Text Theory Research Articles

Derrida in the World: Space and Post-Deconstructive Textual Analysis

Derrida in the World: Space and Post-Deconstructive Textual Analysis Daniel Punday “It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world.” —Of Grammatology In the wake of deconstruction, critics have sought some way to reconcile poststructural textual analytics with a concern for political and cultural issues. The broad dissemination of Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the “local” has come to embody this urge to move away from the abstract metaphysics critiqued by deconstruction for the sake of immersion in the “world.” Thus a discourse of “location” within the world has emerged as an answer to this perceived failure of deconstructive textual analysis. Typical is Susan Bordo’s departure from deconstruction: In theory, deconstructionist postmodernism stands against the ideal of disembodied knowledge and declares that ideal to be a mystification and an impossibility.... The question remains, however, how the human knower is to negotiate this infinitely perspectival, destabilized world. Deconstructionism answers with constant vigilant suspicion of all determinate readings of culture and a partner aesthetic of ceaseless textual play as an alternative ideal. Here is where deconstruction may slip into its own fantasy of escape from human locatedness—by supposing that the critic can become wholly protean by adopting endlessly shifting, seemingly inexhaustible vantage points, none of which are “owned” by either the critic or the author of a text under examination. (142) As a result, Bordo argues, deconstruction claims to be the view from everywhere and nowhere, thus failing to recognize its own “locatedness” within the world. In other words, deconstruction’s abstract textual theory must give way to a concern for “location” if we are to analyze cultural and social issues. Critical “location” has been an especially important and problematic issue in postmodern feminism, where the emphasis on such positioning is coupled with the need to critique mainstream culture. The local, according to Lyotard, is to be a counterforce to the broad narratives that deconstruction has unraveled. Yet, critics find almost immediately that the local has no pragmatic, critical value without such broader narratives. In considering how, for example, one might analyze local instances of gender politics, we are immediately confronted by the metaphysical assumptions implicit within terms such as “man” and “woman,” and forced to construct a larger theoretical apparatus to organize them. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson describe the problem this way: “Suppose... that one defined that object [of social criticism] as the subordination of women to and by men. Then, we submit, it would be apparent that many of the [metanarrative] genres rejected by postmodernists are necessary for social criticism. For a phenomenon as pervasive and multifaceted as male dominance simply cannot be adequately grasped with the meager critical resources to which they would limit us” (26). Thus, although critics may recognize location as a crucial element of the modeling of social space, when they turn to actual critical praxis and analyze texts for their representation of gender, they find it difficult to operate using the model without accepting some traditional metalanguage. Critics have thus gone to the extreme of claiming that, although master narratives are to be avoided, critics in certain circumstances might be granted a theoretical waiver: “Formulating wrongs, on the other hand, can make use of theory. Victims might turn to existing theories or even themselves theorize when striving to phrase the wrongs signaled by their feelings and so on” (Schatzki 49). Critics fall back upon rather conventional critical models precisely because “local” criticism seems to provide no alternative method for analyzing particular textual features and conflicts in relation to this “locatedness.” In order to recover a sense of how texts reflect and engage with the location from which they are analyzed, we need to return to deconstruction through the thematics of location. Critics who debate the use and nature of the local have generally assumed that deconstruction and the world are naturally opposed.1 Certainly, the use to which deconstruction was put in its heyday—as a tool for a type of close reading, a hyper-New Criticism—supports this opposition. I will offer a more sophisticated model of deconstruction’s engagement with the...

:Textual Formations and Reformations

Valuable to cultural historians and textual scholars alike, this volume analyzes the development of textual theory and practice in the twentieth century, questioning not just the assumptions and methodologies of textual study but its very genesis, as well as current definitions of the field.

