New Literary History最新文献

Abstract:

This article explores the relationship between ethics and literature, particularly as it has been conceived in academic debates since the early 1980s. It offers a reconciliation of the dichotomy between literature and moral philosophy through the concept of bifocality: writing that responds to the moral demands of a lived reality in both a philosophical and literary way. I suggest that bifocal writing is often found in works of testimony. Primo Levi's 1986 work The Drowned and the Saved, a collection of essays on the significance of the Holocaust, is then presented as an arch example.

Abstract:

This essay explores speculative resources in the premodern past as displayed in some contemporary anglophone fiction, with a focus on novels by Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood. Among its retrievals, speculative medievalism offers a critical vantage point on ruinous, "neofeudal" futures by fashioning a form of romance narrative centered on workers. The late-fourteenth century English poem Piers Plowman is looked to as a premodern speculative precursor and interlocutor for such versions of the medieval past.

Abstract:

"Aesthetic Affairs" turns to three contemporary works of art—a short story, a graphic memoir, and a film—to consider how they invoke the conventions of human relationship and the paradigm of desire to highlight the inarticulable and seemingly inappropriate feelings solicited by art objects, architectural space, and design. Bringing together theories of architectural space, materiality, and desire with imaginative texts that both utilize and disrupt linguistic referentiality, this essay interrogates the illusion of detachment that governs an ocularcentric approach to art and the rational language that often accompanies it.

Abstract:

If literary narrative as a practice is well suited to capture morally complex situations, that is in large part due to the work of literary (that is, narrative and stylistic) form. This article examines the specific contribution that metaphorical language makes to the literary negotiation of moral complexity. The discussion is positioned vis-à-vis debates on the specific forms of moral knowledge that literature can provide, which I distinguish from both propositional meanings and the dilemmas entertained by analytic philosophers (for instance, the trolley problem). Instead, I draw on metaphor theory to suggest that metaphorical language can enrich the moral resonance of literature by deepening (and complicating) readers' engagement with fictional characters and the situations in which they are embedded. These metaphorical figures probe the experience captured by Cora Diamond under the rubric of the "difficulty of reality." This idea is illustrated through a close reading of Lauren Groff's short story "Flower Hunters," which skillfully orchestrates metaphorical language so as to encapsulate the protagonist's existential and moral impasse in times of ecological crisis.

Abstract:

Critics often valorize fragmentary writing as a device for subverting systems and liberating thought. Roland Barthes is an acknowledged aficionado of this style; this essay argues that he is equally one of its astute skeptics. While his early writings announce the need to dismantle bourgeois ideology in scattered strokes, his later works scrutinize the value of the piecemeal writing even as they ramify its aesthetic possibilities. Barthes's ambivalence replays an episode from the eighteenth century, when the Jena Romantics abruptly renounced the fragment on the grounds that its utopian promise easily devolved into parochial uses. Twenty-first century publishers continue to advertise fragmentary books as avant-garde provocations, but we should view this gesture as a conceit with a long history.

Abstract:

This essay provides a computational close reading of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. In particular, it examines how measurements of its basic building blocks—the chapters, quotations, and pages—can inform our understanding of how Auerbach came to terms with the representation, and distribution, of three thousand years of literary history in a single literary-critical work. By taking the measurements of Mimesis, we are in a better position to assess not only how it functions as a work of literary criticism, but also how it challenges us to imagine the way literary works exist in and over time.

Abstract:

What does it mean for humanity to inhabit a techno-planetary system in which it is not central? This essay will address a facet of this question by exploring the aesthetics of drone warfare. The drone features in my reading as a metonym for a techno-human continuum in which the human as an autonomous subject with interiority and capacity for ethical action appears as eminently dispensable. Aesthetic forms not only are informed by but also shape a mode of perception by means of which we apprehend the world. What happens to such apprehension when both the mode of perception and subjecthood defy human-centered assumptions about aesthetic form? How does one novelize the scalar complexity of distributed vision beyond the human? When decisions about life and death are ceded to a machinic vision, do questions of moral agency and responsibility recede into a posthuman realm or do they gain even more urgency? The essay pivots around questions such as these.

Abstract:

“Philosophy of literature” is a thriving subfield of Anglo-American philosophy but virtually unknown within literary studies. This essay aims to address a significant methodological inadequacy that is characteristic of much work in “philosophy of literature”: the remarkable absence of sustained and close textual interpretation as a technique for argument and substantiation. Underlying this approach are assumptions about the separability of meaning from linguistic form that lie at the foundation of modern philosophical approaches to logic and language, instantiated here by Gottlob Frege’s 1918 essay “The Thought.” The implications of Fregean ideas are legible in the interpretive failings of “philosophy of literature.”

Abstract:

The limited prosodic literacy of revamped formalisms perpetuates the whiteness of lyric reading. By prizing ironic distance and elevating the critic as form’s discoverer, the concept of poetic form reinscribes racialized value judgments even where critics hope to valorize nonwhite poetic strategies. Formalism should instead attend to the history that gave poets their sense of form. Nonwhite poets mark how this process of formalization, through which forms become abstracted and bear value, consistently entails racialization. They prompt us, I argue, not to form but to prosodic details whose contingency and phenomenological complexity suspend codes of formalist reading.