CONVENIENT COSMOPOLITANISM:DANIEL DERONDA, NATIONALISM, AND THE CRITICS

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-614
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Stević
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ethnic Nationalism ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Radical Shift

The specter of cosmopolitanismhauntsDaniel Deronda. In a curious reversal of critical fortune, the novel condemned by many of its initial reviewers for dabbling into obscure mystical doctrines and for pontificating far too explicitly about the significance of narrow loyalties and local attachments has recently come to embody a scrupulous investigation of cosmopolitan ethics. The sources of this radical shift in the understanding ofDaniel Deronda’s politics are theoretical as much as they are interpretative. For some time now, humanistic scholarship has been simultaneously attracted to cosmopolitanism and embarrassed by it: while we continue to be drawn to cosmopolitanism as an ideological project invested in overcoming tribal loyalties and in celebrating the encounter with the other, we are also resistant to its universalizing logic which we often see as complicit with the hegemonic tendencies variously present in the intellectual legacy of the European Enlightenment and in contemporary global capitalism. Faced with this tension, several influential scholars –– most notably Amanda Anderson and Kwame Anthony Appiah –– have turned toDaniel Derondaas an example of a cosmopolitanism free of pernicious hegemonic connotations, a cosmopolitanism understood as a commitment to open exchange between nations and races, rather than as the erasure of all cultural difference. In doing so they have, however, simultaneously overextended the concept of cosmopolitanism, rendering it very nearly meaningless, and misjudged the politics of Eliot's novel, overlooking its deep commitment to the logic of ethnic nationalism. In this essay I wish to use what I take to be the dual failure — interpretative and theoretical — of recent readings ofDaniel Derondain order to reexamine both the politics of Eliot's late writings and the ways in which we use the concept of cosmopolitanism in our critical practice. I will argue, first, that thecosmopolitan Deronda, constructed in a series of influential interpretations over the past two decades, is a specter, an apparition. This phantom, as we shall see, was constructed due to an unusual alignment between the desire to dissociate the great Victorian moralist that was George Eliot from the charge of slipping into narrow nationalist worldview and the desire to recuperate a non-hegemonic vision of cosmopolitanism. Second, I will argue that the novel's much discussed marginalization of Gwendolen Harleth in favor of Daniel Deronda's nationalist mission does not constitute simply a rejection of an egotistical heroine in the name of higher duties, but rather a decisive moment in Eliot's late career and in the history of Victorian fiction: by unequivocally favoring the hero's nationalist commitments over the heroine's private struggles, George Eliot has also rejected the private sphere which has traditionally preoccupied nineteenth-century fiction, in favor of the fantasies of collective destiny. Before analyzing the full implications of this shift, however, I will outline in more detail the interpretative history in which this essay intervenes.

Camus's Absurd and the World of Melville's Confidence-Man

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer
Keyword(s):  
Careful Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Ugly Duckling ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”

The Diaspora of the Novel

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.

Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

scholarly journals Two crossbows and a carbine: Out of the commentary on A.N. and B.N. Strugatsky’s novel “Hard to be a God”

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-58
Author(s):  
Irina N. Arzamastseva ◽  
Alexander V. Kuznetsov
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sea Monster ◽  
Intertextual Connections

The article is devoted to the study of the functions of the characters’ weapons in A.N. and B.N. Strugatsky’s novel “Hard to be a God”. It is important for writing a commentary on the prologue of the novel. The authors used the historical-typological and mythopoetic research methods. As the result of reviewing the history of words-concepts, as it made by A.N. Veselovsky, the authors managed to study the intertextual connections of “Hard to be a God” with V.T. Shalamov’s poem “Crossbow” and his story “May”, as well as N.S. Gumilev’s poem “Just looks through the cliffs...” and E. Hemingway’s play “The fifth column”. Through these connections, the image of weapons is formed in the work of science fiction writers. It is necessary to destruct the mythological enemy – the sea monster, which symbolizes the social evil within the novel framework. As we have found out, the reason for such an intricate symbolism lies in the peculiarities of the age: the image of the sea monster standing for public evil is due to historical reasons. And since the elimination of social problems by such radical methods, according to the authors, is impossible, the movement towards a bright future should be only gradual and peaceful. As in reality, weapons are fundamentally unable to perform their task. Moreover, the weapon is dangerous for its owner, which indicates the ambivalence of the image. In addition, the comparison, important for the novel “Hard to be God”, of the past and future appears the first in the comparison of crossbows and carbines, further developing by other means. Weapons are involved in creating a number of important motives: doom, the danger of using force, and interference in the course of history.

scholarly journals Restoration of the Self through History and Myth in Lina Kostenko’s “Marusia Churai”

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-45
Author(s):  
Myroslava Tomorug-Znaienko
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Unique Individual

