The Ends of History: Response from Justine Murison

Monday, February 20, 2012

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Federal troops occupying line of breastworks on the north bank of the North Anna River in Virgina (1864)
[This post from Justine Murison (English) is the last in our series of comments from the closing roundtable at the Unit's February 10 Ends of History symposium.]

Written by Justine Murison (English)

The title of this conference offers the chance for linguistic play around the word "ends": is this the ending of history and/or historicism? Or are we discussing the aims of historicism? In other words, are we marking a periodization in which literary scholars "end" being "historicists"? Or are we declaring a proliferation of the methodological goals of historicist literary scholarship? As is often the case, all of the above, if not more. But let me consider this question more narrowly by qualifying what we mean by "historicism" since it seems to me that we are here, in part, to mourn the passing of the "New Historicism," a name given to the method somewhat haphazardly and that nobody seemed to like.

On the one hand, we live in the post-New Historicist era, in which the traditional methods of the New Historicism (that is, anecdote, juxtaposition, and a constrained synchronic archive) can no longer respond adequately to the weight of evidence produced by the proliferation and accessibility of digital archives. Nor have these critical maneuvers survived the other major shift, arguably born out of the historical turn and digitization, toward book history, print culture, and bibliography. The new capacities for searching and analyzing data provided by the work of digital humanities has put increased pressure on how we assemble an archive and what we do with it. On the other hand, the recent turn to such modes of analysis like Heather Love’s revival of description and observation, Best and Marcus’s invitation to "surface reading," or Rita Felski’s calls for new formalist strategies all seem to follow from the deconstructive logic of New Historicism, in which historicist research is inevitably incapable of a complete and totalizing summary of the text and thus the world. The "ends" of history seem therefore also to express the limitations of ideological critique and utopian aspirations in criticism. While the scale of the archive seems to stretch ever wider, the scale of the claims about that archive modestly shrinks.

We face a twinned question about the scale of evidence and the purpose of accruing that evidence, and I would submit then that our question is as much existential as it is methodological. What is the purpose of literary study itself at this moment in time, post-9/11 and Iraq, in an era of global warming skepticism and economic collapse? In other words, we are talking about a historical shift in the history of literary criticism. As Eve Sedgwick and Bruno Latour suggest in distinct but complementary ways, we came to the past decade armed with subtle critiques of the invisible machinations of power in liberalism only to be surprised by the very overt, visible, and spectacular methods of power in the War on Terror or, conversely, how the Arab Spring united traditional protest (that is, bodies on the line) with the networking capabilities of new technologies.

If what we are marking in this conference is the end of an era of literary method, I would like to briefly sketch the other "ends" that our renewed interests make visible and also possible, fully cognizant that in doing so I seek to proliferate historical narratives rather than to set them aside. Curiously, these lines of inquiry seem, at first blush, to be paradoxical. They are roughly in affect and phenomenology, on the one hand, and the vast scale of quantification, on the other hand. To be sure, what connects these methods is a renewed sense of what we mean by "materialism." The first method recognizes that our responses, reactions, emotions, and very bodies have a material life inextricable from the texts we assign and interpret, responses that may not be "deep" in the psychoanalytic sense but are nonetheless material and meaningful. In turn, new methods of quantification expressly respond to a scale of evidence that risks becoming so wide that it demands a seemingly opposite perspective: that is, counting, graphing, mapping, and other presentations of data advocated by Franco Moretti. We might thus consider these methods as reflecting (and, arguably, in contention with) not a smoothly functioning liberalism but its inversion in modern warfare in which the fragility of the body’s and brain’s surface and integrity have become as intensely scrutinized as the "distance" of drone attacks.

