Showing papers in "Pmla-publications of The Modern Language Association of America in 2013"

The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies

Abstract: In the name of “homohistory,” “queer temporality,” and “unhistoricism,” some early modernists have accused queer historicists of promoting a normalizing view of sexuality, history, and time. These early modernists announce their critique of the “straight temporality” allegedly caused by a framework of teleology as a decisive break from previous methods of queer history. Using the accusation of teleology as an analytic fulcrum, this essay scrutinizes these scholars’ assumptions regarding temporality, representation, periodization, empiricism, and historical change. Ascertaining the conceptual work that the allegation of teleology performs, I reconsider the meanings and uses of the concept queer, as well as homo and hetero, in the context of historical inquiry. I also assess some of the affordances of psychoanalysis and deconstruction for the history of sexuality. At stake are not only our emerging understandings of the relations between chronology and teleology, sequence and consequence, but also some of t...

The Meaning of the Digital Humanities

Abstract: This question of disciplinary meaning—which I ask from the viewpoint of the humanities generally—is larger than the question of disciplinary identity now preoccupying “DH” itself, as insiders call it. Having reached a critical mass of participants, publications, conferences, grant competitions, institutionalization (centers, programs, and advertised jobs), and general visibility, the field is vigorously forming an identity. Recent debates about whether the digital humanities are a “big tent” (Jockers and Worthey), “who's in and who's out?” (Ramsay), whether “you have to know how to code [or be a builder]” (Ramsay, “On Building”), the need for “more hack, less yack” (Cecire, “When Digital Humanities”; Koh), and “who you calling untheoretical?” (Bauer) witness a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion not unlike that of past emergent fields. An ethnographer of the field, indeed, might take a page from Claude Levi-Strauss and chart the current digital humanities as something like a grid of affiliations and differences between neighboring tribes. Exaggerating the differences somewhat, as when a tribe boasts its uniqueness, we can thus say that the digital humanities—much of which affiliates with older humanities disciplines such as literature, history, classics, and the languages; with the remediation of older media such as books and libraries; and ultimately with the value of the old itself (history, archives, the curatorial mission)—are not the tribe of “new media studies,” under the sway of the design, visual, and media arts; Continental theory; cultural criticism; and the avant-garde new. Similarly, despite significant trends toward networked and multimodal work spanning social, visual, aural, and haptic media, much of the digital humanities focuses on documents and texts in a way that distinguishes the field's work from digital research in media studies, communication studies, information studies, and sociology. And the digital humanities are exploring new repertoires of interpretive or expressive “algorithmic criticism” (the “second wave” of the digital humanities proclaimed in “The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” [3]) in a way that makes the field not even its earlier self, “humanities computing,” alleged to have had narrower technical and service-oriented aims. Recently, the digital humanities' limited engagement with identity and social-justice issues has also been seen to be a differentiating trait—for example, by the vibrant #transformDH collective, which worries that the digital humanities (unlike some areas of new media studies) are dominantly not concerned with race, gender, alternative sexualities, or disability.

“Words with Friends”: Socially Networked Reading on Goodreads

Abstract: Reading isn't what it was. As we enter the “late age of print,” E-Books are still less common than “P-Books” (printed books), but the balance is quickly changing, especially in the world of academic publishing (Striphas xii). While many lament the loss of the p-book's materiality, texts have become more lively as a result of digitization: textual-production platforms like blogging let writers and readers interact with each other and create intimate social relationships. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick found while writing her book Planned Obsolescence using CommentPress, an online platform that enables readers' commenting, writing can become a more social and creative process when done in dialogue with readers. This turn to the social in writing parallels a turn to the social in media generally. Thus, it makes sense to evaluate not how far our devices are taking us from paper—the answer is already pretty far—but rather how digital media are creating new social valences of reading.

