Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2022.a898330
T. Mcnulty
Abstract:The internet is awash with new popular forms, from TED Talks and podcasts to makeup tutorials and tweets. And yet scholars have only just begun to explore these forms cultural effects. This essay develops an approach to new forms of popular digital "content," grounded in the humanistic theory tradition. The approach draws together formalist methods of analyzing genre from computational literary criticism and new media theory and applies them to the investigation of large databases of popular digital content—material on which neither subfield has yet focused extensively. Illustration is provided through a case study: an analysis of the genres that dominate a database of 18,908 of the most popular blog posts on Medium.com, 2019-2021, considered in relation to posthumanist theories of personhood. In this way, the essay shows what a formalist approach to popular digital content, grounded in literary and new media theory, can contribute to our growing, trans-disciplinary comprehension of digital culture.
{"title":"Content's Forms","authors":"T. Mcnulty","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.a898330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898330","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The internet is awash with new popular forms, from TED Talks and podcasts to makeup tutorials and tweets. And yet scholars have only just begun to explore these forms cultural effects. This essay develops an approach to new forms of popular digital \"content,\" grounded in the humanistic theory tradition. The approach draws together formalist methods of analyzing genre from computational literary criticism and new media theory and applies them to the investigation of large databases of popular digital content—material on which neither subfield has yet focused extensively. Illustration is provided through a case study: an analysis of the genres that dominate a database of 18,908 of the most popular blog posts on Medium.com, 2019-2021, considered in relation to posthumanist theories of personhood. In this way, the essay shows what a formalist approach to popular digital content, grounded in literary and new media theory, can contribute to our growing, trans-disciplinary comprehension of digital culture.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"54 1","pages":"795 - 851"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46198019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1093/nq/s2-ix.221.233h
E. Steiner
Abstract:Mitigations in medieval criminal law, designed to prevent or defer execution, have been regarded in a variety of ways: as acts of mercy, as discretionary measures, and as travesties of justice. For post-medieval English and American writers they also represent the past of the law; since at least the eighteenth century they have formed the backbone of legal histories describing the passage from premodern to modern law and from a less to a more equitable distribution of justice. This essay argues that the mitigations inherited from the Middle Ages are "medievalisms-at-law,” serving both as anachronisms—throwbacks to an ostensibly more corrupt or superstitious age—and as touchstones for modernity. When current, they often feel out of time because death is on the line; when obsolete, they abide, both in literature and in law. Seemingly conducive to progressive histories, they threaten to drag modernity back into the Middle Ages. This essay focuses on one such mitigation, the benefit of clergy, which, thanks to its famous “neck verse,” was used not only to obtain mercy for some but also to prevent others from claiming the same benefit. As this essay argues, its potential both to save and exclude is part of what reactivates the benefit of clergy in post-medieval English literature and law. The survival of this legal practice in American slave law, and even in present political discourse, reminds us that old laws never die, nor do they entirely fade away. Instead they go on to create new histories of law, justice, class, and nation.
{"title":"Neck Verse","authors":"E. Steiner","doi":"10.1093/nq/s2-ix.221.233h","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s2-ix.221.233h","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Mitigations in medieval criminal law, designed to prevent or defer execution, have been regarded in a variety of ways: as acts of mercy, as discretionary measures, and as travesties of justice. For post-medieval English and American writers they also represent the past of the law; since at least the eighteenth century they have formed the backbone of legal histories describing the passage from premodern to modern law and from a less to a more equitable distribution of justice. This essay argues that the mitigations inherited from the Middle Ages are \"medievalisms-at-law,” serving both as anachronisms—throwbacks to an ostensibly more corrupt or superstitious age—and as touchstones for modernity. When current, they often feel out of time because death is on the line; when obsolete, they abide, both in literature and in law. Seemingly conducive to progressive histories, they threaten to drag modernity back into the Middle Ages. This essay focuses on one such mitigation, the benefit of clergy, which, thanks to its famous “neck verse,” was used not only to obtain mercy for some but also to prevent others from claiming the same benefit. As this essay argues, its potential both to save and exclude is part of what reactivates the benefit of clergy in post-medieval English literature and law. The survival of this legal practice in American slave law, and even in present political discourse, reminds us that old laws never die, nor do they entirely fade away. Instead they go on to create new histories of law, justice, class, and nation.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"333 - 362"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/nq/s2-ix.221.233h","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44535899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:For more than a century now, the desire for a political interpretation of literary form has persistently resurfaced in many seemingly unrelated corners of literary theory and critical practice: in the early work of Georg Lukács and in the literary sociology of Lucien Goldmann and Franco Moretti, in poststructuralist readings of modernist fiction, in Foucauldian interpretations of the realist novel, in feminist narratology of Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, and, most recently, in the attempts by scholars such as Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh to subvert the distinction between the patterns of literary and social organization. And yet, despite the long list of scholars who sought to explore the relationship between form and ideology, attempts to develop a political formalism have been plagued by far-reaching methodological issues, including excessive reliance on homological reasoning, problematic mechanisms of assigning ideological significance to specific techniques, unresolved relationship between formal and thematic analysis, and implausible claims of literary formalism’s political relevance. In this essay, I introduce the categories of soft formalism, hard formalism, and expansionist formalism in order to analyse both the sources of literary criticism’s attraction to the project of political formalism and the methodological difficulties that make such a project a near impossibility: What do we truly mean when we speak of the politics of form? What do we promise when we imagine a political formalism? What theoretical and rhetorical moves do we perform in an attempt to fulfil that promise? And what do we deliver in the end?