The question, then, might ultimately be ethical, as Stephen Best suggested in his talk this morning: how to maintain a sense of the urgencies, sensitivities, and, above all, limitations at both ends of these scales. This is the quandary expressed, for instance, in Herman Melville’s and Walt Whitman’s reactions to the Civil War. Rather than running from quantification and trying to embrace the "depth" of meaning of the dead, both instead try to account for the different scales of modern warfare through lyric, lists, and numbers. Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War marries the material bodies of soldiers and the physical destruction of the war to quantifications of both by annotating his poems with statistical and factual information. Shifting from lyrical to numerical, from poem to endnote, Melville attaches the two inextricably together but recognizes that they are not synonymous, just as Whitman would in enumerating the war dead through statistics that end with lyrical prose like "the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead— [. . .] ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)." Whitman certainly evokes the "melancholic subject" of history; Melville, however, does not. In his poem, "Shiloh," Melville instead finds a way to express within the poem itself the cumulative effect of moving from lyric to quantification, elsewhere separated in the book. He does so in his remarkable parenthetical aside that distinguishes the temporal break before and after battle: "(What like a bullet can undeceive!)" This line suggests not simply the loss of ideological innocence, or the unveiling of the materiality of that ideology. Instead, it evokes both simultaneously. In fact, it is both a shout and a secret: it appears in parentheses but ends with an exclamation point. It announces and hides, unveils and recovers.

A shout and a secret: in the materialisms we turn to now we contend with what seems overwhelmingly manifest and obvious in the weight of evidentiary expectations, but we are also grappling with the obscured ethical responsibility that evidence entails. This may well be the connecting thread in this reconsideration of history and method across the literary disciplines – that it is a response, ultimately, to the ethical constraints of our scholarly relation to the material world. Read more

The Ends of History: Response from Patrick Bray

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

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Honoré de Balzac by Louis-Auguste Bisson, 1842.
[On February 10, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society for a symposium, The Ends of History. Below are remarks from Patrick Bray, assistant professor of French at the University of Illinois, delivered as part of the symposium's closing roundtable. Prof. Bray's is the second of several responses we hope to publish.]

Written by Patrick Bray (French)

My current book project looks at how the novel, since the birth of the modern concept of literature around 1800, is incapable of incorporating a coherent theory, or a theory of itself, within the text. When a theory is included in a novel, it must obey aesthetic concerns – its relationship to the “outside” of the text is secondary. To take a famous example, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time contains hundreds of “theories” formulated for the most part by the narrator. But the narrator himself is a character who changes over the course of the novel from a boy to a depressed hypochondriac to a writer. How do we assess the validity of any of the novel’s theories when the fictional text itself is unstable?

For the five minutes or so I have today, I’d like to bring up a novel I’m reading at the moment, Balzac’s 1831 The Wild Ass’s Skin, or La peau de chagrin. This is Balzac’s first realist novel – it depicts the political disappointment of the failed revolution of July 1830 and a society that has been corrupted not only by money but by a disconnect between words and deeds. Obviously this is a situation very foreign to all of us. What has always struck me about the novel is that the title character, if you will, is a magic talisman from the Orient. How do you have a credible realist novel that depends so much on a magic skin granting the hero whatever he wishes in return for some of his life force? For the old man who gives the hero the talisman, it represents the mysterious but necessary link between power, knowledge, and desire (Foucault avant la lettre) – in other words it is a fiction that reveals to us how the world works.

In case this seems like too much of a stretch, too close of a reading, you only have to look at Balzac’s prologue where he says that writers have a “second sight” which he calls a sort of talisman that would let them see anything in the world as an inner vision. Close your eyes and travel the world with Balzac. Within the novel, every conceivable theory in every discipline is used to try to explain the magic ass’s skin, and each theory fails. My favorite scene is when three scientists in succession come up short and one of them destroys his lab trying to understand the physical properties of the talisman – I have a fantasy of seeing an MRI explode when a neuroscientist tries to measure the brainwaves of a subject reading Jane Austen.

The point of Balzac’s talisman is not whether it is real or not, what’s its origin might be, but rather what it does, what it allows us to see. By placing a thin slice of unreality within a realist description of Paris, Balzac shows us that the novel presents and then represents reality: it is both historically accurate and a product of the author and the reader’s desires. Scientists, historians, and other positivists who love to read “suspiciously” in order to track down the relationships between power and knowledge, should remember the other term in Balzac’s trilogy, “desire”. The talisman, like literature in general, acts as a concentric mirror, reflecting back at the reader a focused image of his or her own reading desire.

