Literary Taxonomy Research Articles

Disciplining Persian Literature in Twentieth-Century Afghanistan

AbstractHow was Persian literature disciplinized in the twentieth century? This article addresses this question by focusing on twentieth-century Afghanistan and outlining the sociohistorical processes that helped to transform scholarly and literary production into a social enterprise. A major outcome of these underexamined processes was the making of Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā (1949–79) in Kabul, the first modern encyclopedia produced in Persian. The article explains the multilayered significance of Āryānā's literary taxonomies, reading practices, and historiographical models that reified Persian literature as an object of academic study and national veneration in Afghanistan. A close reading of Āryānā's account of Persian literary history illustrates its complex relationship with both Iranian and Afghan nationalisms of the 1940s and 1950s and its contributors’ adherence to a modern methodology. The present study places Āryānā squarely within a transregional ecosystem that brought about the institutionalization of literature in Persian-speaking lands.

New Methodologies in the Study of Natural History

New Methodologies in the Study of Natural History Elizabeth Polcha (bio) The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World ralph bauer University of Virginia Press, 2019 650 pp. Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin daniela bleichmar Yale University Press, 2017 226 pp. Sound, Image, Silence: Art and the Aural Imagination in the Atlantic World michael gaudio University of Minnesota Press, 2019 196 pp. The Natural History of Sexuality in Early American Literature greta lafleur Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018 286 pp. If you have the chance to page through a copy of Daniela Bleichmar's catalogue Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin from the 2017–18 exhibition at the Huntington Library cocurated with Catherine Hess, you will undoubtedly be drawn to an image that accompanies the introduction to the book: a photo of a nearly four-hundredyear-old floor-length Tupinambá cape covered in bright red guará feathers. [End Page 545] The cape was made by Tupinambá artists in seventeenth-century Brazil for sacred use. As Bleichmar explains, "When Shamans wore feather garments in ritual occasions, they were not simply putting on a beautiful costume: they were transforming themselves into birdlike creatures that, through dance and song, invoked powerful forces" (xii). Sixteenth-century French colonizers like André Thevet, who recorded his observations on similar capes in documenting Tupinambá dance practices, could not understand the transformational meaning of such an object. In the context of a natural history exhibition, or printed within the pages of a catalogue, the cape is similarly separated from its sacred use. Yet as viewers, we are undoubtedly drawn to the photograph of this stunning object that is miraculously wellpreserved. In carefully confronting this disjuncture in knowledge, Bleichmar asks whether the cape belongs in a museum or whether it should be repatriated back to Brazil (xi). In a similar vein of thought, we might ask: How can we resist colonial frameworks when researching a discipline as marked by dispossession and violence as natural history? The Tupinambá cape, and Bleichmar and Hess's thoughtful contextualization of it in their exhibition, is one example of how the recent wave of scholarship in natural history is much more than an intervention into the history of science. Recent studies in natural history follow routes of collection that cut across geographies, while questioning the relationship between the local and the global and opening up new frameworks for thinking about genre and medium. Within this work, preserved specimens, sacred objects, and visualizations of plants are as important to studying naturalist knowledge as printed materials and popular narratives. What the more recent wave of scholarship offers for early Americanists is a renewed interest in methodology and new ways of reading, observing, and listening to the material and print archives of the colonial Americas. Consider, for example, how Michele Navakas's scholarship on coral reorients understandings of eighteenth and nineteenth-century literary taxonomy, or how Sari Altschuler's analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" calls attention to Poe's fascination with fungus and a fungal theory of cholera. What this exciting work demonstrates is that scholars are closing the gap between history of science scholarship and humanities disciplines like art history, museum studies, gender and sexuality studies, and religious studies. This trajectory is part of a longer current of research that is sometimes [End Page 546] referred to as "colonial science" studies.1 In the past twenty years, scholarship on what we now call "science" and "ecology" has been crucial to the shifting discourse in early American studies, with pathbreaking works like Joyce Chaplin's Subject Matter (Harvard UP, 2001), Londa Schiebinger's Plants and Empire (Harvard UP, 2004), Susan Scott Parrish's American Curiosity (UNCP, 2006), Christopher Iannini's Fatal Revolutions (UNCP, 2012), Monique Allewaert's Ariel's Ecology (U Minnesota P, 2013), Pablo Gomez's The Experiential Caribbean (UNCP, 2017), and James Delbourgo's Collecting the World (Harvard UP, 2017). In Early American Literature's recent special issue titled "The New Natural History" (vol. 53, no. 4), editor Michael Boyden convincingly argues that the turn toward natural history in the past...

