The Life after Texts, the Life within Them

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Editor’s Note

The Lithuanian classic Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas’ literary history, Naujoji lietuvių literatūra (The New Lithuanian Literature; Volume 1 published 1936; Volume 2, 2009) was the first conceptual, academic history of Lithuanian literature. In this metanarrative account, Mykolaitis-Putinas sought to methodologically describe different authors in terms of each one’s national and aesthetic consciousness. This national historiographic narrative was made possible by the grand national narrative that shaped the Lithuanian literary canon: the development of a national Lithuanian literature and the identification of its most important texts, genres, directions, and authors. Naturally, this grand narrative dictated Mykolaitis-Putinas’ writing methodology, as though the author were hostage to the cultural-historical school of positivism, forced to provide cultural contexts, present dry writers’ biographies, and look for causal connections. His categorization of literary historical content was determined by the quest for a national program characteristic of Romantic literary history – idealized subjects, rather than literary facts. On the other hand, anti-positivist aesthetics (drawn from Wilhelm Dilthey, Benedetto Croce, Maurice de Munnynck, Oscar Walzer, and others) also had considerable influence on his interpretation of the works. Although Mykolaitis-Putinas sought to assess the texts historically, from the perspective of the time he was examining, his own aesthetic views led him to have a critical relationship with literary history as a whole. Each author was critiqued – in terms of content, but even more so in terms of form.The literary history under discussion is a synthesis of two historiographic models: following Romanticism’s model of literary history, it tracesthe nation’s spiritual develoment; following historicist positivism, it seeks to understand different periods, the development of genres and directions, and explores causal connections and cultural contexts. This interpretive model presupposed an aesthetic understanding and the search for a “selfcontained literature”. Mykolaitis-Putinas’ history is a biographical-psychological, aesthetic, and – most importantly – a critical analysis of Lithuanian literature.

In Yugoslavia two books in all have been written with the title 'Yugoslav Literature:'* Milos Savkovic published his lugoslovenska knji~evllost J-lJI in 1938, and Antun Barac wrote his lugoslovenska knji~evnost in 1954. The latter has been translated into several languages. In addition, Preg/ed lugoslovenske knji~evnosti by D. Stefanovic and V. Stanisavljevic has had more than ten editions and was very popular in Yugoslavia as a high school textbook. In all these surveys Serbian, Croatian, Slovene and (in the last-named book) Macedonian literatures were lined up one against another with no effort to put them into any kind of relationship. In encyclopedias (Enciklopedija lugoslavije, I st and 2nd eds., Enciklopedija Leksikografskog 7.avoda, Prosvetina Enciklopedija) there are only histories of the national literatures-Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian. There have been several attempts at theoretical discussions of Yugoslav literary history (in 1956, 1962, 1967) but all of them failed and were labeled 'unitarist' for not sufficiently recognizing the specifics of each national literature. And the efforts to assemble a team of literary historians who would write a history of Yugoslav literature have also failed-attempts that were made by Professor Ivo Franges of Zagreb and Professor J. Rotar of Ljubljana. Something easy and simple in a country with one nationality has, in a country with many, to be prepared for a long time and can only gradually be achieved. Writing about Yugoslav music or painting raises no questions at all. For example, in the late sixties there were several very well organized exhibitions under the general title Jugoslovenska umetnost XX veka in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and the respective catalogues treated Yugoslav painting as a whole. The history of Yugoslavia has also been written with a certain amount of success-both by an individual author (B. Petranovic) and by a collective (I. Bozic, S. Cirkovic, M. Ekmecic and V. Dedijer). Obviously, the history of literature is something ditIerent. As a special field for understanding literature, literary history developed at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. This was a period of national revival in all the countries of Europe. Literary history was conceived of as an effective device for enhancing the cultural self-awareness of a nation. To return to the literary past meant, and even today means-especially in small nationsgaining a notion about the glories of the nation's past. Besides, in the sense of a philosophy of art established by Plato and valid in European esthetics till the twentieth century, literature was defined as a kind of mimesis; and for this reason for the literary historian the first and most important goal has been to describe the context (the social and political background) of the literary work and to summarize its plot (what the artist was saying about the circumstances in which he was living). In the kind of literary history based on the alleged mimetic nature of literature, the main goal was to re-create the past, to make the readers aware of their predecessors, proud of inheriting such a glorious past and such a nation. Since we in Yugoslavia have more than one nationality, it is clear that we can not have one literary history in the classic sense. We have to find a new key that might produce a new idea about what has been going on in all the literatures of Yugoslavia over the centuries. The old model of literary history does not work in a country with several nationalities and with an as yet unfinished process of national differentiation. Besides clearly marked national traditions (Serbian, Croatian, Slovene and perhaps even Macedonian) there are regions where the process of national rebirth is still ongoing (Muslims, Montenegrins). In such circumstances a traditional