Balzac makes us aware of the complicity between scholarship and techniques of power. Balzac’s novel works because it resists theories, because it puts them to the test and reflects back at the reader her or his own reading desires. How does the push for more quantitative analysis of literary works by digital humanists, as well as the instrumentalization of foreign literature departments into language service departments, share the same managerial tools of control as globalization or neo-colonialism. Franco Moretti, in his influential book Graphs, Maps, and Trees calls literary studies “the most backwards discipline in the academy” and advocates “distant reading” as opposed to close reading (which seems to me like outsourcing reading to computers). I think that literature’s inability to incorporate theory has an effect on the literary scholar who must look outside the literary text in order to justify an argument.


"Reading Girl" by Gustav Adolph Hennig (German, 1797-1869) 
As Jonathan Culler has argued, “theory is work that succeeds in influencing thinking in fields other than those in which it originates” (3). The powerful, talismanic, tools given to us by computers, namely text mining and new forms of collaboration, may certainly lead to new ways of approaching literature as a social phenomenon. But we need to know what is so attractive about a distant or digital approach to reading. Where is the desire to draw graphs, make charts, and plot trajectories coming from? What is it that is so disturbing about close reading, as opposed to a safer, more visual, distant reading? In Les Mots et les choses, Foucault calls literature in the modern épistemè a “counter-discourse,” one that undermines all other scientific discourse. As I have tried to show with Balzac’s novel, the literary text reveals the gap between received knowledge and the impenetrability of the real. Without knowing how to read your own desire, the extra interpretive power provided by a computer, by a metric, is not very useful. As the hero realizes near the end of Balzac’s novel, “Le pouvoir nous laisse tels que nous sommes et ne grandit que les grands.” (276) ("power leaves us as we are and only magnifies the great”). 

In an age obsessed with genetic determinism and the quantification of all human activity, what we need most right now may be a little more close reading… Read more

The Ends of History: Lauren M. E. Goodlad's Opening Remarks

Monday, February 13, 2012

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[On February 10, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society for a symposium, The Ends of History. Published below are the symposium's opening remarks from Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Director of the Unit for Criticism.]

Welcome everyone to this February 2011 Winter symposium, a product of the Unit for Criticism’s ongoing partnership with Gordon Hutner, American Literary History, and the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society. For their invaluable support, I also want to thank the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Department of English, and the School of Literatures, Cultures, & Linguistics; I want to thank J. B. Capino, the Unit’s Nicholson Associate Director, for all of his support and the Unit’s Research Assistants, Mike Black and mc Anderson for their indispensable contribution to the organizing and publicizing of this event. I also thank the distinguished scholars who have gathered here today from campuses as far as UC Berkeley and as near as University of Illinois, Chicago; and the Illinois moderators and closing roundtablers who will be participating today. Not least of all I thank this wonderful audience for joining us this morning.

The last time I had the pleasure of convening a co-organized winter symposium with Gordon it was two years ago and the topic was serial television: in particular AMC’s Mad Men. Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, the collection of essays that grew out of that event is now in production with Duke University Press. It may seem to be a very different kind of topic, except of course that Mad Men is a show about history: American history, the history of the 60s, global history, feminist history, civil rights, and above all—as my co-editors Lilya Kaganovksy, Rob Rushing, and I argue in the introduction to the volume—the history of the present-day neoliberalism which we continue to inhabit today. Mad Men is also a formally interesting television text: highly aestheticist, and demonstrably—indeed, for some, addictively—serial. Whatever their particular engagements with past and present, when audiences engage serial forms, following storylines that develop slowly over time, part of what they experience is a kind of formal allegory of the actuality of living in history.

This is to say that forms and formalism are not, as has sometimes been postulated, antithetical to history and historicism. Rather, since form and history stand in relation to one another, formalist and historicist standpoints should occasion dialogue. In the months leading up to the organizing of this conference Gordon and I observed a number of critical questions pressing us to consider the relation of form and history: for example, Franco Moretti’s work on digital archives; Bruno Latour’s question of why critique has run out of steam; mounting interest in formal structures such as the web, matrix, network, or tree; Rita Felski’s ongoing critiques of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and Sharon Marcus’s and Stephen Best’s wonderfully stimulating special issue of Representations, "The Way We Read Now." The result was this symposium and the occasion to invite this veritable dream team of speakers all of whom are working at the cutting edge of this topic. I am really excited about this event.
 Read more

Forum on World Literature (V)

The Singularity of Literature

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

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Written by Harriet Murav, Slavic Languages and Literatures

