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“Introduction” / 353
Frank L. Cioffi
“Postmodernism, Etc.: An Interview with Ihab Hassan”
/ 357
John N. Duvall
“Troping History: Modernist Residue in Fredric Jameson’s
Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon’s Parody” / 372
Don Bialostosky
“Is Gerald Graff Machiavellian?” / 391
Danuta Fjellestad
“Frank Lentricchia’s Critical Confession, or,
The Traumas of Teaching History” / 406
Jeffrey Williams
“The New Belletrism”/ 414
Terry Caesar
“Flying High and Flying Low: Travel, Sabbaticals,
and Privilege in Academic Life” / 443
William Calin
“Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis—’Tis Fifty Years Since:
A Reassessment” / 463
Gérard Genette
“Paul Valéry: Literature as Such” / 475
David Herman
“Narrative, Relexivity, and Ideology” / 486
Pity the contemporary critic, saddled with all the traditional concerns of literary study (commentary, scholarship, history), and now burdened as well with a range of issues connected with theory, politics, pedagogy, the institution, the profession, and blah blah. Among so many potential distractions, one is “postmodernism” (the word), if not postmodernism (the concept). Critics would have it the slightest bit easier if they realized that there is no concept of postmodernism (and could not in fact be one, at present), although there may be one in the future. This does not mean that they should try to dispense with the term “postmodernism”—only that it should be used with suitable diffidence.
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Frank L. Cioffi, “Postmodernism, Etc.: An Interview
with Ihab Hassan” / 357
Ihab Hassan, one of the first critics to use the term “postmodernism,”
reflects on recent developments in literary theory and on the evolution
of “postmodernism” into a term suggesting an extreme relativistic position.
In addition, Hassan assesses English Studies, Romanticism, and the Spiritual.
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John N. Duvall, “Troping History: Modernist
Residue in Fredric Jameson’s Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon’s Parody” / 372
The competing accounts of the relation between postmodernism and history
given by Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon turn crucially on their senses
of pastiche and parody. For Jameson, postmodern narrative is ahistorical
(and hence politically dangerous), playing only with pastiched images and
aesthetic forms; for Hutcheon, postmodern fiction remains historical, precisely
because it problematizes history through parody, and thus retains its potential
for cultural critique. But what these therorists mean by postmodernism
is not the same thing: Jameson’s postmodernism focuses on the consumer,
while Hutcheon’s originates with the artist as producer. As a result, Jameson
and Hutcheon in many instances speak past each other, describing different
cultural phenomena. Although Jameson’s focus on the consumer’s response
to pastiched images and Hutcheon’s emphasis on the producer’s parodied
intentions remain a useful starting-point for thinking about contemporary
representation, both theorists’ investments in certain forms of modernism
render problematic their very attempt to articulate the postmodern difference.
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Don Bialostosky, “Is Gerald Graff Machiavellian?”
/ 391
Victoria Kahn’s account of “Machiavelli’s interest in the productive
uses of conflict” offers a perspective from which to view Gerald Graff’s
widely publicized interest in “teaching the conflicts.” Though a comparison
of Graff and Machiavelli may seem farfetched, they share an interest in
the conditions under which and the strategies by means of which the best
possible polity might be sustained in their respective worlds. Graff has
situated his argument for conflict and against consensus on civic terrain
already cultivated by Machiavelli, and has invested in problems of polity,
history, and prudence central to Machiavelli and some of his interpreters
in our day, but he has not drawn upon Machiavelli’s texts or pressed his
own analysis of these problems as far as Machiavelli and Kahn have done.
Graff is not yet Machiavellian enough.
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Danuta Fjellestad, “Frank Lentricchia’s
Critical Confession, or, The Traumas of Teaching History” / 406
Reacting against the excesses of literary theory, some critics (most
notably Frank Lentricchia) have recently started to promote the idea of
abandoning theory altogether and returning to the “pure” act of reading
a literary text. But the choice should not be between teaching
theory or reading texts, but between teaching theory well or badly. Teaching
literary theory well means teaching it in ways sensitive to whom we teach,
where, when, and for what purposes; it means teaching theory in such a
way that it helps students recover the passionate, the haunting, the transformational,
and the uncanny powers of literature.
