Discipline Of Literary Studies Research Articles

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.

An Introduction to the Narratological Analysis of Radio Plays

Narratology is nowadays an extensive discipline of literary studies relating to particular media (literature, fi lm or theatre) and particular disciplines (philosophy, sociology or psychology). However, this narratological plurality still fails to include numerous artistic phenomena, for example a radio play; its narratological analysis is presented in the following paper. In order to tackle the variety and complexity of a radio play, I use various methodologies drawn from the narratology of literature and fi lm and the theory of theatre. Dan Rebellato’s Cavalry serves as the prime example insofar as it demonstrates that a radio play’s general narrative features (for example, level construction and focalisation) as well as radio-specifi c features (microphone and space construction) can be successfully examined from the narratological standpoint without ignoring the specifi city and individuality of a radio play as a legitimate work of art.

Disquieting Time

For much of the twentieth century, the discipline of literary studies has grappled with the question of how its generally sotto voce activity responds to a history that calls loudly for action. This essay treats the question of literature's quietism in relation to the problem of literature's modernity and temporality. The turn away from the noise of the world at the beginning of the century has been criticized as the motivation for and the effect of modernism's obsession with time. But the modernist “time cult” did not simply withdraw into the space of the internal and eternal. By examining T. S. Eliot's complaint against time in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and engaging theoretical critiques of the desire to be modern, this essay argues that modernism explored alternatives to the static, quieted present, and that contemporary American time-travel narratives continue this exploration. Rather than see postmodernism as the inheritor of modernism's silent and disengaged moments, the essay concludes that both seek to examine the disquieting multiplicity of times and the denser, more complicated versions of the present that they engender.

Do Books Have a Place in a Shanghai World?

For those who haven’t yet noticed, there’s a tune everyone’s whistling nowadays, and it’s the tune of rankings and evaluations. We’re evaluating a lot of things, from hospitals to the work of ministries themselves, but from now on it’s the evaluation of universities and of higher education in general that will attract the most attention. And, evaluated in this manner, universities begin to regain their prestige, at long last—not once again—since these rankings and evaluations do not correspond (quite the opposite, in fact) to the glorious image that the French, it seems, would like to have of themselves. No problem! To these rankings (a new genre of human-interest story, quite useful for fi lling dead space in newspapers), our managers respond with a new battery of assessments, and everybody seems satisfi ed. Everybody but us, the assessed, such tragic fi gures—and much more tragic are those among the assessed who happen to belong to the diffi cult-to-assess discipline of literary studies.1 No matter how much each of us, according to his or her personal tastes, may jeer at, revolt against, or methodically deconstruct academic rankings (chief among them being the Shanghai ranking), our work becomes more and more infl uenced

Life: organic form and Romanticism

What makes something alive? Or, more to the point, what is life? The question is as old as the ages and has not been (and may never be) resolved. Life springs from life, and liveliness motivates matter to act the way it does. Yet vitality in its very unpredictability often appears as a threat. In this intellectually stimulating work, Denise Gigante looks at how major writers of the Romantic period strove to produce living forms of art on an analogy with biological form, often finding themselves face to face with a power known as monstrous. The poets Christopher Smart, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats were all immersed in a culture obsessed with scientific ideas about vital power and its generation, and they broke with poetic convention in imagining new forms of life. In Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, Gigante offers a way to read ostensibly difficult poetry and reflects on the natural-philosophical idea of organic form and the discipline of literary studies.

