Showing papers in "South Central Review in 1999"

Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism

Abstract: Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story -- whose history encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King -- that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the metaphysical detective story, in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world.

The family track : keeping your faculties while you mentor, nurture, teach, and serve

Abstract: How do the necessities of caring for others deter, benefit, or redefine research and teaching in higher education? What have universities done to recognize the difficulties facing academic parents, single mothers and fathers, graduate students, lesbian and gay couples? What pro-family policies can be enacted during institutional budget crises? At a time when the academy is an ever more demanding arbiter and shaper of the lives of those it employs, The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve discusses the challenges and benefits of balancing a rewarding professional life with the competing needs to nurture children, care for aging parents, and engage in other personal relationships. Here academic women and men explore issues that include biological and tenure clocks, childcare and eldercare, surrogate parenting of students, and increasing job demands. In telling stories about the quality of their lives, they express their hopes, anxieties, difficulties, and personal strategies for maintaining a delicate but achievable balance. "Lively, well-written, useful, and persuasive The Family Track reveals much on family roles within the academy and suggests many specific projects and guidelines for Institutional change." -- Judith Kegan Gardiner, editor of Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice

An Interview with Ana Castillo

Abstract: Chicago novelist, poet, editor, translator, coiner of the term xicanisma,' Ana Castillo is the author of four collections of poetry, three novels, one collection of short stories, and one collection of essays. Her fourth novel, Peel My Love like an Onion, will be published this year by W.W. Norton, as will her next collection of poetry. Castillo's first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters,2 received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for presentation at bookfairs in Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere. Her next novel, Sapogonia,3 was a sprawling political work which showed great promise but suffered from a lack of editing. But it was her So Far from God,4 a novel that documented the spiritualism of the Chicano communities of northern New Mexico, that brought Castillo international critical acclaim. The Los Angeles Times raved that So Far from God was the U.S. equivalent of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Washington Post called it "a hymn to the endurance of women."5 Similar praise was forthcoming from Latin America and Europe, making Castillo one of the best-known American authors outside of the U.S.

Cultural Revolution or Cultural Shock? Student Radicalism and 1968 in Germany

Abstract: The sixties generation came to power recently in Germany. Its symbolic figure is Joschka Fischer of the Green Party, who was a student radical in 1968 and thirty years later was appointed foreign minister. While foreign and domestic policies have changed fundamentally since reunification in 1989, diminishing the historical impact of the sixties in West Germany, Germans today still debate the meaning of 1968. Former activists claim that their protest movement created a cultural revolution and a political enlightenment which marked the actual birth of a democratic Federal Republic. Conservative critics disagree; to them, the year was a cultural shock which led to social disintegration. As in many Western countries, the German legacies of 1968 are mired in debate.

Women, America, and movement : narratives of relocation

Abstract: Since the colonial days, American women have traveled, migrated, and relocated, always faced with the challenge of reconstructing their homes for themselves and their families. "Women, America, and Movement" offers a journey through largely unexplored territory the experiences of migrating American women. These narratives, both real and imagined, represent a range of personal and critical perspectives; some of the women describe their travels as expansive and freeing, while others relate the dreadful costs and sacrifices of relocating.Despite the range of essays featured in this study, the writings all coalesce around the issues of politics, poetry, and self- identity described by Adrienne Rich as the elements of the "politics of location," treated here as the politics of "re"location. The narratives featured in this book explore the impact of race, class, and sexual economics on migratory women, their self-identity, and their roles in family and social life. These issues demonstrate that in addition to geographic place, ideology is itself a space to be traversed.By examining the writings of such women as Louise Erdrich, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gertrude Stein, the essayists included in this volume offer a variety of experiences. The book confronts such issues as racist politicking against Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian immigrants; sexist attitudes that limit women to the roles of wife, mother, and sexual object; and exploitation of migrants from Appalachia and of women newly arrived in America.These essays also delve into the writings themselves by looking at what happens to narrative structure as authors or their characters cross geographic boundaries. The reader sees how women writers negotiate relocation in their texts and how the written word becomes a place where one finds oneself."

