Wai Chee Dimock

A Theory of Resonance

Does a literary text remain the same object across time? This essay answers no and bases a defense of literature on that answer. Temporal extension, a phenomenon neglected in contemporary literary ...

Genre as World System: Epic and Novel on Four Continents

What would literary history look like if the field were divided, not into discrete periods, and not into discrete bodies of national literatures? What other organizing principles might come into play? And how would they affect the mapping of “literature” as an analytic object: the length and width of the field; its lines of filiation, lines of differentiation; the database needed in order to show significant continuity or significant transformation; and the bounds of knowledge delineated, the arguments emerging as a result? In this essay, I propose one candidate to begin this line of rethinking: the concept of literary genre. Genre, of course, is not a new concept; in fact, it is as old as the recorded history of humankind. Even though the word itself is of relatively recent vintage (derived from French, in turn derived from the Latin genus), 1 the idea that there are different kinds of literature (or at least different kinds of poetry) came from ancient Greece. Traditionally it has been seen as a classifying principle, putting the many subsets of literature under the rule of normative sets. Theorists like Benedotto Croce have objected to it on just these grounds. “[I]nstead of asking before a work of art if it be expressive and what it expresses,” genre criticism only wants to label it, putting it into a pigeonhole, asking only “if it obey the laws of epic or of tragedy.” Nothing can be more misguided, Croce says, for these “laws of the kinds” have never in fact been observed by practicing writers (36 ‐37). 2 Derrida makes the same point. “As soon as genre announces itself, one

Non-Newtonian Time: Robert Lowell, Roman History, Vietnam War

What is non-Newtonian time? No ready answer comes to mind. Its opposite—Newtonian time—hardly fares better. Neither term is idiomatic or even vaguely recognizable because time is rarely qualified by these adjectives, or qualified at all. In more than just a grammatical sense, time seems to come all in one piece, in one flavor. It is an ontological given, a cosmic metric that dictates a fixed sequence of events against a fixed sequence of intervals. It is present everywhere, the same everywhere, independent of anything we do. It carries no descriptive label and has no need to advertise or to repudiate that label. When seen as this uniform background, time is quantifiable. Its measurable segments are exactly the same length, one segment coming after another in a single direction. This unidirectionality means that there is only one way to line up two events, one way to measure the distance between them. Apparently, we need to imagine time in this concrete form—as a sort of measuring rod—to convince ourselves of its absolute existence. One year, one month, one minute— these unit lengths have to be ‘‘real’’ unit lengths, objectively measurable. And as proof of that objective measurement, they have to come already stamped with a serial number. And so we speak of one particular minute as, say, 10:10, followed by the next minute, 10:11, just as we speak of one year as, say, 1965, followed by the next year, 1966. This serial designation puts time completely under the jurisdiction of number. Most of us take this step quite innocently. Without much thought, we refer to a particular year as 1965, because a numerical bias is so

Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader

rflHE relation between feminist criticism and New Historicism i is a peculiar one, exciting considerable interest and curiosity (not to say unease) and, especially in English Renaissance studies, occasioning some unusually acrimonious polemics. The acrimony has to do, at least in part, with the marginal status accorded by one to the other: figuring in each others discourse at best as a point of departure and at worst as an overlooked point of departure, New Historicists and feminists seem to talk at cross purposes, keeping their mutual distance, relegating each other to a kind of non-presence.1 If the feminist chronicling of womens oppression and celebration of womens difference have appeared misguided to many New Historicists, the New Historicist universalization of power and blurring of genders have struck many feminists as nothing short of reactionary.2

Aesthetics at the Limits of the Nation: Kant, Pound, and the Saturday Review

How powerful is the nation as a taxonomic (rather than jurisdictional) unit? Who gets to classify, who gets to name the phenomena of the world? Do human beings naturally congregate as sovereign states, or can we imagine a different ordering of humanity, something like Bruce Ackerman’s ‘‘world constitutionalism’’ or Jürgen Habermas’s ‘‘postnational constellation’’? Habermas thinks that this new associative form will replace the conventional nation-state:

Pre-national Time: Novel, Epic, Henry James

What difference does it make to map globalization along the axis of time rather than the axis of space? This essay tests that possibility, focusing on pre-national time and exploring it through a genre-based paradigm, inspired by Adorno and especially Lukacs. Adorno and Lukacs see genres as diachronic forms giving each individual work a backward as well as a forward extension. The ancient epic and the modern novel continually interact and must be read in tandem if literature is to be seen as a cumulative, global phenomenon. Jamess novels are global in just this way: looking back to The Odyssey and forward to Erza Pounds Cantos.

