Showing papers in "Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America in 1997"

Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology

Abstract: This essay begins by differentiating between narratively organized sequences of events and nonnarrative sequences associated with deductive reasoning, conversational exchanges, descriptions, and recipes. After reviewing classical accounts of narrative sequences, the essay sketches developments in language theory and cognitive science that have occurred after the heyday of structuralist narrative poetics and that throw further light on two interlinked questions: what is necessary to make a sequence of events a narrative, and what makes some narrative sequences more readily processed as stories than others? Both questions can be addressed by the concept, drawn from artificial-intelligence research, of “scripts”—knowledge representations storing finite, sequentially ordered groups of actions required for the accomplishment of particular tasks. Exploring some literary applications of a theoretical model based on scripts, the final section of the text outlines research strategies for a postclassical narratology that encompasses cognitive approaches to stories. By examining different modalities of the script-story interface, theorists of narrative may be able to rethink the historical development of narrative techniques and to understand better the differences among narrative genres at any given time.

A Theory of Resonance

Abstract: Does a literary text remain the same object across time? This essay answers no and bases a defense of literature on that answer. Temporal extension, a phenomenon neglected in contemporary literary studies, makes some meanings unrecoverable and others newly possible. A text endures as a nonintegral survivor, an echo of what it was and of what it might become, its resonance changing with shifts in interpretive contexts. Since this resonance cannot be addressed by synchronic historicism, I propose an alternative, diachronic historicism, inspired especially by scientific theories on background noise, by Einstein's account of the relativity of simultaneity, and by critiques of the visual bias in Western epistemology. I try to theorize the text as a temporal continuum, thick with receding and incipient nuances, exercising the ears of readers in divergent ways and yielding its words to contrary claims. Literature thus encourages a semantic democracy that honors disagreement as a crucial fact of civil society.

The Star System in Literary Studies

Abstract: A new form of intellectual authority and professional status has emerged in literary studies since the 1970s. Although some scholars have always been more influential and famous than others, only recently have such scholars been constructed as stars in the media and in the profession. This star system, similar to the one that flourished in studio-era Hollywood, makes leading scholars into personalities. It is related to the growth of the conference and lecture circuit and to the rise of literary theory. Although this system does not necessarily reward the wrong people, it does contribute to the public delegitimation of the discipline.

Freud's Uncanny Narratives

Abstract: Critics who work at the intersection of psychoanalysis and narratology frequently examine Freud's “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”). A close reading of the anecdotes interpolated in Freud's essay suggests that while narrative is often motivated by an effort to contain charged material, something always escapes that control, threatening to proliferate without stopping. The dual containing and dispersing effect of narrative is reflected in Freud's doubling of himself as narrator and protagonist; in his ambivalence toward women, the maternal, and creativity; and in his attraction and resistance to literature. Although Freud often appears to reduce literature to an illustration of psychoanalytic laws, the subversive literariness of language and the instability of the subject emerge dramatically in the uncanniness of his own narratives.

"Abroad and at Home": Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth's Belinda

Abstract: women. W H^^ HEN MARIA EDGEWORTH entitled the original sketch of VY Belinda "Abroad and at Home," she demarcated an opposition between the public, or artificial, female self and the private, or genuine, one. The sketch revolves around Lady Delacour, a character distinguished by "the contrast between [her] apparent prosperity and real misery... At home she is wretched; abroad she assumes the air of exuberant gaiety" ("Sketch" 480). Lady Delacour suffers from breast cancer, the consequence of a wound she received when dueling with another woman while they were cross-dressed. Reflecting her sexual ambiguity and her general resistance to domesticity, "the hideous spectacle" of the breast marks Lady Delacour's "incurable" dissipation of "mind" before she dies (481). The events teach Belinda, Lady Delacour's young friend and protegee, that "happiness at Home" is preferable to "happiness Abroad" (483). In the novel that emerged from the sketch in 1801, Lady Delacour's breast presents the same "hideous spectacle" (32), and her sexually ambiguous behavior is compounded by homoerotic insinuations. But instead of dying, she recovers after revealing that her indecorum is only an act; her "natural character" is that of a "domestic woman" (105). This cure allows Lady Delacour to reunite with her husband and child and then to settle the domestic futures of colonial characters never introduced in the sketch. By the novel's end, Lady Delacour has helped expel Belinda's Creole suitor and reward an English plantocrat, and the allusions to "home" and "abroad" broaden to suggest the complex ways in which late-eighteenth-century notions of sexual difference furthered English colonial interests by influencing the definitions of nation and race. Typically recognized as the first Irish novelist, Edgeworth has in recent years become a visible subject of feminist and colonial studies.' But few

