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Abstracts
for Volume 64
Abstracts
> Vol 64, Issue 1
| Articles |
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| Author |
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Title |
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| Peter
Coviello |
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Intimacy
and Affliction: DuBois, Race, and Psychoanalysis
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| Mark
A. Wollaeger |
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The Woolfs
in the Jungle: Intertextuality, Sexuality, and the Emergence
of Female Modernism
in The Voyage Out, The Village in the Jungle,
and Heart of Darkness
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This
essay argues that the incipient female modernism of Virginia Woolf's
first novel, The Voyage Out, was catalyzed by her productive
engagement with Joseph Conrad and Leonard Woolf, whose combined
influence helped Virginia define her difference from Jane Austen.
Conrad's importance to Woolf has not been understood in the context
of her marriage to Leonard, a colonial administrator who gave
up his post in Ceylon to finish his first novel, The Village
in the Jungle, and to set up house in London with Virginia,
who was struggling to finish The Voyage Out. Leonard's
novel has not been studied as an influence on Virginia's, but
for Virginia the potential emotional cost of choosing heterosexual
domesticity was brought home not only by her decision to marry
Leonard but by the discursive pressure of Leonard's text, itself
echoing Conrad's, on the embattled subjectivity of her own. Closely
attentive to the ways in which gender, sexuality, and literary
history mediate between texts, the essay offers a new perspective
on the tortuous composition of The Voyage Out, which Woolf
may have rewritten as many as twelve times, and articulates a
version of female modernism grounded not in the (feminine) subversion
of (male) structures but in the messy tangle of interpersonal
and intertextual relations that informs literary production.
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| Constance
Spreen |
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Resisting
the Plague: The French Reactionary Right and Artaud's Theater
of Cruelty
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| Antonin
Artaud complained bitterly on numerous occasions of the public's
"resistance" to his dramaturgical theories. This essay
traces the history of the reception of Artaud's cultural interventions
in the 1930s by members of the French political far Right and
aims to explain the logic by which Artaud was being resisted.
In so doing, it argues that despite Artaud's uncompromising eschewal
of political involvement, he was nevertheless deeply engaged in
a "politics of style" emanating from the Action Française,
a reactionary, nationalist movement under the tutelage of Charles
Maurras that refused to him entry into the canon of "French"
letters. Diverging esthetic commitments, involving varying notions
of what is constitutive of the poetic and the nonpoetic, translated
in Maurrassian ideology into opposing political commitments. Spreen's
essay demonstrates how Artaud's promotion of a "poetry of
the senses" threatened nationalist esthetic and political
boundaries as nationalists identified Artaudian theater with the
plagues of political and esthetic anarchy imported into France
from abroad. |
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| Paul B.
Armstrong |
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Being
"Out of Place": Edward W. Said and the Contradictions
of Cultural Differences
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Abstracts
> Vol 64, Issue 2
Special Issue: National Literary Histories
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| Author |
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Title |
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| Brook
Thomas |
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Introduction:
National Literary Histories: Imagined Communities or Imagined
Societies?
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| Although
we are, according to some, in a postnational or transnational
era, numerous new national literary histories continue to be produced,
and, as the essays in this issue demonstrate, scholarly attention
to national literary histories continues to reap rewards. The
production of so many new national literary histories continues
in part because there are more officially recognized nations today
than ever before, and in part because old histories are constantly
updated in response to market pressures and a sense that each
generation deserves a new version of its literary past. This demand
for newness means that no matter how comprehensive a past history
might be, it is inevitably faulted for repressing aspects of the
national literary past that the new one claims to recover. A case
in point is the highly successful 1988 Columbia Literary History
of the United States. On the one hand, the Columbia History
reveals unacknowledged continuities with the histories it would
displace. On the other, its formal structure offers a legitimately
new sense of the nation by implying that it is an imagined society,
not, as Benedict Anderson would have it, an imagined community. |
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| Linda
Georgianna |
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Periodization
and Politics: The Case of the Missing Twelfth Century in English
Literary History
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| Richard
Helgerson |
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Before
National Literary History
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In
the last two decades of the sixteenth century, the English produced
no national literary history, but they did begin thinking about
what it would take for England
to have such a history and they began claiming that in their own
time its foundations were in fact being laid. For them this meant
emulating and imitating the accomplishments of ancient Greece
and Rome and of modern Italy. A national literature, as they understood
it, could not begin at home. It had, on the contrary, to take
the form of a translated import. In this, the Elizabethan experience
bears a striking likeness to that of postcolonial nations in the
second half of the twentieth century. For both, only the foreign
model is, as the postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty has
put it, "theoretically knowable." Like modern postcolonial
peoples, the Elizabethans were thus self-conscious "hybrids,"
"mimic men." This essay generalizes from these observations
to argue that all national literary histories inevitably participate
in the condition of mimicry, hybridity, and postcoloniality, that
all are built on a theoretical frame supplied by some foreign
other.
