Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907152
Aihua Chen
Reviewed by: Literature: Why It Matters by Robert Eaglestone Aihua Chen Eaglestone, Robert. Literature: Why It Matters. Polity Press, 2019. 123pp. Is literature a worthy topic of study in an era fixated on science, technology, and information? This has become a subject of debate in recent years, especially as enrollment in college literature courses has declined. J. Hillis Miller has noted that “all who love literature are collectively anxious today about whether literature matters” (13), insisting that it does since it has “three essential human functions: social critique, the pleasure of the text, and allowing a materialization of the imaginary or an endless approach to the unapproachable imaginary” (31). Other literary scholars concur with Miller, though from differing perspectives, including Dennis J. Sumara in Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters (2002) and Mark William Roche in Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (2004). In his recent monograph, Literature: Why It Matters, Robert Eaglestone joins this discussion, offering a timely and judiciously formulated manifesto in defense of literary studies that is groundbreaking in the way it treats literature as a living object whose study can inspire ongoing conversation. Eaglestone presents his argument in four segments: “What is Literature?” “Studying Literature,” “Why Does Literature Matter?” and “What Does Literature Teach?” In his first chapter, Eaglestone reveals the limitations of traditional approaches to defining literature as fiction and narrative, that is, as something “made up.” He argues instead that literature is undefinable and exists as a kind of “living conversation” (6). For Eaglestone, literature, like a conversation, is a form of communication among many parties. In this case, the conversation engages the text, the reader, and the author in discussions of nearly everything. Learning about literature involves understanding the form of that discussion in the same way one comes to understand how speakers create meaning in dialogue with one another. And like conversation, readers’ creative response to a literary text fully engages their minds, their hearts, their feelings about the past, and their hopes for the future. In Eaglestone’s view, literature is “not timeless but time-full.” It involves “a past, visible in various ways, including the historical context of a work and the ‘family trees’ of influence and genre; a person (it’s always read now); and a future (that would be you, joining [End Page 118] the conversation)” (20). As in actual conversation, questions of equality and freedom matter a great deal since “literature is a crucial part of our constant dialogue about humanity’s ever-changing self-understanding — not about what we are but about who we are” (22). In the second chapter, Eaglestone asks questions concerning how we go about “Studying Literature.” Here, he extends the metaphor introduced in the preceding chapter of literature constituting a living
{"title":"Literature: Why It Matters by Robert Eaglestone (review)","authors":"Aihua Chen","doi":"10.1353/sub.2023.a907152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2023.a907152","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Literature: Why It Matters by Robert Eaglestone Aihua Chen Eaglestone, Robert. Literature: Why It Matters. Polity Press, 2019. 123pp. Is literature a worthy topic of study in an era fixated on science, technology, and information? This has become a subject of debate in recent years, especially as enrollment in college literature courses has declined. J. Hillis Miller has noted that “all who love literature are collectively anxious today about whether literature matters” (13), insisting that it does since it has “three essential human functions: social critique, the pleasure of the text, and allowing a materialization of the imaginary or an endless approach to the unapproachable imaginary” (31). Other literary scholars concur with Miller, though from differing perspectives, including Dennis J. Sumara in Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters (2002) and Mark William Roche in Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (2004). In his recent monograph, Literature: Why It Matters, Robert Eaglestone joins this discussion, offering a timely and judiciously formulated manifesto in defense of literary studies that is groundbreaking in the way it treats literature as a living object whose study can inspire ongoing conversation. Eaglestone presents his argument in four segments: “What is Literature?” “Studying Literature,” “Why Does Literature Matter?” and “What Does Literature Teach?” In his first chapter, Eaglestone reveals the limitations of traditional approaches to defining