Discipline Of Literary Studies Research Articles

Crisis and critique in Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021)

ABSTRACT To date, literary fiction’s interventions into debates about the crisis in literary studies, and contestations over critical methods, have received scant scholarly attention. Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind treats the idea of crisis with irony, utilising overstatement in the novel’s narrative discourse to draw attention to crisis discourse’s inefficacy in delivering meaningful change. The novel represents literary critique, especially as extended to non-literary objects, as a compulsion; and, as failing to result in action. Instead, in The Life of the Mind, crisis and critique are discursive conventions which culminate in the protagonist remaining in a suspended emotional and economic state. This paper draws its theoretical approach from the novel’s intertexts, including Lauren Berlant’s conceptions of crisis ordinariness and impasse, and contextualises The Life of the Mind in relation to its intervention into discussions about critique and reading methodologies. Literary criticism and literary fiction are portrayed as being in a state of impasse in Smallwood’s novel. Despite Berlant’s (and Ann Cvetkovich’s) guarded sense of impasse as a state of potential, in The Life of the Mind impasse is regarded ironically; progress in the protagonist’s situation, in the discipline of literary studies, and in the practice of critique, are questionable.

Moving between worlds: Creativity, disability and storytelling

In this essay, the author, using second person, considers the path her deaf body has taken to become a writer and an academic. She contrasts the strictures of the neoliberal university with the creativity that comes from deafness; a creativity that has fostered a generative movement between the disciplines of literary studies and creative writing. She considers the importance of combining the study of Australian literature with the study of creative writing and concludes by dwelling upon an architectural ethos that is predicated upon the care of deaf learners – DeafSpace.

Introduction: Thirty Years after Cultural Capital

Abstract This essay considers the status of John Guillory's Cultural Capital thirty years after its publication. Responding to an ongoing crisis in the humanities (which seems never to have passed) and to the “canon wars” of literary studies in the 1980s and 1990s, Cultural Capital refocused the debate about literary canons and aesthetic value away from contests of judgment in order to describe the social and institutional contexts of canon formation. What emerges from Guillory's Bourdieusian framework is a brilliant account not only of the process of canon formation but also of the professional anxieties that attend arguments about canonicity and representation. The essay explores the structure of Guillory's argument and considers why this work has been largely absent in recent debates about the state of the profession and the discipline of literary studies. The essay then introduces each contribution to this special issue, which seeks to bring Guillory's theory of canon formation back into contemporary debates about the future of literary studies, the politics of cultural representation, and the state of the humanities in crisis.

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Keeping Faith with Literature

Keeping Faith with Literature

Our Advisor

In recognition of the distinguished scholar J. Hillis Miller's long service to the journal as an advisory editor and author, Genre has reprinted a transcript of a symposium to conclude the conference “Contemporary Genre Theory and the Yale School.” The conference was held at the University of Oklahoma in 1984. Panelists Barbara Johnson, Louis Mackey, and J. Hillis Miller comment on work presented at the conference over the previous two days and respond to questions from the audience. Much of the discussion focuses on an appraisal of the differences between deconstructive and Marxist approaches within the discipline of literary studies.