Previous articleNext article No AccessEditors' Introduction: Multiplying IdentitiesKwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.Kwame Anthony Appiah Search for more articles by this author and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 18, Number 4Summer, 1992Identities Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448649 Views: 23Total views on this site Citations: 19Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Samuel Cohen The Whiteness of David Foster Wallace, (Feb 2015): 228–244.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107337022.019Angéline Martel Nous n’avons jamais été urbains mais nous le sommes. Des solidarités pour mieux-vivre par une francophonie canadienne interculturelle et mondialisée, Francophonies d'Amérique , no.1616 (Jan 2003): 5.https://doi.org/10.7202/1005213arMichael Uebel Men in Color, (Jan 1997): 1–14.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-001Jonathan Dollimore Desire and Difference, (Jan 1997): 17–44.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-002Robyn Wiegman Fiedler and Sons, (Jan 1997): 45–68.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-003 “As Thoroughly Black as the Most Faithful Philanthropist Could Desire”, (Jan 1997): 71–115.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-004 Mezz Mezzrow and the Voluntary Negro Blues, (Jan 1997): 116–137.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-005 Reading the Blackboard, (Jan 1997): 138–169.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-006 The World According to Normal Bean, (Jan 1997): 170–191.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-007 All the King’s Men, (Jan 1997): 192–227.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-008 The Riddle of the Zoot, (Jan 1997): 231–252.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-009 “The Cool Pose”, (Jan 1997): 253–285.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-010 The White Man’s Muscles, (Jan 1997): 286–314.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-011 Fists of Fury, (Jan 1997): 315–336.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-012 Photographies of Mourning, (Jan 1997): 337–358.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-013 Pecs and Reps, (Jan 1997): 361–385.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-014 Works Cited, (Jan 1997): 387–413.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822397748-015Miki Flockemann Toni Morrison's beloved and other unspeakable texts from different margins by Ken Hulme and Lindiwe Mabuza, Journal of Literary Studies 9, no.22 (Jun 1993): 194–210.https://doi.org/10.1080/02564719308530041Linda Steiner, James A. Miller Race and cultural production: Responses to the birth of a nation, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10, no.22 (Jun 1993): 179–184.https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039309366858

