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 2 (printemps 2008) - Reading, Writing, and Representation
Ruth Mayer
The Things of Civilization, the Matters of Empire: Representing Jemmy Button
This paper reflects upon the many representations of Jemmy Button, aFuegian native who was abducted to England and returned to Tierra delFuego in the first half of the 19th century. Travel and science writerslike Robert Fitzroy, Charles Darwin, W. Parker Snow, and socialDarwinist writers such as Max Nordau reflected upon Jemmy Button's lifeand fate – and their accounts reveal a deep, if changing, fascinationwith the material aspects of the civilizatory project. Jemmy Button'sstory was told in many variations and with glaringly differentconclusions, but it tends to be told as a story replete with objects,objectification, and with the fantasies that objects inspire. Focusingon the material aspects of the story, I mean to cast light on a largerlogic of materialism which framed the development of Darwin's theory ofevolution and civilization, and its social Darwinist offsprings.
Rey Chow
Reading Derrida on Being Monolingual
The essay is a study of Derrida's autobiographical reflections on thepolitics of language under colonialism, reflections that are madeespecially thought-provoking by Derrida's candid revelations of his ownanguished relationship to the French language. In particular, byjuxtaposing Derrida's reference to French as an absolute “habitat” andBourdieu's use of the concept “habitus,” Chow suggests that Derrida'slife-long work on language may be understood as a form of resistance,not so much to colonialism per se as to the presumption that anylanguage can ever be mastered. Chow concludes with questions aboutmonolingualism and multilingualism that Derrida's interventions haveenabled but left open, and that remain important considerations in thestudy of postcolonial cultures.
Robert S. Lehman
Allegories of Rending: Killing Time with Walter Benjamin
Nearly every critic of Benjaminian allegory has begun with theassumption that allegory is a fundamentally temporal form. Two possiblereadings thus present themselves: on the one hand, a finitist readingin which allegory insists on the implacable decay of all life againstthe organicism of the symbol; on the other, an infinitist reading inwhich allegory becomes the privileged figure for history's dialecticalunfolding. Though each position has resulted in a number of powerfulinterpretations, neither has addressed the most radical feature ofBenjaminian allegory: its challenge to time as the latter manifestsitself by ordering human history. Benjamin develops his allegoricalchallenge to time in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, hisstudies of Baudelaire and, most profoundly, the ninth thesis “On theConcept of History.” In the last of these texts, Benjamin's allegoricalpresentation of the “new angel” depicts a vision of history withouttime, a vision in which events occur absent any temporal continuity. Inthis vision, I argue, the critical force of what Benjamin calls the“allegorical intention” emerges.
Alfred Guzzetti
A Few Things for Themselves
What characteristics inform the camera's view of things? Is aphotograph or a film image capable of offering a view of an objectsimply for itself, regarded for itself, or must that view at its originbring along a baggage of signification, metaphoric or otherwise? Canthis question be disentangled from the way that the author of the imageis to one degree or another inscribed in it, irresistibly leading theviewer back to the spatial realities that the image evokes?
Cary Wolfe
The Idea of Observation at Key West, or, Systems Theory, Poetry, and Form Beyond Formalism
When he died, Niklas Luhmann left behind scattered notes on a projecton “Poetry and Social Theory.” Central to Luhmann's understanding ofthe specificity of poetry is his well-known articulation of theautopoietic closure and difference of psychic systems and socialsystems, consciousness and communication, each operating by means ofself-reference and recursivity. It is within the context of thisdifference that Luhmann understands the significance to poetry ofcharacteristic themes and problems such as incommunicability,ineffability, silence, and so on-themes that reach their high watermark with romanticism. But he understands them specifically within aposthumanist context: that is to say, as expressions not of apsychological or emotional interiority that reveals itself in language(even if only to gesture toward language's inadequacy), but rather asexpressions of a set of differences--most importantly, the differencebetween communication and perception, which in poetry are“miraculously” made to coincide when the material form of the signifierduplicates the semantics of communication (in familiar devices such asrhyme, rhythm, and so on). Even more interesting and challenging forrethinking the concept of form, however, is the circumstance in whichthe material form and semantics of the signifier do not coincide-acircumstance insisted upon with particular rigor in the poetry ofWallace Stevens. This essay deploys Luhmann's concept of form-and moregenerally, his understanding of art as a social system-to exploreStevens' poetics, and uses Luhmann's theory of first- and second-orderobservation to explain how Stevens' “romantic modernism” is mostrigorous and systematic precisely where it is most insistentlyconfounding and paradoxical.