The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory

ing about the social functions of literature. The Fictive and the Imaginary, the culmination of his reflections about the art of representation, does not explicitly engage the question of the politics of literature, and its emphasis on the value of play and the as if might seem to disengage the aesthetic experience from worldly concerns. What Iser means by play, however, is a profoundly important social activity that would facilitate productive uses of difference to create forms of community among decentered human beings whose dissonances and dislocations resist unification. As an instrument for staging various kinds of open-ended exploratory interactions, Iser's notion of literature offers a model of the emancipatory uses of power in the service of communicative democracy. The politics of Iser's theory of nonmimetic representation foregrounds the role of the as if in producing, questioning, and overturning different forms of life. The playful, nonteleological functioning of fictive acts of staging in turn makes possible the reciprocal but nonconsensual exchange of power on which democratic mutuality depends. The Fictive and the Imaginary engages the question of power in representation in order to affirm the liberating and community-building capacities of literature in a perpetually unstable, decentered world. It is thus an important response to the political challenges of our time. The Fictive and the Imaginary moves beyond Iser's earlier concern with reading to offer a general theory of textuality in the service of what he calls literary anthropology. Two questions drive this anthropology: Why do human beings seem to need fictions? And what does the capacity to make fictions reveal about the being of human being? Iser approaches these questions not by undertaking a transcendental phe nomenological reflection but by looking for patterns in several histori cally and culturally specific domains that he thinks provide especially illuminating examples of how human beings have made and thought

A Theory of Textuality

A Theory of Textuality

Intention and Purpose in Rina Yerushalmi'sWoyzeck 91

I assume that any work of art reflects authorial intention. Its determination, however, is probably one of the most difficult tasks in interpretation. I also assume that accounts by the authors themselves are not necessarily valid, and indeed they are often conspicuously inadequate. Therefore, for the scholar, the work itself essentially remains the only reliable object of research. In the following paragraphs I intend to suggest, apply and eventually formalize a method of research whose main objective is to determine authorial intentions and purposes in a given theatrical performance text.

The Story Must Go on and on: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz

A fixed law, an established rule: that is what immobilizes narrative. (Todorov 165) Rereading [is] an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us throw away the story once it has been consumed (devoured) .[ldots] [Rereading] is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors) .[ldots] (Barthes 15-16) Narratives, it seems, move toward closure. This is an impulse of both the narrative itself (which must finally come to an end at a certain page number) and of the reader (who must eventually close the book, put it down, and begin something else). Even texts that attempt to keep meaning in motion, to present multiple possible endings for their plots, are subject to this totalizing pressure. In a society which considers rereading to be a kind of marginal activity (as Barthes implies), when confronted with a perplexing ending most readers will simply pick one scenario and consider the case closed. For example, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) ends with an extremely ambiguous moment in which the protagonist, Milkman Dead, leaps into the arms of his friend Guitar, who has been pursuing him in order to kill him. Although Morrison crafts this moment so that it is subject to multiple interpretations, many readers feel obligated to take a stand as to how the plot of the novel ends. But Morrison's point in creat ing this ending, and in much of her fiction, is to keep meaning in motion, to keep the story going on and on in the reader's mind and heart. The reader might turn back to the first page of the novel to begin rereading it for clues about what the ending means--but only if the reader has been able to resist the totalizing impulse, the desire to close the book, resolve the story, find an ending that sutures over uncertainties in favor of a unified and unambiguous conclusion. The search to find narrative methods that resist the totalizing impulse of narrative and of readers themselves is a central aspect of Morrison's fictional technique, and is certainly connected to her investment in an oral, African American tradition of storytelling, of the Griot. Beloved (1987) marks the height of Morrison's achievement, for it is a narrative that resists closure in numerous ways. I have found that for this reason teaching Beloved is always a new experience--no class reacts to it the same way, as it generates multiple ambiguities that cannot easily be sutured over. Yet in teaching this book, I am always surprised by how ready students are to resolve the issue of Beloved's status in this novel, to decide unambiguously that she is a ghost--in fact, the ghost of the child Sethe killed eighteen years earlier. In my mind, however, the text balances between realistic explanations of Beloved's presence (she is an escaped slave woman who has been sexually abused by a white man) and supernatural ones (she is Sethe's dead child come back to haunt her), and is therefore an excellent example of what Tzvetan Todorov has called the fantastic. Why do students ignore the text's balance between the realistic and the marvelous? And even more puzzling, why has this tendency to fix on a particular meaning for Beloved been replicated by literary scholars, most of whom view Beloved as a ghost? [1] This essay uses structuralist, post-structuralist, and reader-response theories of textuality to argue that the narration in Beloved creates a too close identification between the main characters' points of view and the point of view of the reader; the ultimate result is that many readers finish the text believing, like Sethe and Denver, that Beloved was the ghost of the dead child. From this point of view, the text's meaning is closed, totalized, finalized; and although the narrative voice reasserts itself to raise troubling questions about what Beloved really was, these questions are often ignored. But this essay also argues that Morrison is aware of this tendency, and that she puts the meaning of Beloved back into circulation with her next novel, Jazz (1992). …

