Two Sides of the Same Coin? Form, Matter, and Secrecy in Derrida, de Man, and Borges

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Dove
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
De Man ◽  
Two Sides

Chapter 5 challenges the automatic association between deconstruction and the work of Derrida by turning to the critical legacy of Paul de Man in Latin American literary studies. Dove evaluates Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous opus magnum through competing theoretical accounts of allegory taken from Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson. Bolaño’s novel both alludes to a Jamesonian notion of “national allegory” and performs its exhaustion in the time of neoliberal-administered globalization. In that light, Dove asks what the accounts of allegory found in de Man might still have to say to us today: Can de Man’s account of allegory as narrative postulation or performance of a radical anteriority help to understand how Bolaño’s novel shapes an idea of time that serves as an alternative to modern conceptualizations of historical time?

scholarly journals Humanities at the Periphery. The Return to Philology and the Importance of Literary Studies

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-36
Author(s):  
Tvrtko Vuković
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Society ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
The West ◽  
Humanistic Knowledge ◽  
De Man

The first chapter of the paper summarizes the devaluation process of the humanistic values that has begun in the West a few decades ago. The question is why and how the so-called knowledge societies marginalize humanistic knowledge. The second, third, and fourth chapters are the proposal of the mission of the humanities today: pushed out to society’s periphery, the humanities have the task of preserving skills, experiences, and knowledge that so-called knowledge society considers needless. Thereby, the paper advocates the importance of returning to philology, as Paul de Man puts it in his article Return to Philology, and tries to show the extent to which philology, ceasing to be national, becomes a communal, political and ethical force.

On the Use and Abuse of Rhetoric in Composition and Theory

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-59
Author(s):  
Jason Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Composition Studies ◽  
Kenneth Burke ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
De Man

This chapter examines how “rhetoric” has been defined and used in different fields within the discipline of English. It examines the writings of two key figures—Paul de Man and Kenneth Burke— who have used rhetoric to underwrite their critical projects. Analyzing de Man and Burke’s respective works illuminates a shared investment in the rhetorical concept of agonism; their shared focus on agonism allows us to think beyond a familiar disciplinary narrative where literary studies’ investment in rhetoric is limited to tropes and figures while composition studies’ investment in rhetoric is limited to persuasion. De Man and Burke’s shared focus on agonism illustrates the discipline’s understanding of criticism as an “unending conversation,” a fact that ultimately complicates any clear divisions between fields within the discipline of English.

scholarly journals Jorge Luis Borges’s Partial Argentine Ulysses: A Foundational (Mis-)Translation

2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Waisman
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Argentine Literature ◽  
Modernist Novel ◽  
1001 Nights ◽  
Latin American Literatures ◽  
De Man

Abstract In this article, I first introduce the deconstructionist idea of the error (drawn primarily from Paul de Man) as a potentially productive category, then combine this idea with what I call Borges’s theory of mis-translation, to analyze the foundational role of (mis-)translation in Argentine literature, focusing specifically on Borges’s 1925 version of the last page of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I go on to discuss Borges’s theory of mis-translation and its importance within an Argentine as well as a transnational context. In essays such as “Las versiones homéricas” [The Homeric Versions] and “Los traductores de Las 1001 Noches” [The Translators of The 1001 Nights], Borges posits that translations are not necessarily inferior to originals, and that a translation’s merits may actually reside in its creative infidelities. After delineating Borges’s irreverent position on translation, I carefully analyze Borges’s 1925 translation of the last page of Joyce’s Ulysses, to examine how Borges uses (mis-)translation to create a partial Argentine version of Joyce’s Modernist novel, which serves, among other things, a paradoxical foundational role in Argentine and Latin American literatures.