{"title":"The Homological Imagination: Toward a Critical History of Political Formalism","authors":"Aleksandar Stević","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:For more than a century now, the desire for a political interpretation of literary form has persistently resurfaced in many seemingly unrelated corners of literary theory and critical practice: in the early work of Georg Lukács and in the literary sociology of Lucien Goldmann and Franco Moretti, in poststructuralist readings of modernist fiction, in Foucauldian interpretations of the realist novel, in feminist narratology of Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, and, most recently, in the attempts by scholars such as Caroline Levine and Anna Kornbluh to subvert the distinction between the patterns of literary and social organization. And yet, despite the long list of scholars who sought to explore the relationship between form and ideology, attempts to develop a political formalism have been plagued by far-reaching methodological issues, including excessive reliance on homological reasoning, problematic mechanisms of assigning ideological significance to specific techniques, unresolved relationship between formal and thematic analysis, and implausible claims of literary formalism’s political relevance. In this essay, I introduce the categories of soft formalism, hard formalism, and expansionist formalism in order to analyse both the sources of literary criticism’s attraction to the project of political formalism and the methodological difficulties that make such a project a near impossibility: What do we truly mean when we speak of the politics of form? What do we promise when we imagine a political formalism? What theoretical and rhetorical moves do we perform in an attempt to fulfil that promise? And what do we deliver in the end?","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"363 - 390"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48213538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:With the ideas of skepticism and acknowledgment that he broached in Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell put a lasting imprint on the literary reception of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In the wake of these books, it became standard practice to take Cavell’s reading as a reliable guide to this difficult text, or even to claim that in confronting Cavell, one confronts Wittgenstein. But the conflation of Wittgenstein’s thought with Cavell’s requires us to underplay or completely ignore what Garry L. Hagberg has called a Cartesian “ conceptual undertow” in Cavell—an undertow present in Wittgenstein only as a philosophy-induced malady of thought.
{"title":"Cavell vs. Wittgenstein on the Body-Mind Problem","authors":"H. Staten","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:With the ideas of skepticism and acknowledgment that he broached in Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell put a lasting imprint on the literary reception of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In the wake of these books, it became standard practice to take Cavell’s reading as a reliable guide to this difficult text, or even to claim that in confronting Cavell, one confronts Wittgenstein. But the conflation of Wittgenstein’s thought with Cavell’s requires us to underplay or completely ignore what Garry L. Hagberg has called a Cartesian “ conceptual undertow” in Cavell—an undertow present in Wittgenstein only as a philosophy-induced malady of thought.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"463 - 486"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44834145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The study of lyric poetry—how it works, what it does, and how to define it-- benefits from close comparison to the theory and practice of reading comics. Comics and lyric poems, as a medium and as a genre, share with each other features that they do not share with other genres and media: these features may prove basic to the phenomenology of reading either, especially when creators notice and use them. Both comics and lyric poems rely on breaks between units—line breaks and panel borders—which can be regular or irregular, and which guide a reader’s experience. Both connect semantics to something else: voice and sound, for lyric poetry, visuals in the case of comics. Both invoke complex, sometimes contradictory, reader-controlled relations to the passage of time. And both display an unusual capacity for reader involvement and reader identification, through face and figure in comics, through voice and fictions of voice in lyric. These parallels can help us read canonical lyric, such as a stanzaic elegy by Wilfred Owen: they suggest that credible fictions of persons remain at the root of lyric experience. Those fictions seem more powerful, and friendlier, seen in particular comics that focus on friendly, willing or eager readers, and in particular in the superhero comics series Gwenpool Strikes Back, by Leah WIlliams, David Baldéon and collaborators. Williams and Baldéon’s lighthearted, self-conscious treatment of their Marvel Comics heroine points to the seriousness with which readers and listeners require fictions of belonging, an experience of seeming present and feeling heard, in order to take part in these foundational literary kinds.
