This paper aims to unravel a tension between the act of naming and ‘differential relationality’. Derrida has taught us that ‘naming’ is an essentialising, and thus metaphysical gesture that works to define and circumscribe a field of work (for instance, ‘Eco-Deconstruction’), the human, and ecology. ‘Naming’ entails the beginning of the institutionalisation and sedimentation of a field, despite a ‘field’s’ claim to the opposite. The danger of such sedimentation is that it perpetuates what Derrida calls ipseity that in the history of western philosophy and metaphysics has worked in contradistinction to the nonhuman (animals, environment, ecology).
{"title":"‘To be or not to be’ of Eco-Deconstruction","authors":"N. Anderson","doi":"10.3366/olr.2023.0402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2023.0402","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to unravel a tension between the act of naming and ‘differential relationality’. Derrida has taught us that ‘naming’ is an essentialising, and thus metaphysical gesture that works to define and circumscribe a field of work (for instance, ‘Eco-Deconstruction’), the human, and ecology. ‘Naming’ entails the beginning of the institutionalisation and sedimentation of a field, despite a ‘field’s’ claim to the opposite. The danger of such sedimentation is that it perpetuates what Derrida calls ipseity that in the history of western philosophy and metaphysics has worked in contradistinction to the nonhuman (animals, environment, ecology).","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45655817","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay is an exercise in the phenomenology – and post-phenomenology – of reading in relation to Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel (1927), a novel that thematizes and reflects on the uncanny status of reading and provokes in response an experimental critical ABC. Special attention is given to the work of French psychoanalyst Charles Baudouin in foregrounding the role and effects of suggestion in reading. Engaging with the concerns of writing and reading fiction in the ‘Anthropocene’ (especially in the form of what is here called twi-fi) and drawing on notions of literary anachrony, cryptaesthetic resistance, queerness and deferred effect, the essay offers a new critical appreciation of the singularity of Bowen’s novel.
{"title":"Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel: An ABC of Reading","authors":"N. Royle","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0395","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is an exercise in the phenomenology – and post-phenomenology – of reading in relation to Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel (1927), a novel that thematizes and reflects on the uncanny status of reading and provokes in response an experimental critical ABC. Special attention is given to the work of French psychoanalyst Charles Baudouin in foregrounding the role and effects of suggestion in reading. Engaging with the concerns of writing and reading fiction in the ‘Anthropocene’ (especially in the form of what is here called twi-fi) and drawing on notions of literary anachrony, cryptaesthetic resistance, queerness and deferred effect, the essay offers a new critical appreciation of the singularity of Bowen’s novel.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48995220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper offers an anxious survey of factors inducing boredom or indifference in the readership of environmental writing and criticism. The first is the inertia of limited assumptions in writers and critics about how to engage readers’ attention, with inadequate ideas of what ‘genuine reading’ would be. Secondly and more insidiously, modern readers are usually now immersed in consumerist cultural contexts actively geared to encourage boredom as a market force. Reduced thresholds of attention become effectively a political agent, usually a reactionary one. Next the question is asked: is ‘the reader’ a unified subject? That is, how far are environmental texts and fears unwittingly appealing to unacknowledged fantasies of violence and harm? A final threat to readerly engagement with environmental criticism in particular is that, as the conditions of the ‘Anthropocene’ worsen, just to engage more reading and readers on environmental issues comes to seem less and less adequate, even evasive, an academic theatre only of performing opinions.
{"title":"Reading against the Forces of Boredom: Environmental Literary Culture in ‘the Age of Amazon’","authors":"Timothy Clark","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0392","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0392","url":null,"abstract":"This paper offers an anxious survey of factors inducing boredom or indifference in the readership of environmental writing and criticism. The first is the inertia of limited assumptions in writers and critics about how to engage readers’ attention, with inadequate ideas of what ‘genuine reading’ would be. Secondly and more insidiously, modern readers are usually now immersed in consumerist cultural contexts actively geared to encourage boredom as a market force. Reduced thresholds of attention become effectively a political agent, usually a reactionary one. Next the question is asked: is ‘the reader’ a unified subject? That is, how far are environmental texts and fears unwittingly appealing to unacknowledged fantasies of violence and harm? A final threat to readerly engagement with environmental criticism in particular is that, as the conditions of the ‘Anthropocene’ worsen, just to engage more reading and readers on environmental issues comes to seem less and less adequate, even evasive, an academic theatre only of performing opinions.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41832181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
These are three pieces on reading (‘surface reading’, teaching and learning to read) that take lessons from Flaubert, Derrida, Billy Collins and Rousseau.
以下是福楼拜、德里达、比利·柯林斯和卢梭的三篇关于阅读的文章(“表面阅读”、教学和学习阅读)。
{"title":"Reading Pieces","authors":"Peggy Kamuf","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0393","url":null,"abstract":"These are three pieces on reading (‘surface reading’, teaching and learning to read) that take lessons from Flaubert, Derrida, Billy Collins and Rousseau.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45734145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The ‘Happy Few’ of Stendhal's dedications are certainly readers, but they do not cohere into a community, and are vigilant and suspicious around the use of the first-person plural pronoun. This already sets them apart from the proponents of ‘surface reading’, who, moreover, have a historically questionable and conceptually feeble understanding of the intimate relationship between deconstruction and reading-and indeed of what thinking in terms of ‘surface’ entails.
