Postmodernism and Literary Criticism

The crucial point of Brill's study is that of fit: which critical methods prove most useful towards opening up which texts? Close investigations into the parameters of the language games of texts, critics, and methods enable us to determine which paths to take towards more complete descriptive analyses and critique. Such an emphasis on the philosophical method of Ludwig Wittgenstein reorients literary criticism to involve a conjoint responsibility to both reader and text as the literary critic assumes the humbler role of a guide who assists a reader in/to diverse literary texts. Wittgenstein's philosophical approach provides us with a strong means of developing such a method for literary criticism-a method that points the way forward beyond postmodern criticisms and to a categorically new approach to literary texts. Brill's work discusses at length the implications of Wittgenstein for literary criticism and theory. The volume specifically investigates the implications of Wittgenstein's work for a number of contemporary critical orientations (notably poststructualism, feminism, and psychology). In addition, the research includes actual applications of Wittgenstein for literary criticism: diverse literary texts (including a number of poems and stories by Native American authors) are approached via a Wittgensteinian method as a means of discerning which critical approaches might be more or less efficacious. Not only does the book provide a solid introduction to Wittgensteinian philosophy for the critical scholars, but it also provides a clear methodology useful to critics seeking a means to navigate through the entanglement of contemporary criticism and theory. Brill argues that a reliance upon the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can enable literary critics to escape the seemingly endless dialectic between modern and postmodern theory. Instead of debating which theory is theoretically best, we need to describe when theories work-and when they do not.

Postmodern Critique: Between Relativism and Reduction Horace L. Fairlamb I For many disciplines in the humanities, the last three decades have been enlivened by skeptical claims of epochal scope. In the late sixties Derrida gestured toward the closure of the “historico-metaphysical epoch” of logocentrism; at the end of the seventies Rorty invited the end of philosophy; and Lyotard made “the postmodern condition” a central preoccupation of the eighties. Notwithstanding their differences in detail, poststructuralism, neopragmatism, and postmodernism all contributed to widespread doubts about Western philosophy’s claims to the ultimate foundations of knowledge, truth, and meaning. According to these radical voices, an epochal shift is indicated by changing relations between philosophy, literature, and language. Where ancient philosophy sought to discipline the poets with science, some contemporary philosophers have surrendered to the tricksters of meaning. Meanwhile, literary critics have theorized their trickery seemingly ad infinitum. No wonder some see philosophy and literature as having reversed stations in the hierarchy of critical authority. With philosophy having failed to produce a final consensus on rational grounds, the literary critic’s interpretive sophistication may seem the ultimate form of critique. This triumph of literary over philosophical analysis has a number of attractive features beyond its more exotic theoretical origins. After all, are not poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Did not [End Page 405] Freud get his best ideas from poets and novelists? And with all due respect, might not Shakespeare be wiser than Kant? But the case against traditional philosophy is not so complete as the most radical critics have claimed. As the following pages will argue, the repudiation of foundational philosophy is premature for several reasons. First, the instabilities of language are not decisive for foundational philosophy. Second, the errors of traditional philosophy are best critiqued in foundational terms. And third, certain incoherent features of postmodern skepticism prove explicable in foundational terms. Lacking something more decisive, antifoundational skeptics cannot yet claim a victory. II It is no secret how language has lent prestige to literary criticism. Perhaps the most striking claim for the philosophical significance of language is Derrida’s in Of Grammatology: However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others. But never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the most heterogeneous discourses, diverse and heterogeneous in their intention, method and ideology. . . . [T]his crisis is also a symptom. It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historico-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon. 1 For Richard Rorty, the failure of epistemology led inexorably to this insight: “The ubiquity of language is a matter of language moving into the vacancies left by the failure of all the various candidates for the position of ‘natural starting-points’ of thought, starting-points which are prior to and independent of the way some culture speaks or spoke.” Moreover, language is itself the ultimate challenge to epistemology’s ideal of proper representation: “Philosophy, the attempt to say ‘how language relates to the world’ by saying what makes certain sentences true, or certain actions or attitudes good or rational, is, on this view, impossible.” 2 For some critics, the demise of traditional philosophy follows this failure to domesticate meaning. As the ubiquitous medium of thought, language allows too many forms and uses of knowledge to warrant a single ideal of science and meaning. Since the inevitable slippage of [End Page 406] meaning renders impossible an ultimate vocabulary, the foundational ideal crumbles. No doubt, these strong pronouncements may seem implied by much that has transpired in the history of philosophy, not to mention in literary theory. Yet they conclude too much. Though language is central for philosophy, it is not decisive for all philosophical issues. Not all foundational claims are problems of representation. Nor does the hermeneutic perspective have a monopoly on critical ultimacy. And worse, antifoundational radicalism may be a self-refuting concept. III Postmodernism concludes that because epistemology failed in the past, one moves beyond its burdens by not asking its questions. Hence, Rorty urges us to understand rather than justify beliefs, putting...

The status of the Author's identity in Literary Criticism regarding the ownership of meaning created in a text is still unresolved debate. Postmodern critics like Barthes and Foucault attribute no importance to the author in the matter of interpretation of his own literary work. The present research has focused on highlighting the significance of the existence of the Author for a comprehensive understanding of the text and proposed the notion of the coexistence of the Author and the Reader in order to retain the privilege of the Author as well as to circumvent misleading interpretations on the part of the readers by aligning his interpretation with the thought of the author. The study concludes that it is the author who directs readers' understanding of the text and adds to their knowledge and that the readers cannot be left alone to stagger between their indecisive interpretations of a text.