John Lithgows Real Utopia and the Anticapitalist Romance of the Early Republic

This article analyzes an obscure early American author and activist, John Lithgow, and argues that his 1802 work Equality—a Political Romance deserves our special attention as a groundbreaking piece of writing about economic inequality and the democratic limits of republicanism at the core of the US national project. Specifically, Equality represents a singular development of utopian fiction responding to the political and economic exigencies of its historical moment, and in the process Lith gow inaugurates a variant of the genre—the American anticapitalist romance—that challenges our literary taxonomies, both in terms of utopianism and the literature of the early Republic. It is, finally, the rise of finance capitalism and the protracted de pression of the early national era that conditions John Lithgows serious exploration of anticapitalist ideas and experiment in utopian literature.

The Social Life of Speculation

The Social Life of Speculation Gabriella Friedman (bio) Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic. By Michelle D. Commander. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $25.95 (paper). Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction. By Sami Schalk. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 192 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism. By Shelley Streeby. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 168 pages. $85.00 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times. By Aimee Bahng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 248 pages. $94.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). In the past two decades, scholarly and popular interest in speculative fiction has surged. Groundbreaking anthologies like Sheree Renée Thomas's Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Grace Dillon's Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), as well as scholarship by Ramón Saldívar, Curtis Marez, Dillon, André M. Carrington, Donna Haraway, and others, deploy speculative fiction to address the interconnected histories and current realities of racism, heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. The four books under review here showcase speculative fiction studies (or perhaps, more accurately, "speculative studies") as an emerging, interdisciplinary field engaging many of the key analytics of American studies: racialization, settler colonialism, imperialism, climate change, diaspora, (dis)ability, and the transnational turn. Our current scholarly moment is marked by a turn not only to nonrealist literature but to speculation in all its multitudinous forms. As Michelle D. Commander, Sami Schalk, Shelley Streeby, and Aimee Bahng illustrate, speculation evokes an extrapolative practice that articulates the repercussions of urgent global [End Page 205] problems, a set of political tactics that shape new worlds through activism, and an imaginative strategy that etches unexpected ways to organize social life. Of course, science fiction has an established presence in academe. The prominent journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies were founded in 1959 and 1973, respectively, and the history of science fiction scholarship dates back even further. The editors of Science Fiction Studies, for example, maintain a chronological bibliography that lists Johannes Kepler's "Notes" from Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy (1634) as an early work of science fiction criticism.1 Since then, scholars have painstakingly historicized, contextualized, and debated the parameters and stakes of the genre. Some, like Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, Samuel Delany, and Joanna Russ, highlight science fiction's potential to unsettle hegemonic structures of power; others, such as John Rieder and Patricia Kerslake, analyze the colonial logics texturing the genre. But speculative fiction studies, though it overlaps with scholarship on science fiction, is a different animal: broader, more capacious, less concerned with technical literary and generic questions. While some have tried to demarcate the bounds of speculative fiction—with Robert Heinlein and Margaret Atwood proposing the most famous definitions—others find the ambiguity of the term attractive.2 In Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times, Bahng is "less interested in literary taxonomies than in the various modalities of writing and reading that can alter relations between writer and reader, shift ways of thinking, and produce different kinds of subjects"; she sees potential in speculative fiction's "promiscuity and disregard for the proper" (13, 16). Similarly, Streeby embraces the term speculative fiction in Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism "because it is less defined by boundary-making around the word 'science,' stretching to encompass related modes such as fantasy and horror, forms of knowledge in excess of white Western science, and more work authored by women and people of color" (20). In Commander's Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic, Afro-Atlantic speculation exceeds science fiction, or even Afro-futurism, which Commander regards as only one "subgenre of Afro-speculation of the twentieth and twenty-first century that is concerned with the artistic reimagining of the function of science and technology in the construction of utopic black futures" (6). Schalk's Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis) ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction...