The Doves Ascendant: The American Antiwar Movement in 1968

Abstract: Like many of my colleagues who lived through the sixties, particularly 1968, the most turbulent year of that metaphorical decade, it is difficult to write about the antiwar movement. It is almost as difficult to force myself to make a pilgrimage to the "Wall" during visits to Washington. The memories are too personal and too painful. The sixties were the best of times and the worst of times, especially for those on college campuses who participated in the antiwar movement. It was an exhilarating, intense period, when everything seemed possible, when, for the first and only time in many of our rather ordinary and remote lives in academia, we thought we might make history. It was a heady, bittersweet moment in time that few of us have ever recaptured. I am reminded of a scene in the now unfortunately obscure 1978 film, "The Big Fix," starring Richard Dreyfuss as an old radical turned private eye. In one scene, Dreyfuss, on the trail of a missing person, views old videotapes of Berkeley demonstrations when he begins to sob uncontrollably. My wife and I joined with him as, I suspect, did others of our generation in the dark of the theater. My wife was a Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.) precinct delegate in a district in Detroit that the doves took over in 1968. I was a participant-observer: a skeptical participant on the fringes of the crowd and a careful observer in the sense that I had just begun teaching and writing about the history of U.S. foreign policy with an interest in the impact of opinion on policy. I trust that thirty years removed from the marches and the speeches, I can be more of a dispassionate observer than a nostalgic ex-participant of those best and worst of times.

Dismantling the Dream Factory: The Film Industry in Berubbled Germany

Abstract: In this essay I will tell the story of the German film industry in the postwar years, 1945-1948. The Allies immediately took control of the Nazi's partner in propaganda and Hollywood's only rival. The German film industry was transformed, within a matter of weeks, from an industrial superpower to a cottage industry. The film industry deserved strong condemnation for its collaboration with the Nazis. The Allies' reasons for taking control of the industry and all of filmmaking in Germany are clear. Nevertheless, in so doing, not only did they wipe out one of the Nazi party's most valuable weapons, they also truncated postwar filmmakers' ability to make a different kind of film. The German industry was rendered irrelevant in the years of the occupation to such an extent that it has never recovered. Hollywood thereby lost its most viable competitor. Germans lost a voice that may have given creative force to an honest reckoning with the horrible past in which both industry and audience were, to varying extents, culpable. Until the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich effective at midnight on 8 May 1945, Germany had one of the strongest, most productive film industries in the world. A cartel of studios, producers, distributors, and cinemas left the theaters free of competition and with an audience positively disposed to domestic films. Not only was the film industry implicated in the National Socialist capture and maintenance of power, it also benefited from the war effort. German films had unprecedented access to the cinema market all over Europe. The films filling the schedules of movie theaters throughout the continent were not the propaganda pieces we have come to associate with the regime. Rather, the industry produced a heavy fare of popular entertainment films, similar in look and feel to the Hollywood products of the era. In fact, the German film industry of the late 1930s and early 40s enjoyed a success paralleled only by its American counterparts. And their monopolistic business practices were not radically different from those of the Hollywood studios during the same era. The Allies did not wait until the zero hour for their cultural