Applying a Descriptive Translation Studies model to the analysis of individual dramatic texts: two case studies

This article examines two studies which each apply a Descriptive Translation Studies model (Lambert & Van Gorp 1985) to the translation of dramatic texts.The aim is to identify the adequacy of the model for such studies, and to assess the broader value of individual studies carried out within the framework of Descriptive Translation Studies. One of the studies examines the translation from French into English of a canonised literary text, and the other the progression of a South African theatre text from performance to a published English version and a subsequent translation into French. Parallels are found between the two studies,in that each finds that the translations are produced in order to facilitate performance, and to appeal to the target audience. Each translation was found to be predominantly produced in order to conform to the norms and conventions of the target system. The cultural and literary context of the translated text proves to be the overriding factor in each case.

Fertile Visions: Jacobean Revels and the Erotics of Occasion

Fertile Visions: Jacobean Revels and the Erotics of Occasion Douglas Lanier (bio) The past two decades have seen a remarkable renaissance of interest in the court masque, due largely to the pioneering mythographic studies of D. J. Gordon, Stephen Orgel, and Roy Strong, 1 and equally importantly, to the recent vitality of politically inflected historical criticism. And for good reason: the masque is something of a New Historicist’s dream come true, a genre exemplary of literature’s direct engagement with the micropolitics of English court culture, or, as Ben Jonson puts it in his preface to Hymenaei, a genre preoccupied with “sound[ing] to present occasions” (line 17). 2 In the wake of detailed studies by Dale Randall, Orgel, Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Kogan, Leah Marcus, Jerzy Limon, David Lindley, and Martin Butler, 3 to name just a few, detailed readings of masques within their specific occasions have become plentiful, more attentive to political subtleties, even, I daresay, compulsory. In the process, we have largely left behind the work of an earlier critical generation, work associated with names like E. K. Chambers, C. R. Baskervill, and Enid Welsford, 4 work concerned with tracing the continuities between the masque and traditional folk drama and ritual. This neglect is not entirely undeserved, for this critical generation, working on a much longer time scale and concerned to portray masques as more than merely royal propaganda, tended to paint in rather broad and depoliticized strokes. This approach, with its links to the comparative mythology of James Frazer, sought to assimilate the masque (indeed all of literature) with a unified field theory of myth and folk ritual, and by so doing, it tended to elide the dynamics of region, gender, class, historical moment, and political affiliation. 5 In their hands, the masque became yet another example of long-lived [End Page 327] rituals rooted in agricultural and seasonal cycles, rather than, to borrow Leah Marcus’s terms, a “local” form. Even so, we may have been too hasty in discarding the insights of this earlier critical generation, insufficiently nuanced though they may have been. One area where they retain their usefulness for masque criticism is in assessing the meaning of the dance. Scholars interested in political topicality have tended to focus on the masque text (particularly on the antimasque) and, to a somewhat lesser degree, its staging. This focus is easy to understand, since these elements are the most fully documented and, not incidentally, of most interest to theater scholars. But our stress upon text and scenic design is arguably a distortion. Evidence suggests that the Jacobean masque’s raison d’être is its culminating dances, the revels, dances which eventually included much of the audience and typically lasted for more than half of the evening. The point can be expressed schematically: masques are not theatrical texts with dances appended; they are dances with theatrical texts appended. 6 Typically, Jacobean masque dances follow a relatively stable pattern: at the completion of the antimasque, itself often punctuated with comic or grotesque dances, the masquers first process from their seats within the masque scene to the dance floor and there perform one or more sets of single-gender dances for the audience. These carefully choreographed solo or ensemble dances are designed to display the prowess, beauty, and virility of the individual members of the court. After these dances, the masquers invite members of the court to join them in a general dance, the revels proper, which often lasts for much of the remaining night. Typically the song prefacing the general revels stresses the special efficacy of the single-gender dances: it is those dances, so goes the fiction, that motivate the court to join in the general dance. Equally typical is a final song that announces the end of the evening, sometimes linked to a final dance (or, in later masques, to added comic or “antic” dances), at which the masquers exit in an elegant processional. It is in the context of the revels that the wedding and Twelfth Night masques of the Jacobean court typically announce their status as aristocratic fertility rites. The Jacobean masque describes the ritual effectivity of its masque dances in terms of...

