Transfiguring spatial debilities in Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost (2023)

Beyond the Current Impasse in Literary Studies

Introduction: The Interactive Relations Between Science and Technology and Literary Studies

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

<i>Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human</i> by Maren Tova Linett

Medieval English Manuscripts:

This special issue of the International Journal of Literary Linguistics offers seven state-of-the-art contributions on the current linguistic study of literary translation. Although the articles are based on similar data – literary source texts and their translations – they focus on diverse aspects of literary translation, study a range of linguistic phenomena and utilize different methodologies. In other words, it is an important goal of this special issue to illuminate the current diversity of possible approaches in the linguistic study of translated literary texts within the discipline of translation studies. At the same time, new theoretical and empirical insights are opened to the study of the linguistic phenomena chosen by the authors of the articles and their representation or use in literary texts and translations. The analyzed features range from neologisms to the category of passive and from spoken language features to the representation of speech and multilingualism in writing. Therefore, the articles in this issue are not only relevant for the study of literary translation or translation theory in general, but also for the disciplines of linguistics and literary studies – or most importantly, for the cross-disciplinary co-operation between these three fields of study.The common theme that all these articles share is how the translation process shapes, transfers and changes the linguistic properties of literary texts as compared to their sources texts, other translations or non-translated literary texts in the same language and how this question can be approached in research. All articles provide new information about the forces that direct and affect translators’ textual choices and the previously formulated hypotheses about the functioning of such forces. The articles illustrate how translators may perform differently from authors and how translators’ and authors’ norms may diverge at different times and in different cultures. The question of how translation affects the linguistic properties of literary translations is approached from the viewpoint of previously proposed claims or hypotheses about translation. In the following, we will introduce these viewpoints for readers who are not familiar with the recent developments in translation studies. At the same time, we will shortly present the articles in this issue.

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

Literary studies and memory studies have in common that the main objects of their interest, literature and memory, may be broken down into heuristic triads: author/text/reader and encoding/storing/retrieval, respectively. The two triads may be compared historically and even blended metaphorically, the latter being a procedure present in most human discourses, including science (see Turner 2002; Lakoff and Johnson 2003). The metaphorical blend of memory with literature, where memorizing is the source domain and writing is the target domain, has been indirectly present in Western thought since Plato’s wax tablet (see Draaisma 2001), influencing the way memory is conceptualized and explained. The opposite blend, where writing is the source domain and memorizing is the target domain, would conceptualize the writer as the encoder of meaning that is stored in a text and later recalled by a reader.1 The second metaphor has not been used nearly as widely as the first one, and the most obvious reason for that would be that the metaphor applies fully only to the writer who remembers the text that he or she had written, which limits the usefulness of the metaphor. But the primacy of the author as the most privileged interpreter of the text has been disputed for a long time in literary theory, at least since Wimsatt and Beardsley (1998 [1954]) succinctly labeled the phenomenon “intentional fallacy.” Furthermore, different interpretations of any literary text make it a reconstructive effort towards meaning constructed by various readers (the common wisdom

