Wartime Journalism Research Articles

Torn between the nation and the world: D. F. Karaka and Indian journalism in the Second World War

AbstractFocusing on wartime journalism and nonfiction, this article analyses how nationalist Indians made sense of the war’s political and moral causes and goals, and how such understandings shaped the war’s longer historical resonance in India. The article centres on the wartime publications of the writer and journalist Dosabhai Framji Karaka, juxtaposing them with those of his colleagues in the nationalist newspaper, the Bombay Chronicle. Tracing the unfolding of the war through Karaka’s eyes, the article delineates the acute dilemma that the Second World War posed for nationalist Indians, between the struggle for liberation from colonial rule and the global struggle against fascism. It suggests that contemporaries perceived this dilemma as a choice between nationalism and internationalism. The war dealt a severe blow to the more fluid and capacious political imagination of interwar leftist internationalism, espoused by Jawaharlal Nehru and his followers. While substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the interwar period, this article puts a spotlight on the war, especially the pivotal year of 1942, as a distinct period that should be understood on its own historical terms—terms specific to war, with the urgency that arose from horrendous violence, unpredictable outcomes of battles on multiple fronts, and existential threats to nations and the global order. Such unprecedented pressures and constraints bifurcated the range of possibilities and forced historical actors to make difficult choices. The article shows how, during 1942, Karaka’s position parted ways with that of his peers, who more steadfastly represented the Congress stance.

Of Mutts and Mann: The Mischling Theme in Herr und Hund

This article focuses on Thomas Mann’s autobiographical essay about his dog in the light of his early fiction and wartime journalism. Herr und Hund represents not only an idyllic retreat from troubled times but also an ongoing engagement with themes central to Mann’s creative prose and cultural politics, including distinctions between human reason and animal passions, alleged racial differences among humans, and relations between nature and civilization. Issues currently cordoned off into the discrete categories of animal, environmental, and critical race studies inform one another in Mann’s multi-faceted essay. Herr und Hund marks both an end to the reflections that preoccupied Mann during the war and their continuation by other means, revisiting themes that inspire his earliest prose and will continue to inform his political thought and creative practice for years to come.

The Federated Press and Labor Feminism on the US Home Front during World War II

Abstract: This article analyzes the wartime journalism of three female reporters for the Federated Press, a cooperative news service that provided copy to more than two hundred labor newspapers from 1919 to 1956. The essay demonstrates how WWII labor journalism fostered union women's increased visibility, promoted labor feminism, and groomed leadership for postwar social justice movements. I argue that by acknowledging the importance of working women in the labor movement and insisting on their rightful place in it, these journalists advanced the goals of working-class feminism, seeding a groundswell of middle-class feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.

Oberleutnant Robert Musil als Redakteur der Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung ed. by Mariaelisa Dimino, Elmar Locher, and Massimo Salgaro

