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.
Volume 35, Number 3, Summer 2004:
Special Issue: Critical Inquiries, Explorations and Explanations
CONTENTS:
Antomarini, B. (Brunella)
Stewart, Susan (Susan A.), 1952-, tr. , The Acoustical Prehistory of Poetry
Abstract: If we want to understand the emergence of poetry in our culture, we cannot look to an alleged "essence" of poetry for an explanation. Instead, we need a genealogical method, one that can trace the source or sources of poetic practice. Oral traditions, including the modalities of transmission that characterize pre-literate narratives, help us grasp the sensibilities and techniques that lead to the creation of poetic texts. In oral traditions across the globe, perception and memorization are universally corporeal: events and experiences are internalized and then re-enacted as real presences. The very musicality of such manifestations is an aid for memory and accounts for the temporal flow and provisional meanings that we find as well in modern written poetry. These persistent features of poetry link modern works to archaic ways of being and communicating.
Pasco, Allan H. , Literature as Historical Archive
Abtract: While it is always desirable to develop new archives, it is especially important for late eighteenth century France. A number of cultural historians have suggested that our sense of historical reality would be augmented if it were infused by the information provided by art and literature. The last half of the eighteenth century gives reason to believe that literature offers a particularly useful opening onto the reality of people's lives. Because the methods of literary patronage had changed, for the first time the financing of publication required a mass market. Fortunately, literacy was increasing significantly, thus producing sufficient numbers of paying customers to support a burgeoning publishing industry. People read for entertainment and, it seems, for information. Writers increasingly claimed their works were realistic. Numerous scholars have used these works for illustration of conclusions reached about the period; a few have turned to them as the source of indications of that reality. While literature in one way or another reflects the period of its creation, better methodology needs to be developed for using literature as an opening onto the age. Single works do not in isolation provide trustworthy insights into the thought, feelings, customs, and details of everyday life. Still, reliability increases as the novels and plays included in the archive become more numerous and common elements emerge. Multiplicity of example and congruence of significance are essential for using literature and the arts as reliable historical archives. If a large percentage of the actual works of art not only turn around but focus, for example, on the reasons for emigration, or the anguish of divorce, or incest, or suicide, it seems obvious that literature is responding to contemporary conditions and attitudes. Of course, any conclusions are particularly useful when they are buttressed by other, traditional resources.
Holland, Norman Norwood, 1927- , The Power (?) of Literature: A Neuropsychological View
Abstract: Literature shows its apparent power when we are "absorbed" in a literary experience: Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief." We do not sense our bodies or our environment. We cease to judge the reality or probability of events. And we feel real emotions toward people and things we know are fictions. Our sensory and emotional systems behave in this special way because our "disinterested" stance toward works of art inhibits the brain's action systems to which these other systems are linked. Literature has power over us only if it has no power.
Latham, Sean, 1971- , New Age Scholarship: The Work of Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Abstract: In defending the book and its protocols of reading against the rise of the digital archive, Sven Birkerts worries that "in the theoretically infinite database, all work is present and available—and, in a way, equal." Rather than lamenting this fact, this essay argues that we might recognize such availability as the condition of possibility for cultural studies itself. After first theorizing about the "frenetic" reading practices generated by the digital archive, this essay then engages in an experiment: tracing the use of the word "imperialism" through the digitized version of a British weekly entitled The New Age. The results not only re-embed this now monolithic term in a more complex and unstable historical context, but also point to a new type of synchronic and non-linear critical practice.
Rigby, Catherine E. , Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis
Abstract This article is concerned with a key question of ecological aesthetics: that is, the potential of art speak (of) the earth. Following Jonathan Bate's discussion of Heidegger's late essays in the final chapter of his book The Song of the Earth (2000), the article revisits one of Heidegger's earlier essays, "The Origin of the Work of Art", in order to consider anew his understanding of the earth as "primordial nature", the world as humanly constructed, and the work of art as mediating between them. Reading somewhat against the grain, it is argued that this essay provides a point of departure for a rather different theory of ecopoiesis from that which Bate gleans from Heidegger's later work. According to this ecopoetics of negativity, the earth as primordial nature is precisely that which cannot be spoken in the work of art. Indeed, it is only thus, in its very failure to speak the earth while nonetheless responding to its call, entering into dialogue with it, the work of ecopoiesis succeeds in pointing the way to that which lies beyond the merely human logos that shapes our world.
Gubar, Susan, 1944- , The Long and the Short of Holocaust Verse
Abstract: The enormity of the Shoah often propelled poets in two diametrically opposed directions: on the one hand, toward ellipses, fragmentation, in short poems that exhibit their inadequacy by shutting down with a sort of premature closure; on the other, toward verbosity in long poems that register futility by reiterating an exhausted failure to achieve closure. Composed in what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called "deterritorialized" languages, the laconic stalls of short poems and the repetitive stutters of very long poems illuminate linguistic consternation after Auschwitz. Through translations of Hungarian, Hebrew, German, Yiddish, and Spanish texts, as well as several works composed in English, this essay studies the semantic panic or philological consternation of a range of writers: from such first-generation authors as Miklós Radnóti, Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, and Yitzhak Katzenelson to such contemporaries as Marjorie Agosín, Anna Rabinowitz, Micheal O'Siadhail. Patently mediated in its defiance of sequentiality, verse in this trans-national tradition puts on display the blockage of testimony.
Larsen, Svend Erik, 1946- , Landscape, Identity, and War
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of the landscape in relation to war as articulated in literature from antiquity to the present day. It is the same story as the story of identity creation, but looked upon from the reverse side. Being both the object of war as battlefield, and the subject of war as confirmation of identity, the landscape of war is not just a ruined and bare piece of destructed nature, but a complex imaginative and symbolic entity that questions our way of defining and grounding identity through place—question of the highest significance in a cultural epoch where placeness is at the center of the cultural debate.
Wolosky, Shira, 1954- , The Ethics of Foucauldian Poetics: Women's Selves
Abstract: Although Foucault's analysis of instituted, disciplined selfhood has found application in many fields, poetry on the whole has been neglected, being often seen as a formal discourse removed from wider cultural issues. American women poets, however, here Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks, offer in their work on the one hand a powerful representation, confrontation, and enactment of the disciplining of women's bodies in modern American culture. On the other, their work challenges Foucault's extreme reduction of the subject to disciplinary function, as he himself attempted to do in his later writing on ethics of the self. Gwendolyn Brooks in particular affirms resources of selfhood not only in resistance against disciplinary social institutions and critique of them, but also in commitment to community and social ties which situate women and become sources of strength, definition, and transformation.
Tietz, Ward , Linking and Care in Connection
Abstract: "Linking and Care in Connection" examines recent developments in connectivity in computing and telecommunications to revisit two of literary form's core concepts: care and risk. Hyperlinking, specifically, demands a different type of care and redefines what is cared about and who cares. It intensifies an already existing confrontation with care that's implicit to every reading of a text and every viewing of an image. "Linking and Care in Connection" pays special attention to the semiotic and rhythmic difference presented by "image-links," devices, while new in their capacity to function as signals, are comparable to classical rubrics and religious icons in the way they organize space.