Anthologies, Literary Theory and the Teaching of Literature: An Exchange Gerald Graff (bio) and Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) Di Leo: You’ve thought a great deal about the institutionalization and professionalization of literary studies in America. What role have anthologies played in the institutionalization and professionalization of literary studies? Graff: The roles and effects are obviously multiple and over-determined, but let me start, being the curmudgeon I am, with one of the worst pedagogical results of literature anthologies: legitimating the primacy of literary texts and their supposed transparency, and obscuring the importance of criticism and interpretation (not even to mention theory) for the literature classroom. Di Leo: Why does foregrounding the significance of criticism and interpretation make you a curmudgeon? I would say just the opposite. I don’t think that teachers have really thought enough about how to incorporate theory into the teaching of literary texts. The result is either a misappropriation of theory and criticism in their classroom, or an avoidance of theory and criticism in the classroom. The worst instance of the former is what I call the “cookie cutter approach” to theory which works something like this: apply literary theory “A” to literary text “B”. Result: a valid interpretation of literary text “B” (and a successful use of literary theory “A”). On this strategy, students think that criticism and theory is some kind of game wherein points are scored for the production of valid interpretations. Textbooks like many of the volumes in the Bedford series in Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism that have primary texts along with selections like “What is Deconstruction?” and “What is Feminism?” promote this type of trivial use of theory, albeit I think unwittingly. In other cases, theory and criticism is entirely avoided in the classroom either because it is perceived by the teacher to [End Page 113] be beyond the ken of the students, or because the teacher wants to promote the illusion that literary studies just involves a close reading of the primary literary text at hand. Graff: I agree. Students and teachers who pick up an anthology get the illusion that studying literature is a matter of closely reading a bunch of primary texts and letting those texts in themselves somehow tell them what to say about the texts in class and in student writing. This obscures, conceals, and mystifies the fact that what we say about a literary text, though certainly accountable to the text itself—and this is important in ways I hope we can pursue—is generated not by the text but by the critical questions we ask about it. These questions come from the secondary conversation of readers and critics rather than from the text itself. Di Leo: I like this as a general way of approaching the teaching of literature, but worry about placing the onus of criticism on the asking of the right critical questions. For me, questions can both lead us to find new aspects of the text at hand as well as delimit our discovery of the text. I’d put the emphasis on the “conversation” part of your comment, rather than the “critical question” part. We should encourage our students to enter a conversation about a text. Specifically, the members of this conversation are the people who have written and commented on this text. The student can gain entry into this conversation only by acknowledging the scholarship of its members. His or her questions should concern the terms of the discussion, its assumptions and its conclusions. The arbiter in the conversion should be the literary text in question. In this context, the approach to literary texts is one of entering a discourse community or discussion of the text. Students should recognize that the questions they ask about the text are determined by the terms, assumptions and conclusions of the discourse community concerning the text. These questions are “critical questions” because they are meaningful within a particular critical context, not because they are questions in an anthology or what are perceived to be perennial questions. Graff: Anthologies tend to efface the mediating intervention of criticism in literary study by reducing criticism to its dullest common denominator—informational headnotes and...

