Deconstruction, Walt Whitman, and the Purpose of Literary Education

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-75
Author(s):  
Anton Pokrivčák
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Walt Whitman ◽  
First Century ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
De Man

AbstractThe article explores the purpose of literary theory, and, consequently, literary education at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It first discusses some of the ideas of Paul de Man for whom literary scholarship is challenged by the incompatibility between the nature of the object of literary theory and the methods used to analyse it. Then the author briefly traces some other ideas regarding the nature of literature and their reflection in establishing the purpose of literary education. A particular emphasis is paid to a re-evaluation of the universality of Walt Whitman´s message, as expressed in his “Song of Myself,” under the circumstances of contemporary ideological and cultural struggles.

To Become What One Is

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 251-263
Author(s):  
Lindsay Waters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
English Language ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
De Man ◽  
Power Central

In the twentieth century, criticism flourished in the academy in the English language from the 1930s to the 1960s, but gradually a hyperprofessionalized discourse purporting to be criticism took its place. The problem was exacerbated because people misunderstand literary theory thinking it superior to criticism. Big mistake. Theory proper begins its life as criticism, criticism that has staying power. Central to criticism as Kant argued is judgment. Judgment is based on feeling provoked by the artwork in our encounters with artworks. This essay talks about the author’s encounter with Mary Gaitskill’s novel Veronica. The critical judgment puts the artwork into a milieu. This essay argues the case for the holism of critical judgments versus what the author calls Bitsiness as Usual, the fragmentation of our understanding of our encounters with artworks. The author subjects both Paul de Man and the New Historicists to severe attacks.

The Return to/of Theory

differences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-96
Author(s):  
Kamelia Spassova
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
De Man ◽  
Dominant Part

In his paper “The Return to Philology,” Paul de Man insists that philology and theory should not be in conflict, but should, rather, mutually enhance one another. This claim that the turn to theory is also a return to philology is explored in the context of the structure of language. In the last twenty to twenty-five years, the return to philology has been a dominant part of the Anglo-Saxon discourse of “world literature,” which has turned away from theory. The return to philology is captured in a market-based adaptation of literature in terms of globalization, transnationalism, and translation. In his latest book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory (2019), Galin Tihanov recalls the legacy of classical literary theory and propounds the contemporary discourse of world literature as an unreflected continuation of this legacy as it was articulated in Viktor Shklovsky’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s approaches to literature beyond language. Turning this legacy on its head, this essay focuses, rather, on language in literature. In a short-circuiting way, Roman Jakobson’s linguistics and poetics and Erich Auerbach’s nonnational-based philology can be seen as surprisingly close to one another.

scholarly journals Introduction

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
James Zeigler
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
White Teeth

This introduction to the first of two special issues on “Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women” describes the investigation of feminist literary maximalism. A summary and critical response to James Wood's influential negative review of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, the introduction objects to his designation “hysterical realism” to characterize Smith's and other writer's publishing novels in the genre that literary scholarship has called encyclopedic, systems, maximalist, mega, and novels of information. The current debate in literary studies over the methods of postcritique and critique is referenced in order to recommend the issue's articles as models of an intermediate approach: generous reading. Described as an affirmative mode of interpretation that matches the tenor of postcritique, generous reading retains the central importance of critique by attending to the ways in which texts enact critique through the resources of literary form. Generous reading interprets novels as critique. The final section presents summaries of each article's argument about exemplary big, ambitious novels.

Writ in Water: Far Tortuga and the Crisis of the Marine Environment

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Brayton
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Marine Environment ◽  
Polar Bear ◽  
Salt Water ◽  
First Century ◽  
Mental Maps ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Do So

ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE HAUNTS THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, OUR MENTAL MAPS OF SHRINKING RAINFORESTS MATCHED BY images of melting icecaps and dying polar bear cubs. As the thawing tundra releases an amplifying store of methane, the goal of Bill McKibben's 350.org, to reduce carbon in the earth's atmosphere to 350 parts per million, seems wildly optimistic.1 So, too, does much of the discourse of sustainability. How can humans depend on the biosphere's capacity to regenerate, having already destroyed entire ecosystems and caused countless extinctions and continuing to do so at an accelerating rate? Isn't it already too late? What tends to get lost in the linked discourses of climate change and sustainability is the rising seawater—salt water, the stuff that covers seventy percent of the planet's surface. If the ocean, as Christopher Connery claims, “has long functioned as Western capitalism's primary myth element” (686), then literary scholarship engaged with the discourse of sustainability should reexamine narratives of oceanic catastrophe.

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