Mise-en-scène Speer Morgan Aristotle’s Poetics was written circa 335 b.c.e. but then lost for many centuries, available only through a translation of an Arabic version. Much of its meaning has been argued over, although a few elements are generally accepted. Aristotle discusses drama and lyric and epic poetry. He also talks about the importance of form, diction, the ideal qualities of characters represented in literature, and the emotive or cathartic effect of the whole literary work. Disagreement about his meaning is due partly to the fact that Poetics was the most influential extended writing in literary analysis and theory in the West for two millennia. By the eighteenth century, writers and journalists were certainly discussing what they cared about in literature—particularly the Enlightenment values of rationalism and skepticism. Literary scholarship, or the study of texts and textual history, began with biblical scholarship, particularly in Germany at the end of the century. However, literary criticism in Aristotle’s tradition, focusing on traits of literary texts themselves rather than their history or influences, wasn’t widespread until the twentieth century. The New Critics showed interest in the formal aspects of language and style and how they work together to comprise unity of form. Later in the century, Postmodern critics, partly in reaction to what had gone before, were intrigued by the chaotic, ungovernable nature of those elements and how they threatened coherence and meaning. [End Page 5] Writers have always thought less about theory or approaches to the study of literature and more about the elemental aspects of their work. Style comes naturally to one’s own voice, while plot, setting, mood, and the feel of a work—what the writer invents and puts on the page—need to be thought about and given coherence. The world of theater offers a useful phrase to describe both the concerns of writers in fashioning their works and the concerns of critics in assessing them. Mise-en-scène, “putting on stage,” is a wonderfully loose term that refers to the setting, scenery, and mood of a play or movie as well as blocking and movement. When applied to literature, this term refers to the “feel” of a work expressed through setting, atmosphere, style, and—in fiction—the story itself. Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” provides a fine example of mise-en-scène in a short story. The story has a dramatic setting, as two middle-aged rich New York widows sit and knit at a restaurant overlooking the Roman Forum while their two unmarried daughters go off with young men for dinner. Mrs. Ansley and Mrs. Slade have known each other since childhood and have been unadmitted rivals since young adulthood. The time is late afternoon, and the setting is one that literally overlooks a key place from their own pasts, since they—like their daughters—came here as young women and had romantic encounters. Wharton takes a neutral view toward both women despite the fact that one of them, Mrs. Slade, is openly emotionally needy and discontented. She was in fact married to the “star” husband, Delphin Slade, while Grace Ansley’s husband was low key and unnoteworthy, rich family or not. Yet Mrs. Slade is irritated because Grace’s daughter is the “star” daughter—brilliant, beautiful, daring—while her own daughter, Jenny, although kind and helpful, is in her view hardly a vibrant person. How can her “loser” friend have the ideal daughter? To get back at Grace, she tells her what she has long wanted to confess: that in one of their youthful visits to Rome, she wrote a fake love letter from the dashing Delphin Slade telling Grace to meet him in the Colosseum, hoping that she would go there, be disappointed by Delphin’s absence, and maybe even catch Roman fever (malaria). As the two women knit and talk over their pasts in the quiet evening, set against the backdrop of a beautiful Roman twilight, a fact is revealed that dramatically rearranges their assumptions and all but drives a stake through the self-satisfied but greedy and discontented heart of Mrs. Slade. Grace reveals that Delphin did meet her in the...

Reviewed by: Blood Work: Imagining Race in American Literature, 1890–1940 by Shawn Salvant Jonquil Bailey Shawn Salvant. Blood Work: Imagining Race in American Literature, 1890–1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2015. 229 pp. Blood Work is an incisive interdisciplinary study of the role of blood, as both image and concept, in the development of American racialist thought. Building on postmodern criticism, which has redefined race as "a discursive rather than a biological concept," Shawn Salvant treats race as a socially constructed system of metaphors that American racial rhetoric has associatively paired with blood (2). Salvant's analysis of racial blood rhetoric extends far beyond blood's suggestions of biological essentialism to shed light on the "connotative and nonbiological meanings of blood" (28). These meanings, Salvant reminds his readers, are not stable: lacking a denotative referent, the meaning of race—and, in turn, blood—is always dependent on the sociohistorical moment in which the term is used. To discern the many and sometimes contradictory connotations of racial blood, Blood Work turns to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature: novels written during a period defined by increased racial violence, race law's renewed interest in racial blood ideologies, and the spread of scientific racialism. By applying metaphor theory and critical race theory to his readings of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, and William Faulkner's Light in August, Salvant reveals the "cultural, legal, rhetorical, and literary constructions of the relationships between race, identity, and society" as captured by blood metaphors (5). Blood Work begins with a discerning chapter on the difference between the role of blood in nineteenth-century American racial science and its role in American race law. Whereas racial science held that miscegenation produced degenerative and psychologically unstable subjects because of the inability of black and white blood to mix, legal racial rhetoric applied what Salvant calls an "unnatural logic" (40) of unmixable blood that entirely "negat[ed] the determinative power of the white portion of blood," turning any amount of black blood into a stigmatizing mark (48). "Mark Twain and the Essence of Ink" exposes the tension between these characterological and legal ideologies of racial blood—ideologies of mixing and marking—through an analysis of Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, a novel that conflates the two racial blood discourses and dramatizes the implications of racial blood's dualism for American race law. Salvant's literary analysis pivots on Twain's familiarity with Francis Galton's study of fingerprint science, which Galton hoped would make race "legible" (67). Twain, Salvant argues, uses the image of a bloody fingerprint—composed of one drop of Judge Driscoll's "white" blood (an ironic twist on the [End Page 572] one-drop rule) and the fingerprint of Judge Driscoll's murderer, "the visibly white but legally black Tom Driscoll" (33)—to settle the contention between characterological and legal blood discourses, "allowing blood to act as both the proportional carrier of character and the binary indicator of racial identity" (72). Although Salvant's astute analysis of Pudd'nhead Wilson does not begin until roughly halfway through the chapter, the in-depth historical and theoretical framing of his literary critique helps to stage his arguments in the succeeding chapters. Blood Work's second chapter, "Frances Harper and the Blood of Sacrifice," shifts focus away from legal discourses of racial blood to consider "how the discourse of Christian symbolism works in tandem with a discourse of scientific racialism in the rhetoric of racial blood" (34–35). Through a reading of Harper's post-Reconstruction race melodrama Iola Leroy, Salvant demonstrates how Harper reconceives the blood of scientific racialism, which carries with it notions of racial essentialism and determinism, as blood that confers racial identity through self-sacrificial choice. Salvant contextualizes his argument by tracing the roots of Harper's endorsement of self-sacrifice to African American Christian theology—which had to negotiate between the salvific blood of Christian doctrine and the damning, deterministic blood of racial science—and to her personal encounter with John Brown, who relinquished the legal and social privileges of whiteness on behalf of black slaves when he...

