New Literary History vol 39 no 2 printemps 2008 - Reading Wrting and Representation

New Literary History focuses on theory and interpretation-the reasons for literary change, the definitions of periods, and the evolution of styles, conventions, and genres. Throughout its history, NLH has always resisted short-lived trends and subsuming ideologies. By delving into the theoretical bases of practical criticism, the journal reexamines the relation between past works and present critical and theoretical needs. A major international forum for scholarly interchange, NLH has brought into English many of today' s foremost theorists whose works had never before been translated. Under Ralph Cohen's continuous editorship, NLH has become what he envisioned over thirty years ago: "a journal that is a challenge to the profession of letters." NLH has the unique distinction of receiving six awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ).

Vol. 39, no 2 (printemps 2008) - Reading, Writing, and Representation

Ruth Mayer
The Things of Civilization, the Matters of Empire: Representing Jemmy Button
This paper reflects upon the many representations of Jemmy Button, a Fuegian native who was abducted to England and returned to Tierra del Fuego in the first half of the 19th century. Travel and science writers like Robert Fitzroy, Charles Darwin, W. Parker Snow, and social Darwinist writers such as Max Nordau reflected upon Jemmy Button's life and fate – and their accounts reveal a deep, if changing, fascination with the material aspects of the civilizatory project. Jemmy Button's story was told in many variations and with glaringly different conclusions, but it tends to be told as a story replete with objects, objectification, and with the fantasies that objects inspire. Focusing on the material aspects of the story, I mean to cast light on a larger logic of materialism which framed the development of Darwin's theory of evolution and civilization, and its social Darwinist offsprings.

Rey Chow
Reading Derrida on Being Monolingual
The essay is a study of Derrida's autobiographical reflections on the politics of language under colonialism, reflections that are made especially thought-provoking by Derrida's candid revelations of his own anguished relationship to the French language. In particular, by juxtaposing Derrida's reference to French as an absolute “habitat” and Bourdieu's use of the concept “habitus,” Chow suggests that Derrida's life-long work on language may be understood as a form of resistance, not so much to colonialism per se as to the presumption that any language can ever be mastered. Chow concludes with questions about monolingualism and multilingualism that Derrida's interventions have enabled but left open, and that remain important considerations in the study of postcolonial cultures.

Robert S. Lehman
Allegories of Rending: Killing Time with Walter Benjamin
Nearly every critic of Benjaminian allegory has begun with the assumption that allegory is a fundamentally temporal form. Two possible readings thus present themselves: on the one hand, a finitist reading in which allegory insists on the implacable decay of all life against the organicism of the symbol; on the other, an infinitist reading in which allegory becomes the privileged figure for history's dialectical unfolding. Though each position has resulted in a number of powerful interpretations, neither has addressed the most radical feature of Benjaminian allegory: its challenge to time as the latter manifests itself by ordering human history. Benjamin develops his allegorical challenge to time in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, his studies of Baudelaire and, most profoundly, the ninth thesis “On the Concept of History.” In the last of these texts, Benjamin's allegorical presentation of the “new angel” depicts a vision of history without time, a vision in which events occur absent any temporal continuity. In this vision, I argue, the critical force of what Benjamin calls the “allegorical intention” emerges.

Alfred Guzzetti
A Few Things for Themselves
What characteristics inform the camera's view of things? Is a photograph or a film image capable of offering a view of an object simply for itself, regarded for itself, or must that view at its origin bring along a baggage of signification, metaphoric or otherwise? Can this question be disentangled from the way that the author of the image is to one degree or another inscribed in it, irresistibly leading the viewer back to the spatial realities that the image evokes?

