition that we are all citizens of the same world

Criticism and Style

Abstract: What criticism is worth bothering with? It is criticism that brings to light testimony about how another human being has grappled with a significant part of the world in his or her own style. If the insight I glean from it manages to transcend the particularity of its source to become part of the resources I have for encountering the world, this testimony may be called a genuine form of knowledge, distinct from opinion or intuition. Yet it also maintains some of the texture with which it first appeared. The sort of knowledge I am interested in when reading criticism makes itself known not only through the words that appear on the page, but also through what has gone unsaid. The knowledge disclosed in criticism is above all a kind of self-knowledge, a knowledge of the self attained not through introspection, but through an encounter with something that both draws and exceeds the self. Criticism is a record of the change the self had to undergo to become receptive to the knowledge it is able to glean in the encounter with the object.

Mass Entertainment Before Mass Entertainment

Abstract: Most theorists of mass entertainment restrict the phenomenon to the machine age. This essay argues that mass entertainment is more cogently defined in relation to the audience for whom it is intended rather than to the technologies for its production and distribution. To prove the point, the essay uses such key modern commentary on mass entertainment as Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Culture Industry” essay, and Noel Carroll’s book on A Philosophy of Mass Art to illuminate a Renaissance English city comedy, The Roaring Girl. At the same time, The Roaring Girl helps the essay critique the bias toward reductive totalization in these and other modern accounts of the mass audience.

Pragmatic Liberal Education

Abstract: Liberal education is under siege today. While some scramble to hold on to liberal arts traditions in the face of online instruction, others contend these traditions do little to prepare students for the high-tech jobs of the twenty-first century. Throughout American history debates have raged about what it means for an education to be useful. This article argues for a pragmatic liberal education but against a narrowly instrumental one. Pragmatic liberal education increases students’ abilities to connect study with vital issues in such a way as to promote lifelong inquiry. This form of education, and the tensions it embodies, enables us to see the impact of learning far beyond the university.

Arts, Humanities, Sciences, Uses

Abstract: We should not define the “uses” of the arts and humanities against the sciences. Nor, in our finite world, should we resist asking what their uses are. The long perspective of science helps us see that art, which might seem the most useless of all major forms of human activity, can reshape minds and societies by its very freedom from immediate use. Fiction in particular has led to an expansion in sympathy and a decline in social harm, and like all the arts prompts the imagination to envisage richer purposes in a richer world. Given that we need to imitate in order to innovate, the arts and the humanities, as seedbanks of the human past, make a world of difference. In our ultrasocial species, our arts, our sciences, our societies are humanities, all the way down. If we currently section off science, medicine, engineering, architecture, economics, and fine arts, even these specialisms are also all humanities, the product of human action, thought, inquiry, accumulation, contestation and preservation. In the core humanities, where we examine what we humans think and do, have thought and done, and might think and do, we need to focus more on creative problem-solving in the past and how that can help engender creativity in the present and future. At their best the arts and the humanities, like the best science, critique themselves, both building on and challenging what has gone before. A poem by Szymborska and a novel by Nabokov show how creativity and critique, by exploring the possibility beyond the actual, help extend what is actually possible.

Poetry's Media

Abstract: Anglophone modernist poetics set out to construct poems that were things just like the other things of the world. It was a project of recapturing solidity and objectivity for poetry. In consequence, it confronted with new urgency the question of poetry's media: it was forced to clarify what the raw material of a poem actually was. Because English exists in more than one material mode—it is "verbivocovisual"—most poets understood poetry to be a mixed art, and located the poetic principle at the intersection of language's discrete material substrata. This paper examines the answers given to the question of poetry's media by Charles Olson and William Wordsworth—answers framed, in both cases, in atmospheric, respiratory terms. From these two cases it sketches a media history of poetry as an aerial technology involving the transmission of breath. And it asks what implications our contemporary changing climate might have for this tradition of atmospheric poetics.

