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Vol. 38, no 1 (no 118 - 2009) - The Anecdote
Numéro dirigé par Andrea Loselle
Andrea Loselle
Introduction
Our collective endeavor in this special issue centers on perhaps the least respected of narrative forms: the anecdote. A minimalist tale, a contingent curiosity, a marginal artifact, a humorous aside subject to quick dismissal, the anecdote cannot even, we suspect, really be classed as a genre. And yet it came close to achieving this status as a crucial component of New Historicist criticism during this movement's heyday in the 1980s. Anecdotes back then brought readers to a greater historiographic awareness of the literary.1 Although vulnerable to distortion and error, they are, generally speaking, factual narratives, their special gift to the literary being this soupçon of the real. Just one of these can also be the kernel... (Extrait)
Tom Conley
From Antidote to Anecdote: Montaigne on Dissemblance
In our day a child preparing for a spelling bee might be prone to confuse an anecdote with an antidote. The two words have such a similar ring that the speller might be tempted to find a hidden truth in the difference between the -ti- and -ec- that distinguish their middle syllables. In the age of analogy, in what might be the childhood or adolescence of the printed book, interpreters of the former would somehow find within its meaning and essence the virtues of the latter. An anecdote must be an antidote for something, but for what? Or else, if an antidote is an anecdote, what would be the medical cause inspiring the telling of an offhand tale in the drift of pleasant conversation? According to the logic of association, an anecdote can be a gentle remedy to a strong proposition or, in itself, in its own wit, a reflection that needs to be countered, corrected, or tempered by an antidote. In the medical realm of the same age a good story or a lively narration inspired by the force of debate would have both social and medicinal virtue.1 Or too, it could be, in a... (Extrait)
Malina Stefanovska
Exemplary or Singular?: The Anecdote in Historical Narrative
L'histoire est anecdotique: elle intéresse en racontant, comme le roman. --Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l'histoire (1971)1 Les anecdotes sont un champ resserré où l'on glane après la vaste moisson de l'histoire; ce sont de petits détails longtemps cachés, et de là vient le nom d'anecdotes; ils intéressent le public quand ils concernent des personnages illustres. --Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751)2 Although coming from different perspectives and periods, the two quotations above speak of the ambivalence that modern historiography has systematically displayed toward the anecdote since Voltaire. An anecdote -- defined here as a short, and sometimes humorous account of a true, interesting, if minor, event3 -- is the matrix of any (hi)story telling and the very substance of historiography. Yet, this fertile soil was also often seen as the threatening substratum from which historiography had to extract itself. After all, anecdotes are associated with rumor, legend, lack of rigor or evidence, a fascination with...(Extrait)
Helen Deutsch
Oranges, Anecdote and the Nature of Things
On August 6, 1763, the man who would become the greatest master of anecdotal form in English, James Boswell, and the object of his adulation and future biographical subject, Samuel Johnson, enter a church in Harwich. Boswell is about to take unwilling leave of his new friend, who is doing him the honor of seeing him off on his voyage to Holland. They approach the altar: "Johnson, whose piety was constant and fervent, sent me to my knees, saying, `Now that you are going to leave your native country, recommend yourself to the protection of your CREATOR and REDEEMER.'" Outside the church they talk "of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal." Johnson is provoked by his companion's assertion that "though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it." "I shall never forget the alacrity," Boswell avows, "with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, `I refute it thus'" (Boswell I: 471). In this...(Extrait)
John McCumber
To Be is to Be an Anecdote: Hegel and the Therapeutic Absolute
Anecdote: The narrative of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself striking or interesting. -- OED Anecdotes, it would seem, are of small importance to philosophy. Philosophy is a set of arguments. Philosophical arguments reach universal conclusions, and so cannot make use of particular premises. According to the above definition, which is the Oxford English Dictionary's, anecdotes claim to be striking or interesting, which they cannot be to all people equally. They are therefore merely particular and, like the figures of rhetoric, are to be banned from philosophy's search for truth. Why even think about them? But this simple exclusion of anecdotes from philosophy may, like all philosophical exclusions, be too simple. Nervousness about philosophical simplicity leads us naturally to the most complex, not to say involuted, of philosophers: Hegel. Hegel, who excluded nothing from philosophy, stands in a complex and even tormented relationship to anecdotes. Understanding what that... (Extrait)
Dominique Jullien
Anecdotes, Faits Divers, and the Literary