Reviewed by: The Latino Nineteenth Century ed. by Rodrigo Lazo, Jesse Alemán Elena V. Valdez LAZO, RODRIGO, and JESSE ALEMÁN, eds. The Latino Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 384pp. $89.00 cloth; $30.00 paperback. The fifteen essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century illuminate for literary scholars a complex and often overlooked legacy of Latinidad that has largely remained absent from critical discussions in mainstream nineteenth-century American literary studies and Latina/o studies, although scholars involved in the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project have been writing about nineteenth-century Latina/o literature for, in some cases, more than two decades. Editors Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán have brought together some of the most active scholars in these fields to produce The Latino Nineteenth Century, an innovative volume that offers a variety of methods and terms for literary critics and historians to better grapple with the “Latina/o dimension” of American literary history and its implications for our contemporary moment. Most if not all the essays in the volume make the case that the key to expanding our knowledge about the American nineteenth century in general and the Latino nineteenth century in particular is to rethink the linguistic and formal boundaries of the American literary archive. Central to most if not all of the essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century is the premise that the inclusion of Spanish-language texts in the archive of American literature is no longer a question but a necessity. Lazo underscores this point by stating [End Page 567] in the introduction that besides having to deal with a “dispersed” and “incomplete” collection of materials, scholars examining the literary history of Latinas/os must also deal with its linguistic diversity, which “raises questions about the notion of an archive (singular) versus archives that are not always and not easily accessible” (9, 10). Although the advantages of consulting a multilingual archive are somewhat obvious for many scholars of Latina/o studies, Chicana/o studies, ethnic studies, and other related disciplines—especially for scholars involved in the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project—the volume’s insistence on “reading Spanish-language texts” demonstrates for a broader academic audience some of the tensions, contradictions, and networks such a multilingual American literary archive reveals, as well as the questions it generates (Alemán viii). To what extent, for example, does Spanish-language print culture change the way we view historical figures we thought we knew well? How do we reconcile the nineteenth-century Latina/o archive’s formal and linguistic differences with existing categories and paradigms that fail to account for the conditions that produced them? Contributors to the volume take up the issue of the archive in different ways, some more directly than others. Raúl Coronado writes that Latina/o history should not limit itself to an “object of knowledge (‘American literature’)” that was determined by the “logic of the nation” (50). One strategy for avoiding the impeding effects of nationalist logic on the writing of Latina/o literary history, he argues, is by consulting “alternative, minoritized—as it were—documents that yield different narratives of belonging” and approaching it as a “history of textuality” (51, 54). For him, this means being as aware of Latin American literary history as we are of the literary history of the United States, consulting Spanish-language texts, and focusing on local articulations of Latinidad (54). Carmen E. Lamas makes a similar argument about the importance of knowing the Latin American literary archive in her essay, which shows through a case study of Cuban intellectual Raimundo Cabrera’s writing how the Latin American literary archive helps scholars recover the heterogeneity of Latina/o identity. The terms “Latino/Latina” are directly related to the issue of the archive in The Latino Nineteenth Century, of course, for they encompass a range of experiences and identities. Although some audiences may be skeptical about the applicability of “Latino/a” in a nineteenth-century context and its utility as an organizing term, Lazo explains that it enjoyed widespread usage throughout the Americas, where people used it to “reference themselves” but sometimes in a way that...

Mapping Racial and Ethnic Studies in Canada:Retrospective and Prospective Views of Canadian Ethnic Studies Chairs James Frideres (bio), Shibao Guo (bio), Abdie Kazemipur (bio), Morton Weinfeld (bio), and Lloyd Wong (bio) Introduction (Shibao Guo and Lloyd Wong) Canada has always been diverse with respect to 'race' and ethnicity. In 1901, only three decades after Confederation, the English and French comprised 57% and 31% of the Canadian population respectively (Coats 1931, 134). Thus, 12% of Canada's population were non-French and non-British with the majority being other Europeans such as German, Dutch, Scandinavian, Russian, and many others. However, quite significantly, 25% of the non-French and non-British were racialized minorities and these included First Nations, Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks. Thus, the claims and discourse of many publications in recent decades of "the changing face of Canada" are based on an imagined early Canada being white, and English and French (deux nations). The early scholarship on Canada's already established racial and ethnic diversity essentially had a static conceptualization of ethnicity (Burnet 1976) and this was exemplified in the work of Hughes (1943) and Porter (1965, 1975). Jean Burnet's critique fostered in a more dynamic notion of ethnicity and conceptualized it in terms of social relations. In a special issue of the journal Sociological Focus, which examined studies in Canada, Burnet (1976) examined, through this dynamic lens, the policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. It should be noted that this special issue also featured many other prominent sociologists who examined topics related to immigration, race and ethnicity and these included Crysdale (1976), Clairmont and Wien (1976) and Richmond (1976). That same year Palmer (1976), who was one of the early editors of Canadian Ethnic Studies, provided a comparative analysis of immigration and ethnicity in Canada and the United States. By the late [End Page 1] 1970s and early 1980s, college and university courses on 'race' and ethnicity were standard fare with many of the popular textbooks being used with titles such as: Identities: The Impact of Ethnicity on Canadian Society (Isajiw 1977); Minority Canadians: Ethnic Groups (Krauter and Davis 1978); The Canadian Ethnic Mosaic: A Quest for Identity (Driedger 1978); Ethnicity in Canada: Theoretical Perspectives (Anderson and Frideres 1981); and Racial Minorities in Multicultural Canada (Li and Bolaria 1983). After this the floodgates were opened and the substantive area of ethnic studies started to flourish in Canada with a generation of scholars, most of whom were American- and British-trained, coming to Canada to study 'race', ethnicity, and immigration and to train a new generation of Canadian students. At the same time, the journal Canadian Ethnic Studies/Études éthniques au Canada was born in 1968, followed very shortly by the establishment of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association/Société canadienne d'études éthniques. In the following decades of the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, the literature in these areas exploded as scholars wrote about immigration, different ethnic/racial groups and the dynamics of their experiences in Canadian society. Over the past several decades, there has been a continual literature that examines race and ethnicity in Canada from a more general and critical perspective, and recently these include the summarizing work of Henry and Tator (2010), Hier and Bolaria (2012), Satzewich and Liodakis (2013) and Fleras (2017). Last year, in the fall of 2018, the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association held its 25th conference in Banff, Alberta with the theme of Immigration, Ethnic Mobilities, and Diasporic Communities in a Transnational World. Within this broad theme there was an invitation for theoretical and empirically-based papers on more specific topics such as: • The future of immigration, ethnic studies, and multiculturalism • Intersections of immigration and race, class and gender • Voluntary and forced mobilities: Refugees and the Canadian state • Youth, ethnicity, and identity in multicultural Canada • Ethnic communities, global diasporas and transnationalism in Canada • "Homelands": Memories, reconstructions, returns and directions forward • Citizenship and belonging in transnational spaces • Gender, class, and ethnic intersections in transnationalism • The future of transnational and ethnic mobilities in an unsettled world In addressing the first topic above, regarding the future of immigration, ethnic studies, and multiculturalism, a special roundtable session was created for...