Literature Counts: The Feelings of Overwhelmed

Literature Counts: The Feelings of <i>Overwhelmed</i>

Transatlantic Address: Washington Allston and the Limits of Romanticism

Transatlantic Address: Washington Allston and the Limits of Romanticism Meredith L. McGill (bio) One of the most interesting phases of jerome mcgann’s career has been his recent turn to writing about nineteenth-century American literature. One might say this turn isn’t altogether recent: his 1993 book on “The Visible Language of Modernism” takes its title from Stephen Crane’s Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and includes a sustained meditation on Emily Dickinson’s investment in the visual aspect of her writing.1 But since 2014, when he published two books—A New Republic of Letters, which includes substantial chapters on Edgar Allan Poe and James Fenimore Cooper, and The Poet Edgar Allan Poe—the pendulum of McGann’s attention has swung decisively in a transatlantic direction.2 This shift is particularly welcome to those who study nineteenth-century American literature—and especially American poetry—within a transatlantic context. A prominent Romanticist’s fascination with American texts and cultural formations does much to counter asymmetries in prestige and in critical attention that have long structured the transatlantic literary field. Admittedly, most students of nineteenth-century literature on both sides of the Atlantic have been content to write national histories that rarely, if ever, intersect with one another. Critics have addressed the great themes of Atlantic history, recognizing the importance of transatlantic trade and the transformative effects of the forced and voluntary migration of peoples, but they have done so largely from within the confines of nationally framed literary traditions. Indeed, as I noted over a decade ago in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), it would be difficult to underestimate the sway of the idea of a national literature over the discipline of literary study, structuring as it still does undergraduate [End Page 475] instruction, graduate training, and professional formation.3 A tacit or explicit literary nationalism continues to organize departments of English despite the fact that complexly intertwining histories of language and culture, publication, and literary form tug against the often unquestioned binary division of the field into British and American literatures. While specialists in nineteenth-century Anglophone literature share an atavistic, nationalist commitment to our materials of study, asymmetries of attention rooted in Romantic-era hierarchies of value continue to ensure that, while Americanists must grapple with British literary precedent and evaluate the literature they study against the backdrop of the dominant tradition, Romanticists and Victorianists are free to ignore contemporaneous literary production in Great Britain’s former American colonies. Even important recent scholarship that boldly reconceives nineteenth-century British literature in transnational terms repeats this omission: Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (2017) and Jason R. Rudy’s Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (2017) track the colonial uptake of British poetic forms and poetic ideals in India, British Guiana, Australia, Canada, and South Africa, but omit Britain’s former colony, the newly independent United States, from their field of vision.4 In Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2016), Daniel Hack examines the complexity of African American writers’ engagement with a broad range of British texts, but treats African American literature largely in isolation from larger trends in American literary history.5 The rising prestige of the American novel in the twentieth century has ensured that numerous comparative studies embrace the work of writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and James,6 but the exclusion of [End Page 476] nineteenth-century American poetry from serious transnational consideration—outside of the work of our two proto-modernists, Whitman and Dickinson—is striking.7 One can easily lay the blame for this omission at the feet of Americanist critics who tend to regard Americanness in poetry as discernible only in a break with British poetic norms. We have only recently begun to develop a critical language nuanced and flexible enough to describe the heady mix of cosmopolitanism and provinciality, originality and imitation, postcoloniality, and national and imperial ambition that characterizes metrically regular, formally recognizable American verse. Americanists tend to be embarrassed by the bombastic claims made by nineteenth-century poets and critics who proclaimed the virtues of now-obscure...

Literary History after Literary Dominance

Abstract The various pronouncements of the nation’s dissolution seem to have been premature. Literary history is still very much within the nation, especially if one considers the realm of the middle- and lowbrow, or indeed the vast swaths of genre fiction. What has changed in literary history is the position of literature itself. The discipline of literary study (whether one thinks of it as literary history or literary criticism) institutionalized itself during a period of literary dominance. Now that that dominance is over—now that the field of narrative aesthetic culture includes television, film, and video games, and now that those genres dominate not only markets but the forms of representativity that used to belong almost exclusively to literature—what is the future for literary studies, either as a scholarly discipline or as an institutional field?

Reading the Party

This article outlines an approach to understanding festivity through the lens of literary texts. Studies of festivity in early twentieth-century literature center largely on the image of the party. Representations of parties in the literary texts of this period range widely, and the sheer number of parties found in this body of literature highlights the shared interest of writers of the time to explore the implications of festive sociability. Given these parameters a reader might expect the literature of the period to show parties positively: as utopian occasions for transformative jouissance leading to catharsis and (satisfying) narrative closure. Yet many texts of this time represent festivity not as pleasurable renewal but as unpleasurable waste. This is particularly the case in fiction by the English satirist Evelyn Waugh (1903–66). In Waugh’s texts, celebration tends toward destructive (rather than restorative) disorder. This paper will read Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies (1930) and short story “Cruise: Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure” (1933), using Roger Caillois’s theory of games, to explore the ways in which parties become sites of wasteful play. Moreover, as this article will demonstrate, literary texts are central documents for understanding the cultural history and subjective experience of parties. They evidence the felt and imagined experiences of social and moral transgression; bodily, mental and affective transformation; and class, race, gender, and sexual boundary-crossing occasioned by festivity. In that sense, the discipline of literary studies can contribute to a robust interdisciplinary approach to understanding festivity.