Anecdotes, the dictionaries tell us, are narratives that concern a singular event. They are supposed to be memorable or at least interesting.1 Although they are supposedly based on real life, they are not considered fit to be a serious basis for a philosophical discussion or scholarly elaboration, though they could open the way for one. In fact, one could apply to the anecdote what Roland Barthes says about the fait divers: it is "total," "immanent" information.2 Anecdotes do not formally make a point, they simply tell something -- after them, nothing more needs to be said. Anecdotes have a kind of "so-what?" quality to them. But at the same time, anecdotes capture an essential truth about something; they are often supposed to be in some sense exemplary. For instance, Hegel's anecdotal evidence about Italian women's susceptibility to dying of love is meant to capture an essential truth about the Italian national character.3 The anecdote and the fait divers, while not identical (the fait divers belongs to a more specialized cultural context, that of the daily press... (Extrait)
Andrea Loselle
André Breton's and Eugène Atget's Valentines
"Et que nous ferait tout le génie du monde s'il n'admettait pas près de lui cette adorable correction qui est celle de l'amour...?" --André Breton, Oeuvres I: 648 The product of an amusing or unusual event, an anecdote will be repeated both orally and in print. Its reliability and value as evidence or historical fact is, however, almost always suspect, which the study of multiple versions of single anecdotes confirms: chronology, places, major and minor characters, and so on, almost never fail to change in major and minor ways in the retelling (Saller 74-78). Even though the anecdote's other most salient feature is its oral transmission, most studies, for obvious reasons, draw on published accounts -- from the tablets of antiquity to the ephemeral newspaper -- to verify its unreliability. That is not to say that a keen awareness of its origin in speech does not also work itself into examinations of the anecdote; no treatment of the anecdote can dispense with the word's etymology as "unpublished news" without giving it its due. Oral narratives spring not only from... (Extrait)
Marcel Hénaff
Jean-Louis Morhange
The Anecdotal: Truth in Detail
Different historical dictionaries note that the term "anecdote" was established in literature during the 7th century by the Byzantine writer Procopius of Caesarea, but did not gain full acceptance as a term and as a genre until the 17th century. The word literally designates what is new: a fact or detail that was unknown to the public and had not been disclosed by official history (this was the meaning given by the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française in its 1762 version). The term anecdote soon became synonymous with little story. Hence the question: is there a place for small stories within the larger and more noble or tragic narrative of history itself, which is presumed to be full of meaning? But doesn't history not only as social reality -- actual becoming-- but also as discipline necessarily imply the great narrative as a form? We will have to consider this question. It has been said that great narratives belong to an outdated form of representation.1 Why? To be able to answer this question will also amount to being able to consider the question of the anecdote from an...(Extrait)
John Carvalho
Subtle Bodies and the Other Jouissance
In her conclusion to Gender Trouble (1990) , Judith Butler proposes to move from parody to politics through a deconstruction of identity and re-description of identities which, while they already exist, are deemed unintelligible and impossible by the hegemonic order of society and culture. "If identities were no longer fixed as the premises of a political syllogism, and politics no longer understood as a set of practices derived from the alleged interests that belong to a set of ready-made subjects," Butler writes, "a new configuration of politics would surely emerge from the ruins of the old" (149). Arguably, Butler has tried to make good on this gambit in much of what she has written since the publication of this first major work. This is most clearly so in The Psychic Life of Power (1997), which concludes with a description of the ego as a melancholic response to power imposing on a subject a choice of objects she must lose (even if she never had them) in order to find her self,1 and the same line appears to turn up in her latest works, Undoing Gender (2004) and Giving an Account...(Extrait)
Alison Ross
The Aesthetic Fable: Cinema in Jacques Rancière's “Aesthetic Politics”
The Politics of Aesthetics Politics resembles art in one essential point. Like art, politics also cuts into that great metaphor where words and images are continuously sliding in and out of each other to produce the sensory evidence of a world in order. And, like art, it constructs novel combinations of words and actions, it shows words borne by bodies in movement to make them audible, to produce another articulation of the visible and the sayable. (Rancière, Film Fables, 152) The connection between Jacques Rancière's political theory and his writing on art pivots on a conception of the contingency of patterns of social meaning and order. In his major work on politics, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, Rancière holds that events able to disturb a prevailing distribution of order may be understood as instituting new conventions of meaning, and thus must have first negotiated and altered a sensory field in which they did not previously exist. Altering prevailing patterns of meaning is... (Extrait)