Daniel T. O'Hara

Empire burlesque : the fate of critical culture in global America

Empire Burlesque traces the emergence of the contemporary global context within which American critical identity is formed. Daniel T. O’Hara argues that globalization has had a markedly negative impact on American cultural criticism, circumscribing both its material and imaginative potential, reducing much of it to absurdity. By highlighting the spectacle of its own self-parody, O’Hara aims to shock U.S. cultural criticism back into a sense of ethical responsibility. Empire Burlesque presents several interrelated analyses through readings of a range of writers and cultural figures including Henry James, Freud, Said, De Man, Derrida, and Cordwainer Smith (an academic, spy, and classic 1950s and 1960s science fiction writer). It describes the debilitating effects of globalization on the university in general and the field of literary studies in particular, it critiques literary studies’ embrace of globalization theory in the name of a blind and vacant modernization, and it meditates on the ways critical reading and writing can facilitate an imaginative alternative to institutionalized practices of modernization. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, it diagnoses contemporary American Studies as typically driven by the mindless abjection and transference of professional identities. A provocative commentary on contemporary cultural criticism, Empire Burlesque will inform debates on the American university across the humanities, particularly among those in literary criticism, cultural studies, and American studies.

Neither Gods nor Monsters: An Untimely Critique of the“ Post/Human” Imagination

When I began reading science fiction at the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s, I became fascinated with the stories of a writer with the unlikely pen name of Cordwainer Smith. Paul M. A. Linebarger, the real name of the writer of these fantastic tales of the future, was a professor of what was then called Asiatic studies at the Johns Hopkins University, an expert in psychological warfare, and a civilian consultant to Army Intelligence.1 Smith’s stories epically envision a future world, spanning many thousands of years, in which the Lords and Ladies of The Instrumentality, supported by supercomputers and other marvelous machines, supervise the production and distribution of ‘‘stroon,’’ a drug synthesized from gigantic mutant sheep whose hides have become infected by an alien virus on a world called Norstrilia. Stroon grants near immortality in a time when other powerful drugs, incredible medical advances, and superprosthetic devices make a long life of a millennium or so not just possible but desirable.

The Spirit Medium: Yeats, Quantum Visions, and Recent Lacanian Studies

My work has taken a strange yet not unexpected turn. As the title of this unconventional review essay may suggest, it has recently centered, if that is the word, on strands of discourses—literary, scientific, psychoanalytic—which have one thing in common that I now understand has been my critical focus from the beginning of my career: visionary language and its cultural effects, particularly its promise, to the visionary thinker, of becoming divine, in the form of symbolic immortality. That Professor O’Hara finally understands what he has been doing, however, is not necessarily of interest even to a small public. My newfound self-understanding preceded by only several months

Michel Foucault and the Fate of Friendship

In responding to Jacques Derridas critique of Madness and Civilization as a transcendent experience beyond the language of reason, Michel Foucault makes an initial distinction between the genres of philosophical writing that proves important for the critical understanding of his entire career. I begin with this response not because I am interested in either Derridas accusation or Foucaults defense. Rather, I am interested in Foucaults characterization of these genres and the generic subjects appropriate to them. Quite simply, Foucaults defense provides his readers with a guide to his own self-understanding, which is for me the point of departure for any comprehensive analysis of his work.

An Interview with Frank Lentricchia

Lentricchia: Its not my title. My original title was Memory and Other Crimes, and Don DeLillo thought that maybe the better title was already in the book, The Edge of Night. I thought about that and decided that he was right. I like the tone of it. Its the title of a soap opera, which my grandparents, my fathers parents, used to watch all the time, and which I watched them watch one afternoon in Miami, many years ago. And that became an episode in this book. I like the title because it recalls them. I think it definitely, as far as I can tell, hits the tone of the book pretty exactly, and, also, because it is the title of a soap opera, it recalls, for me, the amount of ... theres a lot of awareness of, and references to, movies, theater, actors, and acting, and there is a kind of energy for assuming voices, and ...

Love's Architecture: The Poetic Irony of Thomas Kinsella

Thomas Kinsella is the leading Irish poet of his generation. He is also a more substantial figure than any of the many verse-technicians now writing in English and being celebrated by famous reviewers in cover blurbs. Strangely enough, however, his poetry has not generally received the kind of sophisticated critical attention it deserves. Only M. L. Rosenthal has treated his work with consistent justice. This may be because Kinsella is not a typical academic poet (something Rosenthal, among others perhaps, apparently can appreciate). Kinsella, born in Dublin in 1928, spent twenty years in the Irish Ministry of Finance before resigning his position in 1965 to come to America as artist-in-residence at Southern Illinois University. Currently, he is a Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia and Director of Temples annual Spring Program in Irish Studies. Over the years he has produced a dozen books of poetry for major university and commercial publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, he has trans-

The Revisionary Muse in Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill: On Literary Politics, Modernist-Style

In On Being Ill, Woolf figures sickness as a new perspective that grants priority to the immediacy of the body more than the mind, endowing language with a new physicality. O’Hara notes the materiality of the words “plush perhaps” and Woolf’s general “crushing together” of words and meanings, that at once enable multiplicity and open up abysses in meaning disjunctions between words and thoughts. Similarly, O’Hara casts revisionism as a sickness that enables multiple vantage points, multiple impossibilities, so any particular subject position may be transcended, thereby temporarily bridging the abyss. This literary politics, modernist style, relies on the imagination to play out the embryonic selves that inhere in moments of being within the larger context of the common experience.

Modernism's Global Identity: On the Dogmatic Imagination in Yeats, Freud, and Beyond

The question of identity is never a purely academic matter. As we see every day, in America s̓ War Against Terrorism, civilizations clash over identity, with great violence. This is especially true in the modern world, in which technology has fostered the power to lay waste to combatants and civilians alike on a massive scale without precedent in human history. How identities are formed, what shapes they take, how they defend themselves once formed, and how they change, if they really do, are all questions embedded within a larger philosophical question of identity, particularly with the global advent of modernity, which early in the last century struck the minds of leading Western intellectuals with considerable force. This larger question, traditionally phrased, is: “What is man?” By which, I mean here, what does it mean to say that a person, a culture, a world or historical period, has an identity? The question of identity is really the question of possessing an essence. However that may be in general, W.B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud conceive of human identity as being substantially dependent, for its “essence” (whatever that may be), upon the operation of a comprehensive and coherent system of symbols whose cultural power they call, respectively, “myth” or “illusion.” Although Yeats thinks that all myth is true in some fundamental sense, and Freud thinks that all myths are illusory and so false if pandemic, both agree that the system of interlocking symbols constituting the cultural machinery of a society works by means of great coordinating mythologies, or the manifold illusion to produce and enforce identity. What is striking to both of them about modern society, especially after the First World War, is the absence of any master symbol to stitch together the symbolic strands or to forge, into a signifi cant whole, the