This chapter investigates the development of national literary historiography within the framework of Ottoman literary modernity, the nation-building process, and its persistence in modern literary studies in Turkey. Drawing on the notion of a “national model” of literary history writing, it examines the institutionalization of the concept of national literary historiography by Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, the leading literary historian in the early twentieth-century period of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state. Accordingly, this chapter explores the emergence of the concept of modern literary history based on the idea of linear time and progress, showing how the modern concept of literary history was imported from Western Europe, indigenized, and transformed into Turkey’s first national literary history by Köprülü. The chapter argues that the nationalization process in Turkish literary historiography occurred gradually through a productive engagement and negotiation with European models and the premodern local biographical collections of poets, or şair(ler) tezkireleri, the dominant form of literary history in the Ottoman Empire. It contends that writing in the early twentieth century, Köprülü systematically developed the primary formulations of national literary historiography based upon a shared Turkish ethnicity, language, culture, and literature with ancient origins rooted in Central Asia. His notion of national literary history during the nation-building period became the norm for subsequent literary histories and still predominates in contemporary literary historiography in Turkey today.

New Literary History at 50Reflections and Futures Bruce Holsinger When rita felski assumed the editorship of New Literary History just over ten years ago, she invoked John of Salisbury's twelfth-century Metalogicon and the famous image (attributed to Bernard of Chartres) of dwarves seated on the shoulders of giants: a notion well suited to her thoughts on the daunting prospect of succeeding the journal's founding editor, Ralph Cohen. On succeeding Rita Felski in turn, I am put in mind of the opening sentence of the Policraticus, John of Salisbury's more rambunctious work of humanistic observation: "Although pleasurable in many ways, the pursuit of letters is especially fruitful because it excludes all annoyances stemming from differences of time and place, it draws friends into each other's presence, and it abolishes the situation in which things worth knowing are not experienced."1 This caustically optimistic view of a transhistorical republic of letters rings true to a new editor's ears, tuned as they are to the simultaneous joys and challenges of leading this storied journal and its particular pursuit of letters into the immediate future. Rita Felski's own will to transcend time and place in the pages of New Literary History is reflected in the variety of historical and theoretical topics her special issues have explored, as well as the colloquial spirit she brought to the editorship through the many intimate gatherings and major conferences arranged over the last decade, all of them organized around things worth knowing and knowing anew, to borrow from John of Salisbury again. One measure of the excitement she brought to NLH can be discerned in the large percentage of the essays coming across our transom that rely fundamentally on her work, which remains at the center of current discussions around modes of reading after the so-called postcritical turn. It is humbling to follow in her footsteps and take on the formidable task ahead. I am deeply grateful to her for the wisdom and counsel she has provided over the last eighteen months, and (like everyone else who reads this journal) in awe of where she has taken NLH over the last ten years. [End Page v] New Literary History began as the 1960s closed, publishing its first issue in October of 1969 and inaugurating a fifty-year run that has helped shape the contours of literary study over several generations. It would be difficult to name a prominent figure in theory and criticism who has not published work at one point or another in its pages. Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Paul Ricoeur, Stanley Cavell, Fredric Jameson, Martha Nussbaum, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wolfgang Iser, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stanley Fish, Hayden White, Richard Rorty, and more recently Bruno Latour, Sara Ahmed, Graham Harman, and Wai Chee Dimock—the illustrious lists go on, and on, and on, drawn from every school of criticism and every theoretical disposition, from French feminism and poststructuralism to new materialism and object-oriented ontology, from Marxism and cultural materialism to ecocriticism, critical race theory, and new historicism. As Cixous herself remarked in these pages some years ago, the longevity of NLH itself represents "a coherence in the world of letters … a proof of, and a metaphor for, the world-wide need to think and save literature."2 Nor has the journal, despite its title, limited itself to the literary. Perspectives from other fields and paradigms have long enriched its intellectual mission to plumb the depths of literary history, politics, genre, and form from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, often seemingly far afield. Past issues have featured essays by Stephen Jay Gould on the science of form, Marshall McLuhan on performance, and the composer and conceptual writer John Cage, who published one of the original fragments of his Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) in a special issue on "Modernism and Postmodernism" in 1971.3 Historians of art, theater, and music, as well as philosophers, classicists, and historians, have figured prominently among its hundreds of contributors over the years. One of the editorial delights of this coming anniversary year has been the excuse it has afforded to browse...

