Contemporary Literary Studies Research Articles

Deftly Mixed: Liminal Identity and the Problem of Knowing in J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold

CHAD JEWETT University of Connecticut Deftly Mixed: Liminal Identity and the Problem of Knowing in J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold IN PARTLY COLORED: ASIAN AMERICANS AND RACIAL ANOMALY IN THE Segregated South, Leslie Bow describes the gap between “white” and “black” on the imagined Southern spectrum of identity as a racial “interstitial,” a liminal space where proximity to whiteness can be approximated and proximity to blackness attends questions of classed performance. Bow uses the interstitial concept to focus on non-white, non-black ethnicities (specifically Asian and Native American communities) and their experiences in the Jim Crow-era South. However, Bow’s concept of troubled racial epistemology is equally helpful in understanding Southern literary concerns of provisional whiteness and blackness. While Bow uses the sliding scale of race to examine Asian, Latino, and Native American proximity to the artificially stable poles of black and white, interstitiality can also apply to depictions of mixed-race (partially white and black) figures. A salient example of this Southern-literary liminality is found in the mixed-race character of Regenia Underwood in J. McHenry Jones’s 1896 novel Hearts of Gold, a work heretofore almost entirely ignored in American literary studies. While issues of racial performance and proximity are hardly unheard of in Southern (and American) literature, Jones’s novel is starkly unique in that his racial-regional formulations create a world in which Regenia Underwood, despite her unchanging performance, expression, and appearance, can be placed at the zenith of American aristocracy or in the confines of the Jim Crow car. Regenia “passes,”into themoneyedupper-classnoless,withouttryingtopassand is deemed “black” without ever fully understanding the situational rules she has broken by moving through the border between North and South. The extremeness of Regenia’s Northern and Southern experiences, combined with her inability to determine the forces at work in these external redefinitions, tells a story different from the codified “tragic mulatta” or passing narratives, making serious study of Jones’s novel all the more essential. Regenia’s novel-long conflict, a set of constant 180 Chad Jewett reevaluations of racial, regional, and socioeconomic identity, exists on a sliding scale of interstitiality, in which her race, like that of Bow’s subjects, is constantly subject to terms of proximity and performance, terms that Regenia is never able to master. In addition, the very era and region of the work’s genesis, the turn-of-the-century borderlands of West Virginia, provide an added layer of liminality, indivisible from that of Jones’s heroine. Regenia becomes a symbol for a three-decade struggle for national knowability that would only grow more vexed in the modernist twentieth century. The paucity of critical work on Jones’s novelisespeciallyoddconsideringtherichlycomplexracialandregional configurations that surround Regenia, a woman who seemingly manages to do the impossible in Reconstruction-era America: to exist simultaneously as both “white” and “black,” before seemingly becoming neither. Regenia’s interstiality and the ways in which her identity resists any form of perceived racial categorization or essentialness constitute two concepts vital to and interrogative of hierarchical senses of self in the post-Reconstruction era. Attendant to these issues of self-understanding and the multiplicity of identity are the modernist questions of epistemology at work in Jones’s novel, and how the seemingly unsettled nature of Regenia’s racial identity (and broader self-identity) reflect a modernist problem of knowing. Indeed, as Mark M. Smith has noted, racial identification became even more important to conservative white hegemony in the post-slavery era, just as “sight became ever less reliable as an authenticator of racial identity” (7), directly contributing to a defining facet of American modernist unsurety. WhileanequationofracialindeterminacywithAmericanmodernism is familiar in contemporary literary studies, the key difference in Hearts of Gold is that Regenia’s “problem of knowing” proves maddeningly regional.; the volley of outside classifications hurled at Regenia serve as a corrective to any essentialized knowability of the American nation-state itself, as well as of the subjects existing within it. Indeed, Regenia’s race seems to change as she moves from abolitionist northern Ohio, through the borderlands, and into the Tidewater South, before arriving in the Deep South. Such mobility, in what Smith calls “a modernizing, geographically...

