Marcel Cornis-Pope

Local and global frames in recent eastern European literatures:Postcommunism, postmodernism, and postcoloniality

My article discusses the applicability of three conceptual categories (postcommunism, postmodernism and postcoloniality) to the post-1989 literary field. I argue that a significant portion of post-1989 literature has challenged not only literary categories, but also traditional definitions of national identity, gender and race, blurring boundaries between high and low culture, politics and literature. While not ignoring points of conflict both inside and between the cultures of post-1989 eastern Europe, the multifaceted landscape of the region, punctuated by multicultural and minority discourses, has often been a fertile ground for an intercultural literature that crosses literary and geocultural boundaries.

Rewriting the Encounter with the Other: Narrative and Cultural Transgression in The Public Burning

Abstract Though his eyes are closed, his senses withdrawn, for one vivid moment he sees himself at a distance in the Fairys arms. […] What he sees up there is a decrepit misshapen creature, neither man nor puppet, entangled in blue hair and lying in an unhinged sprawl in the embrace of a monstrous being […] grotesque. Hideous. Beautiful. […] Somewhere, out on the surface, distant now as his forgotten life, fingers dance like children at play and soft lips kiss the ancient hurts away. (Pinocchio in Venice 329-30)

European Fiction on the Borders: The Case of Herta Müller

Although European frontiers have often been sites of exchange and contact, their role in national and ideological division is a more pronounced feature of post-1945 continental arrangements. Marcel Cornis-Pope and Andrew Hammond explore the disciplinary function of borders via a study of Herta Muller’s Herztier (The Land of Green Plums, 1994). Set in late Cold War Romania, the novel dramatises the manner in which the regime’s closed borders helped to shape the identity of the domestic population, conditioning not only public activity but also the private realms of thought and emotion. As the essay points out, despite the dismantling of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Muller’s text retains its relevant to a ‘Fortress Europe’ still defined by national and ‘civilisational’ boundaries.

Editor's Column: The Makings of an Award—A Retrospective

Twenty years ago, when the first issue of The Comparatisi was published, an important aspiration of comparative scholars in the South came to be realized. Established in 1977 as an outlet for the scholarly work generated by the Southern Comparative Literature Association— the only regional organization devoted to comparative studies in the United States—The Comparatisi evolved under the editorship of Jeanne J. Smoot (1977-1982) ofNorth Carolina State University, and Mechthild Cranston (1983-1991) of Clemson University, from a venue for conference proceedings into a journal in its own right. With such distinguished mentors as Harry C. Rutledge, who conceived the idea for this journal, and Patrick Brady, who baptized it, The Comparatist has remained faithful to its name, featuring articles that make consistent use of a comparative and intercultural approach to explore works from different cultural areas, media, or national traditions of literature. My predecessors, Jeanne J. Smoot and Mechthild Cranston, were particularly successful in defining a number of thematic areas that came to be associated with this journal, such as the comparative study of literary and cultural movements, literature and the arts, relationships among European and NorthAmerican literatures, and translation theory and practice. Other non-traditional areas of comparison, such as inter-American relations, East-West exchanges, Third World studies, and popular culture, were sporadically reflected in the earlier issues. During Mechthild Cranstons nine-year tenure, the journal extended its visibility and readership to every state and a number of foreign countries, gaining subscriptions from every major American university library and a few foreign ones. Contributers included distinguished comparatists from around the country, as well as young scholars who published their first essays in our journal. Beginning with volume XVI (1992), The Comparatist has come under a new editorship whose main goals have been to diversify the journals scholarly focus, improve its structure and circulation, and significantly enhance its national visibility by actively engaging in the contemporary theoretical and professional debates. Six years and as many issues later, The Comparatist can boast a new and improved thematic structure, general design, circulation, and appeal, having truly become a national forum for literary and cultural comparatists. In its current format, The Comparatist publishes articles and reviews in a broad range of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary areas, some well represented in previous issues, others new, such as Afro-Caribbean, Third World, and East European literary exchanges. These have gelled into rubrics easily recognized by our readers: Theoretical Debates, Comparative Poetics, Literary and Cultural Intertextuality, Interartistic Dialogues, Postcolonial and Borderline Contexts, Eastern Texts Read through Western Theories, Oriental/Occidental Frames, and so on. Recent issues have also included

The Figures Readers Make: Interpretive Plots in Reader-Oriented Criticism

The term ‘reader-oriented criticism’ has been loosely used to bracket a variety of approaches (phenomenological criticism, reception theory, reader-response, poststructuralist critiques of interpretation) that have foregrounded reading as a sociocultural, interested activity. In a more restricted sense, the term designates a characteristic Anglo-American direction in literary education, starting with the pioneering work of I.A. Richards and Louise M. Rosenblatt in the aesthetics of response, and concluding with the current poststructuralist, feminist, and psychological contributions to the problematics of ‘reading’. Despite its theoretical diffuseness and eclecticism, borrowing freely from phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, transactional psychology, semiotics, this pragmatic orientation in literary studies is structured by a dominant plot: ‘Crudely summarised, the point of departure in each story is always a dissatisfaction with formalist principles, and a recognition that the practice of supposedly impersonal and disinterested reading is never innocent and always infected by suppressed or unexamined presuppositions. By refocusing attention on the reader instead of the text as the source of literary meaning, a new field of inquiry is opened up’.1

Rereading, Rewriting, Revisioning: Poststructuralist Interpretation and Literary Pedagogy

The seven critical papers discussed in the foregoing chapter are best read in their dialogic sequence, in their effort to trace ‘in other words the figure in the carpet through every convolution’ (FIC, p. 303). Despite their understandable desire for hermeneutic closure, the students who participated in this experiment chose to follow James in a process of reperusal and ‘watched renewal [which is] livelier than that of the accepted repetition’, producing ‘so many more of the shining silver fish afloat in the deep sea of one’s own endeavour than the net of the widest casting could pretend to gather in’ (The Art of the Novel, p. 345). Rather than contain the process of figural revision triggered by their critical rewriting, these readers felt encouraged to explore the ‘wealth of margin’, the site where meaning is produced in the interaction between text and reader. Their attention was thus turned on the interpretive activities (gap-filling, selection, integration, schematisation, restructuring) and modes of critical articulation available to readers who wish to channel their hermeneutic interest into a productive mode of criticism.