When Victorian critics like Margaret Oliphant and Henry Mansel reacted negatively to the popular “sensation novel” in the 1860s, chief among their concerns was that these novels “preach[ed] to the nerves” instead of engaging readers’ cultivated reflective judgment (Mansel 483). Scholarship on sensation novels has sought to identify the unique features that allowed these texts to directly engage readers’ bodies and do certain kinds of cultural or ideological work. In a brief but significant moment in chapter 3 of his ambitious book The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan asks us to rethink both the nature of Mansel's critique and the singularity of sensation novels. A lifelong idealist invested in metaphysics, Mansel bewailed specific features of these “morbid” fictions: their melodramatic subject matter, their emphasis on plot over character, their responsiveness to market demand. But Morgan reads Mansel's review as a reaction against a much broader set of developments in the nineteenth century through which the Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience as disinterested reflective judgment was replaced with a materialist theory of aesthetic response as a corporeal reaction of matter (bodies and nerves) to matter (aesthetic objects). In the compelling story Morgan tells, sensation novels come to look less like unique sites of physiological stimulation and more like popular literary instances of a new aesthetic theory that was reimagining the relationship between humans and objects in their environment. Rather than focusing on the specificity of particular aesthetic objects (artworks, music, literary texts), Morgan turns our attention to how multiple discursive fields in the nineteenth century intersected as they rethought the nature of looking, hearing, reading, or otherwise engaging with objects in the world.With thoughtful, nuanced explication of scientific, philosophical, and literary texts, Morgan advances two interconnected claims, both supplemented by encyclopedic notes and references (which comprise a quarter of the book). His first argument is that the aesthetic experience we tend to value as the “highest” human capacity—because it appears to be a spiritual or transcendental property of autonomous, deliberative, inward-turning selves—was instead imagined within a range of nineteenth-century discourses (physiology, psychology, evolutionary biology, art history, literature, even interior design and color theory) as a function of bodies and the matter that comprised them. The book's second contention is that this “materialist strain” in Victorian aesthetics displaced the agency of aesthetic response from individual human persons to nonhuman matter, resulting not only in the expansion of aesthetic experience to nonhuman animals (think of Darwin's discerning birds) but also in conferring consciousness to inanimate physical objects. Whereas scholarship by Amanda Anderson (The Powers of Distance) and David Wayne Thomas (Cultivating Victorians) associates aesthetic experience with the cultivation of critical detachment and self-reflective individuality, Morgan reads such liberal ideals as reactionary responses to an increasingly materialist account of the self. His argument thus resonates with and broadens the scope of Nicholas Dames's approach in The Physiology of the Novel. Taking a cue from other scholars who have charted a nineteenth-century erosion of mind-body dualism (Allan Richardson, Rick Rylance, Sally Shuttleworth), Morgan shows how this erosion took on radical forms, not just by affording material properties to minds but also by identifying the “enminded” properties of matter. The “outward turn” of Morgan's title refers to the “active and animating” properties of mind that extend to other material substances: matter itself can have properties of consciousness (19).Morgan divides his book into two sections, the first of which traces a mid-nineteenth-century empirical science of beauty that runs counter (but also parallel) to the kind of anti-industrialist and socially attuned aesthetic theories we associate with John Ruskin, who serves as the implicit antihero of Morgan's story. Chapter 1 charts a shift from natural theology to scientific materialism in accounts of beauty and harmony by examining a network of intellectuals associated with the Edinburgh Aesthetic Club in the 1850s, including interior decorator David Ramsay Hay, physician John Addington Symonds, physiologists Thomas Laycock and William Carpenter, and critic E. S. Dallas. At the center of this chapter is a pair of linked paradoxes in the science of aesthetics. Aesthetic form was conceived of as both geometric (ordered, harmonious, and identifiable) and ambient (experienced by non-conscious corporeal processes). And so, while beauty and taste could supposedly be explained with mathematical precision, those thinkers who were invested in such explanations increasingly found that aestheticism's physiological mechanisms evaded rational modes of thought brought to bear upon them. Morgan's method in The Outward Mind is to take up a series of such paradoxes, oppositions between seemingly contradictory modes of thought: humanistic inquiry and scientific positivism, abstraction and materiality, phenomenology and epistemology, aesthetics and politics. He insightfully reads these as dialectics animating new Victorian ways of thinking about aesthetic experience at a time when various humanist and scientific inquiries were only just beginning to distinguish themselves as separate disciplines.Having established how medical writers and literary critics developed a neurophysiological account of aesthetic experience, Morgan turns in chapter 2 to texts by five writers—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—all of whom, despite their different idioms, “rescaled and physicalized the primary units of analysis of aesthetic thought” (88). This rescaling happens in two seemingly contradictory directions: by narrowing in on the immediate moment of response as something that disaggregates both art objects and experiencing selves into their component parts (nerve fibers, organs, colors, shapes, words) and by expanding the register of aesthetic response to encompass the deep time of evolution. In both directions this rescaling “tends to suspend or sideline the human as a unit of analysis” (124). Responses to aesthetic objects are not located within discrete human selves but in the local actions of nerves or the evolutionary development of the species. Hardy's novels feature here as literary manifestations of scientific theories. Where Pater and Allen describe scales of aesthetic response, Hardy “adapts” these theories for use in fiction: he expands moments of physiological intensity with almost lyric detail (Henry Knight clinging to the cliff in Desperate Remedies); disintegrates characters into neurological responses (brains and nerves); and locates aesthetic experience in an expanded time of evolutionary adaptation.While section 1 considers how aesthetic response spreads out across the material properties of the body and the scale of the species, section 2 (“The Outward Turn”) considers how nineteenth-century intellectuals expanded consciousness even further, beyond human observers to the objects in their environment. Environments themselves became sentient. In chapter 3 Morgan examines a cluster of writers who coalesce around Walter Pater and developed Lucretian theories of atomic agency. In a somewhat surprising association of Pater's fiction with sensation novels, Morgan argues that both produce somatic responses in readers. In his imaginary portraits and in Marius the Epicurean Pater applies the materialist theories of psychologist James Sully and Allen by imagining reading itself as a physical experience. Reading Pater's literary texts as enactments of materialist aesthetic theories, Morgan argues that Pater's writing makes language tactile and sensuous; his sentences “imprison” readers (164); his “densely accretive style returns language to bodies” (157).Scholars of the novel might wish here, and elsewhere, that Morgan would expand his literary analysis: Just how, for instance, does the accretive quality or the “semantic density” of Pater's literary language operate (157)? Morgan reads literary texts as applications of material aesthetic theories that he locates first in scientific texts. Building upon Gillian Beer and George Levine's “shared discourse” and one-culture approaches, he reads science and literature “not as domains or fields but as rhetorics that might be flexibly and widely called on” (17). His method is therefore to explicate both scientific and literary texts. While his expositions and claims are compelling and clearly articulated, I found myself wanting more extensive close readings of just how novels by Hardy, Pater, William Morris, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Oscar Wilde anticipate and direct readers’ physiological responses. The lack of space afforded to close readings in The Outward Mind perhaps makes sense given that Morgan focuses his energy on drawing together an astonishingly diverse array of intellectual fields from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He offers novel scholars provocative new ways of thinking about both the physiological responses referenced within nineteenth-century novels and how novels might themselves act as agents of affect and somatic response. The latter point might lead us to wonder whether the relationship between science and literature is as simple as Morgan's framework of parallel “rhetorics” would suggest. When he turns to E. S. Dallas, William Morris, and Vernon Lee, he shows that these writers made literary language inherently somatic. He thus paints a picture in which literature does much more than apply or extend scientific aesthetic theories; it enacts material aesthetics. What sort of critical method is appropriate to such enactment? Morgan points out that literary texts are complicated aesthetic objects, because “[o]ne cannot see a poetic image in the same unmediated way that one sees a color or hears a sound; novels and poems are therefore less immediately or obviously available to empirical analysis” (253–54). He admits that the way literary texts prompt effects in readers’ bodies—for instance the “somatic forces” conveyed by Pater's prose—are “difficult to talk about” (157). In the case of Pater this is because his prose combines philosophical concepts with a style that is “resistan[t] to thought.” But the difficulty here is also that formalist textual analysis does not have a history of playing well with reader response or cognitive criticism.In his chapters on Pater, Morris, and Lee, Morgan poses the question, What happens to social life when empirical theories root aesthetics in universal physiological responses, making aesthetics the work of nerves and evolutionary adaptation rather than the products of specific social and political circumstances? He answers by assessing how writers imagined matter itself to have social properties. In chapter 4 Morgan takes up the case of William Morris, whose physicalist aesthetics at first glance seem at odds with his socialist politics. But unlike Herbert Spencer, for whom evolutionary theory leads to a competitive individualism, for Morris the same theory makes possible a shared corporeality. Reading Morris's essays, lectures, romances, and News from Nowhere, Morgan explores how Morris aligns aesthetic experience with the pleasure of production, self-expression, and use, experienced by laborers who engage in shared embodied practices. The antithesis of the fin de siècle decadent aesthete, Morris rejects the category of “art” as a privileged, refined domain and locates it in the everyday. When Morgan turns to News from Nowhere, he traces in Morris's construction of character an alternative to realism's reliance on introspection and individualistic sympathy. Morris renders characters physically, promoting an ethics of shared corporeal practices; his characters are distinguished by “their external markers and preferred modes of activity” (207).This expanded notion of sociality—one not based on a community of sympathetic individuals but on sensory reactions to corporeally rendered characters or even to books as material objects—has important implications for how we read. In his fifth chapter Morgan shows how Vernon Lee's theories of empathy describe readerly affect as a feeling with or feeling into objects. Indeed Morgan finds in Lee a precursor to Brian Massumi's affect theory. Empathy was not synonymous with interpersonal sympathy until the mid-twentieth century; instead it meant “unconscious physiological reaction to an object” (220). For Lee and her lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, literary language itself is based on this physiological, object-oriented empathy. When we speak of a mountain as “rising,” for instance, the metaphor is not just an act of imagination; we feel our eyes moving upward and our bodies rising. Empathy, Morgan notes, “is rooted in experiences that precede the social domain” (222). I find myself wondering whether Morgan hopes to hold on to a separate, individuated notion of the social domain even as he sees material aesthetics radically expanding sociality to include all types of responsiveness between material things. What are the ethical and political functions of literature—especially in relation to gender, race, or class—in a system of universal corporeality?Despite his statement to the contrary, in many ways Morgan's book is an “intellectual history”—a complex, revisionist, sometimes presentist, and often recuperative one—of an overlooked Victorian mode of thinking (and reading, and looking) (16). His book unearths intricate intersections between a surprising range of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic, and literary thought. His premise is that a reassessment of the material turn in Victorian aesthetic theory might help us overcome our own entrenchment in methodological and disciplinary divisions between humanistic interpretation on the one hand and scientism, empiricism, and positivism on the other. Victorian aesthetic theory might, he says, “reveal some of the ways in which the humanities have long been ‘scientific’” (15). It is in this gesture toward the present, along with steady alignment of Victorian theories with later philosophies and approaches (affect theory, thing theory, distant reading, poststructuralism, neuroscience), that Morgan refuses to engage in a mere intellectual history. He is interested in what his epilogue calls a “nonlinear” method of engagement with the past, one that casts Victorian theories not as merely anticipatory of modern ideas but as sources of alternative, potentially invigorating, less disciplinarily entrenched modes of thinking about aesthetics, reading, and interpretation (261). This is especially apparent in his final chapter, in which he challenges a story we tell of literary critical history: that New Criticism's analytic modes of close reading made a clean break with Victorian modes of “moral-aesthetic evaluative criticism,” and that distant reading's quantitative approach was made possible by digital technologies (244). Not only is distant reading not new, he shows us; twentieth-century New Critics (following I. A. Richards) were “haunted by” the quantifiable methods of reading that preceded them, methods they sought to caricature as scientifically reductionist and naive (237). Morgan uncovers in Lee's empathetic literary criticism a distant reading avant la lettre (Lee was invested in statistical linguistic analysis as well as in the affects of aesthetic experience). More important, Morgan suggests Lee's objective aesthetic theory may inspire ways of marrying phenomenological accounts of aesthetic experience (the feeling of reading, the affects of art) with quantifiable, objective methods of literary formalism. In one of his most provocative moments Morgan asks what literary studies might have looked like if, instead of rejecting the phenomenology and physiology of reading, New Criticism had followed Lee's lead and “embraced corporeality rather than cognition” (253). The critical investment of The Outward Mind is that we might benefit from revisiting nineteenth-century materialist theories of aesthetics at a time when we face our own methodological questions about how to read, how disciplines can intersect, and whether “scientific” approaches to literary analysis (cognitive criticism, digital humanities) impinge upon or invigorate traditional hermeneutic methods of inquiry. As Morgan puts it, Lee's brand of scientific humanistic inquiry, in its refusal to pit the affects of reading against statistical analysis, might help us reunite the phenomenological and the quantitative, the humanistic and the scientific.

