Suchergebnisse

It is hard to think New Literary History without Ralph Cohen. I have already experienced the meticulous editorial practice of Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, and it makes me certain that they will understand and appreciate what I mean. A sober and general literary journal of superior quality, not confined to an identifiable political position, yet touching the radical edges of the profession as well, and lasting forty years! Ralph, with his extraordinary flexibility, combined with some fairly tenacious convictions, was ideally suited to launch and support such a phenomenon. I did not meet him and Libby until 1982. So let me describe the impact of NLH upon me when it burst upon my intellectual horizons, more than ten years before that meeting. I was a year short of tenure when NLH first appeared. In 1966, one year into my assistant professorship, young U.S. instructors with my sort of training were astounded by the appearance of Roland Barthes's "Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits" in the pages of Communications. What struck us as readers was that Barthes, providing a fairly careful system, quickly dismantled and destroyed it in another epistemic idiom at the close of the essay. I was already deeply committed to the importance of the double bind as method, and this was an uncanny example of it. You provide a "scientific" system for analysis, but must also situate and provide a symptomatic reading of the need for such systems. Upon such ground, in my case prepared by Tarak Nath Sen at the University of Calcutta, Paul de Man at Cornell University, and Jacques Derrida, to whom I introduced myself impersonally in institutional solitude, appeared New Literary History. At the University of Iowa, where I was teaching, the conflict between George Lyman Kittredge and René Wellek, the history of literature and literary criticism, was alive in the person of E. P. Kuhl, an altogether vocal emeritus member of the Department of English, then in his eighties. It was deeply important for me that this new journal asked us to look at the prospect of a new literary history, not a new history of literature. I was beginning to teach Antonio Gramsci at that time—the Gramsci who felt that history and sociology must take a literary turn if they were to track the subaltern in an inventory without traces. It is all over his Notebooks, but most particularly in his notes on the historiography of the subaltern, the subaltern being the group that has no access to the "state." Thus, the idea that history should be literary, with the best gifts of criticism, seemed to this young professional a great gift—even if the intention of the title may not have been just that. It was no surprise, then, that I read Hayden White, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Jacqueline Rose in its pages. Looking at the list of contributors to prepare myself for these few remarks, I am astounded at the diversity: Ernst Gombrich, Alicia Ostriker, and Stanley Fish under the same roof. Took some doing.

What is it that one "compare"-s in Comparative Literature? Goethe's Weltliteratur is usually invoked when talking about the beginnings of a comparative literature. The other story is Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach in Turkey. There is also the story of the rise of the discipline of Comparative Literature to intellectual prominence in the United States in the period following the Second World War, largely as a result of the migration to the United States of a group of noted European comparativists seeking asylum from totalitarianism. This group had a great influence in fostering the theoretical transformation of literary studies and in bringing about fundamental changes in national literature studies. But to think of comparative literature as comparative had something to do with the notion of la littérature comparée in France—where comparison implicitly referred to the standards of the French eighteenth century. This attitude is reflected in the fundamental premises of Pascale Casanova's work today. René Etiemble's Comparaison n'est pas raison attempted, in 1963, to combat that impulse in a manner that is still favorably comparable to much that goes on in the Euro-U.S. today. But in terms of the questions we are asking, it is still too much within the internationalist side of cold war logic—going no further than the front-line languages of India and East Asia, with a somewhat paternalistic approach. Whatever the outcome of that debate, and whatever the status of the classical traditions of Asia, Comparative Literature within the United States remained confined to European literary regionalism. After the cold war, the division between a Eurocentric Comparative Literature and geopolitically oriented "Area Studies" seemed to have become less tenable than before. But comparison in favor of the European tradition has remained in place.

In this essay I consider not only fiction as event but also fiction as task. I locate in Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and J. M. Coetzee (1940– ) representations of what may be read as versions of the "I" figured as object and weave the representations together as a warning text for postcolonial political ambitions.4 I am obviously using "text" as "web," coming from Latin texere—"to weave." In the second part of the essay I move into the field of education as a nation-building calculus. I examine planning as its logic and teaching as its rhetoric—in the strong sense of figuration.

I was interested to find that, although "Constitutional Convention," "constitutional monarchy," and "Constitution of the United States" were three items listed under "What literate Americans know" in Professor E. D. Hirsch's provocative book Cultural Literacy, the Constitution was not an index entry. In other words, constitutional matters did not form part of Hirsch's own thinking in the making of his argument. There is nothing in his index between "Conservatism" and "Constructive Hypothesis." It is my opinion that, if one is going to speak for or plan for that complicated thing called an "American," one must think of his or her relationship to the Constitution. In this part of my paper, I consider the argument of the brilliant reinterpretation of the Constitution in Professor Bruce Ackerman's forthcoming book Discover the Constitution. Ackerman's understanding of the Constitution is dualist and exceptionalist. The dualism is between normal everyday politics where We the People are not much involved, and the great exceptional moments in political practice--constitutional politics -where We the People are mobilized and involved in the process of change through higher lawmaking.

