Literary Thinking Research Articles

Do They Believe in Magic? Politics and Postmodern Literature

In “`Do You Believe in Magic?' Literary Thinking After the New Left,” Sean McCann and Michael Szalay argue that postmodern American novelists, by celebrating “the spontaneous, the symbolic, and ultimately the magical” undermine the good sense of progressive thought and contribute to the hegemony of neoliberalism. That literary thinking in the contemporary American novel breaks with conventional progressive thinking in several ways is undeniable. But that it does so in a manner consistent with the “magical thinking” of the sixties and inconsistent with the broader progressive project is not. On the contrary, many of the writers McCann and Szalay indict—Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison, for instance—are as aware of the limits of magical politics as they are, and as committed to a chastened, melioristic model of social struggle. Where the novelists break with McCann and Szalay, this article argues, is in their readiness to grapple with the profound crisis of ideas and strategies that overtook the Left in the second half of the twentieth century, as the tenets of traditional progressive thought and struggle came to seem ever less efficacious. The break with conventional ideas and strategies of struggle, the turn to spirituality, and the exploration of practices of retreat in this literature needs to be seen as an effort to negotiate this crisis and imagine new forms of progressive becoming. In developing this argument, the article draws heavily on William Connolly's efforts to imagine a new progressivism in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style.

In Defense of Crappy Literature: When the Book Is Bad but the Literary Thinking Is Rich!

When a kindergarten student, after hearing a storybook read aloud by his teacher, proclaims “Now, that was a crappy piece of literature!” his proclamation provides an opportunity for an examination of literacy, identity, agency and power. Critical issues and provocative questions emerge about the importance of “crappy” literature and how we create spaces in our classrooms for students to question, examine, respond, and think in a variety of ways about all types of texts.

Tennyson and the Legacies of Romantic Art

Everyone knows that a number of important concepts gained a new resonance and prestige around the turn of the nineteenth century: the phenomenon is called (or is symptomatic of what is called) ‘romanticism’; and any account of romanticism's legacies might well choose to consider the continuing life of those new significances within subsequent literary thinking. The terms that matter are words such as art, aesthetic, imagination, literature, poetry; and the intricate pattern of changes in their meanings has been drawn most influentially by Raymond Williams, initially in Culture and Society and then later in Keywords. Where, for instance, art had once meant ‘any human skill’, as Williams says, it became during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a word with a very specialised and superior sort of reference, evidence of ‘a remarkable change in ideas of the nature and purpose of art, and of its relations to other human activities and to society as a whole’ – the ‘change’ in question being something like a decision to divorce. The story is: art, which had once participated unquestioningly in the main movements of social practice, now became defined by its separateness from that life, and even by an hostility towards it. This divisive change occurs as part of much ‘wider changes in life and thought’, all ways of registering the divisive shock of modern industrial civilisation:1 ‘Clearly’, says Williams, ‘the major shift represented by the modern complex of literature, art, aesthetic, creative and imaginative is a matter of social and cultural history’.2 That history, for Williams, found its most satisfactory account in Marxist terms: ‘a general social activity was forced into the status of a department or province, and actual works of art were in part converted into a self-pleading ideology’ (Culture and Society, 47). Williams himself was not narrowly hostile to a Romantic emphasis on human ‘creativity’; and Coleridge is actually handled very sympathetically in Culture and Society. But it is not difficult to see how the association of a Romantic vocabulary with deplorable political change might be construed as a brand of complicity, and the ostensible distance of that aesthetic language from questions of real politics as a kind of deceit, the institutions of art but agents of bad ideology. Terry Eagleton, Williams's most eminent pupil, is usefully outspoken in this line: the aesthetic, he says, serves as the type of the new ‘bourgeois subject’, who is ‘autonomous and self-determining [and] acknowledges no merely extrinsic law but instead, in some mysterious fashion, gives the law to itself’.3 That is practically a paraphrase of Coleridge's description of the organic form possessed by great works of the imagination: for Coleridge, a Shakespeare play does not obey any rules from without, as does a work by Racine, but grows instead according to an inward law, ‘a law which all the parts obey[,] conforming themselves to the outward symbols & manifestations of the essential principle’.4 A work of art, in the new Romantic sense, is for Eagleton ‘a model of free, self-referential, autotelic, autoaffective being’: which is how capitalism makes the bourgeois subject think about himself.5 But all such pretensions are spurious, as it is needless to say: ‘literature is an illusion’, Eagleton wrote in his best-selling Literary Theory; and the task of the critic then becomes to expose that illusoriness, so returning works of ‘literature’ to ‘the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded’.6

Kazuhiro Matsuzawa, Minoru Tanaka, eds., The Prospect of Literary Studies and Literary Thoughts

Kazuhiro Matsuzawa, Minoru Tanaka, eds., The Prospect of Literary Studies and Literary Thoughts

Space Design and Literary Thinking of "Suksoonyeom(孰遂念)"

Space Design and Literary Thinking of "Suksoonyeom(孰遂念)"

A Study of the Emancipation of Human Nature in Jin Shengtan's Literary Thoughts

A Study of the Emancipation of Human Nature in Jin Shengtan's Literary Thoughts

Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein (review)

Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein (review)

Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left

Toward the end of the 1960s, the New Left and the counterculture developed a libertarian theory of politics that emphasized symbolic action and self-realization. A concomitant suspicion of formal political institutions and a turn to cultural politics have since become common to intellectual discourse within the humanities. This essay argues against these attitudes, while tracing them from the protest movements of the late sixties to contemporary fiction and literary theory. The authors conclude by detailing the strong affinities between this vision of radicalism and the interests of professional labor within the present-day university.