The Social Structure of English in the Text of Theory

Abstract: A number of explanations have been proposed for the turn from high theory to culture, social justice, and the everyday in Anglo-American English departments in the late 1980s. Some of these accounts focus on the exhaustion of text-centered paradigms of reading, others on the need for incisive responses to socio-political developments of the time. This paper argues that a shift in the governance philosophy of American higher education from public service to private investment drove curricular change and significantly altered the research culture in English studies. High theory marks the transition from the scientific ambitions of the field in an expanding higher education sector between 1950 and 1965 to its complex service and signaling function in the entrepreneurial university of the present. As the most institutionally embedded of high theory's foci, deconstruction provides a detailed symptomatic imaging of changes to the social structure of the discipline through its touchstones of textual ascription, decentering, and performativity. In each case, microscopic evidence testing, terminological abstraction, and the search for laws or properties of textual behavior (however uncanny or self-reflexive) create a scientific anti-science appropriate to a field undergoing an institutional devaluation of its knowledge work. In this view, deconstruction gave way to cultural studies, rather than to new and different forms of theory drawn from the social sciences, not because it was civically disengaged or had run out of interpretive steam but because the consolidation of the market-managerial university in the 1980s and 90s called for a different curricular alignment. This alignment, characterized by service teaching and the articulation of a social justice ("diversity") rationale, better fits the current institutional view of English studies as a field that does not make, study, or promise money, and whose future, therefore, lies not in better knowledge but in better organization.

Cognition is Recognition: Literary Knowledge and Textual “Face”

Abstract: Our language for the truths of literature is reformist and nominalist; our experience of reading is, by contrast, habitual and idealist. Contrary to the way we talk about what kind of new, liberatory truths literature expresses, our reading practice itself is grounded in long-standing forms of recognition. Every time we interpret we recall deep seated, ingrained and circular protocols that give us access to truths immanent within the separate realms of literary experience. As interpreters, we depend on prejuges that produce recognition of already existing truths. Literary knowledge, that is, is dependent on recognition. We know because we knew. Literary cognition is fundamentally a matter of re-cognition. This default position for reading is certainly at odds with any revolutionary pedagogic program that prizes originality and pure novelty, wholly freed from the strictures of the past. The default practice of “recognitional” reading proposed here is not, however, at odds with a reformist and a nominalist interpretation of a work, since the recognitions of literary experience are not instances of mere repetition; on the contrary, the literary recognitions we care about are memorable because we see a truth—we know the place, we see a face—as for the first time, and as unique. The recognition is old and general; the force of the recognition is reformist and very particular.

Reading Literature and the Political Ecology of Gestures in the Age of Semiocapitalism

Abstract: Gestures are central to our aesthetic experiences. This is not only true of choreography, theater, and music, but of literature as well. In the following pages, I will (somewhat presumptuously) attempt to reframe our perception of the last three hundred years of literary history by considering the experience of reading literature as a form of gestural impregnation. Within the broad context of what is now frequently referred to as " media archeology, " reading tales, short stories, novels, or plays appears as a complex form of immersion in fictional universes, leading the immersed subject to develop specific relational gestures—in a very similar manner to the way in which a Wii player is led to execute certain bodily gestures when interacting with the machine. I will first suggest that the type of relational gestures inculcated through literature over the past centuries should be analyzed in close connection with the development of political economy. I will then attempt to show how literary studies, as well as the humanities at large, deserve to be reframed in order to accommodate the softness of interpretive gestures against the hardness of machine protocols. In a brief last section, I will sketch some of the ways in which literary interpretation can inspire claims for new human rights within a broad political ecology of gestures. Because my argument is (ridiculously) wide and far-reaching, I will only be able to sketch it within the limits of this article—hence its rather dogmatic style, which will assert a series of quasidogmatic theses. In an issue devoted to the theme of reading, I will leave it to the reader to connect the dots—hoping that the resulting figure will be more convincing than the skeleton presented here only in its most massive features.

Art and Orientation

Abstract: Here Elizabeth Fowler proposes a number of tools for the analysis of art’s orientation towards use, an aspect of made objects (including those made of words) that interpreting critics have ignored as we’ve worked to specify reference. She theorizes a distinction between propositional space and ductile space, and shows how poems by Geoffrey Chaucer (The Parliament of Fowls) and Seamus Heaney (“Lightenings xiii”, “Clearances 8,” and ”The Wishing Tree”) share their orientation towards use with conventions of the built environment. She discusses especially the features of the station, a configuration that is central to the walled garden (hortus conclusus) and temple complex so prevalent in cultures around the globe. Together with the poems, the essay treats gates, holy wells and trees, and the sacred pilgrimage site at Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly, Ireland in order to demonstrate in each case how art invites and guides its users through its ritual experience -- whether it is “doing the station” or “reading.” When we describe art’s “user-interface” well, we have accounted for how it orients its users in time, space, and social life—an orientation we may regard as the acquisition of habitus.