Cary Wolfe
The Idea of Observation at Key West, or, Systems Theory, Poetry, and Form Beyond Formalism
When he died, Niklas Luhmann left behind scattered notes on a project on “Poetry and Social Theory.” Central to Luhmann's understanding of the specificity of poetry is his well-known articulation of the autopoietic closure and difference of psychic systems and social systems, consciousness and communication, each operating by means of self-reference and recursivity. It is within the context of this difference that Luhmann understands the significance to poetry of characteristic themes and problems such as incommunicability, ineffability, silence, and so on-themes that reach their high water mark with romanticism. But he understands them specifically within a posthumanist context: that is to say, as expressions not of a psychological or emotional interiority that reveals itself in language (even if only to gesture toward language's inadequacy), but rather as expressions of a set of differences--most importantly, the difference between communication and perception, which in poetry are “miraculously” made to coincide when the material form of the signifier duplicates the semantics of communication (in familiar devices such as rhyme, rhythm, and so on). Even more interesting and challenging for rethinking the concept of form, however, is the circumstance in which the material form and semantics of the signifier do not coincide-a circumstance insisted upon with particular rigor in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. This essay deploys Luhmann's concept of form-and more generally, his understanding of art as a social system-to explore Stevens' poetics, and uses Luhmann's theory of first- and second-order observation to explain how Stevens' “romantic modernism” is most rigorous and systematic precisely where it is most insistently confounding and paradoxical.

Tzachi Zamir
Wooden Subjects
The essay offers a reading of botanical imagery in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, associating trees with the play's presentation of grief and trauma. I situate the play in relation to Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and its own linkage between trees and violence, and discuss how these plays highlight the dubiousness of tragic pleasure. Shakespeare's response to the misgivings invoked by enjoying tragedy is moral and also psychological, presenting both a moral progress in speaking for pain (in Titus himself) and a penetrating and poetically precise image of what grief involves and what responding to it might demand.

Stefan Mattessich
Self-Critical Theory: Discursive Strategies in an Era of Real Universality
This essay looks at the figure of the universal, or a universalizable substrate, in the work of four contemporary theorists (Cornell, Butler, Badiou, Rancière). It argues that this figure, understood as a “living” universality, implies a necessary implication of the writer and reader in the “abstract” rationalities of today's global system. The first is grasped uniquely in the internalized risk of the latter, taken on as one's own and according to a performative logic of the subject. “Self-Critical Theory” analyzes, in the differences between cultural and radical politics, and between social and philosophical criticism, various registers of this logic, suggesting a common ground from which new possibilities for critique and resistance can arise.

Marta Figlerowicz
“Frightful Spectacles of a Mangled King”: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Narration Through Theater
My paper studies the relationship of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko to theater. I demonstrate that Behn's novella is structured as a series of successive performances observed and responded to by diverse audiences. It is by imitating the interactions between the actors and the spectators of a play that Oroonoko can successfully combine the tragedy central to its plot with a broad exploration of cultural alterity and colonial politics. Since Oroonoko is often regarded as a precursor of the novel, this observation is of wider significance for our understanding of the origins and development of this genre.

David Fishelov
Dialogues with/and Great Books: With Some Serious Reflections on Robinson Crusoe
The essay argues that a work's reputation as a great book is a function of the number and diversity of dialogues it inspires in literature, art and criticism (in the form of allusions, translations, adaptations, parodies, performances and interpretations). After outlining some basic types of (genuine and pseudo) dialogue that can be found in day-to-day communication and in literature, the essay focuses on Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a test case for the dialogic approach to great books. A brief survey of the magnitude and variety of echoes and dialogues this work has inspired throughout the ages provides ample evidence for the new approach. Against prevalent theories of literary history and canon formation—explaining a book's reputation in terms of either aesthetic values or of social hegemonies—the dialogic approach offers an elegant explanation for the gaining of literary reputation and for its fluctuations.

Amy Witherbee
Habeas Corpus: British Imaginations of Power in Walter Scott's Old Mortality
This essay addresses Walter Scott's The Tale of Old Mortality alongside Giorgio Agamben's study of the history of Western sovereignty to argue that even as Agamben's work helps us to clarify the political implications of Scott's novels, these novels reveal alternatives to modern subjectivity through an older, law-based conception of land. Thus, Scott's fictional landscapes demand a reading that is far more geographically literal than the use of land as a symbol for nation, that resists the illusions of certainty encouraged by text, and that envisions jurisdictional power as a counterpoint to the emergence of modern political subjectivity.