Envisioning World Literature in 1863: From the Reports on a Mission Abroad

Abstract: Veselovsky has assigned a task to scholarship which can hardly ever be solved. The Russian formalists, however, have taken up his challenge. —René Wellek (279) The task, which many feel is beyond their abilities, lies within the power of scholarship. —A. N. Veselovsky ALEXANDER NIKOLAEVICH VESELOVSKY (1838-1906) IS WIDELY REGARDED AS RUSSIA'S MOST DISTINGUISHED AND INFLUENTIAL Literary theorist before the formation of Opoyaz (“Society for the Study of Poetic Language”), whose members—Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yury Tynianov, Roman Jakobson, and others—developed the approach generally known as Russian formalism. Readers of Shklovsky may note the prominence accorded to Veselovsky in Theory of Prose (1925). Some will also recall the use of the term historical poetics—in reference to the method put forward by Veselovsky—in the 1963 edition of Mikhail Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky and in his “The Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel: Notes towards a Historical Poetics” (1937-38, pub. in 1975). Another eloquent testimony to Veselovsky's spectral ubiquity in Russian literary theory is the concluding paragraph of Vladimir Propp's pathbreaking Morphology of the Folktale, where Propp humbly asserts that his “propositions, although they appear to be new, were intuitively foreseen by none other than Veselovsky” and ends his study with an extensive quotation from Veselovsky's Poetics of Plot (115-16). It is rarely recognized, however, that Veselovsky's method, in its rudimentary form, constitutes a common denominator of Shklovsky's, Bakhtin's, and Propp's widely divergent approaches.

Redefining Reading: The Impact of Digital Communication Media

Abstract: It's not a book. It doesn't have a smell, you don't touch it …, you're plugged into the internet, you can't concentrate, it hurts your eyes, and you lose the beauty of the words behind this screen. Life itself is in hard copy. … Not this treacherous digitalism which has permeated our lives and our reality. —Respondent to survey comparing on-screen with hard-copy reading Each new technology may be janus-faced, potentially improving and degrading the human condition. The steam engine made industrial products cheaper and more diverse but contributed to the exploitation of child labor and proliferation of squalid urban living conditions. The automobile makes transportation more convenient but pollutes and leads to countless highway deaths. Calculators let anyone perform feats of math but have weakened basic arithmetic skills. A related conundrum holds true for technologies of the written word. The printing press helped spread literacy but shook the foundations of the Catholic Church. Word processing enabled the Japanese to generate text without producing each kanji stroke by stroke, but now many Japanese find themselves forgetting the stroke order. The spelling checkers in word-processing programs monitor typographical errors but dampen motivation to master spelling. Information and communication technologies have generated new platforms on which to read. The list includes desktop and laptop computers, e-readers (such as the Kindle and Nook), tablet computers (e.g., the iPad), and handheld devices (e.g., the iPod Touch, mobile phones). But does reading on these devices differ from reading in hard copy? If so, does our growing dependence on reading onscreen contribute to a redefinition of what it means to read?

Early American Studies—by the Book

Abstract: As a gift for his baptism in london, in february 1759, olaudah equiano records that he received a copy of Bishop Thomas Wilson's Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians (1740 [78]). The book's preface proclaimed the tract suitable for both “the Indians … a tractable People” and “[t]he very Hottentots, who are supposed to be the dullest of Mankind” (v, ix). At this point in his life story, Equiano has moved beyond the now famous “talking book” trope that marks the earlier sections of his autobiography to engage an emergent body of printed materials that were intended to speak to an interethnic cohort of potential Christian converts throughout the British Atlantic world.

Race and Revolution: Blackness in China’s Long Twentieth Century

Abstract: It is in the context of race and revolution during china's long twentieth century that we can best understand the many implications of Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy (1956) in China, where it was translated into the standard Sinitic script as (“The Life of a Boy Servant”) in 1984. The cycle that had begun as a national strengthening movement in the 1890s achieved some kind of completion or vindication with the early-twenty-first-century rise of China on the world stage. Chinese sovereignty was not only achieved during this century but flaunted; revolutions were not only won but largely put aside. Throughout this process, racial thinking played a crucial role, but its significance has been largely ignored because of an all-consuming nationalism that justified itself through a discourse of wounding: China was the victim of Western imperialism and the object of racism. Racism was and is supposed to be a problem for other, principally Western nations, with tainted histories of slavery and imperialism—hence the failure to acknowledge that Chinese nationalism actually has a distinct, though shifting, racial character. Chinese racial nationalism, and, for a time, racial internationalism under Mao, was a major undercurrent in China's revolutionary sequence in the long twentieth century: the late Qing reform and the ensuing republican revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Manchu Qing dynasty; the communist revolution of 1949, which drove out Western and Japanese imperialism and overthrew the republican government; and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, the end of which started China on the path to postsocialism, or “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

The Postcolonial Comparative

Abstract: Comparative literature is unlike any other discipline. elsewhere—for example, in politics or religion—the comparative operates as a subdiscipline within a larger general discipline. The problem for comparative literature is that there is no general discipline of literature: institutionally, the discipline consists of nothing but the fragments of different languages. As a result, through a curious metonymic inversion, comparative literature has come to figure as the totalizing general discipline of which it should form a part. This is why it also seems to offer a natural home for the idea of Weltliteratur. Comparative literature promises the Utopian recreation of the lost amphora of literature as it stood before its fall into the clutches of the nation.