Italy in the 1960s: A Legacy of Terrorism and Liberation

Abstract: In the 1960s a spectacular economic advance that involved extraordinary population shifts from the countryside to the city and from the South to the North transformed Italian society. In A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988, Paul Ginsborg describes the years 1958-1963 as "the beginning of a social revolution." In the immediate aftermath of these years, "Italy ceased to be a peasant country and became one of the major industrial nations of the West."' The Italian landscape and ways of life changed profoundly during the 1960s. In 1952, half of all the homes in Italy lacked running water and only a quarter of them had an indoor bathroom, but in the following decade the country strikingly augmented its development along the lines of the American consumerist model. Indoor plumbing became a normal part of life, as did automobiles, television sets, and most of the standard items of consumption that even in the very immediate past would have been unthinkable for most Italians. Irreparably and almost overnight, the explosion of consumerism resulted in a revolution of rising expectations. Yet, for many of those Italians who lived through the 1960s the social and economic transformation seemed much less historically significant than the problem of terrorism. An era is always seen differently by the people who live through it and the historian who studies it. For people living in the midst of an era, there is no context. They cannot know the essential piece of information on which the historian, to his immeasurable advantage, bases his interpretation: how the story comes out. The number of refrigerators purchased, of telephones in use, and similar statistics, are important indicators of Italy's transformation in the 1960s. Nevertheless, in the minds of the Italians themselves, the crucial story of the decade was its violent close, beginning in 1968, which ushered in the terrorist "years of lead" in the 1970s. In a 1984 national poll, Italians were asked to name the historical development of the last fifty years to which future historians of Italy would devote the most attention. Of those polled, over 36 percent chose terrorism. Nothing else even came

Denise Chavez: Chicana Woman Writer Crossing Borders: An Interview

Abstract: New Mexico professor, poet, playwright, performing artist, short story writer and novelist, Denise Chvez is the author of The Last of the Menu Girls,' The Woman Who Knew the Language of the Animals,2 and Face of an Angel.3 Her second novel, Loving Pedro Infante, will be published this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her plays have been produced across the United States and at Edinburgh, Scotland. She has published a number of poems and short stories, most notably in Chicana Creativity and Criticism4 and in the Norton Anthology ofAmerican Literature. Much of what CMvez writes might be considered performative. In fact, she refers to herself as a performance writer. CMvez's The Last of the Menu Girls, a collection of short stories, reads like a novel because the stories are so closely related. These seven stories describe the coming-of-age of a Chicana girl who works in a hospital and ultimately chooses to become an actress. Her second work The Woman Who Knew the Language of Animals, a theatrical piece, is a magical fable for children about getting along in an ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse world.

Subversive Parody in the Early Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks

Abstract: In her 1989 interview with Martha Satz, Gwendolyn Brooks is asked to comment on "the young Black poets of the sixties" who have had such an impact on the later direction of her work, poets who, while they consistently maintained a deep regard for her accomplishments, criticized her for publishing with a white publisher-Harper & Row-and for writing mainly for a white audience. Brooks's reply: "Those poets said Black poetry is written by Blacks, about Blacks, to Blacks. That word 'to' should never be changed to 'for', as it is so often. Whites were highly excited by the poetry written by these young poets. They felt the vitality of it even when it was 'insulting' to themselves."2 Brooks's distinction between "to" and "for" is a critical one, especially when it comes to understanding the nature of her own work from its beginnings. Given the context of publishing in post-war America, for nearly twenty years while she may have been rewarded for writing to a white audience, she was certainly not writing exclusivelyfor them. Indeed, as she has consistently maintained, if she was deliberately writing for anyone, it was herself.' Regarding this question of Brooks's audience, some might decry the relative lack of academic respect for her work when contrasted not only with canonized white poets, but also with more politically aggressive black poets as well. Yet she herself expresses little concern about being underappreciated or "deprived,"4 a lack of concern probably due to the fact that she has been widely honored and her work remains in print through both white and black publishing houses, even if it has not been celebrated by such influential critics as Harold Bloom. Once we accept, however, that her poems address no set audience, questions concerning the presentation of racial identity in the poems from her early collections A Street in Bronzeville and Annie Allen have less to do with audience than with voice.6 That is, we need to ask what we draw from these poems' stated or unstated assumptions about racial

Angels in an Epidemic: Women as "Negatives" in Recent AIDS Literature

Abstract: For decades feminists have analyzed and critiqued the absenting of women from cultural representation-in history books, in novels and plays, in Oscar-winning films-and perhaps surprisingly this task is not lessened when confronting gay male-authored texts, particularly those treating directly or indirectly the subject of AIDS. I single out the AIDS theme because, even though women may have been only marginally significant to gay men's pre- and post-Stonewall experience (and thus narratives depicting this),' women have been integral to gay men's lives since the advent of the HIV epidemic; gay authors' continued efforts to downplay or ignore women's important roles as supporters, healers, activists, and fellow-sufferers dissolve the radical potential of the AIDS text into the misogynist tradition that typifies the heterosexualized Western canon.

