Showing papers in "Symploke in 2011"

Abstract: Over the course of our conversations it became clear that throughout Lindsey’s life physical activity had been both a friend and an enemy: something that sustained and nourished her, as well as damaged her. Therefore, our proposition is that Lindsey’s stories point to the confusions, tensions, and even crises that are generated when embodied physical activity as a dimension of identity collides with the idea of physical activity as a kind of medicine or tonic that we take to improve our moral or medical health.

Abstract: Literature accommodates many kinds of knowledge...historical knowledge, a geographical, a social (colonial), a technological, a botanical, an anthropological knowledge...if by some unimaginable excess of socialism and barbarism, all but one of our disciplines were to be expelled from our educational system, it is the discipline of literature, which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences are present in the literary monument. —Roland Barthes (1996, 463)

Abstract: Hunger is an especially problematic subject to discuss in theoretical terms as its effects so often seem to fall into the realm of the physical rather than the metaphysical, the ontic rather than the ontological. But it is modernity’s very desire to separate these realms that results in skewed views of complicated problems that do not fit neatly into either category. For example, in a 2008 meeting with United Nations officials to mark World Food Day, former US President Bill Clinton lamented worldwide political attitudes toward food. President Clinton suggested that a significant failure of modern governments has been their lack of foresight in treating food as a commodity in the face of world hunger. Similarly, in his recent work Hunger: A Modern History (2007), James Vernon argues that hunger has become “a category we moderns have used to reflect upon the world we inhabit” and that “through it we have transformed the ways in which we think of ourselves, our responsibilities to each other, and our relationship to the state and the market” (8). But how is this understanding of hunger specific to modernity in the way Clinton, Vernon, and I suggest? The answer to this question becomes clear when understood in light of what Charles Taylor has called modernity’s “malaise” of “instrumental reason” (1991, 5). In this modern mode, reason is drawn primarily from a calculation of the “most economical application of means to a given end” (5). Taylor’s investigation of the effects of modernity suggests that the modern desire to free the individual from some transcendent, sacred, or cosmic order has resulted in the “disenchantment” of the “order of things,” and that without these “old orders,” instrumental reason has become a dominant way of interacting with the world. If we buy Taylor’s argument, then it becomes clear how the effects of modernity have led us to a troubling point in world history, a point in which food can be seen more as commodity than necessity and even hunger falls under the purview of instrumental reason. As this essay is an investigation of the relationship between hunger and modernity, it might seem odd that it takes as its primary focus a novel typically framed by reviewers and critics alike as “post-apocalyptic.” Nearly every review, note, and scholarly treatment of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Abstract: "La faim, c'est moi"- hunger is me- confesses Amelie Nothomb's heroine in Biographie de la faim (The Biography of Hunger) (22). A strange statement, of course, but no stranger than the Flaubertian dictum it evokes. So what exactly does Nothomb acknowledge here? More to the point: what does it mean to suspect that one's identity gels around hunger (20), that, more generally, being is insatiable, grounded by a fundamental and ever-replenished "insufficiency" (satus is Latin for "enough," as the reader will recall)?

Abstract: The language of starvation is a commonplace in discussions of Samuel Beckett’s writing. His texts are described as emaciated and skeletal, as famished and anorexic. His language, characters, plots, settings, form, content, bodies, style, structure, syntax, and contextual reference are all open to charges of being starved, deprived, or wasted, of going hungry. Terry Eagleton is concurring with a majority view, and making exemplary use of a common metaphor, when he speaks of Beckett’s “anorexic texts,” crafted from “[s]tarved words, gaunt bodies and sterile landscapes” (25).1 Such language is at once pervasive and under-examined, signaling a relationship between hunger and Beckett’s writing that has received much passing acknowledgement but surprisingly little sustained attention. It implies a connection that goes far beyond a simple thematic interest in starvation, infiltrating the very structure of his texts, working its way into their very bones. This essay will argue that this critical intuition actually identifies a central element of Beckett’s postwar aesthetics, in which Beckett uses hunger and related experiences as a way of thinking through his ideas about art and language. In this sense, Beckett’s postwar work develops gropingly towards what might be termed an “aesthetics of hunger”—an aesthetics that takes its structure from hunger. Starvation becomes pervasive in Beckett’s work after the Second World War. Living out their lives against a backdrop of constant, grinding deprivation, his characters of this period almost never have enough to eat. In Waiting for Godot (1953), only Pozzo is genuinely well-fed; Lucky, Vladimir, and Estragon can only beg for his leftovers and trade an ever-diminishing stock of root vegetables. The characters of Endgame (1957) are similarly deprived, inhabiting a world of gradual depletion, in which there are no more sugar

