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. 39, no 3 (été 2008) - Literary History in the Global Age
Ralph Cohen
Farewell
I have served as editor of New Literary History for forty years with the aim of exploring and challenging our literary lives. As I retire from this task, I pass the...(Extrait)
Ralph Cohen
Introduction
While most of the people on our planet continue to live in nation-states, these states are undergoing changes within their borders and beyond them. Many of these changes are the result of globalization -- economic and cultural procedures that have "intensified exchanges across national, ethnic, and territorial borders."1 Others are the result of an electronic revolution that has changed methods of communication and organization in personal and public life. It is especially appropriate that a journal entitled New Literary History should undertake an inquiry into "Literary History in the Global Age." "Literary history" and "the global age" have been intertwined in numerous ways, and contributors have been left to decide what they consider "literary history" to be, what aspects of globalization, if any, influence it, and how electronic transformations have participated in such changes. I have divided the papers into three groups: histories, revisions, and alternatives, even though several could easily fit into more than one category. Following the papers, there are commentaries upon them by Hayden White and Jonathan Arac. I. Histories Globalism has made possible the exchange of... (Extrait)
Fredric Jameson
New Literary History after the End of the New
In what follows I want to say something about the cultural production of the future, and any such speculations will inevitably imply something about the histories of that cultural production that we may expect to accompany it (or indeed to follow it and to sum it up). But that is necessarily an exercise in futurology, and so you will not be surprised to find me shifting into a science-fictional mode. For the moment, let's remain in a sociological one. Any talk about the future must first confront globalization as its absolute horizon: the term can have any number of synonyms. Marx called it universalization, but also the world market, a term that certainly remains useful for us today. As a stage in capitalism, I call it late, while others call it flexible or informational. And as a cultural formation, I have analyzed it as postmodernity, a term not everyone accepts, and even those who do are not necessarily in agreement -- tending to limit its meaning to philosophies of relativism (if you dislike it) or of antiessentialism and antifoundationalism... (Exrait)
Brian Stock
Toward Interpretive Pluralism: Literary History and the History of Reading
As a discipline, literary history is about four centuries old. There is not much literary history in antiquity or the Middle Ages. Literary history begins to be written seriously in the early modern period. The writing of this kind of history coincides with the appearance of national identity, that is, the sense of identity associated with the nation-state. Literary history is one form of expression of national identity. Efforts have been made from time to time to introduce an international perspective into literary history, but most projects in the field are still conceived within a nationalist framework. The study of reading is considerably older than the writing of literary history and is not grounded in any single period, doctrine, or ideological position. The chronology of the subject can be divided conveniently into five phases, dealing respectively with oral traditions, alphabetic literacy, rolls and manuscripts, printing, and computers... (Extrait)
Walter F. Veit
Globalization and Literary History, or Rethinking Comparative Literary History—Globally
If the term means the peaceful economic and cultural exchange or military engagement with the "known world," then globalization describes a phenomenon as old as the world's oldest heroic epics and historical narratives. However, the modern condition of "true" globalization is quantitatively and qualitatively different in that the term now includes the whole world and its survival or demise as well as the possibility of instant communication around the globe. Under these changed global conditions of human culture, it is the task of the scholar of literature, as historian or critic, to reassess what has up to now been called literary history, its tradition, theory, and practice -- if only to explore the impact that the commodification of literature in the global intercultural marketplace has on its interpretation by the reading public and the literary critic alike and, therefore, on its meaning. Furthermore, the issues are more...(Extrait)
Nadia Al-Bagdadi
Registers of Arabic Literary History
Faithful to the idea that "Literature in its broadest sense comprises all that mankind imprinted in verbal form to be transmitted to memory," Carl Brockelmann's monumental History of Arabic Literature sought to collect and catalog all of Arabic writing he considered to be of literary relevance.1 The German Orientalist, though, was conscious of the fact that a philosophical history of Arabic Schrifttum, the ultimate aim of his endeavor, was still out of reach and that his aspiration for a "Literaturwissenschaft im h�heren Sinne" had to await further study at the beginning of the twentieth century (1:2). Exhaustive knowledge of the literary material and refined methodology were still in their infancy in comparison to the advance in the study of Islamic religion and tradition initiated by the Hungarian scholar Ignaz Goldziher. Brockelmann, who was aware of the difference between what constitutes "literature" for the Arabs and the modern meaning of "literature," operated with two different concepts of literature. One stems from Arabic... (Extrait)