Reviewed by: Oberleutnant Robert Musil als Redakteur der Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung ed. by Mariaelisa Dimino, Elmar Locher, and Massimo Salgaro David Dollenmayer Mariaelisa Dimino, Elmar Locher, and Massimo Salgaro, eds., Oberleutnant Robert Musil als Redakteur der Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung. Musil-Studien 46. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2019. 342 pp. This volume collects contributions to a 2015 conference at the University of Verona on Robert Musil's editorship of the Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung (renamed Soldaten-Zeitung in August 1915). Musil became its editor in October 1916. There has long been uncertainty about which SZ articles, all published anonymously, Musil wrote himself. Between 1960 and 2014, seven scholars ascribed between three and thirty-eight pieces to him, mostly on subjective stylistic grounds. In the central contribution to this collection, "Die Tiroler Soldaten-Zeitung und ihre Autoren. Eine computergestützte Suche nach Robert Musil," Massimo Salgaro, Simone Rebora, Gerhard Lauer, and J. Berenike Herrmann undertake a stylometric analysis of the twenty-eight SZ texts most often ascribed to Musil, using a digital comparison of their diction with known texts by Musil and others (including Zweig, Blei, Kafka, and Albert Ritter, another writer on the SZ staff). In a handy table on page 100, they ascribe thirteen of the twenty-eight to Musil with 100 percent reliability and the rest with lesser rates of reliability. They emphasize that their results should be treated as only the beginning of more detailed interpretive analysis. It is curious that several other contributors to this volume—perhaps because they had not seen the results beforehand—ascribe SZ texts, either implicitly or explicitly, to Musil although they either do not appear in the table on page 100 at all or have low reliability ratings. Of the fourteen other essays in this volume, nine focus on Musil's editorial work for the SZ or on the echoes of that work to be found in his postwar oeuvre. Christoph Hoffmann discusses Musil's 1922 report "Psychotechnik und ihre Anwendungsmöglichkeiten im Bundesheere," written during his service as Fachbeirat in the Bundesministerium für Heereswesen. Hoffmann distinguishes between Musil's "Schreibposition" as an "Autor" of literary works and as the "Verfasser" (121) of a technical report largely summarizing the results of other studies. Regina Schaunig is similarly interested in the question of "Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren" (133) in Musil's work as literary author and wartime journalist, beginning with the essay "Europäertum, Krieg, Deutschtum," his response to the outbreak of the war, which he welcomed with patriotic enthusiasm. Massimo Libardi and Fernando Orlandi assert that Italian Germanists have a more clear-eyed view of Musil's wartime journalism than [End Page 112] their Austrian colleagues since for the latter, it is a taboo subject that contradicts their image of the writer as antimilitaristic and progressive. They analyze texts from the SZ as "Übungsplatz" (157) for both the satire of the "Parallelaktion" and the quasi-religious "anderer Zustand." Walter Fanta sees in the unfinished satirical drama "Der kleine Napoleon," written shortly after the war, Musil's "Wendung vom Saulus zu Paulus, vom Bellizisten zum Militärkritiker" (184), and argues against including the wartime journalism in his literary oeuvre. Ivana Z. Bogdanović focuses on the SZ Christmastime essay "Heilige Zeit" (100% reliability rating), striking a remarkably personal note in her analysis of Musil as "Ghostwriter der k. und k. Propaganda" (193). As a scholar primarily interested in the mystical aspects of the "anderer Zustand," she feels "die Empörung, irgendwo hinters Licht geführt worden zu sein" (196) by the discovery of his wartime propaganda. This shock will be familiar to readers of Günter Grass's Beim Häuten der Zwiebel; Musil, however, never tried to conceal his work on the SZ. Salvatore Pappalardo and Karl Corino contribute analyses of the SZ's treatment of irredentism, Italian in the case of the former and Czech in the case of the latter, and both connect this treatment to the way the topic appears in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Pappalardo too easily attributes to Musil many of the SZ texts he quotes. I wonder if the author of Törless would have described the Trieste irredentists as "meist junge Burschen, die noch in die...

"These Are the Times," or, in Other Words: Thomas Paine's 1776 Wartime Journalism

"These Are the Times," or, in Other Words: Thomas Paine's 1776 Wartime Journalism

The “Sound of an Extra”: Representing Civil War Newsboys by Pen and in Print

By the time the Civil War began, newsboys had become fixtures of America’s urban landscape. Many people who bought their daily newspaper on the street wrote about newsboys in their diaries and letters. Their writings shed light on the lived experience of wartime journalism. Newsboys were the only representative of newspapers that most readers encountered in person. With their shouts about the latest news, newsboys created a collective listening/reading experience. This meant that the popular urban reception of war news was generated not only individually but in public as well. Reception of the news was greatly influenced by the newsboys who put their own spin on events and generated mass reaction from street crowds.