Abstract: This essay considers the relation between Don Quixote's hunger and the disenchantment (Entzauberung) that Max Weber understood as paradigmatic of the modern condition. Whereas hunger functions within a Hegelian dialectic of desire in Cervantes' novel, literary representations of hunger from later periods (in Kafka and post-Holocaust Polish poetry) acknowledge the cosmic insignificance of human need by substituting the desire for recognition with a desire for self-abdication. While Don Quixote's hunger drives him to seek recognition for his dream world, modern literature's hungry heroes respond to hunger by changing their metaphysical identities. Like desire, hunger functions in the literatures of modernity as an index of psychic wholeness or of its lack, both enabling and resisting the hero's assimilation with the world outside the self.

Abstract: Space is a prominent feature in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987/1988), and whether it is literal or figurative, it compels an allegorical appreciation as to how and what it signifies. For example, 124 Bluestone is unmistakably an architecture that reifies pastness and entrapment. Here, Sethe and Denver are locked in a persistent memory that refuses to set them free. The Clearing, the backyard over which 124 Bluestone overlooks, is, as its name suggests, a place of renewal. This is where Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, encourages the black people to reacquaint themselves with their bodies that have been violated by slavery (88). There is the ironically named Sweet Home, a place which only evokes painful memories for those who once sojourned there. But the novel also references figurative space to speak of memories, emotions and sometimes ideology. Paul D’s heart, for example, is spatially configured as “a tobacco tin lodged in his chest” into which his traumatic memories are placed so that “nothing in this world could pry it open” (113). In this way, he protects himself from being overwhelmed by the perpetual loss (of identity, of family and friends) he experiences. Sethe sees memory as space filled with sorrow or gaps (which she calls “empty space” [95]). And finally, the whitefolk’s fear of, and desire for, power over their slaves are metaphorized as a jungle of their own creation (198-99). As much as space functions metaphorically in the narrative, it is also undeniable that space, especially place, is also a literal, material, and geographical reality which carries social and psychological significances. Criticisms of Beloved tend to ignore that 124 Bluestone, for example, is also a place where Sethe and her daughter live, and whose very presence as architecture refracts the two women’s uncanny, and their hopes. To cite two recent examples: in “Haunted Houses, Sinking Ships” by Samira Kawash, apart from postulating that “the danger signaled by ‘haunting’ derives from the very structure of the house, not from some external element,” the essay has actually very little to say about the house’s materiality, and the way this materiality influences its dwellers. Instead, the house is read as a prison metaphor, which Kawash associates with the system of slavery (74). Similarly, despite J. Hillis Miller’s innovative focus on boundaries and space

Abstract: A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This (1987) is a collection of short fictions written by Robert Coover during the late seventies and early eighties and miscellaneously published in 1987.1 In comparison to Coover’s more overtly sociopolitical works—The Public Burning (1977), which denounces the social fascism of the American establishment through the narration of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s execution, and The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), where the thirst for individual power leads to solipsism and demise—A Night at the Movies engages with a comprehensive media discourse that was redefining its theories and boundaries at the delicate crossroads of the Ford-Carter-beginning-of-Reagan’s eras, between 1974 and 1981—the years when Coover wrote his stories. This was a time when global communication networks were being shaped (Turner founded CNN in 1980) and the Federal Communications Commission had begun to implement programming on, and diffusion of, basic cable television via satellite, positing the basis for a (quasi-)deregulated media proliferation.2 In parallel, a growing use of computer graphics in film and photography introduced digital image processing into analog practices (materializing bodies and objects over a given filmed background), so that new notions of reproducibility and simulation were challenging traditional visual arts and modes of representation.3 Attuned to these transformations of the media scenario, Coover proposes in A Night at the Movies an ungovernable universe of simulacra, where the characters (and the reader) find themselves at a loss, facing the undecipherable nature of reality when massively transformed into “reel.”