The Making of the English Canon

Abstract: (forthcoming, 1998). HAT ARE the origins of the English canon? The answer to VY this question is deceptively simple: Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton achieved decisive status in the mid-eighteenth century, the moment when the terms of their reception were set for years to come. ' These authors were first represented as a literary trinity and first described with consistency as "transcendent," "sublime," and "classic" in criticism written during the 1740s through the 1760s. To make this simple argument, however, one might wish to suggest two further and complicating points: first, that the elevation of older vernacular authors during the mid-eighteenth century confronted and revised earlier literary-historical models in which modern literature improved on the works of the past and, second, that the mid-eighteenthcentury revision of literary history resulted from a shift in the perception of cultural consumption. The canonical form of English literary history emerged as a reversal of an earlier understanding of cultural change. This reversal occurred amid a transformative tension between allegedly high-cultural and mass-cultural works and between the social worlds they were taken to emblematize. The now familiar insight of recent theories of eighteenth-century print culture locates in the book trade a new relation to the past, to rationality, and to community.2 In opposition to an archaic or Gothic past, the present defined itself as refined and polite, as a public sphere of private subjects, and as a nation. But the making of the canon was not simply an expression of print rationalism or of nationalist sentiment. Rather, print commodities and their readers produced over time a retrospective investment in the past. This endowment was, in turn, a compound item, elaborated in positions often taken in opposition to one another. Seen from one perspective, the past was an object of irrecoverable loss, a loss that radiated a Gothic charm. Seen from another, this Gothic nimbus only obscured the past's essential continuity with the present, a continuity extending into England's imagined future. In these antagonistic versions of the past, mid-eighteenth-century critics attempted to fashion a new understanding of cultural transformation. One lasting monument of this attempt was the fixing of literary history and of the literary canon

Passion and Fashion in Joanna Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse”

Abstract: In the preface to her first volume of plays, the Romantic playwright Joanna Baillie claims that one is naturally driven to classify persons into character types, and she argues that this classifica...

On Dialogic Speech

Abstract: tionstheoretische Untersuchung (Sagner, 1994). Although the pivotal role of the Russian linguist L. P. Yakubinsky (1892-1945) in the development of modem linguistics and literary theory has been repeatedly stated by prominent scholars, he has remained virtually unknown outside Russia.l Yakubinsky was educated at Petersburg University in 1909-15 during a period of academic renewal and challenge in Russian linguistics, a field that hitherto had been dominated by the neogrammarian study of language. The neogrammarians' positivist and historicist concerns were contested by a range of scholars interested in the functional diversity of language and concomitantly in the processuality of language as an individual and a collective activity.2 In this heated atmosphere of reevaluation and change Yakubinsky, with some of his fellow students and colleagues, such as Osip Brik and Viktor B. Shklovsky, initiated the movement that later came to be called Russian formalism. In fact, the functional distinction between "poetic" and "practical" language that Yakubinsky introduced in his groundbreaking study "On the Sounds in Poetic Language" ("O 3ByKax CT4xoTBOpHorO a3bIKa"; Jakubinskij 163-76) became the cornerstone of formalist criticism and "served as the activating principle for the Formalists' treatment of the fundamental problems of poetics" (Ejchenbaum 8).3 Yakubinsky thus laid the foundation for structuralism. However, he soon moved away from the formalists' preoccupation with poetic and literary texts and devoted himself to the social dimension of the functions and forms of language.4 Yakubinsky's move can be interpreted in several ways: as a continuation of the work of his teachers Jan A. Baudouin de Courtenay and Lev V. Shcherba, as a result of political developments during the early years of the Soviet Union and his alignment with the Communist Party,5 and as a consequence of his theoretically and politically motivated opposition to Saussurean linguistics. Saussure's ideas had been gaining popularity