The paper analyzes Lina Kostenko’s historical novel in verse portraying the life of the 17th century  Ukrainian minstrel poet Marusia Churai, condemned to death for poisoning her faithless lover. This work, which grows out of Kostenko’s individualized mythical perception of Marusia Churai legend, represents a unique individual construct in which the heroines’ quest for self-realization is kept in tune with the same yearning of the poetess herself; the author’s attitude towards the myth resembles the heroine’s relations with history. The narrative mode of the novel functions mainly in three aspects; these are the heroine’s confrontation with the carnivalized reality of her trial; her subjective journey inward, into the  ruined self, when her execution was pending; and her objective pilgrimage outward, into the history of her ruined land, after getting pardon. The paper touches upon various aspects of the heroine’s perception of history. The main character is depicted as a witness of contemporary events and a bearer of the Word who keeps harmony with the sacred truth of the past. The Hetman’s ‘pardon’ allows Marusia to move freely through history in order to achieve a deeper understanding of her ruined land and seize its spirit. In the experience of the heroine the historical reality appears as versatile and polyphonic, at the same time remaining integral and inseparable from her personality. Kostenko asserts the rights of poets to create their own epochs, to recreate the past or present from within their own mythical experience, becoming thus not only myth-bearers but also mythmakers.

History’s Second-Hand Bookshop

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Lecourt
Keyword(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
The Past ◽  
Racial History ◽  
Spanish Gypsy

This chapter argues that George Eliot too conflated religion with race as a resource for secular individualism, but also that she thought more deeply about what consequences this move held for a major liberal keyword: reading. Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and Daniel Deronda (1876) both stage a character’s recuperation of ethnic inheritance (Gypsy and Jewish, respectively) but only in Deronda does this recuperation successfully yield a many-sided individuality. This is because, as Eliot sees it, Judaism’s scriptural dimension allows one to fashion an idiosyncratic relationship to its racial history. Yet this valorization of scripture as the site at which one can personalize one’s relationship to tradition also runs up against Eliot’s long-standing wariness toward Protestant private interpretation—a fact that Deronda tries to get around by evaluating characters, not according to how well they interpret texts, but by how they relate to books as material metonyms of the past.

Chivalric Romance and Novella Collections

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Moore
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chivalric Romance

This chapter argues that the sixteenth-century novella collection and chivalric romance have much in common. However, their length, status as translations, and multiple authorships have rendered their comparison difficult and have limited their role in studies of pre-novelistic fiction until relatively recently. The chapter characterizes their relationship as ‘rhetorical’, because consideration of the two genres has long been dictated by their staged opposition in the traditional, dualistic narrative of the novel's origin. This narrative imagines a struggle between the past-ness and absurdities of romance and the present-ness and realism of the novel as anticipated in the early modern novella and the closely related picaresque tale. Hence, they possess an interlocking yet uncomfortable — even antagonistic — rhetorical relationship in the literary history of the novel in English.

THE RELIC AND THE RUIN: EQUIVOCAL OBJECTS AND THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST INDANIEL DERONDA

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 855-874 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priyanka Anne Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Daniel Deronda ◽  
The Past ◽  
Right Hand

Early in George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda, Daniel's life is set on a decisive new path by his fleeting attraction to an object in a shop window. He is turning into a side street off Holburn Road when:his attention was caught by some fine old clasps in chased silver displayed in the window at his right hand. His first thought was that [his aunt] Lady Mallinger, who had a strictly Protestant taste for such Catholic spoils, might like to have these missal-clasps turned into a bracelet; then his eyes travelled over the other contents of the window, and he saw that the shop was that kind of pawnbroker's where the lead is given to jewellery, lace, and all equivocal objects introduced asbric-a-brac. A placard in one corner announced –Watches and Jewellery exchanged and repaired. (344; bk. 4, ch. 6)Daniel then moves across the street to avoid the shopkeeper, and it is only from this new vantage point that he notices the name “Ezra Cohen” above the window – the name he's been seeking while wandering Jewish neighborhoods in London in the hopes of reuniting his protégée Mirah with her family. He will return to the pawnshop later and become acquainted with the Cohens, eventually finding through them his mentor and Mirah's actual brother, Mordecai. Although some discussion of the silver clasps ensues, they are neither purchased nor used in the space of the novel. Still, this seemingly inconsequential trinket proves to have a long history, one that raises questions about the lingering remains of the past, the equivocality of the object, and the dispossessions that hauntDaniel Deronda.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Sander Verhaegh
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Analytic Tradition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Naturalistic Approach ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Radical Shift

During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a “naturalistic” approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. This chapter sketches the history of naturalism, distinguishes between different types of naturalism, and shows that contemporary naturalists in the analytic tradition typically view Quine as the intellectual father of their position. Furthermore, this chapter introduces Quine’s naturalism and examines the status of contemporary Quine scholarship, arguing that although many excellent papers have been written about Quine’s philosophy, little work has been devoted to reconstructing Quine’s naturalism and/or its historical development. The chapter ends with an overview of the structure of the book.

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