New Literary History focuses on theory and interpretation-the reasonsfor literary change, the definitions of periods, and the evolution ofstyles, conventions, and genres. Throughout its history, NLH has alwaysresisted short-lived trends and subsuming ideologies. By delving intothe theoretical bases of practical criticism, the journal reexaminesthe relation between past works and present critical and theoreticalneeds. A major international forum for scholarly interchange, NLH hasbrought into English many of today' s foremost theorists whose workshad never before been translated. Under Ralph Cohen's continuouseditorship, NLH has become what he envisioned over thirty years ago: « ajournal that is a challenge to the profession of letters. » NLH has theunique distinction of receiving six awards from the Council of Editorsof Learned Journals (CELJ).
Vol. 38, no 1 (hiver 2007)
ARTICLES
Todorov, Tzvetan
The Notion of Literature
Article
Todorov, Tzvetan
What Is Literature For?
ArticleThis article begins with a critical analysis of the way literature istaught in French high schools today and attributes the shortcomings ofthis method to the predominant conception of literature as aself-sufficient object without any relevant relationship to thesurrounding world. This conception is also widespread outside of schoolamong critics and even writers. This is an unnecessarily restrictedview; in fact literature helps us to better understand the world andlead more meaningful lives.
Gans, Eric Lawrence
Qu’est-ce que la littérature, aujourd’hui?
The concept of Literature is associated with the emergence of national consciousness around 1800; its master genre is the novel.But in the developing consumer society of the nineteenth century, thenovelist’s fiction of authentic life becomes asymptotic to his own,culminating with Proust, whose novel is a series of intermittentnarratives structured only by the ultimate realization of thenarrator’s literary vocation. This desultory structure is homologous tothat of the blog, the auto-narrative of today’s archivalsociety. But although the ultimate narrative artwork is a series ofsemi-connected tales, we still need traditional novels and stories thatgive meaning to the life of desire.
ArticleDubreuil, Laurent
What Is Literature’s Now?
Yes, it is still time to read literature and to write about it. Inthis essay, I consider the different moments of the literary experienceand how diffracted “nows” lead us to nonrational and exceeding thought.If poetical oeuvres always come after other discourses (and not beforethem, as it is usually said), we need to reinspect the very notions oftime and history through the prism of literature. In reading severaldiscrete corpus (from the Francophone negritude movement to Aristotleand Ranciere, from John Ashberry to Ovid or Freud), I show how theliterary responds to the disciplines (such as anthropology, history,psychoanalysis or criticism) in such a way that the very forms of ourknowledge should be altered.
ArticleAltieri, Charles
The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory
I argue that three versions of materialist theorizing ironicallyfail to give adequate accounts of two basic features of literaryexperience—its ways of being sensuous and its manifestation ofparticular features of labor that can produce compelling singularityfor the reader. Ultimately I reject materialist ontologizing because itis has now no significant other—our basic task is to characterize fullyhow sensuousness is achieved and put to work for the imagination.
ArticleHayles, N. Katherine
Intermediation: The Pursuit of a Vision
Twenty-first century literature is computational, from electronicworks to print books created as digital files and printed by digitalpresses. To create an appropriate theoretical framework, the concept ofintermediationis proposed, in which recursive feedback loops join human and digitalcognizers to create emergent complexity. To illustrate, Michael Joyce’safternoon is compared and contrasted with his later Web work, Twelve Blue. Whereas afternoon has an aesthetic and interface that recall print practices, Twelve Blue takes its inspiration from the fluid exchanges of the Web. Twelve Blueinstantiates intermediation by creating coherence not through linearsequences but by recursively cycling between associated images.Intermediation is further explored through Maria Mencia’s digital artwork and Judd Morrissey’s The Jew’s Daughter and its successor piece, The Error EngineArticle, by Morrissey, Lori Talley, and Lutz Hamel.
Cochran, Terry
The Knowing of Literature
ArticleIn this essay, I consider the relationship between literature andknowing. In pursuing this reflection, I underscore the way in whichhistorical understanding, as the basis for the organization ofknowledge in the human sciences, restricts the epistemological importof the literary. In distinction with this prevailing historical modelof literary discourse, I elaborate an understanding of literature –viewed as imaginary projection or idealized discourse – that places inthe foreground its necessary role in thinking.