96 Codex Searching for the Trans-­ Indigenous Alice Te Punga Somerville The title of this piece gestures toward Teresia Teaiwa’s 1995 poetry collection Searching for Nei Nim’anoa, which in turn refers to a Banaban female navigator. The titular poem of the collection is about Teaiwa’s own (scholarly, creative, cultural) search for Nei Nim’anoa. The poem opens “I need to learn how to navigate,” a desire expressed in relation to the act of reading: “Read the stars, the wind, and the ocean swells / Like she did.” Teaiwa the scholar, researcher, and writer “search[es]” for this ancestral and historical figure because of her “need” to “learn” how to “read,” a move that—­ in the context of a collection that reflects over and over on her place in scholarly work and institutions—­ gently reframes and reclaims “read[ing]” within Indigenous Pacific knowledge traditions. Declaring that “drifting in a random sea” “has been too lonely,” Teaiwa yearns to engage in deliberate and expert navigation. The purpose and outcome of navigation, then, is to counter loneliness: to find community. The idea of “searching” in the present piece does not suggest that the “trans-­Indigenous” is out of sight, missing, or inadvertently mislaid. Instead , “searching” in Teaiwa’s sense draws our attention to the deliberate, hopeful, careful, necessarily incomplete (and, for many, ancestral) work that underpins global Native literary studies. The present conversation between Huang, Wilson, and me—­ and Allen—­ is another instance or site of such hopeful, careful, and necessarily incomplete “searching”: an attempt both to describe and to enact the transnational critical work suggested by the term trans-­Indigenous. Teaiwa’s search is not only for location and direction but also for navigational expertise, for method. The idea of method—­connective, collaborative , reciprocal method—­is central to Allen’s (2012) Trans-­Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies and his broader career-­ long work of which it is a significant part. The subtitle of Allen’s book foregrounds its underpinning ambition: to variously propose, moderate, produce, and inspire a broad conversation about methodologies related to Indigenous literary studies. Questions of methodology have long energized Indigenous studies. Broadly, we can trace the language of methodology to the heavy influence of the social sciences in the development of the (inter)discipline, and more specifically, we might note the role of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies as a text that has perhaps enjoyed singular mobility around the Indigenous scholarly world for almost two decades. (Allen acknowledges a debt to Smith’s work Codex 97 in Trans-­Indigenous.) There can be a temptation in the humanities (especially literary studies) to eschew concepts like “methodology” (or, indeed, method) in favor of theory; the book could plausibly have been subtitled “Theories of Global Native Literary Studies” or “Global Native Literary Theory.” Instead, Allen’s work—­ while certainly not antitheoretical—­ elaborates “methodologies” for global Native literary studies in (at least) two forms: analytical methodologies in relation to what one does with literary texts and institutional methodologies in terms of how we think about the structural contexts (discipline, scholarly association, reading list, graduate training) of literary studies and perhaps Indigenous studies more broadly. Lest this parsing of two kinds of “methodology” suggest these (method and context) are entirely extricable, Smith and others elaborate the ways in which the institutional context of scholarly work shapes, and is shaped by, the specific forms of analytical work undertaken in any one project or classroom. At the level of analytical methodology, Trans-­Indigenous practices what it preaches. Rather than gesturing toward possible or ideal engagements with literary and other cultural texts which one might undertake elsewhere , Allen’s own method centers (and is explicitly derived from) his own careful engagements with specific texts. Much of the book involves long passages of detailed, productive, original, and often highly evocative working-­ through of specific texts (especially, but not only, poetry; more on this later). In their essays, both Huang and Wilson take time to elaborate Allen’s methods of analysis, in which readings of specific texts (and especially pairings or clusters of texts) draw from and inform insights into cultural, aesthetic, and political contexts. Huang celebrates this approach, noting “the cumulative...