TV's 1968: War, Politics, and Violence on the Network Evening News

Abstract: It was a year of "horrors and failures," CBS Evening News substitute anchor Harry Reasoner declared in his commentary on the last day of 1968. Reasoner's brief but pointed description summed up how the network evening news programs presented the year's events. They concentrated on war, politics, and violence. The Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, the presidential election campaign, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia were television's big stories. Each produced memorable images and moments of high drama, assuring them prominent places on newscasts in the visual medium of television. By 1968, more than half of the American people relied on television as their principal source of news. What they saw informed, engrossed, and unsettled them. The unexpected and unimaginable were no longer the unusual. Shocks and traumas in rapid succession suggested that disorder, disarray, destruction, and death were the most important facts of American life and international affairs. Reasoner spoke for many who were aghast at what they saw in their living rooms.I The first big story of 1968 on the evening newscasts was the North Korean seizure of the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo.2 "For the first time in a hundred years, an American ship has been captured on the high seas," ABC news anchor Bob Young announced on 23 January. The Pentagon said that the Pueblo was in international waters in the Sea of Japan, but there was little solid information about exactly what had happened to the ship or about the crew's situation in captivity. U.S. news organizations had no correspondents in North Korea, and television journalists treated information from Pyongyang, such as the alleged confession of the ship's captain, Commander Lloyd Bucher, with skepticism. Much of the reporting suggested that the North Korean action was part of a coordinated Communist strategy to exploit U.S. vulnerability because of the heavy concentration of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War or to distract the attention of high officials in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson at a time when the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF) might be

The Haunting of 1968

Abstract: The 1968 baseball season was considered the year of the pitcher. With his intense glare and fastballs under the chins of batters who crowded the plate, Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals permitted just over one run per ball game for the entire season, a modern day record. In the American league, Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers, who habitually swilled two dozen Coca-colas per day and would later be indicted as a gambling felon, won thirty-one games, the first pitcher to win more than thirty games since Dizzy Dean in 1934. No one has done it since. Carl Yastrzemski was the only American league player to hit above .300 and the National League collective batting average was a paltry .243, its lowest in sixty years. But with diminished offense fan interest gradually declined over the ensuing years. With the telecommunications revolution, the American public increasingly wanted its entertainment full of dazzle, speed, and neon. These were more readily experienced in a Magic Johnson-led fast break or a Michael Jordan acrobatic dunk than in the crafty expansion of the strike zone by a control artist who sent batter after batter trudging back to his dugout. Baseball did not feature the blockbuster pyrotechnics now necessary to sustain interest.

1968: The End and the Beginning in the United States and Western Europe

Abstract: During 1968 the most popular American television show was Mission Impossible, and that is what South Central Review has attempted to do in this issue examining, describing, and explaining that tumultuous year in the United States and Western Europe. Obviously, the topic is much too large for a special issue, and so the editor has had to be very selective. This introductory essay will survey and comment on the major American events of the year before other authors examine politics, the peace movement, and the media in the United States. Then, we will sail to Western Europe and investigate key ideas, themes, and actions in France, Germany, and Italy. What should become clear is that 1968 was one of the most significant years of the Twentieth Century. In many ways the year marked the end of the post World War II period and the first phase of the 1960s, and the beginning of a new and very different era in the United States and in Western Europe. On both sides of the Atlantic 1968 witnessed a youth and student uprising. Why 1968, and not another year-1960, or 1980, or today? Many countries had a baby boom immediately after the Second World War that resulted in a enormous crop of youth by 1968, the oldest turning twenty-two that year, with millions behind them. An unprecedented number of these baby boomers were at overcrowded universities living under the older generation's restrictive rules and regulations, which most youth felt were antiquated. It is no coincidence that most of the rebellion of the era was fomented on campuses. Another reason for revolt was technological. The decade was the first era of international televised news. As shocking events happened in the United States, South Vietnam, or Europe, students there and in other parts of the world could watch their peers march against the war, confront college deans, erect barricades in streets, and strike out against the Establishment, and this created a generational esprit de corps. Finally, and most importantly, there were national and local reasons. While the Vietnam War might have been the engine for activism in the United States during the late 1960s, it had much