The notion of corporeality and a concern with the embodied qualities of gendered power has been key to the development of Western feminist theory. The defining of birth, mothering, reproductive management, the praxis of sex, domestic violence and adornment as questions of politics, cultural representation and social organization, has meant that feminism has often been embodied theory. Ecofeminists have emphasized embodied relations of power with respect to reproductive technol-ogy, foodways, and specific environmental impacts on women’s bodies and health. Elements of other ecologisms might be read as embodied theory. The “wilderness reverence” of deep ecology is both implicitly suggestive and explicitly demonstrative of the engagements of bodies with/in their environments. As we have seen, there is an ecofeminist critique of such literature as encapsulating an exclusionary experience of natured embodiment in its emphasis on difficult and demanding physical experiences. There is also a postmodernist critique which focuses on the “purist” elements of such endeavors, which often commend some form of “return” to nature and a holism which posits an “essentialist” relation between humanity and “environment.” Nevertheless, a strong element of thinking through the body is to be found in such writing.

Monika Kaup’s encyclopedic new study promises to be invaluable inasmuch as it organizes and reframes an impressive amount of scholarship from the past three decades of ecological thinking. Pulling together Bruno Latour’s theory of the “factish,” Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s autopoietic systems theory, Markus Gabriel’s ontological thought, and the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion and Alphonso Lingis is no small task—and is made no simpler by its application here to the ever-expanding genre known as “post-apocalyptic fiction.” The coherency of the study is a testament to Kaup’s often rewarding and always careful parsing of the theoretical terrain. What is more, New Ecological Realisms is ambitious in fully reimagining post-apocalyptic fiction within environmental theory while aspiring to map out the new mode of analysis its title names. Despite shared commitments with new materialism, ecocriticism, and related fields, Kaup intends to outline novel “context-based realist ontologies” viewed through the lens of literary criticism (23).New Ecological Realisms entertains close readings centered on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, José Saramago’s Blindness, Octavia Butler’s Parable series, and Cormac McCarthy’s Road. Kaup’s prose shines when she brings theory to bear on the literary examples in question, particularly in her discussion of Saramago’s novel. Kaup makes the inspired choice to connect systems theory—a discourse structured around questions of “observation” and “blind spots”—to Blindness, which details an epidemic vision-loss event in an unnamed city: “The newly white-blind protagonists in Saramago’s Blindness learn that to be blind means to be post-individual. Unlike the sighted, the blind cannot survive as autonomous individuals. . . . Survival is dependent on what Maturana and Varela call social coupling within self-organising collectives” (151). The collective “coupling” described in Blindness is indeed a singular social vision of survival after the ability to “see” is universally upended, a parable for the novel’s time as well as our own. Kaup argues that Blindness systemically addresses the failure of a certain kind of humanist, Cartesian project built on anthropological confidence in vision as the key metaphor for understanding. As Kaup puts it, the novel “literalises its critique of the Cartesian fiction of the disembodied observer by eliminating vision itself” (149). This observation is a prototypical example of how literary analysis functions in New Ecological Realisms: these texts almost always offer a fictional “literalization” of why a robust “new realism” is necessary to make sense of our age of ecological crisis.Ultimately, New Ecological Realisms plants its flag on the claim that post-apocalyptic fiction should be regarded as ontological rather than epistemological. “While postmodernism is an epistemology,” Kaup contends, “new realisms are ontologies” (213). The study thus aspires not just to advance ecological thinking but to clear the way for a new, holistic theory of literature after postmodernism. “Instead of determining whether things are real or constructed,” Kaup writes, “new realism asks: Where are things real? How do things become real that might initially have been constructed or unconstructed?” (19). With such questions the book discloses its indebtedness to object-oriented ontology and speculative realism and places itself firmly in the ambit of Edinburgh University Press’s Speculative Realism series, which offers some of the most interesting interventions in the widening scope of ecological studies.Kaup’s tone is at times inflated in its dismissal of competing or related theories—so much so, in fact, that many of the book’s polemics will surely polarize those trained in the more established traditions of the humanities. Kaup loses little time dispatching several decades’ worth of “constructivist” scholarship by calling that body of work a “failure.” New realism, in contrast, “searches for alternatives to both constructivism and materialist reductionism. Exposing constructivism’s hidden handicap, new realists note that it is predicated on the acceptance of the naturalist concept of the real” (26). The ableist metaphor notwithstanding, Kaup never makes plain why the “handicap” of constructivist thinking is “hidden,” or how a “naturalist concept of the real” offers the correction this area of scholarship so desperately needs. Yet on the need for a new direction, many would be keen to follow Kaup’s work—and will no doubt find a wide range of possibilities detailing how one might reshape reading practices and ontological thinking.A quintessential example of the study’s surprising antagonism toward other philosophical schools is revealed in its