Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10472429
Annie Le
Some medievalists use “medieval Orientalism” to address critiques of Edward Said's engagement with the Middle Ages in Orientalism. However, the author of this article argues that “medieval Orientalism” entrenches a divide between the Middle Ages and other time periods, which sequesters medieval objects of study from contributing to the ongoing theorization of critical frameworks. The article analyzes a thirteenth-century Old French text, Les enfances Renier, to demonstrate how a medieval text depicts ambivalence in the face of alterity, a hallmark of recent post-Saidian engagement with Orientalism. The author argues that the nuances and complexities of medieval representations of interfaith encounter contribute to theories of Orientalism.
{"title":"Different and Familiar: Les enfances Renier and the Question of Medieval Orientalism","authors":"Annie Le","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472429","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Some medievalists use “medieval Orientalism” to address critiques of Edward Said's engagement with the Middle Ages in Orientalism. However, the author of this article argues that “medieval Orientalism” entrenches a divide between the Middle Ages and other time periods, which sequesters medieval objects of study from contributing to the ongoing theorization of critical frameworks. The article analyzes a thirteenth-century Old French text, Les enfances Renier, to demonstrate how a medieval text depicts ambivalence in the face of alterity, a hallmark of recent post-Saidian engagement with Orientalism. The author argues that the nuances and complexities of medieval representations of interfaith encounter contribute to theories of Orientalism.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44662412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10472457
Elizabeth J. West
Abstract In its special issue, “The ‘Medieval’ Undone: Imagining a New Global Past,” boundary 2 reveals connections of medieval studies beyond the field's self-declared boundary of 500 – 1500 AD. Though focusing on medieval studies, these essays underscore the field's long-standing role in promoting an Anglocentric paradigm of time and history. The implications reach beyond the 1500s, into the settler and colonial periods of early America, serving as a reminder that Western-derived divisions of time—that is, periodization—have anchored white-centered epistemologies. Rooted in Western-centric time and chronology, medieval studies reflects a global Anglocentric impact requiring Africana and nonwhite populations to engage the discipline as both intellectual and social advocacy.
{"title":"Afterword: In and beyond the Boundaries of Medievalism","authors":"Elizabeth J. West","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10472457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10472457","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In its special issue, “The ‘Medieval’ Undone: Imagining a New Global Past,” boundary 2 reveals connections of medieval studies beyond the field's self-declared boundary of 500 – 1500 AD. Though focusing on medieval studies, these essays underscore the field's long-standing role in promoting an Anglocentric paradigm of time and history. The implications reach beyond the 1500s, into the settler and colonial periods of early America, serving as a reminder that Western-derived divisions of time—that is, periodization—have anchored white-centered epistemologies. Rooted in Western-centric time and chronology, medieval studies reflects a global Anglocentric impact requiring Africana and nonwhite populations to engage the discipline as both intellectual and social advocacy.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136222861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10300651
Joshua Lam
This is a review essay of Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), an anthology of innovative and cross-genre writing produced primarily in the twenty-first century. Edited by the poets and essayists Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, the book collects poetry and prose by thirty-five Black women, particularly poets, including LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Duriel E. Harris, Robin Coste Lewis, Harryette Mullen, Akilah Oliver, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claudia Rankine, and Evie Shockley, as well as artists such as Adrian Piper and Kara Walker. The essay first assesses the framing and organization of the book in terms of its professed radicalism—a term that encompasses formal innovation and radical politics while eliding the differences between them. This portion of the essay contextualizes the book by examining its relationship to recent scholarship on race and poetry in general and innovative Black poetry in particular. The essay then turns to a major through line of the anthology, in which many writers consider Black futures by revisiting historical archives and imaginaries. Drawing on a lineage of Black feminist thinkers, Joshua Lam uses Christina Sharpe's concept of “wake work” from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) to examine how these writers engage with the language of disaster, from the legacy of slavery and its afterlives to quotidian contemporary manifestations of anti-Blackness. Navigating between what Saidiya Hartman calls “the violence of abstraction” and what Phillip Brian Harper calls “abstractionist aesthetics,” Lam argues that the writings most successful in imagining Black futures are those that, paradoxically, turn to the past: works that explore how the creation and curation of the past (in museums, memorials, historical documents) establishes the limitations of the present.
