National Literary Canon Research Articles

Minority Writing as a Challenge to the National Literary Canon: The Case of Lithuania

This article investigates the question of literary canon formation in presentday Lithuania from the perspective of minority writing and in the context of Western canon theory. The author focuses on debates around literary canon that were stimulated by the ideology of liberal pluralism, and which took place in American academia and public discourse during the 1970s and 1980s; these debates are reflected in publications by Cornell West, John Guillory, and Mikhail Gronas, and are useful in demonstrating the peculiarities of the Lithuanian context.The first peculiarity is the specific history of the minority-majority relationship. In Lithuania, the largest minorities are Poles and Russians, who are perceived in the national historical narrative as former colonizers (primarily Russians, but also Poles, who controlled Vilnius during the inter-war period). The second is the fact that the literary traditions of the languages spoken by these minorities have greater cultural capital in “the World Republic of Letters” than does the Lithuanian literary tradition. In Lithuania, minority literatures are mostly written in minority languages, and this creates additional obstacles for including them in the national literary canon. The third peculiarity is the isolated existence of minority writing and its criticism in Lithuania – it stays within academia, thereby producing no effect on public discourse.The article concludes that in Lithuania, for the time being, minority discourses and the canon debate do not intersect in any significant way. Lithuanian society has not yet developed the need for multicultural selfreflexivity. The crisis of the literary canon here is mostly seen as a byproduct of de-Sovietization, but also – and here the situations in Lithuania and Western countries are similar – of the devaluation of literature as a form of cultural capital.

Borislav Pekić’s New textuality in the light of Bakhtin's concept of the open text of the polyphonic novel

In this paper I analyze two of Pekić’s novels in the light of Bakhtin’s concept of the open text of the polyphonic novel which Pekić develops by means of a new Narrator Figure and a new poetics based on an encyclopedic embedded text structure. Among several literary techniques developed from the beginnings of Pekić’s writing, crucial importance belongs to what I call the Explicit Narrator Figure (for instance, in The Time of Miracles, 1965), who speaks in his own voice as interpreter of found texts, and the Implicit Narrator Figure, who adopts the literary and non-literary voices of (many) others, to whose diction and style he assimilates his own voice (for example, in Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan, 1970). This new (postmodern) narrator figure, both explicit and implicit, acts as an interpreter of «found» texts. What connects these two types of Narrator Figures is the document and related Embedded Narration: both narrators thus deal with the pre-texts as well as texts-in-texts, levels and layers of texts, proto-texts and meta-texts – various types of Framed/Embedded Narratives. The Implicit Narrator Figure deals with Biblical witnessed texts and the Explicit Narrator Figure uses personal testamentary texts. In such a way, both Implicit and Explicit Narrator Figures become the researchers of different types of literary and non-literary documents. These complex inter-textual explorations of the “library” of culture are “encyclopedic” in magnitude and reveal, in combination with the new Narrator Figure’s status as Editor and Interpreter, a new type of narrative text, constituted in the encyclopedic open novel structure. Pekić thus introduces a new form of inter-textuality into Serbian literature, implicitly extending Bakhtin’s (and Dostoevsky’s) legacy by drawing on the Serbian national literary canon and the entire Western cultural “library”.

Ferite aperte. Riflessioni sulle relazioni tra cultura e politica in Turchia a margine degli eventi del Gezi Parkı

In Turkey the historical process of political and social change has always seen the involvement of intellectuals, writers and academics. Starting from the most recent events of Gezi Parki protests, in Istanbul and across Turkey throughout June 2013, this article investigates the role and strategies of Turkish intellectuals and writers in challenging authoritarianism and nationalism on one side, and promoting democratization and freedom rights on the other. Through their mobilization and activism and on a literary level through new tendencies disrupting the national literary canon, intellectuals and writers keep an eye on Turkish politics and question nationalism, the controversial past of the Turkish republic and the collective traumas and memories of the nation.