Anders Pettersson
Transcultural Literary History: Beyond Constricting Notions of World Literature
Literary-history writing has very often stopped at national or cultural borders: it has been French literary history, or Western, or Arabic, or Chinese literary history. There is nothing wrong with that, but transcending such boundaries is certainly possible and sometimes important. By "transcultural literary history," I mean literary history with no predetermined national or temporal limitations.1 This is a vast field, and it allows for investigations of very many kinds. What I wish to emphasize and defend in this essay is, primarily, the very openness of the field. In my view, many different foci, research agendas, and methods are justified in the transcultural study of literary history. We should expect research in the area to pose significant questions and to pursue these in an enlightening manner. That aside, however, we should be wary of all general declarations of what transcultural literary studies "must" be or "cannot" be. One's own research... (Extrait)
David Damrosch
Toward a History of World Literature
The challenges entailed in writing a global literary history are threefold, involving problems of definition, design, and purpose. Can the field of inquiry be defined in such a way that a meaningful history can be conceived at all? If so, could an effective organization and a manageable plan of work be devised to give concrete shape to a project of global scope? Finally, and hardest of all, could a history of world literature be written that anyone would actually want to read? In the following pages, I will seek to reach affirmative answers to these questions. Definition Our globalizing age makes this either the easiest or the hardest time to write a history of world literature. Until recently, the practice of literary history was so heavily dominated by national paradigms that the very idea of a global literary history would have appeared implausible and even -- worse yet -- uninteresting. It seemed perfectly reasonable for Ian Watt to call his study of several British novelists The Rise of the Novel rather than The Rise of the British Novel.1 A few reviewers noted that remarkably...(Extrait)
David Bleich
Globalization, Translation, and the University Tradition
The Priority of Economic Interests Considerable effort in translation studies is devoted to understanding the role of globalization in the recuperation of postcolonial cultures. Sandra Bermann writes in her introduction to a recent collection of essays on translation: "Waves of migrating people have made the contemporary nation-state, and especially its urban centers, into global sites with multiplicities of languages and cultures. At the same time, the international trade, finance, and information technology that support these sites both depend upon and often seek to bypass translation for economic growth with world and regional markets. "How relevant are reconsiderations of translation strategies to the more immediate forces of economic globalization? Unlike those involved in cultural and literary study, economic globalizers want to adopt "`the invisible theory of translation,' the assumption that languages are neutral media for separable `content.' "Because of the simultaneous necessity of translation and the... (Extrait)
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Shall We Continue to Write Histories of Literature?
The title of this essay seems to announce a repetition of what I consider to be one of the worst habits in literary studies and in the humanities at large. For it may indeed look like one of those very dramatic self-referential questions that critics like to ask -- with the implicit promise of arriving at the most reassuring answers, reassuring answers, to make things worse, whose merit seems to grow thanks to the pretension of having opened up, for a moment, the vision of a preoccupying future. I can certainly promise that my own question has a much more straightforward intention and will produce much less optimistic predictions -- for a variety of reasons. In the first place, I believe that the humanities are subsisting -- rather than existing -- today in an institutional, economic, political, and even cultural environment where certain questions that used to be "barely rhetorical" may have turned, behind our backs, into perfectly serious and indeed threatening questions. In this sense, and secondly, we have every reason to pay... (Extrait)
Karyn Ball
Primal Revenge and Other Anthropomorphic Projections for Literary History
Whether what survives is the human or the inhuman, the animal or the organic, it seems that life bears within itself the dream -- or the nightmare -- of survival. --Giorgio Agamben1 I. From the Museum of Dead Animals (Peter Friedl at Documenta 12) During the rain-drenched summer of 2007, I encountered a giraffe outside a zoo in Germany. You might be surprised unless I admit that I discovered this giraffe in Kassel at Documenta 12, curated by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack and organized around the motifs of "bare life" and the "migration of form." This "migrant" giraffe did not live, though I would not label it a simulacrum. The creature in question is the exclusive material of Peter Friedl's installation entitled "The Zoo Story." Cocurator Buergel's catalog introduces Friedl's giraffe as "a fatality of armed conflict." The animal died on August 19, 2002, in Qalquiliyah Zoo, "the only zoo in the West Bank." "When the Israeli forces moved into this city of 45,000 inhabitants... (Extrait)
