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Remaping Genre (PMLA, octobre 2007)

Remaping Genre (PMLA, octobre 2007)

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la revue)


PMLA is the journal of the Modern Language Association of America. Since 1884, PMLAhas published members' essays judged to be of interest to scholars andteachers of language and literature. Four issues each year (January,March, May, and October) present essays on language and literature; aDirectory issue (September) contains a listing of the association'smembers, a directory of departmental administrators, and otherprofessional information; and the November issue is the program for theassociation's annual convention. Each issue of PMLA is sentdirectly to the nearly 30,000 college and university teachers ofEnglish and foreign languages who belong to the association and toabout 3,000 libraries throughout the world.


Vol. 122, no 5 (octobre 2007)


Wai Chee Dimock
Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge

Stephen Owen
Genres in Motion

Michael Wood
The Last Night of All

Emily Apter
Taskography: Translation as Genre of Literary Labor

Diana Taylor
Remapping Genre through Performance: From “American” to “Hemispheric” Studies
Performance as a genre allows for alternative mappings, providing a setof strategies and conventions that allow scholars to see practices thatscripted genres might occlude. Like other genres, performanceencompasses a broad range of rehearsed and codified behaviors, such asdance, theater, music recitals, sports events, and rituals. Aperformance lens allows scholars to look at acts, things, and ideas asperformance. Looking at America as performance might explain why it isdifficult to approach it as a disciplinary field of study. What mightthe shift in genres—from the scripted genres associated with the archive to the live, embodied behaviors that are the repertoireof cultural practices—enable? This essay proposes that an analysis ofthe performance of America might allow scholars to rethink not onlytheir object of analysis but also their scholarly interactions. (DT)

Wendy Knepper
Remapping the Crime Novel in the Francophone Caribbean: The Case of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique
Shaped by a history of mobilities, displacements, and creolizingprocesses, the Caribbean is a significant testing ground for theoriesconcerning the circulation and remapping of genre. Taking PatrickChamoiseau’s theory of generic wandering as my point of departure, Iargue that his Solibo Magnifique exemplifies the principle ofgeneric creolization. This is evident in the novel’s intermixing of thedetective novel, film noir, the spaghetti western, the comic book, thehard-boiled crime novel, and creole storytelling techniques. Bymanipulating the conventions by which the classical detective, thehard-boiled police officer, and the private investigator arecharacterized, Chamoiseau’s narrative turns from an investigation intoone man’s death to an interrogation of Martinique, its history and theworkings of its neocolonial psyche. Through the example of Solibo Magnifiqueand its radiating influence on other postcolonial crime writers, Iconclude that this principle of creative creolization is increasinglyrelevant to understanding a world in which genre’s radiating andrhizomic web of mobilities involves local and global confluences. (WK)

Rebecca Dyer
Poetry of Politics and Mourning: Mahmoud Darwish’s Genre-Transforming Tribute to Edward W. Said
This essay provides an analysis of “Tibaq,” an elegy written in EdwardW. Said’s honor by the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.Noting that the poem exhibits aspects of a number of genres anddemonstrates Darwish’s generally innovative approach to traditionalliterary forms, I consider how he has transformed the marthiya,the elegiac genre that has been part of the Arabic literary traditionsince the pre-Islamic era. I argue that Darwish used the elegy-writingoccasion to comment on Said’s politics and to make respectful use ofhis critical methods, particularly his interdisciplinary borrowing ofcounterpoint, a concept typically used in music analysis. By reworkingthe conventional marthiya to represent Said’s life in exile andhis diverse body of work and by putting his contrapuntal method intopractice in the conversation depicted in the poem, Darwish elegizes along-lasting friendship and shores up a shared political cause. (RD)

Charles J. Rzepka
Race, Region, Rule: Genre and the Case of Charlie Chan
This essay analyzes genre’s impact on racial representation in a bodyof popular fiction that has shaped European Americans’ definition ofAsian American identity for more than three-quarters of a century: theCharlie Chan novels of Earl Derr Biggers. To advance his stated goal ofoverturning Chinese stereotypes, Biggers experimented with genres oflocale and criminality. The Hawaiian setting of his first Chan story, The House without a Key,challenged the generic topography of Chinatown regionalism by invokinga counterintuitive regionalist prototype, while the book’s plotfollowed the conventions of classical detective fiction, a highlyformulaic subgenre of crime literature that perpetuated raciststereotypes while dominating best-seller lists throughout the 1920s and1930s. Exploiting a unique feature of the detective formula known asrule subversion, however, Biggers enlisted the genre’s very tendenciestoward racism to undermine racist stereotypes. (CJR)