Abstract: public hungry, not just for knowledge, but for the chance to help make it available. The collective behavior of Wikipedians reveals shared values that unite them as a collaborative community. Reagle describes these values with particular clarity. The “Holy Trinity” of Wikipedia practice guarantees bibliographic hygiene: entries must demonstrate a Neutral Point of View, No Original Research, and Verifiability. Wikipedia articles are thus only as good as the sources they cite. They offer nothing new, only the best that has been previously thought, said—and published. Another trinity, not so holy perhaps, provides morays for Wikipedians: good faith, openness, and consensus. Reagle himself seems a true believer in these morays. They give Wikipedia its happy face. Treat anonymous others with good faith. Be open online. Act out of group consensus rather than personal gain. Strive for that highest of virtual values, Wikilove. As a collaborative community, Wikipedia has been surprisingly stable from its start. Sanger may have left in a snit, regretting its devaluation of the expert, and squabbles may erupt over which entries deserve protection from vandalism or bias. Wikipedia rumbles on—and over its rivals, most notable Langer’s authority-driven Citizendium. Wikilove may indeed be the source of Wikipedia’s success. I suspect instead it’s because the social and economic stakes of Wikiculture are pretty low: contributors remain anonymous and don’t profit financially from their work. Maybe love works best when it’s anonymous. I really can’t say. I can, however, recommend Good Faith Collaboration to anyone interested in the history of infotech and its new forms of collective agency. Reagle doesn’t tell his story with much finesse, but he’s not a storyteller. Nor is he a critic, so expect little analysis of class, race, or gender bias among Wikipedians. He’s an ethnographer of the virtual and its new forms of life and culture.

Abstract: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” said Gertrude Stein (187),1 and we might be tempted to name René Magritte’s painting A Rose Is a Rose, were it not for the fact that this image (see figure 1) is not a rose, any more than Magritte’s painting of a pipe, The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images) (1929), is a pipe. His caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” amply demonstrates that the signifier is not the signified. In his book This Is Not a Pipe (1968), Michel Foucault devotes some fifty pages to proving that the iconic representation of a pipe is not the same thing as smoking it. Indeed, in our time, no informed person believes in the transparency of the sign. The rose is not a rose because Magritte has named his picture The Tomb of the Wrestlers (Le Tombeau des lutteurs) (1960), a title he borrowed from Léon Cladel’s nineteenth-century novel entitled Ompdrailles, le-tombeau-des-lutteurs (1879). This is an unusual and arresting title for a painting that depicts a red rose inside a room, a rose whose petals are enclosed by the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Moreover, the painting was not meant to illustrate the novel any more than Cladel’s text is an intentional ekphrastic representation of the painting.

Abstract: Any human life that is even the least bit balanced is structured around, on the one hand, the immediate needs of drinking-surviving-eating (to put it plainly, the prosaic); and, on the other, the aspiration to self-fulfillment, where nourishment takes the form of dignity, honor, music, songs, dances, reading, philosophy, spirituality, love, and free time for fulfilling the deepest longings (to put it plainly, the poetic).

Abstract: Our focus here is the Christological themes in two recent works, one by Frederiek Depoortere, and the other an exchange between Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank. Because the scope of the works extends far beyond Christology, e.g., Depoortere’s discussion of the scientific aspects of mimesis and Žižek’s scintillating roman-candle-like excursi and interpretations of literature, political theory, popular culture, history, ethics, etc., much will be neglected. Although Depoortere’s excellent book Christ in Postmodern Philosophy begins with a brief study of Gianni Vattimo, which he characterizes as a return to Thomas Altizer’s “Death of God” theology, for sheer practical reasons, we will omit this discussion.