The "Fittings" of Cymbeline

Conspicuous repetition of forms of a word in a Shakespeare play often signals the presence of a special motif; by their different contexts of usage, they allow an analyst to map values otherwise not easily discernible. In short, the recurring forms frequently represent passable roads to the heart of a play's interests. Recurring words such as grace, play, and recreation in The Winter's Tale and nothing and noting inmMuch Ado served this function in memorable fashion for M. M. Mahood and Paul Jorgensen.' In Cymbeline, Shakespeare repeatedly employs the word fit not only to focus issues of decorum, clothing, and sexuality but also to create an original relationship among them. Concentrating upon an author's wordplay concerning a key term or set of related terms so as to focus a work's motifs and then reveal a relatively coherent relationship among them typified the New Criticism, which as Hugh Grady and Russ McDonald have shown, is now a rapidly receding event in literary history.2 Nevertheless, close reading of the kind identified with New Criticism remains a prerequisite for developing the contextualized interpretations associated with recent critical approaches such as New Historicism. McDonald, among others, has issued a call for close formalist readings of Shakespeare's plays in the context of such subjects as the critic's intellectual autobiography, metrical analysis, a specific rhetorical paradigm, and the theatrical text as voice.' This enterprise, dating from the early 1990s, has come to be known as the New Formalism, and it is in the spirit of this movement that I offer this essay, which moves from lexical to interpretive readings. Robert Weimann has cautioned against the omission of Spass--fun, pleasure-from current [critical] work, urging that we 'begin again to talk about the enjoyment of Shakespeare's text.'5 Teasing out the several significations of the word fit in Shakespeare's late romance Cymbeline conforms to Weimann's wish.

Identifying Text and Postmodernist Editorial Projects

Summing the state of 'current textual criticism', D. C. Greetham has recently suggested that although 'in the past, textual critics have felt that they somehow needed to up with their critical colleagues', 'in these poststructuralist and postmodernist days it is the critics who need to keep with us'.[1] The context of Greetham's comment is, of course, the perception, widely held by certain literary theorists, that text-editing is a largely pragmatic, unsophisticated activity. In attempting to rebut this prejudice, Greetham reminds us that literary criticism and textual criticism have always been closely interrelated. So the editorial practices of the founding fathers of text-editing (of figures such as W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers) were explicitly based on a then current theory of literature: as Greetham puts it, the conjunction of the 'cultural semiotics of clear-text editing and New Critical synthetic analysis were not accidental' (pp. 12-13). At the same time, however, developments in literary and textual theory have not always kept pace with each other, in that the demise of a particular theory of literature has not always brought about the passing away of the particular editorial practices associated with it. So, Greetham notes, the hegemony of clear-text editing continued long after the decline of 'New Critical' notions of literariness which accompanied it. Indeed, the effect on text-editing of most of the new ways of theorizing literariness produced during the past thirty years or so (by Marxism, structuralism, feminism, and so on) has been relatively insignificant. These theories have, of course, had some rather varied consequences for annotation; but annotation, like those theories themselves, is concerned principally with the interpretation of text and not with the condition of textuality itself. For example, feminism might have changed decisions about which works are worth editing and which aspects of works are worth annotating, but it has done little to change attitudes towards the basic practices of editing: the choice and justification of copy-text, the identification of variants, and so forth. This situation was certainly caused in part by the habits of theorists themselves, by the fact that most were happy to do their radical critical work on the texts already established in received editions.[2] In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that text-editors working on several of the big editions which were produced during the 1980s, for example, the Cambridge Shakespeare and the Oxford Shakespeare, were able to insulate themselves from the most controversial claims of literary theorists.[3] To the extent, then, that the theoretical foundations of textual studies have sometimes appeared rather dated, there is some justification for the perception that editorial work is relatively 'untheorized'. Greetham's argument, though, is that this tendency to be 'behindhand' has finally been overcome. Indeed, it is alleged that textual criticism has caught so much that it is now textual critics, rather than literary critics, who are at the forefront of the discipline, in the theoretical 'vanguard', as it were.[4] As Ralph G. Williams has enthusiastically put it, 'textual studies are at present one of the most self-conscious and experimental branches of the humanities'. [5] What lies behind this new self-confidence is, of course, postmodernism, or, more precisely, a sense among textual critics (such as Greetham and Williams) that, in embracing what advertises itself as the very newest development in literary theory, they have finally rebutted the accusation that they were always the last guests to arrive at theory's feast. Jerome J. McGann has made a similar (if characteristically more modest) claim about the pre-eminence of textual studies when he talks about the 'poverty of criticism'.[6] More precisely, McGann has been critical of the influence in the discipline of what he terms 'romantic hermeneutics': the habit, that is, promulgated by theorists (such as Paul de Man) of viewing texts as purely linguistic artefacts. …