Tzachi Zamir
Wooden Subjects
The essay offers a reading of botanical imagery in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, associating trees with the play's presentation of grief and trauma. I situate the play in relation to Kyd's Spanish Tragedyand its own linkage between trees and violence, and discuss how theseplays highlight the dubiousness of tragic pleasure. Shakespeare'sresponse to the misgivings invoked by enjoying tragedy is moral andalso psychological, presenting both a moral progress in speaking forpain (in Titus himself) and a penetrating and poetically precise imageof what grief involves and what responding to it might demand.
Stefan Mattessich
Self-Critical Theory: Discursive Strategies in an Era of Real Universality
This essay looks at the figure of the universal, or a universalizablesubstrate, in the work of four contemporary theorists (Cornell, Butler,Badiou, Rancière). It argues that this figure, understood as a “living”universality, implies a necessary implication of the writer and readerin the “abstract” rationalities of today's global system. The first isgrasped uniquely in the internalized risk of the latter, taken on asone's own and according to a performative logic of the subject.“Self-Critical Theory” analyzes, in the differences between culturaland radical politics, and between social and philosophical criticism,various registers of this logic, suggesting a common ground from whichnew possibilities for critique and resistance can arise.
Marta Figlerowicz
“Frightful Spectacles of a Mangled King”: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Narration Through Theater
My paper studies the relationship of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko totheater. I demonstrate that Behn's novella is structured as a series ofsuccessive performances observed and responded to by diverse audiences.It is by imitating the interactions between the actors and thespectators of a play that Oroonoko can successfully combine thetragedy central to its plot with a broad exploration of culturalalterity and colonial politics. Since Oroonoko is oftenregarded as a precursor of the novel, this observation is of widersignificance for our understanding of the origins and development ofthis genre.
David Fishelov
Dialogues with/and Great Books: With Some Serious Reflections on Robinson Crusoe
The essay argues that a work's reputation as a great book is a functionof the number and diversity of dialogues it inspires in literature, artand criticism (in the form of allusions, translations, adaptations,parodies, performances and interpretations). After outlining some basictypes of (genuine and pseudo) dialogue that can be found in day-to-daycommunication and in literature, the essay focuses on Defoe's Robinson Crusoeas a test case for the dialogic approach to great books. A brief surveyof the magnitude and variety of echoes and dialogues this work hasinspired throughout the ages provides ample evidence for the newapproach. Against prevalent theories of literary history and canonformation—explaining a book's reputation in terms of either aestheticvalues or of social hegemonies—the dialogic approach offers an elegantexplanation for the gaining of literary reputation and for itsfluctuations.
Amy Witherbee
Habeas Corpus: British Imaginations of Power in Walter Scott's Old Mortality
This essay addresses Walter Scott's The Tale of Old Mortalityalongside Giorgio Agamben's study of the history of Western sovereigntyto argue that even as Agamben's work helps us to clarify the politicalimplications of Scott's novels, these novels reveal alternatives tomodern subjectivity through an older, law-based conception of land.Thus, Scott's fictional landscapes demand a reading that is far moregeographically literal than the use of land as a symbol for nation,that resists the illusions of certainty encouraged by text, and thatenvisions jurisdictional power as a counterpoint to the emergence ofmodern political subjectivity.