{"title":"Happy Reading!","authors":"Geoffrey Bennington","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0391","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘Happy Few’ of Stendhal's dedications are certainly readers, but they do not cohere into a community, and are vigilant and suspicious around the use of the first-person plural pronoun. This already sets them apart from the proponents of ‘surface reading’, who, moreover, have a historically questionable and conceptually feeble understanding of the intimate relationship between deconstruction and reading-and indeed of what thinking in terms of ‘surface’ entails.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49272827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In ‘Reading and Its Discontents’, Anne Emmanuelle Berger makes a plea for the specificity of reading literature. Unlike other kinds of reading, the reading of literature has the unique ability to ‘keep the wound open’. As such, it can never be reduced, as some have recently tried, to just another form of culture production or to some politically motivated pedagogical therapeutics. It is also a type of reading, this essay will argue, that cannot be reduced to the kind of silent reading that, as Derrida demonstrated in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, has been the model and telos of reading since Plato. After a brief look at the controversy surrounding the history of silent reading, this essay looks at the question of reading in Plato and, especially, at the surprising number of references in the dialogues to Socrates as a reader. It then turns to Derrida’s reading of Plato in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, first to Derrida’s critique of the Platonic model of reading and writing in the dialogues and then to the deployment of a new kind of philosophical reading and writing in Derrida’s own work, a reading that, as Berger herself suggests, is always also a writing, a reading that is itself then always double, at once silent and aloud.
{"title":"No Reading Aloud! Sound and Silence in Plato’s Socrates and Derrida’s Plato","authors":"Michael Naas","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0394","url":null,"abstract":"In ‘Reading and Its Discontents’, Anne Emmanuelle Berger makes a plea for the specificity of reading literature. Unlike other kinds of reading, the reading of literature has the unique ability to ‘keep the wound open’. As such, it can never be reduced, as some have recently tried, to just another form of culture production or to some politically motivated pedagogical therapeutics. It is also a type of reading, this essay will argue, that cannot be reduced to the kind of silent reading that, as Derrida demonstrated in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, has been the model and telos of reading since Plato. After a brief look at the controversy surrounding the history of silent reading, this essay looks at the question of reading in Plato and, especially, at the surprising number of references in the dialogues to Socrates as a reader. It then turns to Derrida’s reading of Plato in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, first to Derrida’s critique of the Platonic model of reading and writing in the dialogues and then to the deployment of a new kind of philosophical reading and writing in Derrida’s own work, a reading that, as Berger herself suggests, is always also a writing, a reading that is itself then always double, at once silent and aloud.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48098990","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay ponders over the dismissal of reading practices and theories that were linked to the modernist shift from ‘literature’ to ‘writing’ ( écriture) in the second half of the twentieth century. It provides an intellectual genealogy of the rise and fall of the writing/reading couple, before going on to consider the cultural effects – as well as the educational and institutional consequences in academia – of the challenge to literature’s ‘cultural difference’ mounted by both cognitivist and culturalist approaches to literature, in their turn away from or against ‘language’.
{"title":"Reading and Its Discontents","authors":"A. Berger","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0390","url":null,"abstract":"This essay ponders over the dismissal of reading practices and theories that were linked to the modernist shift from ‘literature’ to ‘writing’ ( écriture) in the second half of the twentieth century. It provides an intellectual genealogy of the rise and fall of the writing/reading couple, before going on to consider the cultural effects – as well as the educational and institutional consequences in academia – of the challenge to literature’s ‘cultural difference’ mounted by both cognitivist and culturalist approaches to literature, in their turn away from or against ‘language’.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42296823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Francesco Vitale, Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences","authors":"Eszter Timar","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0383","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43786743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay stages an encounter between several texts by Jacques Derrida (notably Memoires – for Paul de Man, Life Death, and Glas) which delineate the contours of what could be called a ‘memorial agonistics’. Through readings of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, Derrida shows that memory and commemorations always involve struggles in nomination and classification, jealous movements of appropriation and expropriation of the departed, wars in and for the name converging towards the imposition of some countersignature. These violent plays of preservation and substitution seem always to take place around the enigmatic figure of the mother – a monumental corpse instantiated in the essay through the name ‘Notre-Dame de la Garde’.
这篇文章讲述了雅克·德里达的几篇文章之间的相遇(尤其是回忆录 – 保罗·德曼(Paul de Man)、《生死》(Life Death)和《格拉斯》(Glas。通过对马克思、尼采和弗洛伊德的解读,德里达表明,记忆和纪念活动总是涉及提名和分类的斗争,对逝者的侵占和征用的嫉妒运动,为名字而战的战争汇聚到某种连署。这些保存和替代的暴力游戏似乎总是围绕着神秘的母亲形象发生 – 一具不朽的尸体在文章中以“花园圣母院”的名字出现。
{"title":"Glas Struggles","authors":"Thomas Clément Mercier","doi":"10.3366/olr.2022.0381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2022.0381","url":null,"abstract":"This essay stages an encounter between several texts by Jacques Derrida (notably Memoires – for Paul de Man, Life Death, and Glas) which delineate the contours of what could be called a ‘memorial agonistics’. Through readings of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, Derrida shows that memory and commemorations always involve struggles in nomination and classification, jealous movements of appropriation and expropriation of the departed, wars in and for the name converging towards the imposition of some countersignature. These violent plays of preservation and substitution seem always to take place around the enigmatic figure of the mother – a monumental corpse instantiated in the essay through the name ‘Notre-Dame de la Garde’.","PeriodicalId":43403,"journal":{"name":"OXFORD LITERARY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47166823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}