Luis Loayza y el canon de la literatura peruana: condición colonial, ética literaria y forma ensayística en El sol de Lima

This article argues that Peruvian writer Luis Loayza’s essay collection El sol de Lima (1974) rewrites the national literary canon of Perú from the ethical perspective of a writer’s devotion to the craft of writing. In his essays, which examine Peruvian authors from colonial times to the twentieth century, Loayza discusses José Carlos Mariátegui’s and Luis Alberto Sánchez’s ideas about Peruvian literature in order to suggest that it has been burdened by a long-lasting and widespread “colonial condition” that can be found at work in modern times and located even in its most prestigious names (Juan de Espinosa Medrano, Ricardo Palma, etc.). Disowning this colonial tradition, Loayza builds a new corpus of writers who, by assuming their literary vocation and an ethics of self-sacrifice, have defeated the sense of being peripheral in certain passages and moments of their work (Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Abraham Valdelomar, Martín Adán, etc.). This tradition created by Loayza does not rest upon fixed notions such as work and author , but is fragmentary and fleeting in nature. According to El sol de Lima , the Peruvian literary canon is not so much a monumental system of great books as an anthology of brilliant textual instants.

‘Black letters’: problems and issues in the research, dissemination and reception of literature by Afro-Argentines and on Afro-Argentines

Afro-Argentines of colonial descent constitute one of the lesser known minority groups in the country. While scholarly research on this particular group is still scarce, recent studies account for the diversity of its past and current cultural practices. Aside from some exceptions, Afro-Argentine literature is virtually unknown to academia and, as it is usually the case regarding Minor Literatures, it has been excluded from the national literary canon. Towards the end of the twentieth century there was a resurgence not only of studies on Afro-Argentine literature, but also of the presence of Afro-Argentines themselves in fictional writing. This paper will chart the process of retrieval, analysis and dissemination of Afro-Argentine literature, examining some of the issues that arise both at the epistemic and editorial policy levels. We will account for the revival of a literature on Afro-Argentines, in order to explore whether they reproduce a ‘master narrative’ that, through the historical novel, relegates Afro-Argentines into oblivion and/or reduces the group to its stereotypes; or if, on the other hand, these voices can subvert Argentine historiography by positioning this group in a leading role that mirrors the vitality of their present-day social movements.

The Island and the Madhouse: Rethinking the Subject and the Archipelago in Recent Cuban Literature

Aunque estoy a punto de renacer,no lo proclamare a los cuatro vientosni me sentire un elegido:solo me toco en suerte,y lo acepto porque no esta en mi manonegarme, y seria por otra parte unadescortesiaque un hombre distinguido jamas haria.Se me ha anunciado que manana,a las siete y seis minutos de la tarde,me convertire en una isla,isla como suelen ser las islas.Mis piernas se iran haciendo tierra y mar,y poco a poco, igual que un andantechopiniano,empezaran a salirme arboles en losbrazos,rosas en los ojos y arena en el pecho.En la boca las palabras moriranpara que el viento a su deseo puedaulular.Despues, tendido como suelen hacer lasislas,mirare fijamente al horizonte,vere salir el sol. la luna,y lejos ya de la inquietud,dire muy bajito:?asi que era verdad?-Virgilio Pinera, Isla, 1979Although I am about to be reborn,I will not proclaim it to the four windsnor feel myself a chosen one:it was just my luck,and I accept it because it is not in myhandsto refuse, and it would, moreover, be adiscourtesywhich a distinguished man should nevercommit.It's been announced to me thattomorrow,at six past seven in the evening,I will become an island,an island as islands usually are.My legs will make land and sea,and slowly, like a Chopin andante,trees will begin to come from my arms,roses from my eyes and sand from mychest.In my mouth the words will dieso that the wind can howl at its pleasure.After, lying as islands usually do,I will look fixedly at the horizon,I will see the sun rise, the moon,and far now from any anxiety,I will say very sofdy:so it was true?Contemporary Cuban literature has mostly been read in relation to the political and socioeconomic context of the Cuban Revolution's post-Soviet period, which obviously is a singular condition of the writing of the island. In this essay, however, I would like to adopt a different scope and explore this literature's Caribbean connection through Edouard Glissant's concepts of relation, archipelago, and diversion. Cuba's connection with Caribbean canonical writing has nevertheless quite often been problematic. On the one hand, Cuba has a very strong notion of nation and national literary canon, in which the gaze of the metropolis and of Latin American avant-gardes is rather more present than is the case for its Caribbean neighbors and in which the insular condition returns once and again as a motif. On the other hand, some Cuban writers, such as Alejo Carpentier and Antonio Benitez Rojo, could even be considered as foundational within a Caribbean context of repeating islands. I will take a point of departure from Glissant's notion of archipelago in relation to one novel in particular, Desde Los Blancos Manicomios (2010), by Margarita Mateo. In this discussion, I will show the ambivalence and the limits of these concepts by Glissant, which deal simultaneously with the limits of belonging and detachment of a community or imaginary identity. I will discuss whether the use of archipelago stands for a deterritorialization and fragmentation in Mateo's novel and whether it produces agency for the subject. This contemporary novel seems to deal above all with the self as such, within an archipelagic constellation of cultural identity in which foundational fictions of belonging are also quite present. This constellation serves as a commentary on those foundational texts, as an interwoven texture of poststructuralist thinking and intertextual voyage.Not only as a scholar but also as a fictional writer, Mateo, who was born in Havana in 1950, offers a refreshing voice in Cuba's contemporary cultural field. …

