Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346821
J. Jackson
This article pairs the arguments of Cultural Capital with those of Ghanaian decolonial philosopher Kwasi Wiredu. Writing around the same time as Guillory, Wiredu proposes a distinctive mode of decolonization, one focused on concepts rather than syllabi or curricula. In Wiredu's argument, decolonization ought to be a genealogical project, disentangling African thought from colonial impositions. The goal is not simple opposition but the chance to enable located concepts’ and traditions’ mutual interrogation, so that a “decolonized” thinker is one who can make an informed choice as to what analytic lenses or worldviews can or should be defended. Even as literary studies continues to open up possible texts and traditions for study, the bottom has fallen out of a hiring market organized around periodizing categories and national literatures. Turning back to Wiredu and Guillory together might not only help us think more clearly about the politics of literary study but also construct a version of the field based on concepts rather than national-historical fields.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346795
A. Anderson
This article explores the importance of psychoanalysis to John Guillory's literary sociology. The failure of scholars to recognize the canon wars as a symptom of the increasing institutional marginality of literary studies derives from their commitment to what Guillory calls an “ego-ideal” of the profession. In particular, the psychic investments of literary critics account, on the one hand, for their inflated claims to political relevance and, on the other, for the ability of professors of literature to strike an anti-institutional pose from within the privileged space of the university. The essay turns to recent developments in the field to consider how Guillory's analysis might respond to our present moment. If his sociological method neatly describes the failures of self-understanding among scholars with respect to the canon wars and the politics of literary criticism, it nonetheless fails to capture the importance of recent work in a more affirmative key, where ideology critique is joined to the study of lived experience.
{"title":"The Politics and Psychology of the Literary Field: Revisiting Cultural Capital","authors":"A. Anderson","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10346795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10346795","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores the importance of psychoanalysis to John Guillory's literary sociology. The failure of scholars to recognize the canon wars as a symptom of the increasing institutional marginality of literary studies derives from their commitment to what Guillory calls an “ego-ideal” of the profession. In particular, the psychic investments of literary critics account, on the one hand, for their inflated claims to political relevance and, on the other, for the ability of professors of literature to strike an anti-institutional pose from within the privileged space of the university. The essay turns to recent developments in the field to consider how Guillory's analysis might respond to our present moment. If his sociological method neatly describes the failures of self-understanding among scholars with respect to the canon wars and the politics of literary criticism, it nonetheless fails to capture the importance of recent work in a more affirmative key, where ideology critique is joined to the study of lived experience.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90905462","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346834
S. Jeppie
This article opens with the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of Cape Town, when a student poured feces on a statue of Cecil Rhodes. This moment exemplifies the ambivalent relationship between symbolic politics and demands for institutional transformation in postapartheid South Africa. The essay considers two sites of tension: the appropriation of this antiapartheid, decolonial rhetoric outside of South Africa (as in the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns at the University of Oxford) and the borrowing of US discourses of racial identity in South African universities. In both cases, specific social and political contexts and their attendant challenges tend to disappear. In South African universities, this has the effect of occluding class, class inequality, and class struggle. To address the South African context, the essay suggests that the writing of Antonio Gramsci, whose work spans literature as cultural production and practical political mobilization, might provide a more useful politics of reading and writing.