"An Inner About-Face": Auerbach and de Man Reading Montaigne

"An Inner About-Face":Auerbach and de Man Reading Montaigne1 James Funk It has become common among scholars to illustrate the significance of Erich Auerbach's critical project by both situating it within the context of his life and defining it against deconstruction.2 In an early essay, Emily Apter argues that, despite his apparent conservatism, Auerbach's "privileging of exile" (87; he wrote Mimesis as a refugee in Turkey) suggests a parallel with postcolonial theory and might thus offer a corrective to "several generations of Europhilic, deconstructively trained, predominantly white comparative literature critics" (86).3 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht likewise contrasts his own methodological emphasis on Auerbach's biography—a staple of Auerbach criticism whether the focus is (in Gumbrecht's case) on his academic career in Germany, on his exile in Turkey, or on his emigration to the United States4—to deconstruction, which offers only "the bleak insight into the impossibility of any stable meaning and, with it, into the illusory character of any existential orientation" (32, emphasis in original). The implication here seems to be that an analysis that approaches Auerbach's texts deconstructively is bound to ignore the necessary link between Auerbach's own "existential decisions" and his writing (32). [End Page 1301] While neither Apter nor Gumbrecht mentions him, their criticism of reading practices indebted to deconstruction on ethical and political grounds would seem to identify Auerbach as an antidote to the likes of Paul de Man, whose wartime journalism and otherwise checkered life are summoned up indirectly to explain why the critical orientation he spearheaded would deny the link between existence and writing that Auerbach supposedly privileged. Auerbach himself certainly encouraged this connection between life and work, famously noting in the 1953 "Epilegomena to Mimesis" that "Mimesis is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s" (Mimesis 574). Nevertheless, elsewhere in his work—and in Mimesis itself—he calls into question writing's ability to transmit meaning stably and thus reflect life, a position that suggests similarities between his criticism and de Man's. In particular, Auerbach's work on Michel de Montaigne's Essais, both in the 1932 article "Montaigne the Writer" and in the chapter titled "L'Humaine Condition" in the 1946 Mimesis, registers an uncertainty about textuality that conflicts with Auerbach's claim that Montaigne offers a model of authentic existence whose point of departure is the acknowledgment of mortality and the freedom that accompanies it. Paul de Man takes up similar issues in his 1953 "Montaigne et la transcendence" ("Montaigne and Transcendence"), a text that precedes but in many ways anticipates his exercises in rhetorical reading. In that article, de Man identifies an inherent tension between language and subjectivity in Montaigne, one that would imperil efforts to read the Essais as autobiography. De Man therefore makes explicit the problems with textuality toward which Auerbach only gestures, though the language of his own account suggests a much more ambivalent attitude toward questions of writing and existence than might be expected, one that does not simply deny the relation between the two. In this essay, I argue that both Auerbach and de Man consider the possibility that reading and writing amount to a form of death, understood not in an existential or thematic sense, but as a consequence of Montaigne's practice of linguistic self-reflection, which paradoxically severs him from the concrete existence that he seeks to transmit through his text. Rather than claiming, then, that Auerbach's Montaigne represents an instance of humanism while de Man's Montaigne anticipates what we might call "post-structuralism," attention to the reading practices of both demonstrates the impossibility of such tidy historical schemes, suggesting rather that the two critics' concerns cross in unanticipated and previously unnoticed ways. [End Page 1302] I. Auerbach's Montaigne At first glance, Auerbach's 1932 "Montaigne the Writer" seems to describe Montaigne as an existentialist avant la lettre, a man who, in a world where religious and political traditions could no longer ground the human subject, turned inward, his "main concern" being "to protect his inner core, where he kept his mind and his thoughts concealed...

Robert Jordan's (and Ernest Hemingway's) "True Book": Myths and Moral Quandaries in For Whom the Bell Tolls

The true book Robert Jordan intends to write is, self-reflexively, the one his creator does write, including truths Hemingway would not reveal in his wartime journalism. These truths undermine a two-dimensional view of the war (Loyalists good, fascists evil). They reveal Stalinist terror, cynicism, lies and corruption that challenge Jordan's purpose. The truths dramatize Loyalist atrocities and puncture the myths surrounding Loyalist saints and heroes. More important, they express moral dilemmas Jordan experiences in fulfilling his duty, quandaries which again undermine any right-wrong understanding of action in wartime.