Pristed, Birgitte Beck The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History (review)

REVIEWS 555 Soviet lyric and its development by three female poets, concluding that ‘[w]omen’s lyric subjectivity is human lyric subjectivity, which is no small achievement’ (p. 241). Ilya Kukulin’s contribution focuses on contemporary narrative poetry, in particular the new ways in which it presents and talks about history. In the volume’s final chapter, Boris Wolfson examines new drama, a loose set of texts connected by the persistent presence of violence and a pervasive motif of disappearance along with a specific approach to performance. This richly detailed compendium of essays will be of interest to scholars, students of contemporary Russian literature and culture, and pedagogues; for the latter group especially so if utilized in tandem with Late and Post-Soviet Literature: a Reader (Boston, MA, 2014), also edited by Lipovetsky. Sewanee: The University of the South Elizabeth Skomp Pristed, Birgitte Beck. The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, London and New York, 2017. xvii + 343 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €106.99:£74.50. Birgitte Beck Pristed’s well-researched and generously illustrated book is a ground-breaking study of contemporary Russian book design. As the author states in her Introduction, ‘Post-Soviet book covers are striking and confusing’. Taking this challenging formula as her premise, Pristed embarks on a mission to elucidate ‘the obtrusive but largely ignored problem of the visual representation of fiction in contemporary Russian book design’ (p. 1). She begins by explaining the main reasons why the rapidly evolving market of Russian book covers merits academic attention: first, they offer a unique material for analysis that illustrates a radically changing notion of literature; secondly, ‘cover images are consciously and often aggressively used to position contemporary Russian prose’; and, thirdly, one can find among the covers of mass-published post-Soviet series ‘gems from experimental designers, whose advanced artistic conceptualizations of the book are different from but not inferior to the book art of the 1920s avant-garde and the 1970s underground Moscow conceptualists’ (p. 2). Following these magisterial guidelines, Birgitte Beck Pristed attempts to position her research between the disciplines of literary studies, book history, visual and media studies, while examining contrasting Western and Soviet theoretical ideas of the book. The volume under review unfolds along three main thematic axes which correspond structurally to its three parts. Part one covers Russian book design from the Soviet period to the present; part two is devoted to changing values SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 556 in the visual representation of literature; and, finally, part three, entitled ‘Three Generations of Russian Book Designers’, deals with the individual works of three contemporary Russian book designers, Arkadii Troianker, Andrei Bondarenko and Aleksandr Utkin. Each part is further divided into sections (ranging between three to four chapters in each). If the first part, as mentioned above, surveys a graphic cultural history of fiction publishing in Russia, the second is more analytically-oriented, in which Pristed systematically compares the covers of a selection of Russian editions of three literary works that represent ‘respectively, a piece of classic, popular, and contemporary fiction’ (p. 3). Pristed approaches several book design cases as examples of a concrete publishing product and as objects of visual analysis. Her three case studies focus on the pre-Revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet editions of Anton Chekhov’s short story, ‘Dama s sobachkoi’ (‘The Lady with the Little Dog’); the Russian book covers of the English crime story, The World in My Pocket by James Hadley Chase; and, lastly, the many Russian editions of Viktor Pelevin’s 1999 novel, Generation ‘P’(therationaleforchoosingGeneration ‘P’was to explore visual representation strategies in the modern Russian book market). Although Chekhov, Chase and Pelevin refrain from taking an overt ideological position intheirworks,accordingtoPristedallthreewritershavebeeninstrumentalized for various political discussions and values. In all three case studies, Pristed’s aim is to analyse the changing relationship between text, image and material, and to discuss how this change impacts upon the notion of the literary work through its redesign and reinterpretation within Russian book culture. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book reveals the mechanisms behind one of the most interesting post-Soviet publishing enterprises, the Ad...

The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary CriticismRace and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett

The Social Imperative: Race, Close Reading, and Contemporary Literary CriticismRace and the Literary Encounter: Black Literature from James Weldon Johnson to Percival Everett

Differences in the Discipline of Literary Study

Differences in the Discipline of Literary Study

Measuring the Measuring Rod: Bible and Parabiblical Texts within the History of Medieval Literature

In spite of the acknowledged crucial role it had in forming medieval written culture, the Bible and a wide-range of parabiblical texts still remain largely ignored by histories of medieval literatures. The reason for this striking omission of an important group of medieval texts from the 'canonical' narratives is, as I argue, the strong bias in favour of national, secular, fictional, and original texts which shapes literary studies – an inheritance from the nineteenth-century nationalising approaches discussed in the first issue of the Interfaces journal. Of course, the discipline of literary studies and therefore selection, hierarchization, and interpretation are complex social, cultural and political processes where almost anything is possible. It is the environment, the interpretive community, in which the interpretation takes place that has a decisive role. And that, too, is constantly being transformed. Thus, there are no final categories and answers because as long as there are interpretive communities, meanings are generated and operate in new ways. That is why the present discussion does not aim to claim that many of the parabiblical texts are literature and should have been included in the canon of medieval literature. Rather, I examine what the nineteenth-century notion of canon did to these texts and how the current questioning and substantial reshaping of notions of canon can transform our understanding of parabiblical texts.

