TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE最新文献

{"title":"Lydia Davis’s Grammatical Examples","authors":"Lola Boorman","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10814813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10814813","url":null,"abstract":"Critics have always struggled to situate the work of short story writer and translator Lydia Davis within wider trends in postwar and contemporary literature. Paying particular attention to a group of Davis’s “grammar stories,” this essay reads Davis’s fiction as Wittgensteinian “grammatical investigations” that attempt to work against what Toril Moi has described as the “generalized doubt” that characterized the theoretical and aesthetic “skepticism” of postmodernism. Davis’s commitment to this process situates her work within post-postmodern debates about doubt and belief, but reframes these concerns about communication, both aesthetic and social, as problems of grammar. The essay examines how her grammatical investigations resist poststructuralist interpretations of language that dominated the work of her postmodern contemporaries, especially (her ex-partner) Paul Auster, in the 1980s and 1990s. It goes on to explore the gendered labor involved in these kinds of grammatical investigation, labor that is often excluded from the institutional mainstream but crucial in devising “therapies” for problems of linguistic skepticism.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389867","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":"On the Andrew J. Kappel Prize Essay","authors":"Barbara Foley","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10814787","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10814787","url":null,"abstract":"The winner of this year’s prize is Conrad Steel’s “Standard Forms: Modernism, Market Research, and ‘Howl.’” The judge is Barbara Foley, Emerita Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. Foley’s chief scholarly and political interests are in the fields of African American literature, US literary radicalism, and Marxist literary criticism. Her most recent book is Marxist Literary Criticism Today (2019). She is past president of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association and currently serves on the editorial board and manuscript collective of Science & Society.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389866","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":"Hegel after <i>Ulysses</i>? The (Dis)Appearance of Politics in “Cyclops”","authors":"Graham MacPhee","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10814826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10814826","url":null,"abstract":"This essay challenges the dismissal of nationalist politics in readings of Ulysses by reconnecting the “Cyclops” episode to the aporias of modern political thought. Drawing from Joyce’s neglected notes to the episode, it relocates anticolonial nationalism within the diremption and mutual implication of civil society and state, first articulated by G. W. F. Hegel and developed by Hannah Arendt. The essay rereads Hegel’s state/society diremption through Gillian Rose’s conception of “speculative thinking” and the historical openness of the “broken middle.” It argues that “Cyclops” generates a dynamic interpretative space in which other configurations of the social and political in the nation might be registered. In a contemporary moment when legality and constitutionality are under attack in the name of nationalist populism, this reading suggests an alternative to frameworks that conceive of law only as violence.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389868","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":"<i>Journeys of Transformation: Searching for No-Self in Western Buddhist Travel Narratives</i>, by John D. Barbour","authors":"Robert Azzarello","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10814865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10814865","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most central, disturbing, and unique features of Buddhist thought and practice is the concept of no-self. In what is now known as the Anatta Lakkhana Sutta in Pali, or “The Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic,” the Buddha taught that all the things we normally think of as ourselves—our bodies, feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness in general—are in fact not. This does not mean that the Buddha denied that we exist as selves, but that our sense of self, as tangible as it may seem, is like a cloud or flash of lightning, ephemeral and ungraspable, an effect of innumerable past causes and present conditions. Therefore, our sense that our selves are substantially discrete, permanent, and graspable is a delusion—perhaps the most fundamental delusion of all—and this delusion, the Buddha taught, is the root cause of suffering.In his fascinating and deeply researched study, John D. Barbour asks how might real human beings come to terms with this difficult, counterintuitive, and paradoxical teaching. For unlike thought experiments in the philosophy classroom, the Buddha’s claim about the self was intended to register at the very base of one’s being and to transform the way one lives one’s life. Therefore, Barbour asks, how does the concept of no-self play out not in the dense philosophical treatises of Buddhist monastics but in lay Western travel writing into Buddhist Asia? How do Westerners, and especially Western travel writers committed as they are to the autobiographical I, come to question the ingrained notion that the self is substantially discrete, permanent, and graspable?Journeys of Transformation is the first scholarly book to identify and examine a major literary genre that has evolved during the past century: Western travel writing into Buddhist Asia. The book’s first scholarly contribution, then, is