twofold rejection of posthumanism and new materialism. Describing one moment in Jane Bennett’s writing as “a series of rhetorical sleights-of-hands” (41) or arguing that “[Katherine] Hayles misconstrues autopoietic theory as a refurbished version of liberal humanism” (157) indicates the book’s sometimes inimical, jarring tone. Likewise, the monolithic “postmodern critic” is frequently deployed as a straw man for a head-in-the-sand scholar who behaves as if “reality,” as such, were an utter fabrication. In one anecdotal section of the introduction, Kaup paints this picture: Like the scientist in the lab, the postmodern critic in the lecture hall produces knowledge by identifying problems, invoking principles, giving reasons. But in order to get to their academic workplaces, the scientist and the scholar must move through the world, leave home, make their way to campus and walk to class. Their grasp of reality during these activities is pre-reflective, unquestioned, taken for granted. To demand justification that we are in contact with reality during these everyday transactions—as we do in the lecture hall—would be absurd: we just know because we are there. (29–30)The passage is laced with assumptions, including unchecked beliefs that “postmodern critics” question their contact with reality or deny commonsense observations about engagement with the material world. Furthermore, “we just know because we are there” is a strangely uncritical phrase with which to anchor such a position, even when it is viewed beyond the language of constructivism. One may justifiably applaud the project of “new ecological realism” in reclaiming so unassailable a stance, but what this claim means for our reading of post-apocalyptic fiction is less clear.Given how divorced these critiques of the so-called postmodern scholar seem from the arguments proper, such moments feel like later additions, perhaps an attempt to amplify the stakes of the study’s proposed new reading practice. Yet New Ecological Realisms excels not when it takes up arms in the debate about the future of the humanities but when it unites disparate theories into a coherent narrative of new realism. One great example comes in the book’s fourth chapter, where Kaup connects Latour to Gabriel: Gabriel’s rejection of a higher-order real corresponds to Latour’s principle of irreduction. . . . Just as, for Latour, no actor-networks are reducible to other actor-networks, for Gabriel, no field is reducible to another. . . . The rejection of the notion of a fundamental reality in turn has implications for the distinction between (surface) appearance and (hidden higher) reality posited by old realism. Gabriel’s new realism demolishes this dichotomy. There is no opposition between appearance and reality: insofar as existence is defined by the appearance of objects in fields of sense, appearance is reality. (210)Post-apocalyptic fiction, to put it simply, details the disruption felt when one realizes that appearance is reality. In an ecological frame, such disruption might arrive the moment that ignored warnings about ecological or toxic disaster breaks through the realm of imagined or theoretical risk. In this way, understanding the work of Latour, Gabriel, and others is indeed vital to the project of “rehabilitating the real after postmodernism” (197). We would do well to adapt our reading practices to know how to better identify and speak coherently about “reality.”The novels Kaup addresses all, in their own ways, demolish the dichotomy of appearance and reality, revealing the extent to which historical collapse engenders a newfound awareness of the “real.” For instance, The Road is a post-apocalyptic work of fiction not only because its plot engages with familiar tropes of the genre but also because, in its stripped-away landscape, it opens up new avenues for speaking about things that are “real.” In her reading of The Road, Kaup observes, “The paradox of the apocalyptic temporality of finitude is that by destroying history and world, it clears the space for remaking time and world. Both destructive and generative, apocalypse initiates a transition from one epoch to another” (263–64). Perhaps, in the end, that is what New Ecological Realisms is after: a remaking of history and world in the aftermath of those traditions that have left us no closer to salvation. It is an admirable project, to be sure, but one that could still benefit from making allies in different schools of thought who share a commitment to comprehending the “real” world—including those many mental and psychic worlds within it.

The article analyzes the enrichment of the reception frame of I. Murdoch's oeuvre due to the complementation of different discourses (fiction, philosophy, culture study, criticism and theory of literature). In this context the rethinking of post-structuralism and deconstruction theories as a conceptual basis of literary postmodernism for revealing specific features of the writer’s literary text is shown. Murdoch’s theoretical views regarding the role of criticism in the contemporary literary process are considered, in particular her categorical rejection of deconstruction. The literature of postmodernism is a phenomenon that unites different discourses; in this perspective Murdoch's oeuvre fits the outlined framework. Readers know Iris Murdoch both as a writer, theorist and critic of her own works, as well as works of other writers; and also as a moral philosopher, that resorts to an artistic, poetic way of thought verbalization. However, concerning Murdoch's works, postmodernism is related only as a specific way of world perception, world outlook, and not as a concept of postmodern fiction or literary criticism. Approximation of the writer's literary manner to postmodernism is not defined as a theoretical philosophical reflection; it is rather a semi-conscious emotional reaction to the crisis of the modern world, crisis of faith in established values. In Murdoch's novels, the echo of the signs of postmodern consciousness is realized through manifestations of philosophical pluralism and genre metamorphism.