‘Life Grasps Life’: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Minor Jurisprudence

In an article from 1994, I tried to read Franz Kafka’s short story ’In the Penal Colony’ as what I called ’minor jurisprudence’ by drawing on an analogy from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Whatever Kafka had to say about law should not, so I claimed, be understood as a form of theodicy as it usually is but, rather, as the possibility for a new ’politics of desire’. As ‘minor literature’, Kafka’s texts were inherently resistant to attempts to box them into conventional literary taxonomies. And it was this inherent resistance that created the opening for his ’minor jurisprudence’, as well. My aim will be to discuss the nature of this discordant force through the notion of vitalism. More specifically, I will discuss this vitalistic element through Wilhelm Dilthey’s 1883 treatise Introduction to the Human Sciences. But instead of focusing on the hermeneutical method which is the usual way in which Dilthey is introduced into the jurisprudential tradition, I will discuss his more general views on law as a cultural and political phenomenon and on jurisprudence as the ’human science’ that studies it, both significant themes in the 1883 Introduction but which scholarship has largely ignored.

Language, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Literary Taxonomy: Ng Kim Chew and Mahua Literature

Through an examination of short stories from the Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew's 2001 collectionFrom Island to Island, this essay reflects on the taxonomic functions of criteria such as language, ethnicity, and nationality, particularly as they inform contemporary discussions of Chinese, Sinophone, and Mahua (Malaysian Chinese) literature. Several of Ng's stories are set on remote islands and feature individuals who, having been forcibly separated from their original linguistic or social environment, offer a vehicle for reflecting on some of the consequences of literary taxonomies that arbitrarily prioritize one criterion (such as language or nationality) over others. Drawing on Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance, the essay proposes a taxonomic system that does not rely on a single criterion but rather attends to the dynamic interaction among a variety of criteria. The resulting model is used to interrogate the naturalized conception of the family on which Wittgenstein relies.

Le vagabond et ses avatars chez Apollinaire

Passionate about mundane details and singular beings, Apollinaire deploys throughout his stories and novels quite a collection of mysterious and paradoxical characters. A central place in his collection is occupied by the wanderer which illustrates the propensity of the writer towards the occult and the picturesque, towards the anecdotal and the extraordinary. As a being always on the run he is sometimes associated with a bohemian spectator, jouisseur of the street and sometimes a marginal presence bordering on antisocial. Versatile character, the apollinarian wanderer does not refer to a specific social type. Wanderer, bohemian, chiffonnier, antique dealer, he has a rather metaphorical position that allows him to expose multiple identities at once. His multivalent nature makes it difficult for a true literary taxonomy. Always seeking innovation and surprise, Apollinaire was able to refine the ambivalence of the wanderer and often relates it to the image of the artist. Marginal and mystifying, the apollinarian wanderer is yet lacking any pejorative sense because its uniqueness is only a sign of originality. With its attractive heterogeneity, the apollinarian prose creates a vast and fine repertoire with a wanderer who is constantly redefining the concept of wandering. With its multiple facets, it actually becomes a living metaphor of a work that is looking through a hybrid and plural writing, mixing genres and composite images. Exploring the prose of Apollinaire, however, we can detect multiple lines of coherence that ultimately reveal a rich array of the wanderer. Despite the nature of the chameleonic apollinarian wanderer, our challenge is to analyze his literary metamorphoses and thus arrive at a definition that surprises in its many urban disguises.

Writing Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic?

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation. (first paragraph)

Trope Theory, Cane, and the Metaphysical Case for Genre

Although we rely regularly on genre as a conceptual apparatus for our scholarship and course offerings, genre studies as a theory and methodology has never quite recovered from the opposition of Jacques Derrida, whose well-known essay “The Law of Genre” (1980) accused literary taxonomies of distorting the inherently indeterminate meanings of texts by imposing arbitrary restrictions, or “laws,” on our reading practices. This essay surveys the major objections to genre criticism lodged by its principal critics (especially Derrida) before introducing and advocating “trope theory,” a concept from a branch of analytic philosophy called metaphysics, in response to these objections. It then provides a sustained formal analysis of Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) to demonstrate trope theory's superior ability to account for generically hybrid narrative texts and its ability to yield a seemingly infinite number of readings and interpretations.

