Jurgen Pieters

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature

This essays focus on Nabokovs lectures on European and Russian literature at American universities, and sheds new light on the relationship of his views on aesthetics to the development of his own oeuvre.

Fashioning freedom for Shakespeare: Stephen Greenblatt and the existentialist power of literature

This article focuses on the eclectic theoretical underpinnings of Stephen Greenblatts new historicism. Taking the opening of Shakespeares Freedom as our outset we examine the unique status of freedom that Shakespeare embodies in several of Greenblatts books. In our analysis, we suggest that next to Foucaults post-structuralism, Sartres existentialism is of equal importance to the understanding of his new historicism. To support this claim we first argue that Greenblatts conception of the specific position of Shakespeares literary writings within the cultural context of their production can be related to Sartres conception of engaged writing as a form of cultural disclosure. Next, we want to show how Greenblatts conception of freedom as a form of self-fashioning resembles Sartres analysis of human existence. We conclude that Greenblatts Shakespeare, combining a Foucauldian conceptualisation of power and a Sartrean concept of imagination, can be seen as an allegory of the existentialist hero.

Hermeneutiek in veelvoud

Analyse (structuur) Conceptualisering (taal) CLW2011.3.book Page 34 Wednesday, October 12, 2011 4:05 PM

‘I was never a new historicist’: Catherine Belsey's ‘history at the level of the signifier’

The issue that I want to address in the following pages is that of the vexing relationship between a reading practice driven by a historicist finality and one driven by a theoretical one. In principle, the issue should not be an issue at all, let alone a vexing one. After all, every form of historicism (whether of the old variety or the new, or of a different type altogether) is constructed upon a set of theoretical premises, whereas inversely, every theory is determined by a set of historical circumstances, specific markers of time and place that inevitably leave their traces in the ‘universal’ concepts that we seem to have come to expect from our theories of reading. In practice, however, the theory-versus-history-debate proves to be stubbornly persistent, to the point even where it threatens to stifle discussion and reduce the field into two opposing camps: one for those who preach theory and one for those who practise history – and never, ever, the twain shall really meet. In what follows I want to make clear, by means of an example, how this dichotomous logic can easily be overcome. My example is obviously provided by the work of Catherine Belsey, whose ‘history at the level of the signifier’, I hope to show, offers a way of sidestepping the above binarism. As with most debates surrounding the turn to history that we have witnessed in the fields of literary and cultural studies for the past three decades, the work of Stephen Greenblatt offers an apt starting-point. From the very start of the critical vogue he helped to introduce, Greenblatt firmly insisted that he did not want his work to be taken as a further product of the heydays of theory, or at least not in the same way that the deconstructionist reading method (to which his own work was obviously indebted) had been. While he readily admitted to being influenced by some of the high-priests of poststructuralism (Foucault most notably, but also Derrida and Lacan), he stressed above all that his New Historicism differed at least in one central respect from that of their most devoted American disciples. Never really having understood the Textual Practice 24(6), 2010, 1033–1044

An Unexpected Return: Barthes's Lectures at the Collège de France

‘I undertake therefore to let myself be borne on by the force of any living life, forgetfulness. (. . .) Now comes perhaps the age of another experience: that of unlearning, of yielding to the unforeseeable change which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we have traversed.’ (IL, 478)1 With this promise to deliver himself to the forces of forgetfulness, Roland Barthes concluded his inaugural lecture on 7 January 1977, when he joined the College de France as professor of literary semiology. He would teach there for three years, until he was hit by a laundry van while crossing the street— a traffic accident that would lead to his death a month later, on 26 March 1980. It is rather ironic that while Barthes’s writings continue to be read and taught as the work of one of the pioneers of more than one critical school in modern literary theory, this teaching of ‘unlearning’, this exploration of the forces of amnesia in his lecture courses at the College de France, was almost forgotten for more than two decades. Although his inaugural lecture was already published in 1978, it was not until 2002 that Barthes’s notes of the first two Cours appeared, entitled Comment vivre ensemble (1976–1977) (how to live together) and Le Neutre (1977–1978) (the neutral). The series was completed with the publication in 2003 of La Preparation du roman (1978–1980) (the preparation of the novel), consisting of the notes of the last years Barthes lectured at the College.2 In 2005 the first English translation of the courses appeared: The Neutral, translated by Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier; translations of the other two lecture courses, by Richard Howard, are on their way. For Barthes-aficionados, these lecture courses may be somewhat disappointing, at least at a first reading. In terms of content, the notes are surely not the most exciting part of Barthes’s work. They were never intended to be published, and therefore they often lack the intensity of books like S/Z and A Lover’s Discourse, two books that were based on lecture notes Barthes rewrote before publication.

In gesprek met de vorigen

In the first half of this article, I attempt to trace back Stephen Greenblatts exhortation to consider the practices of literary and cultural history as a conversation with the dead to the writings of Machiavelli and Philip Sidney. In the texts second half, I add to their renowned company the name of Constantijn Huygens, whose reflections on the mimetic powers of artistic portraits throw an interesting light on the topic which Greenblatt made so famous.

Be silent then, for danger is in words.' The wonders of reading and the duties of criticism.

In the opening scene of the fifth act of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the title-character is seen to negotiate with two ‘scholars’, who at a previous meeting had asked him to perform one of his magic tricks and conjure before their eyes ‘the admirablest lady that ever lived’. Now that they meet with Faustus a second time, the scholars have finally decided that that lady must be none other than Helen of Troy. As soon as Mephistophilis, the doctor’s devilish accomplice, has complied with their wishes and brought Helen onstage for all to admire, Faustus urges the scholars to remain calm and say nothing. At that point, he addresses them by means of the words that feature as a title above the present essay. ‘Be silent then,’ he implores them, ‘for danger is in words’. The opening scene of act five calls to memory an earlier scene in the play, in which Faustus, at the request of his host, the German Emperor Carolus, resuscitates both Alexander the Great ‘and his beauteous paramour’. Here too, Faustus exhorts his company to remain mute, so as not to disturb the fullness of the images of the Antique heroes as they present themselves before their very eyes: