Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/S0030812922000918
J. Venegas
Abstract James Joyce's Ulysses is rife with Western fantasies about the East: seductive odalisques, damsels with dulcimers, exotic medinas dotted with carpet shops. In invoking them, however, Joyce disarms what Edward Said called Orientalism, or Europe's imperialist stereotypes about Asia and North Africa. Postcolonial critics have seen in Joyce's reformulation of Orientalism an example of his rejection of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and colonialism in Ireland and elsewhere. This essay expands and complicates this scholarly narrative through an examination of Orientalized images of Spain in the novel. A European yet Orientalized country like Ireland, Spain offers Joyce a point of reference to contextualize marginalized national identities beyond colonizer-colonized tensions. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the “minor,” I show how Joyce's engagement with Spain can be conceptualized as a form of Orientalism that decouples Irish identity from British imperialism and the anticolonial nativism that pervaded the Irish Free State after it was established in 1922, the year Ulysses was published.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/S0030812923000032
Kai Sina, Carlos Spoerhase, Kurt Beals
Scholars often credit Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as the originator of the idea of “world literature,” but his contribution to another core concept of modern literary studies has received comparably little attention. In the essay translated here for the first time, “Archiv des Dichters und Schriftstellers” (“Archive of the Poet andWriter”), published in 1823, Goethe formulated the concept of the Nachlass, the archival collection of a writer’s posthumous papers. It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Nachlass as a literary practice since the nineteenth century or its relevance to contemporary debates on the relationship among philology and literature, literary archives, and the politics of cultural memory. In this context, Goethe’s essay plays a key role. Its impact reaches far into themodern era of the twentieth century and indeed our present, where contemporary authors’ archives are sold on a global market. In the German context, literary authors’ collection of their own papers for archival purposes became an object of theoretical consideration only around 1800. More than any other writer of his day, Goethe offered a model for the deliberate fashioning of one’s own Nachlass, through his autobiographical writings, the authorized edition of his complete works, the publication of his correspondence, and, above all, through the meticulous organization of his personal archive. In “Archive of the Poet and Writer,” first published in Goethe’s journal Ueber Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity), Goethe reflected directly on these activities. Here, Goethe reported his satisfaction at the completion of a project: a young man “well acquainted with library and archival work” had managed to bring together all of Goethe’s papers into “perfect order,” “particularly those pertaining to my writing life, in which nothing should be neglected or dismissed as unworthy.” Two points are well to be emphasized, as they proved enduring: Goethe’s explicit connection between work and biography, and his emphasis on the total preservation of documents related to his “writing life.”
学者们通常认为约翰·沃尔夫冈·冯·歌德(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)是“世界文学”概念的创始人，但他对现代文学研究的另一个核心概念的贡献却很少受到关注。在1823年出版的《诗人和作家的档案》(archiiv des Dichters und Schriftstellers)这篇首次翻译的文章中，歌德提出了“Nachlass”的概念，即作家死后论文的档案收藏。很难夸大Nachlass作为19世纪以来文学实践的重要性，也很难夸大它与当代关于文献学与文学、文学档案和文化记忆政治之间关系的辩论的相关性。在这一背景下，歌德的随笔起着关键作用。它的影响一直延伸到二十世纪的现代，甚至我们现在，当代作家的档案在全球市场上出售。在德国的背景下，文学作家收集自己的论文用于存档，直到1800年左右才成为理论研究的对象。歌德比同时代的任何作家都更能通过他的自传、他的全集的授权版本、他的信件的出版，以及最重要的是，通过他对个人档案的精心组织，为人们有意塑造自己的Nachlass提供了一个典范。在歌德的期刊《艺术与古代》上首次发表的《诗人与作家档案》中，歌德直接反思了这些活动。在这里，歌德报告了他对完成一个项目的满意:一个“熟悉图书馆和档案工作”的年轻人成功地将歌德的所有论文整理成“完美的秩序”，“特别是那些与我的写作生活有关的论文，其中没有任何东西应该被忽视或被视为不值得。”有两点值得强调，因为它们被证明是经久不衰的:歌德在作品和传记之间的明确联系，以及他强调全面保存与他的“写作生活”有关的文件。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/S0030812923000019
Nan Z. Da
I recently received an education in how to look at morally significant paintings of plural human activity. The historians and critics I read asked why artists handled crucial details the way they did and made the compositional choices that they made. By “morally significant” I mean paintings that clearly wish to relay precise, terrible predicaments amid life’s plenitude and that cultivate a sense of how benevolence and malevolence work in this world. Such paintings care to represent how things can be for other people. How might such paintings communicate signs of rightness and wrongness, or something having gone wrong, if that rightness and wrongness, their timing, their magnitude, and their real plausibility are not very clear? This artcritical education comes in handy for reading absurdist, postmodern literature that has clearly not forfeited morality or truth-telling. The reader of this kind of literature is put inside rudely incoherent, informationally confusing plots and asked to keep tabs on what’s happening, who is doing what to whom, and in what sequence. Overloaded and overstimulated, these literary worlds also “warn [us] that our (reading) lives depend upon our not missing something” (Cavell 148). My literary test case is the work of Can Xue, a contemporary Chinese writer fixated on exerting this effort of depiction within absurdist, postmodern literature. Global and provincial insanity are written into every layer of her fictions. Her readers, navigating
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/S0030812923000093
Merve Emre
What is the relationship between philology and aesthetic education, the process of learning how to judge and how tomake pleasing objects? If the question strikes us as a nonstarter, it may be because recent considerations of philology as a “failed discipline,” as John Guillory characterizes it, have aligned the manual and intellectual work of philologists with historicist and hermeneutic approaches to criticism (Professing Criticism 168). This view conspicuously underwrites Frances Ferguson’s description of philology, in which philology’s task is to authenticate fragmentary or distressed texts by detailing the chronology of their creation. Philology, Ferguson explains,
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/S0030812922001043
Mark A. Wollaeger
MARK WOLLAEGER is professor of English at Vanderbilt University. His publications include, most recently, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton UP, 2006) and the Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford UP, 2012), as well as articles inModernism/Modernity, Modern Language Quarterly, English Literary History, and James Joyce Quarterly. He is a cofounder of the Oxford University Press book series Modernist Literature and Culture and a past president of the Modernist Studies Association. My university’s first-year students are required to take a small, onesemester writing-intensive seminar, and departments hope this seminar will recruit students into their disciplines. More important, the seminar ushers students into college-level thinking and discourse in a class small enough to permit close attention to writing and to provide a space of sociality in which overwhelmed and anxious students may find not only new ways of thinking but also friends. I had a specific, somewhat personal goal in mind when I designed the seminar I discuss here. I wanted to provide the kind of educational experience I wish my own children had received in their first semesters in university. I felt my engineer son with a second major in economics would have benefited from a course in which he was encouraged to reflect on value along with quantitative analysis, and I thoughtmy policy studies daughter (initially educational policy, ultimately healthcare) would have benefited from a course focused on, say, the place of affect and creativity in contemporary society. So I designed a course on literary value titled The Uses of Literature that raised questions about what students tend to value and why, what professors tend to value and why, and why even though final answers are hard to come by, it is important to pose the questions anyway. Which is to say that all firstyear students, I believe, regardless of imagined career path, should be encouraged to reflect on life choices, and how higher education may inform those choices. (Don’t get me started on the rigidity of most premed advising.) Thus I did not teach the seminar the way I teach classes designed for English majors. Like Michael Clune, I aim with majors to provide a gradual inculcation of literary expertise that ultimately will help students make informed judgments about literature. My first-year seminar, in contrast, is designed more like general education with a hook: students learn to take on greater complexity when problem