Stage Management, Dramaturgy and Spatial Semiotics in Shakespeare's Dialogue

This article examines the ramifications of the hypothesis that encoded in the dialogue of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre texts are precise indications for the actors as to then-entrance and exit points, and that such indications constitute a stage management system, a dramaturgical system and a system of spatial semiotics which might invest these movement patterns with thematic or semiotic significance. Such a suggestion, that we may be able to access a range of ‘spatial’ meanings from an understanding of original performance conditions, is likely to be viewed with some scepticism by Shakespearian scholars of a literary orientation, so strong is the word-based tradition of analysis and interpretation. Yet this is the suggestion that underlies this work: that, complementing the verbal signification of the texts there may also be a verbally inscribed spatial semiotic which provides an additional range of meanings—and that such possible semiotic functions ride upon pragmatic stage management patterns which governed entrances and exits and the rhythms of the original performance context. It is argued that when the texts are interrogated in this light they reveal precise, consistent and coherent traces of such systematic indications in regard to the onstage-offstage spatial relationships operating in performance.

Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America (review)

Reviewed by: Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, and: Essays on Kushner’s Angels, and: Tony Kushner in Conversation James Fisher Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Edited by Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997; pp. viii + 306. $42.50 cloth, $17.95 paper. Essays on Kushner’s Angels. Edited by Per Brask. Winnipeg, Canada: Blizzard Publishing, 1995; pp. 154. $14.95 paper. Tony Kushner in Conversation. Edited by Robert Vorlicky. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998; pp. 286. $42.50 cloth, $16.95 paper. Larry Kramer writes that Tony Kushner, author of the acclaimed Angels in America plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, is “drunk on ideas, on language, on the possibility of changing the world” (quoted in Kushner, Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness [New York: TCG, 1995]). Few contemporary dramatists have engaged as large an audience as Kushner has with these epic dramas; even the estimable Harold Bloom lists Angels in his canon of western literary culture, along with Shakespeare and the Bible. Controversy arises wherever Angels is performed, engaging communities in a critical dialogue over complex issues and the rights and responsibilities of artists. Looking within the broad scope of American politics, religion, history, and social relationships, Angels presents a poignant tapestry of the central human and spiritual issues of the second half of the twentieth century. Opposing poles of conservative and liberal, gay and straight, and transgressor and victim are set within Kushner’s portrait of life in America in the midst of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. He asks a variety of questions about this nation of diverse and often conflicted views and values. Can we face change? Is the United States rushing headlong toward disaster or a bright new future? What will the millennial apocalypse reveal? Inevitably, scholars and artists have been drawn to Kushner’s achievement, and a cottage industry of publications about Kushner has sprung up. Kushner himself has published a collection of some of his essays, speeches, and his play Slavs! in Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. A number of other books have since appeared. Essays on Kushner’s Angels has its strong points but is ultimately a disappointment. Though Per Brask states that his aim is to “get a sense of how [End Page 550] these amazing plays have fared in different contexts in the Western world” (11), he does not effectively carry out this goal. On the plus side, this slim volume features two interviews with Kushner: a brief exchange with Patrick Pacheco originally published in The Body Positive Magazine and a penetrating dialogue with David Savran from American Theatre in 1994, undoubtedly the most in-depth interview with Kushner available. Bent Holm recounts Danish productions at the Aarhus and Det Kongelige Teaters, both staged in 1995. Holm probes the difficulties of moving this distinctly American play to different cultural contexts, and Franz Wille’s contribution follows suit by describing various performances in Zurich, Hamburg, Essen and Frankfurt. Ian Olorenshaw similarly looks at stagings in Sydney and Melbourne. Essays on Kushner’s Angels would have been more useful had it focused more exclusively on a variety of international productions; two additional articles are of lesser interest. Patrick Friesen’s “How Like an Angel Came I Down” offers a short, impressionistic riff on angel imagery that contributes little to a deeper understanding of the plays; Graham Dixon’s “The Obscene Paradox” is somewhat more useful as a thorough examination of AIDS and issues of sexuality present in Angels. Approaching the Millennium provides a broader and bolder collection of essays on Angels than the Brask volume. Geis and Kruger believe Angels has influenced everything from “dramaturgy to queer theory, from AIDS activism to Brechtian epic theatre”; they and their contributors approach Angels as “theatrical texts, as literary work, as popular culture phenomenon, as political reflection and intervention” (1). The first of the volume’s four sections, “Reagan’s Children: Angels, Politics, and American History,” offers five penetrating essays that respond to “charged and conflicted” historical moments reflected in the play (3). David Román focuses on the impact of AIDS...