The National Literary Canon in the Field of Tension Between Aesthetic and Ideological Principles. The Estonian Case with Indications to the Comparative Perspectives

The article is an attempt to outline some problems regarding the literary and non-literary factors which are at work in the formation of the canon. The central example used in this analysis is the interactions between aesthetic and ideological principles in the treatments of Estonian literature of the Soviet period. As this example shows, these principles intertwine on many levels – from interpretation of single texts to the factors constituting the understanding of literary history and the literary canon – which makes the interactions of different principles a complicated sphere indicating the need for reviewing the national canons in the comparative context and especially for further comparative studies of the literatures that share a similar historical experience from the 20th century.

Songbook: how lyrics became poetry in medieval Europe

Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally produced and received - a collaboration of artists, performers, live audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies. The only comparative study of its kind, Songbook treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category poetry: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. Marisa Galvez analyzes the seminal songbooks representing the vernacular traditions of Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian, and tracks the process by which the songbook emerged from the original performance contexts of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and, finally, into an established literary object. Galvez reveals that songbooks - in ways that resonate with our modern practice of curated archives and playlists - contain lyrics, music, images, and other nonlyric texts selected and ordered to reflect the local values and preferences of their readers. At a time when medievalists are reassessing the historical foundations of their field and especially the national literary canons established in the nineteenth century, a new examination of the songbook's role in several vernacular traditions is more relevant than ever.

Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary NationalismDislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. x+322.

<i>Robert S. Levine</i>, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism<i>Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism</i>. Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. x+322.

Catalan and Galician Literatures in Iberian and European Contexts

In her article "Catalan and Galician Literatures in Iberian and European Contexts" Olivia Rodríguez González investigates the problematics of canon formation and proposes an approach within which the formation of a multi-system canon is possible. Reflections on the constitution of a European canon that would be the result of a proportional or market-driven combination of national literary canons leads to the conclusion that, with respect to the multicultural Spanish state, what will succeed in getting into the European canon will do so as a consequence of one of two processes. The first depends on what each literary system does to project itself to the outside world. The second refers to any planning that may be implemented by the Spanish (i.e., Iberian) interliterary system as an indirect route for projecting each of the peninsular literatures: Castilian, Basque, Catalan, Galician, and even Portuguese literature.

DECONSTRUCTING MASCULINITIES, FEMINIST RECONSTRUCTIONS

The non-inscription of women in the process of forming national identities in anticolonial discourse is often constructed on differential and hierarchical polarizations which engender counter-productive identities of women in the African postcolonies. This exclusion privileges skewed monologues of masculine iconographies which have political and positional resonances in the identification of women. African women writers, however, engage in contesting the sociocultural and ideological structures that engender their occlusion from the important sites of nationhood, national literary canons and identities. The critical parameters of this study, therefore, emerge from an investigation of the postcolonial context of the possibilities of reconfiguring modern African political and literary discourse, suggesting in its process a displacement of the assumptive traditional, masculinist ethos and the inauguration and reconstruction of a more inclusive sociocultural order. A beginning point in this process requires a critique of existing masculinist hegemonies prevalent in African literature. This is typified by Nigerian female writer Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo in her novel The Last of the Strong Ones (1996). This novel provides the linchpin for the critique of and opposition to the fetishization of oppressive tradition found in much postcolonial writing. The dual process of the reconstruction of new self-images of women and the deconstruction of masculinities is the two-hander structure of this study.