The Two Cultures of English

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Composition Studies ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Organizational Patterns ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
De Man

The Two Cultures of English examines the academic discipline of English in the final decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium. During this period, longstanding organizational patterns within the discipline were disrupted. With the introduction of French theory into the American academy in the 1960s and 1970s, both literary studies and composition studies experienced a significant reorientation. The introduction of theory into English Studies not only intensified existing tensions between those in literature and those in composition but also produced commonalities among colleagues that had not previously existed. As a result, the various fields within English began to share an increasing number of assumptions at the same time that institutional conflicts between literary studies and composition studies became more intense than ever before. Through careful reconsiderations of some of the key figures that helped shape (and were shaped by) this new landscape—including Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, James Berlin, Susan Miller, John Guillory, and Bruno Latour—the book offers a more comprehensive map of the discipline than one would find from histories on either side of the literature/composition divide.

The voices of Paul de Man

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-195
Author(s):  
Mark Currie
Keyword(s):  
Layered Structure ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
The Status ◽  
De Man ◽  
The Impact

This article argues that analysis of fictional point of view, especially through the effects of speech act categories, has important implications for the analysis of non-fictional discourse. It takes Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading as its example and demonstrates that a multi-layered structure of different voices and personalities creates an untheorised confusion between a text and its reading: a confusion which is seen as a key factor in the impact of deconstruction in literary studies. It examines the status of the metalingual propositions which de Man formulates in this mode as the allegorical meanings of literary texts, and claims that the critique of reference assembled by these readings is subverted by the movements in point of view in the argument.

Aesthetic Dilemmas of Adaptation and the Politics of Subjectivity: Animating the Chinese ClassicJourney to the West

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengcheng You
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
The West ◽  
The Real ◽  
Quest For Meaning ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Canonical Text ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Monkey King

This article reviews four major Chinese animated adaptations based on the classic Journey to the West. It shows how these adaptations, spanning four historical phases of modern China, encapsulate changes in Chinese national identity. Close readings underpin a developmental narrative about how Chinese animated adaptations of this canonical text strive to negotiate the multimodal expressions of homegrown folklore traditions, technical influences of western animation, and domestic political situations across time. This process has identified aesthetic dilemmas around adaptations that oscillate between national allegory and individual destiny, verisimilitude and the fantastic quest for meaning. In particular, the subjectivisation of Monkey King on the screen, embodying the transition from primitivistic impulse, youthful idealism and mature practicality up to responsible stewardship, presents how an iconic national figure encapsulates the real historical time of China.

Double Thoughts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
De Man ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Coetzee’s interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature and philosophy is most evident in later fictions such as Elizabeth Costello. But as Andrew Dean argues in this chapter, this interest in moving across boundaries in fact originates much earlier, in Coetzee’s quarrel with the institutions and procedures of literary criticism. Coetzee used the occasion of his inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Cape Town (Truth and Autobiography) to criticize the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which literary texts are themselves blind. Influenced in part by such figures as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Coetzee posed a series of challenging questions about the desires at stake in the enterprise of literary criticism. Developing these thoughts, Dean explores the way in which Coetzee’s earlier fiction, including such texts as Foe (1986), is energized by its quarrelsome relationship with literary criticism and theory, especially postcolonial theory.

A great convergence: The American frontier and the origins of Japanese migration to Brazil

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sidney Xu Lu
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
The Us ◽  
Two Sides

Abstract This article explains how the US westward expansion influenced and stimulated Japanese migration to Brazil. Emerging in the nineteenth century as expanding powers in East Asia and Latin America, respectively, both Meiji Japan and post-independence Brazil looked to the US westward expansion as a central reference for their own processes of settler colonialism. The convergence of Japan and Brazil in their imitation of US settler colonialism eventually brought the two sides together at the turn of the twentieth century to negotiate for the start of Japanese migration to Brazil. This article challenges the current understanding of Japanese migration to Brazil, conventionally regarded as a topic of Latin American ethnic studies, by placing it in the context of settler colonialism in both Japanese and Brazilian histories. The study also explores the shared experiences of East Asia and Latin America as they felt the global impact of the American westward expansion.

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