The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876 (review)

The of Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790-1876, by Brian Yorhers. Aldershot Hampshire GB/Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2007. 147 pp. $89.95. The premise of this book is that nineteenth-century American travel writing about Holy Land is a malleable but coherent literary tradition. Noting genre's roots in eighteenth-century tales of Barbary captivity, Yothers devotes most of his energy to describing contrasts and comparisons among motifs and themes in a wide range of nineteenth-century Orientalist writings. He exposes thematic continuities and variations that comprise a web of inter-textual debate carried on by professional scholars and clergymen, missionaries, pilgrims, genteel travel writers, and major literary figures, each of whom sought to produce a distinctive account of Holy Land. Yothers mainly offers a literary taxonomy. Occasionally he touches upon wider issues, such as how Holy Land travelers imagined themselves and United States in ways that went against chauvinistic orthodoxies of American exceptionalism. Or why it is reductionistic to say that travelers to West Asia found only Holy Land they sought and nothing more. But such explorations into cultural and ideological analysis are few. And they remain undeveloped relative to Yothers' methodical, somewhat plodding approach to texts he chose to examine. The author organizes material within a framework of cross reference that enables him to discuss similarities and differences among various writers. He treats Skeptical Piety of Protestant Pilgrims (e.g., Edward Robinson, and William Prime) in relation to less mainstream Alternative Orthodoxies (e.g., Clorinda Minor, Orson Hyde, and William Henry Odenheimer); Skeptical Oriental Romance (e.g., John Lloyd Stephens, and William Cullen Bryant) more or less in contrast with Quotidian Pilgrimages, travel accounts that emphasize farcical elements (e.g., Mark Twain, satirist, and David Dorr, traveler and slave). The book closes with an extended analysis of Herman Melville's Clarel. This work, which has received renewed critical attention in recent years, seems to have engaged Yothers as no other in book. Without directly saying so, he depicts Melville as an author of postmodern sensibilities before such a phrase could have been imagined. Yothers believes that to Melville's fictionalizing imagination, the Holy Land is a site at which primacy of interpretation becomes manifest, and thus Holy Land provides best conceivable backdrop for his relentless interrogation of relationship between pluralism and authority, experience and interpretation. …

Between Autobiography and Fiction: Thomas Mann’s Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus: Roman eines Romans

Between Autobiography and Fiction: Thomas Mann’s Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus: Roman eines Romans Sean Ireton In 1949, two years after the appearance of Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann published a roughly 150-page account of the novel’s genesis, which he titled: Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus: Roman eines Romans. On the surface, this text appears to be an autobiographical record of the four years that he spent working on the novel. With the aid of his journals from the period, Mann seeks to reconstruct, “die Geschichte des Faustus, eingebettet wie sie ist in den Drang und Tumult der äußeren Ereignisse” (GW 11: 148).1 Such “tumultuous events” include his bouts with various illnesses and the ongoing war in Europe, which he followed closely in the news. Despite the countless autobiographical details provided in the Entstehung, the secondary title that Mann chose, Roman eines Romans, suggests more than just a factual memoir. The implication of this subtitle is that the Entstehung can also be read as a work of literature in its own right and perhaps as a kind of “metanovel”: that is, as a text that reflects not only on the making of its specific predecessor, Doktor Faustus, but also on the transcendental question of the novel as a literary genre. Taking the subtitle, Roman eines Romans, as a cue, the present interpretation of Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus explores the aesthetic dimension of this so-called “novel,” probing its taxonomic limits and relating it to Mann’s own view of what constitutes modern literature. Mann in effect constructs a thematically coherent work that transcends autobiography and approaches fiction, a work in which he himself functions as both reflected character and reflective narrator. The amount of scholarship devoted to the Entstehung is negligible compared to the critical interest in Doktor Faustus. The fact that Mann’s thematically and stylistically complex Faust epic, which he conceived as no less than “den Roman meiner Epoche” (GW 11: 169), should overshadow the relatively prosaic narrative of its genesis is hardly surprising. In fact, almost all discussions of the Entstehung occur only marginally in analyses of Faustus. The main question put to the former text concerns Mann’s motivation for writing it in the first place. Mann claimed that the impetus behind the book was to give credit to Theodor Adorno, whose [End Page 210] contribution in matters pertaining to musicology was not given proper due in the novel itself (Briefe, 1948–1955 und Nachlese 225, 240). Further reasons include: a reluctance to put his grandiose Faustus project fully behind him; an attempt to produce a miniature Dichtung und Wahrheit as part of his ongoing Goethe imitatio; and the desire to render an “account” (in the sense of a Rechenschaftsbericht) of his novel given the controversy it was beginning to raise in Germany. A summary of these motives can be found in “Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus: Thomas Mann’s Narrated Poetics,” a published lecture by Rüdiger Görner, who also addresses but does not fully explore the element of aesthetic theory in the text. For instance, Görner never develops his initial characterization of the Entstehung as a “metanarration,” no doubt because he tends to dismiss Mann’s deliberations as a mere parody of poetics. Though obviously not a novel in the strict generic sense of the term, the Entstehung nevertheless distorts the boundaries of literary taxonomy, particularly the dividing lines between fiction and nonfiction. Indeed, Mann bends the taxonomic limits of his entire Faustus project, hinting that Doktor Faustus can just as well be read as a biography and the Entstehung as a novel. Doktor Faustus not only lacks the conventional label “Roman,” but further purports to be the biography of a German composer, as indicated in the subtitle (Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde) and emphasized by Serenus Zeitblom several times throughout the narrative. In the Entstehung, Mann makes similar remarks about the formal status of Faustus: “folglich keinen Roman, sondern eine Biographie mit allen Charakteristiken einer solchen zu schreiben” (GW 11: 164). And more than halfway through his near seven-hundred-page book, he is still struck by its...

