LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory最新文献

{"title":"Wrestling with the Eco-Self in John Webster's Duchess of Malfi","authors":"E. Gruber","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1941721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1941721","url":null,"abstract":"The evocative lines of Eliot’s poem capture John Webster’s necro-obsession, a tilt toward morbidity that often seems to verge on madness. For example, The Duchess of Malfi (1623) obsesses over intransigent flesh, judged so because of its proneness to decay. The play’s Malcontent, Bosola, cogently outlines the problem, asserting, “Though we are eaten up of lice, and worms, / And though continually we bear about us / A rotten and dead body, we delight / To hide it in rich tissue” (2.1.57–60). Here, he evinces ecological awareness, insisting upon humans’ thorough embedment in the natural world. Yet this realization incites dread rather than comfort. Perhaps this is why Bosola subtly divides putrefying (hence rebellious) flesh from the sentient selves who vainly try to mask the inevitable. In this light, dualistic thinking (segregating mind from body, person from world) should be understood as a compensatory maneuver, a means of coping with morbid psychologizing. As Bosola’s complaint about fleshly frailty suggests, simply asserting biological imperatives will not yield a satisfying definition of humanness. The issue, most directly engaged by ecocriticism and in the related field of ecopsychology, is where to locate the boundary between self and world.","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"231 - 249"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41816539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Speculative Formalism: Religion and Literature for a Postsecular Age","authors":"Sean Dempsey","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1901199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1901199","url":null,"abstract":"In a sonnet written in the opening years of the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth laments that the “world is too much with us.” He found the world’s proximity to be “too much,” in part, because he felt the economics of “getting and spending” had disordered Man’s relation to Nature and the traditional attachments of the heart (1–2). Because of this “we are out of tune” and the world “moves us not” (8–9). In response to the deadening proximity of the modern economic world, Wordsworth cries out in the sonnet’s final sestet:","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"79 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2021.1901199","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41787033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Can Postcritique Handle a “Heaven-sent” Text?: Quranic Enchantment in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish","authors":"Kyle Garton-Gundling","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1901201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1901201","url":null,"abstract":"The postcritical turn in literary studies has a vexed relation to religion. Postcritique draws heavily from religious terms and concepts, and yet it shies away from dealing with religion as religion. As Rita Felski acknowledges, “We now know that secular interpretation – even in the guise of critique – has not stripped itself of its sacred residues and that reason cannot be purified of all traces of enchantment” (Limits 174). But lest her account of postcritique seem “dangerously close to the edges of secular thought” Felski reassures her secular-minded readers that literary “enchantments are magical without requiring the intervention of the supernatural” and therefore “art works are not heaven-sent” (Uses 57; Limits 75, 153). Similarly, James Simpson speaks of a “secular faith,” a way of reading in which we “experience at least some faint reverberation of divine frission” (379, 378). But he still draws a clear line between secular readers like him and religious people “who are confident in the existence of the heavens” (378). And Stephen Best, with reference to Paul Ricoeur, supports a “postcritical faith” that credits an experience of absorption in a text, but Best's use of religious terms serves discussions of secular reading, not religious experiences (341–42). For all their investment in religious language, these scholars retain a secular mind-set that Charles Taylor identifies as a “closed immanent frame” that involves, if not a complete “rejection of the transcendent,” at least a very circumspect bracketing of it (548). Postcritical scholars are still too critical of religion to lend it their characteristically sympathetic treatment. Thus, in spite of a number of implicit affinities, postcritique has left direct engagements with religion in literature up to postsecular studies. So far, religion is a source for postcritique, not its object. In other words, postcritique is not yet postsecular – and I want to show how it could be enriched by becoming so. Although postcritique seeks to turn away from ideological critiques that demystify literature, it is still beholden to secular critiques that demystify religion. So how can","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"136 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2021.1901201","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46514029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"College Parochialism","authors":"Jessica Ling","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1902195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1902195","url":null,"abstract":"To a secular literary history, the academic novel is a pleasurable but critically unproductive curiosity. More than other minor genres, it has been faulted for a certain parochialism – an overinvestment in the academic figures and institutions that it represents. Earliest nineteenth-century versions such as Reginald Dalton and Verdant Green and modern iterations such as Lucky Jim, Changing Places, and On Beauty dwell too long in the sleepy quadrangles, departmental meetings, and toothless rivalries of university life in a fashion, novelist David Lodge writes, “safely insulated from the real world and its sombre concerns” (263). Heated squabbles over faculty appointments and scholarly territory often appear “comically disproportionate to the passions they arouse,” if not, as critic Gore Vidal has suggested, as “activities marginal (to put it tactfully) to civilization” (180). Its plots are at once “too sensational and apocalyptic,” as Elaine Showalter puts