Trauma, (Mis)Perception and Memory in Uwem Akpan's ‘Fattening for Gabon’

It is a generally accepted principle in contemporary poststructuralist literary studies that language can only ever partially succeed in signifying that which it purports to signify. Where the profoundly dislocating experience of trauma is concerned, language loses even this partial success, and the victim of psychic violence is forced to resort to silence, a silence which is all the more expressive precisely because it overwhelms language. Thus, trauma fiction reveals what Steiner refers to as ‘the revaluation of silence’ which emphasises ‘the conceit of the word unspoken’ (67). Uwem Akpan's short story, ‘Fattening for Gabon’, from his collection Say You're One of Them (2008), is concerned with the culpability of socio-economic structures in giving rise to and perpetuating trauma in children. This paper will examine the retrospective narration of the protagonist by paying particular attention to the motif of memory. A discussion of the painful ambivalence of the experience and textualization of trauma, as conveyed through the story's use of silence and the disruption of the conventional bildung typical of narratives of remembrance, will form a substantial part of the paper.

Book Review: Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination

Spiritual Identities: Literature and Post-Secular Imagination. Edited by Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2010. Vol. 17 of Cultural Interactions: Studies in Relationship Between Arts. ISBN 978-03911-925-7. Pp. vi + 231. $58.95. The Peter Lang series, Cultural Interactions: Studies in Relationship Between Arts, of which this volume is a part, directs its attention to forging new relationships between arts, expanding their interdisciplinary possibilities. Spiritual Identities serves this purpose well, emphasizing fresh perspectives on role of the religious in contemporary literary (1). Those who dispute nineteenth-century claims that religion was no more than a relic of unscientific thinking will be heartened by articles in this volume, which start from perspective, reminiscent of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, and others, that the religious is increasingly revealed as an irreducible category of thought, feeling, experience and imagination which can never be explained away and with which we will always have to reckon (1). In recognizing importance of contemporary religious yearnings, editors maintain that 'cracks' into which religious impulses flow in a world without religion are nothing other than space of literature itself: literature is neither an alternative to, nor a substitute for religion, but a way in which religious experience can happen (5). All of essays in volume, then, invite readers to rethink and reimagine persistence of religious ideas, questions, and influences on lives and works of a wide variety of authors and literary works. The essays in this volume are wide-ranging, some more illuminating than others. The essays in volume which seem least successful at highlighting a contemporary return to recognition of religious impulses in art are those focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors and their works. Essays by Nancy Jiwon Cho and Emma Mason that investigate work of lesser-known writers, like eighteenth-century devotional writer Susanna Harrison, and poets Anne Barbauld and Felicia Hemans, do helpfully underscore ways that these women negotiated their identities as writers by using, in various ways, their relationships with and commitments to both traditional and dissenting forms of Christianity. But Brian Ingram's essay on George Eliot's early Evangelicalism and Simon Marsdon's piece on spiritualized landscape of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights cover already analyzed territory. And although Andy Mousley's essay on spiritual humanisms focuses on more recent writers, in using work of Martin Luther King to create a dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva, essay takes up so many aspects of these writers' work that it fails to bring its point home clearly. The essays that have more promise for thinking about religious in contemporary literary studies are those that specifically engage newer works of literature, underscoring ways in which religious impulses cut across, undermine, and reformulate traditional, dichotomous ways of thinking. …

Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing David Greven Beam, Dorri . 2010. Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press. $89.00 hc. $71.00 e-book. 270 pp. Correction: The print version of this review contained a typographical error in the first sentence. At the request of the publisher, the online article and pdf have been corrected. Dorri Beam's Style, Gender, and Fantasy is a bracing study of écriture feminine in nineteenth-century American writing. What makes Beam's book valuable is her rigorous and passionate exploration of a specifically feminine poetics in the period. Disabusing the reader of any staid notions of what constitutes literary value, Beam makes a persuasive case for a legitimate female literary style that emphasizes what she calls "highly wrought" language and imagery. Often dismissed as flowery and frilly, this style, through Beam's insightful and tough-minded presentation, comes into its own as a highly self-conscious mode of literary art-making and self-expression. Beam's work significantly adds to our understanding of what was at stake for the nineteenth-century woman writer on multiple levels—and not least, her claim to aesthetic legitimacy to begin with. The standards of taste and decorum relegated even popular women writers (and women were by far the more popular writers of the era) to the sidelines. Beam restores the importance of female writing in the century to contemporary literary studies, but crucially he does this by taking women's writing seriously as an aesthetic project. In so doing, she also illuminates what was generally at stake for this century's literature in aesthetic terms. Regarding the latter, Beam's work expands the emergent scholarly interest in literary style in the period. Indeed, many prominent male writers of the period have often been accused of being prolix or florid—Edgar Allan Poe comes to mind. While the entire question of nineteenth-century literary style will now be reexamined in light of Beam's project, her focus will have its most salutary effect in our sustained reappraisal of significant figures such as Margaret Fuller and Harriet Prescott Spofford, among others, artists whose challenging work has often been simultaneously dismissed and misunderstood, especially in aesthetic terms. Writers such as Spofford have been ignored or undervalued until very recently because they offer no "proposal[s] for practical change, . . . no alternative to the cult of feminine beauty" they foreground (134). Yet Beam demonstrates persuasively that Spofford "mines [End Page 165] the possibilities of gorgeous or ornamental style for a woman writer, perversely developing its potential as a feminist aesthetic" (134). Personally, I find Beam's appreciation for Spofford's perversity as bracing as her elucidation of what Spofford—a languorously, sensually weird writer—does with the word. For Beam, nineteenth-century women's writing is characterized by a "stylistic floridity" that invites a "trance-like entrance" into a literary world in which "fruits flush, waters brim and cascade, color pulses, and light saturates"; the "personified elements of nature—sun, rocks, and flowers—take on lives of their own and speak to alternative sensual ways of being in the world that marriage will imperil" (2). Surprisingly, Beam makes no mention of the great French feminist Hélène Cixous's dynamic and controversial theory of l'écriture féminine, literally "women's writing." Regardless of how Beam might view Cixous's work, it would have been interesting and also helpful to see her engage with the theorist's ideas. In any event, Cixous's ideas take on a new force for me if I link them to the historical context Beam provides. "Language that was transparent, that did not grant immediate access to the text or to the author," Beam writes, "was inappropriate for a woman writer"; language that evinced "labor" disrupted limited notions of female propriety. Writing with a flourish, an accentuated personality, further disrupted these standards by flaunting style, a "dubious accessory" (4). The highly, almost disorientingly stylized language and imagery of writers like Spofford—so routinely dismissed or ignored for precisely these reasons—take on a new purposefulness here. What has seemed like...

Gifts of Scholarship

The vexed issue that remains, however, is precisely that of evaluation. If ‘literature’ is taken, in part, as a marker of critical value, then what constitutes ‘good’ contemporary literature? The ‘immediacy’ of a text, its transient status as a marker of a particular, similarly short-lived zeitgeist? The connection between Ellroy and Peace is interesting in this respect, as it is refreshing to realise that the former’s The Big Nowhere (1988) is nearly twenty-five years old. The demarcation of the contemporary becomes apparent here. Ellroy has recent published Blood’ sAR over(2009), and is planning a further phase of his career focusing on political novels. One could argue that Ellroy can no longer be classified as a ‘contemporary’ writer as his work stretches back over a quarter of a century. The counter-argument would then be to focus on his most recent work, despite the existence of a clear line of strategic continuity connecting this material to his earlier publications. As an area of academic study, contemporary literature is a fluid space, but it is this element of ambivalence that productively foregrounds aspects of the associated critical discourses that require attention. In David Peace: Texts and Contexts, Katy Shaw has produced a necessary study of an important writer; but she has also succeeded in approaching some of the wider issues linked to contemporary literary studies. When considering this field, criticism must do more than select the next man or woman of the year. What we see in Shaw’s text is the use of this point as a springboard to inaugurate a continuing assessment.