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Jeffrey Williams, “The New Belletrism”/ 414
A survey of the recent turn in criticism toward autobiography and personal
expression finds them not to be an anomaly or sign of self-indulgence,
but part of a larger trend toward more belletristic forms, ones also including
“experimental criticism,” “crossover criticism,” and “public criticism.”
This shift represents an appeal to a larger audience, one that might expect
and appreciate familiar literary forms rather than the social-scientific
modes of theory. The new belletrism has become prevalent because in answering
exigent institutional needs, it justifies the humanities in the face of
ideological pressure from the “Culture Wars” and the material pressures
of reduced funding. It projects not only a revamped professional rationale,
one reinvoking the traditional object of literature as a ground for literary
studies, but also a renewed teaching rationale, that professors of literature
appreciate and disseminate the pleasures of literature. Lastly, it exhibits
the influences of the “journalization” of academic writing.
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Terry Caesar, “Flying High and Flying Low: Travel,
Sabbaticals, and Privilege in Academic Life” / 443
What is the place of travel in academic life? First and foremost, it
is a site of privilege. Few things other than the opportunity to travel
argue for the abiding presence of hierarchy in academic life as well as
attest to the rise of superstar figures in the 1990s. Travel, by definition,
crosses boundaries, disrupts distinctions, and puts things in circulation
that normally remain in place. On the basis of travel, an academic flies
high—to the sort of global conferences fictionalized by David Lodge and
reflected upon by Gayatri Spivak or Jacques Derrida. The majority
of academics, however, fly, if at all, very low—most venerably on the occasions
of a sabbatical, whose potential for some disruption of usual procedures
through travel explains why the sabbatical is so subject to various kinds
of institutional monitoring. In any case, career plans are surprisingly
consonant with flight plans.
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William Calin, “Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis—’Tis
Fifty Years Since: A Reassessment” / 463
Mimesis is considered one of the great books of criticism of our century.
In it Erich Auerbach combines close readings of texts with broader considerations
of social and historical reality. His vision of Western literary history
concentrates on figura and on the mixed style, both Christian in origin.
After having given rise to a powerful, concrete representation of reality
in Dante, these techniques were to fuel a tradition of realism in the modern
centuries culminating with Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Zola. A problem
with this vision is that it affects Auerbach’s reading of individual texts.
In Mimesis, those works that lead up to Dante or to Balzac are inevitably
faulted, in one way or another, for not being Dante or Balzac. While there
have been widely varying responses to Mimesis, the perspective taken here
is one that sees Auerbach as exalting the perennial and universal values
of humanism and the great books.
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Gérard Genette, “Paul Valéry:
Literature as Such” / 475
Although literature is perhaps the major topic of the vast oeuvre of
Paul Valéry (1871-1945), he wrote little about the theory of literature.
Nevertheless, it is possible, through a survey of his writings, to establish
some of the main principles of his poetics, particularly with respect to
the topics of literary convention and literary history. Especially noteworthy
from a later perspective is the way in which themes in Valéry’s
implicit poetics run parallel to doctrines articulated by Russian Formalists.
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David Herman, “Narrative, Relexivity, and Ideology”
/ 486
Jeffrey Williams’s book outlines a new approach to understanding the
forms and functions of reflexivity in literary narrative. Basing his account
on a corpus of (mainly) British novels, the author argues that self-reflexive
“narrative moments” operate ideologically; more precisely, these moments
work to naturalize narrative as a privileged mode of communication and
exchange. While underscoring the suggestiveness of Williams’s approach,
this discussion draws on work in narrative theory, cognitive science, and
discourse analysis to dispute the claim that reflexivity in stories always
carries an ideological charge. Pointing up broad sociocommunicative functions
of reflexivity in discourse, the discussion also questions the scope of
Williams’s claims, which are anchored in a limited corpus of literary narratives.
Further, the question is posed as to whether the ability to tell and understand
narratives should be viewed as an innate cognitive endowment, rather than
a contingent and culturally-specific achievement.
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