Introduction: Rethinking Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama Robert Markley In 1983, in a special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Inter- pretation entitled "New Approaches to Restoration Drama," James Thompson called for a rethinking of the grounds of interpretation in order to "address [the] most basic and crucial questions about our concepts of history and literary history and the relationship between them." Until scholars undertake this project, he argued, "historicism [will retain] its laissez-faire character which ensures a free-for-all of contexts and backgrounds, with histories of ideas free to draw from any history and any idea."1 Twenty-five years later, rethinking the problems of history and interpretation in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama remains crucial to understanding the literary culture of the period, even if the values and assumptions that underlie "history" and "literary history" have changed. In that 1983 special issue, Thompson and his fellow contributor Michael McKeon were concerned with historicizing the drama in the terms of (then) recent work in Marxist theory; Michael Neill [End Page 1] with exploring the generic relationships between the "heroic heads" of Restoration tragedy and the "humble tails" of erotic and satiric comedy; and Harriett Hawkins with countering providentialist interpretations of Restoration comedy and exploring the ways in which contemporary audiences and latter-day critics perceived the drama.2 If some of these concerns now belong to a half-forgotten past of scholarly contention, the problems of literary history, cultural context, and reception continue to provoke debate, critical self-reflection, and reassessments of the relationship between dramatic literature and the turbulent history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The contributors to this special issue of Comparative Drama—Laura Rosenthal, Tita Chico, Diana Jaher, Jean Marsden, and James Thompson—explore, in different ways, questions that could not have been posed in the 1980s: the nature and purpose of feminism in the theater, the specter of slavery onstage, and the complexities of depicting the stabilities and instabilities of class relations. In the process, these scholars both extend and challenge what we might call first-generation revisionist criticism of the drama. In important ways, the differences between rethinking the drama in the 1980s and the 2000s reflect changes that have occurred within the profession as a whole: if Thompson and McKeon during the heyday of Reaganomics described the urgent necessity of criticism's historicizing—and radicalizing—its values and assumptions, the contributors to this issue see that urgency in terms of moving beyond the critical legacy they have inherited and reconsidering the roles played by the drama in representing Restoration and eighteenth-century gender politics, property law, and comic theory. Despite, or perhaps because of, the critical revolutions of the last few decades, drama remains a sideshow for many critics of the long eighteenth century, who continue to revisit and recast the late twentieth-century project of examining the history of the novel. Although Ian Watt's account of the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century has been extended, challenged, rewritten, dismissed, and resurrected, its status as a marker of a conceptual history of modernity is taken more or less for granted, even as "modernity" itself has become an exceedingly vexed term.3 To the extent that "the novel," literary "realism," the middle class, empiricism, bourgeois subjectivity, and modernity itself tend to be defined [End Page 2] in mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing terms, the drama is either treated as a retrograde showcase for a declining aristocratic ideology or assimilated to a narrative of incipient modernization. In different ways, the essays in this special issue resist both of these alternatives by asking questions that disrupt the overarching narrative of a Whiggish or progressivist historiography. In this respect, they also implicitly put pressure on the Habermasian notion of the rise of the public sphere in the eighteenth century and its assumptions that the dissemination of print culture and the popularity of the coffeehouse created a conceptual space in which political and socioeconomic debate could take place without deferring to the demands of partisanship, class prejudice, and religious bias.4 In different ways, the essays in this special issue recall our attention to the performative spaces of Restoration and...