Scientific Analogy and Literary Taxonomy in Darwin's Loves of the Plants

This essay situates Eramus Darwin's wildly popular annotated poem Loves of the Plants (1789) alongside Francis Bacon's suggestions for applying inductive method to emotions, Wordsworth's parody of empiricism in “The Thorn,” and the function of footnotes in eighteenth‐century satires and georgics. Within this framework, I show that Darwin's text forges relations through analogy, an empiricist procedure shared by eighteenth‐century natural and moral philosophy. While Darwin exploits this conjunction to create an outlet for his radical analogical science, melding literary and scientific practice threatens to reveal knowledge built on empirical method as, at bottom, the product of rhetorical figures. I argue that the disjunctive format and formal components of Darwin's poem—and mental gymnastics they require of readers—are calculated to forestall the collapse of scientific analogy into its literary counterparts of metaphor and simile.

The Lady Named Thunder: A Biography of Dr. Ethel Margaret Phillips (1876-1951), and: China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott (review)

Reviewed by: The Lady Named Thunder: A Biography of Dr. Ethel Margaret Phillips (1876-1951), and: China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott Carol C. Chin (bio) Clifford H. Phillips. The Lady Named Thunder: A Biography of Dr. Ethel Margaret Phillips (1876-1951) University of Alberta Press. xvi, 409. $34.95 Shirley Jane Endicott. China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xv, 252. $24.95 There ought to be a word in the literary taxonomy for biographies written by the children or grandchildren of their subjects. They are certainly not first-person memoirs, although they often draw heavily upon the subject's own oral and written recollections, nor do they have quite the same flavour as scholarly or journalistic accounts written by non-family members. A [End Page 551] subcategory of this genre might be the life stories of missionaries, usually women, who spent their lives and raised their families in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these provide a detailed and insightful glimpse of a particular slice of Chinese history, written by authors who spent their formative years in China. (Many eminent Sinologists were themselves the children of missionaries.) Others are more personal accounts, focusing on the struggle to create a normal family life under extraordinary circumstances, but with little to say about the epochal changes that produced those circumstances. Rarely does an author succeed in combining both the historical and the personal. The two books under review plainly illustrate both the charms and the difficulties of this type of biography. The life of Ethel Margaret Phillips, or Margaret, as she became known, was one of both hardships and triumphs. Her early life reads like a Victorian novel: abandoned by her mother, raised by grudging relatives, and sent to boarding school to train as a governess. In 1898, however, Margaret became one of the first women to enrol in medical school at the University of Manchester, and in 1905 she sailed to China as a medical missionary. After a brief stint in Beijing, Margaret settled in Pingyin, a smallish city in Shandong province with a well-established missionary presence and a fairly rudimentary medical dispensary. She was the sole foreign doctor in the area, and much of her effort went into overcoming the local population's distrust of foreign medicine and unwillingness to adhere strictly to prescribed treatment. Within a few years she convinced the mission to raise funds to build a properly equipped women's hospital, supervising the design and construction herself. By this time she had become a respected figure among the Chinese, receiving the Chinese surname of Lei, or 'thunder.' The author provides lively vignettes of many of Margaret's cases and her dealings with both the local population and the mission community, as well as her own bouts of serious illness. Later Margaret practised medicine in Beijing; it was during this time that she adopted a baby (the author) from the United States. She survived the Second World War in a Japanese internment camp but died a few years later in England. Margaret Phillips's life spanned a time of considerable political and social upheaval in China, and her daily involvement with patients provides a valuable window onto the lives of poor and ordinary Chinese during these changes. A slight drawback of the book, however, is the author's attempt to give the flavour of Margaret's experiences by relying heavily on indirect quotes from her diaries and letters with little attempt to distinguish the significant details from the trivial. Reading these sometimes banal observations in the third-person voice of the narrator can produce a rather odd effect. For instance, from the childhood chapters: 'One day Ethel insisted on being allowed to cook the Sunday dinner while everyone else went to church, just to show that she still could. Happily both the roast and [End Page 552] the pudding were a success.' Similarly, a telling account of the death of a Chinese convert whose family opposed his Christianity is introduced by the irrelevant detail that Margaret had overslept that morning. Such infelicities of style are an occasional distraction from an otherwise absorbing narrative...

