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Showing papers in "Style in 1999"


Journal Article
01 Jul 1999-Style
TL;DR: Genette's distinction between autographic and allographic manifestations raises questions as mentioned in this paper, as well as the question of whether an art work can exist either "autographically" in one object, such as a painting or a sculpture, or in "allographic" versions or copies of the object such as literature or music.
Abstract: Gerard Genette The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence Translated by G M Goshgarian Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997 vii + 272 pp $4250 cloth; $1695 paper Trans of L'oeuvre de l'art [1]: Immanence et transcendence Paris: Seuil, 1994 Gerard Genette L'oeuvre de fart [2]: La relation esthetique Paris: Seuil, 1997 297 pp Those who have followed the evolution of Gerard Genette's publications may not be surprised by his two most recent books After all, Genette has demonstrated a mastery of a variety of subjects: narratology in Narrative Discourse and Narrative Discourse Revisited, language and linguistics in Mimologics, genres and modes in The Architext, intertextuality in Palimpsests, the margins of literary works in Paratexts, and style in the last essay of Fiction and Diction More direct precursors of Genette's two-volume study of The Work ofArt, furthermore, are evident in the earlier parts of Fiction and Diction, Esthetique et poetique, an anthology edited by Genette of what are widely regarded as standard essays on important issues in aesthetics Nevertheless, Genette must feel that he has expanded the boundaries of his considerations so much that he owes us an apologia "The reader will perhaps be surprised to find a mere specialist in literary studies setting out to explore, without having provided (much) advance notice, one or two disciiplines usually reserved for philosophers" (Immanence 1) The general discipline in question here is, of course, aesthetics, and Genette argues that to understand literature better, it is useful to know "what kind of art it is, what kind the others are, and what an art in general is" (Immanence 2) Genette's overall title, The Work ofArt (or the artwork), signifies ambiguously, either to refer to the immanent qualities in the work and how the work manifests itself (the predominant subject of Immanence), or else to mean the work performed by art, a meaning better expressed by the French title: that is, the creation of a transcendent version of the original (considered in the second part of Immanence) or the work's relations with elements outside it, including the audience (explored in Relation) At the outset, one should mention that in these two volumes, Genette progressively emphasizes the importance of the pragmatic function of art (Immanence 257) The first problem that Genette considers in Immanence is the location of the art work According to the late Nelson Goodman, whose Languages of Art provides a starting-point for Genette's argument, as immanence, art must exist either "autographically" in one object, such as a painting or a sculpture, or in "allographic" versions or copies of the object such as literature or music (immanence 16) But, Genette notes, allographic arts like the latter two, though they depend on performance or on reproduction through such things as the printing press for their execution, originate in the "ideal object of immanence," the result of the unique autographic act of writing a novel or composing a score (Immamnence 17) The essential property of the original autographic act (the words in the order they occur in a novel, for example) cannot be changed in a successful execution (printing) of the manuscript The "manifestation" of these "properties of immanence" in a text may exhibit many different irrelevant, or contingent, elements like the typeface or the quality of the paper (Immanence 86-- 90) In the case of text with different versions (The Song of Roland or even Joyce's Ulysses), each version would be considered an autographic original (Immanence 112) Genette's distinction between autographic and allographic manifestations raises questions A straightforward example of an allographic manifestation is a performance of a musical composition, which, of course, requires an artistic interpretation (Immanence 50) On the other hand, the recordings of this performance would be classed as autographic multiple objects because they are mechanically reproduced with no artistic effort as in other second-stage multiple objects like photographs, prints, and cast sculpture (Immanence 40, 45, 72) …

24 citations


Journal Article
01 Apr 1999-Style
TL;DR: Barbara Johnson's The Feminist Difference as discussed by the authors examines the differences between women and men with respect to psychoanalysis, race, and gender, and argues that it is literature above all else that may offer the vast capacity for mystery essential in confronting the uncertainties and contradictions of feminism.
Abstract: Barbara Johnson. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1998. viii + 215 pp. $22.00 cloth. Barbara Johnson's The Feminist Difference is heralded by a striking cover: a glossy reproduction of an androgynous-looking creature wearing a softly-- constructed blue-black jacket and hair as short as a typical man's, with no bust evident or any stereotypic female jewelry; thus, Johnson initially confronts us with a visual representation of both difference and similarity even before she engages us in the shifting verbal text of "difference" as experienced in the feminist sphere. Is the representation consciously meant to suggest androgyny? Are women able to analyze in just which ways they are unlike men, apart from obvious anatomical differences? What effects do cultural representations of race and gender have upon women's perceptions of their differences among themselves, as well as differences from men? Barbara Johnson suggests in The Feminist Difference that it is literature above all else that may offer the vast capacity for mystery essential in confronting the uncertainties and contradictions of feminism. Johnson embraces literature as a type of cultural work which makes accessible those ideas which are necessary and yet impossible to articulate fully except through the ambiguous territories possible in story and poetry. Johnson launches her feminist critique with an examination of literary differences with respect to psychoanalysis, race, and gender. Juxtaposing works such as Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," Gilman's `"The Yellow Wallpaper," and Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," she frames her analysis in these terms: "Is Female to Male as Ground is to Figure?" In this trio of narratives, the initiative toward therapy is generated by what Johnson identifies as a discommoded man rather than by the woman herself. Aylmer, in Hawthorne's story, wants to erase the birthmark and obliterate sexual difference by erasing woman to ground or blankness. The figure in "The Yellow Wallpaper" becomes recursive in a startling way; in the end readers do not know which side of the paper she is on and thus also do not know where to locate themselves. Johnson believes that both stories are narratives of a woman's complicity in her own destruction, a destruction related to the repression of ambivalence and to the repression of writing. Mixed feelings are not permitted; what the woman ultimately rejects, then, is herself as complex woman. In "The Quicksands of the Self," Johnson complicates the questions of race raised in the narratives by Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut. In Larsen's novel, Quicksand, the mulatto named Helga learns to act out the logic of self-erasure in merging with a man as the omnipotent other. Race is shown to be a kind of selfobject from which a self is able to derive both positive and negative mirroring. Racial pride and prejudice, however can be seen as institutional structures, not merely interpersonal phenomena. Larson is lauded for recognizing that the mother, who bears the burden of creating a positive mirror for her child, may herself suffer from the impossible ways in which her "difference" is inscribed in the social order. Johnson next focuses upon Bigger in Richard Wright's Native Son. Bigger not only kills; he writes. Bigger's letter hides the unmistakable traces of its black authorship, but the detectives are blind to such clues. Johnson believes that it is because the rape plot is so overdetermined that Bigger becomes a murderer and that most readers do not recognize the almost invisible plot about black women in Wright's fiction. The difference is not recognized. Johnson caps her discussion of racial "difference" with an astute analysis of Toni Morrison's Sula as a recontextualization of Freudian concepts of envy, castration, and the penis in the framework of American sexual and racial arrangements. …

22 citations


Journal Article
22 Mar 1999-Style
TL;DR: Proverbs have been collected from a very wide variety of cultures and, with a few possible but still disputed exceptions, no past or present culture is reported to have gone without them as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: 1. What are proverbs? "Where there's a will, there's a way." When you hear or read the words just cited, you will readily recognize that you have encountered a proverb. You should also find it quite easy to recall additional instances of this literary or, perhaps better, protoliterary genre.(1) Does this mean that you (or anybody else) can easily say what proverbs are? Hardly so, and numerous proverb scholars have in fact despaired of the task of defining the familiar subject matter of their expertise.(2) It appears that no definition can both map all of Proverbia and protect the neighboring lands of cliches, maxims, slogans, and the like from unwanted annexation. Rather than legislate necessary or sufficient conditions for Proverbian citizenship, we propose to issue residence permits to all brief, memorable, and intuitively convincing formulations of socially sanctioned advice.(3) We prefer the word "advice" to "wisdom" - the more frequently invoked alternative - because we see proverbial descriptions and prescriptions as offering ad hoc strategies for thought and conduct rather than timeless truths. This view isn't difficult to justify, given the frequent occurrence of contrary proverbs. After all, how could you believe that "where there's a will, there's a way" if you also believe that "man proposes, god disposes"? To complicate matters further, "there is no place like home" may but need not be said ironically to ridicule parochialism, yet the familiar proverb's apparent contrary, "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence," is typically uttered in an ironic spirit to chastise unjustified dissatisfaction with the home turf. Clearly, a mental or printed dictionary of proverbs is not a foolproof "book of wisdom" any more than a mental or printed dictionary of ordinary words. Ordinary and proverb dictionaries alike list verbal means whereby humans facing different challenges of their lifeworlds can hope to attain, retain, and disseminate advice - whether through the wise use of words in general or through the wise use of those special strings of "always already" quoted words called proverbs.(4) Since we think that proverbs are as proverbs do, we propose to explore in the next four sections of this article when, where, how, and why they function. We have profited from recent work in several pertinent fields but venture into uncharted territory as our argument unfolds. In the sixth and final section, we provide a summary of our views in five plain-spoken "theses." 2. When are proverbs? Proverbs have been collected from a very wide variety of cultures and, with a few possible but still disputed exceptions, no past or present culture is reported to have gone without them.(5) It is quite possible, therefore, that proverbial advice has been with us (that is, with the human species) for much of the last two thousand or more generations of roughly thirty years each.(6) Indeed, the capacity to coin, remember, and share proverbs, and thus efficiently transmit accumulated experience, may well have been one of the adaptive advantages that fully developed human language bestowed on its early users. Since most of the history of the human species has been the history of oral rather than literate cultures, it is not surprising that the originally oral medium of transmission still affects the mental processing and communicative exchange of proverbs. Even when you read the sentence "Where there's a will, there's a way," you are likely to conceive of it as a "saying" rather than a "text" - just as most jokes, even in written or printed form, carry with them the aura of oral performance. Proverbs "take us back" to the times when, as pre-literate children and pre-literate humans, we were mainly learning how to live through communal hearsay. But there is nothing simple-minded nor childish about proverbial advice as an oral means of sharing accumulated experience.(7) Indeed, the sea change from orality to literacy in the history of particular societies does not seem to threaten the survival of proverbs as a fairly distinct kind of verbal expression and communication. …