MARK WOLLAEGER是范德比尔特大学的英语教授。他最近的著作包括《现代主义、媒体和宣传:1900年至1945年的英国叙事》(普林斯顿大学出版社，2006年)和《牛津全球现代主义手册》(牛津大学出版社，2012年)，以及在《现代主义/现代性》、《现代语言季刊》、《英国文学史》和《詹姆斯·乔伊斯季刊》上发表的文章。他是牛津大学出版社现代主义文学与文化丛书的共同创始人，也是现代主义研究协会的前任主席。我所在大学的一年级学生被要求参加一个小型的、一学期的写作密集研讨会，各院系希望这个研讨会能吸引学生进入他们的学科。更重要的是，在一个足够小的班级里，研讨会引导学生进入大学水平的思考和话语，使他们能够密切关注写作，并提供一个社交空间，在这个空间里，不知所措和焦虑的学生不仅可以找到新的思维方式，还可以找到朋友。当我设计我在这里讨论的研讨会时，我心中有一个具体的，有点个人的目标。我希望自己的孩子在大学的第一学期就能获得这样的教育体验。我觉得，我的第二个专业是经济学的工程师儿子会从一门鼓励他在定量分析的同时思考价值的课程中受益，我认为我的政策研究女儿(最初是教育政策，最终是医疗保健)会从一门专注于情感和创造力在当代社会中的地位的课程中受益。因此，我设计了一门关于文学价值的课程，名为《文学的用途》(The Uses of Literature)，这门课提出了一些问题:学生倾向于看重什么，为什么看重什么，教授倾向于看重什么，为什么看重什么，为什么尽管很难得到最终答案，但提出这些问题还是很重要的。我认为，这就是说，所有的一年级学生，无论想象中的职业道路如何，都应该被鼓励反思人生选择，以及高等教育如何影响这些选择。(不要让我开始谈论大多数医学预科建议的僵化。)因此，我没有像教英语专业学生那样教研讨班。像迈克尔·克伦一样，我的目标是让专业逐渐灌输文学专业知识，最终帮助学生对文学做出明智的判断。相比之下，我第一年的研讨班设计得更像是通识教育:学生们学会在遇到问题时承担更大的复杂性
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/S0030812922001006
E. Auyoung
the degree of phonological similarity
相似度:音系相似的程度
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/S0030812922000943
M. Janion, Marta Figlerowicz
MARTA FIGLEROWICZ is associate professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University, where she also holds secondary appointments in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Film and Media Studies Program. The author of two books, Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character (Oxford UP, 2016) and Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature (Cornell UP, 2017), she is working on a new project entitled “It Must Be Possible: Global Modernisms and the Problem of Trans-cultural Knowledge,” as well as on a book-length translation into English of the selected writings of Maria Janion. Introduction
MARTA FIGLEROWICZ是耶鲁大学比较文学和英语副教授，她还在斯拉夫语言文学系和电影与媒体研究项目中担任二级职位。她是两本书的作者，扁平的主角:小说人物理论(牛津大学，2016年)和感觉空间:现代主义文学中的情感和意识(康奈尔大学，2017年)，她正在研究一个名为“它必须是可能的:全球现代主义和跨文化知识的问题”的新项目，以及将玛丽亚·贾尼恩的选集翻译成英文。介绍
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/s003081292300010x
Daphne A. Brooks
DAPHNE A. BROOKS is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of three books including Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021), the winner of nine prizes and awards including the 2022 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society, the 2022 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History from the American Society for Theatre Research, the 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and the 2022 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. A little over a decade ago and during the time when I served on the faculty of Princeton’s Department of English and (what was then) the Center for African American Studies, I was invited by the department’s undergraduate student body to participate in the inaugural English majors’ colloquium, an annual spring affair in which faculty members deliver remarks in response to a single question posed by the majors. The question that year was this: “Why do we read what we read?” The assignment was both intriguing and wholly frustrating, since I had, at that point, witnessed chronic exclusionary practices from the top down in Princeton’s English department, a unit in which I taught for a total of thirteen years, beginning in my post as an assistant faculty member and concluding as a tenured full professor. The “we” rang hollow to me since I often found myself reading with and alongside a set of students who, while drawn to African American literature (one of my primary areas of specialization), were nonetheless rarely based in the Department of English as majors. They expressed little interest in pursuing a degree in English and often articulated a discomfort with what they perceived to be the history of anti-Blackness in the discipline—as both a field of inquiry and a site of unreconstructed university sociality. My own experiences as a Black feminist studies professor at Princeton confirmed as much. Throughout my entire time at Princeton and through what amounted to over half-a-dozen times in which I taught some portion of the multicourse survey in African American literature that my former colleague Valerie Smith and I designed back in 2002, the “we” in my African American literature courses amounted to Black and brown students who largely rejected English as a path of study. This was a sentiment that surfaced in each iteration of the class when I taught it (and I once taught the survey across an entire academic year). Their reasons were varied—
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/S0030812922000992