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| Hinrich
C. Seeba |
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Trostgründe:
Cultural Nationalism and Historical Legitimation in Nineteenth-Century
German Literary Histories
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The
field of German Studies is committed to literature as a social
practice, to history as a discourse of continuity and to the nation
as a mental construct. The 'culturalist' approach to writing national
literature is concerned mainly with two questions: how does the
concept of cultural continuity, with its attending moral claims,
respond to the numerous political breaking points in German history?
Since Germany for centuries has lacked a unified state as a kind
of constitutional framework for developing an undisputed national
identity, the idea of a national literature, as it gained momentum
between the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the founding
of the German Reich in 1871, tended to serve a compensatory function:
to create in language and literature what was missing in political
reality. Thus, a discourse of consolation, in German Trost,
emerged, an attempt to raise national pride in the face of political,
economic, and social gloom by drawing attention to great German
achievements in the realm of the arts, literature, philosophy,
and science. The Romantic philosopher Fichte's call of 1807 for
a "national book" was heeded in several areas, in linguistic
terms by Campe's Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache
(1807), in literary terms by Goethe's Faust I (1808), and
in historical terms by a growing number of histories of German
national literature, with Ludwig Wachler's retrospective of 1818
("At the time, looking back on a glorious past offered the
only worldly consolation") being among the first and the
historian Gervinus's Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur
der Deutschen of 1835 ("Like art, history must soothe,
and we must never go away from a work of art unconsoled")
being the most significant politically. Writing the history of
German national literature, thus, was always considered an important
contribution to the idea of Kulturnation, cultural nation,
which was supposed to anticipate and justify the hoped-for nation
state.
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Abstracts
> Vol 64, Issue 3
| Articles |
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| Author |
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Title |
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| Catherine
Sanok |
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Almoravides
at Thebes: Islam and European Identity in the Roman de Thèbes
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| This
essay explores the representation of cultural identity and difference
in classical romances associated with the court of Henry II and
Eleanor of Aquitaine. While the story of Troy is used to define
European identity as an inheritance from the classical past, the
first romance, the Roman de Thèbes, recognizes interaction
with Islam as constitutive of European identity. The war between
Oedipus's sons for the city of Thebes is populated not only with
Greeks and Thebans, but also with several Muslim armies, including
Almoravides, who ruled much of Spain at the time of the poem's
composition. The poem's capacious understanding of cultural identity
registers in its surprising representation of Almoravides as allies
of the proto-European Greeks. But in imagining Muslims as participants
in the classical past of European culture, the Roman de Thèbes
also excludes them from a privileged category of European identity,
historicity itself, through what Edward Said has called "synchronic
essentialism." In its representation of Almoravides and other
Islamic armies at Thebes, the Roman de Thèbes paradoxically
anticipates their exclusion from other romance narratives of European
identity, even as it recalls the cultural interaction those narratives
repress. |
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| Jean
E. Howard |
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Shakespeare,
Geography, and the Work of Genre on the Early Modern Stage |
| This
essay argues that attention to the formal features of genres is
one way of exploring the historicity of texts. Using early modern
drama as her focus, Howard examines the links between generic
forms and the historical forces to which they were both response
and provocation. In particular, she examines the importance of
geographical setting in demarcating differences among dramatic
genres on the early modern stage and in forming part of the repertoire
of conventions through which the historicity of texts can be addressed.