Speaking My Mind: Literary Taxonomy and the Strange Case of Journalism

Speaking My Mind: Literary Taxonomy and the Strange Case of Journalism

The Advantages of Critical and Systematic Literary Taxonomies: A Review Article of New Work by Cerquiglini, Juvan, and Zima

The Advantages of Critical and Systematic Literary Taxonomies: A Review Article of New Work by Cerquiglini, Juvan, and Zima

Who/what is the subject? Representations of self in late twentieth-century French art

Word and image studies focus customarily on the relationship between literature and painting, approached either thematically, as in the classical ut pictura poesis tradition, or as semiotic systems, in the wake of Lessing's seminal study.' Alternatively, they examine the interface between verbal texts and their visual illustrations. However, to date a rich area of inquiry remains insufficiently tapped - the application of theoretical constructs developed in one domain to the creative practices of another. Literary theory, for example, has much to offer to the analysis of certain painterly phenomena; and art theory can shed light on the verbal arts.' This kind of exchange is likely to appear most desirable at times of transition, when a canon expands or undergoes radical changes. My concern here is precisely with such an occurrence within the genre of the representation of self, during the 1970S and 1980s, decades known as postmodern. While my analysis centers on French theory and practice, its potential applications are in no way nationally bound. During the period examined, a variety of oblique 'returns' to premodern artistic practices have taken place - among these being the genres of autobiography and self-portrait - which modernism at its height had devalorized. The tool of choice for theorizing the recent reemergence of self-portraiture in French painting proved - for me - to be literary genre theory (complemented by philosophical reflection on the question of subjectivity). Yet, as we shall see, it was a term taken from painting, the pictorial self-portrait ('autoportait' in French) that provided the French taxonomy of literary autobiography with a name for a new category meant to reflect the expansion of the genre and its theory beyond their earlier canonical boundaries. I in turn borrow this renewed literary taxonomy to shed light on painting, using the literary category now named 'autoportrait' to think through new versions of self-representation in the visual arts. To foreground this reciprocity (and to some extent convergence), I take the liberty of using 'autoportrait' (and its variants) to refer both to verbal and visual art, alongside the Anglo-Saxon 'self-portrait', which refers strictly to visual art. The notion of representation of self, throughout this article and in the title, subsumes all three connotations. The ensuing analysis pursues a dual goal: to document and interpret contemporary French pictorial auto-portraiture; and to stimulate reflection on the nature of interart connections as well as on the workings of theory.

Contacts: Writing by and about Nathaniel Mackey

It is perhaps not so surprising that a writer such as Nathaniel Mackey, who has directed so much attention to the viability of traditional literary taxonomies, would himself be betwixt and between critical enthusiasms. While there is little question that Mackey is "recognized," his rich body of literary work has not been engaged (that is to say written about) with the energy that one might expect. Mackey's valorization of the "risk of obscurity" in writers as diverse as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Wilson Harris, and Kamau Brathwaite has become somewhat prophetic. An odd dialectic of presence and absence might accurately characterize Mackey's current situation. In compiling this bibliography and conversing with colleagues near and far, I note that Nathaniel Mackey is certainly known, but awaits the fellowship of close readers and writers he richly deserves.