Combining Close and Distant Reading: Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and the Aesthetic of Bookishness

Abstract: Any analysis of reading today must consider contemporary writing practices. The epochal shift from print to digital texts has been under way for some time. Indeed, print books are now so interpenetrated with digital media at every stage of their production that they may more appropriately be considered an output form of digital texts than a separate medium. Much has been written about the end of books, but, as Alan Liu observes, they have been deconstructed almost from the beginning, from the remixing of Bible excerpts according to the liturgical calendar to the experimental fiction of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poemes (“End” 509-11). This tradition notwithstanding, Jessica Pressman correctly detects in some contemporary novels anxiety about the continued life of books and a desire to reassert the book's authority in the face of the exponential expansion of the Web and the ongoing conversion of books into digitized texts, including the several million now available at Google Books and other online venues.

Globality, Difference, and the International Turn in Ecocriticism

Abstract: Comparative literature has always pursued literary studies in a transnational framework. But for much of its history it has been a “modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited to Western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature). Not much more,” as Franco Moretti pithily sums it up (54). The rise of postcolonial theory in the wake of Edward Said's and Gayatri Spivak's influential work vastly expanded comparatist horizons, as did the attention to minority literatures that spread outward from the study of American literature and culture in the 1990s. In 1993 Charles Bernheimer's report to the American Comparative Literature Association, “Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century,” criticized the elitist and exclusionary tenor of earlier reports on the state of the discipline by Harry Levin (1965) and Tom Greene (1975). Instead, it emphasized “tendencies in literary studies, toward a multicultural, global, and interdisciplinary curriculum” and called for an expansion from comparative literature's traditional focus on a mostly western European and North American canon of works to a truly global conception of Goethean Weltliteratur, for inclusion of previously marginalized minority literatures from around the world, and for connections to media studies, other humanities disciplines, and the social sciences (47).

What Is Jim Crow

Abstract: The titles of Kenneth W. Warren’s essay “Does AfricanAmerican Literature Exist?” and book What Was African American Literature? instantly provoked me.1 Admittedly skeptical of these questions, I could not help turning to my mental Rolodex of published authors and texts attesting to African American literature’s historicity or currency. As I read the essay and the book, I gradually realized that they raised more questions than answers—which, I suppose, could have been the point all along. Warren’s work pulled the rug out from under longstanding ields of academic inquiry and devoted readers outside the academy. In doing so, it elicited an initial public reaction in the Chronicle of Higher Education that was marvelous for its diversity and intensity. Subsequently, in the spate of responses online and in print, at conferences and in classrooms, his work has breathed fresh air into scholarship on African American literary history. In the year that has passed since I first read Warren’s writings, my disagreement with his main argument remains, yet the thrust of my critique has changed. Previously I accepted, as many did, the historiographical premise of Jim Crow in What Was African American Literature? For Warren, Jim Crow means the “system of Jim Crow segregation” that once deined a “social world”: “his social order, created by local and statewide laws, statutes, and policies, received constitutional sanction in 1896 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson,” and “it was inally dismantled, at least judicially and legally, in the 1950s and 1960s,” speciically with the 1954 ruling by this court in Brown v. Board of Education, overturning Plessy (1–2). (A quick glance at the MLA International Bibliography shows that Warren’s characterization of Jim Crow largely resembles what one inds in the latest literary scholarship.) Based on this standard deinition in literary studies, I maintained that the genuine intellectualism of African American writers, even the notorious elitism of some of them, did not rob their literature of efectiveness in the formal (or statesanctioned, electoral, and legal) realms of political action (“African American Literature”). A lexible cultural notion of political action shows not only that African American literature has long existed but also that it is a legitimate thing of the present and the foreseeable future, as long as its writers see themselves and act as agents of social change. Now, I believe that the historiography of Jim Crow that Warren uses to launch What Was African American Literature? should have been as controversial as his resultant periodization of African American literary Hurston, Zora Neale. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1995. Print. Sundquist, Eric. Rev. of What Was African American Literature?, by Kenneth Warren. Journal of American History 98.2 (2011): 550–51. Print. Warren, Kenneth W. “The End(s) of African American Studies.” History in the Making. Spec. issue of American Literary History 12.3 (2000): 637–55. Web. 30 Sept. 2012. ———. What Was African American Literature? Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print. 388 What Was African American Literature? [ P M L A