{"title":"What Comics Can Say about Lyric, or, Reading with Gwenpool","authors":"Stephanie Burt, Emmy Waldman","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The study of lyric poetry—how it works, what it does, and how to define it-- benefits from close comparison to the theory and practice of reading comics. Comics and lyric poems, as a medium and as a genre, share with each other features that they do not share with other genres and media: these features may prove basic to the phenomenology of reading either, especially when creators notice and use them. Both comics and lyric poems rely on breaks between units—line breaks and panel borders—which can be regular or irregular, and which guide a reader’s experience. Both connect semantics to something else: voice and sound, for lyric poetry, visuals in the case of comics. Both invoke complex, sometimes contradictory, reader-controlled relations to the passage of time. And both display an unusual capacity for reader involvement and reader identification, through face and figure in comics, through voice and fictions of voice in lyric. These parallels can help us read canonical lyric, such as a stanzaic elegy by Wilfred Owen: they suggest that credible fictions of persons remain at the root of lyric experience. Those fictions seem more powerful, and friendlier, seen in particular comics that focus on friendly, willing or eager readers, and in particular in the superhero comics series Gwenpool Strikes Back, by Leah WIlliams, David Baldéon and collaborators. Williams and Baldéon’s lighthearted, self-conscious treatment of their Marvel Comics heroine points to the seriousness with which readers and listeners require fictions of belonging, an experience of seeming present and feeling heard, in order to take part in these foundational literary kinds.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"487 - 516"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46664707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The intersection of literature, literary studies, and sociology has long been a key site of experimentation. This article contributes to recent debates about applying sociological methods to literary objects and literary modes of interpretation to the objects of sociology through a historical approach. I introduce the term “sociopoetics” to demarcate the characteristics of what I suggest is a literary-historical category of hybrid works that ask to be read both as sociological studies and literary texts at once. Drawing on C. Wright Mills and Kenneth Burke, I define sociopoetics as what Burke has called a “strategy,” a rhetorical gesture that names recurrent yet incompletely articulated social situations. I then trace the development of sociopoetics as a strategy by reading two illustrative texts: Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown community studies (1929, 1937), the first best-selling American sociological monographs, and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s documentary photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). I argue that these works grapple with situations of disciplinary impasse while addressing specific social problems that impact human welfare; in particular, they engage with the promise and inadequacy of representing “typical” individuals and social scenarios in the 1930s, a period of crystallization among the disciplines and widespread strife in the US.
{"title":"Socio/Poetics","authors":"Ingrid Becker","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The intersection of literature, literary studies, and sociology has long been a key site of experimentation. This article contributes to recent debates about applying sociological methods to literary objects and literary modes of interpretation to the objects of sociology through a historical approach. I introduce the term “sociopoetics” to demarcate the characteristics of what I suggest is a literary-historical category of hybrid works that ask to be read both as sociological studies and literary texts at once. Drawing on C. Wright Mills and Kenneth Burke, I define sociopoetics as what Burke has called a “strategy,” a rhetorical gesture that names recurrent yet incompletely articulated social situations. I then trace the development of sociopoetics as a strategy by reading two illustrative texts: Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown community studies (1929, 1937), the first best-selling American sociological monographs, and James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s documentary photo-essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). I argue that these works grapple with situations of disciplinary impasse while addressing specific social problems that impact human welfare; in particular, they engage with the promise and inadequacy of representing “typical” individuals and social scenarios in the 1930s, a period of crystallization among the disciplines and widespread strife in the US.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"415 - 440"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48975514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay presents a method for analyzing literary and cultural texts that I call black thought. Black thought reveals how changing the skin color of a protagonist in modern Western literature would result in an ontological crisis of coherence within the text because its historically contingent racial codes, genre-based discursive conventions, internal plot structure, and governing registers would summarily fail. At this point of collapse, we can ask questions such as “why couldn’t this character be read as legibly black (or white)?” at the given historical moment or, “what elements of this work’s governing structure would have to change so that a particular character could be plausibly read under a different racial category?” Through exemplifying the practice of black thought in the writings of Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, as well as Arthur Laurents’s 1946 play Home of the Brave, Amma Asante’s 2013 film Belle, and the artwork of Diego Velázquez vis-à-vis Kerry James Marshall, I show how students and scholars would benefit from seeking to determine why changing the race of a work’s protagonist would necessitate the creation of a fundamentally different text or historical context, which brings the study of literature into conversation with other fields, such as political theory, history, sociology, and psychology.