The Wound of History: Walcott's Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction

Abstract: The figure of the wound is central to Derek Walcott's Omeros, one of the most ambitious works of postcolonial poetry. Walcott grants a European name to the primary bearer of the wound, the black fisherman Philoctete, who allegorizes African Caribbean suffering under European colonialism and slavery. This surprisingly hybrid character exemplifies the cross-cultural fabric of postcolonial poetry but contravenes the assumption that postcolonial literature develops by sloughing off Eurocentrism for indigeneity. Rejecting a separatist aesthetic of affliction, Walcott frees the metaphoric possibilities of the wound as a site of interethnic connection. By metaphorizing pain, he vivifies the black Caribbean inheritance of colonial injury and at the same time deconstructs the experiential uniqueness of suffering. Knitting together different histories of affliction, Walcott's polyvalent metaphor of the wound reveals the undervalued promise of postcolonial poetry.

Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved

Abstract: The title character in Toni Morrison's Beloved embodies the history and memory of rape. In fact, her supernatural form is the shape-shifting witch, derived by African Americans from the succubus, a female rapist and nightmare figure of European myth. Beloved functions like a traumatic, repetitive nightmare: in addition to representing characters' repressed memories of rape, she attacks Sethe and Paul D. Morrison also uses the succubus figure to represent the effects of institutionalized rape during slavery. Beloved drains Sethe of vitality and Paul D of semen, and these violations represent dehumanization and commodified reproduction. Finally, by portraying a female rapist figure and a male rape victim, Morrison foregrounds race, rather than gender, as the crucial category determining the domination or rape of her African American characters.

What American Renaissance? The Gendered Genealogy of a Critical Discourse

Abstract: women's conversation. HE CRITICAL DISCOURSE of "renaissance" emerged over a . century ago to become academic currency in recountings of nineteenth-century United States literary history.' In the past decade, this discourse has framed more than two dozen monographs and essays, even though there has been little consensus on the historical period, the canon of authors or texts, or the value this critical tradition figures. Initially identified with Unitarian and transcendentalist writing, the era of renaissance doubled to cover both extended periods from the 1790s to the 1890s and a decade or so of concentrated literary excellence usually located around mid-century. As a trope, renaissance lacks any stable referent, even by way of a resemblance to sixteenthand seventeenthcentury Europe; as a literary term, renaissance has increasingly figured valorization. The discourse's critical power comes from appeals to authority rather than from any well-defined paradigm of or rationale for what might constitute an American renaissance. Some critics acknowledge that the notion exists merely for scholarly convenience or authorization (see Matthiessen, American Renaissance xii; Wright 4; Leverenz 166; Colacurcio 478, 491). But these positions obscure the tradition's role in the negotiation of cultural values, the asymmetrical distribution of cultural capital, and the maintenance of a gender hierarchy. In the struggle to determine what counts in the American cultural field, who adjudicates that field, and what validations are given lasting and representative significance, the language of renaissance serves to maintain male preeminence. In those dynamic, "mutually defining relations among classification, function, and value" that, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith demonstrates, define evaluation, the discourse promotes the "cultural re-production of value," as well as men's ascendancy, through the aesthetics of renaissance excellence (47, 32). It enlists professional and institutional authority to consolidate value in a literary field largely