I propose a methodology of literary study to be used in a wide range of disciplines and genres. While there have been numerous applications of postcolonial theory to the analysis of texts produced before, during, and after colonization, this transnational feminist methodology (TFM) is updated or reinvented to include discussions of the psychological and material ramifications of neocolonialism and neo-imperialism, especially about the immigrant experience—in particular, the perspective of children of immigrants living in diasporic communities. The work’s focus on postcolonial feminism is complicated by looking at gender, race, trans-nationality, and other identity factors that shape the work of writers of marginalized identities living in the Western world from an intersectional perspective.In this work I have identified a methodology that has been used but isn’t very well defined. TFM is still in the process of being theorized and continues to evolve as seen in mostly interdisciplinary feminist academic journals. It is currently a fluid theory and there hasn’t been a clear understanding of how TFM can be used in the study of literary and cultural texts. But now, looking back nearly twenty-five years later, it seems that TFM has mostly been taken up in social studies, especially women’s studies, and not as much in literary studies and cultural studies. It seems then, then the main divide in TFM approaches has to do with practical applications in the real world vs. theoretical application, as with the study of literary and cultural production, a divide I hope to problematize in this dissertation as not mutually exclusive. Yet the urgency of applying TFM to cultural productions and literary texts not only is useful but it’s important and becoming even more urgent the longer it takes to become canonized. We need to talk about how it can be applied and how it can be used and analyze how artists are actually using it both as driving the work of cultural producers but also in the analysis of cultural production. TFM can be a framework for interpreting artistic creations, but to do that, we need to delineate some of the basic principles of this emerging methodology. For example, in addition to form, many cultural producers/artists who use TFM in their work or whose work lends itself to TFM analysis engage with adaptation. Often, creators engage or talk back to the Western literary canon, as is the case in this dissertation with Forushande talking back to