Swearingen, C. Jan
What Is the Text? Who Is the Reader? A Meditation on Meanderings of Meaning
The displacement of literature by culture and ideology as theprimary texts studied in many English departments has brought with itnew practices of reading. Alongside and sometimes instead of literaryworks, “the text” and its construction are the objects of reading, withspecial attention given to the “culture” of which texts are seen as aresult or trace, a partial or distorted representation. There isincreasing reference to the text and to histories of the book insteadof to literature, more reference to discourse than to rhetoric, andless engagement with rhetorical criticism that examines therelationships among author, text, and reader that together constitutemeaning. The companionship among cultural, historical, and rhetoricalstudies shared by the first new historicists sometimes seems to havedissolved in conflict and alterity-driven models of identity, meaning,and even history. The present state of new historicism, particularlyits many different methods of reading for alterity, difference, and theculturally determined constructs, invites us to reform and refinecurrent objects and methods of reading, particularly the postreadingpractices we teach and model for others. Through this process we mayrediscover, or create, a new sense of what literature is and maybecome.
ArticleHagberg, Garry
Imagined Identities: Autobiography at One Remove
ArticleOf a rather extended family or ways we engage with literary works,one constitutes an occasion for self reflection of a distinctive kind.The relational conception of selfhood as developed in Americanpragmatic thought, viewed against the Cartesian picture of the self,allows us to see the way in which the comparisons we make betweenourselves and literary characters yields self-knowledge. And morestrongly, the relational conception of experience derived frompragmatism allows us to see the way in which autobiographical orreflexively-engaged literary experience itself becomesself-constitutive. In short, the self-negotiated profiles of our ownidentities are both sharpened by, and indeed in part constituted by,literary engagement. If we are in part composed of relations, theselves that enter those imaginary worlds do not remain unchanged.
Wegner, Phillip E.
Recognizing the Patterns
I argue that the question framing this symposium, “What IsLiterature Now?” is itself always already an interrogation of thenature of globalization in our contemporary moment. I do so by way of adetailed discussion of William Gibson’s most recent novel, Pattern Recognition(2003). The questions Gibson asks in this work concern the future roleof one of the most important forms of modern literature, the novel, ina world in the midst of dramatic political, economic, and technologicalchanges. In a present rendered so fluid and unstable as to make theclassical vocation of the realist novel impossible—any picture of thepresent hopelessly obsolete long before the work sees the light ofday—the novelist’s task shifts to the labor of what Gibson names“pattern recognition,” a mapping of broader trends and directions inwhich our global situation tends. There is a deeply polemical elementat work here as well: for Gibson, the novel, like the nation-state towhich it is inextricably linked, is a residual form, and the unfinishedprojects of modernist innovation and Utopian communal formation will becontinued only through new electronic media forms allegorized in Pattern RecognitionArticleby the “footage.” However, underlying this vision is a deeper anxietythat the potentialities opened up by the end of the Cold War and theglobalizing 1990s will in fact be derailed by the virulent forms ofU.S. nationalism unleashed following the events of September 11, 2001,events too that Gibson’s novel is among the first to incorporatedirectly into its thematic structure. There is thus a performative aswell as a constative force to the operation of pattern recognitionoutlined in this work: Gibson asks us to recognize the real movement ofthe present before we commit ourselves to a course of action from the“gray muck and bones” of which we may not be able to extricateourselves for a long time.
Bennett, Tony
Habitus Clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu
Habitus is a key concept in the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and plays an organizing role in his classic study Distinctionwhere tastes are divided between different class-based habitus. Thesedivisions are set in the context of Bourdieu’s account of the Frenchcultural field as being polarized between a bourgeois habitus definedby the Kantian ethos of disinterestedness and a working-class habitusgoverned by the choice of the necessary. This paper probes this accountof the habitus and aesthetics and its political implications, in thelight of the challenges to it that are presented by Bernard Lahire'ssociology of individuals and Jacques Rancière's account of the politicsof aesthetics. It is illustrated by drawing on the evidence regardingthe social distribution of cultural tastes from a recent study of therelationships between cultural practices and cultural capital in theUnited Kingdom. The central argument of the paper is that, far fromsucceeding in using the techniques of empirical sociology to map out aspace that is beyond aesthetics, Bourdieu’s account remains complicitwith those tendencies in the history of western aesthetics that havefunctioned to exclude the working classes from full politicalparticipation.
ArticleCuller, Jonathan D.
Commentary: What Is Literature Now?