Thomas Malthus and Nikolai Chernyshevskii: Struggle for Existence or Mutual Help?

This paper compares and contrasts dystopian counterfactual thought experiments in Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) on the one hand and the utopian vision of the future in Chernyshevskii's novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) on the other hand. Chernyshevskii's future forecast appears in Vera Pavlovna's fourth dream (Chapter XVI) and arguably constitutes Russia's answer to Malthusian theories, an interpretation that is supported by the novelist's critical writings. Malthus' vision of the future is based on the assumption that a constant struggle for existence between individuals is inevitable within human society: he believes that there will always be a shortage of food and other natural resources, since population grows much faster than food production. With reference to closely related theories by Darwin and Kropotkin, the present article argues that for Černyševskij, in contrast, one of the most fundamental principles underlying interpersonal relations is mutual help, which leads to cooperation and teamwork for the sake of the common good. The method used for this analysis is interdisciplinary, combining critical tools from the disciplines of literary studies and philosophy. While numerous studies have been devoted to Vera Pavlovna's fourth dream, the novelty of the above approach lies in reappraising this famous chapter by reading it as a thought experiment. This experiment plays through the Malthusian scenario of population growth and results in a completely different outcome. Such an analysis sheds light both on Chernyshevskii's model of the future and on the epistemic value of literary thought experiments within a wider cultural and scholarly context.

Kasaysayan, Sining, Lipunan: Ang Politika ng Panitikan sa Makabagong Panahon

Given the reality of our neocolonial situation, the discipline of literary study fulfills its received pedagogical function of converting reason-bearing individuals into obedient subjects. This normative ideology represses criticism, concealing the lived experience of exploitation and class conficts. The concept of ideology itself is suppressed, replaced with accepted terms and approved habits of interpretation. Meanings of art-works are identified with the single author’s identity, thus ignoring or excluding their enabling contexts and institutional practices. Using a symptomatic, historicist reading of Lualhati Bautista’s novel as an example, this essay argues that the ideology of texts differs from that of the author owing to diverse mediating factors. Current forces of alienation and reification intervene. Through their own mechanisms of interpellation, texts transform readers into subjects who attempt to imaginarily resolve real social contradictions. Given our multilingual and multiethnic audience, the choice of language for literary expression becomes crucial in the process of articulating textual meanings as multifaceted, dynamic reflections of specific conjunctures in Philippine history.

Is it just too Catholic for us? The reception of I promessi sposi and the problem of religion and literature

This paper examines the American and Italian reception of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi. It places the American reception of Manzoni within a larger context of the anti-Catholic nativism that has pervaded American society and academe. The reception of Manzoni in Italy, in contrast, is marked by anti-clericism. The case study of Manzoni’s reception raises the larger issue of the role of the study of religion within the discipline of literary studies.

Scales of Reading

We read according to different scales: fast or slow, selective or thorough, deeply or skimming along. What is at stake in scalar variations like these? Quite a lot, this essay argues. The contrast between close reading and distant reading, as formulated by Franco Moretti, raises provocative challenges for the discipline of literary study. Moretti’s claim that “knowing is not reading” exemplifies the current devaluation — and undertheorization — of the kind of knowledge that close reading produces. “Distant reading” converges with recent critiques of historicism, experiments in machinic reading, and narratives of the “turn away from the linguistic turn” to foreground the epistemological limits of interpreting individual texts. In light of these challenges, I advocate the reexamination of precisely what we learn through close reading. This project, of articulating anew the terms of literary-historical understanding, may be aided by resources of the hermeneutic tradition — although the possibility seems out of step with current “antihermeneutic” ideas. I argue that scale remains a literary event and that units of analysis derive from processes of interpretation. We need disciplinary accounts that incorporate both intrinsic and extrinsic sources of meaning and that explain why experiences of reading have validity as sources of knowledge.