CONTEMPORARY LABOR AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE

This introduction to the special issue on “Contemporary Labor and Cultural Exchange” argues for the importance of the category of labor to the study of contemporary transnational literatures and cultures. Responding to dominant discourses on globalization as well as the debate about “world literature” within literary studies, the introduction suggests that increased attention to the routes of labor migration and cultural representations of exploited migrant labor offers a new, productive approach to the study of contemporary literature and culture. In contrast to the celebratory rhetoric of globalization which represents a “flat” and democratically interconnected world, the focus on labor migration brings to light the persistence of uneven development and exploitation, and the frequent isolation of migrant workers, even as the surplus value they generate plays a major role in the global economy. Written at a time when many U.S.‐based universities are adopting the neoliberal practices of global corporations, the attention to labor in literary and cultural studies also places an emphasis on the material conditions of academic production and scholars' embeddedness in economic processes. An approach to transnational literature which follows the cartography of labor migration and uneven development could become a vital alternative to the “world literature” curriculum which tends to disregard economic inequality.

Reading and Being Read: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as Literary Agent

Reading and Being ReadJamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place as Literary Agent Lesley Larkin (bio) If as teachers of literature we teach reading, literature can be our teacher as well as our object of investigation. . . . Our own undecidable meaning is in the irreducible figure that stands in for the eyes of the other. This is the effortful task: to displace the fear of our faceless students, behind whom are the eyes of the global others. Otherwise, who crawls into the place of the “human” of “humanism” at the end of the day, even in the name of diversity? —Gayatri Spivak Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master’s yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings. —Jamaica Kincaid In her 2003 work, Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak calls for university teachers to understand literature as a teacher in its own right. “If as teachers of literature we teach reading,” Spivak writes, then “literature can be our teacher as well as our object of investigation” (23). Imagining literature—especially literature categorized as “ethnic” or “global”—as a pedagogical agent, Spivak calls for a shift in institutional power, one that counters the intransigent asymmetry in Western universities that presents ethnic and global “others” to Western subjects for analysis rather than dialogue. Such reading encounters avoid submitting readers to a counterhegemonic gaze while they ponder feelings of self-difference1 (“our own undecidable meaning”) in response to encounters with ethnic difference (Death 23). Such reading encounters are also, Spivak suggests, scenes of subjection at which readers occupy the “place of the human” in contradistinction to persons figured by the ethnic literary text (Death 23). Despite multiculturalism’s effort to challenge the exclusive category of the human, the privileged “place” of this category in the university has not been eliminated. And although the postmodern human2 is not ascribed the stability that was previously the hallmark, however false, of its predecessors, it is imbued with a similar privilege—one that is transacted against “others” retained as objects of intellectual labor. In the context of contemporary literary studies, the place of the human continues to be occupied by privileged reading subjects.3 [End Page 193] It is against the interpellation of the postmodern human that Spivak warns her audience of literature professors. And it is to literature that she turns for remedy. But her solution is not simple, for readers, particularly university students, are often blind to the lessons in critical self-reflection many works of ethnic literature offer—not least because they are encouraged to view such literature instrumentally. (How will reading this work help me compete against global peers?) Encounters with ethnic literatures are not enough to dislodge readers from positions of privilege or to “displace the fear” of lost privilege Spivak identifies in her “faceless students” (Death 23). Acknowledging that the presence of diverse literatures is not a sufficient condition for the wholesale reordering of power relations within the academy, Spivak presents literature not as an object to be mastered but as a pedagogical agent—a teacher. It is with Spivak’s call in mind that I turn to Jamaica Kincaid’s devastating account of tourism, A Small Place (1988), which anticipates and extends Spivak’s formulation of literature as pedagogical agent. Kincaid’s brief collection of essays, which takes on Antigua’s tourist economy, selfish tourists, hapless “natives,” corrupt politicians, and the slavers and slaves that preceded them all, functions quite deliberately as a teacher. Using second-person address throughout, A Small Place points the finger at its actual readers, critiquing contemporary reading practices for their affinity with global tourism and imperialism. Even more dramatically, this text teaches readers how to read it as it unfolds. Rhonda Frederick has captured the pedagogical force of A Small Place in a persuasive essay detailing her teaching strategies. Arguing against the impulse to mollify “mainstream” students by encouraging identificatory reading...

Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

The Novel and the Nation: The Case of David Grossman’s See Under: Love

While Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is a crucial reference point in studies of the relations between the novel genre and the nation, it is often forgotten that he locates the link between the two in a particular “apprehension of time”. The first part of this article returns to Anderson’s thesis in order to show that, as different tendencies in contemporary literary studies have recognized, the critical potential of the novel genre lies in its ability to construct a different apprehension of time. The second part of the article applies this insight to the case of David Grossman’s See Under: Love (1986). While Grossman’s novel is routinely recognized as a major intervention in Israel’s national imaginary, and especially in the way the nation related to the Holocaust, this reading underlines that such an intervention is made possible by its reorganization of the ‘timing’ of the nation. A close reading of the novel reveals that it stages and dismisses two different ‘timings’ of the nation, while it constructs a different temporality that affirms rather than dismisses or trivializes the paradoxical simultaneity of the past and the present. This operation is related to the tradition of so-called “secular messianism”, which was famously instantiated in the work of Walter Benjamin. As Anderson’s thesis on the link between novel and nation is itself explicitly indebted to this aspect of Benjamin’s work, this reading of Grossman’s novel demonstrates the continuing relevance of Anderson’s thesis for an understanding of the novel genre’s critical potential.

Kategoria motta we współczesnym literaturoznawstwie

In the contemporary literary studies, the category ‘motto’ has a well-established position, although one often meets an opinion that a uniform theory of universal motto has not been developed yet. This article is an attempt to synthesise the existing findings about the motto. It presents an overview of the most interesting research positions. This allows us to illustrate, in general terms, how the meaning of the motto changed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and how it evolved from a very general blurry meaning to the one representing the main characteristics of intertextuality.

Internet and literature — Some recent Hungarian examples

Digital storage and retrieval of texts has been in the focus of an entire branch of contemporary literary studies. Literary texts online meant a new step, allowing readers to access (and editors to build and modify) the corpus in a radically new way, via the Internet. A recent development, however, the era of the network (with its “community sites” and all the different interactive communications between users) raises quite new issues. In addition to problems of archiving, accessibility and connectibility, the issues of literature produced and received on the Internet came to the fore, and deserve interest and theoretical reflection in their own right. In this study, some cases from the Hungarian internet scene concerning the temporality, authorial position, collective production, etc. are described, in order to call for a more systematic and thorough survey of these phenomena in general.

Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of ChristFilm Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of Christ. Thomas Leitch . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. ix+354.

<i>Thomas Leitch,</i> Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From <i>Gone with the Wind</i> to <i>The Passion of Christ</i><i>Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From <i>Gone with the Wind</i> to <i>The Passion of Christ</i></i>. Thomas Leitch . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. ix+354.

Alienation in Irvine Welsh’s &lt;i&gt;Trainspotting&lt;/i&gt;

This article examines how Melvin Seeman’s theory of alienation (1959) and modern alienation research manifest in Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting”. This is an important novel, not only because of its commercial success, but also because it depicts a specific marginalised subculture. Postmodernism and systems theory approaches, as well as changes in the social and political spheres have motivated researchers such as Geyer (1996), Kalekin-Fishman (1998) and Neal and Collas (2000) to reinterpret Seeman’s theory. This article attempts to incorporate this new theory of alienation in the analysis of contemporary fiction. Seeman identifies five aspects of alienation, namely powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, social isolation and self-estrangement. Following Neal and Collas (2000), in particular, this article omits self-estrangement, but shows how the other four aspects of alienation have changed since Seeman’s formulation. It is argued that “Trainspotting” depicts a specific occurrence of alienation in modern western society, besides normlessness, meaninglessness, and social isolation, highlighting Seeman’s concept of powerlessness, in particular. The article further argues that applying Seeman’s theory of alienation in the study of contemporary literature provides a fresh theoretical approach that contributes to the understanding of how fiction engages with its environment.