14 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 1999-Style
TL;DR: For example, the authors argues that postmodern narratives are a historical form of satire, and postmodern fiction remains historical, precisely because it problematizes history through parody, and thus retains its potential for cultural critique.
Abstract: History is unquestionably one of the most contentious areas of debate among those concerned with postmodernism. I would like to take up Fredric Jameson's and Linda Hutcheon's competing accounts of the relation between postmodernism and history not because their differences stand as a recognized debate (such as that of J[check{u}]rgen Habermas and Jean-Francois Lyotard), but rather because their accounts of postmodern fiction seem to leave little room for compromise. [1] For Jameson, postmodern narrative is a historical (and hence politically dangerous), playing only with pastiched images and aesthetic forms that produce a degraded historicism; for Hutcheon, postmodern fiction remains historical, precisely because it problematizes history through parody, and thus retains its potential for cultural critique. Despite the apparent polarization of these two views, I wish to negotiate a position that acknowledges both Jameson and Hutcheon because at certain turns I find both perspectives useful--depending on the c ultural texts that they scrutinize. Such a negotiation is not as daunting once one realizes that what they mean by postmodernism is not the same thing: Jameson's postmodernism focuses on the consumer, while Hutcheon's originates with the artist as producer. As a result of this different focus, Jameson and Hutcheon in many instances are speaking past each other, describing different cultural phenomena. [2] At the same time, for all their interest in defining the postmodern, both Jameson and Hutcheon owe much to modernism, albeit to differing strands: Jameson to the Adornian tradition and Hutcheon to the tradition of the avant-garde. 1. Jameson--Postmodern or Postmodernity? Jameson makes a series of distinctions between modernization, modernism, and modernity that provide a productive insight into his work on postmodernism: if modernization is something that happens to the base, and modernism the form the superstructure takes in reaction to that ambivalent development, then perhaps modernity characterizes the attempt to make something coherent out of their relationship. Modernity would then in that case describe the way "modern" people feel about themselves. (Postmodernism 310) The response of art and literature to the alienating effect of modernization, as is well known, was often hostile. To invoke "modernism" as a category is to think in the terrain of oppositional aesthetics and poetics. But because Jameson is so interested in mapping the affect of the contemporary moment, the way "postmodern" people feel about themselves, when he speaks of postmodernism or the postmodern, what he means might more accurately be called-to borrow David Harvey's title-the condition of postmodernity. Hutcheon notes the confusion that results from Jameson's use of "the word postmodernism for both socio-economic periodization and the cultural designation," a move that deliberately collapses the distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity (Politics 25). Hutcheon's postmodernism, which focuses on the intentions of artists to comment critically on their contemporary moment through their interventions in aesthetics and poetics, is more clearly linked than Jameson's to what he himself means by mode rnism; in other words, Hutcheon's postmodernism, like Jameson's modernism, represents the response of the arts to the material conditions created by modernization. Jameson's postmodernism shows his debt to both reader-response criticism and the work of Jean Baudrillard, who as early as Consumer Society (1970) was attempting to shift attention away from a traditional Marxist category--the means of production--and toward a new one--the means of consumption. In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson provides a post-mortem on modernist aesthetics, for he clearly sees as no longer viable modernism's protopolitical projects of defamiliarization, "with their familiar stress on the vocation of art to restimulate perception, to reconquer a freshness of experience back from the habituate and reified numbness of everyday life in a fallen world. …

13 citations


Journal Article
01 Apr 1999-Style
TL;DR: Veitch's book American Superrealism: Nathaniel West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s as discussed by the authors is the most comprehensive study of West's work in American literature.
Abstract: Jonathan Veitch. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,1997. xx + 182 pp. $50.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. As the opening pages of Jonathan Veitch's book American Superrealism: Nathaniel West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s suggest, something like a second rediscovery of Nathaniel West appears to be underway. West's four short novels, all published in the decade preceding his death in 1940, earned praise from such influential figures as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, but they went largely unread in his lifetime. It was not until the fifties and sixties that critics like Daniel Aaron, Norman Podhoretz, and Leslie Fiedler began to praise West as a "universal satirist" and a major American novelist. During the theory explosion of the seventies and eighties, however, critical attention again largely turned away from West. Veitch alludes to this reception history in the opening pages of his book, but he also notes that West has recently made another comeback, as evidenced by the detailed studies of his work in Thomas Strychacz's Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism and Rita Barnard's The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance-and he could now add the 1997 publication of the Library of America edition of West's work. While Veitch admires the studies of Strychacz and Barnard, he criticizes their tendency "to treat West's fiction as an illustration of their own theoretical interests" (xi). Veitch's own book-length study, with its remarkably lucid prose and its crucial insights into West's place in twentiethcentury American literature, is the best of these recent treatments and among the most important books yet published on the author, despite its own subjection of West to its author's theoretical interests. The current revival of West is a function of the recent trend toward sociopolitical approaches to literature and cultural studies, and Veitch's book is also a manifestation of this trend. He laments earlier critics' attempts to transform "a deeply political writer like West into a `universal satirist' for whom, in Aaron's words, 'the real culprit is not capitalism but humanity"' (xvi). In his attempt to repoliticize West, Veitch reverses Aaron's formulation, arguing that "in West's fiction, the real culprit is not humanity, but capitalism" (xvi). But at the same time, Veitch characterizes West's work as an American adaptation of the aesthetic developments of the European avant-garde. He labels West's work "superrealism," the original translation of surrealisme used on that movement's American debut in 1931, to distinguish West's project from the depoliticized, purely aesthetic connotations "surrealism" eventually acquired in America. Perhaps Vetich's best statement of his new take on his subject occurs midway through the book: "In fact, the peculiar accomplishment of Nathaniel West was to discover a way of adapting an avant-garde style of writing to a native social criticism" (64). Veitch's introduction situates West within the social milieu of the 1930s, the decade in which his entire writing career took place, by describing the specifically American problem West's social criticism addresses. According to Veitch, Americans in the 1930s experienced a "crisis of representation" because they were unable to represent the social reality of the Great Depression, to discern the forces responsible for their misery. He finds this crisis not only in literary works, but also in historical studies of the period and documentary evidence like photographs. The main aesthetic response to this problem, he argues, is exemplified by writers like Steinbeck, who offered an oversimplified pastoralism in which "the particularity of lived experience" was pitted against "the abstract forces of modernity" (9). The remaining chapters trace the development of West's markedly different vision. First, Veitch introduces West's superrealism, whose twin strategies of literalizing the fantastic and rendering the literal with a "hallucinatory vividness" together "subject representation to a thorough deconstruction" (21 ). …

13 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 1999-Style
TL;DR: For instance, this paper pointed out that Graff is a manipulator of appearances who will wear sheep's clothing to satisfy wolfish appetites for power, and he is a "leftist" who will use any means to attain an end.
Abstract: At first hearing, this question may sound like an accusation. The stock figure of the Machiavel, like the commonplace connotation of "rhetoric," calls to mind a calculating schemer who will use any means to attain an end, a manipulator of appearances who will wear sheep's clothing to satisfy wolfish appetites for power. My question might appear to ask whether Graff is something other than he seems, whether he is after more than he says, whether he is strategically deceiving us for the sake of undeclared and self-aggrandizing ends. Has he, for example, managed to get himself attacked as a "leftist" in order to gain credibility among left-leaning critics who still remember his earlier attacks? Is he still pursuing that earlier antitheoretical agenda under the guise of a friend of theory? This line of criticism might be suggested by my question, and I would even admit to exploiting its sensationalism to draw attention to my argument, but it does not represent either the Machiavelli or the Graff I want to discuss. The question arose for me in the margins of Victoria Kahn's essay on "Habermas, Machiavelli, and the Humanist Critique of Ideology" in the special issue of PMLA devoted to "The Politics of Critical Language," and it has led me to further inquiry into Kahn's interpretation of Machiavelli, into Machiavelli himself, and into Graff's proposals for the reorganization of literary studies, the humanities, and the university on what he calls a conflict model. [1] The phrase in Kahn's essay that provoked my question was "Machiavelli's interest in the productive uses of conflict" (472), for the phrase could describe Graff's widely publicized interest as easily as Machiavelli's. Graff, after all, has identified himself as firmly with the slogan "teach the conflicts" as Matthew Arnold identified himself with the slogan "the best that has been known and said" and for the same reason, too--to make his position, as Arnold would have said, "prevail" in what Arnold called "culture" and Graff, in his more conflictual idiom, calls "the culture wars." This link between Graff and Machiavelli might well have led nowhere, but Kahn's own articulation of contemporary critical theory with Renaissance exemplars seemed to legitimate the posing of such a question, not for the benefit of Machiavelli scholars (of which I am not one); but for the edification of contemporary professors of English (of which I am), and moreover other features of her account of Machiavelli's interest in productive conflict seemed to firm up the analogy with Graff's proposal but also to offer a position from which it might be elaborated and criticized. Kahn learns much from Machiavelli and other Renaissance writers about the problems of using historically distant words and deeds as examples to imitate or standards by which to criticize contemporary affairs. It is difficult, she shows, to maintain the difference between past and present that makes the past exemplary, while at the same time demonstrating the resemblance between them that gives the past force and relevance in the present situation. She points to Machiavelli's reduction of his historical sources from continuous narrative to fragmentary exemplary anecdotes and aphorisms as a strategy by which he makes Roman history available for his Florentine readers' interpretation and critical application to their own circumstances. My own argument will proceed in similar fragmentary fashion, further reducing Kahn's Machiavelli's version of Livy's Roman Republic for Renaissance Florentines for the citizens of the late twentieth-century American Republic of Letters. That last phrase, "Republic of Letters," helps to link what may seem to be the farfetched terms of my comparison through their common interest in the conditions under which and the strategies by means of which the best possible polity might be sustained in their respective worlds. The phrase feels a bit orotund and out of date, but it links political ideals with literary interests in a way that I think names the good to which both Kahn's and Graff's work is devoted, though neither of them uses the phrase. …