Let It Pass: Changing the Subject, Once Again

Abstract: HIS ESSAY attempts to intervene theoretically and pragmatically at a critical moment in our profession, when literary studies in colleges and universities across the United States is increasingly becoming culture studies.' This transformation over the past two decades in the social, philosophical, and political bases of the humanities is due partly to the academy's efforts to acknowledge diversity, by institutionalizing multiculturalism and various "studies programs" (women's studies, gay studies, ethnic studies, composition studies) in response to the influx of nontraditional students since the early 1970s, and partly to poststructuralism's efforts to theorize difference and to destabilize the very categories of identity on which those studies programs are founded. Such programs, particularly women's studies, have traditionally been devoted to a humanist concept of the subject as "source and agent of conscious action or meaning" (P. Smith xxxiii-xxxiv) and committed to opening this subject position to previously marginalized groups. In contrast, poststructuralist theories, including some feminist theories, have revealed the humanist subject to be a sham insofar as it is the effect, not the origin, of representation. As this essay suggests, when antifoundational theories that deconstruct the self converge with studies programs that revive it, anxiety arises over the positions we find ourselves in as scholars and teachers in the newly configured university.2 Culture studies would seem to offer a pedagogy for working through the tensions between these two perspectives on the subject since issues of identity formation and of subject position are central not only to its object of study but to its method of inquiry. Culture studies has shifted

"Kissing a Negress in the Dark": Englishness as a Masquerade in Woolf's Orlando

Abstract: in lesbian modernist writing. OW "ESSENTIAL" is national identity to the modern subject? According to Benedict Anderson, "in the modern world everyone can, should, will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender" (14). Anderson's use of quotation marks around "have" highlights the difficulty of choosing to take up an identity when ideology (here nationalism) masks this process as a formulation. Anderson implies that national identity is partly chosen and partly imposed, that it is a product, like gender, of both individual agency ("everyone can") and collective constraint ("everyone should"). Tom Nairn notes that "[w]henever we talk about nationalism, we normally find ourselves talking before too long about 'feelings,' 'instincts,' supposed desires and hankerings to 'belong,' and so on" (334). Indeed, national ideology often depends on essentializing equivalences between elements of identity such as gender and sexuality, on the one hand, and race and nationality, on the other. George Mosse has argued that before World War II nationalism was a strong ideology because of the deployment of other controlling ideologies, such as an implicitly normal middle-class "respectability," a term, he explains, that indicates "'decent and correct' manners and morals, as well as the proper attitude toward sexuality" (1). And as the cultural critic Paul Gilroy has insisted, English nationality in particular always implies a racial claim: "The politics of 'race' is fired by conceptions of national belonging and homogeneity which not only blur the distinction between 'race' and nation, but rely on that very ambiguity for their effect" (45). Given the extent to which ideologies of national inclusion depend on equating gender with the performance of heterosexual respectability and equating national affiliation with notions of racial belonging, one might conclude that gender and nationality can operate as essentializing ideologies of identity only if sexuality and race remain nationality's half-hidden or forgotten others.