Literary History Writ Large; or, The Multilingual <i>MLQ</i>

Literary scholars draw comparisons more often than they reflect on the practice of that drawing. Our study of comparisons in hermeneutic practice shows that comparative study is not merely a characteristic of general and comparative literary studies. It can also be found as a (generally qualitative) practice within the monolingual disciplines. The comparison of texts with similar themes is particularly widespread and popular, typically discovering through this comparison the differences and similarities of the literary treatment, in order to prove the aesthetic worth of a work and thus to make increased aesthetic pleasure possible. In addition, there are also studies which, through comparison of sample texts test the validity of statements about literary history or the typology of genres. The practice is particularly associated with comparative literary studies, which claims thus to overcome the limitations of monolingual literary studies. In principle, this form of test study can be extended to an unlimited number of cases, whereby philologists can, among other things, demonstrate how well-read they are. Nevertheless, this form of comparison, too, has to date mostly been used qualitatively, without exploring the potential of a quantitative expansion of the study. Making reference to Descartes’ thesis (1628) that every growth in knowledge is always grounded in a comparison, it is discussed under what circumstances individual case studies may be understood as technically comparative in nature. In this regard one should be careful not to rob the concept of the comparison of the element of differentiation. Therefore, in what follows, we only class studies as comparative when they consider at least two cases (e. g. at least two works), although the main interest of the study may be reserved for one case. Further, in literary studies, comparisons may be used both to discover the characteristics of the object investigated (›discovery function‹) and as a (sometimes comparatively conceived) control testing the scope of assertions or hypotheses (›control function‹). The emphasis of the use of comparison, as a rule, lies on the qualitative description of the complexity of individual selected cases, whose aesthetic value and place in literary history may thus be judged. By contrast, quantitative comparisons of a few variables within many cases are seldom used by literary scholars. Literary studies have to date hardly taken into account the contrast between quantitative and qualitative comparisons which has been so thoroughly discussed in social science, nor of the attempts to overcome this contrast (for instance through multi-value comparative quantitative analysis, which takes account not only of the need to revise hypotheses, but also the possible necessity of the revision of categories during or after the drawing of comparisons). Instead, an appeal to the ›incomparability‹ of literary art, made as early as 1902 by Benedetto Croce frequently recurs, or the argument, borrowed from Ethnology and Religious Studies, for the need for necessary ›respect for the unique and different nature‹ (Haupt 2013) of the object of study is often made. Earlier attempts at empiricisation, for instance the empirical study of literature movement of the 1970s (cf. Schmidt 2005), were unable to establish themselves, much less become part of the regular course of German Studies. This was partly because the fundamentally hermeneutically oriented field of literary studies could not accept the empiricists’ rejection of hermeneutic methods (cf. Ort 1994). There was an almost reflex professorial defence of interpretative reading. Consequently, we think it important that empiricism should no longer be conceived of as an argument against hermeneutic approaches to philological objects of study, but rather to make it available as a useful aid to the improvement of established methods of literary study (cf. Groeben 2013). Literary studies can thus work against the reproach that its generalisations are based at best on insufficient data, and at worst on mere intuition. Building on the often overlooked, but well established philological technique of comparing parallel passages, we wish to demonstrate how, where, and to what extent, the corpus technology offered by the digital humanities can help to empiricise literary studies. Corpora offer, in the first instance, the possibility of qualitative comparison of verbal parallels, but also to make parallels of content in the form of intersubjectively explicable, repeatable search procedures more transparent (cf. Fricke 1991, 2007). In this respect, the comparison of parallel passages, an old established hermeneutic method can be made empirical. In a further step, we will discuss the possibilities of quantitative comparisons in corpora (i. e. hypothesis-led variables oriented comparisons): on the one hand, the statistical description of corpora through stylometrics, which allows texts as a whole to be described, for instance in terms of word and sentence length, or the frequency of specific graphemes; on the other the analysis of collocations and the determination of »usuelle Wortverbindungen« (common multi-word expressions), which allow for the study of individual textual characteristics. In this connection, we discuss the necessity and usefulness of comparative corpora for the scope of statements determined via corpus analysis, as well as the dependence of the quality of the comparison of parallel passages on the quality of the chosen corpus. To what extent literary studies as a field will adopt these statistical comparative techniques as a philological method in the age of the digital humanities, remains to be seen. We are, given the aversion to statistical matters which this predominantly hermeneutically oriented discipline has shown to date, somewhat sceptical. We are also sceptical about whether corpus linguistic quality standards of corpora composition will be accepted. We would therefore consider not only statistically based procedures for composing corpora, but also other means of plausibilization, such as the explication of the texts studied, and an argument for their selection, to be not only legitimate but appropriate. Despite the field of literary studies’ continued reluctance to use quantitative methods, we still see a possibility that quantitative textual comparisons could provide a stimulus to standardisation. Corpus based comparisons make us aware that the comparison of many texts presupposes explicit assumptions about the comparability of what is compared. This requires a precise formulation of the questions to be explored, as well as a precise explication of the textual phenomena studied, so that exact statements about the relationships between the characteristics compared become possible.