Editorial

Editorial Kristin Stapleton Zhao Erfeng and Sheng Xuanhuai were two larger-than-life political actors in the last decade of Qing rule. After their deaths in the 1910s, they continued to figure in Chinese politics and culture. In this issue of Twentieth-Century China, Joohee Suh analyzes biographies of Zhao published in the early years of the Republic, exploring various interpretations of his role as conqueror of the Western border regions and adversary of the Sichuan railway protection movement. The lack of a consensus on the significance of the 1911 Revolution is apparent, she argues, in the different assessments of Zhao’s place in history. Qiliang He examines the extravagant funeral procession of Sheng Xuanhuai in Shanghai in 1917, detailing the negotiations that resulted in the particular procession route and discussing the motivations of those who participated, including more than a million spectators. He argues that such public spectacles created a shared experience that bound diverse immigrant communities together as city people. One of Sheng Xuanhuai’s successors as a leader of industry, Liu Hongsheng, is a central figure in The Lius of Shanghai, 1 in which Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh mined family letters to trace interpersonal relationships and cultural change. In his article in this issue, Micah Muscolino takes a close look at neglected aspects of Liu Hongsheng’s business career. In particular, Muscolino shows how Liu managed different business ventures so that they supported one another, using by-products from his coal operations as fuel and raw material for factories in other sectors. Through his study of the Liu business empire, Muscolino uncovers the history of China’s transition to an economy based on fossil fuels. Conceptions of childhood in a China at war are the subject of Xu Lanjun’s contribution to this issue. She sheds light on children’s traveling troupes that formed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, examining the educational philosophy that inspired them, as well as their role in wartime propaganda. Vulnerable children, including refugees and orphans, gained symbolic importance during the national crisis, and Xu discusses how educators and activists encouraged children to think of themselves as part of the resistance struggle. Three recent books are reviewed in this issue: Parks Coble’s work on Chinese wartime journalism in the 1930s and 1940s, Joan Judge’s analysis of visual and written representations of women in Shanghai’s Women’s Eastern Times (Funü shibao) during the first decade of the Republic, and Shellen Xiao Wu’s study of the evolution of mining engineering and the integration of China’s coal resources into the world economy. [End Page 109] Footnotes 1. Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh, The Lius of Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Copyright © 2016 Twentieth-Century China

Paul de Man's Philosophical Poetics

AbstractWhen details of the literary critic Paul de Man's anti‐Semitic wartime journalism surfaced in the 1980s, enemies of deconstruction in the academy claimed that the always‐controversial style of thought tended inherently towards nihilism in its tight focus on the paradoxes of language and in its relative indifference to truth claims. More recently, ‘speculative realists’ in philosophy have lambasted deconstruction and critical theory more generally with neglecting the reality of the physical world as it exists outside language and human comprehension. But what if Paul de Man's own engagements with Kant and the European philosophical tradition in the latter years of his life reveal a side of deconstruction that was as concerned with the intransigence of the material world as it was with the paradoxes of language? In this article, I take the measure of recent debates in Continental philosophy around realism and language, with the aim of bringing to light a less visible side of de Man's philosophical poetics, one that has nonetheless been pursued by scholars critically concerned with the precisely philosophical resonances of de Man's bracing theories of language and materiality.

Exploring diachronic register change in reports of armistice 1902–2003

This paper presents a linguistic perspective on changes in news writing in the context of Australian wartime journalism over a century. It forms part of a larger study that takes reports of the conclusion of war from the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) as a set of texts of the same register, through which to investigate change in the meanings and context of news reporting. Reports of the ends of seven wars (or the end of a phase of war) in which Australia has been involved from 1902 to 2003 were analysed linguistically using the framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (see e.g. Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). In SFL, the configuration of conditions that motivate a writer’s selection of meanings ? the context of situation ? is viewed as a set of parameters: field (the kind of social interaction that is taking place), tenor (the relationship of the participants in the interaction) and mode (what part the language is playing in the interaction) (Halliday and Hasan, 1985). This paper focuses on the parameter of tenor, particularly social distance and the ‘textual visibility’ of the journalist, by exploring some lexicogrammatical realizations of semantic motifs. These motifs are: the textual identification of the journalist or agencies (realized by bylines), mediation of news information (realized by projection and the thematic status of projected information), semantic intervention in the news process (realized by tense selections that bring all news information in line with the journalist’s frame of temporal reference), and codal sharing (realized by homophoric and deictic reference).

What Shaw Really Wrote about the War

In Wisenthal and O'Leary's What Really Wrote About the War, Bernard speaks for himself - revealing his passionate views of World I as neither unpatriotic nor pacifist. Aiming to correct misconceptions and explore the complexity of Shaw's wartime journalism, the editors have assembled the first annotated collection of his writings about the including What I Wrote About the War (1914), the previously unpublished More Common Sense About the War (1915), and What I Said in the Great War (1918). This landmark volume also includes an important piece called Peace Conference Hints, Shaw's unsolicited advice to the Allies at the end of the war. In addition, the authors draw parallels to Shaw's theatre of war, noting how his attitudes about war infused his plays, including Heartbreak House and the Back to Methusaleh cycle he began to write during this period. Shaw seems to be one of the belligerents in the himself, the editors argue, enjoying the use of his verbal firepower in his pugnacious campaign against politicians' ineptitude and his audience's fatal misunderstandings of what is going on. Essential reading for scholars and still relevant today, his work speaks to anyone who exercises the right to ask questions and voice objections in times of war.