Electronic text: investigations in method and theory

1. Introduction 2. The Rationale of Hypertext 3. Annotating a Text: Literary Theory and Electronic Hypertext 4. Lighting Out for the Territory: Hypertext, Ideology, and Huckleberry Finn 5. Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of Textuality 6. The Body Encoded: Questions of Gender and the Electronic Text 7. New Directions in Critical Editing 8. Digital Archive as Expanded Text: Shakespeare and Electronic Textuality 9. Coda: Is it Morphin' Time? Select Bibliography

Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843

Reviewed by: Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India Lisa Blansett Matthew Edney. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Pp. 458. $35.00. One of the major Enlightenment projects undertaken by the British lay in the area of measurement. Indeed, a kind of fetish for accuracy formed the foundation for a variety of instrumental practices that affected social order, spatial planning, and state formation. Another project was the construction of the British Empire, pushing the boundaries of the kingdom beyond the reaches of the setting sun. Examining the intersection of these two projects from an interdisciplinary perspective is a prodigious undertaking. Matthew Edney, whose academic title itself defies disciplinary boundaries, has produced an excellent study of mapping and empire, interesting and provocative in its analysis of the collusion between cartographic practices and the practices of “conquest and government” (1). As “associate professor of geography-anthropology and American and New England studies and faculty scholar in the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine” (book jacket), Edney has sought to dismantle the notion that the map is the territory, that it functions as an accurate and transparent transcription of the world. In fact, Edney rather boldly calls the assumptions underlying the realist-map “incorrect and lazy” (339). Despite this single instance of moralizing, his work modifies the assumptions of positivist science that he finds in the history of cartography and geography. Instead he examines shared codes and representations of “the arena of overlap between the ideology of map-making and the ideology of empire” (32). [End Page 113] The book is thus presented as a revision, and as such, sets out to transform the way scientists, including geographers and, to a certain extent, historians of cartography, have seen and re-presented one textual object, the map. To this end, Edney incorporates recent theories of representation, textuality, and cultural production. His most prominent invocation is of Michel Foucault, in particular his theories of knowledge detailed in The Order of Things (trans. 1970) and his history of the disciplinary panopticon (Discipline and Punish [trans. 1977]). Edney argues very ably that surveying, mapmaking, and the material map create an archive of knowledge, which then provides the reproducible documents for systematic control of India. Most compellingly, to my mind, he suggests that the map itself becomes the master metaphor of the archive and of knowledge, the symbol of property and domination. Edney’s comprehensive study covers the construction of the archive from the surveys of Bengal conducted by James Rennell, for the East India Company from 1765 to 1771, to the end of the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) under the towering figure, George Everest. Of the book’s four parts, sections 1 and 2 function in part as background in that they provide a history of science and an overview of the East India Company’s work in India. I found these two sections the most interesting: Edney theorizes the map and the gaze, as well as the class, racial (and, only briefly noted) gender implications of practicing British empiricist science; and how, through mapmaking, the British were able to create “an essentialist opposition between the Indians and themselves” (33). In addition, parts 1 and 2 detail important epistemological ruptures between its two historical points. With a variety of drawings, he demonstrates how science and aesthetics figure the gaze, as evinced in representations of the picturesque in India which, consequently, had to be refigured to fit the landscape. Edney also traces the differences between the two types of survey, the route survey with surveyor pushing a perambulator over hill and dale (all the while avoiding the odd pothole in the road), and the GTS in which “the surveyor first calculated the relative positions of locations and then plotted them” (105). The latter method is more abstract and more accurate, and creates a more perfect panopticon for the British. The British also used the mathematical skills required of trigonometry to create a “socio-intellectual hierarchy,” and “hierarchical division of labor by race” to keep most Indians out of helping map their country, thus limiting indigenous...

