New Literary History最新文献

Abstract:

I use the term “formalism” to name the tendency of compulsion to reduce experience, through repetition, to a simple shape, rhythm, and intensity. This essay shows how compulsion’s reduction of the self to just a few characteristics enables—even solicits—analogy across different contexts. Focusing on Othello, I consider several aspects of Shakespeare’s staging of compulsion: the two-way traffic between religious and secular domains; the splitting of the self, which often entails the projection of the self onto others; and the role of such splitting in the representation of racialized violence.

Abstract:

The concurrent diffusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Argentina and the state’s deployment of torture and disappearance during the most recent military dictatorship have led many critics to interpret the turn to Lacan as a cerebral substitute for political protest after the coup d’état. This essay examines how the ruling junta’s specific forms of violence provoked a crisis in the relationship between psychoanalysis and humanism, erupting in the literary field through the figure of the desaparecida. In tension with human rights discourses prevailing in the 1980s, Luisa Valenzuela’s experimental fiction explores the subject’s fragmentation under conditions of state terror and the ethical ambivalence of humanitarian efforts to repair the ego in the wake of torture.

Abstract:

We are “label eaters”; we eat “storied food.” In agricultural and literary history, the food label is a central medium, the pastoral a central genre. Revisiting the pastoral through William Empson’s influential theory and through science and technology studies, this essay argues that the pastoral covertly legitimates authority by overtly mediating nature. It was refined during the consummation of agricultural improvement, or romanticism, by authors such as Arthur Young, William Wordsworth, and Fredrick Accum. This revised theory of the pastoral genre facilitates an examination of today’s “clean label” trend as part of a broader coalescence of populism and technocracy.

Abstract:

Jacques Rancière and J. M. Coetzee, exact contemporaries, are both interested the worker’s access to aesthetic experience. In Rancière’s case, this involves looking backward to the fact that nineteenth-century workers were able to squeeze time from their working lives for art and literature. In Coetzee’s case, however, this problem of distributing aesthetic sensibility turns out to be a matter of looking forward in history, and of his own practice. How is he to write in a way that does not unfairly exempt him from work?

Abstract:

Can one "know everything"? In the past, there were people who came close to doing so, but it seems impossible to have contemporaries who know everything. Certainly, some texts aspire to "say everything"; and the French expression tout dire has a venerable history. Yet saying everything is not the same as polymathy. Can texts, however, be polymaths? A case for an affirmative answer to the question is made by way of passive constitution.

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Abstract:

Historians of the Enlightenment are stymied by Denis Diderot's cloven polymathy. An insoluble dilemma arises between, on one hand, the amazing range of interests attested in his roles as both editor and contributor for the Encyclopédie and, on the other hand, his incorrigible dilettantism, in the centrifugal and often inconclusive pursuit of whatever topic came his way. We will do better to relinquish synthesis and highlight instead the multiplicity and versatility of Diderot's productive exuberance as such. We can then see how, rather than build arguments, he metabolized ideas into designs exhibiting a constantly increasing complexity that matched his inexhaustible energy. We can also appreciate his lifelong habit of writing in response to outside, and more or less random, prompts and assignments. An accidental polymath, Diderot preferred the pursuit of a train of thought over disciplined conclusiveness: witness his preference for dialogue over more integrative forms driven by argumentative power. A stranger to disciplinary methodology, he would nowadays be a journalist, not an academic.

Abstract:

The aim of this response is to comment not so much on individual contributions, from all of which I have learned much, or indeed on individual examples of polymaths but rather on the practice of polymathy: on what the examples chosen by the authors of these essays tell us about the structures underlying, enabling, or blocking this practice and the ways in which it has changed over the centuries. It will reflect on the deceptively simple questions of What? Who? How? Where? When? With What Effects?

Abstract:

Mary Somerville (1780-1872) and William Whewell (1794-1866) both contributed to the disciplinary formation of the sciences in Great Britain in the nineteenth century: she as a synthesizer who connected the various branches of knowledge in the emerging physical sciences, and he as the first person who used the history of all branches of science to define what distinguished scientific knowledge from other kinds. Both published bodies of scholarly work whose volume and breadth astounded their contemporaries and seem almost unimaginable today. Neither is included in standard histories of science because neither made the kind of original discovery around which those histories are organized. They become much easier to comprehend in the context of polymathy, which recognizes discerning and illuminating coherence in large bodies of knowledge as an exceptional but essential creative act. Their writings reveal the adeptness of the polymathic mind in framing large bodies of knowledge through two rhetorical moves: (1) association, which connects the subject with commonly held assumptions and values and draws on aesthetic traditions that have emotional resonance; and (2) orientation, which provides organizing ideas and conceptual frameworks that establish the coherence of the subject matter and guide the reader through the text. The distinctively anti-disciplinary approach of Somerville and the fluid nature of the disciplinary categories Whewell used to organize his history suggest that the world of knowledge, including science, has never been divided into the territorial disciplinary structures that dominate higher education. Like polymaths collectively, Somerville and Whewell are apparent anomalies whose very existence challenges our notions about the role and value of specialization.