Hunger, World, the X: On Ghosh and Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents

Antonis Balasopoulos
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Abstract

This essay constitutes an unorthodox response to Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents: instead of attempting to conventionally engage with a text that challenges the idea of any unitary totality as a whole, I opt instead to dwell on the interplay between language and silence in three different sites of inquiry within the text: the first concerns the question of hunger, for which I take as my starting point Ghosh’s own starting point in the first chapter of the book, namely Rabidranath Tagore’s reflections on a brief episode on the river Ganges. I excavate the transcontinental provenance of these reflections for western, particularly Kantian, aesthetics before I focus on two aspects within the episode that such a framing misses or remains silent about: the paradoxical tendency of material satiation to demote the importance of hunger (as paradigmatically exposed in Brecht); and the indeterminacy of the kind of hunger that is involved in the boatman’s response within Tagore’s text (as evidenced by prehistoric cave paintings). Finally, I demonstrate the importance of taking these complications into account when reading Ghosh’s own extensive interest in foregrounding hunger within the literary phenomenon and its hermeneutic reception. In the second part of the essay, I dwell on Ghosh’s critique of prevailing notions of “world literature” in the fifth chapter of the book by demonstrating the ontological (Heideggerian) rather than empirical meaning of world in his writing, and, by extension, the subtractive and absence-centered meaning of what he calls the “more than global.” Finally, I turn to J. Hillis Miller’s reading of Wallace Stevens’s “The Motive for Metaphor” in the fourth chapter as an exemplary site for the exploration of the interface between poetics, hermeneutics and ontology that is central to Ghosh’s theory of the literary, and thus serves to highlight, in Miller’s very engagement with the failure of language as an issue of concern in the poem, the possibility of dialogue between the two critics: indeed, as I show, Stevens’s figure of the “X” serves both as a signifier of the ineffable and as one for criss-crossing, for the “across” involved in “thinking literature across” authors, continents and traditions.
饥饿、世界、X:论戈什和米勒的跨大陆思考文学
这篇文章是对Ranjan Ghosh和J.Hillis Miller的《跨越大陆的思考文学》的非正统回应:与其试图传统地处理一篇挑战任何整体整体观念的文本,相反,我选择在文本中的三个不同的调查地点详述语言和沉默之间的相互作用:第一个涉及饥饿问题,为此,我在本书第一章中以戈什自己的出发点为出发点,即拉比德拉纳特·泰戈尔对恒河上一个简短插曲的反思。我挖掘了西方美学,尤其是康德美学的这些反思的跨洲来源,然后我关注了这一事件中这样一个框架遗漏或保持沉默的两个方面:物质满足感贬低饥饿重要性的矛盾倾向(正如布莱希特所展示的);以及泰戈尔文本中船夫的反应所涉及的那种饥饿的不确定性(史前洞穴绘画证明了这一点)。最后,我证明了在阅读戈什自己对在文学现象及其解释学接受中突出饥饿的广泛兴趣时,考虑到这些复杂性的重要性。在文章的第二部分,我详细阐述了戈什在本书第五章中对“世界文学”主流概念的批判,通过展示他写作中世界的本体论(海德格尔)而非经验意义,以及他所说的“超越全球”的减法和缺席中心意义。希利斯·米勒在第四章中对华莱士·史蒂文斯的《隐喻的动机》的解读,是探索诗学、解释学和本体论之间界面的一个典范,这是戈什文学理论的核心,因此,在米勒将语言的失败作为诗中关注的问题时,两位评论家之间对话的可能性:事实上,正如我所展示的,史蒂文斯的“X”形象既是无法言说的象征,也是纵横交错的象征,是“跨越”作家、大洲和传统的“思考文学”中的“跨越”。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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