Literature in Our Time, or, Loving Literature to Bits

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Callus
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Paul Auster ◽  
Anne Michaels

In this essay Ivan Callus provides some reflections on literature in the present. He considers the tenability of the post-literary label and looks at works that might be posited as having some degree of countertextual affinity. The essay, while not setting itself up as a creative piece, deliberately structures itself unconventionally. It frames its argument within twenty-one sections that are self-contained but that also echo each other in their attempt to develop an overarching argument which draws out some of the challenges that lie before the countertextual and the post-literary. Punctuating the essay and contributing to its unconventional take on the practice of literary criticism is a series of exercises for the reader to complete, if so wished; the essay makes no attempt, however, to suggest that a countertextual criticism ought to make a routine of such devices. The separate sections contain reflections on a number of texts and writers, among them, and in order of appearance, Hamlet, Anthony Trollope, Jacques Derrida, The Time Machine, Don Quixote, Mark Z. Danielewski, Mark B. N. Hansen, Gunter Kress, Scott's Reliquiae Trotcosienses, W. B. Yeats, Kate Tempest, David Jones, Anne Michaels, Bernice Eisenstein, Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Deidre Shauna Lynch, Tim Parks, Tom McCarthy – and Hamlet again. The essay's length fulfils a performative function but also facilitates as extensive a catalogue of aspects of the countertextual in literature and elsewhere as is feasible or as might be dared at this stage.

Double Thoughts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
De Man ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Coetzee’s interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature and philosophy is most evident in later fictions such as Elizabeth Costello. But as Andrew Dean argues in this chapter, this interest in moving across boundaries in fact originates much earlier, in Coetzee’s quarrel with the institutions and procedures of literary criticism. Coetzee used the occasion of his inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Cape Town (Truth and Autobiography) to criticize the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which literary texts are themselves blind. Influenced in part by such figures as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Coetzee posed a series of challenging questions about the desires at stake in the enterprise of literary criticism. Developing these thoughts, Dean explores the way in which Coetzee’s earlier fiction, including such texts as Foe (1986), is energized by its quarrelsome relationship with literary criticism and theory, especially postcolonial theory.

Dialogues with the Blind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgina Kleege
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
Rudyard Kipling ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Paul Auster ◽  
Raymond Carver ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Stock Character

This chapter surveys literary and theoretical representations pairing blindness and visual art. Jacques Derrida observes that when visual artists depict blindness they are in fact making reference to their own artistic process. The chapter examines fiction by Rudyard Kipling, Wilkie Collins, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Hilary Norman, Paul Auster, Tracy Chevalier, and others. While many of these representations follow the contours of the Hypothetical Blind Man, some authors use depictions of blindness to posit the power of language to capture the ephemeral nature of the visual. Authors update the stock character of the blind seer to offer readers a mirror image of themselves.

Northrop Frye and the Problem of Spiritual Authority

PMLA ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 87 (5) ◽  
pp. 964-975 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles F. Altieri
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Contemporary Problem ◽  
Underlying Structure ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Evolutionary Patterns ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye's recent criticism confronts the contemporary problem raised most powerfully by the Vietnam War—can we find a telos or definition of man on which we can ground our moral reactions and our visions of human development. Frye establishes this telos by an analysis of origins. Contained in a civilization's statements of “concern,” in its imaginative treatments of its own condition, one can find an underlying structure of desire which defines the ends of man. This structure and the recurrent images it produces then can serve as the middle terms people use to justify and value their actions. Frye shares his treatment of mediation with contemporary Hegelians like Sartre, Lukács, and Ricoeur, but grounds his absolute in tradition rather than in ideal absolutes or posited evolutionary patterns. Frye's idea of mediation also provides an ethical model for literary criticism: the critic tries to combine literature as product and as cultural possession by interpreting his materials as projections of imaginative desire. Furthermore, we can use Frye to criticize the relativist denial of origins in structuralist critics like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

scholarly journals Entre nomes partidos e corpos pro(s)téticos, as regras de um jogo duplo