Cosmopolitanism and Indigenism: The Uses of Cultural Authenticity in an Age of Flows

Abstract: In an age of vibrant flows and border crossings, the notion of inauthenticity seems essential to conceptualizing the cultural production of our time. This paper examines two models of literary praxis that underscore the important role of inheritance in literary/cultural production, namely Taiwanese cosmopolitanism and indigenism. Though seemingly opposed to each other, the two paradigms operate with a great emphasis on the notion of cultural authenticity. They ask difficult questions, such as “What does it mean to identify oneself as an heir to a cultural tradition that is considered oppressive and overpowering to one’s native culture?”; “What constitutes ‘cultural authenticity’ in an age of ceaseless change and border-crossings?”; “What material stakes may be involved in the evocation of the notion of authenticity in literary praxis?” These two paradigms, as illustrated by two prominent writers from Taiwan—Yang Mu and Sayman Rapongan, demonstrate how the untimely question of authenticity may help shed light on some of the critical issues in global literary and cultural studies.

Wittgenstein, Pedagogy, and Literary Criticism

Abstract: Both literary critics and philosophers have sought to use the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to provide a firmer foundation for the way we talk about literature. These attempts have generally fallen short in their attempts to extract a positive theory of literature and reading from Wittgenstein. In working through some of Wittgenstein's remarks on music and poetry in Zettel , I suggest that Wittgenstein does not give us a "new" way of reading, but instead gives us tools for clearing up misunderstandings about our process of reading. Reading Wittgenstein may help us give literary criticism peace, allowing us to see that our disagreements about critical styles do not prevent us from carrying forward the day-to-day practice of criticism. Wittgenstein's focus on how we learn to use words turns our attention away from literary theory and toward literary pedagogy, reminding us to think about how we learn and teach the very terms that we debate and question.

Wittgenstein's Use

Abstract: The current “crisis” of the humanities foregrounds conceptual confusions about the humanities’ use. Wittgenstein’s account of meaning as use can help clarify these confusions, but only by making humanistic knowledge internal to the knower’s form of life. Part of the reason recent debates over the practical value of the humanities have proven so unsatisfying is their failure to explain how it is possible for humanistic knowledge to be either useful or useless to the human beings whose lives form its basis. Because in Philosophical Investigations knowledge of human life is normally expressed in how humans live, not in descriptions of how humans live, the practical value—that is, the use—of humanistic study seems obvious only in contexts where dehumanization has become continuous with human life. Martha Nussbaum’s attempt to enlist the humanities in combatting dehumanization fails to account adequately for this dependence of humanistic knowledge on humans’ alienation from themselves and their kind. If Wittgenstein can meaningfully describe the natural conditions of being human, it is only because he addresses readers who, like himself, find it natural in certain contexts to live as though having forgotten them. Chinua Achebe’s account of racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness also addresses readers for whom, in certain contexts, dehumanization comes naturally, but Achebe presupposes, rather than describes, what it means to know another as a human being. In Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, knowing a human being is a matter of acknowledging, not necessarily of describing, naturally occurring conditions of one’s own and others’ form of life. However, in contexts where dehumanization has come to seem natural—that is, where humanity is experienced as an external condition to which, in living, everyone conforms—acknowledging what it means to be human requires describing what one knows. These descriptions will comprise contributions to the humanities. Knowing another as a human being, when not naturally occurring, means getting to know human life better, and getting to know human life is Wittgenstein’s use.