Contested Jews: The Image of Jewishness in Contemporary German Literature

Abstract: In 1985, three years after the death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Giinter Riihle, the intendant of the Frankfurt Kammerspiele decided to produce Fassbinder's provocative play, Der Mall, die Stadt und der Tod' [Garbage, the City, and Death], but instead he created a national scandal. The real play was never performed. Instead, another kind of dramatic spectacle occurred with German Jews in the audience taking the stage while simultaneously, a thousand people gathered outside the theater and protested against the production of the alleged anti-Semitic play. Charges and counter-charges followed with Riihle, who was also the play's director, supposedly asserting that "Schonzeit fiir Juden in Deutschland vorbei war." Or, in other words, Germans should feel free to make Jews targets of criticism because they were no longer to be considered an endangered species. Despite the nastiness and trauma of this event, the so-called Fassbinder scandal was important for the Jewish community in Germany because it was the first time in postwar history that Jews of different generations and political persuasions united to voice their deep concern of how Jews were to be portrayed on the stage and in literature. Though the political action of the Jews was successful in stopping the production, it did not, however, answer many crucial questions that the demonstration raised. For instance, is there a correct way to represent Jews critically and positively in art? Is the situation in Germany such that Germans must be more careful than, let us say, Americans or French, in the manner in which they depict Jews? Is every negative portrayal of a Jew to be associated with anti-Semitism? If, until recently, as Rafael Seligmann has claimed in his book, Mit beschrankter Hoffnung, Jewish writers in Germany have not risen to the task of depicting the situation of German Jews and Jewishness in Germany with candor, how can one expect Germans to represent Jews in a forthright and free manner? To put the problem more provocatively, were German Jews upset by the Fassbinder play because Riihle was depicting a contemporary Jew in a critical manner in a way that contemporary Jewish artists had not done and

More on History and Morality

Abstract: It goes without saying that I took the greatest interest in reading the essays devoted to my work in the South Central Review,' and I am very grateful to the editors for having organized this forum. I will abstain from commenting here on those articles, the majority, which are favorable to the positions I take. Happily (not necessarily for me, but in the interest of opening the debate), not all the essays are favorable; Larry J. Reynolds, in particular, assumes a critical stance in his.2 I would like to comment on it briefly, in order to specify the nature of our disagreement. I use the verb "specify" because I have the impression that, in large part, Reynolds does not understand the meaning of my arguments and that at least some of our views are closer than he thinks (but I have only myself to blame for my lack of clarity). The first misunderstanding concerns the moral judgments the historian brings to bear upon the events he analyzes. I observe, firstly, that these judgments are omnipresent, and secondly, that they generally tend to express sympathy either with the heroes or the victims of the events under study. I go on to argue that in making these judgments, the historian himself is not performing a moral act (he contents himself with defending his own interests, and there is nothing intrinsically moral about giving moral lessons to others); and I add that, even were he to do just the opposite, namely to systematically attack his own kind-the group with which he identifies-he still would not necessarily be acting morally. So what I recommend by way of a conclusion is that the historian forego any systematic attribution of the labels "good" and "evil" to

Multiculturalism, Reintegration, and Beyond: The Afrikanisch-Asiatische Studentenf6rderung in Gottingent