Introduction: Darwin and Literary Studies

Roughly a decade ago, it could be said that Charles Darwin's thought was notably absent from the discipline of literary studies. Although Darwin had long been seen as an important influence on specific writers or movements--Conrad and Hardy in England, for example, or American naturalism--this influence seemed to amount to little more than a fatalist recognition of the cruel logic of a godless cosmos. A major thinker of the nineteenth century, Darwin appeared to have almost no place in the various discourses that informed twentieth-century literary analysis, from Russian formalism and New Criticism through cultural materialism and queer theory. It is true that a few important works had been written in the 1980s that explicitly brought the insights and methods of contemporary theory to bear on Darwin and his cultural and intellectual legacies: here Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots, Margot Norris's Beasts of the Modern Imagination, and George Levine's Darwin and the Novelists still stand out as vibrant works of scholarship. Yet while these books are cited and praised even today, they never launched entire research programs in the manner of contemporaneous works such as Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men, or Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology. This relative absence of Darwin from literary discussion was understandable, if regrettable. After all, applications of Darwin's thought to the social, the political, and the cultural have a notorious track record, having justified both eugenicists' interventions into human reproductive rights and Social Darwinists' justifications of social and economic inequalities. Humanists could be excused for expecting that renewed efforts at Darwinian cultural analysis would only reach intellectually predictable or politically repugnant conclusions. But wariness of such reductive ideas or reactionary agendas seemed to have quietly given way to outright avoidance of Darwin and even biology itself. An epistemological skepticism or methodological rigor regarding specific lines of argument had calcified into an unchallenged assumption that any gesture toward the biological would inevitably revive the kind of false universalisms that literary studies had spent much of the 1980s and 90s unmasking. At the same time, outside of literary studies, just the opposite trend seemed to be happening: Darwin was assuming an ever-greater prominence in scholarly and other public discourses. During the 1990s several disciplines beyond the hard sciences, such as philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, were taking up Darwinian theory while journalists and popularizers pumped out one best seller after another claiming to explain all manner of phenomena in terms of evolution by natural selection. In the public sphere, the most visible of these disciplines was the field of evolutionary psychology. Building on the sociobiology worked out in the 1970s by E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, and others, evolutionary psychology explicitly sought, under the banner of Wilson's consilience, (1) to apply theoretical models from evolutionary biology to human behavior. And while its claims remain highly controversial, the discipline itself, as Dana Carluccio points out in her contribution to this issue, become astonishingly popular over the last twenty-five years, both as a research program and as a pop culture phenomenon (510). Carluccio observes: Its proliferating publishing venues, academic societies, and textbooks are echoed by journalism, novels, and movies that have trumpeted the field's hypotheses, making them as ubiquitous in US culture today as psychoanalytic notions, such as Freudian slips. Someone who has never heard of evolutionary psychology is nonetheless likely to believe that men find physical cues of female fertility (like youth) attractive because it helps them pass on their genes. (510-11) Of course, if evolutionary psychological reasoning has passed over into pop culture or common sense--or, maybe more precisely, into what John Guillory has called spontaneous philosophy (2) (Sokal 476)--it might be suspected that this transition has been effortless for the simple reason that the gap was so narrow to begin with. …

Traction

Entering college students often struggle with their professors' expectations for “analysis” since those expectations are often ingrained in disciplinary assumptions that scholars rarely need to articulate. In this essay, I argue that we need to teach analysis explicitly in first-year writing courses and that we need to help students transfer those lessons across the curriculum. By asking students to read “with” and “against” the grain of texts, I give them tangible ways to rough up and pull apart the sources we read together. Students find this language useful in helping them engage directly with sources and ideas, rather than sliding into description or summary. Reminding them that this particular approach originates in the discipline of literary studies, I then have students themselves draw conclusions about what “analysis” looks like -- and what it does -- in other disciplines by examining samples of scholarly writing.

Lesbian Oppression and Marginalization: Teaching Across the Disciplines of Literary Studies and Social Work

Lesbian Oppression and Marginalization: Teaching Across the Disciplines of Literary Studies and Social Work

Introduction: Beckett, Language and the Mind

Many studies of Beckett’s work put language at the centre of their enquiry, but few have looked at language in relation to the disciplines of neuroscience or psychology, despite Beckett’s persistent and well-attested interest in both fields. Beckett was preoccupied by various clinical perspectives on language and thought at key moments in his life, but the significance of abnormal linguistic usage in Beckett’s prose and his theatre has been approached from this angle only sporadically. This double issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies on ‘Beckett, Language and the Mind’ offers a more sustained consideration of the uses of both neuroscience and psychology to Beckett studies, at a time when the discipline of literary studies is particularly alert to what these approaches can offer.