Guest Column—The New Public Humanists

Abstract: T HE LINE BETWEEN THE ACADEMIC HUMANITIES AND THE PUBLIC humanities is fuzzy and getting more so all the time—and that is a good thing. We inherit a distinction between the public humanities, oriented to nonspecialist audiences and nonacademic careers, and the academic humanities, oriented to “disciplinary professionalism” (Bender 9).1 While academic and public understandings of the humanities will not merge anytime soon, they can no longer be neatly drawn as distinct if contiguous domains. Wellmarked paths that cross and recross this boundary delineate a third space—a space for the practice of public scholarship. Timothy K. Eat man refers to public scholarship as “scholarly or creative activity that joins serious intellectual endeavor with a commitment to public practice and public consequence” (“Engaged Scholarship” 18). In this intermediate zone, we can follow the tracks of academic humanists who partner with nonacademic institutions and organizations, interlaced with the footprints of publicly engaged cultural professionals based in other sectors. Citizens of William Paulson’s “enlarged humanities” (inclusive of “the entire project of making and remaking the social, cultural, and material collectives to which we belong” [191]), these scholars describe themselves as undertaking “diferent forms of making knowledge ‘about, for, and with’ diverse publics and communities,” as Eatman and I demonstrated in our 1 2 8 . 2 ]

Sonorous Duration: Tristram Shandy and the Temporality of Novels

Abstract: This essay tracks relations between Laurence Sterne's sonorous prose and his discussions of time in Tristram Shandy (1759-67), identifying a novelistic technique of rhythmic narration geared to represent experiential temporality. I call this technique sonorous duration, and I demonstrate how it conveys a pulsating embodied experience shared by intradiegetic communities as well as by readers. After giving a brief account of early musicology and eighteenth-century elocutionary treatises to indicate the cultural context in which Sterne develops his notions of rhythm and duration, I offer close readings of key scenes in Tristram Shandy that exemplify a novelistic interest in sonority as a means for representing shared and embodied temporal experience. In conclusion I consider the implications these durational readings have for formalist discussions by critics such as Gerard Genette and Garrett Stewart.

The Plagiarist's Craft: Fugitivity and Theatricality in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom

Abstract: After showing that nine percent of William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom is plagiarized in ways that strongly resemble the ways in which William Wells Brown typically plagiarized, I argue that Brown wrote the narrative in tandem with Craft. Recognizing that possibility encourages us to pay closer attention to the formal aspects of Running, whose abrupt tonal shifts and frequent comic digressions make it one of the most peculiar of the major African American slave narratives. Just as Running prolongs, to an extraordinary degree, the intermediate condition of its fugitive protagonists, so does it hold open, by means of its highly theatrical interludes, the prospect of another future, another stage on which black and white Americans might encounter one another. (GS)

Reading, in a Digital Archive of One’s Own

Abstract: WHAT ARE WE REALLY TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE STATE OF READING? AND WHAT DO WE HOPE TO LEARN FROM THE Answers to that question? Confirmation of deeply held prejudices, or a better understanding of what reading means in digital cultures? We need to pose those questions right up front because the debate about the state of reading has been precipitated by the increasing ubiquity of the e-book, even though reading culture has been undergoing massive infrastructural changes for over a decade in the United States. The public discourse on the state of reading and on whether it has a viable future has focused on the future of the book and of literary reading now that e-books have apparently changed everything. The state of reading, as such, is not at stake because it doesn't seem likely that firemen from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 will be swinging by your place anytime soon to torch your books and replace them with a well-appointed wall screen, eliminating reading forever in favor of mindless viewing. People will keep reading, if only to take in the endless text that comes at them on their various screens, from the ones on the wall to the ones they carry around with them everywhere on their portable devices. Try looking at those screens without reading. No, it's clear from the assumptions that underpin the end-is-near pronouncements about the e-book that there's reading and then there's reading and that when people talk about the future of reading, they're worried about whether readers worthy of the name will continue reading literary fiction in the twenty-first century. But that isn't a very interesting question because it imagines the act of reading in such an ahistorical manner, curled up in a well-upholstered time warp, far from the unruliness of contemporary reading cultures.