Abstract: In 1994, Sabine von Dirke offered an analysis of the German debate over multiculturalism in which she demonstrated how this discussion, beginning in the early 1980s, created a forum for Germans from across the political spectrum to negotiate different and conflicting notions of German identity.' Since then, the climate has not been favorable in Germany for a rewriting of citizenship laws and the development of a concept of Germanness allowing for ethnic diversity. Recent debates confirm that--even under the new German government--these topics remain highly controversial. In the following essay I will first discuss the current status of multiculturalism as an alternate concept to the idea of an ethnically homogeneous German nation-state. As I shall demonstrate, factors such as the German history of emigration and immigration, the influence of unification, and the debate over citizenship are central to the conflicting perceptions of multiculturalism prevalent in the Federal Republic today. To illustrate this disagreement more concretely, I will focus on two title stories covering the current state of multiculturalism that were published in the highly popular magazines Der Spiegel and Brigitte in the spring of 1997. Following the analysis of these articles as reflecting the polarity of multicultural arguments, I will turn to the situation of students and academics from Africa and Asia, whose particular concerns are rarely recognized in debates and research on immigration, citizenship, and multiculturalism. More specifically, I will discuss the Afrikanisch-Asiatische StudentenfOrderung in Gottingen, which since the late 1950s has emerged as a model institution addressing the distinct needs of these students and academics. My analysis will show that the association offers a paradigm for implementing multicultural solutions, one which deserves attention for its exemplary character and effective, practice-oriented approach to representing multicultural students and academics in Germany. My discussion will highlight in particular how the association developed a unique discourse of multiculturalism, using concepts such as "Interkultureller dialog, " "Reintegration" and "Selbsthilfe" to

The "Fittings" of Cymbeline

Abstract: Conspicuous repetition of forms of a word in a Shakespeare play often signals the presence of a special motif; by their different contexts of usage, they allow an analyst to map values otherwise not easily discernible. In short, the recurring forms frequently represent passable roads to the heart of a play's interests. Recurring words such as "grace," "play," and "recreation" in The Winter's Tale and "nothing" and "noting" inmMuch Ado served this function in memorable fashion for M. M. Mahood and Paul Jorgensen.' In Cymbeline, Shakespeare repeatedly employs the word "fit" not only to focus issues of decorum, clothing, and sexuality but also to create an original relationship among them. Concentrating upon an author's wordplay concerning a key term or set of related terms so as to focus a work's motifs and then reveal a relatively coherent relationship among them typified the New Criticism, which as Hugh Grady and Russ McDonald have shown, is now a rapidly receding event in literary history.2 Nevertheless, close reading of the kind identified with New Criticism remains a prerequisite for developing the contextualized interpretations associated with recent critical approaches such as New Historicism. McDonald, among others, has issued a call for close formalist readings of Shakespeare's plays in the context of such subjects as the critic's intellectual autobiography, metrical analysis, a specific rhetorical paradigm, and the theatrical text as voice.' This enterprise, dating from the early 1990s, has come to be known as the New Formalism, and it is in the spirit of this movement that I offer this essay, which moves from lexical to interpretive readings." "Robert Weimann has cautioned against the omission of Spass--fun, pleasure-from current [critical] work, urging that we 'begin again to talk about the enjoyment of Shakespeare's text."'5 Teasing out the several significations of the word "fit" in Shakespeare's late romance Cymbeline conforms to Weimann's wish.