Ethopoiesis: Foucault's Late Ethics and the Sublime Body

Abstract: This paper argues that Neil Hertz’s model of the sublime turn allows us to perceive the aesthetic, and specifically literary, consequences of Foucault’s late ethics reimagined as a sublime poetics. In doing so, the present analysis attempts to reanimate the concept of the sublime as a powerful ethical category reconceiving the subject in terms of the acts of writing that structure a constitutive aesthetic relationship to her own body. More generally, this account of Foucault proposes that his late ethics, and not necessarily the politics of his earlier work, holds the most interest for literary critics, since these ideas explicitly rethink ethics as a poetics, and thus foreground the frequently underrecognized force of literary creation, and not simply cultural representation, in shaping subjects of power.

Implicative Criticism, or The Display of Thinking

Abstract: This essay establishes a distinction between two different modalities of criticism, which it calls "conclusive" and "implicative." The former reports on conclusions previously reached and invites verification or refutation from the reader; the latter displays the writer's process of thinking and invites continuation. Discussing criticism by Eve Sedgwick, Stanley Cavell, Neil Hertz, Raymond Williams, and D.A. Miller, and drawing on the writing of J.L. Austen, the essay turns from recent spatial discussions of close and distant criticism to conceive of criticism as a temporal matter of finished and unfinished writing.

Unthinkable Readers: The Political Blindspot of French Literature

Abstract: Literary theory and criticism in France is, and has always been, centered around Writing as a cause, a subjectless event, and an intransitive mystery, at the expense of reading and readers, whose social diversity and political workings remain largely overlooked. Neither critical sociologies of reading, nor the more literary phenomenology of the act of reading, have been able, so far, to make room for the Anglo-American politics of reading, itself a historical assumption of the relativity of interpretation which took various forms, from literary Marxisms to cultural and minority studies—all of which can be seen, as a result, as the political blindspot of literary studies in France.

Five French Critics

Abstract: When I met with Rita Felski some months ago on the sunny grounds of the University of Virginia in the ever-busy hall of Alderman Library, and she asked me to write a short presentation for a forthcoming issue of New Literary History hosting several contemporary French critics and scholars of literature, I gave myself no time to think twice, probably suspecting that any second thoughts would have deterred me from such a venture. There was at least one good reason to accept the invitation and to ignore the foreseeable difficulties of the exercise. After more than fifteen years directing the French journal Critique, founded in 1946 by Georges Bataille, I have grown more and more convinced that journals—or revues—and more particularly literary journals are probably the closest thing we have left to what used to be the Republic of Letters. Had I been invited as a scholar of French literature—which I also am on other days—to introduce this anthology of French critical texts, I would most probably have declined the honor as too perilous as well as undeserved. Coming from a fellow editor, however, this was an offer I could hardly refuse. To be honest, there was also an element of excitement in that hasty decision. The special issue was still in its exploratory stage and the list of potential French contributors very much tentative. We had a mutual agreement that I would play no part in the process of selection. This is how I signed up for five blind dates with French authors. But then I have always liked blind dates—the expression, that is, ever since I first met it with perplexity, at an early stage of my acquaintance with the English language, in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Now that the cards have been dealt, let us see our hand. I think it is a pretty good one.

American Memory in Black Elk Speaks

Abstract: Black Elk Speaks is now generally understood to be John Neihardt's highly idiosyncratic representation of his interviews with Black Elk While this is certainly the case, Black Elk's worldviews nonetheless can be recognized if we carefully track the patterns of misrecognition that pervade Neihardt's book For it can be shown that as Neihardt works to channel Black Elk, Black Elk is channeling Neihardt When that reciprocal process is critically exposed, the dark historical import of Black Elk Speaks shifts from a Native American to a non-Native American frame of reference The "dream" that "died" in the mud of Wounded Knee is not the Great Vision of Black Elk

Narratives of Resentment: Notes towards a Literary History of European Anti-Americanism

Abstract: This essay investigates the history and internal functioning of a specifically literary form of anti-Americanism that for more than two hundred years has played a key role in the propagation of negative images of the United States. Drawing on Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Duhamel's Scenes de la vie future (1930), and Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955), it analyzes three major narrative paradigms of anti-Americanism literature: the story of the disillusioned emigrant, anti-American futurology, and anti-American tribunalism. On this basis, the essay offers a discussion of fictional literature as a medium for the development and dissemination of anti-Americanism, before concluding by linking literary anti-Americanism to the quest for a common European identity.