Global media go to war: role of news and entertainment media during the 2003 Iraq war

Global Media Go To War: Role of News and Entertainment Media During the 2003 Iraq War. Ralph D. Berenger, ed. Spokane, WA: Marquette Books, 2004. 382 pp. $49.95 pbk. Just as the pacification of Iraq has proved to be far more complicated than U.S. citizens were led to expect, so too the media coverage of the conflict fails to fit neatly into black-and-white descriptions. Global Media Go To War presents the war in Iraq through the lenses of thirty essays and articles from academics and journalism professionals, as well as four editorials that provide a frame of activism. The thirty articles, edited by Ralph D. Berenger of The American University in Egypt, take a multidisciplinary approach on the assumption that a variety of spotlights illuminating the parts will best reveal the whole. Chapters include content analyses of news, frame analysis of propaganda, simple historical narratives about newcomers such as Al-Jazeera and blogs, and first-person accounts. Like the reports filed by roughly six hundred embedded journalists in 2003, the essays provide sharp images of small slices of war. Still, one suspects that the complete picture will take months, if not years, to develop. The book aims to illuminate media effects on various audiences-Arab and Western citizens in particular-and obviously all of the evidence is not in yet. American and Iraqi elections loomed as this book went to press, and the final resolution of the domestic turmoil in Iraq still seemed far off. The final say on media effects must wait. Nevertheless, Global Media Go To War is valuable to scholars of wartime journalism and propaganda. Its best chapters reveal many nuances that do not fit into sound bites and remind readers that covering war accurately and fairly can be hell. For example, a chapter by Stephen D. Cooper and Jim A. Kuypers demonstrates a fundamental difference in the tone of stories filed by embedded reporters compared with those filed farther from the battle lines. The former, which seized the public's imagination with the notion of following combat in real time, consistently presented a more upbeat and active view of the war than the latter-which included, in retrospect, a healthier dose of perspective and caution. Embedding may be exciting and preferable to press pools, but embedded reports as a primary source of news are a poor way to learn about war. Defying conventional wisdom shaped by the U.S. government and the main American television networks, AlJazeera emerges through several essays as relatively balanced, thoughtful, and liberal. …

The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons, and: The Iraq War: A Military History (review)

The United States and its allies went to war against Iraq in 2003, as Williamson Murray and Robert Scales reasonably propose, "to make an example out of Saddam's regime, for better or worse" (p. 44). Exactly what the war exemplified, and whether the results are better or worse than might have been achieved by other means, are, to say the least, matters of continuing dispute. In the meantime, we might as well start getting the facts straight, at least as far as military operations are concerned. The two books above are both contributions to that necessary work. They are exercises in bridge-building, reaching forward from wartime journalism and postwar postmortems to the more mature scholarship of the future. Given the time pressure under which they were prepared, they are far better than anyone would have had reason to expect.

The encyclopedia of nineteenth-century land warfare: an illustrated world view

The Napoleonic Wars opened the century; the American Civil War punctuated its midpoint. Throughout, conflict seldom abated, whether between the European powers on their own continent or between their colonial proxies around the world. Byron Farwell, an authoritative and engaging chronicler of military history, illuminates here all aspects of this colorful, horrifying, compelling century of war. Global in reach, the encyclopedia covers Latin American rebellions; African, Indian, and Southeast Asian conflicts; Chinese and Japanese actions; and the Indian wars of North America. It is comprehensive, with coverage of weapons development, battles and campaigns, military leaders, and more. Farwell's treatment of military medicine and wartime journalism is unmatched, and his interpretive essays relate events and people to one another and to the century's technological and scientific trends. Including nearly 1,000 illustrations reproduced from period sources, this groundbreaking encyclopedia is destined to become a much-used and desired reference.

America's Two Visitors: Tocqueville and Weber

A common assumption holds that the best and most reliable guide to an interpretation of America came from the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville and his great classic, Democracy in America. Max Weber never wrote a book on America; in fact, all his writings first appeared as articles in scholarly journals and were only later to find shape in the form of a book. But many of his: thoughts on America, some based on his trip to the U.S. in 1904, can be culled from his various writings, wartime journalism, and correspondance, most of which is being published with such commendable Germanic editorial and annotational thoroughness that his œuvre will be unavailable for years to come.

