Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10045146
Sunil M. Agnani
Hannah Arendt's work On Revolution brings into contact two temporalities: the decade of its composition (the 1960s), alongside its understanding of revolution in conjunction with “Enlightenment.” A reader of Edmund Burke who turns to this work will be startled at the degree to which he plays a central role. His ideas and even his temperament seem to guide her profound praise for “the men who made the American Revolution” alongside her shock centered around Robespierre but mingled with her discussion of Rousseau and the French Revolution. This connection between Burke and Arendt is worth tracing because it allows readers to understand her response to the post-WWII age, which witnessed the emergence of manifold diverse “revolutions” in the social and political realm brought by decolonization, both in the European and non-European (i.e., Asian, African, postcolonial) contexts. It also allows readers to question Arendt's view of the role that suffering and poverty ought to play in moments of revolution and to scrutinize her thesis that wherever a solution to the “social” question was sought by “political” means it has led to terror and violence, with the notion of resentment playing a crucial role.
{"title":"Edmund Burke and Hannah Arendt: Decolonization, Resentment, and the Social Question","authors":"Sunil M. Agnani","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10045146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10045146","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Hannah Arendt's work On Revolution brings into contact two temporalities: the decade of its composition (the 1960s), alongside its understanding of revolution in conjunction with “Enlightenment.” A reader of Edmund Burke who turns to this work will be startled at the degree to which he plays a central role. His ideas and even his temperament seem to guide her profound praise for “the men who made the American Revolution” alongside her shock centered around Robespierre but mingled with her discussion of Rousseau and the French Revolution. This connection between Burke and Arendt is worth tracing because it allows readers to understand her response to the post-WWII age, which witnessed the emergence of manifold diverse “revolutions” in the social and political realm brought by decolonization, both in the European and non-European (i.e., Asian, African, postcolonial) contexts. It also allows readers to question Arendt's view of the role that suffering and poverty ought to play in moments of revolution and to scrutinize her thesis that wherever a solution to the “social” question was sought by “political” means it has led to terror and violence, with the notion of resentment playing a crucial role.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44203220","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10045160
Joshua Lam
In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant-garde forms have produced poetry focused upon the theme of racial objectification. Individual and collaborative projects by Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, who write and perform together as the Black Took Collective, practice what this article calls a poetics of thingification: a poetry that draws attention to language's capacity for reification in general and for racial objectification in particular. Drawing upon thing theory and recent scholarship on race and avant-garde poetry, this article focuses on Dawn Lundy Martin's poetics in order to demonstrate how poets combine innovative techniques with racial stereotypes to scrutinize hegemonic expectations at the level of poetic form, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric and lyrical modes of conventional African American poetry, these poets use the trope of the objectified Black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.
{"title":"A Poetics of Thingification: Dawn Lundy Martin and the Black Took Collective","authors":"Joshua Lam","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10045160","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10045160","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the last two decades, African American poets working in innovative and avant-garde forms have produced poetry focused upon the theme of racial objectification. Individual and collaborative projects by Dawn Lundy Martin, Duriel E. Harris, and Ronaldo V. Wilson, who write and perform together as the Black Took Collective, practice what this article calls a poetics of thingification: a poetry that draws attention to language's capacity for reification in general and for racial objectification in particular. Drawing upon thing theory and recent scholarship on race and avant-garde poetry, this article focuses on Dawn Lundy Martin's poetics in order to demonstrate how poets combine innovative techniques with racial stereotypes to scrutinize hegemonic expectations at the level of poetic form, especially within the tradition of African American poetry. Rather than adopting the humanizing rhetoric and lyrical modes of conventional African American poetry, these poets use the trope of the objectified Black body to deconstruct linguistic processes of racial reification from within.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45904061","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10200482
{"title":"In Memoriam: Michael Hays","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10200482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10200482","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45270829","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10316191
R. Richardson
This review essay offers an enthusiastically positive review of Branka Arsić's Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (2016). Arsić gives us a Thoreau who is a pondside Pythagoras, learned and disciplined, with roots deep in Greek and Ionian and Persian and Hindu thought. Her Thoreau is a prophet with a freshly thought-out message about how perpetual mourning drives the perpetual renewal of life, about the importance of disindividualizing, and about the persistence of life at its most basic and elemental level. Arsić shows how, once we learn to see and hear and walk and sit without filters, without metaphors, and without other preconceived containers for pure experience, we can come to see, with Thoreau, that at the most important level, there is no death.
