Derek Attridge

Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other

Innovation in cultural practice is both an act and an event where by the other is brought into and comes into being. I call the private aspect of this process creation and the public aspect, by which innovation gives rise to further innovation, invention. A related phenomenon is the responsible encounter with the human other; in both, the subject’s modes of understanding undergo change as the subject registers and affirms the singularity of the other. A further domain to which this account applies is reading, another act-event in which a responsible response entails an innovative affirmation of innovation. Responding to the literary work involves performing its verbal forms. The responsibility invoked in all these instances is responsibility for rather than to, since the other is brought into existence (and transformed from other to same) by the subject’s response. The ethical obligation implied here is, as Levinas argues, prior to any philosophical account we could give of it.

The Cambridge History of South African Literature

South Africa’s unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experience of its peoples. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all the country’s eleven official languages (and more minor ones), produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors drawn from all of the major regions and language groups of South Africa. It will provide a complete portrait of South Africa’s literary production, organised as a chronological history from the oral traditions existing before colonial settlement to the post-apartheid revision of the past. In a field marked by controversy, this volume is more fully representative than any existing account of South Africa’s literary history. It will make a unique contribution to Commonwealth, international and postcolonial studies, and serve as a definitive reference work for decades to come.

ZOË WICOMB’S HOME TRUTHS: Place, genealogy, and identity in David’s Story

Zoë Wicomb’s 2000 novel David’s Story appeared at the same time as a number of South African novels in which genealogy and location play an important part. Wicomb’s representation of some of the troubling aspects of the liberation struggle and of Griqua identity was written in Glasgow, a location which might have played a part in her ability to achieve a certain distance from events in South Africa, and which, for readers who are aware of it, affects the reading of the novel. The most powerful element of the novel, however, is the treatment of Dulcie, the truth of whose story remains unreachable.

Joyce the Irishman

In Stephen Hero , the abandoned forerunner to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , the undergraduate artist-hero attacks the Irish educational system and gives promise of his rebellion against it and the culture it represents: The deadly chill of the atmosphere of the college paralysed Stephens heart. In a stupor of powerlessness he reviewed the plague of Catholicism . . . The spectacle of the world in thrall filled him with the fire of courage. He, at least, though living at the farthest remove from the centre of European culture, marooned on an island in the ocean, though inheriting a will broken by doubt and a soul the steadfastness of whose hate became as weak as water in siren arms, would lead his own life according to what he recognised as the voice of a new humanity, active, unafraid and unashamed. (SH 198–9/194) Joyce’s repudiation of Catholic Ireland and his countering declaration of artistic independence are well-known and integral features of his life-long dedication to writing. Yet he was formed by the Ireland he repudiated and his quest for artistic freedom was itself shaped by the exemplary instances of earlier Irish writers who had, in his view, failed to achieve that independence which he sought for himself, an independence which was at once the precondition and the goal of writing.

Ethical Modernism: Servants as Others in J. M. Coetzee's Early Fiction

The distinctive ethical force of literature inheres not in the fictional world portrayed but in the handling of language whereby that fictional world is brought into being. Literary works that resist the immediacy and transparency of language—as is the case in modernist writing—thus engage the reader ethically; and to do justice to such works as a reader is to respond fully to an event whereby otherness challenges habitual norms. When the fiction itself concerns the ethics of otherness, as in J. M. Coetzees two earliest fictions, Dusklands and In the Heart of the Country, modernist techniques can be especially powerful as a means of involving the reader ethically. In these two works, Coetzee undermines the conventional discourses that are traditionally employed to represent—and in so doing disempower—servants in the same gesture by which he tests the conventions of fictional representation.

Molly's Flow: The Writing of "Penelope" and the Question of Women's Language

If Bloom and Stephen, in their singularity and in their interchange, seem to represent languages two principles, Molly might represent the extreme of language at its loosest and most flowing. (Gottfried 35) To enter the mind of Molly Bloom after so much time spent in the minds of Stephen and Leopold is to plunge into a flowing river. If we have hitherto been exploring the waste land, here are the refreshing, life-giving waters that alone can renew it. The flow is the flow of Nature. . . . (Blamires 246)

The rules of English metre: a response to Nigel Fabb:

Nigel Fabb’s account of the ‘implicated form’ of metrical verse in ‘The Metres of “Dover Beach” ’ in a recent issue of Language and Literature (2002) offers a fruitful way of thinking about the frequent indeterminacies and ambiguities of metrical form. What seems to me less successful is his attempt to contrast this account with what he presents as the ‘inviolable rules’ and ‘strict limits’ of the iambic pentameter. To determine these he relies on the ‘stress maximum’ principle proposed by Halle and Keyser (1971), a principle whose inadequacy can be (and has often been) easily shown by testing it against actual and invented lines.1 Fabb’s version is in some respects even less adequate than the Halle and Keyser original; it reads, ‘a stressed syllable in a polysyllabic word, which [i.e. when it] is preceded by another syllable in the same line, must be in an evennumbered position’(2002: 104). This ‘inviolable rule’ would have the unfortunate effect of characterizing a large proportion of English iambic pentameters as unmetrical, notably all those involving what is traditionally called ‘trochaic substitution’. One example of this common variation will have to suffice:

Expecting the Unexpected in Coetzee’s Master of Petersburg and Derrida’s Recent Writings

The author is familiar to me, the book is new. Not just new to me, but newly published, recently written, so that it comes to me without the filter of commentary that so quickly surrounds a work when it enters the public domain; that filter through which almost everything we read is coloured and constrained. It is a work of my time, not yet a part of history. It might be a new novel by a writer whose previous novels I know and value, or a new philosophical work by a philosopher whose earlier writings I admire. What is my responsibility as a reader of such a new work? Is it different from the responsibility I have to works already received within a tradition? How am I to do justice to whatever originality and singularity the new work possesses?

Context, Idioculture, Invention

This essay examines three moments in the reception of the work of literature: the relation between the writer and his or her context; the relation between the reader and his or her context; and the relation between the reader and the original context of the writer. By introducing the notion of the idioculture—the singular, and constantly changing, combination of cultural materials that constitutes any individual—it is possible to move from the first two of these relations (where the work of invention and of creative reading can be seen in terms of the artists or readers internalization of the tensions within the circumambient culture) to the third, in which the play between contingency and historical connectedness produces the continuing experience of inventiveness for the reader.

Deconstruction and Fiction

‘Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.’ This is how Philip Sidney, writing in his Defence of Poetry in the late sixteenth century, carves out a space for fiction, a space in which the accusation of telling lies (which Plato, for instance, had accused poets of doing) simply does not make any sense. This distinction between two primary modes of discourse, fictional and nonfictional, has often been made since Sidney’s day, and it operates strongly in much thinking about language use in our own time.