9 citations


Journal Article
22 Mar 1999-Style
TL;DR: For instance, Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry" as discussed by the authors is one of the most famous examples of a piece of work that can be seen as a kind of "never be sent" poetry.
Abstract: No matter how complicated anything is, if it is not mixed up with remembering there is no confusion, but and that is the trouble with a great many so called intelligent people they mix up remembering with talking and listening, and as a result they have theories about anything but as remembering is repetition and confusion, and being existing that is listening and talking is action and not repetition intelligent people although they talk as if they knew something are really confusing, because they are so to speak keeping two times going at once, the repetition time of remembering and the actual time of talking but, and as they are rarely talking and listening, that is the talking being listening and the listening being talking, although they are clearly saying something they are not clearly creating something, because they are because they are always remembering, they are not at the same time talking and listening. Do you understand. Do you any or all of you understand. Anyway that is the way that it is. And you hear it even if you do not say it in the way I say it as I hear it and say it [. . .] And does it make any difference to you if you do understand. It makes an awful lot of difference to me. It is very exciting to have all this be. Gertrude Stein, "Portraits and Repetition" (1935) Like much of her writing, Gertrude Stein's prose poem "Patriarchal Poetry" meditates on the limits of a limiting vocabulary. It troubles the presumptive coherence of symbolic discourse in order to acknowledge and enable a vast range of human subjectivity. Always asserting a generative link between modes of language and modes of being, it requires an improvisatory approach to reading and reveals the insufficient arithmetic of patriarchal subjectivity by encouraging its performative remainders. Though consistent with Stein's ongoing interrogation of the relationship between language and identity and language and power, the 1927 piece resists the interpretive approach of even her most agile readers. In fact, Marianne DeKoven, whose subtle and fluid readings have set a standard for Stein scholarship in the last two decades, suggests that "Patriarchal Poetry" is unreadable. She contends that this "lengthy piece [. . .] not only defies interpretation, it defies reading." Its consistent interrogation of the givens of meaning-making approach a kind of limit for DeKoven, finally yielding a text that is not worth reading because its "writing reaches us as blank tedium" (A Different Language 128). In most of Stein's work, as DeKoven and many others have argued, there is a suggestive correspondence on the one hand between play with sound and rhythm and, on the other, the promise of a feminist politics. But in "Patriarchal Poetry," "Stein builds no reiterative, incantatory rhythm, no complex patterns of sound" that might be said to provide an "interpretable feminist thematic content" (128, 129). In dialogue with this frustration, I want to suggest that this poem, which has proven elusive and even irrelevant to many readers, invites us to once again broaden our understanding of what it means to read Stein. To read this piece involves both a hermeneutic pursuit of meaning and a risky engagement with interpretive uncertainty. This risk is most profoundly figured in a reader's willingness to read "Patriarchal Poetry" aloud, for when we do, we generate an unpredictable and heterogeneous phonotext.(1) Brought about by the experimental form of the text and differentially animated by each reader bold enough to give voice to its sequences, such music not only accompanies but periodically overwhelms the definitive search for meaning and suggests epistemologies and modes of subjectivity beyond the horizon of Western patriarchal logic.(2) Make no mistake: reading "Patriarchal Poetry" is very difficult. It repeatedly asks us to imagine new relationships with the words on the page. It confronts us with the fundamental labor of reading by making us work through such passages as this: Never which when where to be sent to be sent to be sent to be never which when where never to be sent to be sent to be sent never which when where to be sent never to be sent never to be sent never which when where to be sent never to be sent never to be sent which when where never to be sent which when where never which when where never which to be sent never which when where to be sent never which when where to be sent which when where to be sent never to be sent never which when where to be sent never which when which when where to be sent never which when where never which when where which when where never to be sent which when where (Yale Gertrude Stein 122) Traditional scansion is of little help. …

9 citations


Journal Article
22 Sep 1999-Style
TL;DR: This paper published Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip (Boyd), a collection of nearly four hundred epigrams that parody the sensibility if not tenets of contemporary literary theory (a bubble on the front reads "Po-mo to Go!").
Abstract: "Publicize Your Privates" This past fall, alongside their stolid fleet of anthologies, Norton released a postcard-sized, surprisingly whimsical book called Life's Little Deconstruction Book: Self-Help for the Post-Hip (Boyd). Playing off the 1991 bestseller, Life's Little Instruction Book, it gathers nearly four hundred epigrams that parody the sensibility if not tenets of contemporary literary theory (a bubble on the front reads "Po-mo to Go!"), containing lines recognizable to those who might have sat through college courses through the 1990s, especially in the humanities, such as "Perform Your Gender" (presumably referring to the polemic of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble) or "Voice Subjugated Discourses" (harkening to the general thrust of postcolonialism). One of the featured epigrams (one of the few that takes up a whole page), #13, is "Publicize Your Privates," referring, one surmises, to the recent turn toward autobiography in literary criticism and the proclivity to mention things like peeing and penises. [1] I start with this because I think it emblematizes a commonplace view-- commonplace enough to be the object of popular parody--that academic literary criticism in the 1990s has been overtaken by what has variously been called "personal criticism," "autobiographical literary criticism," "confessional criticism," "the new confessionalism," or permutations thereof. [2] That is, the dominant and established mode of literary criticism has moved from the High Theory of the 1970s and 80s, epitomized, say, by Paul de Man or Fredric Jameson, and from its difficult, more densely philosophical or social-scientific, impersonal tenor, language, and style, to the more experiential, subjective, literary tenor and language of autobiography, among other things? Drawing on linguistics, continental philosophy, structural anthropology, and sociology, Theory purported a conceptual depth and precision (the attribution of "rigor" was the highest compliment one could pay to a critical work, "unrigorous" a blunt dismissal), supplanti ng the more appreciative, literary basis of the previously dominant practice of close reading. (Though the New Criticism mandated attention to the formal structures of poetry, it was an avowedly literary form that it sought to identify, and the impetus for that pursuit derived from the tacit appreciation of poetry.) One might recall that, in the early days of the Theory Years, critics sought to encompass literary studies under the banner of the new "human sciences" and saw literary criticism as a central component of the "science of signs." To amend Fredric Jameson's famous motto, the desideratum for that earlier moment might well be summarized as "Always theorize!," whereas now the motto seems to have shifted to "Always personalize!" This shift is usually regarded as having been inaugurated by Jane Tompkins's 1987 essay, "Me and My Shadow," which renounces the "straitjacket" of the philosophical "apparatus" of the theory-driven criticism that she herself practiced [4] and, in a more informal, suggestive essayistic style, calls for criticism that "would always take off from personal experience" and feeling (Kauffman 126). By the early 1990s, this shift was decisively stamped as "personal criticism" by Nancy Miller in Getting Personal (1991), and concretized in several collections, notably The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism (Freedman et al.; 1993) and Wild Orchids and Trotsky (Edmundson; 1993), which includes essays by established critics such as William Kerrigan, Frank Lentricchia, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and the title piece by Richard Rorty. By the later 90s, personal or confessional criticism appeared to have attained full institutional status as a critical movement, one marked by the publication of t he Routledge anthology Confessions of the Critics (1996), edited by H. Aram Veeser, who is best known for his standard collection, The New Historicism (1989), establishing that movement nearly a decade earlier. …

8 citations


Journal Article
22 Jun 1999-Style
TL;DR: Kakutani and Robbe-Grillet as mentioned in this paper pointed out that hypertexts defer too much to readers and thus abrogate the high mystery of authorship, the people who make such things might as well be nameless.
Abstract: I. Scary New Networks On her way to the Pulitzer Prize for book reviewing, the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani took a memorable swipe at hypertext fiction, decreeing that the best things in this line amount to "Myst and Warcraft II as re-imagined by Robbe-Grillet" (40). Given the generally dismissive context of the article, her remark seems intended as a desultory putdown: hypertext fictions are not really literary but belong to a lower order, the computer games. Having jumped up from their cultural station, these things seem not even to deserve proper mention: One well known hyperfiction concerns a man who fears that his ex-wife and son have been killed in a car accident; another traces the adventures of a cyberpunk hero battling an evil kingdom. (40) The first text so efficiently summarized here is Michael Joyce's afternoon; the second might be the adventure game Zork, though that featureless description could fit many other titles as well. The lack of specific reference is no doubt meaningful: since Kakutani believes that hypertexts defer too much to readers and thus abrogate the high mystery of authorship, the people who make such things might as well be nameless. Their work is all the same, or at least equally contemptible. To test the dubiousness of this conceit, imagine the following, written a few decades from now by some scion of the house of Gates for a freshmen seminar at harvardOnline: In the 20th century the novel was still a marginally popular form. One famous novel concerns a man obsessed with a woman who is socially above him. Another traces the struggles of a young person against an unjust society. This lampoon is no doubt too hard on novelists, who generally do not deserve resentment. There might in fact be common cause here. After all, Kakutani' s write-off damns by association Alain Robbe-Grillet, arguably a very important (if suspiciously "new") novelist. One might wonder about this targeting. Who's afraid of Robbe-Grillet, and why? Recent reports point to serious trouble in the market for books, especially mainstream fiction. The rate of growth in book sales has been falling steadily over the last seven years and the most recent figures available at this writing reflect not growth but decline (Carvajal). Have the prospects for commercial publishing become so dire lately that any departure from time-tested practices seems threatening? Even if accurate, that view seems too narrow. Kakutani's dislike of unruly or experimental fiction in fact belongs to a larger cultural process whose implications touch more than a single industry. As Donna Haraway observed more than a decade ago: we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work to all play, a deadly game. [...--] from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks [...] (Simians 161) To be sure, Haraway's concern about the "new networks" differs notably from Kakutani's distaste for networked or polylinear writing. Here and in later essays Haraway worries cogently about the implications of an "informatics of domination" for social justice, even as she warily takes on hypertext as a metaphor (Modest Witness 125). Kakutani's concerns seem parochial or tribal, invested more in the unutterable Joyce (of all names) than the eponymous Intel or Microsoft. Both critics, however, express deep skepticism about the conjunction of networked information systems with systematic simulation or gaming; both find the notion of promiscuous sign-play inimical or "deadly," Kakutani to the aims of literature, Haraway to certain forms of liberal society. Each may be right in her way, at least in some measure. Thirteen years after Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs" first appeared, the informatics of domination has engendered rampant globalization of trade, obscene concentration of wealth, and lately an orgy of absurd stock speculation. …