Preface: Literature and Science: Cultural Forms, Conceptual Exchanges

In his Rede Lecture of 1959, the English scientist and novelist C. P. Snow coined the phrase ‘‘two cultures’’ to describe a disjunction between the sciences and the humanities that, he believed, both signaled and produced grave social problems. Four years later he explained that his primary objective in the lecture was to sharpen ‘‘the concern of rich and privileged societies for those less lucky.’’ But what amazed, angered, or amused his ever broadening audience, and subsequently became the chief legacy of the piece, was his claim that ‘‘the intellectual life of the whole western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.’’ Humanists and scientists, he argued, have nothing in common: from their assembled data to their research methods, from the way they think to the way they talk, ‘‘a gulf of mutual incomprehension’’ divides them. They inhabit, in an anthropological sense, two cultures. The accuracy of Snow’s comments is not our concern in this special issue. We are interested more in what Jay Clayton, in his essay in this volume, calls a ‘‘convergence.’’ On the one hand, scientific specializations have moved at such a pace that the untrained are virtually illiterate. On the other hand, the practical impact of this specialized knowledge—from reproductive technologies to electronic archives, from bioterrorism to gene therapy—makes science illiteracy no longer an option. Scholars in the humanities simply have to come to terms with these forces of change. Unpersuaded by the language of crisis with which some cultural observers have responded to the current situation, we see an opportunity for creative and productive responses to the emergence of new forms of knowledge, of cross-disciplinary

Gender, the Market, and the Non-trivial in James

In a complex and philosophically resonant passage in Capital, Marx lays out his critique of the commodity form by critiquing its abstract operative principle, something like the epistemology of exchange. What he focuses on is the production of equivalence, the conversion of material objects into some quantifiable abstraction, so that things that are quite different can be shown to be quite similar, can be shown to have a common denominator, a measurable denominator, and can be taken to be commensurate and exchangeable. Money, the simplest and most handy vehicle of exchange, is the most obvious medium by which equivalence is being produced, and, for Marx, it is also the most obvious example of the violence that is done to the world by adequating it, by turning it into a kind of universal arithmetic, a comprehensive totality of uniformly calibrated and uniformly matchable terms. Marx is not the only one to have been struck by the mental juggling as well as the mental brutality inherent in the act of exchange. Aristotle, whom Marx cites with approval, had long ago observed in the Nicomachean Ethics that exchange works not only, most immediately, as a principle of economic transaction but

Editor’s Column—Humanists as Builders

Old Gym, a threestory stone structure at the heart of campus, dating from 1900. It had been largely empty since the opening, in 2005, of the new, 100, 000squarefoot, stateoftheart Douglas B. Gardner Integrated Athletic Center, one of the key attractions of Haverford College. How to adapt the Old Gym for the twentyirst century? And how might humanists contribute to its remaking? McGrane, an associate professor of En glish, saw it as a special challenge. An eighteenthcentury scholar with an equal commitment to print culture and digital media, McGrane had long integrated coding and online interface into book history, leading collaborative Mellon workshops such as he (New) Digital Archivalism (2009) and running the TriCo Digital Humanities initiative with colleagues from Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr Colleges. Renovating the old is second nature to her, as is the art of teamwork. Things took a decisive turn in 2012, when McGrane became director of the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities and, through campuswide forums on the future direction of Haverford, emerged with a compelling action plan. Working with the college’s capital campaign, Lives hat Speak, she helped raise a record 12.4 million dollars to transform the Old Gym into a building called VCAM (Visual Culture, Arts, and Media [ig. 1]). he new home for the Hurford Center and the interdisciplinary visual studies minor it had been championing since the late 1990s, the building now also houses three other programs: the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives (PACC),1 the Haverford Innovations Program, and the Summer DocuLab, all sharing a community kitchen and a space called Maker Arts, equipped with cuttingedge digital tools. 1 3 3 . 3 ]

Recycling the Epic: Gilgamesh on Three Continents

This essay examines the 2006 collaboration between poet Yusef Komunyakaa and dramaturg Chad Gracia, the recycling of Gilgamesh as low-budget stagings in the USA. The migration of the epic into a performance-basis genre—and into vernacular settings and grassroots organizations—constitutes a feature of epic that Mikhail Bakhtin overlooked. These downward percolations in venue are accompanied by a parallel downshift in thematics and demographics: the audience changes across time, as does the sympathy for characters. In the Komunyakaa/Gracia stage adaptation, it is not Gilgamesh, and not even Enkidu, but Humbaba, their not-quite-human adversary, who becomes the emotional focus, turning a genre once dedicated to the hubris of kings and princes into one saturated by the pathos of those who are “slaves to the gods.”