Rey Chow
Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mourner (or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence)
[A] process of systematic fragmentation . . . can . . . be seen in the disciplinary carve-up of the indigenous world: bones, mummies and skulls to the museums, artwork to private collectors, languages to linguistics, "customs" to anthropologists, beliefs and behaviours to psychologists. To discover how fragmented this process was one needs only to stand in a museum, a library, a bookshop, and ask where indigenous peoples are located. Fragmentation is not a phenomenon of postmodernism as many might claim. For indigenous peoples fragmentation has been the consequence of imperialism. --Linda Tuhiwai Smith, "Imperialism, History, Writing, and Theory"1 Since 1900 non-Western objects have generally been classified as either primitive art or ethnographic specimens. --James Clifford,The Predicament of Culture2 Transacting Untimely Native Remains Of the numerous memorable scenes in early twentieth-century Chinese literature, one holds a special tenacity for... (Extrait)
Emily Apter
Untranslatables: A World System
Many literary historians would concede that the traditional pedagogical organization of the humanities according to national languages and literatures has exceeded its expiration date, yet there is little consensus on alternative models. Mobile demography, immigration, and the dispersion of reading publics through media networks defy such sectorization, yet, thinking the comparative postnationally brooks obvious dangers. Postnationalism can lead to blindness toward the economic and national power struggles that literary politics often front for, while potentially minimizing the conflict among the interests of monocultural states and multilingual communities (as in current U.S. policy that uses an agenda of cultural homogeneity to patrol "immigrant" languages and to curtail bilingual education). National neutrality can also lead, problematically, to the promotion of generic critical lexicons that presume universal translatability or global applicability. Theoretical paradigms, many centered in Western literary practices and conventions, thus "forget" that they are interculturally incommensurate... (Extrait)
Nirvana Tanoukhi
The Scale of World Literature
This is his home; he can't be far away. --Sophocles, Philoctetes The Problem: Literary Space Distance has long been a thorny issue for comparative literature. Whether one tries to explicate a foreign text, map a course of influence, or describe an elusive aesthetic, there is the problem of crossing considerable divides without yielding to the fallacy of decisive leaps. And yet, a condition conducive to methodological malaise found consolation in a fixed literary geography that justified comparison, ingeniously, with the very fact of incommensurability. Impossible distances beg to be crossed precisely because they cannot be. And for crossings to be attempted, each book, each author, each device -- each canon, nation, or interpretive community -- would assume its rightful place. While comparative literature, it was said, would occupy the space-in-between conventional places. And so, by a euphoric celebration of displacement, the comparative method became unquestionably subversive: in practice it exacted "shock value,"1 institutionally it was a "thorn in the side,"2 in ideological wars it proffered a... (Extrait)
Wai Chee Dimock
The Egyptian Pronoun: Lyric, Novel, the Book of the Dead
Does it make sense to think of literary history as a special kind of world history, and what are the consequences of globalizing in this way, claiming the entire planet as an interlocking archive? How many continents can we realistically embrace, what time frames become necessary, and do these yield a new morphology of genres, along with new longitudes and latitudes? What is the relation between scale and scope in this exercise, between details observable at close range and patterns discernable from afar? In what follows, I propose to go back to the ancient world -- to Egypt -- to make a case for a literary history with just this broad compass. Crucial to this undertaking is what Anne Freadman calls an "inter-generic" landscape, populated not by discrete classes of literary objects but by the breakdown of that discreteness, a process of transposing, adapting, and cross-fertilizing, enacted on every route, every locale.1 The history of genres, told as a formal diaspora -- a history of scattering and recombining -- calls for a... (Extrait)
Jerome McGann
Pseudodoxia Academica