Post-colonial Drama:Theory, Practice, Politics

In Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins embark on an ambitious, if not impossibly contingent, project. It is ambitious in that the authors’ field of exploration includes most of the postcolonial drama written and performed in “english” throughout the world. Taking as their focus, dramatic language (both vocal and visual), the arrangement of theatrical space and time, and the manipulation of narrative and performative conventions of drama, they aim “to isolate possible ways to read and view theatre texts ... as well as ways to interpret the strategies by which playwrights, actors, directors, musicians and designers rework a historical moment or a character or an imperial text or even a theatre building” (1).

<i>Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation</i>, edited by Philip Cohen

<i>Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation</i>, edited by Philip Cohen

Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville by Iain Macleod Higgins

REVIEWS this very shift away from the idealist monoglossia (Alexandrian anal­ ogy) she finds in textual theory toward a heteroglossia, a celebration of an idiosyncratic textual anomaly, that the "legacy" of Auerbach is to be seen most clearly in contemporary textual studies. The "venerable bon usage" (p. 102) has ceded to the partial, the avant, and the brouillions, in demonstration of the continuance of those postmodernist aspects of Auerbach's philological "character" noted by Geoffrey Green's essay. Even (perhaps especially) in such moments where one feels the provo­ cation most strongly, the essays in Lerer's book are justly Auerbachian in their setting down of a philological "challenge" which must then be confronted with all the energy, enthusiasm, and vigor that characterizes Mimesis itself. So what is thefinal legacy of Auerbach? Much too early to say, of course, but in a sense both Lerer's Literary History and Hanna's Pursuing History epitomize that legacy in their scholarship, rhetoric, and shape. DAVID GREETHAM City University of New York Graduate School IAIN MACLEOD HIGGINS. Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville. Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Pp. ix, 335. $49.95. Any book that begins its introduction by reference to Adam and Eve announces the scope of its own ambition. lain Higgins's ambition in Writing East is not only admirable but, for the most part, successfully realized. Taking its cue from the peripatetic originary pair, Writing East also journeys eastward, moving with Sir John, the narrator and ostensi­ ble author of the complex of texts commonly known as "Mandeville's Travels," from the familiar world of western Europe to the East as it was created in the medieval occidental imagination. In his own scholarly ex­ cursus, Higgins employs two guiding principles. The first guiding principle is that the East, imagined and reimagined over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is not one but many: the "Travels," that is, encompasses a multiplicity of orients as its narrative moves through Egypt, Palestine, Constantinople, the land of Prester John, India, the Terrestrial Paradise, and back to western Europe again. In its writing of this multiplicity, the "Travels" is one of those essential 277 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER medieval "artifacts that give expression to the worldly aspirations of medieval Christian culture" (p. 13). Its ideology is thus manifested in its geography. Higgins's second guiding principle also concerns multiplicity-not, however, in the geography within the text of the "Travels," but in the subsequent textual travels of The Book ofJohn Mandeville itself. As Higgins explains (in his book's most original and convincing portions), the "Travels" is not one text but many. Constituted of redactions, ver­ sions, translations, and "isotopes" (p. 26), The Book is best understood as a "multi-text" (p. viii), "a heterogeneric compilation," "a multinodal network, a kind of rhizome" (p. 18). In its attention to issues of textu­ ality, Writing East is a compelling response to recent theoretical contro­ versies about the nature and transmission of medieval texts. Scholars such as Paul Zumthor, Peter Shillingsburg, and Tim William Machan (although only the first is listed in Higgins's extensive bibliography) are among those debating whether it is possible to establish a unified and stable text, whether it is possible to trace the descent of a text from a single, identifiable, and authored (in a modern sense) manuscript source, and, in fact, whether it is desirable to do so. Higgins's implicit answer to each of these questions is "no." Throughout Writing East, Higgins demonstrates that The Book is not a unified text, nor is it a sin­ gle text, nor is the earliest extant version authoritative. Reading it as if it were stable or stemmatically determinable is to accept modern premises that falsify the process whereby medieval texts were created. Refuting the dominant schools of modern editing practice that either establish a best text or amalgamate a variety of available texts, Higgins aims for a "palimpsestic or topological reading" that considers the man­ uscript versions together so as to analyze "the rhetorical strategies and ideological aims" (p. 27) of each. From the more than 60 French, 44 English, 103 Dutch...