An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry from France. (MLA Texts and Translations) by Gretchen Schultz

248 Reviews science and artistic creation ismost visible. Novelists give an account of these tensions in theirworks and provide us with a rich landscape of a world in turmoil, unable fully to comprehend the nature of the progress that is being made. By careful analysis of a rich and well-defined corpus, the author has produced a study of the novel from an original perspective and given new insights into a world that was becoming evermore divided. University of Exeter Malcolm Cook An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry from France. Ed. by Gretchen Schultz. (MLA Texts and Translations) New York: Modern Language Association ofAmerica. 2008. xl-f-368pp. $11.95. ISBN 978-1 60329-029-6. In Les Progres de lapoesie francaise depuis 1830 (Paris: Charpentier, 1874), Theo phile Gautier devotes only three pages of a total hundred to female poets, grouping them alongside 'regional' poets fromBrittany and Provence. Catulle Mendes, defin ing poetry as a 'metier d'homme' in Le Mouvement poetique francais de 1867 a 1900 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), p. 200, dispenses with Lucie Mardrus, Anna de Noailles, Nicole Hennique, and Anne Osmont in a single page, concluding that 'la poesie des femmes ne devrait etre qu'un charme de plus dans lamaison' (p. 201). However, as Gretchen Schultz's biographies attest,many of the fourteen poets included here won prestigious literaryprizes in their lifetime despite fierce criticism from theirmale peers. Schultz's introduction to this excellent antho logy challenges the pernicious and reductive patriarchal forces which shape the creation of national literary canons, and their 'profound gendering of aesthetic values' (p. xviii), providing instead a refreshing selection of unjustly marginalized poets who, through intertextual dialogues, succeed in fostering a powerful sense of community and common purpose. The anthology is thus divided chronologically into three periods?Romantic (Desbordes-Valmore, Tastu, Gay de Girardin, Mer cceur, Colet), Parnassian (Ackermann, Blanchecotte, Michel, Siefert,Villard), and Symbolist (JudithGautier, Krysinska, d'Houville, Vivien)?and the texts selected display both intriguing correspondences with and striking divergences fromwhat literary history has come to regard as the dominant poetics of each movement. Familiar themes among the Romantics, for example, are love, beauty, sorrow, and loss, while the Symbolists articulate a sensual, ineffablemystery similar to that evident in theirmale counterparts. Themes uniting these diverse writers are theur gent search for an authentic and independent female poetic voice and the problem of inscribing a woman's memory and legacy among thegrands hommes de lapa trie;while their poetry often transcends gender to consider the human condition, Blanchecotte memorably cries 'Domptons l'homme, desarmons Dieu!' (p. 156). Indeed, several poets strike a forceful political tone, with Siefert's anti-Napoleon III polemic Les Saintes Coleres and Michel's anti-imperial tirades, while Vivien's dark, carnal lesbian verse, Vaillard's cynical satires, and Tastu's challenge to the MLR, 105.1, 2010 249 Church's inflexiblemodel of obedient femininity prove thatmother, daughter, and spouse are but three of the infinitelyvaried and complex visions ofwomanhood which these writers have to offer.This well-documented bilingual anthology, with a wide range of translation styles, is a first-ratepedagogical tool. Throughout, Schultz directs the reader towards the finest recent scholarship in the field (Adri anna Paliyenko, Aimee Boutin, Wendy Greenberg), and the current resurgence of academic interest in these writers suggests that themuch-needed reconsideration of the nineteenth-century canon, with all the benefits thatbrings to both teaching and research, iswell underway. University of St Andrews David Evans CEuvres poetiques completes, vol. ix. By Theodore de Banville. Ed. by Peter J.Edwards and Peter S. Hambly. Paris: Champion. 2009. 414 pp. 75. ISBN 978-2-7453-1876-3. Although substantial scholarly interest has eluded him, Banville's poetry inspired considerable debate during the nineteenth century, as the documents gathered here amply attest. Following a dozen minor poems discovered since the recent eight-volume critical edition of his complete poetic works, the editors present 350 pages of contemporary critical responses to Banville. As well as individual reviews of each of his seventeen verse collections bar only Amethystes and Roses de Noel, this includes a wide selection of vues d'ensemble, including well-known essays by Baudelaire (1861) and Mallarme...