{"title":"In the Wake of Disaster: Black Women's Innovative Poetics","authors":"Joshua Lam","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10300651","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300651","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This is a review essay of Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), an anthology of innovative and cross-genre writing produced primarily in the twenty-first century. Edited by the poets and essayists Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, the book collects poetry and prose by thirty-five Black women, particularly poets, including LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Duriel E. Harris, Robin Coste Lewis, Harryette Mullen, Akilah Oliver, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claudia Rankine, and Evie Shockley, as well as artists such as Adrian Piper and Kara Walker. The essay first assesses the framing and organization of the book in terms of its professed radicalism—a term that encompasses formal innovation and radical politics while eliding the differences between them. This portion of the essay contextualizes the book by examining its relationship to recent scholarship on race and poetry in general and innovative Black poetry in particular. The essay then turns to a major through line of the anthology, in which many writers consider Black futures by revisiting historical archives and imaginaries. Drawing on a lineage of Black feminist thinkers, Joshua Lam uses Christina Sharpe's concept of “wake work” from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) to examine how these writers engage with the language of disaster, from the legacy of slavery and its afterlives to quotidian contemporary manifestations of anti-Blackness. Navigating between what Saidiya Hartman calls “the violence of abstraction” and what Phillip Brian Harper calls “abstractionist aesthetics,” Lam argues that the writings most successful in imagining Black futures are those that, paradoxically, turn to the past: works that explore how the creation and curation of the past (in museums, memorials, historical documents) establishes the limitations of the present.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45884882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10300609
Devan Bailey
Writing in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988) late in his career, the neoliberal theorist F. A. Hayek lamented that writers and artists of his time had remained under the spell of “constructivist rationalism.” The truth, however, is more interesting. Sharing Theodor W. Adorno's fear that the “administered world” that arose in the twentieth century might “strangle all spontaneity,” artists embraced chance, open-endedness, and indeterminacy. In the process, experimental artists went beyond negating the rationalized postwar social order; their work also positively modeled the dispersed, unwilled—in a word, spontaneous—conception of social order that simultaneously came to theoretical expression in the work of neoliberal intellectuals. This essay offers new insight into the formal unity between spontaneous aesthetics and the neoliberal account of the order produced by markets. After broadly retracing the shared commitment among experimental artists and neoliberal intellectuals to spontaneous order—that is, to order as an emergent effect of dispersed activity rather than the rational outcome of conscious construction and coordination—this essay reads Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977) as a text in which the spirit of aesthetic revolt formally and materially converges with the neoliberal intellectual and political project.
新自由主义理论家f·a·哈耶克在其职业生涯晚期的《致命的自负:社会主义的错误》(1988)一书中哀叹，他那个时代的作家和艺术家一直处于“建构主义理性主义”的魔咒之下。然而，事实更有趣。和西奥多·阿多诺(Theodor W. Adorno)一样，他们担心20世纪出现的“被管理的世界”可能会“扼杀所有的自发性”，艺术家们拥抱机会、开放性和不确定性。在这个过程中，实验艺术家超越了对战后理性化的社会秩序的否定;他们的工作还积极地模拟了分散的、不情愿的——一句话，自发的——社会秩序概念，这些概念同时在新自由主义知识分子的工作中得到理论表达。这篇文章对自发美学和新自由主义对市场产生的秩序的描述之间的正式统一提供了新的见解。在广泛地追溯实验艺术家和新自由主义知识分子对自发秩序的共同承诺之后——也就是说，秩序是分散活动的一种新兴效应，而不是有意识的建构和协调的理性结果——本文将雅克·阿塔利的《噪音:音乐的政治经济学》(1977)视为一篇文本，其中美学反抗的精神在形式上和物质上与新自由主义的知识和政治计划融合在一起。
{"title":"Neoliberal Kosmos and the Cunning of Aesthetic Revolt","authors":"Devan Bailey","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10300609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300609","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Writing in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988) late in his career, the neoliberal theorist F. A. Hayek lamented that writers and artists of his time had remained under the spell of “constructivist rationalism.” The truth, however, is more interesting. Sharing Theodor W. Adorno's fear that the “administered world” that arose in the twentieth century might “strangle all spontaneity,” artists embraced chance, open-endedness, and indeterminacy. In the process, experimental artists went beyond negating the rationalized postwar social order; their work also positively modeled the dispersed, unwilled—in a word, spontaneous—conception of social order that simultaneously came to theoretical expression in the work of neoliberal intellectuals. This essay offers new insight into the formal unity between spontaneous aesthetics and the neoliberal account of the order produced by markets. After broadly retracing the shared commitment among experimental artists and neoliberal intellectuals to spontaneous order—that is, to order as an emergent effect of dispersed activity rather than the rational outcome of conscious construction and coordination—this essay reads Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977) as a text in which the spirit of aesthetic revolt formally and materially converges with the neoliberal intellectual and political project.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47642672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10300594
Valerio Amoretti
This essay argues that reading involves a form of unconscious psychic work that has the potential to deeply affect and transform the reader. Recent discussions about the practice of reading shunned psychoanalysis because of its alleged reliance on a suspicious epistemology rooted in the Freudian-Lacanian framework. But object-relations theory offers an alternative paradigm, as Eve Sedgwick knew when she proposed the concept of “reparative reading.” This essay looks to post-Kleinian developments in psychoanalysis, in particular the work of Wilfred Bion and the contemporary Bionians, to describe reading as a creative, quasi-intersubjective process, constituted by the unique match of the psychic demands made by a text and a reader's ability to work with those demands.