Periodicals to Pedagogy to the Profession of Literary Studies

Periodicals to Pedagogy to the Profession of Literary Studies Teresa Mangum (bio) Perhaps the worst kept secret about teaching is that innovation in the classroom fulfills the longing of most academics to remain lifelong students. As the essays in this volume suggest, all of us have found that in the actual teaching of periodicals, instructors as well as students learn far more than any of us anticipated as we designed our various syllabi and assignments. Many of the contributors discuss imaginative attempts to weave periodical assignments into undergraduate courses in the novel, drama, transatlantic literature, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Others describe graduate courses that offer periodical vistas of readership, print culture, serialized time, conversations between literature and science, interchanges of image and text, battles for cultural supremacy, and painful histories of British imperialism. Both the increasing variety of critical approaches we are bringing to bear upon periodical culture and the diversity of the serial press provide exciting opportunities to teach our graduate students about nineteenth-century texts but also about the discipline of literary studies. Moreover, the particular constellations of resources available to scholars of periodical studies grant a rare opportunity for experiential learning, that is for a thoughtfully staged introduction to the discipline but also engagement with the discipline. And this distinctive pedagogical practice offers those who teach periodical studies the uniquely rewarding role not only of covert student, but also of teacher-mentor. Here, drawing upon the experience of students from two different versions of a graduate course, "Victorian Periodicals and Their Readers," as well as from a seminar titled "Victorian Inscriptions of India" in which I included periodical assignments, I make the case that periodical pedagogy offers a particularly promising path to professionalization.1 Specifically, I reflect on the way my students have [End Page 438] fashioned methodologies, developed dissertation topics, comprehended conferences, and published rather than perished. For several decades now, many of us have debated the best way of teaching critical methodologies and critical theory to graduate students. Through sheer serendipity, many members of my current graduate seminar are also taking an introduction to critical theory. Repeatedly, we are finding that magazines provide an excellent laboratory in which to test assumptions that are fundamental to the discipline of literary studies as well as the uses and limits of methodologies. As an example, specialists in periodical form demand that we reconsider the very unit of literary study. As we all know, the most fundamental question – what is a text? – is deeply vexed in periodical studies. Is a text one installment of a serialized novel, the issue in which an installment appears, a single issue or volume of a magazine, the full run of a journal? The very consideration of these questions plunges students into the throes of critical theory. Like many of the other contributors to this issue, I balance my syllabus among three types of activities. Within a given three or four week period we read a novel that raises interesting issues about a particular decade and periodical publication. Next, we focus on secondary studies that discuss individual periodicals, methods for studying periodicals, more general contextual work on culture and literary taste, and scholarship on the novels we are reading. Each unit culminates in a day when students present reports based on their own primary research in periodicals. As a class we develop a list of questions to take to the stacks, but as the semester progresses, I strongly encourage students to pursue topics that will enable them to experiment with a specific methodological approach and to consider topics they can develop into a final paper or even a future dissertation project. The sheer challenges of managing the material, of considering what constitutes foreground and background, of resituating a novel so that one has to rethink the "center" of research and writing demand uniquely self-conscious analyses of what the discipline of literary studies is today, of where we have points of contact with historians and art historians, and of when and how critical theory serves or obstructs analysis of print culture. The class culminates in a conference that we hold on the Saturday between the close of classes and the week of...