8 citations


Journal Article
22 Jun 1999-Style
TL;DR: The PairGain hoax as mentioned in this paper was one of the earliest examples of insider trading in the stock market, which was first reported by a Yahoo! finance bulletin board on the morning of April 7, 1999.
Abstract: Hacker Trading On the morning of April 7, 1999, the stock price of PairGain Technologies Inc. suddenly rose more than 30% amid rumors that the company was being acquired by an Israeli rival, ECI Telecom Ltd. The rumor of a buy-out of PairGain had been in the air for months, but that morning it caught fire on a Yahoo! finance bulletin board (fig. 1). Stacey Lawson, a 32-year-old female IT manager from Knoxville, posted a message about the buy-out along with a link to a Bloomberg News page that announced the story as well as quotations from the CEOs of PairGain and ECI. As rumors are wont to do, the story of the buy-out traveled quickly, accelerated by cutting-edge information technology--there were mass e-mailings via a Web service called Hotmail--and by good old fashioned speculative greed. In a short time, the price of PairGain skyrocketed and over 13 million shares of PairGain were traded that day on NASDAQ, about 700% higher than its daily average. But something was amiss. Investigators from NASDAQ and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suspected insider trading--in this case, insider information being leaked in order to dramatically increase the stock's value. The management of PairGain and ECI were contacted, but both denied being involved in any negotiations. For its part, Bloomberg News also denied knowledge of the buy-out, and it was discovered that the report had actually been published on Angelfire.com, a site operated by Lycos. Smelling a hoax, investigators turned to Angelfire and to the Yahoo! bulletin board and started sniffing out the remnants of electronic shenanigans and digital chit-chat. Someone had apparently downloaded graphics from Bloomberg.com and used them to create a bogus Web page reporting the buy-out; next a message was posted on Yahoo! with the link to the bogus news report and mass e-mails were launched through Hotmail. The FBI was called in, though by then the ploy's plot had become clear: invest in PairGain at one price, start a buy-out rumor using Hotmail and Yahoo!, "substantiate" it with a "news report," all in order to drive up the stock's price, and then make a tidy profit by selling it off. By noon of the same day, news of the hoax had brought PairGain's price back down (though it ended the day up nearly 10%). A few days later, the gig was really up. Following the trail of IP addresses left at the sites of the hacks, FBI agents closed in on Gary Dale Hoke, a 25-year-old, mid-level engineer employed at PairGain's Raleigh, NC, operation. He was arrested and charged with securities fraud. In June, Hoke pleaded guilty. He apparently acted alone. Hoke's hoax made headlines in both traditional and online media, and morals were quickly drawn up: old tricks can find new outlets--and new suckers--on the Web, and covering your tracks in cyberspace is harder than you might think. But there are other lessons as well. Hoke's stated motive, for instance, was hardly illegal: personal gain, the maximization of profit, is considered a prime mover of stock market speculation. What was illegal were his means: the fraudulent dissemination of securities information. For those of us interested in interactivity--which may be situated at the limen of social and technological performance--the most pertinent lessons of the PairGain hoax lie in his techniques, namely, the creation of a digital avatar (an alias of Hoke, Stacey Lawson enjoys tennis, dancing and water sports), the mimicry of a report by a leading financial news source ("ECI Telecom and PairGain Technologies, Inc. today jointly announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement"), the rumorological use of bulletin board and e-mail services ("GO PAIR!!!!")--and, perhaps most importantly, in the speed and ease with which all these techniques broke down. Hoke had applied his knowledge of online communities, telecom companies, and interactive multimedia in a project designed to hack his way to riches. …

6 citations


Journal Article
22 Jun 1999-Style
TL;DR: Information Overload Today, we are often told, we live not simply in an age of information, but in a age of excessive information as discussed by the authors, and our interactions with this world of information seem plagued by an increasing sense that we cannot keep up, can't take it all in, that we are being overwhelmed by information, deluged by data.
Abstract: Information Overload Today, we are often told, we live not simply in an age of information, but in an age of excessive information. The amount and availability of information seem to be increasing at an exponential rate. We feel that our entire world is moving, changing, mutating, at an accelerated pace. Our interactions with this world of information seem plagued by an increasing sense that we cannot keep up, can't take it all in, that we are being overwhelmed by information, deluged by data: the sense of an "information overload." One of the first attempts to represent this kind of information overload appears in Ted Mooney's 1981 novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets. There, Mooney describes "A Case of Information Sickness" in the following terms: On his way to Diego's, Jeffrey discovers a woman harmed by information excess. All the symptoms are present: bleeding from the nose and ears, vomiting, deliriously disconnected speech, apparent disorientation, and the desire to touch everything . [...] A small crowd has collected around her, listening to her complicated monologue: Birds of Prey Cards, sunspot souffle, Antarctic unemployment. Jeffrey hesitates. I've never seen one so far gone, he thinks. But, judging her young enough to warrant hope, he gently takes the rubber mat from the woman, unrolls it upon the pavement, and helps her to assume the memory-elimination posture. After a minute, the bleeding stops. "I was on my way to dance class," she says to him, still running her ravening fingers over his leather coat sleeve, "when suddenly I was dazzled. I couldn't tell where one thing left off and the next began." [...] Jeffrey explains that he believes information sickness, like malaria, recurs unpredictably. (34) The symptoms in this case are remarkably similar to those in a case of schizophrenic experience cited by Fredric Jameson to illustrate certain characteristics of postmodernity: Suddenly, as I was passing the school, I heard a German song; the children were having a singing lesson. I stopped to listen, and at that instant a strange feeling came over me, a feeling hard to analyze but akin to something I was to know too well later--a disturbing sense of unreality. It seemed to me that I no longer recognized the school, it had become as large as a barracks; the singing children were prisoners, compelled to sing. [...] At the same time my eye encountered a field of wheat whose limits I could not see. The yellow vastness, dazzling in the sun, bound up with the song of children imprisoned in the smooth stone school-barracks, filled me with such anxiety that I broke into sobs. (27) In each "case," the experience is described as a form of illness and is characterized by similar symptoms: a sense of discontinuity and unreality, a disorienting dazzlement, the inability to distinguish boundaries or limits. For Jameson, the incident he describes is emblematic of a postmodern breakdown of temporality, which "releases the present from all the activities and intentionalities that might focus it," so that it suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming. [. . .] This present [. . .] comes before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, here described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity. Jameson's description of this overwhelming experience seems extremely similar to Mooney's "case of information sickness." Indeed, this connection is strengthened when Jameson goes on to cite the example of Nam June Paik's multiple-screen video installations, suggesting that viewers used to a more traditional aesthetic are "bewildered by this discontinuous variety," while "the postmodernist viewer [. . .] is called upon to do the impossible, namely to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference. …

Journal Article
22 Mar 1999-Style
TL;DR: In the case of the first act of free will as mentioned in this paper, a young William James found rescue from his own "ontological wonder-sickness" in a definition of free-will posited by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier (Varieties 135; Will 63).
Abstract: Amidst a wracking melancholia that revealed to him "that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life," a young William James found rescue from his own "ontological wonder-sickness" in a definition of free will posited by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier (Varieties 135; Will 63). In James's 1870 diary entry that records this remarkable instance of mental and moral resummoning, he enlists Renouvier's concept of free will - "'the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts'" - in a grim struggle against his own morbid degree of "mere speculation and contemplative Grublei" (Letters 1: 147). Having previously determined suicide to be "the most manly form" to put his daring into, James now vows to direct his "free initiative" towards staunch belief in his "individual reality and creative power" (148). While scholars have often fixed on this passage for its nascent markers of a pragmatism James most famously lodged in his celebrated declaration that "my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will," they tend to give only a nod to what James attests will be his means to subsequent acts of free will (147). Citing the English psychologist Alexander Bain and his postulates for the acquisition of habits, James writes, "I will see to the sequel" (148). Recollect, he instructs himself, that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action - and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser; never forgetting how one link dropped undoes an indefinite number. (148) Hence James rediscovers in habit, that usually so stolid affair, not only a newly valiant source for the homecoming of his very being, but also a language with which to express his restored creative energy. From this point on James begins with quiet urgency to develop a narrative of habit, one that proves integral to his writing on the processive self and challenges our assumptions about habit's aesthetic force. Perhaps because we tend to dress habit in so prosaic a mood, readers of William James have neglected to address fully the range of its significance in his writing. More often than not habit's importance to his work is generally dealt with straightforwardly as constituting the topic of his engaging "Habit" chapter in The Principles of Psychology, or is handled as a building-block philosophical concept on the way to grander ideas - its function, for instance, in the tychistic ideas with which James worked. In his bench mark 1935 study of the philosopher, Ralph Barton Perry writes of James's "Habit," curiously, with no further analysis, that "it is not without bearing on its success that it should have sprung from an early and lifelong faith of his own in the benign effect of routine and the cumulative significance of little acts" (2: 90). Gerald Myers, who presents a more recent and deeper interpretative analysis, still only mentions the concept as a physiological layer underlying the will's "psychological habit" (199). George Cotkin, on the other hand, does recognize James's emphasis upon "the salutary role of habit formation," hearing in it an echo of the Victorian predilection to regard habit's disciplinary function as "an anodyne for doubt," yet he keeps his inquiry trained on the influences of "Scottish common-sense philosophy" and the principles of science (69-70). Even in as involved a cultural critique as Ross Posnock's, which at its core places James's work within a genealogical model of human thinking that presents the historical conditions of how we think, there is no intensive examination of habit's presence or power in that kind of human shaping; again, habit becomes subsumed by other ideas, as it does in the work of Bruce Kuklick, James Kloppenberg, and Kim Townsend. Only Joseph M. Thomas's searching exploration into how James's writerly reliance upon habit issues from his deeper and conflicted involvement with the concept stands as the welcome exception. …