{"title":"On the Psychic Work of Reading","authors":"Valerio Amoretti","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10300594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300594","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay argues that reading involves a form of unconscious psychic work that has the potential to deeply affect and transform the reader. Recent discussions about the practice of reading shunned psychoanalysis because of its alleged reliance on a suspicious epistemology rooted in the Freudian-Lacanian framework. But object-relations theory offers an alternative paradigm, as Eve Sedgwick knew when she proposed the concept of “reparative reading.” This essay looks to post-Kleinian developments in psychoanalysis, in particular the work of Wilfred Bion and the contemporary Bionians, to describe reading as a creative, quasi-intersubjective process, constituted by the unique match of the psychic demands made by a text and a reader's ability to work with those demands.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45290881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10300000
Other| May 01 2023 Contributors boundary 2 (2023) 50 (2): 223–224. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300000 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Contributors. boundary 2 1 May 2023; 50 (2): 223–224. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300000 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsboundary 2 Search Advanced Search Valerio Amoretti is a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. He writes on object-relations theory, literary theory, and neuroscience.Devan Bailey recently completed his PhD in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine, where he served as program coordinator for the Center for Culture and Capital for three years. Trained as a twentieth-century Americanist, his research engages modern intellectual, cultural, literary, and political history. His work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Studies in American Fiction, among other places.Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, critic, and collagist who has written extensively on gender, poetry, and poetics, including feminist critiques of issues in modernist poetry and studies on the objectivist poets. Drafts is her late twentieth-century long poem; Traces, with Days is a long work from this century. She appeared in boundary 2 first in 1975, then again... You do not currently have access to this content.
{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10300000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300000","url":null,"abstract":"Other| May 01 2023 Contributors boundary 2 (2023) 50 (2): 223–224. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300000 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Contributors. boundary 2 1 May 2023; 50 (2): 223–224. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300000 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalsboundary 2 Search Advanced Search Valerio Amoretti is a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. He writes on object-relations theory, literary theory, and neuroscience.Devan Bailey recently completed his PhD in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine, where he served as program coordinator for the Center for Culture and Capital for three years. Trained as a twentieth-century Americanist, his research engages modern intellectual, cultural, literary, and political history. His work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Studies in American Fiction, among other places.Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, critic, and collagist who has written extensively on gender, poetry, and poetics, including feminist critiques of issues in modernist poetry and studies on the objectivist poets. Drafts is her late twentieth-century long poem; Traces, with Days is a long work from this century. She appeared in boundary 2 first in 1975, then again... You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134903282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10300679
B. Ghosh
This essay reviews Anustup Basu's book Hindutva as Political Monotheism (2020) in the context of current debates over Hindu political theology after the Bharatiya Janata Party's electoral wins of 2014 and 2018. The book charts the consolidation of Hinduism as a monotheistic imperative ever since its inception in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and its axiomatic place in present-day masculinist majoritarian India—“Modi's India.” This review places the book's historical reading of political Hinduism and its arguments on an informatic Hindutva mediascape (Hindutva 2.0) alongside recent books with similar ambitions.
{"title":"The Making of the Hindu Normative","authors":"B. Ghosh","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10300679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300679","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay reviews Anustup Basu's book Hindutva as Political Monotheism (2020) in the context of current debates over Hindu political theology after the Bharatiya Janata Party's electoral wins of 2014 and 2018. The book charts the consolidation of Hinduism as a monotheistic imperative ever since its inception in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and its axiomatic place in present-day masculinist majoritarian India—“Modi's India.” This review places the book's historical reading of political Hinduism and its arguments on an informatic Hindutva mediascape (Hindutva 2.0) alongside recent books with similar ambitions.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44035261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10300579
Bradley J. Fest, R. Duplessis
This interview with poet, essayist, literary critic, and collagist Rachel Blau DuPlessis was conducted via email correspondence between June 11 and August 29, 2020. Author of over a dozen volumes of poetry and half a dozen books in modernist studies, poetics, and feminist criticism, DuPlessis reflects broadly on her career in this interview. She discusses the ongoing role of feminism in her writing and thought, the forms of the fold and the fragment, the relationship between her poetry and criticism, her work in and on the long poem, and her post-Drafts poetry, including her (at the time) most recent book, Late Work (2020). The interview concludes with a conversation about the relationship between poetry and theorizing practices and a meditation on writing during a global pandemic.