Globalization, Postmodernism, and Literary Criticism

The terms “postmodern” and “postmodernism” first of all referred to new departures in the arts, in literature, and in architecture that had their origins in the 1950s and early 1960s, gained momentum in the course of the 1960s, and became a dominant factor in the 1970s. After their heyday in the 1980s, postmodern innovations had either run their course or were absorbed by the mainstream, if not commercialized by the advertising industry. On a more intangible level, the terms referred to the new “postmodern” sensibility that had given rise to those innovations, but that also manifested itself more broadly in, for instance, the so-called counterculture of the later 1960s. This postmodern sensibility was irreverent, playful, and ironic. It rejected the distinction between high art and popular culture and demystified the status of art and the artist. Its articulation in the form of literary criticism—where the label “postmodern” first gained wide currency—prefigured the theory-driven criticism that arose in the course of the 1970s and that was heavily indebted to French poststructuralism. In the next decade, this postmodern criticism or critique, an amalgam of poststructuralist ideas and assumptions, branched out into all directions, making itself felt in historiography, ethnography, musicology, religious studies, management and organization studies, legal studies, leisure studies, and other areas that unexpectedly experienced a postmodern moment, or even a more lasting postmodern reorientation. Finally, and at its most encompassing level, the term postmodern was applied to late-20th-century Western society as a whole. The argument here was that somewhere in the postwar period modernity had given way to a postmodernity that recognizably constituted a new economic and sociocultural formation. There was not much agreement as to the exact turning point, or on the nature, of the new “postmodern condition,” but its theorists, most of whom saw it as inextricably entangled with capitalism, even if some emphasized its emancipatory pursuit of heterogeneity and difference, argued that it was here to stay. If it did, it soon was left to its own devices. We have since the turn of the century not heard much about postmodernity. Postmodern criticism has fared better and though it, too, would seem to have run out of steam in the new millennium, it has fundamentally changed our perspectives on literature, architecture, the arts, and a host of other subjects, not the least of which is the rational, self-determined subject of Enlightenment humanism.

This article considers some of the affinities between postmodern literary theory and the psychoanalytic theories concerned with intersubjective phenomena. Postmodern literary theory is described briefly, and it is argued that one of its major concerns is the nature of, and the political and cultural influences on, subjectivity and identity. Despite that, postmodernism generally, and literary postmodernism in particular, can be said to lack a theory of the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the experience of self. This article contends that the more relational schools of psychoanalytic theory can provide an example of the construction of selfhood that is of importance to contemporary and postmodern literary criticism. The academy has, to a considerable extent identified 'psychoanalysis' with the work of Jacques Lacan, but since the 1980s the work of such theorists as Jane Flax and Jessica Benjamin, building on the work of Nancy Chodorow, have increasingly opened up the possibilities of relational and object relations theory for literary studies. The relational psychoanalytic theories operate in the same epistemological universe as postmodern literary criticism, congruent with the postmodern idea of 'truth' as constructed and relational, and selfhood as shifting, contingent, and always-in-process. Particular attention is paid to the work of Wilfred Bion, whose understanding of self provides an account both of the failure of meaning, and of the development of mind. Some examples of a relational approach to literary analysis are provided.

Despite postmodern literary critics’ anti-essential conception of man in the Renaissance, Renaissance thinkers and artists believed in the nature of man and embodied such a belief in their works. Staying away from our contemporary ideological polemics on the human nature, this paper examines the inner self in the Renaissance in relation to Shakespeare’s four tragic characters: Hamlet, Cordelia, Romeo, and Juliet. The inner self was not a new concept in the Renaissance period. What was new was the attitude and direction of the concept. As a political power became concentrated on the kings of the modem nations, prudence seemed to be the courtiers’ best policy for political survival. The Reformation also put extra pressure on the contemporaries, who sometimes had to conceal their religious convictions for the sake of personal safety. On the other hand, disillusioned by dissembling in the court and the Reformed world, people desired the virtue of sincerity, which was also strongly supported by the Reformers who believed in the human emotion overt reason. Keenly aware of the differences between inner and outer, Shakespeare’s tragic characters criticize dissembling, a strategy of prudence as a representation of the self. And they also give priority to ‘that within.’ Their sincerity as an inner power looks insignificant, but it eventually causes the corrupt society to fall down and helps the society to recover a healthy state thanks to their tragic sacrifice. Postmodernists’ idea of the self in the Renaissance is a projection of their own self-image. The completely autonomous self demystified by the postmodern literary critics was the idea of man espoused by liberal humanism, which was actually unknown to the Renaissance men. A study of the inner self in the Renaissance as related to Shakespeare allows us to discover truth in its own historical contexts and to reflect on our modem or postmodern life.

<i>John Donne and Baroque Allegory: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation</i>. Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2017. Pp. viii+228.

This article, which is based on my Master's dissertation,1 aims to provide insight into the workings of national identities as historical and discursive constructs, through a combination of theoretical background and literary criticism. I begin by considering contemporary concepts of national identities and their creation and discuss their implications for the methods to study the phenomenon of national identity. The insights of contemporary theorists are illustrated with the example of the creation of ‘Flemish’ identity. I then take a side-step to examine how the same images of Flemish ‘national’ identity are used by Hugo Claus in his 1983 novel Het verdriet van België. The literary analysis of Het verdriet van België is the main subject of the present article, hypothesising that Claus' use of images of Flemish identity capitalises on, and parallels, contemporary theories on national identity, not only to allow the functioning of a number of literary techniques in the novel, but also to provide a postmodern critique of national identity. I will touch upon the relevant theory only briefly, in order to concentrate on what it contributes to understanding Het verdriet van België.