Journal Article
22 Sep 1999-Style
TL;DR: Ihab Hassan as mentioned in this paper was the Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he has been teaching since 1970 and has had an enormous impact on literary culture and theory.
Abstract: Born in Cairo, Egypt, Ihab Hassan followed the path that many bright young Egyptians took in the first half of this century: he trained to become an engineer. After graduating with highest honors from the University of Cairo, Hassan came to the United States to further his study of electrical engineering, and in 1948 he earned his MS in that field at the University of Pennsylvania. Yet he continued on at Penn, changing his field to something that spoke to him, evidently, more deeply than did engineering. He studied literature, and earned two degrees in English--an MA in 1950 and a PhD in 1953. After a brief period teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Hassan moved to Wesleyan University, where he taught from 1954-1970. Since 1970, he has been the Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. During his professional career, he has also held visiting professorships in Sweden, Japan, Germany, France, and Austria--as well as at Yale, Trinity College, and the University of Washington. Over the last forty years, Hassan has won numerous awards and fellowships, including Guggenheim Foundation fellowships; Senior Fulbright lectureships; National Endowment for the Humanities grants; research appointments in France, England, Italy, Japan, Australia, and Ireland; and teaching awards. He was awarded honorary degrees by the University of Uppsala (1996) and the University of Giessen (1999). Currently he is Chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Association of University Professors of English. Ihab Hassan's bibliography is long, including some fifteen books and 200-odd articles. Among his critical works are Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (1961), The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (1967), The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (1971), Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (1975), The Right Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural Change (1980), and The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (1987). In more recent years, some of Hassan's work has moved toward autobiography, some toward travel writing: Out of Egypt: Fragments of an Autobiography appeared in 1986, Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters in 1990, and Between the Eagle and the Sun: Traces of Japan in 1996. His Rumors of Change: Essays of Five Decades collects portions of earlier works. Hassan continues actively publishing in academic journals, and some of these articles will be alluded to in the interview that follows. The last lustrum has witnessed his publication of "Criticism in Our Clime: Parables of American Academe," "Negative Capability Reclaimed: Literature and Philosophy contra Politics," "The Expense of Spirit in Postmodern Times: Between Nihilism and Belief," a contribution to a PMLA "Forum on Intellectuals," "Postmodernism Revisited: A Personal Account," and "Queries for Postcolonial Studies." Hassan's writings have been translated, at this writing, into twelve different languages. I first met Ihab Hassan in 1982, when I participated in his NEH Summer Seminar, "Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Question of the Text." It was there that I discovered Hassan was more than just a writer and critic; he was a teacher of extraordinary ability and power. In the intervening years we have kept in touch, and I find I have been influenced as much by Hassan's pedagogy and stance as by his writings. The following interview was assembled from November, 1998, through January, 1999, and done by telephone, e-mail, and postal mail. Your major works of criticism that engage the idea of the postmodern--The Dismemberment of Orpheus, Paracriticisms, The Right Promethean Fire, The Postmodern Turn, and many essays--have had an enormous impact on literary culture and theory. Can you briefly characterize and account for this impact? …

Journal Article
22 Mar 1999-Style
TL;DR: Erdrich's early novels, Love Medicine and Tracks, have received the highest praise for their stylistic beauty and lyricism, yet they also have been criticized for a lack of psychological depth and inattention to the historical and political conditions of oppression suffered by Native American characters as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The language of margins and borders marks a position of paradox: both inside and outside. - Linda Hutcheon (Poetics 66) In her novels Love Medicine and Tracks, Louise Erdrich engages the paradox of employing and glorifying the oral tradition and its culturally cohesive function by inscribing this tradition.(1) The text that simultaneously asserts and denies the presence of voice makes explicit the paradoxical presence and absence that is the condition of all language, of all texts as they compose words to call forth a world. In Erdrich's work this paradox plays itself out in representing a people, and their culture, who have been unrepresented or represented in manipulative ways in the service of a dominant group's ideology. Her work thus questions the politics of representation. Erdrich's early novels, Love Medicine (1984, 1993) and The Beet Queen (1986), have received the highest praise for their stylistic beauty and lyricism, yet they also have been criticized for a lack of psychological depth and inattention to the historical and political conditions of oppression suffered by Native American characters. In her essay "The Silko-Erdrich Controversy," Susan Perez Castillo argues against such accusations, urging a more sophisticated hermeneutical approach to Erdrich's texts. She emphasizes the importance of attending to their silences and, following Brian McHale, to their postmodern use of"representation itself to subvert representation, problematizing and pluralizing the real" (292). In her reading of Tracks, Nancy J. Peterson situates this subversion in terms of Erdrich's renegotiation of historical discourses: "The new historicity that Tracks inscribes is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality. Tracks takes up the crucial issue of the referentiality of historical narrative in a postmodern epoch and creates the possibility for a new historicity by and for Native Americans to emerge" (991). For instance, "the evocation of the oral in the written text implicates [a] counterhistory in the historical narrative [constructed through documents] that it seeks to displace" (985); "The documentary history of dispossession that the novel uses and resists functions as an absent presence" (987). Erdrich innovatively participates in "[w]riting history (as historical novels and in other forms)," which, Peterson says, "has [...] become one way for marginalized peoples to counter their invisibility" (983). Indeed, the play of absence and presence imbues Erdrich's texts in multiple ways. Perhaps most striking among these is precisely the inscription and thematization of the invisible and the visible. In her texts, this inscription and thematization acquire both negative and positive significances; invisibility signifies cultural oppression but can also signify access to the transcendent when invisibility inverts and expands into vision. Yet the significance of invisibility and vision constantly shifts in Erdrich's novels according to the speaker and the reader who situate themselves inside or outside of Native American culture. In the fluidity of their meanings - their crossing the boundary of definition - the concepts of invisibility and vision, along with concepts of the inside and the outside, reflect the complexity of Erdrich's aesthetic engagement of the idea of the border. In her novels about Native American characters confined within and defined by the borders of a reservation and the boundaries of ethnic definition, Erdrich (who is herself part Chippewa, part German American) uses the concept of the border as metaphor and narrative strategy for a newly imagined negotiation of individual and cultural identity. In Border Theory, David E. Johnson and Scott Michaelsen complicate the premises of border studies that began with a focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, but has expanded to include "Latin American, Caribbean, and internal U. …

