Trauma Remythologized: Natsuo Kirino’s The Goddess Chronicle

Journal Article Beyond the Current Impasse in Literary Studies Get access Mary Poovey Mary Poovey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Literary History, Volume 11, Issue 2, Summer 1999, Pages 354–377, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/11.2.354 Published: 01 July 1999

Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

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.

Medieval English Manuscripts:

The notions of what is male and what is female are cultural conceptions into which all human beings are placed. These conceptions form a sex-gender view in African culture. This study examines the concept of gender and sex in Akachi Ezeigbo’s trilogy using survey method. It was discovered among other things that Ezeigbo is using these literary texts as a medium to seek for the end of oppression of women in the world outside the texts. This work analyzed issues in Akachi Ezeigbo’s trilogy from a female point of view as Njoku (2004:277) asserts, “Feminist criticism engages issues from the female point of view which reflects the changing nature of society and highlights the protest of a marginalized group (women)”. Akachi Ezeigbo's trilogy is therefore seen as a message of hope to all oppressed women in Africa; that women are already in the ascent and that total liberation is possible and at the threshold. The “benign way” to survive being the pathway of sound education and economic empowerment of women. These will help to facilitate the “coming salvation.

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...

In this essay, authors Todd Reynolds, Leslie S. Rush, Jodi P. Lampi, and Jodi Patrick Holschuh provide a disciplinary heuristic that bridges literary and literacy theories. The secondary English language arts (ELA) classroom is situated at the intersection between literary theory and literacy theory, where too often literary theory does not include pedagogical practices and literacy theory does not take disciplinary differences into account. Reynolds and coauthors propose an English Language Arts heuristic for disciplinary literacy to guide teachers toward embracing student-led interpretations. They explore the connections among the Common Core State Standards, New Criticism, and the ELA classroom and focus on the prevalence of interpretive monism, which is the belief that only one interpretation is appropriate for students when reading a literary text. The essay explicates a heuristic for ELA literacy that centers on students actively creating interpretations of and transforming literary texts. By embracing this heuristic, the authors assert, teachers can focus on student-led interpretations of literary texts and thus empower their students.

<i>The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable</i>, by Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus

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

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

What is literature, and what can be for criticism? James Kirwan's study stands back from the current debate on the how of criticism to ask if criticism can ever be an enterprise consistent with its subject - the literary text - or even with its own method. Through an examination of some of the perennial problems in literary theory, drawing upon the whole history of writing on from Plato to Derrida, Kirwan reveals the presence within the critical tradition of an ideal model of literature that at once creates and frustrates both the aims and methods of literary theory. Literature, Kirwan concludes, can never be more than a beautiful lie. Consequently, criticism will only ever produce either an appeal to the transcendental, or a turning of into science or history, a process which deprives it of its identity.

Das umgeschriebene Genie<b>. Zum Verhältnis von literarischem Autorschaftsdiskurs und Schriftpraktiken im Theater</b>

This article reflects on literary and humanities education in the current Philippine K to 12 senior high school literature curricula, through tracing the position of Philippine literary theory and criticism, or Kritika, in its objectives. It seeks to problematize whether its presence or absence is symptomatic to the “disastrous neoliberal” architecture of contemporary Philippine humanities education. While this study relates the literature subject to Martha Nussbaum’s claim that “the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought” are indeed “losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit and skills suited to profit-making”, this paper also locates her idea through Constantino’s “miseducation of Filipino people” with the aim of decolonizing from the educational ethos that was never intended to promote democracy, freedom, and equality. Toward that objective, locating Philippine Kritika in the literature education is essential since it speaks to Isagani R. Cruz’s concept of “the other Other of Western literary theory”, which describes the education that Filipinos have inherited as impoverished because of its “ignorance of half of the world’s literary texts and theories.” The poverty it brought via colonialist hegemony is “unconsciously shared by Philippine literary thought” as evidenced by New Criticism being “the ruling paradigm in Philippine literary circles today” despite the emergence of newer critics and recent positions in Philippine postcolonial studies.

This article sets out to discuss how we may work with the notion of ‘cultural&#x0D; encounters’. Two examples are presented and discussed: One is drawn from the&#x0D; novel Monnè, outrages et défis (1990) by the prize-winning Ivorian author&#x0D; Ahmadou Kourouma. The other example refers to a job interview of an ethnic&#x0D; minority Dane in Denmark, published in a review by a Danish municipal&#x0D; administration (Århus Kommune) in 2003. The article brings a number of critical&#x0D; literary theories into dialogue in order to discuss two major points. First, the article&#x0D; shows how the chosen theoretical notions can help us to describe what happens&#x0D; in situations of communication where different, and possibly incommensurable,&#x0D; agents and contexts meet and interact in settings that are marked by conceptions&#x0D; of cultural differences. The theories used are Michel Foucault’s discursive formations,&#x0D; Emile Benveniste’s concept of enunciation, Mikhail Bakhtin’s reflexions of&#x0D; contrapuntal narratives, and Homi Bhabha’s theorisation of the anteriority of the&#x0D; sign as it occurs in a disjunctive temporality. Secondly, the article introduces a&#x0D; new interpretative method of how literary texts and critical literary theory may&#x0D; be used within anthropological studies. Instead of focusing on the notion of&#x0D; ‘identities’ and the ensuing conflicts between difference and sameness, this&#x0D; approach focuses on cultural articulations as dynamic communicative processes.&#x0D; In so doing, it situates itself within literary and anthropological theories of&#x0D; representation. Making a close reading of the chosen texts, the article shows that&#x0D; cultural encounters are never merely a question of ‘culture’. Cultural encounters&#x0D; become communicative scenarios where ideas, motives, intentions, and emotions&#x0D; are expressed, interpreted, and received by differently reacting agents.