it, and utterly quotidian (121). What accounts for the persistent appeal of the academic novel? Partly, we might say, it results from the circularity between these novels and their audience. Many readers are academics themselves, and so its readership is largely also parochial: an enthusiastic professorate keeps the work of C.P. Snow and Kingsley Amis alive for their students, mutually ratifying the romance of college. “The daily life of a professor,” Showalter concedes, “is not good narrative material,” but where else might we indulge with relish the struggles of academics and their liturgies of classes and conferences with equal parts reverence, affection, and taste for minor celebrity (121)? This essay not only proposes that our “parochial” love for university life and literature has an affective history dating from the nineteenth century, but also that in returning there we might understand our attachment to its figures – the avuncular don, the bumbling warden – as a form of religious devotion with roots in the parish itself. The majority of scholars in nineteenth-century Britain were Anglican clergymen. The English don, whom Sheldon Rothblatt observes was “a clergyman in the first instance, not an academic,” adopted the life and concerns of the former (454). “The typical Oxbridge fellow,” writes William Clark, “unless a hopeless slacker or hardcore academic, was headed one day for a vicarage or","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"117 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2021.1902195","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44716586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reparative Reading and Christian Anarchism","authors":"Raili Marling, William Marling","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1901200","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1901200","url":null,"abstract":"Writing by anarchists is particularly resistant to coherent critical reading: they tell us to take their estimates of human nature on faith, but then arrive at radically different political views. This makes them, however, interesting for reparative reading. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, the difficulty of reading the classics creates a good deal of their value. In this article we take up the confounding final work of one of his heirs, the charismatic American Christian Anarchist Ammon Hennacy (1898-1970). At the outset of reading Hennacy‘s One-Man Revolution in America (1970), we understood that we had to find a position within what Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski have called the “method wars” between the proponents of critique (Marxist-inspired or poststructuralist) and a diverse field of scholars seeking for more capacious and enchanted modes of engaging with literary texts. The debate in itself is not new – Susan Sontag had already written against interpretation in 1966 – but it has become a focus of intense conversation within literary studies since the 2000s. What has come to be called postcriticism raises important points. Many of the established critical gestures have become predictable and unilluminating, dismantling the text without sufficient attention to its aesthetic qualities and readerly pleasure (Anker & Felski 15–16; Felski, Uses of Literature). The meaningful politics of critical reading have also been lost, because of the formulaic nature of many analyses, and politics are particularly important to the text that we needed to tackle. If politics is reduced to the mere identification of an underlying ideology, without fresh insights about the power of the text to engage and change the reader, the critical gesture loses force. Felski has been especially concerned about the dominant metaphors of depth and distance that make scholars seek hidden layers, to expose the text and thereby to assert their own superiority over it, the author, and the common reader. Different critics have enumerated the shortcomings of critique: negativity, pessimism, vigilance, diagnostic gaze, suspicion. Rita Felski seemed to be describing some aspects of our reaction to Hennacy:","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"99 - 116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2021.1901200","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41773909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Limit Point of Hope: Black Theology and Gloria Naylor’s the Women of Brewster Place","authors":"Rachel Arteaga","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1901202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1901202","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have seen a rapid shift in Western thought on a fundamental point: the relationship between the religious and the secular. The thesis that has underwritten intellectual life in the Wes...","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"155 - 172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2021.1901202","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46083456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Children of the Culture Wars: Secularism, Aesthetics, and Judgments of Value in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty","authors":"R. Horton","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1868252","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1868252","url":null,"abstract":"Minutes before she jumps into Howard Belsey’s lap for a dissolute sex scene that could make even Humbert Humbert blush, Victoria Kipps – daughter of Monty Kipps, Howard’s conservative nemesis and fellow Rembrandt scholar – explains why Howard’s class at Wellington College is “a cult classic” (312). With a pitch-perfect blend of earnestness and droll irony, Victoria’s discussion of Howard’s pedagogy provides one of contemporary fiction’s clearest and funniest descriptions of what Rita Felski describes as the “sensibility” of the contemporary “critical mood” (Limits 6). It involves an extensive explanation of why Howard simply “can’t say I like the tomato” (311, original emphasis).","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"41 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2021.1868252","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47485690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Natural Theology and the Revelation of Little Dorrit","authors":"M. Knight","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1868250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1868250","url":null,"abstract":"For some time now, I have been fascinated by the role of the watch in