Daniel Fried
Riding Off into the Sunrise: Genre Contingency and the Origin of the Chinese Western
The paradoxical dependence of genre histories on historicallyaccidental acts of naming and on transcendental critical imagination isdemonstrated by the Chinese western, a little-understood genre that hasbecome a major part of Chinese-language cinema over the past twodecades. After the genre was proposed in 1984 by the Chinese filmtheorist Zhong Dianfei, as a realist reaction against the ideologicalexcesses of the Cultural Revolution, its ambiguous status as aHollywood import quickly became a proxy for larger cultural battlesover China’s place in an American-dominated international culturalsystem. Moreover, despite assurances by Zhong and other critics thatthe genre was not susceptible to Hollywood influence, the productionhistory of the genre from the late 1980s to the present demonstrates apattern of generic influence and eventual fusion that tracks Chinesestate-owned studios’ evolution from subsidized propaganda organs toparticipants in a globalized entertainment industry. (DF)

Christopher N. Phillips
Lighting Out for the Rough Ground: America’s Epic Origins and the Richness of World Literature
This essay argues that epic, far from being a dead genre, rangesreadily across formal and geographic boundaries and that the terms America and epichave defined each other from the Renaissance forward. Drawing on arange of case studies from Jamestown to Kentucky, I examine the ways inwhich epic travels through translation, exile, ethnology, and prophecy.While I focus on the United States and the colonies that wouldeventually constitute it, I argue that American literature was aninternational endeavor before it was ever a national one and that therole epic played in that internationalism prefigures and interrogatesthe Goethean Weltliteratur ideal dominating current discussionsregarding world literature. In response to the difficulties that theorycreates in discussing the development of both genre and worldliterature, I advocate a return to the archive to give theoreticalarguments a more inductive grounding. (CNP)


Stefan Hawlin
Epistemes and Imitations: Thom Gunn on Ben Jonson
The mode of imitatio enhances the persistence and evolution ofgenres over time, contrary to the implications of Foucault’s concept ofepistemes (the idea of discontinuous historical eras). Imitatio,well practiced, awakens extraordinary commonalities of sensibilityamong poets of different periods (classical, Renaissance,contemporary), including how they understand and manipulate genres, andso raises the possibility of a more unitive view of history, culture,and time. Ben Jonson, with his coherent theoretical view of imitatio,was a crucial poet for Thom Gunn, who self-consciously imitated themode of imitation, producing in “An Invitation” a re-creation of thecountry-house poem as embodied by Jonson’s “To Sir Robert Wroth” and in“Lament” (his great AIDS elegy) a response to seventeenth-centuryfuneral elegy, in particular Jonson’s “Elegie on the Lady Jane Pawlet.”(SH)

Susan Zieger
Pioneers of Inner Space: Drug Autobiography and Manifest Destiny
The drug autobiography emerged as a genre in the United States primarily through imitations of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater(1821). For De Quincey, the intoxicating consumption of opium and printwas linked to imperial mastery. Texts such as Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s Hasheesh Eater(1857) adapted this association to suit the westward expansion of theUnited States and its accompanying ideology of manifest destiny. Underthe influence of hashish, Ludlow explored his inner psychic space as ifit were the United States frontier. As nineteenth-century Romanticmodels of intoxicated dreaming gave way to early-twentieth-centurytheories of addiction, drug autobiographies such as D. F. MacMartin’s Thirty Years in Hell(1921) readapted the genre, representing the disappointments ofmanifest destiny as addicted exile. While drug autobiographies accruedcountercultural authority, appearing to signify the irrationalunderside of Enlightenment modernity, their fantasies of esotericexploration derived from broader cultural ideals of imperial power andknowledge. (SZ)

Harsha Ram
The Sonnet and the Mukhambazi: Genre Wars on the Edges of the Russian Empire
Genres travel in multiple directions. This article maps the evolutionand movement of two lyric genres in Georgia, a small nation situatedsouth of the Caucasus mountains, between Russia, Turkey, and Iran. The mukhambaziarose from a polyglot urban culture rooted in Near Eastern traditionsof bardic performance and festivity, while the sonnet was importedaround the time of the Russian Revolution as a marker of Europeanmodernization. The brief coexistence of these two genres allows for areexamination of the foundational opposition between East and West.Moving beyond the familiar dichotomy of tradition and modernity, thisessay explores the texts and debates of more than a century,reconstructing the discrepant cosmopolitanisms and multiple modernitiesthat typified the Caucasus region. In doing so, it seeks both to makeavailable a literary archive unknown to American readers and tocontribute to ongoing debates on the relations between the local, thenational, and the imperial as cultural formations. (HR)

Ed Folsom
Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives


Jonathan Freedman, N. Katherine Hayles, Jerome McGann, Meredith L. McGill, and Peter Stallybrass. Reply by Ed Folsom
Responses to Ed Folsom’s “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives”


Arielle Saiber
The Polyvalent Discourse of Electronic Music

John Frow
“Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need”: Genre Theory Today

Geoffrey Galt Harpham
Genre and the Institution of Research: Three American Instances

Bruce Robbins
Afterword