Difficult Figuration: Feminine Signifiers in Male Texts

Like response theory and deconstruction, feminist criticism has pursued a reader-oriented, revisionistic interpretive practice, as well as a rigorous critique of the ideological infrastructures of interpretation. But unlike its male counterparts that have often taken an ahistoric turn, overlooking ‘the issues of race, class, and sex, and giv[ing] no hints of the conflicts, sufferings, and passions that attend these realities’,1 the feminist approach to reading has been more pragmatic, politically-oriented, revalorising women’s experience and exposing their traditional suppression as signifiers in culture. For feminists, ‘the question of how we read is inextricably linked with the question of what we read. More specifically, the feminist inquiry into the activity of reading begins with the realization that the literary canon is androcentric, and that this has a profoundly damaging effect on women readers’.2 Theory and practice, response and canon revision actively interact in feminist criticism. The act of reading is in this perspective ‘frankly political’, a ‘search for feminine identity’, a struggle to regain access to the process of signification. The interpretive act is integrated, if somewhat ostentatiously, into a political practice aimed at reversing the sociocultural roles ascribed to women in patriarchal culture. The task of understanding ‘one’s own feelings, motivations, desires, ambitions, actions and reactions’ is related directly to a critical examination of ‘the forces which maintain the subordination of women to men’.3

Stringing ‘The Figure in the Carpet’: Seven Readings, Seven Critical Plots

In what follows I will discuss seven readings of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ developed by the members of my critical theory seminar. Six of these papers appeared in the Draftings in Reader-Oriented Criticism issue (DIROC). My own analysis, presented midway through this seminar, but fully articulated only in this chapter, is added here in order to represent more accurately my own obtrusive presence in this community of readers. Three other papers were left out from the Draftings collection because they remained at an incipient level of critical articulation. From the theoretical perspective adopted in this seminar, emphasising the interactional, open-ended process of critical writing,1 this did not meant that they were not ‘finished’, but rather that they did not pursue the interaction with James’s story and other readings far enough, did not foreground their own configurational process sufficiently. The primary purpose of this seminar, and of the publication venture that followed it, was to provide ample opportunity for the articulation of self-conscious, positional readings that engaged in a critical dialogue with James’s text and with each other. These essays could follow, as indeed most of them have, established modes of critical articulation, or they could resort to deconstructive, ironic, parataxical procedures in order to fulfill their purposes. Students were also encouraged to seek some degree of self-awareness, to spell out the assumptions and critical operations that led from early response to critical ‘rewriting’. Ideally, after several weeks of intense rewriting and classroom discussion, all interpretations can attain this ‘bi-active’ critical focus on textual figuration and their own interpretive manoeuvres. The three papers left out did not manage to make it beyond the level of a good response report or a formalistic application of a readily available interpretative grid (in this case borrowed from Peircean semiotics).

‘Limp’ vs. ‘Acute’ Criticism: An Interpretive Community Refigures James

In the spring of 1986 a group of graduate students with diverse backgrounds and interests (in American literature, communication and theater arts, religious studies, women’s literature, English pedagogy) met in my Topics in Criticism class to debate reader-oriented models of criticism and their role in the classroom. A substantial portion, as it turned out, of this seminar evaluating recent scenarios of meaning-making (phenomenological, semiotic, ‘affective’, deconstructive) was devoted to a critical workshop on James’s ‘Figure in the Carpet’ that studied these interpretive moves in actu. My purpose in conducting this experiment was not to unveil an ‘essential secret’ or figural design in James’s story, but rather to foreground the intricate process by which various competing interpretive figures come into being in the process of critical articulation; also to test the resourcefulness of a community of readers such as ours when confronted with a text that both flaunts and questions a traditional poetics and mode of interpretation premised on the existence of a hidden ‘figure of the text’.

The Figure of Catachresis and the Plot of Unreadability in Deconstruction

In the polarised scenario of contemporary criticism, deconstruction has willingly played the role of the arch antagonist and dismantler of traditional scholarship, assaulting the notion of a fixed and determinable meaning, and the authority of any particular system of reading fueled, according to Jacques Derrida, by the ‘powerful, systematic, and irrepresible desire for such a signified’.1 Certain deconstructionist pronouncements, especially when lifted out of their qualifying contexts, have contributed to the misconception that poststructuralist theory is adverse to disciplined, ‘thoughtful’ reading, blocking the process of interpretation even before it had a chance to articulate anything: ‘Modern hermeneutics … is actually a negative hermeneutics. On its older function of saving the text, of tying it once again to the life of the mind, is superimposed the new one of doubting, by a parodistic or playful movement, master theories that claim to have overcome the past, the dead, the false. There is no Divine or Dialectic Science which can help us purify history absolutely, to pass in our lifetime a last judgment on it’.2