Journal Article
22 Sep 1999-Style
TL;DR: In a recent collection of autobiographical considerations and occasions, Getting Personal, Nancy Miller has an essay with a lovely footnote as discussed by the authors, which was given as a paper in Dubrovnik, where the comfort of her room was disturbed by the view of a beautiful island.
Abstract: I myself find safety in locating myself completely within my workplace. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic Introduction. Flight Check In her recent collection of autobiographical considerations and occasions, Getting Personal, Nancy Miller has an essay with a lovely footnote. A version of her essay, she notes, was given as a paper in Dubrovnik. She goes on to mention how, in effect, the comfort of her room was unsettled by the view of a beautiful island. After several days contemplating the island, and then taking an eventual boat ride there, Miller comments: I realized I had not sufficiently figured in the ambivalence of perspective that double siting creates: the politics of oscillation. (This could also point to another fable about feminism, the referent, and movements of political liberation, but I will leave that for another time.) I thank Myriam Diaz-Diacoretz and Nada Popovich for including me in this event. (120) The event ostensibly takes place in Dubrovnik. But it can also be understood as the oscillating one that takes place inside Miller's head. The first thing to say about the relationship of academic life to travel is that travel participates in the great Outside of the life of the mind: the Real World, under the sign of the World Elsewhere. Typically, however, for an academic, the result is intellectual: travel finds its eventual place in the life of the mind. Of course, perhaps Miller only gave the paper at the conference in order to be able to go to Yugoslavia. Certainly academics like faraway countries and beautiful islands as much as everyone else. Moreover, no more than anyone else, they cannot be held responsible for subsequent political developments, which in this particular case serve to make Miller's "politics" appear to be an unfortunately precious notion. But so it goes when anybody travels. Travel crosses boundaries, disrupts distinctions, and puts things in circulation that normally remain in place. Take the difference between being on tour and at a conference. Miller is not a tourist, yet in Yugoslavia she can be compared to one, if only because her temporary presence lacks permanence and therefore becomes vulnerable to some more strict, particular political account. [1]' Just so, it is difficult to extricate academic travel from tourism, for each is susceptible to, if not equally driven by, the lure of beautiful islands. As Dean MacCannell writes in his classic study, The Tourist, the value of such things as trips and conferences "is a function of the quality and quantity of experience they promise.[ldots] The end is an immense accumulation of reflective experiences which synthesize fiction and reality into a vast symbolism, a modern world" (23). This essay, however, will not attempt to relate academics either to those who travel widely, such as professional athletes or business people as well as tourists, or those who travel for a living, ranging from flight attendants to secretaries of state. (For a broader account of travel culture, see Clifford.) Instead, I want to try to treat the expansiveness of academic travel within its own peculiar framework, where travel appears to exist as a marginal activity, and therefore an unstable one, requiring careful accounting to deans and provosts. A professor venerably abides in the modern world as one of the great rooted figures--teaching regular classes in the same department at one university, year after year. And yet there are many professors who travel widely and often, such as Stephen Greenblatt, for example, who fulsomely acknowledges colleagues and occasions in five countries (other than the United States) in his latest book, Marvellous Possessions. What can we make of such travel? The first thing to say is that it is exceptionally privileged. If we inquire, for example, whether--if only as part of the "oscillation"--it is subject to some ambivalence with respect to others, we find none. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 1999-Style
TL;DR: In this article, Hayes-Roth et al. introduce the concept of directed improvisation in oral storytelling, where the storyteller incorporates the listener as one of the story's characters.
Abstract: Interactive Story During the past few years, the rapid growth of electronic media and other technologies has engendered a quest for a new narrative form, interactive story. The key idea is to transform the passive story observer into an active story participant. But how should the observer participate? Three interactive story genres have emerged: Activity-enhanced story play, in which the participant may elect to play any of several activities encountered in the course of the story. Hyper-story exploration, in which the participant may choose which of several branches to take at critical moments in the narrative. Immersive story experience, in which the participant may "get into the story" as one of the characters. These three genres represent a steep progression in the sophistication of the art required to create stories in the genre and in the sophistication of the technology required to enable stories in the genre. Thus, for several years now, children have enjoyed activity-enhanced story play in a proliferation of CD-ROM products and game players have enjoyed hyper-story exploration in a variety of CD-ROM products and adventure games. Admittedly, both the artistic technique and the technology foundation employed in these two genres are modest. Our own work focuses on the third and most challenging genre, immersive story experience. Participants "get into the story," interacting with each other and with other non-participant characters, through a technique we call directed improvisation (Hayes-Roth, "Directed Improvisation"): Cast one or more participants in well-defined roles among other story characters. Constrain all of the characters-participant and non-participant-to play their roles within a simple abstract plot structure. Let the characters improvise! (n.p.) Directed Improvisation in Oral Storytelling Immersive story experience actually has conceptual roots in a traditional type of oral storytelling in which the storyteller incorporates the listener as one of the story's characters. In fact, some storytellers even engage their listeners in a form of directed improvisation. Let us first consider an example from everyday life. In Which Nathan's Mommy Tells Him a Story In the two transcripts below, four-year-old Nathan's mother immerses him in story experiences that she has designed to engage, entertain, and enlighten him. Transcript 1. Nathan's Mommy Tells Him a Squirrel Story Nathan: Tell me a story, Mommy. Mommy: Once upon a time, there was a little brown squirrel. Nathan: And his name was Nathan. Mommy: And his name was Nathan. Nathan lived in a nest with his mommy halt-way up a tall redwood tree. Every morning when he woke up, Nathan would run up the trunk of the redwood tree to wake up his friend . . . Nathan: Ben! Mommy: . . . his friend Ben. "Ben, wake up. It's time to play!" Then those two little squirrels would go racing up and down the trunk of the redwood tree and out to the ends of the branches, chasing and chasing each other. Nathan: Nathan was the fastest one. He could run faster than Ben. Mommy: That's right. Nathan ran much faster than Ben. But Ben didn't know that. He thought he was the fastest squirrel. And he was always bragging about that. "You can't catch me, Nathan. I'm the fastest squirrel in the whole world. You can't catch me." Nathan: But he's wrong. I'm really the fastest one. Mommy: That's right. You are the fastest one. But Nathan doesn't say that to Ben. He just lets Ben brag. And sometimes he lets Ben catch him, just for tun. Nathan: And I catch Ben too. Mommy: That's right. Sometimes Ben catches Nathan and sometimes Nathan catches Ben. Well, those two little squirrels had so much fun, racing up and down the redwood tree. But they never left the redwood tree. …

Journal Article
22 Sep 1999-Style
TL;DR: The need to write without knowing what is a power that, paradoxically, contributes to and perhaps suffices to "fill" literature as mentioned in this paper, but it is also a feeling of hopelessness.
Abstract: G[acute{e}]rard Genette We read in Paul Val[acute{e}]ry's Tel Quel: "Literature is thronged with people who don't really know what to say but feel a compelling urge to write" ("Odds and Ends" 130). A sentence stating a rather harsh, but not exclusively negative, truth, since the "urge to write without knowing what" is presented for what it is: a power. An empty power, but one that, paradoxically, contributes to and perhaps suffices to "fill" literature. And Val[acute{e}]ry will say about some of the most beautiful verses that they work on us without telling us very much, or that tell us, perhaps, that they have "nothing to tell us" ("Poetry and Abstract Thought" 74-75). Such is literature, "reduced to the essentials of its active principle" ("Odds and Ends" 97). This need to write is not Val[acute{e}]ry's. Writing inspired in him only one feeling, many times expressed by him, and that we might say, took the place for him of a goad or a compensation: boredom. A deep feeling, deeply connected with the practice and the truth of literature, although a taboo of propriety ordinarily forbids its recognition. Val[acute{e}]ry had the power (since this too is a power) to experience it more intensely than anyone else, and took it as the point of departure for his reflections on Letters. This 'what's the use?', this disgust with writing that seizes Rimbaud after composing his oeuvre, happens to Val[acute{e}]ry beforehand, so to speak, and never ceases to accompany him and in some sense to inspire him. If every modern work is somehow haunted by the possibility of its own silence, Val[acute{e}]ry was, and apparently remains, the only writer who did not experience this possibility as a threat, a temptation weighing on the future, but as an anterior, preliminary, perhaps propitiat ory experience. With the exception of Vers anciens, the Introduction [grave{a}] L[acute{e}]onard, and Monsieur Teste, the major portion of his work follows, as if by a perpetual breach, from a very serious and definitive decision not to write any more. It is literally a post-scriptum, a long codicil, wholly enlightened by a feeling of its complete uselessness, and even its total nonexistence as anything other than a pure exercise. Val[acute{e}]ry strongly suspected many pages of literature of having this for their whole significance: 'I am a page of literature'; we often find in him, implicitly or insistently, this inverse affirmation: 'I have nothing more to do with literature: here is proof of it.' His literary destiny was therefore this rather rare experience, one perhaps rich in its apparent sterility: to live in literature as in a foreign country, to inhabit writing as if on a visit or in exile, and to fix upon it a gaze simultaneously interior and remote. It is easy to exalt literature, easier still to demolish it; each of these positions involves an element of truth. The truth that exists at their narrow and difficult junction it happened to Val[acute{e}]ry to experience as the exact place of his residence, on the chance of arranging for himself a comfort, and a career in this difficulty, as others in revolt or despair. "It is not a question of abusing literature," writes Maurice Blanchot, "but rather of trying to understand it and to see why we can only understand it by disparaging it" (302). This salutary disparagement, or devaluation was one of Val[acute{e}]ry's constant theses, and it would be hard to measure all that the modern awareness and practice of literature owes to this reductive effort. What repels him in literature is, as he often explains it, the feeling of arbitrariness: "what I can change easily offends me in myself, and bores me in others. Hence many antiliterary, and singularly antihistorical consequences" (Oeuvres 2:1502). Or again: As for history and novels, my interest is sometimes held, and I can admire them as stimulants, pastimes, and works of art; but if they lay claim to "truth" and hope to be taken seriously, their arbitrary quality and unconscious conventions at once become apparent, and I am seized with a perverse mania for trying possible substitutions. …

Journal Article
22 Mar 1999-Style
TL;DR: For instance, the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" as discussed by the authors is a well-known example of a genre-linked hymn, and it has been used extensively in the study of genre in poetry.
Abstract: Richard Cronin has observed that in Shelley's poetry, as in his life and thought, "there is an ever-present drive towards a rejection of conventional controls" countered by the recognition that "controls, systems, conventions, are humanly necessary" (35). These contrary pulls, as Cronin calls them, make Shelley's attitude toward literary genre problematic and make further genre-linked critical approaches to his poetry very challenging, so much so, in fact, that little genre criticism exists in modern Shelley studies. Yet, as Jennifer Wallace points out, "Shelley was an extraordinarily diverse writer, experimenting with genre far more than either Keats or Byron" and maintaining an active dialogue throughout his life with the forms offered by literary tradition (4). This is not to say that Shelley's generic experiments are poetic imitations. Genre for Shelley is unfixed and mutable. Envisioning genre as a "process [. . .] subject to the flux of history," he judges poetic accomplishment by the degree to which a writer expands or modulates generic conventions and consequently alters them for the future (Cronin 33). "Every great poet," Shelley asserts in "A Defence of Poetry," "must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification" (484). The contrary pulls that Cronin detects in Shelley's poetry, and which problematize the status of genre in the poems, are sometimes activated or exacerbated by Shelley's genre choices. They indicate Shelley's sophisticated understanding of the mutability of genre while they figure that mutability in the poetry itself. The "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" exemplifies how Shelley employs genre and genre-linked features in innovative and figurative ways. The poem is in dialogue with the classical hymn, a genre to which tradition grants unusual structural flexibility and in which writers, including Shelley, find both a positive support and a challenge to their innovative skill. The classical hymn presupposes fundamental separation while aspiring to unity, and so provides Shelley with inherent contrary pulls, or inherent dialectics, congenial with his aim to contain an effusive, inspiring power in poetic form. That "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" struggles between containment and effusion is not disputed by critics today, but Shelley's modern readers recognize that dialectic as working primarily in language itself. Questions of genre are frequently passed over, and, despite the generic claim of Shelley's title and the features of classical hymn that appear in the poem, critics are reluctant to come to terms with hymn. In fact, critical discussions of the generic resonances of the "Hymn" often rest on misapprehensions about genres that Shelley himself did not share, particularly that genres exist immutably and apply equally to all past and present literary works. Adopting a vague exemplar of the Christian hymn, for instance, recent readers of Shelley conclude that the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" is an ironic hymn or simply an ode (Cronin 224; Curran 58; Fry 8; Hall 136). Observing the critical confusion surrounding its genre, Stuart Curran writes that the poem "seems to present us with a generic crux" (58). But largely overlooked by commentators, the tradition of classical hymn can be brought to bear in ways that both supplement our understanding of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and illustrate Shelley's shrewd employment of genre to oppose its potential to become fixed and inert. Modern critics of Shelley discern a dialectic of containment and effusion in the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." Primarily, they understand that dialectic as operating in language itself. For Tilottama Rajan, it is the mechanism of a "Romantic deconstruction" that "unfixes," "disseminates," "disarticulates," and "disrupts" ostensible meaning and unity, so that the poem "survives not as what it originally was but as a series of [indeterminate] self-transformations" (292, 283, 296). …