{"title":"Henry Thoreau's Perpetual Grief and Unquenchable Life","authors":"R. Richardson","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10316191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10316191","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This review essay offers an enthusiastically positive review of Branka Arsić's Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (2016). Arsić gives us a Thoreau who is a pondside Pythagoras, learned and disciplined, with roots deep in Greek and Ionian and Persian and Hindu thought. Her Thoreau is a prophet with a freshly thought-out message about how perpetual mourning drives the perpetual renewal of life, about the importance of disindividualizing, and about the persistence of life at its most basic and elemental level. Arsić shows how, once we learn to see and hear and walk and sit without filters, without metaphors, and without other preconceived containers for pure experience, we can come to see, with Thoreau, that at the most important level, there is no death.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48830739","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-10045132
Jason Fitzgerald, Bruce Robbins
In this wide-ranging interview, Bruce Robbins reflects on themes that have long been at the center of his work, including cosmopolitanism, the political functions of literature and of literary criticism, narratives, progress, feelings, morals, class politics in general and “middle-class politics” in particular, solidarity, anti-statism, how to measure a scholarly career, and more.
{"title":"The Possibility of Progress: An Interview with Bruce Robbins","authors":"Jason Fitzgerald, Bruce Robbins","doi":"10.1215/01903659-10045132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10045132","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this wide-ranging interview, Bruce Robbins reflects on themes that have long been at the center of his work, including cosmopolitanism, the political functions of literature and of literary criticism, narratives, progress, feelings, morals, class politics in general and “middle-class politics” in particular, solidarity, anti-statism, how to measure a scholarly career, and more.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43601670","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-9789696
T. Marshall
In his late unpublished essay “Dionysus in 1992,” Norman O. Brown arrived at the ancient Greek term “spoudaiogeloion” to express his idea of a “serious laughter” that could respond to dialectical tensions without unbalancing them. Brown had, in 1959, converted Freud's Witz book into a serious theory of art. This turned the focus on humor into a focus on art, subtly repressing the place of laughter in art and thinking for Brown and those who took him seriously. His casual conversation was always full of fun, but his formal thought lacked that liberating concept until the last decade of his life. Not even the accusation by Marcuse of “mystification” could bring him out of his idealizations—until he saw the dialectical power of humor's ambivalence. “Spoudaiogeloion,” with room for Joyce's farcical wit and Blake's high visions, gave Brown a useful “way out” of tensions between “high” and “low” art or philosophy.
诺曼·O·布朗(Norman O.Brown)在其晚期未发表的文章《1992年的酒神》(Dionysus In 1992)中提出了古希腊语“spoudaiogeloion”一词,以表达他对“严肃的笑声”的看法,这种笑声可以对辩证的紧张关系做出反应,而不会使它们失衡。1959年,布朗将弗洛伊德的《威茨》一书转变为一种严肃的艺术理论。这将对幽默的关注转变为对艺术的关注,巧妙地压制了笑在艺术中的地位,并为布朗和那些认真对待他的人思考。他随意的谈话总是充满乐趣,但直到生命的最后十年,他的正式思想才缺乏这种解放的概念。甚至马尔库塞对“神秘化”的指责也无法使他摆脱理想化——直到他看到幽默矛盾心理的辩证力量。《斯波达奥吉隆》为乔伊斯的滑稽机智和布莱克的高瞻远瞩提供了空间,为布朗摆脱“高”与“低”艺术或哲学之间的紧张关系提供了一条有用的“出路”。
{"title":"Whaddayou Mean “ςπουδαιογɛλοιον”?: Nabi's Last Laugh","authors":"T. Marshall","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9789696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9789696","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In his late unpublished essay “Dionysus in 1992,” Norman O. Brown arrived at the ancient Greek term “spoudaiogeloion” to express his idea of a “serious laughter” that could respond to dialectical tensions without unbalancing them. Brown had, in 1959, converted Freud's Witz book into a serious theory of art. This turned the focus on humor into a focus on art, subtly repressing the place of laughter in art and thinking for Brown and those who took him seriously. His casual conversation was always full of fun, but his formal thought lacked that liberating concept until the last decade of his life. Not even the accusation by Marcuse of “mystification” could bring him out of his idealizations—until he saw the dialectical power of humor's ambivalence. “Spoudaiogeloion,” with room for Joyce's farcical wit and Blake's high visions, gave Brown a useful “way out” of tensions between “high” and “low” art or philosophy.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49395141","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-9789752
Andrew Schelling
Andrew Schelling recalls and discusses a college course, “World Poetry,” which Norman O. Brown taught at University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1974. The turbulent politics and weird, harrowing culture changes of North America set a context. Brown's class met weekly in a remote meadow ringed by second-growth redwoods. Brown developed his interest in the “law of metamorphosis,” which he thought poetry captures, and put his attention on how the human body changes, producing text as sound or performance. Using two anthologies compiled by Jerome Rothenberg, Brown drew students into a poetry that was physical, raw, multilingual, and perhaps a scriptural base for the era's counterculture. Schelling portrays Brown as a quixotic figure, Sir John Falstaff among scholars. A quick sketch of the “Santa Cruz ecosystem” brings into the mix Gregory Bateson, whose thoughts on evolution paralleled Brown's on poetry, and Jan Willis, veteran civil rights activist and scholar of Sanskrit.