Reading Demanians Reading de Man

Now that the dust has begun to settle after the furor surrounding the discovery after Paul de Man's death in 1983 of his war-time journalism in Nazi-occupied Belgium, it is time to ask what there is to learn from the entire affair aside from the reminder that academics like a good fight as much as everyone else. Certainly, part of what fueled the intensity of the controversy was the sense that the reputation of deconstruction (and, in a sense, literary theory itself) was on the line. So it seems appropriate to ask now what are the consequences of the controversy for deconstruction and, more generally, for literary theory. I am not going to argue for (or against) the proposition that what the young Paul de Man did, said, thought, and wrote between 1940 and 1944 has consequences or implications for deconstruction, as I see no very direct linkbetween the ideas expressed by de Man then and the practice and theory of reading known as deconstruction developed by him, Jacques Derrida, and others twenty to forty years later.' But this does not mean that the controversy over de Man is without consequences for deconstruction or without lessons for literary theorists. On the contrary. What the de Man affair provides is the fullest display we are likely to have of how deconstructive critics actually read texts. In a sense, the de Man affair accomplished what was attempted in the 1979 collection, Deconstruction and Criticism, in which Derrida, de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom all were supposed to read the same poem, Shelley's Triumph of Life. Faced with the discovery of de Man's wartime journalism, these critics, with of course the exception of de Man (and that of Harold Bloom), but now joined by Jonathan Culler, Shoshana Felman, and a host of younger critics, read and interpreted the same texts, de Man's wartime writings, with a focus and intensity not found in the earlier, rather artificial test case. The theoretical interest of the de Man affair is thus that the body of commentary on de Man's wartime journalism gives us an unparalleled occasion to examine the relation between deconstructive interpretive theory and practice. In the 1970s, theorists commonly insisted that practice needed to accord with theory; in keeping with this, phrases of condemna-

De Man, Schiller, and the Politics of Reception

Over the last ten years, the work of Paul Man has not become any easier to assimilate. Frank Lentricchia could not have been more wide of the mark when in 1983 he predicted the war between traditionalists and deconstructors would draw to a close by the end of this decade, with Man rediscovered as the most brilliant hero of traditionalism [39]. For even if Man's juvenile contributions to Le soir had remained hidden a few more years in the archive, it is clear Lentricchia would have lost his wager. The furor over Man's wartime journalism has at least had the virtue of making manifest the extraordinary violence with which his mature work is resisted. Doubtless, a measure of institutional success continues to attend de criticism. would be astounding if this were not the case, given the visible rigor of the methodology, the prestige and relative power Man himself was able to achieve, the cultural force of certain notions of comparative literature, theory, European philosophy, and so on. As a rule, however, contemporary criticism quarantines and ignores Manian theory by way of various hegemonic strategies of inclusive exclusion, supplemented by extravagant gestures of anthropomorphization and rejection. One could with considerable justice invert Lentricchia's formulations and claim the most significant realignments of institutional power in literary during the 1980s amount to wholehearted approval of the rhetoric of Criticism and Social Change. Nothing, it seems, is more obvious than the political inadequacy of Man's texts. The task of pursuing some form of historicism has taken on the self-evident necessity of an ethical imperative. It is a fact, Man wrote in 1972, that this sort of thing happens, again and again, in literary studies [AR 4]. What happens perhaps a little more rarely in literary is the event of an exemplary figure such as Man, capable of inspiring the most lurid gestures of monumentalization and ritual sacrifice. The pages follow seek to articulate Man's theoretical text with the politics of his reception and with the question of politics. I shall be pursuing the notions of history and politics inform Man's late texts, mounting

The Temptation of Fascism and the Question of Literature: Justice, Sorrow, and Political Error (An Open Letter to Jacques Derrida)

1. Jacques Derrida, Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 14, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 12764-republished in a slightly expanded form in Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). All references, unless otherwise indicated, will be to the Critical Inquiry edition and will be cited parenthetically.

Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism.

The volume exhibits both the wealth of historical research provoked by de Man's wartime journalism ...and the intensive scrutiny devoted to line after line of the texts themselves. - Literature and History. In addition to the thirty-five essays, Responses contains a detailed chronology of Paul de Man's life up to the time of his first American academic appointment.