Journal Article
22 Mar 1999-Style
TL;DR: The notion of literary allusion was introduced by Ziva Ben-Porat as mentioned in this paper, who defined it as an explicit or implicit reference to another literary text that is "sufficiently overt" to be recognized and understood by competent readers.
Abstract: 1 Over the past two decades, theoretical interest in intertextuality, presupposition, and influence has generated a good deal of interesting discussion of the device of literary allusion. This has led to a better understanding of what the device is and how it functions. A literary allusion is an explicit or implicit reference to another literary text that is "sufficiently overt" to be recognized and understood by competent readers (Petri 290). It is "a poet's deliberate incorporation of identifiable elements from other sources" and should be distinguished from "intertextuality" in the "involuntary" sense of the term (Miner 38-39; and see Alter). In Ziva Ben-Porat's formulation, a literary allusion contains a "built-in directional signal" or "marker" that is "identifiable as an element or pattern belonging to another independent text" (108). By definition, an allusion must be allusive (passing or indirect) and thus is distinguished from what can be called reinscription. In an otherwise helpful discussion of literary allusion, Robert Alter is misleading when he describes Wallace Stevens' "Peter Quince at the Clavier" as alluding to the story in the Apocrypha of Susannah and the Elders (133-34), and Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet "Thou art indeed just, Lord" as alluding to the lines in Jeremiah that are its Latin epigraph and are translated in its first three lines (135-39). These are reinscriptions or, in Alter's own phrase, "midrashic" amplifications of antecedent texts, not allusions to them (132). Nor is an allusion the same as quotation, the exact and explicitly signalled transfer of one text into another. "Quoting poems," Leonard Diepeveen explains in his study of American Modernist poetry, "incorporate phrases in the new poetic text that precisely duplicate the verbal patterns of the original source, stealing for the new poem the conceptual content and the texture of a previously existing text" (2). While "alluding texts attempt to assimilate their borrowings [and do] not present the allusion as a self-contained texture" (10), the exact texture of quotations introduces a "disruption" into the host text (4). For John Hollander, the crucial difference between an allusion and an echo is that the echo "does not depend on conscious intention" (64). In many cases, however, no clear indication of conscious intent is provided by the author. For example, George Herbert's "Affliction (4)" contains the line, "My thoughts are all a case of knives" (82). Elizabeth Bishop may be said unequivocally to refer to Herbert's poem in her lyric "Wading at Wellfleet" because she puts the phrase "all a case of knives" in quotation marks (7). On the other hand, Philip Larkin's poem "Deceptions" contains the line "Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives" (32). That Larkin consciously intended to allude to Herbert's poem cannot be unequivocally claimed. But it does pass Perri's test of being sufficiently overt to be so taken by competent readers. In Ben-Porat's terms, it is a "veiled referent" but nonetheless the marker of a literary allusion (109). My particular interest lies in questions about the function of literary allusions in lyric poems. For example, how are the intertextual possibilities triggered by an allusion controlled or delimited? Is it a relationship of part to part, part to whole, whole to part, or whole to whole? And how is this to be determined by the reader? Other questions involve allusions that introduce a reflexive or meta-element into a poem, thus inviting consideration of the poem as being about itself vis-a-vis another literary text, as well as about its expressive or representational subject. Another interrogative node concerns the use of allusion "to enrich a poem by incorporating further meaning" (Miner 39). Do allusions always enrich a lyric poem? Are they not sometimes counterproductive or superfluous? What is a reader or critic to do if an allusion is perceived to weaken rather than strengthen a poem? …

Journal Article
22 Jun 1999-Style
TL;DR: The Labyrinth Project as mentioned in this paper is a three year research initiative on interactive narrative, which I have been directing at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California for the past two years, with three primary goals: (1) to expand the language, art, culture and theory of interactive narrative; (2) to produce emotionally compelling electronic fictions that combine filmic language with interactive storytelling; and (3) to help establish USC as a primary training ground for new talent in this medium.
Abstract: Interactive narrative did not begin in cyberspace. It has deep, tangled roots in an array of earlier forms--such as, theater, poetry, novel, dance, opera, radio, cinema, television, and performance art. But the new electronic media provoke us to redefine these two concepts--narrative and interactivity--their distinctive functions, pleasures, and stylistics, and their complex relations with history and subjectivity. These were the starting premises for the Labyrinth Project, a three year research initiative on interactive narrative, which I have been directing at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California for the past two years. This research initiative has three primary goals: (1) to expand the language, art, culture and theory of interactive narrative; (2) to produce emotionally compelling electronic fictions that combine filmic language with interactive storytelling; and (3) to help establish USC as a primary training ground for new talent in this medium and as an RD and their respective styles have qualities that are well suited to these new media and possibly capable of pushing them in new directions. The decision to start with artists from prior media (novel and film) rather than cyberspace was based on a paradoxical assumption. …

Journal Article
22 Jun 1999-Style
TL;DR: In this article, a CD-ROM translation of Brossard's novel, Le desert mauve (1984) is presented, where the authors explore the relationship between reality and fiction, the reader and the writer, in the process of translation.
Abstract: Terre, poussiere, un paysage sans fenetre, sans abri. Terre observee du silence, beaute anterieure, le desert est indescriptible. (149)/Earth, dust, a landscape without windows, without shelter. Observed land of silence, preexistent beauty, the desert is indescribable. --Nicole Brossard What drove me to this obsession? The beauty of language, the character of Melanie, the images flying about in my head as I was reading? The all-encompassing nature of Brossard's project and its confluence with my own cultural practice of revealing the process of production? My fear of the future? --Adriene Jenik Quebecoise writer Nicole Brossard's novel, Le desert mauve (1984), is a dialogue between two versions of a story. In the imaginative space between the words of the writer and the desire of the reader, the process of translation enacts a shifting narrative in which the relationship between reality and fiction, the reader and the writer, is always questioned. Brossard, one of Quebec's most important writers, and a crucial feminist writer and theorist, was interested in "translation as an act of passage [..., as] the transformation of a reality" (Interview 1996). Brossard developed her novel as an "interactive discourse" (Parker, "Mauve Horizon" 109) interrupting her own writing process in order to read and imagine dialogues between the characters she had already created. Within the novel, this strategy is found in the conflation and cleavage of Laure Angstelle's novel, Le desert mauve, with its translation, Mauve, l'horizon, by Maude Laures. In the space between the two sites of writing, the translator imagine s the possibilities of the text she has read, creating a fluid dimension of desire, a "space in which to swim with the words" (Brossard, Interview 1996). Brossard's provocative writing has seduced many readers and inspired some brilliant translations. One of these is Adriene Jenik' s CD-ROM translation, Mauve Desert. From her first reading of the English translation of Brossard's novel, Jenik realized that she had found a book that would transform her own life. [1] As she explained in a letter to Brossard, exploring the possibility of her project at an early stage, Jenik was fascinated with not only the transformation from written words to image-sounds, or from French to English, but also the movement from North to South, from night to day, from your generation to mine. [2] The translation from print to electronic text recaptures that process's "root sense of movement through language [...] of language that moves" (Hayles 804). Brossard, in a discussion with Jenik included in the CD-ROM translation, says that "before the idea of the novel had definitely shaped itself," she knew that it would be in "a hot place, where the weather, la temperature, would be almost unbearable; people would be sweating; the light would be difficult." That site became the American desert because of that desert's beauty and danger, its timelessness and history; and because in the desert there are the "traces of the decadence of civilization" in the litter of old bottles and the abandoned, rusting cars. Brossard imagined the desert through the images and words of books about the desert, appropriating the flowers and cacti that excited her through naming, through language. Her translator, Maude Laures, too, finds the desert as a dimension of her reading. But Jenik locates the site of translation in the desert where she lives, and writes the desert from her own experience as well as from her desire: "I live out in the desert, and essentially the desert has b een seen as this kind of trashcan, a waste land for all the worst of civilization" (Interview). In her CD-ROM translation, Jenik creates a space, "un paysage, une enigme dans laquelle je m'enfoncais a chaque lecture" (143), "a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading"(133). In the interactive reading, originally conceived as a film, the process of production is consciously on display, as Jenik "shows the seams" of her work by including scenes of the video shoot and her correspondence with Brossard about the project within her translation. …