Abstract: Suman Gupta’s Globalization and Literature joins others in Polity Press’ series on Themes in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Culture. Gupta’s project is timely given both the acceleration of globalization as a structuring phenomenon of—or, minimally, an inescapable backdrop to—nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Still, and Gupta makes the point, literary scholars have been a little late to the party of globalization studies, an area marked out already in the seventies and eighties (and beyond) by social scientists working in sociology, political science, and anthropology. The vastness and variegation of the topic of globalization and literature leave an unusually broad range of possible approaches to it. Gupta chooses an eclectic model which concentrates heavily on literature review and suggestive synopses, yielding a text that is focally extensive, though at times diffuse in insight. Chapter 1 briefly reviews the provenance of “globalization” as a term and, collaterally, theories of globalization, citing, among others, the work of Anthony Giddens, Roland Robertson, David Held, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Gupta himself construes globalization as a relatively recent and contemporary development, separating himself from those who would trace it back centuries and view all manner of human interaction across space as (notionally) symptomatic of globalizing processes. Rather than “empty the term ‘globalization’ of its historical and contextual content,” rather than “extend it retrospectively in an ahistorical and acontextual fashion,” Gupta foregrounds globalization’s “specificities” as defined by time and space (10-11). Finally, while acknowledging the determinative role of economics in the shaping of globalization, Gupta eschews the econocentric biases found in, notably, Wallerstein, Mandel, and Jameson. As the author sets out in the introductory chapter, the book falls into “broadly two uneven parts”: chapters 2 and 3, which deal with prominent

Abstract: This essay looks at the human face of hunger, up close and personal. “Feeding Hunger” will explore the topic from three perspectives, alternating but refracting on one another. It is from this corporeal perspective—influenced perforce by the prevailing culture—that I, as a middle-class mother, amateur chef, and food writer, approach the subject of hunger by examining what I take for granted about food. Under ordinary circumstances, Natalie Crouter, another comfortable middle-class American mother, would have shared my point of view; but her status as a prisoner of war in Baguio, the Philippines, throughout World War II, dramatically altered her way of regarding the world, and life itself, as she, her family, and five hundred other internees dealt with diminished food supplies, and the nutritional, social, and medical consequences. The third perspective, and the grimmest, is the statistical evidence from the United Nations World Food Programme on “food insufficiency” in Nepal, Niger, Guatemala, and Haiti (among eighty countries) in which individuals in are crushed beneath the numbers that provide counterpoint to the narratives.

Abstract: In 1992, Gilles Deleuze entered into a correspondence with Alain Badiou at the younger man’s urging, and for two years, these two thinkers exchanged letters on the aim and faults of one another’s projects, only ceasing after having “affected,” in Badiou’s words, “clarification.”1 Deleuze later destroyed this correspondence, urging Badiou to never publish or circulate his own copies. “In the corner of his study,” Jean-Jacques Lecercle writes of Badiou, “there must lie some of the most important letters in contemporary philosophy.” The imagination of what such letters may contain animates Lecercle’s fascinating and overdue study of these seemingly antithetical thinkers as a disjunctive pair. While the rhizomatic thought of Deleuze has been increasingly embraced by the “Anglo-American” philosophical community in recent years, the axiomatic work of Badiou has come along as a refreshing corrective to a complete splintering of discourse. For the literary theorist, the most pertinent question at this point has become less about what these philosophers think than how this thought may be utilized for the betterment of the discipline. The importance of Deleuze already in profound evidence, the rise of the speculative materialists gives weight to the increasing necessity to understand and manipulate the insights of Badiou if literary theory is to keep pace with the explosion in thought his major works have produced. Yet to approach Badiou without recognizing that it is “vis-à-vis Deleuze and no one else” that he posits his endeavor is to misunderstand the scope and aim of both projects, as well as remain only tangentially informed about the most fertile moments of the last thirty years of French thought. Welcome, then, is Lecercle’s study on the literary approaches (aesthetic and otherwise) of Deleuze and Badiou. Presenting the two thinkers not as the halves of a dialectic but rather as a correlative “disjunctive synthesis,” Lecercle is able to not only illuminate the specific areas of paradox in the thought of these two complex theorists but to also provide a cohesive background that joins them in their irreconcilable projects. Lecercle, an expert on Deleuze, is more clear and insightful in his treatment of Deleuze’s prose, concepts, and aesthetics, but the author then seems all the more taken— seduced, nearly—by the austerity of Badiou’s style and the asceticism of his position—responding, we might say, to the call of the Other. Other than the disjunctive synthesis—Deleuze’s concept in which two disparate notions may be jointly suspended on a background of convergence—Lecercle’s study is driven by what he calls “strong reading,” a process

