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).
Volume 36, Number 4, Autumn 2005
SOKEL, Walter Herbert, 1917-, On the Dionysian in Nietzsche
Abstract: Nietzsche reverses Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy of the Will into an entirely affirmative direction. The unity of all being in the Will, that desiring energy, which constantly forms and re-forms the world, he sees embodied in the Greek divinity, Dionysos. Even though the Dionysian idea underlying The Birth of Tragedy seems to disappear from Nietzsche's subsequent work in explicit terms, it remains implicitly the cornerstone of all his thinking. It re-appears in two main forms in Thus Spake Zarathustra: As the idea of the Eternal Recurrence of all things and as the holistic perspective from which Nietzsche views and evaluates existence. The individual has for Nietzsche significance only as a symptom of the condition the whole of being has attained. This symptomatological view of the individual underlies Nietzsche's medical approach to human existence which endeavours to enhance the health and well-being of the whole species to which individual life and happiness has to be subordinated. At the same time, however, the state of the whole of existence manifests itself only in individuals. Thus individual greatness, though symptom, is by the same token supreme end in itself. While holism accounts for aspects of Nietzsche's thought which are close to the eugenic ideal, it also leads to a, in the broadest sense, liberal sense of "justice" in which all aspects of an idea or problem are to be taken into account. Nietzsche's Dionysian monism engenders complexity, ambiguity, and irony. It is the radical enemy of all fanaticism, i.e., of any monocausal interpretation of phenomena. Nietsche's Dionysianism is ultimately an aesthetic, a spectator's approach to being. It seeks to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the spectacle that existence presents.
CHROSTOWSKA, S. D., Stanislaw Brzozowski, Philosopher of History, Myth, and Will
Abstract: Before his untimely death, Stanislaw Brzozowski (1878-1911) had proven himself a thinker of exceptional acumen, through critical analyses spanning the gamut of Polish and European culture. Next to Czesaw Milosz, he holds a signal place in twentieth-century Polish intellectual culture, yet is surprisingly little-known abroad. A prolific writer of literary and cultural criticism, philosophy, and prose fiction, Brzozowski remains to be situated within the broader cultural thematics of his time. Brzozowski's Legend of Young Poland: Studies in the Structure of a Cultural Soul (1909) can be read for its author's philosophical views on history. Brzozowski's extensive knowledge of and critical engagement with Continental philosophy mean that his ideas on history must be related to those of Marx, Nietzsche, Sorel, Vico, and Husserl. While not a full-fledged philosophical system, Brzozowski's philosophy of history borders on prophetic in the magnitude of its import and sheds light on the intellectual concerns of pre-World War I Europe.
O'LEARY, Timothy, 1966-, Foucault, Dewey, and the Experience of Literature
Abstract: What is the work of literature? Can we expect that poetry, or literature, or art, should engage in the world of action, the world of doing things? Do we reluctantly accept, with Auden, that poetry makes nothing happen, or do we adopt Seamus Heaney's optimism that poetry might be able to stop tanks? This paper addresses these questions by drawing on Foucault's idea of the transformability of experience, and Dewey's analysis of the way that art works in our experience. It argues that the force and value of literature comes from its capacity to get into and transform the experience of the reader, and it explains this capacity primarily in terms of Foucault's account of the way that "being is historically constituted as experience". This transformation of experience, it is argued, constitutes the distinctive action of literary works.
KLARER, Mario, 1962-, Humanitarian Pornography: John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolting Negroes of Surinam (1796)
Abstract: John Gabriel Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolting Negroes of Surinam ranks among the most important and influential humanitarian texts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By employing images that lean towards the pornographic, paired with the Burkean notions of the sublime, Stedman attracts a particularly male audience, yet at the same time creates a fertile ground for humanitarian empathy in his readers. Coded erotic attraction coupled with repulsive violence also governs William Blake's illustrations of the torture scenes included in Stedman's Narrative. In order to come to terms with this paradoxical side by side of arousal and rejection, I will use psychoanalytic film theory to account for some of the pornographic mechanisms at work in the Narrative and its illustrations, as well as apply Burkean concepts of the sublime as a possible contemporaneous theoretical source for Stedman's text.