While postcolonial studies has - for a long time and for good reason - been concerned with critical analysis of literature, field has recently witnessed some change as scholars have increasingly studied literature as well as other cultural products and phenomena. In research and teaching, they have gone predominantly literary focus of postcolonialism, which characterized late-twentiethcentury scholarship, to other cultural realms.1 The present article will explore this trend by outlining theoretical and methodological framework of postcolonial cultural studies and by reflecting on both its benefits and its challenges. In second part, a case study on a South African life narrative shall demonstrate ways in which postcolonial cultural studies can serve as a suitable approach to literary texts and their historical, social, and political contexts.Postcolonial Cultural StudiesDiscussing history and (interdisciplinarity of postcolonialism in his book Interdisciplinary Measures, Graham Huggan comes to conclusion that would probably be true to that status of literature and literary has shifted with move to a culturally oriented analysis.2 Yet, his careful phrasing - would probably be true to say - suggests that he is not quite convinced of this shift in focus; instead, he critically reflects upon this development.In is sometimes now as 'first wave' of postcolonial criticism (the period between roughly mid-1980s and mid-1990s), literary modes of analysis were central, and most of key figures to emerge from this period were trained literary critics.3Huggan's choice of words and passive voice - what is sometimes now seen - imply again that he doubts this classification. He goes on to discuss recent work of 'second wave', by comparison, as a materialistinspired postcolonial criticism that is self-consciously interventionist in its approach to current social and political debates.4 While some critics consider 'second wave' a corrective to these earlier textualist/culturalist tendencies,5 Huggan polemically criticizes it for the lack of anxiety it shows over its own interdisciplinary methods, and unabashedly symptomatic readings it gives of literary and other cultural texts.6 Contrary to metaphors of 'first' and 'second wave', which suggest change and development, Huggan argues that literature continues to be central in he classifies as not-so-new forms of postcolonial analysis.7 His arguments provide appropriate starting point for exploring postcolonial cultural studies. Why has study of literature been so influential in postcolonial studies? Why do scholars go beyond this focus and include other cultural products as well? Which products do they include? What benefit does it have to combine postcolonial and cultural studies? In ways are approaches concerned with issues of (interdisciplinarity?Examining why literature has played a pivotal role in postcolonialism, Ania Loomba argues that literature is an important means of appropriating, inverting or challenging dominant means of representation and colonial ideologies.8 Literature does not simply 'mirror' its historical, social, and political surroundings but is characterized by its aesthetic mediation between reality and imagination. Creating fictional settings, characters, and plot-lines, it can playfully confront dominant sets of knowledge and construct alternative realities. Moreover, polyvalence is one of defining features of literature, which is why texts allow for different, possibly even contradictory, readings. Therefore, literary texts are, as Leela Gandhi argues, more than any other social and political product [... ] most significant instigators and purveyors of colonial power and its double, postcolonial resistance.9 Given that literature has been so important in postcolonialism, it is not surprising that many scholars in this field are trained in or affiliated with literary studies. …