2019 ◽  
pp. 148-165
Author(s):  
Gabriela Semensato Ferreira
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Paul Auster

Em Double Game (1999/2007), Sophie Calle elabora um projeto colaborativo com Paul Auster a partir de um trecho de Leviathan(1992),do escritor norte-americano. No romance de Auster, a personagem Maria Turner, inspirada na vida e na obra dessa artista francesa, é apresentada. Ao analisar as “regras desse jogo”, Calle, por sua vez, insere o trecho sobre Maria em seu livro. Porém, realiza no texto operações de corte e enxerto, marcadas pela cor vermelha. Neste artigo, propomos pensar o excerto em questão como suplemento,avaliando como este transborda os limites da narrativa de Auster, e como articulam-se, nesse gesto ou jogo, linguagens e discursos diversos. Para isso, realizam-se recortes necessários, considerando, como parte do corpo ou corpustextual, trabalhos teórico-poéticos como Prosthesis (1995), de David Wills, e Gramatalogia (1973), de Jacques Derrida. Assim, sugerimos uma aproximação entre as ideias de “prótese” e “suplemento”, para propor formas de ver e de ler essas obras de arte a partir das duplicações e duplicidades que encenam. Trata-se, portanto, não apenas da noção de duplo, mas da ficção das “escrituras de si” desses artistas, e da tensão que se dá pela vinculação e divisão de nomes próprios em suas obras.

Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 232-237
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Normal Science ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
The Third ◽  
Important Message ◽  
Fredric Jameson

Let’s take a step back. In the introduction, I sought to demonstrate some of the ways in which formalism has become instinctive in literary criticism, using several different genealogies. The first briefly surveyed some current thinkers, including Franco Moretti, Caroline Levine, Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, who assert that formalism is constitutive of literary study and a distillation of the best elements of its scholarly history. The second looked at how formalism had emerged as a contrast to methods based on reading for the content and ideas of literary texts, considering first a trajectory up to the New Criticism and Cleanth Brooks’s diagnosis of the heresy of paraphrase and subsequently an arc away from it, one through Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida that maintained the suspicion of literary content. And the third looked at the scholarship that formed the ‘ethical turn’, which similarly refused to read for the moral thought in literature, preferring to emphasise the ethical effects of form. All the while, though, there has been a sort of normal science of literary criticism that largely refused the insistence on form and was willing to let its scholarship rest with attempts to bring authors into conversation with issues that the critics cared about. That school of criticism has never received the dignity of a formal title, and I concluded by suggesting that it deserved one. Moreover, I argued, the moral thought in Victorian narratives offered a useful example in this regard, since it is a literary tradition deeply concerned with communicating an important message, and subsequent traditions in moral philosophy offer useful resources for clarifying the ideas such authors had....

The Two Criticisms—or, Structure, Lingo, and Power in the Discourse of Academic Humanists

1991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Lauter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Black Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Black School ◽  
Power Response ◽  
Critical Methods

In October of 1966 the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center was the site of an international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” The name of the symposium expresses part of its ambition: to model literary criticism on certain “scientific” paradigms. In particular, the meeting was designed to explore the implications of structuralist thinking—and especially that of continental scholars—on “critical methods in humanistic and social sciences.” Whatever the organizers may have meant by “humanistic . . . sciences,” and whatever the value of the conference in examining structuralist thought, as it turned out the symposium will be remembered historically, if at all, as a beginning of poststructuralist analysis in the United States. For at the conference Jacques Derrida made his American debut, delivering a critique of structuralism whose title, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” embodied many of the terms and concepts that have since characterized academic criticism in this country. In the two decades after that Baltimore conference, some version of Derridean analysis— call it deconstructionist, speculative, formalist, or, my preference, “ludic”—has come to be increasingly central to the practice of literary study ... at least as it is carried out in the influential academic towers of New Haven and its suburbs across the land. A few months before this event in 1966, and I dare say unnoted at that conference, Stokely Carmichael had posed a new slogan for what had been thought about up to that time as the “civil rights movement.” Carmichael had been arrested by Greenwood, Mississippi police when, on June 16, participants in the march named after James Meredith had attempted to erect their tents at a local black school. During that evening’s rally, Carmichael angrily asserted that blacks had obtained nothing in years of asking for freedom; “what we gonna start saying now,” he insisted, is “‘black power.’” The crowd responded immediately to those words, chanting its “black power” response to Carmichael’s call.