The appearance of Bloomsbury’s New Modernisms series marks a turning point in the study of modernism, a moment at which its discoveries and insights can be productively evaluated and reflected upon. Bloomsbury’s series offers a range of introductions, guides, and handbooks—not manifestoes or polemics—to help students and scholars map the diverse perspectives and approaches that now make up the field. This dispassionate accounting of what has been accomplished in modernist studies over the past twenty or so years—in relation, of course, to the longer history of modernism itself—signals an important watershed: the “new” modernist studies is no longer primarily preoccupied with its own project of “making it new,” and is now a well-established field. Of course we might read Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s important 2008PMLA article, “The New Modernist Studies,” in a similar light—less a proclamation than a summary and assessment of the field as it stood at that time. That piece, written a decade ago, however, still performed the function of introducing an emergent field to scholars outside that field. Bloomsbury’s series, I would argue, represents a new era: an era in which the field itself has already coalesced and in which overview, summaries, and assessments no longer need also serve as introductions to an emerging field.“Well established” does not of course mean clearly defined or easy to describe: on the contrary, the field of modernist studies consists in large part of debates over how the field should be defined. On the one hand, recent attempts to rethink the term have made it harder than ever to pin down what “modernism” means, whether in stylistic, historical, or geographical terms. On the other hand, a residual sense of modernism seems to endure, so that most of us, as Justice Potter Stewart once said of pornography, know it when we see it: artworks from roughly the first half of the twentieth century that hit a range of familiar notes: stream of consciousness, opacity of form, manifestoes, the Men of 1914, the Women of the Left Bank, the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz age. This odd mix of overdetermined clichés on the one hand (think of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris) and open-ended, endlessly shifting and expanding categories on the other presents a challenge to anyone who wishes to understand what has actually been happening in modernist studies over the past few decades.And indeed, much has been happening: scholars have been redefining the field, expanding it along geographical, chronological, and stylistic axes and making space for different voices, methodologies, and critical perspectives. They have worked to create a much broader and more racially, sexually, economically, and politically inclusive canon. A more precise and accurate rendering of the field, were such a thing possible, would thus require redefining contested terms and peeling back layers of myth, legend, and ideology. It would also require reimagining a cultural phenomenon—modernism—whose original incarnation is still potent enough to exert its pull on our cultural imagination. Telling the story of modernism is a complex historiographical project that also demands mastery of a discrete (but large, diverse, and constantly expanding) body of knowledge. It is both simpler and far more complicated than it seems.One of the major challenges facing scholars of modernism is the many ways in which—as a discipline and as a culture—we are still breathing the air of modernist ideology ourselves.1 I refer to modernism’s celebration of revolution, rupture, and shock, its desire to jettison the past in favor of beginning afresh, its rapturous idealizations of heroic artist/critics whose adversarial stance vis-à-vis the culture and its institutions mark them as somehow freer or purer than the cultural and historical conditions of possibility from which they emerged. All of these tendencies—along with all of their political, aesthetic, and social implications—appear in multiple historical moments, but they come to a thundering crescendo during the modernist moment, and they continue to exert a powerful hold on us today.Modernism’s stark binaries between center and periphery, subversion and containment, rebellion and complacency, revolution and institution have also furnished us with some of our most durable critical, political, aesthetic, and historical truisms. How subversive energies become codified and institutionalized (and what is lost and gained through this process) is at once the story of modernism itself, and the story of the field of modernist studies, which has struggled since at least the era of Lionel Trilling with the problem of what it means to canonize rebellion. But not only would a fuller understanding of the field require a richer sense of the ongoing ideological influence of modernists like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound on modernist studies, it would also need to take into account later generations of charismatic thinkers such as Trilling, Irving Howe, or Roger Shattuck, who consolidated and canonized their own vision of modernism (along with the profession of literary criticism as we know it) at midcentury. Rediscovering the complexity and contentiousness of the movement as it emerged and responding to these two mutually reinforcing incarnations from the modernist and the midcentury moments is all the more difficult because these ideas are so fundamental to the self-understanding of our discipline. Indeed, the history of modernism’s invention, canonization, and transformation could also be told as the history of literary studies as a field. As a result, sorting these questions out can sometimes seem a project better suited to the psychoanalyst’s couch than to the literary historian’s record.Now for the good news: the Bloomsbury New Modernisms series is ably equipped to help us address these challenges. For scholars and students in the field, and those outside of it, who want to familiarize themselves with modernism as an ongoing set of problems, questions, and approaches, this collection of slim volumes (each about 200 pages long) will offer a clear-eyed and comprehensive introduction to many different facets of the new modernist studies, one that moves with authority and elegance among the tangled philosophical issues raised by the topic, its definition, and its central concepts. At the same time, it offers a richly informative survey of the field from a variety of angles.The many incarnations of modernism over the course of the twentieth century is one story, among others, told by Sean Latham and Gayle Roger’s introductory entry in the series, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. As its title suggests, this book is primarily a historiographical project, although in the process of offering its history of the “idea” of modernism it covers a lot of important ground, introducing the reader to key figures of the modernist movement and to the story of modernism’s changing legacy over the course of the past century. It is an elegant, lucid, and helpful introduction to the field of modernist studies. Yet— and to its very great credit—it does not shy away from the definitional problems I have described but weaves them into a clear articulation of the difficulties and contradictions at the heart of modernism as a project and as a field.The book begins to historicize the established narrative of modernism with the claim that “there is no such thing as modernism— no singular definition capable of bringing order to the diverse multitude of creators, manifestoes, practices, and