Teorías de la hermandad poético-musical en el contorno nacional: la generación argentina de 1837

Considering the processes of nation-building in Argentina during the nineteenth century as well as the consolidation of debates pertaining to the constitution of a 'national literature,' this article explores the relationship between poetry and music outlined in some works by the most important writers of the Argentine romantic Generation of 1837. Juan Thompson, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Esteban Echeverría, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Bartolomé Mitre all expressed concerns for the role of music in their personal lives and in the broader national cultural project. These intellectuals did not always agree on the hierarchical relationship between music and poetry, but the ongoing search into the character of a national song constituted for all of them the middle point between both arts. However, the uneasy relationship between music and poetry, a sisterhood necessary for the development of national customs and progress, came to represent a complex dichotomy between the oral character of music and the work of the 'letrados.' Existing song repertoires within the national popular realms represented a threat to their cultural project, to the effect that folksong collections such as El Cancionero Argentino of 1837 were published by the intellectual elite as a way to obliterate other musical representations. Despite their efforts to bar the popular folklore from these discussions, defining the argentine character as inevitably lyrical and musical at the same time would eventually allow a work such as José Hernández's Martín Fierro to be centrally positioned within the national literary canon.

Revivifying Russia: Literature, Theory, and Empire in Viktor Shklovskii's Civil War Writings

When in 1924 Iurii Tynianov identified Viktor Shklovskii's memoir A Sentimental Journey as a work 'on the margin of literature', he was commenting on the text's generic experimentation. But he also provided an apt label for its geopolitical setting, as war drives Shklovskii back and forth from Russia's dying imperial centre Petrograd to the country's peripheries. The sometimes uneasy relationship between Shklovskii's literary theory and his movement through the disintegrating Empire is this essay's main focus. Drawing on recent scholarship that identifies a fundamental paradox of modern literary theory as both the cosmopolitan study of literature per se and a discipline validated by national literary canons, the essay proposes that Shklovskii negotiates cosmopolitan and national impulses by exploring Russian literature as the expression of a multi-ethnic and multilingual empire. In analogy with Shklovskii's famous dictum that art exists to 'make the stone stony', the argument is made that in his Civil War writings Shklovskii strove to revivify the Russian Empire, that is, to 'make Russia Russian', by presenting his readers with a new and strange view of Russia from its imperial borders.

Birth of a Nation? The Origins of Senegalese Literature in French

Although most critics chart Senegalese literary history from the 1930s and the rise of Negritude, there also exist a small number of texts from the 1850s-1020s that are usually classified as a sort of proto-Senegalese literature. This article focuses on Abbe David Boilat's Esquisses senegalaises (1853) and Bakary Diallo's Force-bonte (1926), both of which occupy a deeply ambiguous position within the national literary canon because of their open support for French colonialism. The article contends that the status of these texts as key works in the Senegalese national canon rests on a specific vision of their Franco-African hybridity. By questioning the value and the limitations of the notion of hybridity in relation to colonialism and nationalism in Senegal, the article aims to discover whether these texts by Boilat and Diallo might be deemed to signal the birth of a nation or the birth of a colony.

Mixing Memoir and Desire: James Frey, Wound Culture, and the “Essential American Soul”

