New Literary History, hiver 2007

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. 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 is taught in French high schools today and attributes the shortcomings of this method to the predominant conception of literature as a self-sufficient object without any relevant relationship to the surrounding world. This conception is also widespread outside of school among critics and even writers. This is an unnecessarily restricted view; in fact literature helps us to better understand the world and lead 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, the novelist’s fiction of authentic life becomes asymptotic to his own, culminating with Proust, whose novel is a series of intermittent narratives structured only by the ultimate realization of the narrator’s literary vocation. This desultory structure is homologous to that of the blog, the auto-narrative of today’s archival society. But although the ultimate narrative artwork is a series of semi-connected tales, we still need traditional novels and stories that give 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. In this essay, I consider the different moments of the literary experience and how diffracted “nows” lead us to nonrational and exceeding thought. If poetical oeuvres always come after other discourses (and not before them, as it is usually said), we need to reinspect the very notions of time and history through the prism of literature. In reading several discrete corpus (from the Francophone negritude movement to Aristotle and Ranciere, from John Ashberry to Ovid or Freud), I show how the literary responds to the disciplines (such as anthropology, history, psychoanalysis or criticism) in such a way that the very forms of our knowledge should be altered.

ArticleAltieri, Charles
The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory
I argue that three versions of materialist theorizing ironically fail to give adequate accounts of two basic features of literary experience—its ways of being sensuous and its manifestation of particular features of labor that can produce compelling singularity for the reader. Ultimately I reject materialist ontologizing because it is has now no significant other—our basic task is to characterize fully how 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 electronic works to print books created as digital files and printed by digital presses. To create an appropriate theoretical framework, the concept of intermediation is proposed, in which recursive feedback loops join human and digital cognizers to create emergent complexity. To illustrate, Michael Joyce’s afternoon 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 Blue instantiates intermediation by creating coherence not through linear sequences but by recursively cycling between associated images. Intermediation is further explored through Maria Mencia’s digital art work 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 and knowing. In pursuing this reflection, I underscore the way in which historical understanding, as the basis for the organization of knowledge in the human sciences, restricts the epistemological import of the literary. In distinction with this prevailing historical model of literary discourse, I elaborate an understanding of literature – viewed as imaginary projection or idealized discourse – that places in the 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 the primary texts studied in many English departments has brought with it new practices of reading. Alongside and sometimes instead of literary works, “the text” and its construction are the objects of reading, with special attention given to the “culture” of which texts are seen as a result or trace, a partial or distorted representation. There is increasing reference to the text and to histories of the book instead of to literature, more reference to discourse than to rhetoric, and less engagement with rhetorical criticism that examines the relationships among author, text, and reader that together constitute meaning. The companionship among cultural, historical, and rhetorical studies shared by the first new historicists sometimes seems to have dissolved in conflict and alterity-driven models of identity, meaning, and even history. The present state of new historicism, particularly its many different methods of reading for alterity, difference, and the culturally determined constructs, invites us to reform and refine current objects and methods of reading, particularly the postreading practices we teach and model for others. Through this process we may rediscover, or create, a new sense of what literature is and may become.

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 American pragmatic thought, viewed against the Cartesian picture of the self, allows us to see the way in which the comparisons we make between ourselves and literary characters yields self-knowledge. And more strongly, the relational conception of experience derived from pragmatism allows us to see the way in which autobiographical or reflexively-engaged literary experience itself becomes self-constitutive. In short, the self-negotiated profiles of our own identities are both sharpened by, and indeed in part constituted by, literary engagement. If we are in part composed of relations, the selves that enter those imaginary worlds do not remain unchanged.

Wegner, Phillip E.
Recognizing the Patterns
I argue that the question framing this symposium, “What Is Literature Now?” is itself always already an interrogation of the nature of globalization in our contemporary moment. I do so by way of a detailed discussion of William Gibson’s most recent novel, Pattern Recognition (2003). The questions Gibson asks in this work concern the future role of one of the most important forms of modern literature, the novel, in a world in the midst of dramatic political, economic, and technological changes. In a present rendered so fluid and unstable as to make the classical vocation of the realist novel impossible—any picture of the present hopelessly obsolete long before the work sees the light of day—the novelist’s task shifts to the labor of what Gibson names “pattern recognition,” a mapping of broader trends and directions in which our global situation tends. There is a deeply polemical element at work here as well: for Gibson, the novel, like the nation-state to which it is inextricably linked, is a residual form, and the unfinished projects of modernist innovation and Utopian communal formation will be continued only through new electronic media forms allegorized in Pattern RecognitionArticle by the “footage.” However, underlying this vision is a deeper anxiety that the potentialities opened up by the end of the Cold War and the globalizing 1990s will in fact be derailed by the virulent forms of U.S. nationalism unleashed following the events of September 11, 2001, events too that Gibson’s novel is among the first to incorporate directly into its thematic structure. There is thus a performative as well as a constative force to the operation of pattern recognition outlined in this work: Gibson asks us to recognize the real movement of the present before we commit ourselves to a course of action from the “gray muck and bones” of which we may not be able to extricate ourselves 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 Distinction where tastes are divided between different class-based habitus. These divisions are set in the context of Bourdieu’s account of the French cultural field as being polarized between a bourgeois habitus defined by the Kantian ethos of disinterestedness and a working-class habitus governed by the choice of the necessary. This paper probes this account of the habitus and aesthetics and its political implications, in the light of the challenges to it that are presented by Bernard Lahire's sociology of individuals and Jacques Rancière's account of the politics of aesthetics. It is illustrated by drawing on the evidence regarding the social distribution of cultural tastes from a recent study of the relationships between cultural practices and cultural capital in the United Kingdom. The central argument of the paper is that, far from succeeding in using the techniques of empirical sociology to map out a space that is beyond aesthetics, Bourdieu’s account remains complicit with those tendencies in the history of western aesthetics that have functioned to exclude the working classes from full political participation.

ArticleCuller, Jonathan D.
Commentary: What Is Literature Now?