politics that have been variously constellated around this enigmatic term” (1). Having dispensed with the problem of offering a singular definition, Latham and Rogers turn in a different direction, explaining, “Our focus is on the formulation and reception of modernism—the ways in which its intellectual and cultural histories have been made” (3). The authors are careful to specify that their approach comes with its own constraints and limitations, namely that they will be examining the idea of modernism not just as it existed in its original form, but as it has been refracted and reflected by the critics, teachers, and artists who have built, destroyed, and rebuilt it over the past century.Lest it seem that the book concerns itself only with a hall of critical mirrors, Latham and Rogers do acknowledge the ways in which modernism itself arose in response to new social, political, and economic developments. As they put it, “Something was happening. . . . The established conventions of realism, representation, and poetic form seemed to be failing in the face of new experiences, new audience, and new things” (11). Their story of canonization, popularization, invention, branding, public relations, and cultural capital (an approach very much in the spirit of the new modernist studies) calls attention to the many mediating factors that intervene between so-called historical conditions and forms of aesthetic expression, adding a layer of welcome complexity to their narrative of development. According to Latham and Rogers, “Amid this enormous expansion . . . modernism becomes less a single tradition or a byword for difficulty than a prismatic way of describing all kinds of aesthetic responses to the turbulence of modernity” (15).Because their history of modernism is significantly institutional and disciplinary, Latham and Rogers are able successfully to navigate the intellectual shoals of historical determinism and formal essentialism on which so many stories of modernism, from Edmund Wilson to Fredric Jameson, have depended.2 To aid them in this undertaking, they organize the volume around two competing figures for modernism. The first of these is based on Joyce’s “strandentwining cable,” an imaginary umbilical cord Stephen Dedalus envisions as he strolls on the beach in the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses. The second image is that of a plate filled with iron filings whose shapes change as a magnet is moved beneath it. This image, taken from Pound, captures “a plural . . . array of patterns and shapes produced as different critical magnets are dragged through the heaped filings of the twentieth century (11). The idea is that the cable stands for the development of a tradition or canon that includes and excludes particular texts based on some fairly stable criteria mostly having to do with formal innovation. The iron filings, on the other hand, are intended to capture the many movements, ideologies, and interpretations that have followed in the wake of modernism, reshaping existing texts into new patterns and systems after the fact, suggesting that the canon itself is variable and placing its emphasis not on individual great texts but on organizing theories and visions.Neither of these images is static or simple; in both cases change, motion, and transformation are built into the image itself. If this makes them hard to follow, or at times to feel a little bit tortured, this is probably because Latham and Rogers are using them not only to clarify competing visions of modernism but also to illustrate the complexity and the volatility of the problems they are describing. The difficulty of these images is also very much in the spirit of modernist thought, as is their tendency to metamorphose from one form to another: they function in the spirit of Pater’s “hard, gemlike flame,” and Marx’s “All that is solid melts into air,” arguably two of the founding metaphors of modernism. To make matters still more complex, the image of cables transforms itself into a third image of networks, which serves as the organizing metaphor for the book’s final chapter.Latham and Rogers use these images not just to capture competing visions of modernism but to organize the chapters of their book. The figures of the cable and the iron filings are useful insofar as the story they are telling is not a singular narrative of modernism’s development but, rather, a series of competing narratives, each of which has been laid palimpsestically on top of the ones that came before. The chapters thus move chronologically, but they inevitably circle back on each other as new understandings, interpretations, and motives behind the competing visions of modernism are revealed.In the first chapter, “The Emergence of Modernism,” Latham and Rogers explain how aesthetic and creative ferment, change, and conflict were consolidated into a coherent term and movement by influential founding artists and theorists of modernism such as Pound, Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, Q. D. Leavis, and others during the first half of the twentieth century. The second chapter, “Consolidation,” elaborates further on this process, examining the way modernism shifted from a set of affiliated artistic movements to an academic field of study. In this chapter, Latham and Rogers examine influential collections and essays by Irving Howe, Harry Levin, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Lionel Trilling, and many others who were instrumental in creating modernism’s midcentury incarnation, which, as I have already mentioned, is probably just as influential as the version created by the modernists themselves.The third chapter, “Iron Filings,” moves away from this story of consolidation and describes the ways in which, beyond the project of establishing a coherent modernist canon, another project was also underway, a project to acknowledge a wider (and in some cases) different array of aesthetic practices. Latham and Rogers tell us that “the question of what to do with all these other modern aesthetic and cultural practices—all these things that cannot be easily or only assimilated to the elevated tradition—gave way to alternative definitions of modernism” (104). They then go on to detail the ways in which the influence of feminist, Marxist, race-based, and postmodern criticism, among other approaches, transformed the understanding of modernism and expanded the notion of the sorts of texts that fell within the purview of modernist criticism, including “detective and science fiction genres, commercial graphic design and advertising, . . . jazz, the blues, and Western swing, . . . film, radio, and photography” (103). These approaches, they argue, helped to move once-overlooked authors such as Mina Loy, Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer to the very heart of the modernist canon.The concluding chapter offers “an overview of the New Modernist Studies” that examines “the major nodes that now make a diffuse network of ideas, objects, texts, and approaches while also framing some of the most pressing questions now being asked about modernism” (161). Like the first chapter, this one does not provide a conclusive definition or explanation of modernism, nor does it promise to take a comprehensive measure of the field. Instead, it offers a handful of “capsule summaries” of books that have already appeared or are scheduled to appear in the New Modernisms series. These summaries, according to Latham and Rogers, “are meant . . . to offer a broad survey of the field’s current state” (161). They include Modernism’s Print Cultures and Modernism, Science, and