William V. Spanos

The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary Imagination

... All the plays that have And any explanation will satisfy: ever been written, from ancient We only ask to be reassured Greece to the present day, About the noises in the cellar have never really been anything And the window that should not have but thrillers, been open. Dramas always been realistic Why do we all behave as if the door and theres always been a might suddenly open, the detective about. Every curtain be drawn, plays an investigation brought The cellar make some dreadful to a successful conclusion, disclosure, the roof disappear, Theres a riddle, and its And we should cease to be sure of solved in the final scene. what is real or unreal? Sometimes Hold tight, hold tight, we must insist earlier. Might as well give the that the world is what we have game away at the always taken it to be. ... start.

Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutic Circle: Towards a Postmodern Theory of Interpretation as Dis-Closure

I argue thus. If it be true that painting employs wholly different signs or means of imitation from poetry, the one using forms and colors in space, the other articulate sounds in time, and if signs must unquestionably stand in convenient relation with the thing signified, then signs arranged side by side can represent only objects existing side by side, or whose parts so exist, while consecutive signs can express only objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other, in time. Objects which exist side by side, or whose parts so exist, are called bodies. Consequently bodies with their visible properties are the peculiar subjects of painting. Objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other in time, are actions. Consequently actions are the peculiar subjects of poetry.

Pierre's Extraordinary Emergency: Melville and “the Voice of Silence,” Part 1

‘‘Come, I hate a mystery; speak, my son.’’ Fortunately, this prolonged verbalized wonder in his mother afforded Pierre time to rally from his double and aggravated astonishment, brought about by first suspecting that his mother also had been struck by the strange aspect of the face, and then, having that suspicion so violently beaten back upon him, by her apparently unaffected alarm at finding him in some region of thought wholly unshared by herself at the time. ‘‘It is nothing—nothing, sister Mary, just nothing at all in the world.’’ —Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics

The widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language not only undermines aesthetic and moral responsibility in every use of language; it arises from a threat to the essence of humanity. . . . Much bemoaned of late, and much too lately, the downfall of language is, however, not the grounds for, but already a consequence of, the state of affairs in which language under the dominance of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity almost irremediably falls out of its element. Language still denies us its essence: that it is the house of Being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings. —Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ Basic Writings

The End of Education: "The Harvard Core Curriculum Report" and the Pedagogy of Reformation

Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like ours, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it allows the well-trodden battlelines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and power it carries with it.

The "Nameless Horror": The Errant Art of Herman Melville and Charles Hewitt

So if you want to know why Melville nailed us in MobyDick, consider whaling. Consider whaling as a FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. A product wanted, men got it: big business. The Pacific as sweatshop. Man, led, against the biggest damndest creature nature uncorks. The whale-ship as factory, the whaleboat the precision instrument. The 1840s: The New West in the saddle and Melville No. 20 of a rough and bastard crew. Are they the essentials? Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael

A Dialogue on Oral Poetry with William Spanos

horror, we must regain the sense of the totality and the immediacy of human experience. In order to determine where we are, we must learn, syllable by syllable, where we have been. The sense of history is, for society in crisis, what relentless self-searching, psychoanalytic or otherwise, is for the individual in crisis, that is, it can be releasing and enriching, cathartic and creative; it may be the only thing that can save our lives. History implies exhortation, because it is confession, failure and triumph. It is the measure of our capacity, the link between man and man, the key to

Hannah Arendt, Non-Jewish Jew

This chapter traces the origins of my affiliation with Arendt’s work that traces back to the early 1980s, when the Nietszchean/Heideggerian philosopher David Farrell Krell and I, having driven down to Todtnauberg in the Black Forest to visit the cabin where Heidegger did his late writing, informed me of Heidegger’s love affair with his young Jewish student Hannah Arendt. On returning to the United States, I plunged into her writing and that of the scholars who had represented Arendt as a political scientist engaged in the Habermasian question of the polis. In reading these accounts of Arendt’s thought, I found little reference to her life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany nor to her abiding interest in the question of Palestine, which she had written a lot about. It was this scholarly suppression of Arendt’s fraught personal life that instigated my will to put back into play—contrapuntally—these suppressed aspects of her life and works.

A “Mad Generosity”

The great American novelist John Gardner became my Binghamton colleague for two years between 1980 and 1982. At first, he and I kept our distance because I had found his criticism of the American postmodern novel perverse, and he, my commitment to postmodernism equally perverse. But because our young partners became close friends, we were reluctantly thrown together. This took the form of frequent weekend visits to their farmhouse in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, immediately south of the New York State border. During those visits the initial distance between us collapsed into a close friendship, one characterized by a loving strife in which the previous binarist labels—Apollo/Dionysus, Modernist/Postmodernist—no longer applied. What was especially revelatory was how deep I found that ambiguity to lie in John’s very being when I read Mickelsson’s Ghosts after his horrific death in a motorcycle accident between Susquehanna and Binghamton.

On the Place on Excrement

Similarly I found W. B. Yeats, another modern poet celebrated by the New Critics as an exponent of the worldless autotelic poem, to be profoundly committed to this finite world—and to the related cause of Irish independence from British colonial rule. This was not only the case with Yeats’s late poems, where it is apparent; it is also the case with the poems emanating from his “Phases of the Moon,” system, which, in reading them contrapuntally, I found to be a device intended paradoxically to undermine the Modernist obsession with myth by rendering it inoperative. A closer reading than that of the New Critics was even true of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the “autotelic poem” par excellence, where the poet, in the very act of begging to be taken into the “artifice of eternity,” celebrates the dying body to which he is inexorably attached.