literature as fiction and narrative, that is, as something “made up.” He argues instead that literature is undefinable and exists as a kind of “living conversation” (6). For Eaglestone, literature, like a conversation, is a form of communication among many parties. In this case, the conversation engages the text, the reader, and the author in discussions of nearly everything. Learning about literature involves understanding the form of that discussion in the same way one comes to understand how speakers create meaning in dialogue with one another. And like conversation, readers’ creative response to a literary text fully engages their minds, their hearts, their feelings about the past, and their hopes for the future. In Eaglestone’s view, literature is “not timeless but time-full.” It involves “a past, visible in various ways, including the historical context of a work and the ‘family trees’ of influence and genre; a person (it’s always read now); and a future (that would be you, joining [End Page 118] the conversation)” (20). As in actual conversation, questions of equality and freedom matter a great deal since “literature is a crucial part of our constant dialogue about humanity’s ever-changing self-understanding — not about what we are but about who we are” (22). In the second chapter, Eaglestone asks questions concerning how we go about “Studying Literature.” Here, he extends the metaphor introduced in the preceding chapter of literature constituting a living","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907147
Gai Farchi
Abstract: Contemporary French author Annie Ernaux makes salvaging, recycling, and defying obsolescence into a materialist poetics. Ernaux aligns her textual collages with a late-capitalist incarnation of the Parisian ragpicker. The overlap of the two main tropes in Ernaux’s oeuvre, the axis of reminiscence (embodied here mainly in the works The Years and A Girl’s Story ) and the axis of everyday experience in late capitalistic Paris and its suburbs ( Exteriors , Things Seen ), assemble into a poetics of chiffonnage . In both axes, residues of the everyday are recycled into writing, an effort that reframes the tradition of ragpicking from its context in nineteenth-century Paris into a discourse of waste and recycling.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907148
Philip Mills
Abstract: Austin’s (in)famous characterization of poetry as parasitical has been subject to many interpretations, from Derrida’s considering it a limit of and a central problem in Austin’s theory to Cavell’s attempt to reintegrate poetic uses of language within the framework of Ordinary Language Philosophy. In this essay, I argue that poetry, rather than being excluded from the realm of the performative, can be considered as a performative dispositif that acts upon ordinary language and, through it, upon our forms of life. To reevaluate poetry, I suggest moving from the ‘parasite’ metaphor (poetry is passively feeding on ordinary uses of language) to a ‘virus’ metaphor (poetry is actively disrupting ordinary uses of language). By building on works of French theorists and poets Christophe Hanna, Franck Leibovici, and Manuel Joseph among others, I explore how poetry reveals the virality of language.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907150
Ryan Prewitt, Max Accardi
Abstract: This essay follows the recent discourse on two phenomena: the tendency of hegemony to incorporate subversive cultures, and the digital reanimation of prominent dead people. At the intersection of these phenomena lies what we call “cultural necromancy,” a special case of hegemonic incorporation that aesthetically manipulates the physical presence of a deceased figure in the service of power. This essay explores historical analogues to cultural necromancy and how the digital age has accelerated the process through examples ranging from medieval saints to Lenin’s mausoleum to the Tupac hologram. It then examines cultural necromancy’s implications for counterculture and resistance.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1353/sub.2023.a907153
Niall Gildea
Reviewed by: A Partial Truth (Poems 2015–19) by Christopher Norris Niall Gildea Norris, Christopher. A Partial Truth (Poems 2015–19). The Seventh Quarry Press, 2019. 133pp. “No interval but some event takes place.” (Norris, “Freeze-Frame,” A Partial Truth) A Partial Truth, a collection of thirty-seven pieces, is the seventh volume of poetry by philosopher and literary theorist Christopher Norris. Nobody familiar with Norris’s distinguished career will be surprised to learn that his recent turn to versification is not a repudiation of intellectual and rhetorical seriousness, but a re-emphasis of the same using resources not typically found in academic prose. Norris, an interdisciplinarian long before that term became a slogan, has in his work clocked up considerable epistemological mileage across diverse terrain, his critical friendship with deconstruction leading him to important interventions in analytic and Continental philosophy, institutional critique, philosophy of science and mathematics, legal studies, music, politics and, after all, creative criticism. Creative criticism is a relatively embryonic genre, until recently typified generally by a prose that owes a debt to Jacques Derrida’s Cir-confession, Glas and La carte postale. This is a style that foregrounds the philosophical unsaid – the repressed autobiographical, desirous, and otherwise messy constituents of that canon. It does so in part by jettisoning the academic politesse, and let’s say timidity, which help maintain such statutes of limitation. In a more specific way, creative criticism may be understood as a Romantic development set in train by the “Yale School” of deconstruction and its fellow travelers, straining in their own ways against the subordinate role of the reader and critic instituted by the likes of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot. In the foreword to his 2017 volume The Winnowing Fan, Norris at once compliments this “strong” critical rebelliousness (xii), and critiques its ecstatic, quasi-apocalyptic hubris, provisionally aligning his own creative criticism with the “poetic diction” (xxi) of eighteenth-century figures such as Dryden and Pope. It is an analogy with caveats – not least Norris’s stated allergy to the “air of arrogance” (Tempus-Fugitives ix) of [End Page 122] their heavily end-stopped tendentiousness – but one which schematizes a poetics that both carries a definite argument and could not make this argument otherwise than in a manner reliant on verse’s formal properties. Note, however, the fact that Norris takes his distance from both strong criticism and those eighteenth-century essayists on the grounds of their shared self-assurance. A steadier presiding influence is William Empson, whose enmity towards Eliotic New Criticism, which “fixes a prescriptive gulf between poetry and other kinds of discourse,” makes him a political forebear, dissenting from modern forms of literary historical doctrinalism, specifically “that whole anti-rationalist complex of i
书评:克里斯托弗·诺里斯的《部分真相》(诗歌2015-19)部分真相(诗歌2015-19)。第七采石场出版社，2019。133页。“没有间隔，但发生了一些事件。(诺里斯，《定格》，《部分真理》)《部分真理》是哲学家、文学理论家克里斯托弗·诺里斯的第七部诗集，共37篇。熟悉诺里斯杰出职业生涯的人都不会惊讶地发现，他最近转向诗歌并不是对智力和修辞严肃性的否定，而是重新强调了同样的东西，使用了在学术散文中通常找不到的资源。早在这个词成为一个口号之前，诺里斯就已经是一个跨学科的人了，在他的工作中，他在不同的领域积累了相当多的认识论里程，他与解构主义的批判友谊使他在分析哲学和欧陆哲学、制度批判、科学哲学和数学、法律研究、音乐、政治，以及创造性批评方面进行了重要的干预。创造性批评是一种相对萌芽的体裁，直到最近才以雅克·德里达(Jacques Derrida)的《自白》(cirl -confession)、《玻璃》(Glas)和《邮政菜单》(La carte postale)的散文为代表。这是一种突出哲学的未言说的风格——被压抑的自传体、欲望和其他混乱的经典成分。它之所以能做到这一点，部分原因是抛弃了学术上的礼貌，让我们说胆怯，这有助于维持这种诉讼时效。从更具体的角度来看，创造性批评可以被理解为一种浪漫主义的发展，它是由解构主义的“耶鲁学派”及其同行者设定的，他们以自己的方式与马修·阿诺德(Matthew Arnold)和t·s·艾略特(T. S. Eliot)等人建立的读者和评论家的从属角色作斗争。在他2017年出版的《扇子》一书的前言中，诺里斯立即赞扬了这种“强烈的”批判叛逆(第十二章)，并批评了其狂喜的、准世界末日的傲慢，暂时将他自己的创造性批评与18世纪人物(如德莱顿和蒲伯)的“诗意措辞”(二十一章)结合起来。这是一个与警告的类比-不仅仅是诺里斯对“傲慢的空气”的过敏(tempuss -逃犯ix)[结束页122]他们的严重结束的倾向-但是一个图式化的诗学，既带有明确的论点，也不能做出这种论点，除非以一种依赖于诗歌形式属性的方式。然而，请注意，诺里斯与强烈的批评和那些18世纪的散文家都保持距离，因为他们都有自信。一个更稳定的主导影响是威廉·恩普森，他对艾略特新批评主义的敌意，艾略特新批评主义“在诗歌和其他类型的话语之间固定了一条规定性的鸿沟”，使他成为一个政治先驱，反对现代形式的文学历史教条主义，特别是“整个反理性主义的复杂思想，使诗歌和非诗歌语言之间的不连续性成为美学，伦理和(尽管很少宣传这样)社会政治原则的陈词滥调”(天普斯-逃亡者xix-xx)。诺里斯并不是Empson的直接弟子，他认为德里达和诺里斯曾经邀请他阅读的其他“可怕的法国人”“从简单的道德或社会角度来看，非常令人厌恶，以至于我无法忍受他们”(qtd)。在哈芬登52)。然而，诺里斯的诗文批评和散文批评的一个不变的品质是，当涉及到现代欧洲思想的更深奥或直接浮夸的飞地时，他的解释是受欢迎的冷静。《部分真理》和诺里斯的诗集都明确地概述了他的诗歌是如何对当代诗歌的日记式、含糊不清的懒散做出反应的;但他转向诗歌是否也表明了他对当代理论的某种反应呢?《部分真理》的前言谦虚地写道:“如果这些诗有任何独特的优点，那么它就在于以一种方式处理有趣的想法，这种方式运用了某种正式的手段来描绘复杂性和进一步的含义，这是散文无法达到的。”我们将具体说明形式和话语复杂性之间的关系，但是现在，值得提出的是诺里斯对历史上可识别的诗歌形式的承诺排除了他的拐弯抹角，争论不定的性格。
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{"title":"After Extinction ed. by Richard Grusin, and: Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction by David Farrier (review)","authors":"C. Crews","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43089666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – an almost continuous rave of interconnected love and desire, anger and violence – is also a story of the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of her life by writing it. She turns a traditional genre of a young person’s coming of age into a neurologically realistic portrait of the growth of an artist by multiplying narrative voices and by ignoring conventional bounds of narrative probability. Her story of the growth of a creative mind adumbrates well the picture of brains and their processes currently being described and developed as a “predictive processing” model. Work in neurobiology and neurophysiology has been producing empirical demonstrations of the centrality of failure to successful human cognition.
