Peter D. McDonald

Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?

The continuing fallout from the theory wars, evident not least in the nostalgic after-theory narrative that is still in vogue, has dissipated critical energy in contemporary literary studies. Rejecting that narrative, this essay calls for a review of the legacy of theory and the polemical oppositions that set it against other scholarly enterprises, like book history. In particular, it suggests that the theoretical interrogation of the category of literature in the past forty years fruitfully intersects with book history’s investigation of the material conditions of literary production, opening up new possibilities for literary historiography, while also imposing new demands on it. The essay identifies two traditions of antiessentialist thought (the skeptical and the enchanted), considers the ontology of the printed literary text, and examines the legacies of, among others, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu. (PDMcD)

The Writer, the Critic, and the Censor: J.M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature

on censorship, J. M. Coetzee’s Giving Offense (1996) stands out as an avowedly singular intervention. As Coetzee himself points out in the preface, the twelve essays that make up the volume, most of which originally appeared between 1988 and 1993, constitute neither a “history” nor a “strong theory” of censorship. Rather they represent an attempt, Wrst, “to understand a passion with which I have no intuitive sympathy, the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring,” and second, “to understand, historically and sociologically, why it is that I have no sympathy with that passion.”1 These prefatory remarks prepare the way for a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study that is at once psychoanalytic, literary, historical, sociological, and autobiographical. They also make plain the antirationalist spirit of Coetzee’s enquiry, which centers not so much on legislative history or the practice of censorship as on the passions revealed and concealed in writings for or against it. One of the most important essays, “Emerging from Censorship” (1993), seeks, for instance, to understand the curiously “contagious power” of the censor’s “paranoia” (37). Why is it, Coetzee asks, that writers—and here he includes himself—so often “record the feeling of being touched and contaminated by the sickness of the state” (35)? The Writer, the Critic, and the Censor

Old Phrases and Great Obscenities: The Strange Afterlife of Two Victorian Anxieties

3. Science and Education: Essays (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), 109. 4. See particularly Frank M. Turner, ‘Newman’s University and Ours,’ in John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 282–301, and Sheldon Rothblatt, The Modern University and its Discontents: The fate of Newman’s legacies in Britain and America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 5. The Idea of a University, ed. Martin J. Svaglic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 116. 6. Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 16 (Chapter 2).

THINKING INTERCULTURALLY: Amartya Sen's Lovers Revisited

Abstract The future of multiculturalism as a term governing policy and shaping public debate has been in question for some time. This essay argues that a philosophical or conceptual reappraisal is now also overdue. After discussing the history of multiculturalism, as a word and as a concept, and the current debate about its future, it offers a rationale for thinking interculturally, as an alternative not just to multiculturalism but to varieties of cosmopolitanism and interculturalism as well. In addition, it suggests that to develop this other mode of thinking we should look not to the social and political sciences, which gave us multiculturalism, but to literary studies and, in the first instance, to the writings of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy. The essay concludes by raising some questions about the idea of cultural translation as a model for thinking interculturally.

The present is another country: A comment on the 2010 media freedom debate

Abstract The spectre of apartheid censorship haunted the 2010 debates about media freedom. While acknowledging the force of the historical parallel, this article takes issue with the polemical use of the past in this context, arguing that the more pressing issues raised by the Protection of Information Bill and proposed Media Appeals Tribunal need to be seen against the background of the post-apartheid legislative framework and the African National Congresss own changing attitudes to the print media since 1994. The article concludes with some reflections on the relationship between the rights to freedom of expression and human dignity.