Cultural Politics and the Sociology of the University

Sarah Winter responds to the essay by this issue's guest editors (Sean McCann and Michael Szalay), "Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left"

The New Left before the Counter-Culture

David Bromwich responds to the essay by this issue's guest editors (Sean McCann and Michael Szalay), "Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left"

Chants Demagogic

Eric Lott responds to the essay by this issue's guest editors (Sean McCann and Michael Szalay), "Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left"

Mimetic Theory in Chinese Literary Thought

In the field of Chinese and comparative literature, a scholarly consensus holds that the idea of mimesis is not entirely absent, but a mimetic theory of literature is nonexistent in the Chinese tradition. The assumed absence of mimetic theory has become the basis for a fundamental dichotomy between Chinese expressive views and Western mimetic views of literature. This essay presents solid evidence to prove the contrary. By constructing a Chinese mimetic theory in relation to its Western counterpart, it explores how mimesis evolved in the historical development of Chinese aesthetic thought, how it appeared in the poetic theories of some influential literary thinkers, and what significance it has for the mainstream of Chinese literary thought. It argues that mimetic theory constitutes a fascinating but neglected current in Chinese literary thought, one which opens new horizons in comparative poetics.

The Many Faces of Gertrude: Opening and Closing Possibilities in Classroom Talk

The authors examine classroom discussions of Hamlet in two distinct and separate contexts. They display contrasting patterns of discourse to highlight the influence of a classroom's interpretive norms on students' opportunities for critical readings of literature. The excerpts of classroom talk focus on how two teachers and their students constructed Queen Gertrude's character and illustrate how classroom discourse can shape students' understandings of literature and of literary characters. The authors suggest that the nature of students' participation in classroom discussion is based on their construal of the classroom culture, and they raise questions about the roles that teachers play in creating that culture. Opening possibilities for students to raise questions of compelling interest, to initiate topics of substance, and to consider the complexity and ambiguity of plight and motive requires a constellation of classroom supports. After exploring the patterns of interaction and their different results in the two classrooms, the authors suggest strategies for supporting students' developing literary thinking as well as their emerging critical perspectives of social power and position.

創造社的文化行爲與上海出版市場——從另一個角度看創造社的文學主張

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English. 以往研究者往往側重創造社精神活動的一面，局限於尋找創造社的文化行爲和文學主張在歷史文化方面的制約因素以及所受國外文學思潮的影響，從而對創造社的解釋多少流於偏頗。 事實上，作爲上海出版市場的一分子，創造社不可避免地受到所處商業環境的影響；反過來他們又以商業的手段和行爲加入到這個出版市場的運作當中。本文一方面致力於疏理創造社的種種文化活動——從崛起於泰東圖書局，到籌辦出版部自主經營；從最初標新立異的文學主張，到引發革命文學論争——與上海出版市場這一商業環境之間的種種關聯；另一方面又以此爲基礎，從一個新的角度對創造社在不同時期提出的文學口號和主張重新加以討論，以補充過往研究在這方面的不足。 Chuangzaoshe was a pro-revolution literary society based in Shanghai from 1921 to 1929. During its ten-year history this literary society changed its. literary propositions several times. Its variable characteristics not only brought itself fame in 1920s but also attracted a great deal attention from the scholars over the past twenty years. Unfortunately, the studies on Chuangzaoshe have always focused on its spiritual aspects, and the analyses on its literary propositions have long been based on two things: one is the rapidly developing political and cultural circumstances of 1920s, the other is the influence from the foreign literary thoughts. As a matter of fact, the development of Chuangzaoshe had a lot to do with the Shanghai publishing industry: the business environment of Shanghai exerted a strong influence on the cultural activities of Chuangzaoshe, and Chuangzaoshe in turn resorted to business strategies and methods in order to survive in the business competitions. The primary purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relations between the cultural activities of Chuangzaoshe and the publishing industry of Shanghai. From this perspective, I seek to further explore the hidden background of Chuangzaoshe’s literary propositions. It is hoped that this research will help fully understand Chuangzaoshe and the Chinese literature in the May-Fourth Era.

Re-mapping the Traces: Cultural Interaction and the Changing Chinese Literary Thought

Re-mapping the Traces: Cultural Interaction and the Changing Chinese Literary Thought

Literary Openness: A Bridge across the Divide between Chinese and Western Literary Thought

Research Article| March 01 2003 Literary Openness: A Bridge across the Divide between Chinese and Western Literary Thought MING DONG GU MING DONG GU Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2003) 55 (2): 112–129. https://doi.org/10.1215/-55-2-112 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation MING DONG GU; Literary Openness: A Bridge across the Divide between Chinese and Western Literary Thought. Comparative Literature 1 March 2003; 55 (2): 112–129. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-55-2-112 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Literary Openness: A Bridge across the Divide between Chinese and Western Literary Thought

Literary Openness: A Bridge across the Divide between Chinese and Western Literary Thought

中國文學觀念的演變和文學的自覺

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 本文從中國古代文學觀念演變的角度，進一步申述了「文學的獨立和自覺非自魏晉始」的觀點，認為文學的獨立和自覺是從戰國中期開始初露端倪，而到西漢後期劉向校書時基本完成，並對近年來有關文學的自覺自魏晉開始經過三百年才完成的説法，提出了不同意見。Concerning the changes of ancient Chinese literary thoughts, this essay gives further accounts on the point of view that "the self-awareness and independence of Chinese literature was not appeared from the Wei-Jin era.” With a theory that the independent literary conscious in China should be germinated in the mid-Zhan Guo era, and fundamentally done by Liu Xiang's textual criticism in the late Xi Han dynasty, this essay provides for the subject a different perspective.

Thinking about Literary Thought

Thinking about Literary Thought

Writing well: health and the power to make images

There is increasing interest in connections between writing and wellbeing, but a perceived tension between writing well and writing to improve health. This paper gives a brief outline of some...