I rip my title off Sir Thomas Browne, that great antiquarian whose curiosity and gorgeous prose were once so central to our scholarly self-conceptions. And let me now gloss that with a text from England's first self-constituted global poet reflecting critically on the aesthetic commerce of East and West at the beginning of our modern age. Having scored big in that market, Byron brazenly tells his readers -- whose hypocrisy, like Baudelaire, he understands and sympathizes with -- how to "sell you, mix'd with western sentimentalism, / Some samples of the finest Orientalism."1 Because I will pursue an agnostic line today, these two white men shall be my touchstones: one a long-forgotten literary worthy, the other a self-advertised trader in the globalized literary market. They will help me describe what Trotsky, that great heretic of the left, called "the privilege of historical backwardness."2 I'd like to warm up with a few little agnostic exercises -- just to slip into the right spirit of contradiction. So let's start from the Western source of all heretical and agnostic thought, the Bible. Perhaps the hardest of the many... (Extrait)
Frances Ferguson
Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text
Franco Moretti has recently dramatized the difficult relation between literary history and reading at the present moment, in the process renewing all of our justified anxieties about exactly what we can say about "literature." Although Goethe called for the advent of "the age of world literature" in 1827 and Marx and Engels saw a world literature arising "from the many national and local literatures" in 1848, an ever-growing awareness of planetary interconnections in political, economic, and ethical life has lent urgency to the project of thinking in terms of a planetary system of literature.1 To register the enormity of this task for the readers who would be its foot soldiers, Moretti observes, "we are talking of hundreds of languages and literatures here. Reading `more' seems hardly to be the solution. Especially because we've just started rediscovering what Margaret Cohen calls the `great unread.'"2 So much to read, so little time. Moretti thus holds out before us a project whose immensity impresses us with the comparative triviality... (Extrait)
Mark Poster
Global Media and Culture
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. . . . And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. --Karl Marx1 Global Discourse in Question Increasing global relations catalyze the question of culture: are the basic conditions of culture changed, diminished, or supplemented as a result of intensified exchanges across national, ethnic, and territorial borders? What are the major discursive regimes that have emerged in connection with the phenomenon of global culture? What models of analysis are best suited to examine these exchanges -- translation, transcoding, mixing... (Extrait)
Amy J. Elias
Interactive Cosmopolitanism and Collaborative Technologies: New Foundations for Global Literary History
Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me. It occurs to me that I am America. --Allen Ginsberg, "America"1 Allen Ginsberg's "America" (1956) playfully reminds us of the importance of rhetorical mode. Self-reflection and political critique merge in the poem as the speaker manages simultaneously to assert his opposition to and his complicity with the dominant world power of his day. This power happens to be his home country and the discursive regime that -- he is dismayed to realize -- has formed his habits of mind in the midst of cultural racism, the Red Scare, and metastasizing pop-culture consumerism. Yet conversing with a personified America, the speaker repeatedly asserts solidarity with ordinary working people across racial and ethnic boundaries, and the poem is at least partly about remembering what the abstraction of the political has... (Extrait)
Hayden White
Commentary: “With no particular place to go”: Literary History in the Age of the Global Picture
[C]riminal organizations, cannily mirroring the practices of their legitimate counterparts, have exploited economies of scale, developed worldwide partnerships, and cultivated new markets. As a result, bank fraud, human trafficking, protection rackets, narcotics smuggling, state-sanctioned embezzlement, assassinations, and even old-fashioned political corruption are practiced today on a scale previously unimaginable. --Review of McMafia by Misha Glenny, New Yorker, June 23, 2008, 83 The papers gathered here offer a wide range of views on the topic "literary history in the global age." They range from Karyn Ball's disturbing discussion of the dark side of global technology to Anders Pettersson's cool report on the current state of world literary studies. Many of the essays presume an important difference between "world" literature and "global" literature. A couple, those of Mark Poster and Amy Elias, for... (Extrait)
Jonathan Arac
Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age
No consensus dominates current thinking toward literary history in our global age, to judge from the remarkable assemblage gathered here. Some contributions are wonderfully erudite, others probe the lacunae in what we as yet know or can think, but all are open essays, trying out live directions for further development. Some exemplify by their performance models of a newly global literary history, and some imagine plans for organizing collaborative projects that encompass more of the world than any single scholar can command. Yet others think through the changes that may be required for the genre of literary historiography to comprehend the world that we are striving to know. In "Toward Interpretive Pluralism: Literary History and the History of Reading," Brian Stock masterfully reconsiders his long career's work on the history of reading, while reaching forward to new collaborations with brain scientists. I am especially intrigued by the maneuvers through which he puts "universalism." From its position in classical philosophy of life, in a Gibbonian turn...(Extrait)