Journal Article
01 Dec 1999-Style
TL;DR: The issue of the style of Poe's writing has long been a contentious one as discussed by the authors, and it remains so even today, despite the fact that many of those who have found fault with his writing have often been little more than impressionistic; this seems especially true of those literary giants and scholars who have condemned his prose.
Abstract: The issue of Poe's "style" has long been a contentious one--and it remains so. Those who have found fault with his prose include Henry James, Yvor Winters, T. S. Eliot, Margaret Fuller, Mark Twain, Julian Symons, Harry Levin, and James M. Cox. Some of these have argued that Poe was a bad stylist and that his narrators all sound the same. Those who have championed him as a literary stylist, on the other hand--occasionally in extravagant terms--include James Russell Lowell, George Bernard Shaw, R.. D. Gooder, Donald Barlow Stauffer, Joseph R. McElrath, and James W. Gargano. I prefer to reside with this latter camp, some members of which have expressed the insight that Poe's narrators can be distinguished, stylistically, from one another and that Poe displays considerable stylistic versatility. He cannot be dismissed as having a single "style," and his various styles are more often than not felicitous. Unfortunately, pronouncements on Poe's writing have often been little more than impressionistic; this seems especially true of those literary giants and scholars who have condemned Poe's prose. In the (perhaps chimerical) desire to put an end to the contention once and for all, and to decide it in Poe's favor, I have charged onto the battleground armed with the catalogues of tropes and schemes: Lanham, Quinn, Sonnino, Espy, Taylor, Joseph, Dupriez, Cluett, Corbett, Crowley. While hostilities continue, I am patiently working my way through the Poe oeuvre trying to keep several hundred rhetorical, grammatical, and linguistic terms in my head at once (I always preferred to do things the hard way)--attempting to find patterns. After having read most of Poe's tales and much of his criticism (a rather large body), I have thus far identified 209 (mostly rhetorical) devices--aspects of his styles. I have catalogued them with definitions from the modern rhetors and exemplifications solely from the Poe canon. Using Lanham's system of classification in A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (182-96), I have determined, for one thing, that Poe employs all of the types classified by Lanham. This would probably be true of any highly productive creative writer, but patterns would differ from author to author. For instance, up to now I have counted twenty-three types of devices of balance, including antanagoge, three kinds of doublets (antithetic, pleonastic and range), triplets (and other kinds of seriation), antimetabole, inclusio, and palindrome. I have not tallied instances of each kind of balance but I think it safe to conclude that Poe's prose suggests a fondness for parallel structure, sometimes antithetical. I have also catalogued nearly two dozen devices of description, from anemographia to triplets adjectival and adverbial, and conclude that Poe is a highly descriptive writer. (Everyone knows that, but it is better to be able to confirm it by patient analysis rather than merely to suspect it.) He is especially fond of enargia and its various subtypes. Additionally, I have enumerated three dozen types of emotional appeal and other devices of vehemence--no surprise to those well acquainted with the prose and poetry of the passionate and histrionic Poe. Not all of these are figures of emotion per se (such as figures of repetition), but in Poe's hands they often become devices of ardency. Perhaps the largest class of rhetorical terms in Poe's works is indeed that of repetition--the duplication of letters, syllables, sounds, words, clauses, phrases, and ideas (several of which are examined, below). What Lanham calls techniques of argument also abound; Poe is, after all, an eminently rhetorical writer not only in his literary criticism, where we woul d expect attempts at persuasion, but in his fiction as well. We do find instances illustrating what Lanham calls "ungrammatical, illogical, or unusual uses of language," but Poe uses many of these deliberately as devices of comedy--often verbal comedy: antistoecon, barbarismus, bomphiologia, epenthesis, metathesis, prosonomasia, and puns (indeed, most of these can be found in the playful tales included in David Galloway's The Other Poe). …

Journal Article
22 Mar 1999-Style
TL;DR: This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison as mentioned in this paper was the first published version of Coleridge's "This Lime Tree Bower's Prison" poem, and it is the only version of the poem that is known to exist.
Abstract: Michael Simpson Goldsmiths' College, University of London But, if hereafter thou shalt write, not feare To send it to be judg'd by Metius care, And to your fathers, and to mine; though't be Nine yeares kept by: your papers in, y'are free To change, & mend, what you not forth do see. Horace, Ars Poetica. Trans. Ben Jonson It has become quite fashionable when discussing the artistic products of early-nineteenth-century Europe to refute the Romantic ideology of spontaneous genius with reference to the numerous and laborious re-workings that such products in fact entailed: Beethoven's obsessive re-scripting, in his sketchbooks, of a single theme, along with Coleridge's intermittent but perennial revision of his poems have recently been documented in some detail. Jack Stillinger has furnished ample evidence of this "textual instability" in Coleridge's poetic writing and has drawn the following conclusions from the welter of drafts and variants that constitute all of Coleridge's major poems: While some of these versions are in some sense "better" than others - structurally, logically, stylistically, philosophically, and so on - every one of them is independently authoritative, because it was authored by Coleridge himself. [...] The longstanding practice of identifying definitiveness with "final authorial intention" is no longer defensible, and Coleridge is an author whose practice supports this argument with particular force. In the theoretical framework of my study, he produced a new definitive version, the "final" text that he intended to stand at the moment, every time he revised a text. (10) In this article, I shall perform my own act of revision, or rather revisionism, by first accepting the premise of an almost mechanical process of emendation in Coleridge's poetic writing before then arguing that "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" in particular demonstratively recuperates such change as an integral part of the textual incarnation that results from it. What I shall not do, however, is subscribe to Zachary Leader's notion, contra Stillinger, that the published version of a poem, here "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," is predominantly important in itself; instead, I shall address the relationship between this version and one crucial earlier impression.(1) This retroactive gesture, which works to countervail the disjunctions highlighted by Stillinger, will be seen as driven not so much by a Romantic ideology of organicism as by a determinant that is best tracked within a history of ideas. Between the first extant text of "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," which forms part of a letter addressed to Robert Southey, and the poem's first published incarnation, Coleridge's letters and notebooks bear significant traces of his reading in Kant and Fichte. Entering the vexed critical debate about Coleridge's trading of allegiances from Hartley's account of experience to a largely Kantian model of mind, I shall propose that the revision of the first version of this poem, as effected by the later, published version, is motivated by this epistemological shift. Since the Kantian mind is posited as strenuously organizing its experience, to render it conformable with its own standards of intelligibility, I shall read the two versions of Coleridge's poem as divided by their correlation with Hartley's and Kant's theories only so that the Kantian model can demonstrate its superiority by actively assimilating or revising Hartley's model. The differences between the two versions of "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," which Stillinger valorizes, are staged only so that they can be recuperated in the capacious unity of the later draft and its Kantian affiliations. By thus gearing a discussion of textual variants to an account of a larger discursive field, this essay effectively follows Jerome McGann's practice and principle of promoting textual criticism to the extent of coordinating it with a history of ideas. …

Journal Article
22 Sep 1999-Style
TL;DR: The last will and testament of an ex-Literary critic was published in the September/October 1996 issue of Lingua Franca and caused a commotion among American literary scholars as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Ours is a confessional age, as the popularity of Oprah Winfrey's and other television talk-shows testifies to. Recently, the confessional mode has made its way into what--for at least the first half of this century--aspired to be a relatively impartial, objective, and impersonal enterprise: literary studies. It is not only that the 1990s brought a surge of autobiographies in which well-known literary academics reveal all kinds of pungent details about their professional and private lives (see Alice Kaplan's French Lessons, Frank Lentricchia's Edge of Night, or Marianna Torgovnick's Crossing Ocean Parkway). More importantly, critical essays on literary texts and/or issues are spiced with references to the critics' private lives. [1] Indeed, David R. Shumway may be right when he claims that, "Personal matters, once regarded as extraneous to disciplinary discourse, have become central to it" (96). What has prompted this entry of confession into literary studies? Some would say that it is our preoccupation with self-location, incited by the turn in theory that asks critics to specify their positionality as regards gender, class, race, and sexual preference. Others might speculate on the significance of the feminist claim that "the personal is political" in encouraging the confessional mode. Yet others may point to the postmodern trend to cross all kinds of boundaries and to mix genres and discourses. A few may even claim that academics resort to the personal narrative to liven up their otherwise dull and drab professional discourse. Be this as it may, what I find particularly fascinating a bout critical confessions is their role in forming the public image of the persona of an academic teacher. A peak of sorts--or perhaps a nadir--in the confessional trend in literary criticism seems to have been reached recently with the publication of Lentricchia's article "Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic," in the September/October 1996 issue of Lingua Franca. The article caused quite a commotion among American literary scholars. I was at Columbia University when Lentricchia's "Last Will" was published. Within a few days, everybody (or so it seemed to me) was talking about the article: each casual encounter between academics, each dinner party with more than one academic at the table, each graduate seminar provided an occasion to discuss Lentricchia's essay. So what was it that Lentricchia wrote that caused such tremors in the academic world? In the article, this "Dirty Harry of contemporary critical theory," as a reviewer once called Lentricchia, [2] admits to having suffered for years from a kind of split-personality disorder. His secret "me-the-reader" kept experiencing "erotic transport" when reading books, while his public self, that of "an historian and polemicist of literary theory," was speaking about literature as a political instrument. His two selves, as he writes, were "unhappy with one another" (60). Since this part of Lentricchia's article could be seen as an echo of the "two selves" confession made some ten years earlier by another academic at Duke University, Jane Tompkins, it offers nothing new. [3] Rather, it is what follows that made me and other literary critics and teachers raise our eyebrows. Lentricchia continues by announcing his conversion from a political critic and graduate mentor into a literary enthusiast. To explain his decision, he cites a number of classroom incidents in which graduate students have passed judgments on books from the position of self-righteousness and moral and political superiority. One of the climactic moments leading to Lentricchia's conversion was, he writes, a student's statement that "the first thing we have to understand is that Faulkner is a racist" (64). This comment, says Lentricchia, ignited his desire to communicate "how unspeakably stupid" he found such views. The views themselves, claims Lentricchia, are due to the corruption of students' minds by contemp orary literary theory. …