SINDING, Michael, Genera Mixta: Conceptual Blending and Mixed Genres in Ulysses
Abstract: This essay draws on cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to illuminate what may be the most important issue in genre theory at present: genre mixture and hybridization. Genres have been very productively treated as cognitive schemas, but so far such treatments have not adequately accounted for critics' descriptions of their encounters with complex works, because they have lacked a model of how schemas are modified, rearranged, and combined. In the past decade, however, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have worked out just such a model in considerable detail. Conceptual Blending Theory has roots in linguistics, psychology, literary hermeneutics, and brain science. Fauconnier and Turner and others have used Blending Theory to analyze a wide range of thought and meaning, both m undane and highly creative, in the arts, sciences, and everyday life. Taking the example of Joyce's Ulysses, and focusing on the "Circe" episode, I discuss various kinds of genre mixture, showing how surface details as well as structural aspects of the text can be explained in terms of the processes and principles of conceptual blending.
FRANKE, William, The Singular and the Other at the Limits of Language in the Apophatic Poetics of Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan
Abstract: Postmodern writers and artists of all sorts have evolved radical new poetics based preeminently on the secret resources of silence. Poets have focused particularly on silences become audible in the tearing of language and the rending of sense. To a significant degree, this is a rediscovery of the oftentimes repressed resources in Western tradition of apophatic discourse, discourse on what cannot be said. Jewish writers have been particularly important in this revival, partly because the biblical interdiction on representations of the divine, denounced as idolatrous ("graven images"), gave Jewish tradition a peculiar attunement to the limits of representation and a special sensibility for the Unrepresentable. Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan, emerging almost contemporaneously out of widely divergent cultural backgrounds in Egypt and Romania respectively, nevertheless share these coordinates in common. Writing as post-Holocaust Jews, each in a different way lends language to silence in order to give voice to the unspeakable. An attempt is made, furthermore, to distinguish between two different traditions of apophatic thinking, one based on the ineffability of being or existence and the other on the ineffability of language itself. These strands are traced back to Neoplatonism and the Bible and are aligned primarily with Celan and Jabès respectively.
DUTT, Carsten, 1963-, To Oelze": On Gottfried Benn's Farewell Lines to His Friend
Abstract: When confronted with his own death, Gottfried Benn, the poet-physician who became famous for his shockingly pitiless texts on dying and death, sought refuge in formulas from the Platonic-Christian tradition intended to endow life with metaphysical meaning. Or so it appears, at least, if one reduces Benn's farewell lines to his friend F. W. Oelze to the sequence of statements they express. Such an apophantic reduction, however, is hermeneutically indefensible: it ignores the text as it has been handed down to us--specifically, its form, which expressively undercuts the expression of metaphysical confidence. The present essay--an attempt at procedural interpretation--describes the interferences between what Benn said and the way the line breaks impose themselves on what he said.
WANG, Ning, 1955-, Translating Journals into Chinese: Toward a Theoretical (Re)Construction of Chinese Critical Discourse
Abstract: Translation has played a very important role in Chinese literature, theory, and criticism. Modern Chinese literature is almost a translated literature, for, through a sort of cultural translation, traditional Chinese literary and critical discourse was deconstructed and has manifested itself in a new form. But translating Western journals into Chinese is only a recent practice, adopted since the turn of the century, because Chinese theorists realize that many insightful theoretical concepts and ideas first appear in journal articles. The article lays more emphasis on why Chinese scholars take the initiative of translating some leading Western humanities journals, such as New Literary History, Critical Inquiry and boundary 2, into Chinese. To the author, founded earliest among all the three above-mentioned and having close relations with Chinese literary scholarship, New Literary History most strongly influences Chinese scholars' literary study and critical thinking. And its academic norms and strict selection of manuscripts have certainly set a fine example in China's literary study and theory and criticism as well as the editing of journals of literary and cultural studies in the Chinese context. Chinese literary and cultural studies, due to the translation of these journals, will move closer and closer toward the international community, thereby having equal dialogues with the latter. Since most of the articles published in the above-mentioned journals anticipate their authors' substantial research and profound thinking of cutting-edge theoretical issues, they will certainly provide illumination to Chinese scholars' theoretical reflections. The article also points out that globalization has broken through the demarcation between nations and countries, and between center and periphery, with transnational corporations functioning as an "empire" everywhere. In this way, globalization has also benefited people who want to get out of their isolated domain, enabling them to communicate more effectively in such a "global village." It has therefore enabled Chinese scholars to more conveniently communicate with the international scholarship on any theoretical and academic topic, including literary and cultural studies. In today's context, they translate Western and international theoretical journals into Chinese, for the purpose of making China's literary and theoretical studies closer to the international community and allowing it to communicate more easily with the same. Maybe in the near future, when the Western and international colleagues want to know what has been going on in China's literary and cultural studies, and what new ideas we Chinese theorists have put forward, they will also start, in collaboration with their Western colleagues, to translate some excellent Chinese theoretical journals into the major Western and international language: English.