The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to The Brownies’ Book

Abstract: In The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B. Du Bois posits that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. Yet, in The Crisis “Children’s Numbers” and The Brownies’ Book, Du Bois confronts a new problem for the twentieth century: the question of how to raise black children in the face of disillusionment and despair. Collectively, Du Bois’s works for children respond to this problem by crossing the line that separates youth and age. The systematic dualities of innocence and violence in these writings represent a revised effort to guide the black child’s entry into double consciousness and to repurpose it as a model for a resilient black subjectivity beginning in childhood.

Strolling through the Slums of the Past: Ralph Werther’s Love Affair with Victorian Womanhood in Autobiography of an Androgyne

Abstract: Love Affair with Victorian Womanhood in Autobiography of an Androgyne This essay examines the role of flânerie in Ralph Werther's 1918 Autobiography of an Androgyne. In his everyday male existence, Werther lived a life of self-alienation. Strolls through urban slums in search of same-sex pickups, however, allowed him to become the woman he felt himself to be at his core. Critical assessments of the memoir largely overlook his preferred model of femininity, which derived from Victorian-era assumptions that women were, psychologically and morally, little more than children. Autobiography shows that flânerie was an ontology built on a paradox, for just as the flâneur's static identity consists of constant movement, Werther based his identity on the notion that childhood, itself transitional and peripatetic, was the destination of Victorian womanhood. By aligning flânerie with Victorian womanhood we might better understand how the latter is not antithetical to modern notions of sexuality but is the foundation on which the parameters of modern sexuality were constructed.

The Dead That Haunt Anil's Ghost: Subaltern Difference and Postcolonial Melancholia

Abstract: Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje's haunting novel about the Sri Lankan civil war, probes paradoxes that arise in postcolonial fictional representations of transnational violence. What is conveyed by novels of war and genocide that cast the whole of a decolonial territory as a “deathworld”? The prism of death in Anil's Ghost requires readers of this text to relinquish settled notions of how we as humans understand our finitude and our entanglements with the deaths of others. Postcolonial fictions of violence conjoin historical circumstance with phantasmatic expressions to raise important questions about mourning, collective agency, and the subalternity of postcolonial societies. Advancing a theory about “postcolonial crypts” in fiction, I argue that postcolonial fictions' attention to violence transforms notions about the value of human life appraised through a dominant human rights framework.

Early American Religion in a Postsecular Age

Abstract: A survey of the journal early american literature from the mid-1980s to today reveals a curious phenomenon: religion disappears from the tables of contents during the 1990s. Beginning in 2000, religion returns with measured consistency, culminating with a special issue devoted to “methods for the study of religion” in 2010 (Stein and Murison). This resurgence of interest in religion, not only as a topic of inquiry but also as an analytic category, coincides with the “religious turn” that for the past decade has shaped literary studies and the disciplines intersecting with it. In the wake of 9/11 and the political revival of the religious right, Americanists were surprised at the intense and exceptionally religious nature of the United States. Given the religious and political inflections of the war on terror to follow, the academic study of religion could not remain the “invisible domain” that it had been in American and literary studies throughout the 1990s (Franchot). The context demanded a critical response, particularly because the largely liberal and secular academy could not understand the visible fervor of the religious right at the turn of the twenty-first century. Across disparate fields and disciplines, scholars and critics have revisited religion as a serious topic of intellectual inquiry. Over the past decade, work on religion has focused on how literary forms mediate between the human and the divine, the role of a transcendent belief system in relation to political or social formations, and the conjunction between spirit and matter, the supernatural and the natural. In reflecting on such connections between the secular and the sacred, scholars also elicited a concomitant revision of the narrative of secularization that had long impeded the study of religion by defining modernity through religion's absence, irrelevance, and inevitable replacement by competing paradigms.

Prolepsis and the Tradition of Juvenile Writing: Henry Kirke White and Robert Southey

Abstract: This essay considers the poetry of the juvenile author Henry Kirke White (1785-1806), largely unstudied today but well known throughout the nineteenth century. Kirke White's work provides an example of the importance to juvenile writing of prolepsis—a trope that yokes immediacy to the future, employing a range of strategies including both anticipation and retrospection. Robert Southey's edition of Kirke White's Remains, coming on the heels of Southey and Joseph Cottle's edition of Thomas Chatterton (1752-70), consolidated juvenile writing into a recognizable tradition. Taking young Romanticera writers seriously now helps us recover how many young people published and how actively their writing was discussed. Romanticism's relation to juvenility can shape new hypotheses about literary practice and offer alternative understandings of tradition: the juvenile tradition, through a proleptic sense of its own immanence, anticipates its future critical neglect but indicates the retrospection and reinterpretation that will someday remedy it.