{"title":"Something Worth Leaving in Shards: An Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis","authors":"Bradley J. Fest, R. Duplessis","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10300579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300579","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This interview with poet, essayist, literary critic, and collagist Rachel Blau DuPlessis was conducted via email correspondence between June 11 and August 29, 2020. Author of over a dozen volumes of poetry and half a dozen books in modernist studies, poetics, and feminist criticism, DuPlessis reflects broadly on her career in this interview. She discusses the ongoing role of feminism in her writing and thought, the forms of the fold and the fragment, the relationship between her poetry and criticism, her work in and on the long poem, and her post-Drafts poetry, including her (at the time) most recent book, Late Work (2020). The interview concludes with a conversation about the relationship between poetry and theorizing practices and a meditation on writing during a global pandemic.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48458856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10300665
B. Parker
In her new book on the function of cynicism, Helen Small defines a positive role that cynicism can play in the liberal articulation of the very ideals and norms that cynicism affronts. She provides this “strategic cynicism” with a nineteenth-century lineage including Friedrich Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle. This review essay identifies some problems in the concept of strategic cynicism, drawing on Hegel's understanding of intentional action. Strategic cynicism is ultimately a role-playing (or impersonation) of cynicism by normativity on its own behalf. As Small conceives norms, they are vulnerable to cynicism because they are stranded and without immanent grounding. Turning to Henry James's novel The Awkward Age, this essay shows how cynicism can be answered not by pointing to better intentions, but only by what we discover retrospectively, from the consequences of how things turn out, our commitments to be. The essay ends with a consideration of the dysfunction of liberal responses to Donald Trump's cynicism.
{"title":"Shelter from the Storm: Cynicism and the Refuge of Meaning","authors":"B. Parker","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10300665","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300665","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In her new book on the function of cynicism, Helen Small defines a positive role that cynicism can play in the liberal articulation of the very ideals and norms that cynicism affronts. She provides this “strategic cynicism” with a nineteenth-century lineage including Friedrich Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle. This review essay identifies some problems in the concept of strategic cynicism, drawing on Hegel's understanding of intentional action. Strategic cynicism is ultimately a role-playing (or impersonation) of cynicism by normativity on its own behalf. As Small conceives norms, they are vulnerable to cynicism because they are stranded and without immanent grounding. Turning to Henry James's novel The Awkward Age, this essay shows how cynicism can be answered not by pointing to better intentions, but only by what we discover retrospectively, from the consequences of how things turn out, our commitments to be. The essay ends with a consideration of the dysfunction of liberal responses to Donald Trump's cynicism.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45254360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10300623
Lucius T. Outlaw
Jeffrey C. Stewart's book on Alain Locke is an unsuccessful endeavor. Stewart characterizes his book as a biography, leading the reader to expect an illuminating, accurate, and truthful account of Locke's life based on and disciplined by adherence to credible evidence and standards of scholarship. However, the life of Locke that Stewart recounts is, to a large extent, an imaginary construction that draws on but ventures far beyond the documentary evidence in narrating Locke's life, his “inner life” especially. Consequently, the chapters have the character of literary fiction—biographical fiction—seemingly plausible at times. Furthermore, numerous scholarly shortcomings and egregious misreadings and misrepresentations of W. E. B. Du Bois add to the book's failings. After reading twenty-eight of Stewart's forty-four chapters and “Epilogue,” this writer refused to suffer Stewart's book any further and ended his reading, his trust exhausted.
{"title":"The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke: An Unfinished Reading of Jeffrey Stewart's Troubled Biography","authors":"Lucius T. Outlaw","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10300623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10300623","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Jeffrey C. Stewart's book on Alain Locke is an unsuccessful endeavor. Stewart characterizes his book as a biography, leading the reader to expect an illuminating, accurate, and truthful account of Locke's life based on and disciplined by adherence to credible evidence and standards of scholarship. However, the life of Locke that Stewart recounts is, to a large extent, an imaginary construction that draws on but ventures far beyond the documentary evidence in narrating Locke's life, his “inner life” especially. Consequently, the chapters have the character of literary fiction—biographical fiction—seemingly plausible at times. Furthermore, numerous scholarly shortcomings and egregious misreadings and misrepresentations of W. E. B. Du Bois add to the book's failings. After reading twenty-eight of Stewart's forty-four chapters and “Epilogue,” this writer refused to suffer Stewart's book any further and ended his reading, his trust exhausted.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46769722","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：