Literary Taxonomies and Genre in The Welsh Bardic Grammars

Dans cet article, l'A. examine les principes de classification de la grammaire galloise barde, et constate que meme si elle ne parle pas en termes de genre, elle fait neanmoins certaines distinctions generiques liees a la forme et au sujet. Ainsi, comme toute culture a toute epoque, le Pays de Galles medieval a sa propre hierarchie de formes litteraires dans lesquelles certains types de composition sont consideres comme ayant une valeur superieure. Cerdd dafod porte cette distinction et reflete l'acte de preservation culturel ayant sous-tendu l'ecriture de la grammaire galloise barde

The making of a minor poet: Edward young and literary taxonomy

(1991). The making of a minor poet: Edward young and literary taxonomy. English Studies: Vol. 72, No. 4, pp. 355-367.

Melville as Novelist: The German Example

MELVILLE AS NOVELIST: THE GERMAN EXAMPLE Gustaaf Van Cromphout* Criticism of Herman Melville has found few questions more baffling than that concerning his relationship to fiction. Though now internationally recognized as one of the greatest American novelists, he is at the same time thought by many not to be a novelist at all. R. P. Blackmur anticipated much current criticism when, in "The Craft of Herman Melville" (1938), he stressed Melville's "radical inability to master a technique—that of the novel—radically foreign to his sensibility." Janet Giltrow has recently argued that to regard Melville's early narratives as novels is to engage in generic misclassification since they are "composed in the expository mode of the travel genre." For Howard Mumford Jones, Moby-Dick is neither a novel nor a romance but a "journey book." According to Ann Douglas, Melville was "profoundly distrustful of fiction," and Mardi and Moby-Dick are "neither factual chronicles nor fictions . . . [but] heightened imaginative explorations of significant events and emotions." Nina Baym also believes that Melville had a quarrel with fiction and that none of his longer works "are wholly or even mainly fictive." Michael Davitt Bell, on the other hand, regards Melville's writings as the culmination of the American romance tradition , but he has serious doubts about the term "romance" being useful at all as a generic label. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker reflect a similar distrust of traditional categories when they state that Melville was "never a novelist or romancer within the ordinary definitions."1 Mid-nineteenth-century reviewers of Melville's works expressed themselves in much the same way.2 In his boldest and greatest experiments—Mardi (1849), Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), and The Confidence-Man (1857)—Melville confronted his contemporaries with problems in literary taxonomy which nothing in their English or American reading experience had prepared them to solve. The reviewers often perceived a connection, however, between Melville's problematic achievement and German models.3 This perception deserves to be taken more seriously than it has been, for most of what appears confusing or eccentric in Melville's practice is supported by German novelistic theory and by the example of the German Romantic novel. *Gustaaf Van Cromphout is a Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He has published widely on American and German literature. 32Gustaaf Van Cromphout The German influence reached Melville largely through intermediaries . Henry A. Pochmann has examined Melville's debt to German philosophy, which reached him through Coleridge and Carlyle among others.4 More relevant to the present investigation is the spread of German literary awareness in the America of the eighteen-forties. In October, 1840, the North American Review, discussing Wolfgang Menzel 's controversial History of German Literature (1840), testified to the widespread interest in German letters: "Translations from all the distinguished authors, and imitations of every sort, already abound. A German mania prevails . . . manifesting] itself not only in poetry, but in various departments of literature and philosophy." A year later the same journal, reviewing Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern by Friedrich Schlegel, who in his earlier years had been the chief German theoretician of the novel, claimed that "the services rendered to literature " by Friedrich and his brother August Wilhelm "are known wherever literature exists. Their most important works in the department of criticism have been well translated into English and have excited universal admiration." In January, 1848, The Literary World asked itself the rhetorical question: "What man or woman of cultivation does not, at this epoch," take an interest in "the fanciful and fascinating literature of the Germans[?]" The journal praises Frederic Henry Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany (1847), a massive anthology of selections from twenty-eight authors, but adds, "many oí these are well known."5 Equally well known by the 1840s were the peculiarities of the German novel: "The Germans are more given to speculate than to narrate. Their very novels, Lafontaine's, Lamotte-Fouqué's, Jean Paul's, Tieck's, are not so much stories as they are theories of life." According to the North American Review of January, 1844, Jean Paul's "productions are all strict transcripts of his inward life. . . . His...