Constructing an Interdisciplinary Course on Literature and Environmental Feminism

Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 333 Melanie Dawson Constructing an Interdisciplinary Course on Literature and Environmental Feminism In her recent book, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet, Elizabeth Ammons describes her investment in environmental literature, a subject matter that is appealing to her in part because of its roots in what she casts as tangible realities. Ammons positions ecocritical work as a corrective to her perception of academic abstraction. Creating contrasts between environmental writing and a literary emphasis on what she terms the “‘inexpressibility’ of language,” Ammons views the former as privileging real-world consequences that ground the text and, with it, the discipline of literary study.1 While I understand the intersection of world and text in somewhat different ways and have no wish to suggest that ecological criticism is valuable because of its referentiality alone, there is in ecofeminist writing a real-world application that helps students both probe literary texts and confront theoretical complexity in ways that are enhanced by the kinds of tangible realities Ammons highlights. Powerfully organizing the ways that students imagine their personal and collective pasts as well as their material, corporeal, and familial futures, environmental writing offers various avenues through which to address feminist concerns—those situated in the colonial past, the present day, or the 1. Elizabeth Ammons, Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010), 5. 334 Melanie Dawson dystopian future. From global climate change to rising food prices and ethical approaches to the consumption of fuel, food, and imports of all kinds, environmentally sensitive literature confronts a host of social, economic, and gendered consequences. Like Ammons, I am a specialist in late nineteenth- and early twentieth -century US fiction who, like many teaching in this era, encourages students to interrogate fiction in light of historical contexts. I view environmentally oriented writing as approachable through mechanisms very similar to the historically saturated approaches to literature that have supplied the grounding of many scholars who were educated in the 1990s and beyond. Environmental concerns offer unique opportunities to explore fiction in light of historicized narratives of land use; they also encourage readers to investigate the consequences of alterations to the natural world, which are now proceeding at an unprecedented rate of speed. The genetic modification of edible plants, for example, as well as species depletion, weather-related disasters, and massive oil spills can be invoked to argue that it is precisely the time to historicize the present and to imagine the tangible consequences of environmental change in the making. Many of the texts I teach in my Feminism and the Environment course (taught at the undergraduate level in the English department and cross-listed with the women’s studies program) posit that at moments of historic rupture and cataclysmic disaster, social structures alter so as to limit women’s access to resources and power. Linking domination of the environment to the domination of women (a connection that ecofeminist theory helps elucidate for students), fictions such as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) urge readers to recognize the ideological components of responses to environmental change. Alongside other readings in the class, these fictions imply that environmental change can be used to justify hierarchies of gender as well as class and race in the service of reasserting order in the wake of disaster. Invested as such fictions are in the conditions that alter social structures, they assert that “the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land” can be used to consolidate and intensify forms of political and social control , as in Suzanne Collins’s 2008 novel The Hunger Games, with which I began my class in fall 2012. As the quotation above suggests, the damaged and shrinking land mass of North America brought about a “brutal Melanie Dawson 335 war for what little sustenance remained” and led to victory on the part of Panem, the repressive state that stages a brutal spectacle of its domination over the nation’s youth.2 In exploring what ecofeminists recognize as interwoven...

Headlong into futurity

‘So, with a kind of madness upon me, I flung myself into futurity.’ These are the words with which H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller powers his machine into high gear, as a result of which he will soon find himself more than 800,000 years removed into ‘futurity,’ a sufficient distance from which to speculate on the long-term effects of the profound changes occurring back in England in 1895. With this abrupt gesture, Wells also pretty much invented speculative fiction, the literary genre which self-consciously addresses the present by flinging the technology of today into the futurity of an imagined tomorrow. This genre constitutes something of a secret sharer to the conventional history of technology, which operates primarily by tracing genealogies of the technology of today into the lived past of the last few centuries. To consider the relationship between literature (or art or culture) and the history of technology is to consider the relationship between speculating about the future and studying the past, between what the philosopher Ernst Bloch termed the ‘anticipatory consciousness’ of cultural production and what historians can verify or at least hypothesize about what actually happened in the past. This distinction manifests itself in many ways in the literature, art and culture of technology, as is evident in the range of topics and approaches in the three full-length essays and two briefer case studies on the topic that share the current issue of History and Technology with this introduction. This distinction between the study of the literature of technology and the historiography of technology should be regarded less as a stark divide than a question of perspective, which is why elements of the approaches taken by the essays here overlap with and complement those of the history of technology more strictly speaking. Nevertheless, observing where they separate from and run counter to the conventional methodologies of history and how those methodologies are changed when incorporated into the discipline of literary studies will also, hopefully, be instructive regarding what both fields can tell us about their shared object of study, what we can term in the broadest sense the ‘technological imaginary’: the range of ways in which technology is and has been conceptualized and represented. In this introduction, I discuss some key sites of overlap and divergence and suggest some of their implications both for the study of the literature, art and culture of technology and for the history of technology.