Antebellum Authorship and the Common Property of American Literature

and monolithic characterizations of the “market revolution” that recently have dominated our picture of antebellum America. By exploring the problem of a book’s value at their center, McGill uses the debates over copyright as a case study of how the very concept of the “market” took shape 363 AUGST / Antebellum Authorship at a pivotal moment in the evolution of federal power in the United States: “at stake in the struggle over international copyright is not simply authors’ and publishers’ profits, or the nature of intellectual property, but the place of print in market culture at a moment when the shape and fate of markets was anything but assured” (p. 85). If, as McGill persuasively demonstrates, copyright was another battleground in a protracted war between Republican and liberal ideologies, then “the circulation of print raised questions about the compatibility of democracy and market revolution” (p. 86). Reviving the creative and vigorous arguments of opponents of international copyright, McGill allows us to understand how, at least throughout the antebellum period, the logic of market expansion was contested by an avowedly political vision of the instruments and artifacts of the print medium—where the consolidation of capital and the supposedly natural right to private property would be offset by the widest ownership of texts, where “the mass produced book would be an exception to the rules of market exchange” (p. 63). For literary critics, McGill offers an especially useful analysis of the “strong half-life of the Republican understanding of print as public property” (p. 14). By framing this study around legal and congressional debates about the economic status and cultural significance of literary property, McGill suggests how we might rethink the study of American literature once contemporary scholars set aside their own ideological, and anachronistic, attachment to the development of a national literature and the suppositions about the unity and coherence of an author’s work on which it depends. It is remarkable that, given the extraordinary revision of the literary canon that has taken place over the last thirty years, the methods and concepts we use to study texts from the past have remained relatively oblivious to the actual conditions of reading, writing, and publishing from which they emerged. Not unlike the historical profession’s preoccupation with Great Men prior to the advent of social and cultural history, the discipline of literary studies is poised finally to break with its own outworn values and methods. McGill’s work and other innovative scholarship in the history of the book have opened up new opportunities for us to rewrite the history of literature, indeed literacy and culture more generally, from the bottom up—to reckon with everyday practices and objects from the old media that are every bit as revolutionary and mundane as those that now bind us to the new. Thomas Augst, associate professor of English, University of Minnesota, is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003), and is writing a new book about mass culture and political change, The Sobriety Test: Temperance and the Melodramas of Modern Citizenship. REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / SEPTEMBER 2004 364 1. Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (1979). For influential early works in the American history of the book in literary criticism, see Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986); and Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: oPublication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. (1990). For recent work on the history of reading, authorship and publishing in nineteenth-century America, see Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (1993); David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (1999); Scott Casper, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1999); Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival On the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (2000); Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America From The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (2000); Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (2002); and Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003).

Postslavery literatures in the Americas: family portraits in black and white

Since its demise in the nineteenth century, slavery has given rise to an outpouring of literatures that reflect the diversity of its hemispheric legacy, but the discipline of literary studies has been reluctant to admit commonalities among former slave societies in the New World. Examining major novels from the 1880s to the 1970s, George B. Handley shows how fiction from different nations shares what he calls textual simultaneity in revealing parallel narrative anxieties about genealogy, narrative authority, and racial difference.In comparing these novels, Handley demonstrates the ways in which, ironically, U.S. culture tried to shed its own miscegenated Caribbean image of itself during the time of its greatest expansion into the Caribbean. He argues that imperialism was a means by which the United States could pretend to its own whiteness and civilization by creating a new extranational miscegenation. At the same time, the United States' encroachment in the Caribbean created an environment in which the islands' cultures called upon divergent discourses on the legacies of slavery to retain a sense of autonomy.By offering a critique of current postslavery literary criticism in the Americas as well as exemplary comparative readings of novels by important postslavery writers including William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Alejo Carpentier, Jean Rhys, Charles Chesnutt, Cirilo Villaverde, Rosario Ferre, and others Handley seeks to address the major questions raised by this abundance of postslavery literature and finds meaningful correspondences that begin to show the outlines of a larger tradition of postslavery literature in the Americas.

The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley by Michael P.Branch and Daniel J. Philippon (review)