Joseph North
Over the last decade many literary academics have been reflecting on aims and methods. Those of us gathered in this section are, shall we say, tolerably united in our view that we should give new thought to the category of the aesthetic, though we understand this task differently. For my part, I have proposed elsewhere that literary studies would be better able to contribute to the central struggles of our time if our highly developed existing program of historical and cultural analysis (“literary scholarship”) were accompanied by an equally sophisticated program of aesthetic education (“literary criticism”). Some have found this proposal thought-provoking; others, not. In any case, it has caused at least some to wonder what “literary criticism” might look like under such a paradigm. In this short essay I experiment with one idea worth considering: What if we articulated the aims of criticism by way of the category of “the commons”? I take it that a version of this thought has occurred to many people, and I am not proposing anything radically new—but I do hope to offer a clear point of entry into this line of thinking, the better to assess how promising it might or might not be. I suggest that the language of the commons may help us address two important problems: the problem of how a specialized critical institution might understand its relationship to critical practices circulating in the society at large, and the problem of how a specialized critical institution might justify its role in cultivating necessarily value-laden practices of aesthetic judgment (though because of space constraints I focus mainly on the first of these). I also briefly express some doubts about this line of thinking, chiefly the fact that many of today’s commons exist largely at the pleasure of states and markets.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1632/S0030812922000980
Jonah Siegel
JONAH SIEGEL, distinguished professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, is the author of Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton UP, 2000) and Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the ArtRomance Tradition (Princeton UP, 2005), as well as the editor of The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources (Oxford UP, 2008). His most recent books include Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After (Oxford UP, 2020) and Overlooking Damage: Art, Display, and Loss in Times of Crisis (Stanford UP, 2022). The idea that one needs to learn what is beautiful, that what happens at the moment of aesthetic experience is not an automatic response, like squinting in bright light or sweating in the heat, is widely shared. Nevertheless, the process whereby one comes to learn what is beautiful gets surprisingly little sustained attention. Analysis is constrained by powerful critical conventions, including the sense that there is not much left to say once one has identified the interest determining the claim that something is beautiful. In fact, two contradictory and generally unstated (because so apparently self-evident) beliefs shape the modern relationship to aesthetic experience and limit the possibility of reflection: on the one hand, the conviction that true aesthetic responses are fundamentally individual and personal, and for that reason not capable of being taught, and, on the other, the certainty that relations to art are constrained by the interests of the group, and therefore absolutely determined and inevitable—making instruction unnecessary or worse. The temptation of recent critics has been to think of the project of aesthetic education as Karl Marx had it when he described culture as a kind of training, one in which the particular pleasures or interests of one social class are reinscribed as necessary and universal. From this perspective, the notion that social progress might be attendant on learning—and learning through art—gives off a suspicious smell of reactionary condescension even as it violates several widely shared principles about the intersection of education and politics. Current sensibilities, then, have made it difficult to recognize in the writings of Friedrich Schiller and Matthew Arnold anything other than reactionary formulations of very limited interest to contemporary thought. The sense that the aesthetic experience implied Bildung, or development, “culture” not in its simplest and least compelling sense—where it means the established body of knowledge of a
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