The Allegorical Impulse in the Works of Julien Gracq: History as Rhetorical Enactment in "Le Rivage des Syrtes" and "Un Balcon en Foret"

This text focuses on the role of history in Julien Gracq's novels, Le Rivage Des Syrtes and Un Balcon En Foret, and in his critical essays. It draws on theories of allegory, textuality and history in its analysis of the interplay of fictional and factual history in Gracq's writings.

Feminist Theatre Voices. Edited by Elaine Aston. Loughborough: Loughborough Theatre Texts, 1997. Pp. 182. £7.99 Pb - Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting. Edited by Heidi Stephenson & Natasha Langridge. London: Methuen, 1997. Pp. xx + 172. £9.99 Ph

Feminist Theatre Voices. Edited by Elaine Aston. Loughborough: Loughborough Theatre Texts, 1997. Pp. 182. £7.99 Pb - Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting. Edited by Heidi Stephenson & Natasha Langridge. London: Methuen, 1997. Pp. xx + 172. £9.99 Ph - Volume 23 Issue 3

Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing?

Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing? Robert Phiddian (bio) Does the principal purpose of Sec [Derrida’s pet name for his essay “Signature Event Context”] consist in being true? In stating the truth? And what if Sec were doing something else? 1 As these teasing questions hint, deconstruction does not aspire in a straightforward way to be a discourse of truth. It is interested in questions of truth, but it does not pursue them in the direct, serious, and analytic fashion of speech-act philosophers like John R. Searle or of traditional hermeneutics. In the subjunctive voice, it might be “doing something else,” but what? Derrida goes on to outline his essay’s (and philosophy’s) uneasy relationship with truth, exclaiming “How is it possible to miss the point that Sec, from one end to the other, is concerned with the question of truth, with the system of values associated with it, repeating and altering that system, dividing and displacing it in accordance with the logical force of the iter, which ‘ties repetition to alterity.’” 2 Repetition, alteration, iterability: these doublings and distortions of truth into language are what fascinate Derrida, rather than truth as essence or truth as brute fact. He looks at the effect of truth in language with the eye of neither an idealist nor an empiric, but a parodist. Long ago, Gregory L. Ulmer argued that “part of the difficulty of Derrida’s oeuvre is that it may be the first fully developed theory ever couched in the parodic mode.” 3 Much in Derrida’s work demonstrates the accuracy of this perception. However, I want in this essay to take this point further and to turn it around, to argue that Derridean deconstruction is not just a (serious) theory couched in a parodic mode (that it is a parodic theory of language), but also that it treats language and questions of truth and reference as if they were already in a play of parody (that it is a theory of parodic language). Though some recent work is beginning to look at ways of taking it less “seriously,” 4 this is decidedly not the way it has generally been received in the academic community, so the first thing I have to do is to make a space for this argument in the context of thought about deconstruction. [End Page 673] I. The Range of Deconstruction Deconstruction can, among other things, be read as a rethinking of Western philosophy, or as a rhetoric of textuality and absence. I take the second path because I am not intellectually equipped to assess deconstruction as a challenge to philosophy, and I am temperamentally disinclined to believe either (a) that it is on the verge of destroying civilization as we have known it, or (b) that it is on the verge of creating new heaven and new earth, beyond logocentrism. So, for my purposes, deconstruction is a thoroughgoing rhetoric of traces and absences in language, a theory of textuality, and a powerful (if occasionally pointless) way of reading. This essay’s interest in it is tactical rather than fundamentalist, and the tactics that I will focus on are those connected with interpreting texts. As a method of interpretation, deconstruction came to fame as a hostile way of disfiguring texts, as, according to Mark Edmundson’s persuasive argument, an attack by philosophy on literature. 5 In an act of hermeneutic violence, it sought to expose and exploit the gaps, blindnesses, contradictions, and aporias in texts that make naive claims to truth, beauty, reason, structure, progress, mimesis, and the like. Paradoxes, inconsistencies, and unconscious contradictions (conceived psychoanalytically, politically, or in a spirit of formalist rigor not wildly different from New Criticism) were exposed, especially in Romantic texts, and their implications were teased out in more or less tendentious ways. This seemed exciting in the 1970s and early 1980s, but employing a skeptical method to undermine texts which are naive about their truth claims is really rather easy, and it rapidly becomes repetitive. 6 A few of these deconstructions provided interesting and rigorous investigations of the terms of and biases in the production of meaning in texts. A lot lapsed into empty, odorless...