The Decomposing Form of Joyce's Uysses

Abstract: Eros in Mourning. A T THE END of "Calypso" (ch. 4), Bloom defecates while reading a story, a "prize titbit" in an old number of a journal called Titbits (56; line 502); when he finishes his business, he tears away "half the prize story" and wipes himself with it (57; line 537). I read this moment as a witty and profound allegory of literature touching reality. One might be tempted to think that the incident is merely Joyce's little joke, a comment on the subliterary character of the titbit in question, yet Ulysses is a text that freely allows the subliterary to circulate within it. And Bloom's reading of the story, embedded in a scene of perhaps unprecedented novelistic realism, touches off a reflection on mimetic truthfulness: "Life might be so," Bloom thinks (56; line 511). In Bloom's toilet, both literary mimesis, in the form known as realism, and Ulysses itself are mis en abyme in more ways than one.' Yet realism is abime only through a process that simultaneously reconstitutes it in a way inconceivable by the laws of classical representation.2 In Ulysses realist mimesis is reconceived as the isomorphism of two decompositional series, one involving language and the other the body: the smearing of the logos with shit emblematizes the correspondence between these two series. It might be argued that this correspondence is illusory, since everything takes place in language-toilet, bowel movement, and all. But this objection would be as out-of-date as the metaphysics to which it replies, a substantialist metaphysics that asserts a simple correspondence between words and things. What is in question here is, rather, the movement of form-making and of the dissolution of form that is the common matrix of text and body. In "Scylla" (ch. 9) Stephen Dedalus declares the identity of this double movement in body and in text: "As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies ... from day to day, ... so does the artist weave and unweave his image" (159; lines 376-78). The analogy of the living body indicates that the artist's weaving and unweaving, unlike Penelope's, is not an alternation. What Stephen names is, rather, the simultaneity, if not the unity, of composition and decomposition; and Ulysses acts out this simultaneity.

Poetry at Stake: Blaise Cendrars, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Poetry in the Literature Classroom

Abstract: jective lyric voice. A S ATTENTION shifts from canonical texts and formalist methodologies to the contextualized study of more popular forms, poetry appears to be the genre whose traditional status within the humanities curriculum is most seriously threatened.' But why growing interest in minority discourses, gender studies, and even popular culture should reduce the number of poetic texts on student syllabi is by no means clear.2 If, as Ross Chambers has recently proposed, literary studies is transforming itself into "relational studies,"3 a brand of cultural studies in which canonized or "elite" works are studied "alongside" historically marginalized ones (Easthope 60), then why are sonnets, epics, odes, and confessional lyrics so rapidly disappearing from the literature classroom? Why has poetry not proved to be a more useful tool with which to do cultural studies, with which, that is, to explore how symbolic value is institutionally and ideologically constituted (Bennett 142)?4 There are of course many reasons for the decline of poetry studies within the academy, not the least of which is the failure of primary education to introduce students to poetic devices at an early age. Further, the very rhythm of academic life would seem to dictate a shift away from poetry toward prose. Poems-both Romantic and modernist-were the major focus of earlier New Critical and poststructuralist styles of exegesis; a declining interest in poetry has predictably accompanied the retrenchment of deconstruction within the academy. Moreover, poetry's historical association with bourgeois aesthetic ideology and with different forms of universalism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism has also contributed to its lack of prominence in today's literature classroom.5 Recently, a number of critics have observed that this association is ill-founded;6 Cary Nelson, for instance, maintains that "poetry is the literary genre . . . most

Reflections on a Manual

Abstract: “Reflections on a Manual” was Roland Barthes's contribution to the colloquium “The Teaching of Literature” held at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1969. Organized by Tzvetan Todorov and Serge Doubrovsky, the Cerisy gathering featured other prominent theorists, like Gerard Genette and A. J. Greimas, whose concerns Barthes addresses and adapts to his own purposes in this paper. Reading manuals of the history of French literature as texts whose grammar is organized by a set of oppositions, he conducts a structuralist enterprise that becomes an inquiry into the myths enabling societies to create and preserve their identities. Barthes's reflections on the teaching of literature recall some of the major works that punctuate the phases of his career, from Mythologies (1957) to “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966) to The Pleasure of the Text (1973).

Presidential Address 1996: Shadows of Futurity: The Literary Imagination, the MLA, and the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: ECAUSE I am sometimes as eagerly confessional as I am incurably epigraphic, I must begin by admitting that I tend to be enthralled by "futurology," which I suppose might be defined as the not very scientific science of the ways in which what will be may evolve out of what has been. And though, I hardly need note, this tag end of the 1990s is an especially juicy time for us futurologists, poets and their readers have been approaching the second millennium for over a century, as my three epigraphs emphasize. No matter how you figure it-as a mysterious futurity casting its gigantic shadows upon the literary imagination, as a new day dawning, or as a sun setting over the evening