‘To the Indian Names are Subjoined a Mark and Seal’: Tracing the Terrain of Ojibwe Literature

In Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe boast the first Native American literary writer in print circulation – through her husband Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s The Literary Voyager (1826–1827). While the Tsalagi (Cherokee) probably boast more individual writers in the 19th-century with the prevalence of journalism from the late 1820s onwards; and while numerous epistolary and conversion narratives, not to mention the transcriptions of traditional songs and stories, precede Schoolcraft’s publication, Ojibwe writing in all forms has proliferated. Gerald Vizenor, among others, has claimed that by the late 20th-century the Ojibwe ‘claim more published writers than any other tribe on [the North American] continent’. This essay summarises the growth of that literary archive, considering a variety of relationships to two kinds of ‘text’, the pictographic legacy of rock art and birchbark scrolls, and the littoral legacy of treaties and federal documentation, that leave their mark across a range of Ojibwe writing. It seeks to briefly outline the changing nature of Literary Criticism as it pertains to Native American literatures, while considering claims to continuity between literary culture and earlier forms of ‘textual’ record common to the Ojibwe. Looking, ultimately, at some of the ways in which the thematisation of resistance and endurance, and the prevalence of the image of the document, and the self-conscious reflection on text and textuality, characterise aesthetic and formal choices in a number of Ojibwe texts, the essay proposes several points of contact between the historical, political, and literary claims of contemporary Native American Literary studies.

Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn

Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn Heather Love (bio) There is perhaps no term that carries more value in the humanities than “rich.” In literary studies especially, richness is an undisputed—if largely uninterrogated—good; it signifies qualities associated with the complexity and polyvalence of texts and with the warmth and depth of experience. There is, to be sure, no necessary connection between the intricacy of texts and the intricacy of human feeling and cognition. Nor is there a necessary connection between the capacity to interpret such texts and the ability to respond justly and empathetically to the ethical dilemmas represented in them. Even so, this is a busy intersection. The link between the richness of human experience and processes of textual interpretation can be understood, on the one hand, through the origin of philosophical hermeneutics in practices of divination and, on the other, through the significance of the communicative situation in defining hermeneutics. The text, in its singularity, is both an access to otherness and a message or call to attention. A belief in the aesthetic and ethical force of literature is evident in the work of midcentury critics like Cleanth Brooks (“The poet . . . must return to us the unity of experience itself as man knows it in his own experience”) and Lionel Trilling (“literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty”).1 It also appears in the work of Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for whom literature signals the inexhaustibility of human potential.2 It appears as well in recent arguments against theory and on behalf of New Formalism (“literature could pose the largest issues of social and personal destiny in a vividly human context”) and in the recent turn to ethics, which, as Dorothy J. Hale writes, “has been accompanied by a new celebration of literature.”3 If the encounter with a divine and inscrutable message was progressively secularized in the twentieth century, the opacity and ineffability of the text and the ethical demand to attend to it remain central to practices of literary interpretation today. [End Page 371] Given the subsumption of many aspects of religion into the concept of culture after the Enlightenment, it is not surprising that these sacred aspects of hermeneutics should survive into the era of secular modernity. What is more surprising is that its humanist aspects have such a continued presence in supposedly anti- or posthumanist literary studies. The rise of interpretive practices borrowed from Marxism and psychoanalysis, structuralism and poststructuralism, and semiotics and deconstruction has displaced the individual and consciousness from the center of inquiry, shifting attention to structures of language, desire, or economic capital. At the same time, political forms of criticism such as feminism, postcolonial studies, African-American studies, diaspora studies, and queer studies have critiqued humanism by pointing to its founding exclusions. Common to the rise of these theoretical and political fields is a disavowal of earlier critical movements—particularly the New Criticism—that are understood to embody the shortcomings of humanist philosophy. In critiques of the canon, the text, organicism, the nation, culture, and tradition—as well as the very concept of the human—the anchors of humanistic criticism have come under sustained and powerful attack in the past several decades. Still, despite widespread rumors of the death of humanism, key humanist values remain alive and well in literary studies. What to make of this persistence of humanist values in the context of a disciplinary milieu that often sees them as outmoded? It might be explained as a typical contradiction between intellectual conviction and lived practice—there are no doubt de facto humanists among posthumanists, just as there are Marxist heroes of consumption.4 More persuasive accounts of the persistence of humanism in contemporary literary studies can be found in histories of the discipline. While critics like Gerald Graff and John Guillory focus on the stabilizing role of universities, departments, and syllabi, Ian Hunter turns his attention to the role of teaching.5 In his essay “The History of Theory,” Hunter traces the persistence of humanist ethics in literary studies, suggesting that both “the New Criticism and the literary theory that displaced...