This paper critiques Casanova and Moretti for linking nationalist historiography, canon, and close reading. Using my current work on the Yiddish author Dovid Bergelson (1896-1952) I argue that close reading can be attentive to various kinds of borderlands within a single literary language (the space between different idioms in a single language, the space between different languages, and the space between meaningful language and sheer sound). Yiddish, written right to left in Hebrew characters, uses a Germanic grammatical frame, has a significant element of Hebrew, Russian, Ukrainian and other Slavic languages, in addition to elements from Romance languages. The animation of heteroglossia, multivoicedness, both intralinguistic and interlinguistic, however, is not limited to Bergelson or to Yiddish, but can be found in most literary works.

The tension between the national, the comparative, and the global has already played out in slightly different terms in the former Soviet Union. Literature from the so-called national minorities was to be “national in form, socialist in content.” Socialism, of course, was to have been an international movement of the working people all over the globe; however, “socialist” turned out to mean what the Central Committee of the Communist Party said. As Khrushchev and others famously said, the people equals the party equals the leader. And in post-war Soviet Russia, the people also turned out to mean Russians, and not the national minorities of the Soviet Union. This fascinating slide along the slippery slope of the signifying chain is not the unique experience of the “evil empire.” Didn’t universality turn out to be limited to the particularities of Western Europe and North America? Having jettisoned “universal truths,” the new terminology of globality opens the door to some new form of exclusion.

Therefore not for the sake of a global or planetary literature, but for the sake of literature itself, what matters is not what or how much we read, but how. Attentiveness to the singularity of artistic literature in the first place and the singularity of a particular work are key. "Singularity" does not necessarily call up a unique national literary tradition. A work can be understood as singular in the way that it animates the borderlands that I mentioned earlier. It is not by marking a presence, but by leaving an absence, an incongruity, by re-marking in a second language what had been said in the previous language, leaving a trace on what has already been said, rather than claiming primacy, originality, or unique utterance. The metaphor of borderlands, evoking a space between, better captures attentiveness to multiple languages than the imperial metaphor of globality.

Close reading does not necessarily reinscribe literary scholarship within national historiographies. I am not convinced that, to paraphrase Casnova, it is the national habit of thought that creates the illusion of uniqueness. Close reading rests on the premise that the literary text is irreducible to socioeconomic, political, and psychoanalytic tools of inquiry; there is always some remainder of specific textuality that cannot be translated into other systems. "Art is made of devices," Viktor Shklovsky famously said, and by "devices" he included defamiliarization ("making it strange," prolonging perception and making difficult so that we do not simply recognize objects, but encounter them afresh). The Formalists and Structuralists shifted attention away from semantics to acoustics and grammar; Roman Jakobson talked about the way verbal art makes the sign palpable, quoting "Valery's view of poetry as 'hesitation between the sound and the sense." Even this superficial description shows that close readers are not necessarily associated with national historiography.

My sample close reading comes from my ongoing study of Bergelson's novel Nokh alemen (When All is Said and Done, 1913). Bergelson was born in Ukraine in 1884; he received a traditional Jewish education with a particular Hasidic twist; he started writing in Russian and Hebrew, but switched to Yiddish; he loved the Russian writer Chekhov and the French author Flaubert. Bergelson lived in Berlin in the 1920s, returning to Soviet Russia in 1933, and having been found guilty of nationalism, was shot on Stalin's orders on August 12, 1952. As a prose writer, Bergelson may be compared with Kafka, Joyce, and Babel.

The reading I present this evening uses Henri Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jakobson to explicate the text. Bergson describes consciousness as arising in the moment when an action cannot be performed mechanically because of some kind of obstacle. When the representation of an action is fulfilled immediately by the performance of the action there is no space, Bergson says, for consciousness. When, however, an obstacle thwarts action, a space opens up for consciousness to appear: "the obstacle creates nothing positive; it simply makes a void" (Bergson 144). Deleuze and Guatarri expand this notion of the void in their analysis of minor literature. "Deterritorialization" refers to an alternative space inside a dominant culture, "what a minority constructs in a major language"{Deleuze, 1986 #592 @ 19}. Deleuze and Guatarri privilege a non-referential use of language, a "void in sense" in which meaning is “neutralized" and the "subject of the enunciation" is effaced. Bergelson, working in Yiddish, is already writing in a minor language. It is therefore more appropriate to characterize his project as a double deterritorialization, because his language refuses the "national" ethnographic trend in literary Yiddish that had dominated until his own work was published.