{"title":"Nobby, or Metamorphosis","authors":"Andrew Schelling","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9789752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9789752","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Andrew Schelling recalls and discusses a college course, “World Poetry,” which Norman O. Brown taught at University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1974. The turbulent politics and weird, harrowing culture changes of North America set a context. Brown's class met weekly in a remote meadow ringed by second-growth redwoods. Brown developed his interest in the “law of metamorphosis,” which he thought poetry captures, and put his attention on how the human body changes, producing text as sound or performance. Using two anthologies compiled by Jerome Rothenberg, Brown drew students into a poetry that was physical, raw, multilingual, and perhaps a scriptural base for the era's counterculture. Schelling portrays Brown as a quixotic figure, Sir John Falstaff among scholars. A quick sketch of the “Santa Cruz ecosystem” brings into the mix Gregory Bateson, whose thoughts on evolution paralleled Brown's on poetry, and Jan Willis, veteran civil rights activist and scholar of Sanskrit.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41846730","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-9789654
D. Tiffany
This short essay makes inquiries and observations about how Norman O. Brown understands the confluence of poetry and prophecy, especially concerning the sorts of language he associates with “prophetic” poetry. Specifically, the essay attempts to identify more clearly the particular features of the diction of prophetic poetry, as Brown conceives it, and how it relates to the expressive substance of his own diction in the innovative critical texts he produced. The diction of Brown's own “prophetic” texts can be at once libertine and bossy, silly and imposing, initiatory and constraining. The alternation in Brown's texts between didactic assertion, libertine refrains, and borrowed scraps of obscure patois, embodies the violent oscillation of prophetic language, as Brown conceives it, which veers between elevated and vernacular registers of language.
{"title":"Apocalyptic Style and Prophetic Diction","authors":"D. Tiffany","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9789654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9789654","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This short essay makes inquiries and observations about how Norman O. Brown understands the confluence of poetry and prophecy, especially concerning the sorts of language he associates with “prophetic” poetry. Specifically, the essay attempts to identify more clearly the particular features of the diction of prophetic poetry, as Brown conceives it, and how it relates to the expressive substance of his own diction in the innovative critical texts he produced. The diction of Brown's own “prophetic” texts can be at once libertine and bossy, silly and imposing, initiatory and constraining. The alternation in Brown's texts between didactic assertion, libertine refrains, and borrowed scraps of obscure patois, embodies the violent oscillation of prophetic language, as Brown conceives it, which veers between elevated and vernacular registers of language.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41970177","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1056/nejm189411011311814
R. Herzig
Placing the neoliberal academy's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic alongside Norman O. Brown's May 1960 Phi Beta Kappa speech, “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,” this essay considers the place of madness, sacrifice, and monstrous motherhood in approaches to the university.
{"title":"Alma Mater","authors":"R. Herzig","doi":"10.1056/nejm189411011311814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1056/nejm189411011311814","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Placing the neoliberal academy's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic alongside Norman O. Brown's May 1960 Phi Beta Kappa speech, “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind,” this essay considers the place of madness, sacrifice, and monstrous motherhood in approaches to the university.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1056/nejm189411011311814","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41398527","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-9789710
Stephen G. Carter
This essay explores Norman O. Brown's conception of politics and metapolitics. Brown describes politics via Freud's family romance, as a sphere of conflict between fathers and sons. The first part of the argument focuses on Brown's notion of the fraternal—collectivities organized via metaphorical extensions of brotherhood—as a central, underemphasized, and socially ambiguous aspect of his understanding of politics. The second part discusses Brown's use of figures drawn from ecological or environmental spaces, in particular trees and forests, to outline a notion of metapolitics, even while he also critiques conventional connections between the natural world and motherhood as still beholden to familial frameworks. The essay closes by arguing that Brown's forest imagery combines functional competent stewardship with playful wilderness pleasure, aiming to articulate forms of collective life that transcend Oedipal drama.
{"title":"Fraternal Forms and Forest Figures: Politics and Metapolitics in the Thought of Norman O. Brown","authors":"Stephen G. Carter","doi":"10.1215/01903659-9789710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-9789710","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores Norman O. Brown's conception of politics and metapolitics. Brown describes politics via Freud's family romance, as a sphere of conflict between fathers and sons. The first part of the argument focuses on Brown's notion of the fraternal—collectivities organized via metaphorical extensions of brotherhood—as a central, underemphasized, and socially ambiguous aspect of his understanding of politics. The second part discusses Brown's use of figures drawn from ecological or environmental spaces, in particular trees and forests, to outline a notion of metapolitics, even while he also critiques conventional connections between the natural world and motherhood as still beholden to familial frameworks. The essay closes by arguing that Brown's forest imagery combines functional competent stewardship with playful wilderness pleasure, aiming to articulate forms of collective life that transcend Oedipal drama.","PeriodicalId":46332,"journal":{"name":"Boundary 2-An International Journal of Literature and Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42641766","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}