This article focuses on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations are limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Further, this article addresses the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This includes specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The article is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.

Reviews103 universities and colleges. There are frequent allusions to the way rhetorical studies were supplanted by departments devoted to the study of English literature. Some essays look back on this evolution with considerable disapproval while others look forward to greater collaboration between rhetoricians and teachers of composition. The villain of the piece is often the English departments which "have ignored and even disparaged" (p. 246) teachers of composition , rhetoric andjournalism while members of such departments "struggle over abstruse questions of intentionality in literary texts" (p. 48). One implicit consequence of this view, fortunately not held by all the contributors , is that rhetoric is primarily shown as applicable to all discourse except literary discourse. This is presumably the reason why there is no mention ofthe contemporary work in literary applications of rhetoric by the Liège Group (in its General Rhetoric), by Genette, or by Valesio, while Paul de Man gets only a passing nod. With one or two exceptions the contributors treat European rhetorical studies as having come to an end with Ramus. Fortunately there are a half-dozen very good, even excellent, essays here, which propose a vision of rhetoric fully open to work with literary models and texts. These include D'Angelo's study of the evolution of the analytic topoi, Larson 's proposals on classifying discourse, Stewart's comments on the Phaedrus, Raymond's study of enthymemes and examples, and Kinneavy's essay on the dieory and practice of the teaching of writing. The last is an example of an expanded view of rhetoric, integrating the classical teaching of the practice of discourse into an eclectic and interesting description of twentieth-century concern for situation (Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer). In short, this volume conveys the need for a renewal of rhetorical studies and manifests the struggle between a narrow professional and national view and a broader view that is able to include literary and literary-critical discourse. Dartmouth CollegeJohn D. Lyons Adorno, by Martin Jay; 199 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984, $15.00 cloth, $5.95 paper. "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on," wrote Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics, "because the moment to realize it was missed." Adorno's own thought also lives on, but by contrast the moment to more fully understand (if not realize) it may be approaching. Martin Jay's Adorno, like his books on The Frankfurt School and Western Marxism, is clear, sympathetic, and 104Philosophy and Literature penetrating. It is a welcome addition to, and sets the standard for, recent literature in English on Adorno. Adorno would have condemned any simplifying, systematizing, or packaging of his wide-ranging and difficult writings. Accordingly, Jay applies to Adorno's work Adorno's own metaphorical notions offorce-field — the interplay of attractions and aversions that constitutes "the dynamic, trans-mutational structure of a complex phenomenon" — and constellation — "a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of changing elements that resists reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative first principle" (pp. 14-15). In diis light, Jay discusses five irreducible themes and tensions: (1) Adorno's Western Marxism, articulated in his brand ofCritical Theory; (2) his "aesthetic modernism ," rooted in atonal techniques and compositional principles of Schoenberg; (3) his uneasy "mandarin cultural conservativism," expressed in antipathy for mass culture, bureaucracy, and technological reason, and in pessimism and distance from political activism; (4) his Jewish heritage, evident in his understanding of post-Auschwitz Germany and connection of all totalistic thought widi totalitarianism; and, (5) his deconstructionism and early development , via Nietzsche and Benjamin, of poststructuralist themes present in Derrida , Foucault, and others. In a brief biography, Jay traces the origins and development of these themes, and dien examines their roles in Adorno's philosophy and analyses of modern culture. By focusing on the paratactic essay, "Subject and Object," Jay explicates Adorno's project for a critical philosophy aware ofits own historical immanence, and brilliandy identifies recurring themes in Adorno's myriad criticisms of others. Adorno rejects the separation of subject and object by both positivists and idealists who pursue the domination of nature, and thus subjectify reason and hypostatize social domination. Moreover, Adorno rejects the unification of subject and object by Hegel, Lukacs, Benjamin, Heidegger, and others...