Breece came from and his letters to his mother that fill the second half of the book are full of homesickness as well as the estrangement he felt at the changes that had taken place there. Douglass hints at placing Pancake's work in the context of other Appalachian writers, but could have done more with this. We know he read and lent out his copy of Chuck Kinder's Snakehunter, and we know he was friends with Mary Lee Settle and presumably knew her work-but we get no sense oftheir influence (if any) or that of Davis Grubb or of the book of Tom Kromer's stories he was editing. Pancake in turn has influenced such younger writers as Chris Offutt, Chris Holbrook, and Pinckney Benedict. At times Douglass is off-base (as are many others) who use the word "Appalachian" loosely and list such writers as Bobbie Ann Mason and Marsha Norman under this rubric. The second half ofthe book is a collection of Pancake's unpublished writing, mostly the letters to his mother-which add to our knowledge of the author. The letters are a bit of a chore to wade through, but ifone is interested in Pancake they have their rewards. And occasionally, like the unsent letter to his girlfriend Emily Miller or the late letter to his friend and teacher John Casey, they are loaded with intimations ofthings his suicide sheds light on in a new way. There are also the beginnings of a few stories and two sketches for a novel. A few newspaper portraits he had published are mentioned, but not included (one wonders if they might not have been more interesting than so many letters to his mother which have a tedious sameness to them). Pancake's suicide was not from lack of publication, for his work had been published in the Atlantic and editors in New York were soliciting stories as well as a novel. Ironically, two artists' colonies sent him letters unknowingly offering fellowships within days ofhis death. His small output has also been published in England and has been translated into German and Portuguese. Unfortunately, A Room Forever has its quota of typos. For example on page 112 there are two separate quotes from "Trilobites," each with its own annoying, easily found typos. But anyone interested in Pancake's work, which would mean anyone interested in contemporary Appalachian fiction, needs to read this book-both for what light it sheds on Pancake's work and for the peripheral issues his life and work have provoked. -Jonathan Greene Branch, Michael P., and Daniel J. Philippon. The Height ofOur Mountains : Nature Writing from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1998. 448 pages. Hardcover $39.95. Paperback $18.95. 68 The attention given to nature writing in the past two decades has intensified dramatically, so much so that it now forms an increasingly distinct discipline ofliterary study. What once was the topic ofan occasional "special offerings" course is now the center of graduate concentrations and even programs. With this progression comes the creation of such works as Michael P. Branch and Daniel J. Philippon's The Height of Our Mountains. This anthology focuses on Virginia's Blue Ridge and Shenandoah Valley, drawing selections from seventy writers ranging from the colonial period to the present. That the work seeks an academic audience is immediately evident. Following a foreword by distinguished environmentalist John Elder, the editors present an extensive scholarly introduction putting forth a clear ideological statement of their approach to nature writing as a discipline. It succinctly sketches the academic considerations that customarily define the field and, in distinction, arranges the broadened boundaries for the editors' own choices. Most notably, they extend beyond that form most closely associated with nature writing, the personal essay, to include not only the more intuitive additions such as journals, discovery narratives, and travel writing, but even fictional works grounded in the region. In fact, the only exclusion based on genre is that all the works included are prose-and that with the admission that "regional nature poetry . . . could easily fill another volume." Given the fine geographical focus ofthe book, to...

"Sadism Demands a Story": Oedipus, Feminism, and Sexuality in Gayl Jones's "Corregidora" and Dorothy Allison's "Bastard out of Carolina"

nvestigating the imbrication of sexual and artistic passion developing within a matrix of violence and oppression, this essay looks at two first novels-Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)and wonders if it is possible to save memories and preserve stories of horrific brutality without repeating them. Relying upon the disciplines of literary studies, psychology, and, to a lesser extent, history, I focus on the complex, commingled relationships between sexual trauma, its repression, and its potential healing through narration/ narrative. Within these hysterical texts, in which trauma is forcibly and violently enacted upon a female body, cultural/political/ historical factors merge with personal/psychological ones to induce experiences so devastating that we wonder how, even if, they can be endured. In Corregidora and Bastard, culturally instituted and legally sanctioned sadomasochism-slavery in the first text, class prejudice resulting in poverty in the second-becomes inseparably entwined with individual and psychological sadomasochism-domestic violence and incest in both texts-which situates each trau-

The social life of literature: Cultural studies, cultural ethnography and the future of literary studies∗

Summary This study moves, by way of brief comments on the historical shaping of the discipline of literary studies, to an investigation of the methodological and disciplinary coherence of cultural studies. In turn, this leads to some remarks concerning cultural ethnography and its attendant epistemological constraints. The essay concludes with some thoughts in favour of a repositioning of literary critical activity.