摘要：本文提出了一种分析文学和文化文本的方法，我称之为黑人思想。黑人思想揭示了改变现代西方文学中主人公的肤色将如何导致文本中连贯性的本体论危机，因为其历史上偶然的种族密码、基于流派的话语惯例、内部情节结构和统治语域将彻底失败。在这个崩溃的时刻，我们可以问一些问题，比如在给定的历史时刻，“为什么这个字符不能读成清晰的黑色（或白色）？”，“这部作品的统治结构中的哪些元素必须改变，才能在不同的种族类别下合理地解读一个特定的角色？”通过在托尼·莫里森、简·奥斯汀、拉尔夫·埃里森、理查德·赖特和切斯特·希姆斯的作品中，以及阿瑟·劳伦斯1946年的戏剧《勇敢的家》中，举例说明黑人思想的实践，Amma Asante 2013年的电影《美女》，以及Diego Velázquez与Kerry James Marshall的艺术作品，我展示了学生和学者如何从试图确定为什么改变作品主人公的种族需要创造一个根本不同的文本或历史背景中受益，这将文学研究带入与其他领域的对话中，如政治理论、历史、社会学和心理学。
{"title":"Well-Wrought Black Thought: Speculative Realism and the Specter of Race","authors":"K. Roy","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay presents a method for analyzing literary and cultural texts that I call black thought. Black thought reveals how changing the skin color of a protagonist in modern Western literature would result in an ontological crisis of coherence within the text because its historically contingent racial codes, genre-based discursive conventions, internal plot structure, and governing registers would summarily fail. At this point of collapse, we can ask questions such as “why couldn’t this character be read as legibly black (or white)?” at the given historical moment or, “what elements of this work’s governing structure would have to change so that a particular character could be plausibly read under a different racial category?” Through exemplifying the practice of black thought in the writings of Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, as well as Arthur Laurents’s 1946 play Home of the Brave, Amma Asante’s 2013 film Belle, and the artwork of Diego Velázquez vis-à-vis Kerry James Marshall, I show how students and scholars would benefit from seeking to determine why changing the race of a work’s protagonist would necessitate the creation of a fundamentally different text or historical context, which brings the study of literature into conversation with other fields, such as political theory, history, sociology, and psychology.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"441 - 462"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48785939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In 2008, zadie smith found two possible paths for the future of the Anglophone novel in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Though “one is the strong refusal of the other,” the opposed works share a “constructive frustration,” namely, “the frustrated sense of having come to the authenticity party exactly a century late!” But if what Smith calls “the authenticity baton” indeed passed on from white Oxbridge graduates “to women, to those of color, to people of different sexualities, to people from far off, war-torn places,” then it is high time to review what those supposedly timely writers produced, what futures they’ve been envisioning for the Anglophone novel. For the so-called global novel has not lacked frustrations of its own: that is, a (market) pressure to perform one’s authenticity, which is perhaps a polite way of saying the requirement that one continuously and convincingly perform one’s suffering. The authenticity baton, as it turns out, comes with implicit rules, such as the dictate that an African or Asian author continuously and ostentatiously display her ties to “far off, war-torn places” even if her country of origin has, over time, found comparative peace and affluence.