I made other alterations in my portrayal of myself, most of which pictured me in ways that made me tougher and more daring and more aggressive than in reality I was, or I am. People cope with adversity in many different ways, ways that are deeply personal. I think one way people cope is by developing skewed perception of themselves that allows them to overcome and do things they thought they couldn't do before. My mistake, and it is one I deeply regret, is writing about person I created in my mind to help me cope, and not person who went through experience. -James Frey's a note to reader, A Million Little Pieces imagined person we encounter in Frey's blockbuster memoir, A Million Little Pieces (AMLP) (2003), proved alluring not just to author and supposed addict himself, but to an American public deeply interested in stories of recovery, personal transformation, and heroic self-reliance. James of AMLP-troubled, swaggering, prone to intimate with death, in hot pursuit of radically autonomous selfhood-is close kin to prominent type in national literary canon, as well as familiar protagonist in what Mark Seltzer calls contemporary wound culture, where versions of that type and their relationship to and opened private bodies and torn and opened psyches (Seltzer 109) command extraordinary attention. popularity of James, up until public debunking of his authenticity, had much to do with his status as contemporary permutation (if rather bathetic one) of D. H. Lawrence's essential American soul, mythical New World man who is hard, isolate, stoic, and killer (Lawrence 68). Fantasies of regeneration through violence, as Richard Slotkin has so compellingly demonstrated in his studies of frontier mythology, still linger long after closing of geographic frontiers (Slotkin, Regeneration; Gunfighter). Commenting from across Atlantic on the brash explicitness of American capitalism, Terry Eagleton puts point bluntly: The pioneer spirit [of nation] was displaced rather than dissolved. epic rapacity which subdued land in first place carried on as regular business. Probably no other people on earth use word 'aggressive' in such positive fashion, and no group outside psychoanalytic circles is so fond of word 'dream' (Eagleton 66). We find in AMLP an evocation-profound, timely, and disturbing-of enduring magic of these words in popular imagination. Teasing out literary and cultural affinities of Frey's imagined person or personified coping strategy helps us understand better, I suggest, abiding attraction of radical autonomy as personal ideal, along with inevitable implication of violent action in such autonomy. Frey's non-fiction book explores young addict's time at rehabilitation clinic, and it presents to us pop-cultural protagonist we know well: injured soul who overcomes daunting challenges, manages to heal, grow strong, and flourish, and who brings his pain and redemption to public as abject confession and spiritual guide. initial success of AMLP depended heavily on its claims to gritty realism in its public probing of private wounds, its supposed honesty in relaying harrowing details of personal redemption, and of course also its visual legitimization in form of photogenic and brash young author himself, alive to tell tale, who claimed in early interviews that he wanted to be the f-ing best writer of his generation (qtd. in Valby 64).1 This was story, above all, about success in self-creation. When Frey's claims to have written true story were revealed as largely fraudulent by journalists at thesmokinggun.com and by Oprah Winfrey, former patron, his authority as an honest evangelist was sabotaged.2 That book strains credulity (or should) on nearly every page-from its preternaturally stoic and arrogant narrator, to its preposterously stereotyped supporting cast, to its relentlessly maudlin plot twists-is curious and rather overlooked element of this saga. …

Literary Self-Referentiality and the Formation of the National Literary Canon

The author discusses the process of nationalizing literature, that is, the formation of a national literary canon in Slovene poetry from the Enlightenment to Post-Romanticism. The utopian projection and formation of a ‘Slovenised’ literary system has been intertwined with the successful establishment of a unified Slovene literary language. The use of images of Parnassus and Elysium, these topoi in the European cultural memory, was one of the self-regulatory strategies acquired by Slovene writers to mark the distinction between their own discourse and the norms of the ‘classics’ and a competitive comparison with other modern national literatures in order to achieve integration into the canon of ‘world literature’.

Towards a Comparative Jewish Literary History: National Literary Canons in Nineteenth-Century Germany and England

Towards a Comparative Jewish Literary History: National Literary Canons in Nineteenth-Century Germany and England

The Emergence of Mark Twain's Missouri: Regional Theory and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The contribution of regional criticism to studies of American literature and culture has been held back in our time by the assumption that the region enforces a very limiting provincialism upon its communities and, thus, its literary products. Such an assumption has emerged, perhaps understandably, in a cultural context in which the question of what constitutes a more universally American identity dominates thought nearly to the point of obsession. And yet there is a persistent sense that the individual region in the United States remains, somehow, a crucial unit of culture. Considering this issue in the most general spatial and cultural senses, the critic W. H. New points out that the very question whether authors can ever not be in space yields either absurd answers or openly political ones--political statements that constitute new definitions of the relation between spaces in a society (14). Regarding literature in particular, New writes: Defining the significance that particular spaces have for us, we parenthetically define or at least hint at our preconceptions about the significance of statements that will emerge from those given spaces, locales, regions. The of region, that is, contains within it a of total structure, and it is often the artifice and the emotional reality of this implied total structure that literature encodes. (14-15) This statement formulates the capacity of notions of region, the knowledge of specific geographic landscapes and their cultures, and the explicit and implicit significance in their eventual representative voices, to inform literary texts. What I will call a regional reading of any literary text, then, if it is to apprehend the region's hidden notion informing literature, will require an understanding of the region's intricacies, of the singularities of its moment and topology, and also, of course, of its emergence from and within a national context. The potential value of this method would seem to reside both in a literary exposition that reveals new meaning in the text and also, somewhat incidentally but not unimportantly, in a qualification of the strains of national criticism that have attempted to frame any previous understanding of the literature. In an American context, the national model of empire follows its own peculiar, profoundly complex set of relations within its national borders. And in this setting k seems that the region, either in seeking to reproduce the national model on a smaller scale or in fashioning itself in some other way, cannot avoid, at some point, a confrontation with that complexity, and the realization that America's tangled national history and culture constitute a great measure of its inheritance, for better or for worse. It may be instructive in this connection to note that even the region's attempt to claim some kind of authentic identity apart from the nation personifies exactly that paradoxically individualistic quality of the American national character. Perhaps attention to a specific literary product, and to its grounding in a particular American regional context, will make this kind of complexity clearer. And since a highly suspicious reactionary motive has often motivated the tendency to retreat from nation to region, it is probably safest to consider a literary text that has been universally acknowledged as an archetypally American model, as an undisputed and permanent member of the national literary canon, and as a work that transcends the presumably narrow provincial limits of the region and engages the presumably larger national themes and concerns. Perhaps no American book could be more exemplary under these criteria, or provide a better case study for this kind of regional reading, than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain's novel, of course, is widely considered to be a definitively American literary text. And yet, if the arguments of New and others are to be taken seriously, if the region does indeed offer a particular and appropriate critical framework for studies of literature, a regional reading of Huckleberry Finn should be productive and valuable in the context of any understanding of the novel (New 13). …