Runouden kuva elintilaa etsimässä

The Poetic Image in Search for Living Space In my article, I examine the concept of image, a concept which has been particularly problematic in the research of poetry. I will demonstrate that the previous definitions of the concept have been incoherent, too general and even contradictory. In contemporary literary studies, the concept of image has been used as a generali¬zation encompassing various figures of speech. At the same time, it has been understood as a “pure image”, a concrete and literal expression of sensory perception. In the first sense, the image is in the same category as, for example, the metaphor, the symbol, and the allegory, whereas in the second sense it is given a specific definition of its own. In a sense, this confusing terminology is understandable given that the concept of image in literature and poetry is metaphorical from the outset. Nevertheless, terminological incoherence is not acceptable because of the major contradictions in the broader sense of the concept of image. In Yrjö Hosiaisluoma’s definition, image is a singular visualizing expression in a text. According to Hosiaisluoma, in the modern poetry the image has been understood mostly as a “pure image” and only secondarily as a figure of speech. On the other hand, Janna Kantola argues that the metaphor, the allegory and the symbol all belong to a group of tropes, in which words are separated from their literal senses. One of my objectives is to demonstrate the major difference between metaphorical and literal use of ‘image’. The divergence is so crucial that it is impossible to consider the image as a trope. My article considers three themes. First I read critically Aarne Kinnunen’s delineation of the notion of “pure image” in his essay “Jumalaton avaruus”. It is crucial to discuss Kinnunen’s essay because it is probably the most cited discussion of the concept of image in the Finnish literary research, along with Tuomas Anhava’s article “Runon uudistumisesta”. However, Kinnunen’s essay is mostly referred to only in passing, so I find it necessary to analyze the essay here in more detail. I associate Kinnunen’s thoughts about image to new criticism and structuralism. In the second part, I compare metaphor and image with the help of Eva Feder Kittay’s model of the structure of the metaphor. I study the semiotic means of showing the difference between image and metaphor. In addition, I consider the difficulties that Saussurean semiotics faces in defining the concept of image. In the third part, I introduce phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard’s term “the poetic image” (une image poétique) in order to demonstrate how phenomenology fills the gaps that structuralism leaves open in the analysis of image. My principal argument in this article is that the image should be interpreted above all as an ontological phenomenon. In its way of eagerly analyzing semantics, semiotics has forgotten the ontological question of Being. Image is not just about describing the external reality; rather, it is about having a fundamental view of the world, a certain stance towards the surrounding reality.