Feminist German Studies across the Disciplines: Introduction to Grossmann, Ferree, and Cocks

The following three essays, written by historian Atina Grossmann, sociologist Myra Marx Ferree, and political theorist Joan Cocks, are a feminist contribution to ongoing debate about role of multi- and interdisciplinary work in emerging field of Studies. Defined in 1988 Studies Association Guidelines for Curricular Organization at American Educational Institutions as the interdisciplinary study of contemporary cultural, social, economic, and political life of German-speaking peoples in their historical and international context, Studies has been embraced most enthusiastically by scholars trained in discipline of literary studies. For literary scholars, Studies, often loosely associated with British Cultural Studies, has provided an opportunity to import Anglo-American methodologies developed over past several decades into their own field and to address a wider range of cultural products than was authorized by traditional canon of literature. Studies has found particular acceptance among younger, U.S.-trained Germanists poised to assume leadership of field as an older cohort of emigres whose intellectual production was oriented towards Federal Republic now moves towards retirement. To younger Germanists, Studies seems to represent a new, uniquely U.S.-American perspective on things German. As Marc Weiner put it in his provocative letter announcing policies Quarterly would pursue under his editorship: German Studies has begun to develop an identity different from that of its counterpart, (German) Germanistik, as manifested in a variety of intellectual paradigms that differ from those abroad. Despite claims to interdisciplinarity made in GSA Guidelines, then, Germanists have frequently considered Studies mainly purview of Departments, viewing it particularly as a vehicle that would allow them to broaden curricular offerings, teach courses in English, and hence reach larger numbers of students at a time of declining language enrollments. Unlike Germanists, however, proponents of Studies in fields like history and political science, other core areas of GSA, seem much more strongly committed to

Chinese Literary Studies and Post-Structuralist Positions: What Next?

By the early 1970s, the spectre of post-structuralism had begun to haunt the corridors of certain departments of English and Philosophy in a number of French, American and English tertiary institutions. The term 'deconstruction' was variously seen as provocative and essential or, conversely, as politically-charged, unintelligible and unnecessary by the many academics and critics who either flocked to embrace it or dismissed it out of hand. There were not too many people who were able to maintain neutrality in relation to the 'newspeak' of post-structuralist discourse, and the term 'deconstruction', with which this discourse was most frequently associated, came to signify a crisis of grand proportions in literary studies for its opponents and proponents alike. Deconstruction revealed through the many textual strategies adopted in its name that the discipline of literary studies was governed less by authoritative and reliable rules of analysis and interpretation than by an unhappy pluralism which masked its uncertainties through the privileging of literature, like philosophy, as language in its most authentic form. By the 1980s, battles fought in the name of poststructuralism/deconstruction had largely been won, thanks in part to the support lent by many postgraduate students in various disciplines of the Humanities who committed themselves to the task of mastering the 'newspeak' and its problematic concepts and who embarked on their

Between Discipline and Transgression: Re-Tracing the Boundaries of British Hispanism

Over the last few years in Britain, conventional attitudes towards literature, the principles by which it is studied, its purposes and value have been subjected to a growing radical critique, crucially informed by developments in literary and cultural theory. The force of this critique has come, however, not so much from specific theoretical 'approaches' such as Marxism or Structuralism, many of whose concerns are by no means incompatible with a traditional emphasis on the analysis of the isolated literary text. More fundamental, perhaps, in unsettling received ideas have been the attempts to break down the ideological fences which enclose the category of literature as a definable field, as a privileged set of 'great works'. Indeed, the traditional boundaries of the entire discipline of literary studies are being re-drawn to take into account other forms of writing and signifying practice. In short, a move is well under way to repeal what might be called the Literary Enclosure Act.1

The Definition and Practice of Literary Studies

F ONE could converse with a text, ask it specific questions about its composition and meaning, and receive accurate replies in return, the discipline of literary studies could take less modest forms than the one I wish to propose here. It was observed by Plato that written composition very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or