{"title":"Pain and Prejudice in the World Literary Market","authors":"S. Im","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In 2008, zadie smith found two possible paths for the future of the Anglophone novel in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Though “one is the strong refusal of the other,” the opposed works share a “constructive frustration,” namely, “the frustrated sense of having come to the authenticity party exactly a century late!” But if what Smith calls “the authenticity baton” indeed passed on from white Oxbridge graduates “to women, to those of color, to people of different sexualities, to people from far off, war-torn places,” then it is high time to review what those supposedly timely writers produced, what futures they’ve been envisioning for the Anglophone novel. For the so-called global novel has not lacked frustrations of its own: that is, a (market) pressure to perform one’s authenticity, which is perhaps a polite way of saying the requirement that one continuously and convincingly perform one’s suffering. The authenticity baton, as it turns out, comes with implicit rules, such as the dictate that an African or Asian author continuously and ostentatiously display her ties to “far off, war-torn places” even if her country of origin has, over time, found comparative peace and affluence.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"391 - 413"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49159059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:In a series of essays, Paul Ricœur and Jacques Derrida described the work of metaphor as a cognitive operation requiring readers to apprehend simultaneously the continuity and difference of tenor and vehicle: Juliet is and is not the sun; a book is and is not a chariot. In this paper, I show how the cognitive features required of a reader in thinking through metaphor are the same as those necessary to imagine literary metamorphosis, a trope that can be understood as the actualization of metaphor within the diegetic frame, that is, as a metaphor that is no longer figurative, but descriptive. Drawing on the work of W. T. Mitchell, this paper explores the relationship between these two literary figures as imaginative processes. In it, I propose that the phenomenological model of metaphor developed by Ricœur and Derrida be redeployed as a much-need critical apparatus with which to account for the cognitive work required in conceiving of metamorphosis in creative literature, focusing on key examples from Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, and Rushdie.
{"title":"Rhetorics of Becoming: Between Metamorphosis and Metaphor","authors":"S. Frampton","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In a series of essays, Paul Ricœur and Jacques Derrida described the work of metaphor as a cognitive operation requiring readers to apprehend simultaneously the continuity and difference of tenor and vehicle: Juliet is and is not the sun; a book is and is not a chariot. In this paper, I show how the cognitive features required of a reader in thinking through metaphor are the same as those necessary to imagine literary metamorphosis, a trope that can be understood as the actualization of metaphor within the diegetic frame, that is, as a metaphor that is no longer figurative, but descriptive. Drawing on the work of W. T. Mitchell, this paper explores the relationship between these two literary figures as imaginative processes. In it, I propose that the phenomenological model of metaphor developed by Ricœur and Derrida be redeployed as a much-need critical apparatus with which to account for the cognitive work required in conceiving of metamorphosis in creative literature, focusing on key examples from Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, and Rushdie.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"183 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45641912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Many recent climate change fictions take the form of multi-plot ensemble novels: long fictions that split their narrative attention among several different protagonists. Though this ensemble form has long been a staple strategy of Western realism, this article explores what new affordances it might offer in the face of planetary crisis. In particular, multi-protagonist climate change novels put pressure on the representational capacities of fictional character. Such texts remain resolutely character-driven, but expanding the scale of the novel's narrative form drives peculiar fissures into fictional personhood. The novels I consider in this article often foreground a paired set of tropes that thematize the relationship between personal and planetary scales--the nonhuman reader and the excessively fictional character--in order to invite a unique form of identification with the very ontological premise of fictionality itself. Multi-protagonist climate change novels repeatedly contrast the nonhuman totalizing perspective with the highly situated lives of characters who experience their own membership in the human species as a phenomenon akin to fictionality, to being emplotted in a logic that they cannot full grasp and can never analyze from an external position. This narrative situation of feeling fictional follows from the increasingly common novelistic desire to reconcile character-driven fiction to the scales of environmental crisis.
{"title":"Feeling Fictional: Climate Crisis and the Massively Multi-Protagonist Novel","authors":"Victoria Googasian","doi":"10.1353/nlh.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Many recent climate change fictions take the form of multi-plot ensemble novels: long fictions that split their narrative attention among several different protagonists. Though this ensemble form has long been a staple strategy of Western realism, this article explores what new affordances it might offer in the face of planetary crisis. In particular, multi-protagonist climate change novels put pressure on the representational capacities of fictional character. Such texts remain resolutely character-driven, but expanding the scale of the novel's narrative form drives peculiar fissures into fictional personhood. The novels I consider in this article often foreground a paired set of tropes that thematize the relationship between personal and planetary scales--the nonhuman reader and the excessively fictional character--in order to invite a unique form of identification with the very ontological premise of fictionality itself. Multi-protagonist climate change novels repeatedly contrast the nonhuman totalizing perspective with the highly situated lives of characters who experience their own membership in the human species as a phenomenon akin to fictionality, to being emplotted in a logic that they cannot full grasp and can never analyze from an external position. This narrative situation of feeling fictional follows from the increasingly common novelistic desire to reconcile character-driven fiction to the scales of environmental crisis.","PeriodicalId":19150,"journal":{"name":"New Literary History","volume":"53 1","pages":"197 - 216"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47242896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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