Posthumanities and Post-textualities: reading The Raw Shark Texts and Woman's WorldWurth, Kiene Brillenburg
2011 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1265447
This essay explores how and why the "old" medium of paper has come to function as the matter of a "new" posthuman subjectivity in contemporary fiction (since 2005). Paper, paper-based writing, and the book have long been involved in the cultural construction of "humanness" and human consciousness. Some critics see the ascendancy of electronic media as the inevitable downfall of this culture of "humanness," but experimental trends in recent fiction precisely point to an implication of paper matter in the construction of a subjectivity beyond the space of interiority and authenticity associated with a "human" selfhood. Selfhood, like text, here becomes assemblage: an assemblage of borrowed words. Focusing on Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts and Graham Rawle's Woman's World , I show how writing, text, and self are inextricably intertwined, and how this reinvigorates the contemporaneousness of the novel in the digital age.
Lines and Crimes of Demarcation: Mathematizing nature in Heidegger, Pynchon, and KehlmannIreton, Sean
2011 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1265456
In his bestselling novel from 2005, Die Vermessung der Welt ( Measuring the World ), Daniel Kehlmann brings together the explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in an effort to show that the scientific progress preached by the Enlightenment is a double-edged sword. Hence the double entendre of the title: Humboldt's and Gauss's "surveying" ( Vermessung ) enterprises typify human "arrogance" ( Vermessenheit ) toward nature. The ideas presented in Kehlmann's book were no doubt influenced by Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997), a metafictional history in which the Mason and Dixon survey is represented as a rationalist endeavor that transforms the primitive American landscape into an organized grid of human control. Both authors are critiquing, from a postmodern vantage, eighteenth-century instrumental reason, which manifests itself in the urge to measure, chart, and demarcate the world. At various points in his narrative, Pynchon sums up this basic anthropocentric view as mathesis , a term that recalls the early modern scientific project of mathesis universalis or the attempt to "mathematize" nature. According to Heidegger, mathesis, which sums up our modern technological attitude toward the world, developed as a result of Galilean geometry, Newtonian science, and Cartesian philosophy, all of which conceptualize reality according to purely speculative mathematical laws. This article brings Heidegger, Pynchon, and Kehlmann into dialogue with one another in an effort to show how they each critique, in remarkably similar fashion, the conceptual as well as physical lines of demarcation that mathesis inflicts upon the world.
Dialogues across the Continent: The Influence of Czeslaw Milosz on Seamus HeaneyKay, Magdalena
2011 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1265465
This article analyzes the influence of Polish poet Czes aw Mi osz on Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney in reference to two poems — Mi osz's biographical, ethically self-critical "Bypassing Rue Descartes" and Heaney's ethical allegory "From the Republic of Conscience" — which serve as case studies to elucidate the way in which Milosz's poetic changes as it travels westward and influences Heaney's volume The Haw Lantern (1987). Heaney's experiments with the parable form, and his corollary desire to bring the "aerated" language of abstractions into a poetry based on concrete experience, are conducted under the aegis of Mi osz, his "Master." These experiments are not historically neutral, and the political dimension of Mi osz's poetic meditation is not lost upon Heaney, whose own desire is to forge a poetic more de-materialized than that of his previous volumes North (1975) and Field Work (1979). His view of Mi osz, however, is affected by associations against which Mi osz himself rebels. Most notable for this comparison is Mi osz's insistence that "noble feelings" are dangerous for literature and — in spite of his avowed anti-Romanticism — his bardic aura. Heaney's experience with Mi osz must be seen in the cultural context with which each poet was associated and in the context of Heaney's desire at the time to attune himself to Eastern European poetry in general and to his "Master" in particular. This article first situates Heaney's encounter with Mi osz in literary-historical and biographical space, then closely compares the two poems at hand, and, finally, considers the sort of transnational reading strategy that these poems demand.
Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and the "Anti-Ocular" Turn in Continental Philosophy and Critical TheoryJanus, Adrienne
2011 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1265474
This essay analyzes Jean-Luc Nancy's recent work À L'Écoute (2002)/ Listening (2007) as a culminating moment in what might be called the "anti-ocular" turn in Continental philosophy. It situates Nancy within a genealogy of "otocentric" thinkers that includes Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, Jacques Attali, Didier Anzieu, and Luce Irigary. These figures not only present a critique of vision as the dominant paradigm in Western thought, but also develop a positive alternative model of listening that offers the possibility of reintegrating modes of sensual perception excluded by "ocularcentrism" and the conceptual abstraction associated with it. As exemplified by Martin Jay's otherwise admirable "synoptic survey" of "anti-ocularcentric" discourse in twentieth-century French thought, however, the importation and translation of these "otocentric" figures into the field of Anglophone critical theory — when they are acknowledged at all — tends to allow the visual paradigm to reassert itself, if only as the object of endless deconstructive critique.
Suturing the Wound: Derrida's "on Forgiveness" and Schlink's The ReaderWorthington, Kim L.
2011 Comparative Literature
doi: 10.1215/00104124-1265484
This essay urges a reconsideration of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and the familiar, if far from transparent, moral terminology of his admirers and detractors alike. It focuses on conceptions of forgiveness in particular, considering these through the lens of Jacques Derrida's essay "On Forgiveness"/"Le Siècle et le Pardon." Derrida concedes his is a "mad" conception of forgiveness: "what there is to forgive must be, and must remain, unforgivable — such is the logical aporia." He argues that losing sight of the impossible absolute (forgiveness that forgives the unforgivable) opens the rhetoric of "ordinary" forgiveness to personal and political abuse, to hypocrisy and calculation. Forgiveness might suture a wound, enabling healing and reconciliation, but its closure also ushers in, if not forgetting, an attenuation or weakening of the suffering of victims of unforgiveable crime and the silencing or appropriation of their voices. Contra critics who argue that Schlink offers an exculpatory, because explanatory, portrayal of his Nazi protagonist and second-generation German narrator, I argue that The Reader exposes the potential for abuse that characterizes the rhetoric of "ordinary" forgiveness. Schlink does not excuse his Nazi perpetrator or invite forgiveness of her, but rather portrays a narrator invested — personally and politically — in the process of exculpation. Reading The Reader alongside Derrida's essay enables reexamination of critical responses to the novel, invites consideration of the invested nature of forgiveness and the "work of mourning" that is reconciliation, and points us towards a better understanding of Derrida's conception of "pure" forgiveness, possible (only) as impossible.