Little Dorrit (1855–57). As you may recall, the timepiece is in the possession of Mrs. Clennam, and marked with the initials D. N. F. Toward the end of a fiendishly complex plot, which I cannot summarize adequately here, we discover that the watch was her late husband’s. He gave it to her in the hope that the initials, which are said to stand for “Do Not Forget,” might recall a duty-of-care to a child, not hers, conceived out of wedlock and sent away at birth. During the climactic scene of the narrative, just before we discover who that child is, Mrs. Clennam tells us about her reading of those letters:","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"10 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2021.1868250","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42578505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chasing David Copperfield’s Memory of a Stained Glass Window: Or, Meditations on the Postsecular and Postcritical","authors":"W. Werner, John S. Wiehl","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1876612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1876612","url":null,"abstract":"On meeting Agnes Wickfield, David Copperfield – the eponymous hero of Dickens’s beloved autobiographical novel – reflects, “I cannot call to mind where or when, in my childhood, I had seen a stained glass window in a church. Nor do I recollect its subject. But I know that when I saw her turn round . . . I thought of that window; and I associated something of its tranquil brightness with Agnes Wickfield ever afterward” (194). From one perspective, this moment seems a testament to David’s unreliable powers of observation, but there is more to his comparison than simply that. Indeed, we open with this passage from David Copperfield because we – scholars of nineteenthcentury British literature – found David’s recollection here a particularly resonant convergence of religion, criticism, and the postcritical that it is the purpose of the essays collected in this special issue to explore. Trying to describe Agnes, David invokes, of all things, a stained glass window he once saw in a church, but he says nothing concrete, material, or substantial about it: its location, purpose, colors, dimensions, position, artist, era, and even subject matter are lost. In other words, everything that might form the subject of a critique, history, or theory of the window is missing. Nevertheless, David is convinced that the feeling imparted by the church window suffices in comprehending the person of Agnes. And he’s right, of course. It turns out that to conceive Agnes, to see her in our mind’s eye and to understand her value and meaning, we don’t need an exhaustive cataloging of the definite attributes of a church’s stained glass window. David’s approach to conveying to his reader what Agnes means to him struck us as analogous to approaches encouraged by postcriticism. Motivating this burgeoning field, more or less, is a persistent question: if, as Helen Small has suggested, the raison d’etre of the humanities is the “study of the meaning-making practices of the culture,” is it a given in literary studies that critique is necessarily the best mode for carrying out this study (4)? Do the “moves” and engrained practices of critique best reveal how a text makes its meanings?","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"1 - 9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2021.1876612","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46978416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Finding Hope in the “Radical Ordinary”: Charles Dickens’s Perspectives on Christianity in Bleak House and Little Dorrit","authors":"Christine A. Colón","doi":"10.1080/10436928.2021.1868251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2021.1868251","url":null,"abstract":"When Charles Taylor published A Secular Age in 2007, he entered into the growing interdisciplinary discussion of postsecular studies and provided an insightful way of thinking about our current age as well as its ostensibly secular development. Questioning the traditional evolutionary narrative in which the West gradually becomes more secular, Taylor offered a new framework within which to explore nineteenth-century literature as we begin to reflect more deeply on how individual writers grapple with religious and secular changes. While he still sees the nineteenth century as the period in which “unbelief comes of age,” he is particularly interested in exploring the persistent longing for transcendence (the experience of God’s supernatural presence in the world) that may be seen even in secular authors like Thomas Carlyle or Matthew Arnold, whose works reveal their attempts to combat the “fragmentation and loss of depth” that characterized their experiences of this new, disenchanted, immanent world in which any sense of the supernatural had been eliminated (374, 381). Using this immanent/transcendent binary and revealing the complex ways it manifests itself in different ages, Taylor continually complicates the idea that society has undergone a neat, orderly progress from belief to unbelief. Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles provide an interesting challenge to Taylor’s use of this binary as a means of articulating the differences between faith and unbelief. In their response to A Secular Age, they express their concern that by equating Christianity with moments of transcendent escape from the immanent frame of the secular world, Taylor minimizes the power of the immanent, incarnational work of Christians’ daily lives. In contrast to Taylor, they believe that “directing attention to the ‘radical ordinary’ may offer a more variegated account of the possibilities in our ‘age’ . . . than do Taylor’s depictions of the irruptions of transcendence that the immanent frame cannot control” (350). While Hauerwas and Coles focus on the real lives of contemporary Christians, their thoughts have important implications for the ways we conceive of Christian characters in literature, particularly in novels, for this concept of the “radical ordinary” enables us to explore the complexities of what authors may be illustrating when they craft characters who still faithfully practice their Christianity in fictional worlds that have often been seen as secular.","PeriodicalId":42717,"journal":{"name":"LIT-Literature Interpretation Theory","volume":"32 1","pages":"24 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/10436928.2021.1868251","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47180477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}