Abstract: Sophia A. McClennen’s new book is a much-needed study that introduces the life and work of Chilean playwright, novelist, cartoonist, essayist, cultural critic, and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman, who now teaches Literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, to a broader US-American audience. McClennen creates her argument based on a decisive event in Dorfman’s life, the military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in 1973, ending the presidency of the popularly elected Salvador Allende. Pinochet quickly dismantled institutions, installed an authoritarian regime, and sought to redefine the relationship between state and society. His regime’s brutal repression of popular unrest and its massive human rights violations earned international condemnation. According to McClennen, Dorfman harbored a “personal obsession with Pinochet” (270), and in an interview, Dorfman comments on the event as follows, “It was the moment in my life when everything changed, the moment of conception of the person I now am, how I became this person who’s bilingual, who’s multicultural, who’s hybrid” (qtd. in Postel par. 7). Dorfman, who had worked as communications and media advisor for Allende, was forced into exile and focused his subsequently published critical and creative works on the experiences of exile, tyranny, trauma, memory, and diaspora. As McClennen makes abundantly clear, his work revolves around the fundamental belief that art and politics are interconnected and that a literature of engagement asks readers to envision a future where hope, and not nihilism, is the appropriate response. Dorfman’s prolific production of texts, his work in a broad range of genres, his consistent defiance of what Derrida calls “The Law of Genre,” and his incessant experimentation with rhetorical forms all turn a coherent assessment of his work into an enormous enterprise. Dorfman’s own words hint at the difficulty of this task: “My style isn’t at all unified. I’m full of

Abstract: The story of the US is typically told as one of heroic immigrants: those Europeans who first came to these shores escaped tyranny and sought freedom, forming the nation and becoming Americans. However, the story is different when it comes to other groups of immigrants. Lisa Lowe, in her influential book Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996), shows how immigration has been racialized, with Asian immigrants excluded from the national political sphere while included as labor in the economic sphere. Using both ethnographic accounts and literary portraits, she explores how Asian American women in particular are conscripted as labor and exploited. Lowe’s first book, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (1994), examines the heterogeneous nature of orientalism in texts from the eighteenth century to the French Tel quel group’s infatuation with Maoism in the wake of 1968. Immigrant Acts brings together her analysis of Asian American history and representation. She is currently completing two new books, The Intimacies of Four Continents and Metaphors of Globalization (forthcoming from Duke UP), which study the history and theory of globalization. She has also co-edited the volume The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (with David Lloyd; 1997), which includes an interview Lowe conducted with Angela Davis, and she co-edits the series Perverse Modernities (Duke UP), with Judith “Jack” Halberstam. Relevant to this interview, one might also look at her entry on “Globalization” in

Abstract: Most readers of this book will be familiar with the readers in this book— Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek, and Cavell. They have each contributed brilliantly provocative interpretations of philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and film. Critics have been duly provoked of course, but inasmuch as these figures are now well established as our maîtres à penser, it is rare to find anyone suggesting that their interpretations go too far, that they fail to abide by normal standards of academic accuracy and scholarly sobriety. These standards are for us, and as for them, well, brilliance shines all the brighter when rules and norms are broken, flagrantly, and without apology. These shining lights are routinely dispensed from such standards, but it is still worth taking the risk, Colin Davis suggests, to ask whether Derrida reads too much into a work, whether Žižek gets carried away, whether Deleuze is guilty of “critical excess.” Yet it will be asked how one can say when interpretation becomes excessive. It will be objected that interpretation is not an activity governed by rules laid down by who knows what tribunal of scholarly rectitude. What is the benchmark for an academic interpretation anyway—when it says something confirmably true, when it is correct, when it provides textual evidence, when all the footnotes are in the right place, the i’s dotted, the t’s crossed? These are the right kind of objections to a book such as this (the wrong kind is to dismiss the majority of the figures considered as being “Continental” thinkers, and therefore constitutionally slapdash in their approach to scholarship). But the right kind of response to them—Davis’ response—is to offer a faithful exposition of what, exactly, these people do say, proceeding neither from the parti pris that their interpretations are worthless, nor from the overzealous position that everything in them is of equal worth. Davis’ chapters are models of clear analysis, economical when necessary, more expansive when necessary, adept at keeping the broader implications in focus while the moves and maneuvers of each thinker are tracked in their detail. But it is the tone Davis adopts that really counts: he is not relentlessly quizzical, but is nonetheless unfailingly deft at establishing