In the Remains of Theory: Ethical Criticism in Contemporary Literary Studies

In the Remains of Theory: Ethical Criticism in Contemporary Literary Studies

Unbecoming Rizal: José Garcia Villa's Biographical Translations

José Garcia Villa is best known as a modernist Filipino poet who migrated to America in the 1930s. Much critical discussion of Villa in Philippine literary studies has emphasised his narrow concern with aestheticism and his rejection of contemporary demands to politicise artistic production. This paper returns to Villa's first short story collection Footnote of Youth (1933) and argues for a reconsideration of the politics of Villa's modernist aesthetics. In particular, I wish to concentrate on a series of short stories at the end of the collection that present revisionary ‘shadow biographies’ of revolutionary hero José Rizal, whose own life story and novels have attained, in Carol Hau 's words, the status of ‘master-narratives’ of the Philippine nation, with Rizal himself portrayed as the ‘First Filipino’. Apart from engaging in translation across language in a multilingual environment, the short stories are translations in a larger sense. They re-present elements of longer narratives such as biography and indeed the ‘biographisation of the social’ deployed by the colonial and bourgeois national states in a consciously fragmentary form. Furthermore, they map such biographies onto the lives of ordinary Filipinos in a manner that destabilises them: on a rational level, the claims of filiation made in these stories are preposterous, yet the narrative and literary economies of the texts encourage readerly identification with their subaltern protagonists. In exploring the space of contradiction that Villa's stories occupy, and the manner in which their formal qualities enable a reappraisal of this space, this paper also to makes a larger argument concerning the frequently neglected centrality of the short story and life-writing in exploring national imaginaries under late colonialism, and encourages reflection on the manner in which biographisation is an unacknowledged subtext in contemporary postcolonial literary studies.

The Politics of the State in Contemporary Literary Studies

AbstractThe relationship between literature and the state has been controversial since the time of Plato. Until recently, however, the few scholars to write on this subject considered it an underdeveloped topic in literary studies. This survey article argues that the last 10 years that have seen marked growth in literary‐critical interest in the state form of government. It explains this growth as a product of two, apparently contradictory, historical phenomena: (i) the way that government responses to political violence (especially after the 9/11 attacks) have demonstrated the awesome power of the state; and (ii) the way that, under the aegis of neoliberal economic policy, the long‐standing welfare and regulatory functions of the state have been eroded. These historical patterns have given rise to two strands of critical discourse, which the article describes as the ‘critique of sovereignty’ (i.e., the inherently coercive nature of state power) and the ‘defense of social citizenship’ (i.e., the right to welfare services). The article describes these trends and exemplifies them by reference to recent books and articles in literary theory and criticism; it also demonstrates their consequences for literary interpretation through illustrative readings of fiction by J. M. Coetzee, James Kelman, Louise Dean, and Hari Kunzru. It concludes by pointing out the contradictory nature of state power at the present time, where the state’s resort to sovereign violence is (at least in part) a response to the loss of the legitimating power of its welfare function. For this reason, the critique of sovereignty and the defense of social citizenship should be seen as distinct responses to the same historical situation.

ANDREW HASS, DAVID JASPER and ELISABETH JAY (eds), The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology.

‘AND the Word (Logos) was made flesh’ (John 1:14); ‘and they two shall be one flesh’ (Ephesians 5:31). When do two distinct disciplines (logoi) become one? This volume seeks to set out the approximate working parameters and boundaries of a relatively new inter-disciplinary discipline—‘English Literature and Theology’. The future is bright according to one editor (Hass)—this is ‘a field that, in its very evolution, seems to be outstripping its own designations, “literature” and “theology” ’ (842). Faced with the no-doubt sobering task of charting this dynamic marriage in a meaningful way which will stand the test of time, the editors sensibly opted to allow the contributors a considerable degree of freedom. So, rather than designing the volume as a comprehensive survey intended largely for reference (what I would normally imagine a ‘handbook’ to be), they invited the contributors to address ‘key moments and developments in the mutual engagement of theology and literature’ (xv). This has resulted in a good measure of high-quality, discursive contributions, some of which are outstanding. There is a drawback though: as one of the editors readily admits (Jay, 12), their emphasis on ‘key moments’ has resulted in a clear bias towards historical themes and relatively traditional texts, so that the resultant demography might be described largely as white English, male, and Anglican, hardly reflecting the breadth of contemporary literary study nor of theology. Interestingly, the contributions which concern ‘outsiders’ who struggled against the demographic flow (e.g. Joyce, Newman, George Eliot) are among the most penetrating.