Special attention is given to the geography of Shakespearean tragedy
with Macbeth as a test case for the essay's claims. |
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| Christian
Thorne |
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Providence
in the Early Novel, or Accident, If You Please
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| When
early English novels attempt to represent the social totality,
they perceive in everyday life not the working out of God's will
(that is, providence), but rather an extraordinary social complexity
which can either be described as "fortune," or - the
answer that novels increasingly turn to - as a sophisticated but
empirically comprehensible social network of causes. The emergent
system of finance capital also required such causal and prudential
narratives in order to produce the idea of credit as calculable
risk. Early novels can thus be understood as cognitive mapping
for the commercial classes; at their heart lie the deep connections
between credit, causal narrative, and social complexity. |
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| Kristine
Byron |
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"Books
and Bad Company": Reading the Female Plot in Teresa de
la Parra's Ifigenia
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| This
essay examines Venezuelan writer Teresa de la Parra's Ifigenia,
contexualizing the novel in a female tradition of discourse on
women and reading (including Jane Austen and Rosalia de Castro),
while simulantaneously examining the ways in which Parra writes
against the grain of the nineteenth-century female reader as embodied
in Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The essay posits Parra's novel
as a text interested in scrutinizing literary scripts as well
as social ones. It accomplishes this through a combination of
pastiche and parody of literary conventions, the employment of
subversive rhetorical strategies by its protagonist, and an emphasis
in the novel on the topos of reading and the female reader. By
scrutinizing the female romance plot itself, Parra both challenges
and transforms the tradition of the novel in Spanish America,
while building on a unique female literary history. |
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Abstracts
> Vol 64, Issue 4
| Articles |
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| Author |
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Title |
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| Heather
James |
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Royal
Jokes and Sovereign Mystery in Castiglione and Marguerite de
Navarre
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| Focusing
on tales in Castiglione's Courtier and de Navarre's Heptameron,
this essay examines the rhetorical and social functions of jokes
performed by early modern kings in response to betrayal by intimate
servants of their households. Alarmed less by the local acts of
betrayal than by the theoretical implications of crime attempted
on the king's person and property, Alfonso I of Aragon and François
I forego the resources of law and instead play games that open
up, explore, and attempt to repair problems in the theory of sovereignty
itself. After examining the jests in detail, the essay pays close
attention to the historical occasions and political motivations
for the texts' internal narrators to resist the kings' charismatic
bid for autocratic rule. Rather than lend full support to the
monarchs' long-range goals, the essay demonstrates, the texts
of Castiglione and de Navarre open up political dialogue on the
ideal form of governance. |
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| Julie
Kane |
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The Myth
of the Fixed-Form Villanelle
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| This
essay examines the various accounts in literary reference sources
as to how and when the villanelle's poetic form came to be fixed;
it then subjects each claim to the test of research. Despite the
prevailing belief that a "fixed-form villanelle tradition"
existed as of the sixteenth century or even earlier in France,
research results demonstrate that only one poem in the "A1bA2
abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2" form was written prior to the
mid nineteenth century. Moreover, the actions of two less-than-accurate,
if not deliberately dishonest, French scholars-one in the eighteenth
century and one in the nineteenth-created the myth of a longstanding
fixed-form tradition for the villanelle. Ironically, however,
a genuine fixed-form villanelle tradition has arisen since the
1870s, brought into being by modern poets who believed that they
were perpetuating a form of medieval or Renaissance heritage.
Had Pierre-Charles Berthelin in the eighteenth century and Théodore
de Banville in the nineteenth century been more scrupulous in
their scholarship, English-language poetry would almost certainly
never have gained such poems as Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go
Gentle into That Good Night," the untitled villanelle in
James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Elizabeth
Bishop's "One Art," or Theodore Roethke's "The
Waking." |
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| Hal
Gladfelder |
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The Hard
Work of Doing Nothing: Richard Savage's Parallel Lives
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| While
alive, the eighteenth-century poet Richard Savage was known less
for his poetry than for his trial and conviction for murder and
his lifelong campaign to be acknowledged as the bastard son of
two aristocrats. After his death, he became famous as the subject
of Samuel Johnson's first biography, the 1744 Life of Savage.
This essay focuses on Savage's construction of a public persona
in order to examine the emergence of a modern practice of authorship
in the early eighteenth century. In response to the changing conditions
of publication during this period, many authors self-consciously
presented themselves to the public through their own and other
writers' texts, so that authorship began to be conceived of as
a form of celebrity: both as a strategy of self-advertisement
and as a means of moral compensation for the author's increasing
sense of alienation and commodification. This public fashioning
of the authorial persona through published texts involves a modeling
of oneself in imitation of preexisting narrative genres and readymade
life stories-in Savage's case those of hack author, condemned
criminal, and disinherited aristocrat. Savage's preferred narrative
of aristocratic dispossession was largely elaborated through texts
by other writers (including Johnson and Eliza Haywood) and aimed
to set him above the money-grubbing careerism of the literary
marketplace; but his relentless self-promotion in fact contributed
to the historical process of commodification of authorship rather
than counteracting it. |
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| David
Rosen |
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T.
S. Eliot and the Lost Youth of Modern Poetry |
| To
make himself Modern, W.B. Yeats shed the youthful voice of his
first three decades, and took on the persona of an angry and decrepit
old man. While still in his twenties, T.S. Eliot was already writing
poems about aging esthetes and faded ladies. W.H. Auden and his
generation were jaundiced before they entered college. That all
of these authors should have felt it necessary to assume such
a voice suggests a deeper problem in the psychology of modern
lyric. This essay teases out the consequences for poetic form
and ideology by focusing on the early work of T.S. Eliot: from
long-suppressed poems of his Harvard years (brought out in 1996
as Inventions of the March Hare) to The Waste Land.
Following the collapse of the 19th century imaginative (visionary)
tradition, Eliot sought a comparable authority for poetry in the
workings of mere consciousness. This shift brought about many
of the formal/technical, as well as tonal developments most associated
with modern poetry. In addition to Eliot, this essay considers
Yeats, who aimed to preserve an oracular authority for his work,
and contemporary fiction writers, who understood consciousness
primarily as an extension of mimesis. |
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