Virtuality Takes Command

Abstract: Thank you for asking me here to speak in person. It's so retro. You could have easily produced a virtual Codrescu to do the job--and in a few years, I am sure, the virtual Codrescu will be as close to the real thing as a set of parameters can produce. You can still experience me virtually, however, if you close your eyes. It will be just like listening to the radio. But I doubt that any of you are interested in virtuality to that extent. In fact, you'll have to look hard to find anyone-and that includes the techno-geeks at Microsoft-who are so invested in virtuality that they would prefer to get their information without the ambiguous and paradoxical participation of all their senses. It would be hard indeed to find such a person, but there are some who come close. I met two young men who spend over fourteen hours a day in something called MUD-a Multiuser Dungeon-which is an imaginary world created by a number of players with shifting and evolving identities, many of whom are part human and part animal. These two cybernauts kept their eyes to the ground while I spoke to them, and when I asked them if they felt uncomfortable in human society, they both nodded, "yes." When I pressed them about what exactly made them uncomfortable, one of them mumbled, "it's limited." That surprised me because I would have thought that the opposite might have been the case. Spending fourteen hours glued to the screen, using very little of your body, seems limited to me. I am no great sportsman, but I get tremendous enjoyment from the pure animal activity of a body which, I believe, puts forth its own information and discovers things that are not immediately quantifiable. But then-it turned out that these two guys were pursuing an interdisciplinary, cross-speciae Ph.D. in cultural studies. They were posthumanists. And as far as I could see, they had all the elements that would make for a successful academic career later on. They were utterly dependent on a machine that-like the university--provided for their physical needs, they had an ideology that was virtually defiant

"Literary Studies at Century's End-Modest Proposals": The 1997 SCMLA Presidential Address

Abstract: Two of my favorite thinkers are Browne and Calvin. I have in mind in particular Sir Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus (1658),' a work in which Browne claims to have discovered that what he calls quincunxes-and what we would call rectangles or squares with five points (four at the corners and one at the center)--are everywhere in the world, marking the material, the human, and the philosophical. All things, Browne says at one point, "are seen Quincuncially."2 Browne's remarks point us to the importance of perspective; it is as if once one begins to see rectangles, squares, and fives in the world, one sees them everywhere. Calvin is also interested in perspective. My Calvin, by the way, is not John but Hobbes's friend. Calvin, as other "Calvin and Hobbes" aficionados will recall, is quite focused on perspective-his own. The world goes awry when he is expected to look at things from someone else's vantage point. In one strip, in fact, Calvin's world quite visibly goes awry when, as a result of seeing more than one side to an issue--more than his side-he becomes a figure in a neo-cubist painting. For Calvin this notion of multiple points of view is threatening, and he forces his world back into recognizable order where a single perspective--his perspective-is the only one that counts. I have thought about Browne and Calvin as I have considered this presidential address. Not that I will discuss quincunxes or comic strips but that I have been thinking of how it is that when one focuses on a particular subject or idea, everything seems to relate to that idea in some way. Maybe we're all more like

More on Todorov, History, and High Moral Ground

Abstract: I appreciate Tzvetan Todorov's recognition of the modest critique I offered of his writings in the South Central Review, though of course I'm dismayed by his impression that I do not understand the sense of his arguments. In the paragraphs below, I'll try to defend my account of his work and address some of the new issues he raises in his present response. First of all, let me say I do not presume to know Todorov's intentions better than he does, so when he cites them to show why my "portrait" of him is unrecognizable, I can only reply that my comments about the author of his works are based on the works themselves, as they have been translated into English. Although I regret the mismatch between Todorov's self image and the "Todorov" of my essay, the mismatch seems to me to have little bearing on the validity of my essay. The task I was given when invited to contribute to the South Central Review's special issue was to discuss the usefulness of Todorov's writings, especially his essay "The Morality of the Historian," to Americanists such as myself engaged in historical literary study. Todorov makes the point that my essay does not refute his argument about "heroes" or "victims," but "simply" repeats it, but as the introduction to my essay makes clear, my goal was not to "refute" Todorov (I doubt that anyone has the skill to do that), but rather to point out what I saw as the many insufficiencies in the classification scheme he spends the first half of his essay setting out. Although he himself acknowledges some of these insufficiencies in the second half of his essay, thus aligning our arguments somewhat, he does so in the context of seeking alternative ways for the historian to assume "the role of moral agent,"' a search whose benefits I question. In the second half of my essay I tried to show the rationale informing Todorov's insistence upon "the morality of the historian" and why this insistence holds little appeal for a contemporary Americanist. Because Todorov does not take exception to my characterization of him as a moralist first, a historian second, I assume it is not one of my "misunderstandings"; however, my comparison of his views to those of "outspoken members of the right-wing,"2 to which he