Pub Date : 2024-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-11083895
Marta Figlerowicz
This article argues that Erich Auerbach's Mimesis depicts figural thinking as inextricable from ritual violence perpetuated against vulnerable, minority populations. To an extent that has been underappreciated, Mimesis also reflects on Auerbach's own complicity with anti-Semitic Western ethnocentrism. The article uncovers an unexpected intertext for the book's second chapter, “Fortunata,” which narrates the birth of figural thinking. It reads this chapter in conjunction with earlier versions of the ending of Mimesis preserved in Auerbach's Istanbul lectures. The unexpected intertext of “Fortunata” is a then-recent bestseller about Nero's persecution of the Christian, Quo Vadis? (1896), by the Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz, in which Peter and Petronius feature as major characters and as each other's doubles. Reading Mimesis through this lens helps one see that it constructs, around such spectacles of violence, a Viconian account of Western culture's foundational, recurrent brutality.
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Pub Date : 2024-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-11083843
Sora Han
This article explores the history of jail construction and architecture on the occasion of a now vacant North County Jail that sits in the center of downtown Oakland. Put to use neither by the state as COVID-19 ravaged overcrowded prisons nor by the city trying to find ways of offering shelter to the houseless, its vacancy became all the more material during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. What do abolitionists do with such vacancies? Inspired by the sonic geography of Angela Davis's memories of the New York Women's House of Detention, this article is a performance of how abolitionist thought both engages and exceeds the terms of panopticism by focusing on the curious boundary of the panoptic jail window. The sculptural abolitionist imaginaries provoked by conceptual artists Sonya Clark and Charisse Pearlina Weston provide new ways of doing things with the shadows and sounds these windows reflect, transmit, and occlude.
{"title":"North County Jail","authors":"Sora Han","doi":"10.1215/01903659-11083843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-11083843","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the history of jail construction and architecture on the occasion of a now vacant North County Jail that sits in the center of downtown Oakland. Put to use neither by the state as COVID-19 ravaged overcrowded prisons nor by the city trying to find ways of offering shelter to the houseless, its vacancy became all the more material during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. What do abolitionists do with such vacancies? Inspired by the sonic geography of Angela Davis's memories of the New York Women's House of Detention, this article is a performance of how abolitionist thought both engages and exceeds the terms of panopticism by focusing on the curious boundary of the panoptic jail window. The sculptural abolitionist imaginaries provoked by conceptual artists Sonya Clark and Charisse Pearlina Weston provide new ways of doing things with the shadows and sounds these windows reflect, transmit, and occlude.","PeriodicalId":514238,"journal":{"name":"boundary 2","volume":"6 17","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141138173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-11083791
{"title":"Announcement of Change in Editorship","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/01903659-11083791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-11083791","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":514238,"journal":{"name":"boundary 2","volume":"214 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141133450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-11083869
Dubravka Djurić
From historical perspectives, this article points to the interactions between official politics, official literary culture, and radical poetry in socialist Yugoslavia and postsocialist post-Yugoslav cultures. The complexity of parallel political and poetically antagonistically opposed poetry formations and the role of feminism are discussed within this constantly changing social and political environment. At the same time, connections and interactions between different parts of this cultural spaces are revealed, which are concealed within the dominant methodological nationalism approach to poetry studies. The focus is put on the intensive relation between radical poetry and radical art practice connected with transnational flows in Yugoslav socialism from the late 1960s and 1970s, and later its reappearance in 1990s during the war in Yugoslavia. At the end, the article discusses the function of translation of American poetry in articulation of radical postsocialist poetry in Serbia, and the role of feminism as a political frame for this kind of work.
{"title":"Experimental Poetry in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literary Spaces: Socialism, War Transition, and Beyond","authors":"Dubravka Djurić","doi":"10.1215/01903659-11083869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-11083869","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 From historical perspectives, this article points to the interactions between official politics, official literary culture, and radical poetry in socialist Yugoslavia and postsocialist post-Yugoslav cultures. The complexity of parallel political and poetically antagonistically opposed poetry formations and the role of feminism are discussed within this constantly changing social and political environment. At the same time, connections and interactions between different parts of this cultural spaces are revealed, which are concealed within the dominant methodological nationalism approach to poetry studies. The focus is put on the intensive relation between radical poetry and radical art practice connected with transnational flows in Yugoslav socialism from the late 1960s and 1970s, and later its reappearance in 1990s during the war in Yugoslavia. At the end, the article discusses the function of translation of American poetry in articulation of radical postsocialist poetry in Serbia, and the role of feminism as a political frame for this kind of work.","PeriodicalId":514238,"journal":{"name":"boundary 2","volume":"23 14","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141136776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-11083830
Chris Mustazza
Engaging with Lytle Shaw's Narrowcast: Poetry Audio Research as a point of departure and persistent interlocutor, this essay argues that new digital methods of studying recordings of poets as speech share common ground with the speech science used in insidious practices of state-sponsored surveillance. It extends Shaw's argument, which focuses on poetry audio in the 1960s, into the current moment to highlight how the work of digital humanists working with sound is liable to misappropriation. Machine listening, a practice used to parse thousands of hours of audio in condensed periods of time, is increasingly being used to study poetry recordings, and it fundamentally reorders traditional modes of reading/listening. Such practices also move the line between signal and noise, changing the threshold between audiotext and paratext. Poetry scholars interested in sound need to attune their ears to ways of listening that leverage machinic prostheses and to be aware of the dangers that come with such newfound abilities.