本文以2015年开普敦大学(University of Cape Town)发生的“罗德必须下台”(Rhodes Must Fall)抗议活动开篇，当时一名学生向塞西尔·罗兹(Cecil Rhodes)的雕像上倾倒粪便。这一时刻体现了后种族隔离时代的南非，象征政治与制度转型需求之间的矛盾关系。这篇文章考虑了两个紧张的地方:在南非以外挪用这种反种族隔离、非殖民主义的言论(如牛津大学的罗德必须垮台运动)，以及在南非大学借用美国的种族认同话语。在这两种情况下，特定的社会和政治背景及其伴随的挑战往往会消失。在南非的大学里，这造成了阶级、阶级不平等和阶级斗争的封闭。为了解决南非的背景，本文建议安东尼奥·葛兰西(Antonio Gramsci)的写作，他的作品涵盖了文学作为文化生产和实际政治动员，可能会提供更有用的阅读和写作政治。
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Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346873
Elizabeth Hewitt
{"title":"Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States","authors":"Elizabeth Hewitt","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10346873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10346873","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"115 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80868146","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 : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10346847
Mark Chiang
This article argues for the limitations of John Guillory's analysis of canon formation in terms of its treatment of race. The article reads Guillory's 1997 essay “Bourdieu's Refusal” alongside Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant's 1999 essay “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” pointing in each to a sociological determinism, for which well-intentioned social actions intended to address racial and gendered inequalities of representation seem only to prop up structures of market domination. In spite of Bourdieu's resistance to American discourses of racial identity, the article argues, the “globalization of race” in fact allows for the emergence of a relatively unmediated political discourse. Cultural studies, in particular, provides an entrance to that project. One limitation of racial politics is that it does not necessarily impact the structure of economic relations, but at the same time, purely class or economic struggles do not necessarily alter noneconomic modes of class domination in the social and cultural sphere, nor the symbolic violence of social hierarchies such as race or gender.
{"title":"Refusing Race: Cultural Capital and Cultural Studies","authors":"Mark Chiang","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10346847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10346847","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues for the limitations of John Guillory's analysis of canon formation in terms of its treatment of race. The article reads Guillory's 1997 essay “Bourdieu's Refusal” alongside Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant's 1999 essay “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” pointing in each to a sociological determinism, for which well-intentioned social actions intended to address racial and gendered inequalities of representation seem only to prop up structures of market domination. In spite of Bourdieu's resistance to American discourses of racial identity, the article argues, the “globalization of race” in fact allows for the emergence of a relatively unmediated political discourse. Cultural studies, in particular, provides an entrance to that project. One limitation of racial politics is that it does not necessarily impact the structure of economic relations, but at the same time, purely class or economic struggles do not necessarily alter noneconomic modes of class domination in the social and cultural sphere, nor the symbolic violence of social hierarchies such as race or gender.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83494191","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10146738
Michelle Robinson
This essay argues that by studying parodies of detective fiction from the turn of the twentieth century, one can envision a more complete history of the detective genre's development and the alternate paths it might have pursued. Mark Twain's A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1902), Melville Davisson Post's The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason (1896), and Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne's The Wrong Box (1889) instruct the reader to regard detective fiction as a genre about the production of the corpse and the transnational economic systems that generated it, rather than the ratiocinative mastery of the detective. These three parodies of detective fiction burlesque incipient genre texts from the nineteenth century by painstakingly regurgitating the global political and economic stakes that set the stage for local mysteries, even when they defer rather than advance the plot. They also foreground the corpse-as-spectacle by engineering human remains that resist forensic elucidation and are the product of bizarre and cataclysmic histories of violence. In emphasizing detective fiction's nineteenth-century literary antecedents, Twain's, Post's, and Stevenson and Osbourne's detective parodies indicate that the genre might have pursued a different direction, one where its dominant element was the disturbing debasement of a body by a complex circuit of global political and economic relations.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10146777
J. Park
{"title":"Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia","authors":"J. Park","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10146777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10146777","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88563043","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10146751
Steve Pinkerton
Ralph Ellison's long-neglected essay “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” (1965) has lately received increased critical attention as a revealing paratext for Ellison's unfinished second novel. Yet little has been said about that essay's conspicuous psychosexual themes or its confoundingly ambivalent rhetoric of avowal and disavowal. Nor have scholars yet charted the essay's unique evolution over a full decade's worth of drafts and revisions. Drawing on original archival research, this article reads “Tell It” as responding to two contexts that for Ellison were both achingly personal and pressingly political: first, the often hostile criticism he endured from the ideological left during the 1960s, and second, his deep-seated antipathy to the sociology of race. Both of these contexts carried psychological implications concerning Black masculinity and the fates of fatherless Black families such as the one in which Ellison was raised. (His essay largely narrates “a personal dream” that symbolically equates Lincoln's assassination with the untimely death of Ellison's own father.) In obliquely writing back to his critics and to then-regnant theories about Black lives, Ellison mingles quasi-confessional feints with strident denials and abrupt volte-faces in ways that elude any straightforward interpretation. Yet this very tangle of contradiction may itself be his way of “telling it like it is”: of exploring the massive contradictions of US history and American identity that, for Ellison, must inform any individual or collective effort to make sense of “our orphan's loneliness.”