Whitman’s Children

Abstract: Looking at Walt Whitman’s Civil War writings—especially his memoir Memoranda during the War and his letters of consolation—this essay argues that Whitman discovered in the war a way to enlarge the vision of sex and sexual possibility he had initiated in the “Calamus” poems of 1860. Taking as a point of departure the babies named Walt that were born after the war to soldiers for whom Whitman had cared, the essay describes the multiplicity of roles the poet inhabits in the war writing (mother, father, nurse, lover, confidant, scribe) and reads his acts of surrogacy as efforts to restore carnality, in its world-making force, to family and, in particular, to parenthood. Whitman’s project of queer generation, the essay argues, usefully complicates recent scholarship on sex, time, and futurity. (PC)

Awkward Moments: Melodrama, Modernism, and the Politics of Affect

Abstract: The modernist privileging of irony and detached contemplation frequently combined with a recognition of the social and artistic significance of affect. The relation between melodramatic structures of feeling and modernist innovation is evident in two plays of the interwar years: Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann’s Happy End and W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s On the Frontier. Scholars need to develop a vocabulary that complements the customary critical emphasis on modernist “irony,” “estrangement,” and “difficulty” and that can be used to reconstruct the full force of the modernist uses of affect. Instead of estranging melodrama to make it palatable to an audience trained in high modernism, the negotiations between sentimentality and avant-garde aesthetics in Happy End and On the Frontier trigger a backward dialectical movement in which the modernist rallying call to “make it new” blurs into the established patterns of melodrama. (BK)

The Law of Torts and the Logic of Lynching in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition

Abstract: Tort law, which governs civil wrongs, coalesced during the late nineteenth century as courts became increasingly willing to compensate injured people. Its history, however, has been told without reference to issues of race or compensation for slavery and its aftermath. In the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Charles Chesnutt stretches tort discourse by using its principle of corrective justice to theorize liability for racial injustice and so discovers what law suppresses—the problem of collateral consequences when responsibility is made a function of race. Not only does corrective justice reach an operational limit when the enormity of the wrong exceeds the ability to pay, but using race to assess liability aligns corrective justice with the logic behind the southern practice of lynching. Recovering Chesnutt’s use of tort challenges the dominance of contract law as the framework for reading Marrow and revises our historical understanding of the significance of reparations. (TM)

An Image of Europe: Yinka Shonibare’s Postcolonial Decadence

Abstract: In 1891 Oscar Wilde argued that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.” A hundred years later, the Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE takes up where Wilde left off, arguing that “[t]o be an artist you have to be a good liar.” This essay explores how Shonibare reinvents Wilde's antirealism for a globalized, postcolonial world. Building on Leela Gandhi's notion of “interested autonomy,” I argue that in works such as his 2001 photo series Dorian Gray, Shonibare turns to Wilde's aestheticism as a means of upending the relation between realism and politics found in Chinua Achebe's critique of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, rediscovering the disparate racial and sexual geographies at stake in Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and in Albert Lewin's 1945 film version of it. Shonibare's post-colonial decadence, I argue, demonstrates how decadent aestheticism may become central to postcolonial imaginings of the real.

Global Comparatism and the Question of Language

Abstract: As she struggles to get her bearings in the subterranean world of wonderland, a disoriented alice finds that the act of fanning herself or eating a cake has become uncanny; instead of refreshing her and lifting her spirits, the items she encounters alternately telescope her body, nearly breaking her neck, and shrink her down toward the point of nonexistence. At least Alice experienced these dizzying changes sequentially; her scholarly successors in comparative literature are not so lucky. We find ourselves caught in the turmoil of a field that is exploding to global proportions even as enrollments shrink to levels not seen for half a century, putting severe downward pressure on faculty size, and no helpful mushroom is at hand to help us achieve a stable comfort level. Our inability to encompass the world by adding a wealth of new hires is a practical problem with theoretical consequences. Traditionally focused on the relations of a few literary “great powers,” our discipline increasingly needs to take into account a much wider range of cultures, and of languages, than ever before. If we wish to respond to the opportunities and the challenges offered to comparatism by globalization, we will need to rethink our relation to the national languages and literatures that have long been the focus of comparative study.