Nokh alemen, When All is Said and Done, is about a young woman, Mirele, who cannot find herself in either the traditional Jewish world or in "modern" life, with its new opportunities. My focus, however, is not on the existential, socioeconomic, and political borderlands that the work depicts, but the linguistic ones. The singularity of When All Is Said and Done cannot be reduced to socio-economic conditions of 1913. What makes the work utterly unique is its use of deterritorialized language: language that operates in the borderland between languages and in the "void" between meaning and meaningless sounds.

In one scene, Mirele goes to visit her friend, a (Jewish) midwife who rents a room on the outskirts of the shtetl. The midwife starts to read aloud and translate from a book that a landowner's wife, a Catholic, had given her, Dicta Sapentium [Words of Wisdom] (the Yiddish text does not translate the Latin). The midwife:

explained to her verse after verse according to the translation 'Omnis felicitas mendacium est.' Both girls suddenly became like mourners [shivezitserns], and it seemed that they were reading to each other from the Book of Job Martin, 102;

ir eyn posek nokhn tsveytn loyt der iberzetsung fartaytsht: Omnis felicitas mendacium est ... Beyde meydlekh zaynen mitamol enlikh tsu shivezitserns gevorn, un gedukht hot zikh shoyn, az zey leyenen itst eyne far der tsveyter dem poske iov DB 138.

Although Bergelson refers to a translation of the passage from Dicta Sapentium, the passage "Omnis felicitas mendacium est (all happiness is false)," he does not provide a Yiddish translation of the Latin, but leaves the Latin in Latin characters in the midst of the Hebrew characters of his Yiddish. In this refusal of transparency, Bergelson foregrounds the irreducible graphical, acoustic, and semantic differences between languages, he leaves the space, or, the borderland between them just that, a borderland. His insistence on opacity marks the irreducible differences between languages just as it marks the irreducibility of his own art and the demand that it makes on readers to read closely.

A striking example of Bergelson's technique of the borderland between sense and non-sense comes in passage having to do with Passover, the spring holiday celebrating the exodus from Egypt. Passover requires a thorough cleaning of the house to remove all traces of leavened food products. Mirele lies in her bedroom listening to the sounds of the preparations, including her father's recitation of Hebrew prayers and the sounds coming from the stove in the kitchen:

And the sound of the little inner iron door moving quickly back and forth over the flame could be heard here [in Mirele's room]: pakh—pakh--pakh. ..pakh--pakh—pakh... pakh—pakh—pakh ...

Un gehert hot zikh aher, vi s'klopt dortn di inveynikste tshugene tirl, rirt zikh ibern flam, un tsit zikh geshvint ahin un tsurik: pakh—pakh--pakh. ..pakh--pakh—pakh... pakh—pakh—pakh ..."{Bergelson, 1922 #577 @ Vol 5, 180}.


The word in Hebrew and Yiddish for Passover, which appears before the passage cited above, is orthographically identical to the spelling Bergelson gives to the sound "pakh" except for the middle letter (pay, samekh, khet; pey, aleph, khet). The sequence "peysekh ...pakh....pakh...pakh" suggests a comparison between "peysekh" and "pakh." the meaningless sound "pakh" absorbs Passover (which Yiddish speakers pronounce "peysekh") into itself. In this instance Bergelson orthographically and acoustically digs a "void" or "hole" in sense, which beautifully reflects the “void” that is the heroine’s experience.

Close readings that are attentive to borderlands do not necessarily promote or assume hermetically sealed national historiographies: on the contrary, note the evacuation of the traditional, “national” heritage in the example above. My close readings, however, do not matter unless I publish them. The market for work on non-English literature is limited. Unless an author's works are part of the canon and or unless significant English translation is available, publishers are reluctant to consider scholarly studies of such literature. I conclude with two pragmatic suggestions. If we are serious about the need to expand what we teach and research we ought to: (1) encourage more translations by counting them as evidence of significant scholarly and creative work when we grant tenure and promotion; and (2) work collaboratively for hard-wired funding of less commonly taught languages. Read more

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