Film Theory in Poland Before World War II

Polish cinema has a history essentially as long as those of cinemas elsewhere. The first screening in Polish territories took place in Cracow in 1896, and in that same year Kazimierz Pr6szyiski created his own camera, pleograph. In 1902, perfected pleograph was employed by Preszyfski to produce first Polish narrative film, Powr*t Birbanta (The Return of a Merry Fellow). Regular production in Poland started, however, some years later with adaptations of national literary canon, commercially-minded melodramas, and comedies. In general, production before World War I remained domain of economically feeble, ephemeral studios. During war, number of films produced increased. The studio Sfinks, a virtual monopolist which promoted its own version of Hollywood star system (responsible for beginnings of Pola Negri's career), produced, among others, several patriotic (anti-Russian) pictures reflecting spirit of that time. The restoration of Polish state in 1918 created conditions for development of national art. Although industry was still economically weak, theory and criticism flourished during first years of independence. Unlike Polish pre-war productions, Polish criticism and theory attained a comparatively high standard and an original profile. In her indispensable book on history of Polish theory, Jadwiga Bochenska divides pre-war theorizing into three distinct periods: (1) from 1898 to World War I; (2) period between 1918-1930, ending with introduction of sound; (3) 1930s and World War II.2 According to Marcin Gizycki, mediocrity of production in pre-war Poland provided impetus to campaign for artistic cinema.3 Between two world wars, Polish intellectuals and artists went through a peculiar film fever,4 as Gizycki calls it, which was quite incompatible with current stage of development of local cinema. The result of this creative fever deserves more careful analysis. In Poland, as elsewhere, the first 'theories' sound more like birth announcements than scientific inquiries-to repeat Dudley Andrew's wellknown comment.5 Cinema, still in its infancy, did not provide a fertile ground for theory. The majority of early texts on consisted of dilettantish yet passionate attempts to give cinema stature of art. FILM THEORY FROM 1898 TO WORLD WAR I The first texts written by a Pole on cinema appeared as early as 1898: they were Boleslaw Matuszewski's two studies, Une nouvelle source de l'Histoire and La Photographie animte, published in French, in Paris.6 These were pioneer texts, arguably on a world scale, which aimed at presenting practical possibilities of to world of science and government institutions. Though now almost forgotten, publication of these works was well-received and debated in many French journals.7 Matuszewski (1856-1943?), a well-known Warsaw photographer and cameraman, probably worked for Lumiere brothers in Poland, France, and Russia where, in 1897, Tsar awarded him title of court cinematographer. As a cameraman travelling across Europe, Matuszewski was interested primarily in recording function of film, as an eyewitness to history. Film, according to Matuszewski, provides research methods for science of history by supplying it with direct vision. In his studies, he considers living photographs capable of truthful documentation of reality. Unlike traditional photography, which is capable of distortions and falsifications, living photographs can present only absolute truth.8 This opinion, interestingly, Matuszewski grounds on technical impossibility of altering thousands of pictures (frames). Matuszewski, regarded in Poland as pioneer of scientific cinema, stresses cinema's educational and cultural role in bringing nations together. He postulates creation of archives, a storehouse of historical cinematography, functioning as a new source of history. …