{"title":"Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet: Rebuilding the Bildungsroman","authors":"Ellen Spolsky","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet – an almost continuous rave of interconnected love and desire, anger and violence – is also a story of the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of her life by writing it. She turns a traditional genre of a young person’s coming of age into a neurologically realistic portrait of the growth of an artist by multiplying narrative voices and by ignoring conventional bounds of narrative probability. Her story of the growth of a creative mind adumbrates well the picture of brains and their processes currently being described and developed as a “predictive processing” model. Work in neurobiology and neurophysiology has been producing empirical demonstrations of the centrality of failure to successful human cognition.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41766519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay explores new technologies of communication, mischievously suggesting that an ordinary memoir, on some fundamental level, is no different from what occurred with a young woman in a persistent vegetative state who “willfully modulated [her] brain activity.” If, as Elaine Scarry famously suggested, readers produce mental imagery “under the instruction of a writer,” then thinking about the role of alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) in providing such instruction might help us to think through the relationship between cognition and generic innovation while, importantly, making room for neurodivergent writers. When George Perec wrote The Void without using the letter “e,” he imposed a restriction that could be said to work a bit like a “tennis-yes, navigation-no” protocol. In Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, the blind writer Stephen Kuusisto reinvents travel writing by having hearing and touch take the lead. Narrative itself ends up being transformed. This essay explores how disability puts pressure on the procedures of conventional narrative.
{"title":"The Neuroscientist’s Memoir: Dramatic Irony and Disorders of Consciousness","authors":"R. Savarese","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores new technologies of communication, mischievously suggesting that an ordinary memoir, on some fundamental level, is no different from what occurred with a young woman in a persistent vegetative state who “willfully modulated [her] brain activity.” If, as Elaine Scarry famously suggested, readers produce mental imagery “under the instruction of a writer,” then thinking about the role of alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) in providing such instruction might help us to think through the relationship between cognition and generic innovation while, importantly, making room for neurodivergent writers. When George Perec wrote The Void without using the letter “e,” he imposed a restriction that could be said to work a bit like a “tennis-yes, navigation-no” protocol. In Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, the blind writer Stephen Kuusisto reinvents travel writing by having hearing and touch take the lead. Narrative itself ends up being transformed. This essay explores how disability puts pressure on the procedures of conventional narrative.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41995041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 BC) is often called “the first Chinese poet,” because the primary work attributed to him, Li sao (“Sublimating Sorrow”), is the first in the tradition to evoke a distinctive persona engaged in self-reflection and personal narrative. To explain why this story of frustrated political ambition became arguably the first instance of Chinese autobiography or life writing, this paper uses the notion of “biological handicap,” proposed by Amotz Zahavi. As a peacock’s cumbersome tail feathers reduce its individual chances of survival but communicate valuable information to potential mates, the Li Sao’s poetic persona uses images its audience understood as external marks of invisible, spiritual potency, like long eyebrows and fragrant adornments, to evoke unfulfilled political potential, resulting in an early model of literary interiority.
{"title":"The Smell of Inner Beauty in Ancient China","authors":"Casey Schoenberger","doi":"10.1353/sub.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 BC) is often called “the first Chinese poet,” because the primary work attributed to him, Li sao (“Sublimating Sorrow”), is the first in the tradition to evoke a distinctive persona engaged in self-reflection and personal narrative. To explain why this story of frustrated political ambition became arguably the first instance of Chinese autobiography or life writing, this paper uses the notion of “biological handicap,” proposed by Amotz Zahavi. As a peacock’s cumbersome tail feathers reduce its individual chances of survival but communicate valuable information to potential mates, the Li Sao’s poetic persona uses images its audience understood as external marks of invisible, spiritual potency, like long eyebrows and fragrant adornments, to evoke unfulfilled political potential, resulting in an early model of literary interiority.","PeriodicalId":45831,"journal":{"name":"SUB-STANCE","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47243384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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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