{"title":"I Am Become Data: Lytle Shaw's Narrowcast and the Era of Machine Listening","authors":"Chris Mustazza","doi":"10.1215/01903659-11083830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-11083830","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Engaging with Lytle Shaw's Narrowcast: Poetry Audio Research as a point of departure and persistent interlocutor, this essay argues that new digital methods of studying recordings of poets as speech share common ground with the speech science used in insidious practices of state-sponsored surveillance. It extends Shaw's argument, which focuses on poetry audio in the 1960s, into the current moment to highlight how the work of digital humanists working with sound is liable to misappropriation. Machine listening, a practice used to parse thousands of hours of audio in condensed periods of time, is increasingly being used to study poetry recordings, and it fundamentally reorders traditional modes of reading/listening. Such practices also move the line between signal and noise, changing the threshold between audiotext and paratext. Poetry scholars interested in sound need to attune their ears to ways of listening that leverage machinic prostheses and to be aware of the dangers that come with such newfound abilities.","PeriodicalId":514238,"journal":{"name":"boundary 2","volume":"29 27","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141136448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-11083908
Simon During
This essay offers a conspectus of Said's work as a whole. It focuses on why Said chose four writers in particular to lionize and engage with. These writers are Jonathan Swift, Giambattista Vico, Joseph Conrad, and Erich Auerbach, and what they share is their conservatism. Why then did Said, a pioneering critic of empire, place these conservative writers in his private canon? The reason, the essay argues, is that Said sensed the structural connection between progressivism and imperialism, that is to say, the overwhelming force of the connection between improving the world, making it fairer and more affluent, and taking control of territories who are not interested or committed to progress.
{"title":"Edward Said and the Western Humanities","authors":"Simon During","doi":"10.1215/01903659-11083908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-11083908","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay offers a conspectus of Said's work as a whole. It focuses on why Said chose four writers in particular to lionize and engage with. These writers are Jonathan Swift, Giambattista Vico, Joseph Conrad, and Erich Auerbach, and what they share is their conservatism. Why then did Said, a pioneering critic of empire, place these conservative writers in his private canon? The reason, the essay argues, is that Said sensed the structural connection between progressivism and imperialism, that is to say, the overwhelming force of the connection between improving the world, making it fairer and more affluent, and taking control of territories who are not interested or committed to progress.","PeriodicalId":514238,"journal":{"name":"boundary 2","volume":"60 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141141689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-11083921
Jonathan Arac
In light of Oxford University Press issuing two volumes in The Critical Works of William Empson (Some Versions of Pastoral [1935] and The Structure of Complex Words [1951]), this essay thinks over Empson's career and major works to consider what his value may be nearly a century after his first book, with special attention to problems that Empson's Englishness may pose to readers in the United States.
{"title":"Empson Here and Now?","authors":"Jonathan Arac","doi":"10.1215/01903659-11083921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-11083921","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In light of Oxford University Press issuing two volumes in The Critical Works of William Empson (Some Versions of Pastoral [1935] and The Structure of Complex Words [1951]), this essay thinks over Empson's career and major works to consider what his value may be nearly a century after his first book, with special attention to problems that Empson's Englishness may pose to readers in the United States.","PeriodicalId":514238,"journal":{"name":"boundary 2","volume":"51 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141143601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-01DOI: 10.1215/01903659-11083882
Yi Zheng
This essay explores Fu Lei's Family Letters, 1954–1966 (1981) as an accidental then aborted künstlerroman for the newly established People's Republic of China. It suggests that Fu's private epistolary transformation of the bildungsroman is an important undercurrent of Chinese socialist literature and a telling participation in the utopian historical-aesthetic project of socialist subject formation. Reading the Family Letters as a coincidental socialist bildungsroman allows us to see Fu's “heart and mind's journey” in the early decades of the People's Republic, challenging the dichotomous framework with which the relationship between the Chinese state and its intellectuals is often understood. More importantly, it allows insights into Fu's vision of the artistic bildung and its implication for a New China. Through Fu's narrative preoccupation with Jean-Christophe, and in contrast to the officially orchestrated New Folk Songs movement (1958), this understanding of the correspondence as a Romantic bildungsroman with two protagonists probes the question of the possibilities of a socialist developmental narrative, of agency and participation in the emergence of new subjectivity, and of the role of the artist in New China.
{"title":"The Bildungsroman of an Artist for New China: Fu Lei's Family Letters, 1954–1966","authors":"Yi Zheng","doi":"10.1215/01903659-11083882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-11083882","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay explores Fu Lei's Family Letters, 1954–1966 (1981) as an accidental then aborted künstlerroman for the newly established People's Republic of China. It suggests that Fu's private epistolary transformation of the bildungsroman is an important undercurrent of Chinese socialist literature and a telling participation in the utopian historical-aesthetic project of socialist subject formation. Reading the Family Letters as a coincidental socialist bildungsroman allows us to see Fu's “heart and mind's journey” in the early decades of the People's Republic, challenging the dichotomous framework with which the relationship between the Chinese state and its intellectuals is often understood. More importantly, it allows insights into Fu's vision of the artistic bildung and its implication for a New China. Through Fu's narrative preoccupation with Jean-Christophe, and in contrast to the officially orchestrated New Folk Songs movement (1958), this understanding of the correspondence as a Romantic bildungsroman with two protagonists probes the question of the possibilities of a socialist developmental narrative, of agency and participation in the emergence of new subjectivity, and of the role of the artist in New China.","PeriodicalId":514238,"journal":{"name":"boundary 2","volume":" 59","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141131703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}