Afterword: Turning Back to Literature

PMLA ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 125 (4) ◽  
pp. 1087-1095 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Caruth
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Literary Writing ◽  
Literary Archive

Three times I rushed, and my heart urged me to hold her, and three times she flew from my hands like a shadow or even a dream.—Homer, The Odyssey 11.206–08.To speak of the future of literary criticism is always to speak of the future of literature, which is a mode of language and an institution whose very being essentially touches on the possibility and fragility of its own future. “The fragility of literature,” as Richard Klein suggests, “its susceptibility to being lost,” is at the heart of all literary writing, which emerges from the absence of a “real referent” and thus sustains itself through its reference to other texts, to the archive of literary writing that is made up of figures and other literary articulations that allow us to read. Klein reminds us, citing Jacques Derrida, that literary texts may always disappear: not only because they may be forgotten but also because they are susceptible to the erasure of the archive, to apocalyptic destruction, and to the collective loss of the knowledge of how to read—as a result of new modes of media saturation or, I would add, through the collapse of readability in the age of what Hannah Arendt calls “the modern lie” (“Truth” 253). The force and fragility of literature and of literary criticism are bound up with the possible disappearance of the literary archive, which we implicitly confront in reading literature and in pursuing its forms and thoughts as literary critics.

scholarly journals María Zambrano y la quimera

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-200
Author(s):  
Pablo Muñoz Covarrubias
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Benito Perez Galdos ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Miguel De Cervantes ◽  
Maria Zambrano ◽  
Benito Pérez Galdós ◽  
Special Space ◽  
The Way

María Zambrano and the Chimera During her career as a philosopher, writer and thinker, María Zambrano once and again portrayed literature as a special space for her research. In that sense, she investigated the principal traits belonging to the razón poética in several genres such as poetry and fiction. The purpose of the following pages is to investigate the way in which she read and recreated literary works chiefly by Miguel de Cervantes and Benito Pérez Galdós. Her literary criticism is anchored to metaphoric symbolism. One of her most recurrent symbols is the chimera. The chimera becomes an indispensable and ambiguous image in her analysis of Don Quixote and Misericordia. Key Words: María Zambrano, Literary Criticism, Razón Poética, Cervantes, Pérez Galdós

scholarly journals Understanding Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. p43
Author(s):  
Najah A. Almabrouk
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Review Paper ◽  
Structural Theory ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
International Colloquium ◽  
Theory Structure ◽  
The Past ◽  
Binary Oppositions

Deconstruction, a philosophical post-structural theory derived mainly from the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, has evoked a great controversial debate over the past few decades. Promoting a sophisticated philosophical view of literary criticism, deconstruction has always been a complicated topic to comprehend especially for students and novice researchers in the field of literary criticism. This article review paper attempts to present an explanation of the main notions of the theory by reviewing one of Derrida’s most influencing articles on critical theory: “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. The article which marked the birth of post-structuralism theory, was first delivered in 1966 at John Hopkins International Colloquium on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”. This seminal work of Derrida criticizes structuralism for the great importance given to centralism and binary oppositions for the sake of accessing meaning. It can be claimed that the article sums up his ideas on deconstruction which in fact attacks all notions of center, totality and origin. Deconstruction is perceived as a method of breaking down and analyzing text in an attempt to approach some new interpretations which might be totally different from any other previous ones.

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