Technology (both included in this review). Other titles include Modernism, Sex, and Gender; Modernism in a Global Context; Modernism and the Law; and Modernism, War, and Violence, all of which have already appeared as additional volumes in the series. (Forthcoming titles include Modernism and Environments; Race and New Modernisms; and Modernism and Mass Media.)This overview makes clear that the goal of the series, like the goal of its first volume, is not to offer a conclusive explanation of modernism as a term but, rather, to give a sense of the many vibrant and generative questions and approaches that currently make up the field of modernist studies.3 Though each book is freestanding and can be taken as an introduction to its own particular approach to modernism, reading several of them simultaneously, as this review has given me the occasion to do, reveals some interesting features of the series worth noting. The first is that difficulties of definition seem far less pressing when specific critical questions or problems are foregrounded. It is instructive to see, for instance, how debates about modernism’s periodization recede into the background when another subject, such as the history of print culture, takes center stage. It doesn’t seem difficult for Faye Hamill and Mark Hussey to specify in Modernism’s Print Cultures, for instance, that the period they are focused on “ranges from 1890 to 1945” and that “this includes the period (from the 1910s to the 1930s) that is most closely associated with high modernism” (7).The second notable element that emerges is the importance of methodological and institutional questions to the new modernist project. Modernism’s Print Cultures is an example of the way in which the efforts of the field include, but go beyond, the expansion of the canon, to question the basic assumptions of modernist (and other) ideologies. Modernism’s Print Cultures, for instance, begins by questioning assumptions about the sorts of texts that are worthy of critical attention, and rejects the notion that artists and critics must write from a nonideological position, one located outside of the economic and cultural institutions in which modernist texts were produced and disseminated. While this approach to modernism does involve a widening of subject matter, what’s really at stake is an expansion of reading practices and interpretative contexts, not just an expansion of the texts included in the canon.Modernism’s Print Cultures opens with a discussion of a long prose poem by Blaise Cendrars. The piece was published as a poster that could be folded into a pamphlet the size of an envelope, featuring the poem, a watercolor, and a map. The generic complexity and difficulty of categorizing this object—whether as a a a or a makes it an image for Modernism’s Print The book on to offer a overview of the history of modernist studies and the study of culture, and of books as It closely examines the of and other forms of that moved between high and culture and sometimes the between Hamill and Hussey reader at the beginning of the volume that book is a to critical in the study of modernism’s print and its in including of criticism, book and studies, and But this makes the story they tell no less as they move and through a broad range of issues modernism and print the central of in the New Renaissance, to the of in print culture, to debates over to the and of modernist volume does a good of the of the new modernist studies and the study of print culture more Of course, was on the move the modernist a period in which the among culture, advertising, and print culture and But the story of this volume concerns the of modernist studies on the one hand and the study of print culture on the Indeed, it is difficult to modernist studies as a field the of studies, print culture, and the of texts, or the of in the modernist little and the of to these texts made by and by studies like those by and and many others in this and Hussey make the additional point in the volume that the modernists themselves were some of the first to print culture a subject of were with and in the literary many of them multiple in what describes as the that from the to the . . . the the and and the as and Hussey it is to an attention to the issues and questions by the term print culture from the century . . . to this like the introductory volume, thus moves between a set of terms and ideas that from modernist thinkers themselves and the on these ideas that have critical of modernism in the that S. Modernism, Science, and to ideas that were influential during modernism. this book also makes its to the new modernist studies very clear from the its goal seems to be different from the two books I have to a moment of and to the of and ideas to the development of modernism as an artistic and literary This is very much in the spirit of Latham and Roger’s placing theories and at its the story of modernism’s development in The of the series takes some of the of no need for to to be the first to this subject or to that critics have its importance or to claim that he will offer conclusive about modernism based on this is thus able to an and for the of this intellectual and to new in some of modernism’s most familiar figures and for instance, reading to as an of in response to the of or the of to be to the development of notion of and comes through in a series of that seem to map the and of to the modernist was the he us, the radio, film, culture, and but also of the and the us to the familiar stories of and transformation from this new us that for that were an . . . included and the of and what later as These will give a sense not only of how the of this volume range but also of its and is at an of discoveries outside the field of and he is at just how these through the of culture, offering for instance, of D. as a response to or as a form of or the influence of on by T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and he covers in the introduction range from to to influence on science studies. that are into “The and “The and “The with a to the studies movement as the most recent and development out of and approaches to modernist in as he does is the of he in these chapters and the of ways in which it could have been The range of approaches he includes the and the At moments the of the project seems to to the of this volume and the by at the beginning of The of this is mostly is a element to much of the in this series, in the sense that many of the historical questions that are being asked are also might understand the New Modernisms series to be the question of whether modernism can be read as an in sense to what we are still the same as our modernist If the intellectual challenges of this problem are made clear by the first book in the series, the other two books I have each their own multiple ways of the both intellectual and historical, between the modernist moment and our Bloomsbury series clearly with the complex questions and problems by the new modernist studies, to the of a field that has been and in recent Though I have not the to read all the books in the series, I can with of Modernism in a Global a book that very and to with theories of and debates about and reading modernism in a variety of contexts, from to modernism, the book “a more a more understanding of what modernism does when it is on the as a this series should make it harder for critics to into the sorts of and about modernism and modernist studies that have the field since its For scholars who to go beyond of modernist studies and to a sense of it has and as a field, Bloomsbury’s series will serve as an