n the history of literary studies, as well as in the humanities more generally, there are two sorts of people who influence and push forward the development of literary studies in a particular cultural context: one by means of insightful theoretical thinking, the other by means of organizational ability. I should mention in particular two eminent American literary scholars who have influenced not only my own career as a Chinese scholar of literature, but also literary stud- ies in China more broadly. These two people both have close relations with the prestigious journal New Literary History. Fredric Jameson, one of the advisory editors of the journal, not only influenced my studies on postmodernism in the Chinese context but also helped reroute China's postmodern studies and cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s with his monumental work on postmodernism. 1 Ralph Cohen, founder of the journal and editor during the past forty years, not only helped reori- ent my own academic career, but more importantly, helped reorient the study of literary theory and comparative literature in China during the last ten years, thanks to the impact of New Literary History as well as the volume he edited, The Future of Literary Theory. About three years ago, when I was attending the fourth Sino-American Symposium on Comparative Literature held at Duke University in 2006, I told Jameson of my desire to see Ralph Cohen. Jameson immediately expressed his gratitude for the considerable help Cohen had given him in the early part of his career. I am sure that many of today's prominent literary scholars are likewise indebted to Cohen. But in this essay, I will first reflect on Cohen's help to me and his unique contribution to literary studies in China before dealing with the remarkable role played by New Literary History.

This article introduces the special issue titled “Critical Reflections and Future Direction in the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Motivation.” We begin by framing the importance of research that considers the changing demographic landscape of the United States. Specifically, we note the increasing racial and ethnic diversity in our schools, as well as the accompanying trend of racial segregation. We discuss the two aims of the special issue, which focus on the identification of constructs that are important to understanding the schooling experiences of racially and ethnic minority youth, as well as on culturally grounded methods that can improve the operationalization of constructs such as race, ethnicity, and culture. We conclude with an overview of the four main articles and commentary that compose the special issue.

In a 1961 essay, Roland Barthes argues that a central feature of modernity is the proliferation of ‘social situations’ in which food serves not just to nourish bodies but to communicate identities ...