a compelling reevaluation of autobiography as a major genre of twentieth-century literature. The second scholarly contribution would be Barbour’s methodology. While he does not discuss his critical method in detail, perhaps owing to his academic background in religious rather than in literary studies, Barbour’s work fits squarely into what literary critics and theorists may recognize as reparative reading practices as developed especially by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick via Paul Ricoeur. Barbour’s critical method, in other words, is to go deeply into the authors he examines by trying to understand their own perspectives on their journeys and providing glosses in their terms. While Barbour does employ a hermeneutics of suspicion at times, especially when the authors he examines uncritically display their economic, gendered, or racial privilege while traveling in often very poor and disadvantaged communities of color, his stance in general is sympathetic toward the complex affective and spiritual lives of his subjects, in some sense taking the journey along with his authors. His generous readings, then, seek not only to understan","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389870","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":"Metaphysical Horror in Samuel Beckett","authors":"Christopher Conti","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10814839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10814839","url":null,"abstract":"Efforts to unravel the strands of philosophy and literature in Samuel Beckett’s work have marked each phase of its critical reception. While the archival turn in scholarship has shed valuable light on Beckett’s debts to philosophy, it has also exposed the rift between the epistemological assumptions of scholars and Beckett’s philosophy of ignorance. I argue that Beckett’s tragic view of philosophy took literary shape as a species of metaphysical horror, Leszek Kolakowski’s term for the failed quest for the absolute in Western thought. Beckett’s legacy is then viewed in a postsecular context as negative theodicy, the struggle to come to grips with the ethical and anthropological consequences of metaphysical horror.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135393915","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":"Standard Forms: Modernism, Market Research, and “Howl”","authors":"Conrad Steel","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10814800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10814800","url":null,"abstract":"Before he was a famous poet, Allen Ginsberg was a market researcher. He stopped only when he managed to persuade his employer to automate his job out of existence (using one of the commercial computers that had first become available four years earlier); the resultant unemployment benefits enabled him to write “Howl.” This article reconsiders this iconic text of the nascent US counterculture as a product of the postwar structures of informatics, automation, and precarity that are sometimes now referred to as surveillance capitalism. But it also asks what relation those structures had and have to poetry, and why poetic technique—specifically, a repertoire of techniques inherited from an earlier generation in Europe—became so crucial to how Ginsberg’s generation responded to the emergent surveillance-capitalist terrain. The period of unemployment when Ginsberg wrote “Howl” also marked his first significant encounter with the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who would become a key formal and imaginative model, and the coincidence makes visible a strange parallel between modernist poetry and market research. The paranoid aesthetics of information management that “Howl” puts into motion, it is shown, had been contained as a potential within modernist poetics all along.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389869","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":"<i>Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia</i>, by Jon Day, <i>Stories and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative</i>, by Paul B. Armstrong","authors":"Joshua Gang","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10814852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10814852","url":null,"abstract":"“Every sentence of psychology,” Rudolf Carnap (1959: 165) wrote in “Psychology in Physical Language” (1932), “may be formulated in physical language. . . . This is a sub-thesis of the general thesis of physicalism to the effect that physical language is a universal language, that is, a language into which every sentence may be translated.” This reductive physicalism was fundamental to Carnap’s early efforts to unify the sciences. And in “Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)” (1974), Jerry Fodor did his best to shut it down. Of course Fodor isn’t the only philosopher to reject reductionism. See W. V. O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1953) and Hilary Putnam’s “Psychological Predicates” (1967) for other examples. But for my purposes here Fodor’s rejection is the most relevant. In short, his point is that even if you could demonstrate one-to-one correspondences between psychology and physics—a claim he disputed on both empirical and logical grounds—that doesn’t mean you should or need to. We have special sciences like psychology because we are interested in psychological matters and because we find psychological concepts valuable. For that reason it doesn’t make much sense to talk about those matters—about mental states, emotions, sexual desire—in a language that has no words for them. It’s not meaningful and it’s not practical, the same way it’s not meaningful or practical to talk about a heap of sand by referring to each grain individually. Moreover, Fodor maintained that such reductionism wasn’t necessary to begin with. Logically, you could