The "idealist" and the "materialist" are both exclusive predications. There have been attempts to question this exclusivist opposition, generally by way of a critique of the "idealist" predication of the subject: Nietzsche and Freud are the most spectacular European examples. Sometimes consciousness is analogized with labor-power as in the debates over intellectual and manual labor. Althusser's notion of "theoretical production" is the most controversial instance [For Marx 173-93]. The anti-Oedipal argument in France seems to assume a certain body without predication or without predication-function. (The celebrated "body without organs" is one product of this assumption -see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.) I have not yet been able to read this as anything but a last-ditch metaphysical longing. Since I remain bound by the conviction that subject-predication is methodologically necessary, I will not comment upon this anti-Oedipal gesture. The better part of my essay will concern itself with what the question of value becomes when determined by a "materialist" subject-predication such as Marx's. This is a theoretical enterprise requiring a certain level of generality whose particular political implications I have tabulated in passing and in conclusion. Here it is in my interest to treat the theory-politics opposition as if intact.

It is difficult to speak of a politics of interpretation without a working notion of ideology as larger than the concepts of individual consciousness and will. At its broadest implications this notion of ideology would undo the oppositions between determinism and free will and between conscious choice and unconscious reflex. Ideology in action is what a group takes to be natural and self-evident, that of which the group, as a group, must deny any historical sedimentation. It is both the condition and the effect of the constitution of the subject (of ideology) as freely willing and consciously choosing in a world that is seen as background. In turn, the subject(s) of ideology are the conditions and effects of the self-identity of the group as a group. It is impossible, of course, to mark off a group as an entity without sharing complicity with its ideological definition. A persistent critique of ideology is thus forever incomplete. In the shifting spectrum between subject-constitution and group-constitution are the ideological apparatuses that share the condition/ effect oscillation.

After my public lecture on "Literature and Life" in March 1980 at the Riyadh University Center for Girls [sic], a student asked me with some asperity: "It's all very well to try to live like a book; but what if no one else is prepared to read? What if you are dismissed as an irresponsible dreamer?"I found an answer to her question at the tail end of a metaphor:" Everyone reads life and the world like a book. Even the so-called' illiterate.' But especially the 'leaders' of our society, the most 'responsible' nondreamers: the politicians, the businessmen, the ones who make plans. Without the reading of the world as a book, there is no prediction, no planning, no taxes, no laws, no welfare, no war. Yet these leaders read the world in terms of rationality and averages, as if it were a textbook. The world actually writes itself with the many-leveled, unfixable intricacy and openness of a work of literature. If, through our study of literature, we can learn ourselves and teach others to read the world in the 'proper' risky way, and to act upon that lesson, perhaps we literary people would not forever be such helpless victims." It is difficult to say that very last bit to a woman in Saudi Arabia. So I added, half to myself, and with a sense of failure: "Mere literary studies cannot accomplish this. One must fill the vision of literary form with its connections to what is being read: history, political economy-the world. And it is not merely a question of disciplinary formation. It is a question also of questioning the separation between the world of action and the world of the disciplines. There is a great deal in the way." In that exchange I was obliged to stress the distinction between my position and the position that, in a world of massive brutality, exploitation, and sexual oppression, advocates an aesthetization of life. Here I must stress that I am also not interested in answers to questions like "Whati s the nature of the aesthetic?" or "How indeed are we to understand 'life'? "My concern rather is that: 1) The formulation of such questions is itself a determined and determining gesture. 2) Very generally speaking, literary people are still caught within a position where they must say: Life is brute fact and outside art; the aesthetic is free and transcends life. 3) This declaration is the condition and effect of "ideology."4 ) If "literary studies "is to have any meaning in the coming decade, its ideology might have to be questioned

I translated this Bengali short story into English as much for the sake of its villain, Senanayak, as for its title character, Draupadi (or Dopdi). Because in Senanayak I find the closest approximation to the First- World scholar in search of the Third World, I shall speak of him first. On the level of the plot, Senanayak is the army officer who captures and degrades Draupadi. I will not go so far as to suggest that, in practice, the instruments of First-World life and investigation are complicit with such captures and such a degradation. The approximation I notice relates to the author's careful presentation of Senanayak as a pluralist aesthete. In theory, Senanayak can identify with the enemy. But pluralist aesthetes of the First World are, willy-nilly, participants in the production of an exploitative society. Hence in practice, Senanayak must destroy the enemy, the menacing other. He follows the necessities and contingencies of what he sees as his historical moment. There is a convenient colloquial name for that as well: pragmatism. Thus his emotions at Dopdi's capture are mixed: sorrow (theory) and joy (practice). Correspondingly, we grieve for our Third-World sisters; we grieve and rejoice that they must lose themselves and become as much like us as possible in order to be "free"; we congratulate ourselves on our specialists' knowledge of them. Indeed, like ours, Senanayak's project is interpretive: he looks to decipher Draupadi's song. For both sides of the rift within himself, he finds analogies in Western literature: Hochhuth's The Deputy, David Morrell's First Blood. He will shed his guilt when the time comes. His self-image for that uncertain future is Prospero. I have suggested elsewhere that, when we wander out of our own academic and First-World enclosure, we share something like a relationship with Senanayak's doublethink. When we speak for ourselves, we urge with conviction: the personal is also political. For the rest of the world's women, the sense of whose personal micrology is difficult (though not impossible) for us to acquire, we fall back on a colonialist theory of most efficient information retrieval. We will not be able to speak to the women out there if we depend completely on conferences and anthologies by Western-trained informants. As I see their photographs in women's-studies journals or on book jackets-indeed, as I look in the glass-it is Senanayak with his anti-Fascist paperback that I behold. In inextricably mingling historico-political specificity with the sexual differential in a literary discourse, Mahasveta Devi invites us to begin effacing that image.