After Bolaño: Rethinking the Politics of Latin American Literature in Translation

Abstract: On 25 november 2012, when the united states novelist jonathan franzen opened mexico's feria internacional del libro de guadalajara, he spoke of his experience of reading Latin American fiction. Asked about the region's representation through literature in English translation, Franzen stated that, magic realism having now “run its course,” Roberto Bolaño had become the “new face of Latin America.” Franzen's words echo what has almost become a commonplace in the United States over the last five years: naming Bolaño “the Gabriel García Márquez of our time” (Moore), after the publication by Farrar, Straus and Giroux of the translations of Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives [2007]) and his posthumous 2666 (2004; 2666 [2008]). Bolaño is also considered by many writers, critics, and readers in Latin America to be “reigning as the new paradigm” (Volpi, sec. 3). If in the United States market, through the synecdoche of literary commodification, García Márquez's revolutionary Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude [1970]) and, specifically, the magic realism of his fictional Macondo came to stand in for the diverse literary projects of Latin American authors in the 1960s, one must ask if a similar operation is taking place with Bolaño. While the number of translated Latin American literary works continues to be limited and most “go virtually unnoticed” (“Translation Database”), the significance of Bolaño's place at the center of a new canon in translation is magnified and necessitates inquiring into how his critical success in the United States market may be shifting the politics of translation of other texts. As a critic announced in 2011, “a second Latin American literature Boom is happening … [that] probably owes its existence to the explosion of the late-Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, whose popularity re-opened the door to North American publishing houses for Latin American authors” (Rosenthal).

Editor’s Column—The Fantasy of the Library

Abstract: O NCE UPON A TIME, WHEN I WAS DREAMING OF BECOMING A writer, I used to envy Virginia Woolf. I envied her not because she had the audacity and authority to declare that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” (“Character” 38), nor because she invented modernist style, but because she had the good fortune to live in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum and its famous Reading Room (ig. 1). In my imagination, Woolf ’s London homes—46 Gordon Square, 52 Tavistock Square, and 37 Mecklenburgh Square—were not just places in the social geography of London, or simple markers on the literary map of Bloomsbury; rather, they were outposts in a cartography of reading whose epicenter was the British Museum’s room, which Woolf had described in A Room of One’s Own as “the vast dome . . . the huge, bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names” (33). I always imagined Woolf walking the short distance from one of her homes to the British Museum, passing through Sydney Smirke’s iron gates, past the Roman and Greek igures, and arriving at the Reading Room with bated breath, ready to commune with the major authors in the En glish canon, which I, a child of late empire, would come to know as Beowulf to Woolf. Mastering Beowulf to Woolf was once a rite of passage, the gateway to Matthew Arnold’s kingdom of culture—“the best which has been thought and said in the world” (5). Since I could never visit Woolf ’s “band of famous names,” I dreamed about what the colonial library meant for those who belonged to it through an enforced language and culture but were out of it because of the stain of subjection. And because the Reading Room of the British Museum was so far removed from my ordinary Editor’s Column

What’s in a Date? Temporalities of Early American Literature

Abstract: It's time for a pop quiz. you have ten minutes. (is your heart racing? take a deep breath.) What major events in American literature and American history took place in and around the following years? (1) 1789 (2) 1800 (3) 1820 (4) 1830

Bede's Liberation Philology: Releasing the English Tongue

Abstract: In his tale of the miraculous healing of a mute youth in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (bk. 5, ch. 2), Bede figures language pedagogy as poetic emancipation. The tongue’s loosening is an escape from physical disability and a figurative deliverance from the bonds of pagan sin through baptismal gesture. It also signifies liberation from the desolation of being trapped in one’s own consciousness, a freeing into communion with other people. Bede uses the figure of a linguistically disabled youth to explore the grammatical underpinnings of all language, spoken or written. While he depicts the sacramental aspects of Latinate language learning, he also makes a startling move, hinting that English, a tongue ideologically and geographically peripheral, can adopt the pedagogies of Latin for its own secular uses. The story is an interpretative capstone to Bede’s accounts of Caedmon, Imma, and Gregory I’s encounter with English slaves in a Roman marketplace. (IAD)