accept that all psychological phenomena are physical phenomena without accepting anything more constraining than that. This is the notion of “token physicalism” (Fodor 1974: 100). And Fodor believed that any position more reductive or restrictive than token physicalism was probably untrue anyway. “Reductionism,” he concluded, “is probably too strong a construal of the unity of science; on the one hand, it is incompatible with probable results in the special sciences, and, on the other, it is more than we need to assume if what we primarily want is just to be good token physicalists” (107–108).Along those lines, I think it’s important for literary critics and theorists to be good token cognitivists (in the disciplinary, rather than the strictly mentalistic, sense of the term). While literary criticism is by no means a “special science,” and while our relationship to cognitive science is logically and historically different from the psychologist’s relationship to physics, I think the spirit of Fodor’s argument holds. We can (and should) acknowledge that, at some level, reading and writing literature rely on various cognitive processes. How could they not? But this acknowledgement does not entail a strongly reductive or explanatory relationship between them—that is, it does not entail one-to-one correspondences between literary and cognitive discourses. Nor is it meaningful ","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"2012 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389864","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":"Art, Graffiti, and the Deskilled Work of the Novelist: The Forgotten 1970s in Don DeLillo’s Underworld","authors":"Andrew Strombeck","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10580823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10580823","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article reads Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) as scrutinizing the relationship between art and deskilled labor in the period from 1973 through 1997. Examining a relatively understudied set of chapters set in the 1970s, it considers them in the context of theoretical work by Harry Braverman, Kathi Weeks, Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, and John Roberts. Depicting artist Klara Sax’s project as rooted in her 1970s observations of the remnants of skilled labor, and her embrace of what she calls the “graffiti instinct,” DeLillo suggests, pace Roberts, that the vestiges of lost working-class skill appear in the art groups in the novel’s present. Such valorizations of the artist’s labor are offset both by the absorption of the former artist Jesse Detwiler into Nick Shay’s corporate workplace and by the novel’s neglect of gentrification. In turn, with Underworld’s representations of the Bronx in the 1950s, DeLillo scrutinizes his own working-class origins.","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"129 1","pages":"203 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87874423","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":"Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature by Christopher Krentz (review)","authors":"Alexander C. Dawson","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10580849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10580849","url":null,"abstract":"Reflecting on the “compelling presence” (2) of characters with disabilities in postcolonial literature, Christopher Krentz proclaims in Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature that “disability is finally on the world’s agenda” (11). Despite there being over half a billion people with disabilities living in the Global South, they have been largely neglected when it comes to social, political, and scholarly awareness. Postcolonial literature provides a “corrective” (2) for this absence, argues Krentz, restoring the dignity of people with disabilities through depictions of “human, relatable, and exciting” (5) disabled characters in and from the Global South. Such literary works, he argues, both reflect and inform the progress that has been made in disability rights since the mid-twentieth century. Recognizing the parallel growth of postcolonial literature and global human rights, Krentz traces how literary works published after the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights potentially informed future rights instruments, most notably the 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Studying African, South Asian, and Caribbean fiction in English from the 1950s to the present, Krentz analyzes writing by, among others, Chinua Achebe, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Edwidge Danticat. In highlighting the centrality of disability in these texts, he acknowledges that “disability theory needs to expand and shift if it is to engage meaningfully with global disability” (22). His push to expand the field of disability studies beyond its North American and European biases echoes calls made by scholars such as Ato Quayson (2007), Clare Barker (2011), Shaun Grech and Karen Soldatic (2016), and Jasbir K. Puar (2017), among others, who have pushed for robust scholarship on both theoretical frameworks and literary texts produced in the Global South. Acknowledging the complexity and ambiguity in how the term disability is understood, Krentz refuses to simplify the concept to an","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"12 1","pages":"225 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84364726","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 Value of Poetry, by Eric Falci","authors":"G. Leadbetter","doi":"10.1215/0041462x-10580836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-10580836","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44252,"journal":{"name":"TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46254506","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}