{"title":"Ambivalent Man: The Is-and-Isn't World of Ralph Ellison's “Tell It Like It Is, Baby”","authors":"Steve Pinkerton","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10146751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10146751","url":null,"abstract":"Ralph Ellison's long-neglected essay “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” (1965) has lately received increased critical attention as a revealing paratext for Ellison's unfinished second novel. Yet little has been said about that essay's conspicuous psychosexual themes or its confoundingly ambivalent rhetoric of avowal and disavowal. Nor have scholars yet charted the essay's unique evolution over a full decade's worth of drafts and revisions. Drawing on original archival research, this article reads “Tell It” as responding to two contexts that for Ellison were both achingly personal and pressingly political: first, the often hostile criticism he endured from the ideological left during the 1960s, and second, his deep-seated antipathy to the sociology of race. Both of these contexts carried psychological implications concerning Black masculinity and the fates of fatherless Black families such as the one in which Ellison was raised. (His essay largely narrates “a personal dream” that symbolically equates Lincoln's assassination with the untimely death of Ellison's own father.) In obliquely writing back to his critics and to then-regnant theories about Black lives, Ellison mingles quasi-confessional feints with strident denials and abrupt volte-faces in ways that elude any straightforward interpretation. Yet this very tangle of contradiction may itself be his way of “telling it like it is”: of exploring the massive contradictions of US history and American identity that, for Ellison, must inform any individual or collective effort to make sense of “our orphan's loneliness.”","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"75 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91092721","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10146791
Y. Kim
{"title":"Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature","authors":"Y. Kim","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10146791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10146791","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72772557","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 : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1215/00166928-10146764
Christian Mehrstam
John Badham's cult film WarGames (1983) is widely recognized as one of the most influential narratives shaping the popular image of the hacker. Research and critiques are, however, conflicted regarding what that influence is. Some see it as troubling and countercultural, others as light-hearted and conservative. Little attention has been given to the fact that WarGames is a convergent narrative working across multiple media. In a study of David Bischoff's eponymous tie-in novel, this article reveals a composite genre vehicle focused on the new kind of kid rather than the new technology. The protagonist is presented as an outsider by means of literary science fiction devices, only to be made more “normal” and recognizable as part of the school story, love story, and thriller. This refamiliarization gives WarGames a conservative potential, less evident but still present in the film. While it cannot completely neutralize the countercultural character of the hacker gestalt, it seeks to affect the audience's interpretation of WarGames as a media ensemble. The article's result brings nuance to the conflicted assessments of WarGames and contributes to the understanding of the narrative's influence on digital youth discourse at the peak of the personal computer revolution.
{"title":"WarGames and the Refamiliarization of the Hacker","authors":"Christian Mehrstam","doi":"10.1215/00166928-10146764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10146764","url":null,"abstract":"John Badham's cult film WarGames (1983) is widely recognized as one of the most influential narratives shaping the popular image of the hacker. Research and critiques are, however, conflicted regarding what that influence is. Some see it as troubling and countercultural, others as light-hearted and conservative. Little attention has been given to the fact that WarGames is a convergent narrative working across multiple media. In a study of David Bischoff's eponymous tie-in novel, this article reveals a composite genre vehicle focused on the new kind of kid rather than the new technology. The protagonist is presented as an outsider by means of literary science fiction devices, only to be made more “normal” and recognizable as part of the school story, love story, and thriller. This refamiliarization gives WarGames a conservative potential, less evident but still present in the film. While it cannot completely neutralize the countercultural character of the hacker gestalt, it seeks to affect the audience's interpretation of WarGames as a media ensemble. The article's result brings nuance to the conflicted assessments of WarGames and contributes to the understanding of the narrative's influence on digital youth discourse at the peak of the personal computer revolution.","PeriodicalId":84799,"journal":{"name":"Genre (Los Angeles, Calif.)","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85418864","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}
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