Duke University Press Log

Considering Theory

Today's guest post is by Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, editors of Theory Aside. Jason Potts is Assistant Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and Daniel Stout is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. Here, they discuss the recent launch of The CI Review, and the history—and future—of theory.

 

“Sometimes there is an idea whose time has come, and come again,” writes W.J.T. Mitchell in his editorial note accompanying the June 2014 launch of The CI Review, the new online-only forum from Critical Inquiry. We couldn’t agree more--and, as the editors of Theory Aside, we are happy to see Critical Inquiry putting its considerable weight behind a project that sounds a lot like ours. The goal, in Theory Aside, is to think about some of the thinkers and lines of inquiry that got lost during the canonization of critical theory. In particular, we were concerned that the very dynamics that had made the age of Theory so exciting were also contributing to the speediness of its much-discussed death. Once it began to understand itself as the purveyor of radical newness and to promise the wholesale repeal of outdated methodologies, theory began to treat ideas as especially perishable things, as if they arrived with best-before dates after which they needed to be discarded and replaced. Radical innovation, or nothing: Theory, we argued, both rose (fast) and fell (steeply) because it made “the paradigm shift” the model of intellectual progress.

How encouraging, then, to have The CI Review, a venue in which thoughts whose time has come again might be revisited. And encouraging, too, to see things like the new volume from the University Press of Kentucky, Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory, a collection devoted to “reinterpreting canonical and current texts [in order] to demonstrate fresh interpretations and narratives.” What should be saluted about efforts like these is their acknowledgement of the need for sustained self-reflection about the boundaries of humanistic attention. Theoretical inquiry, Mitchell implies, has construed itself too narrowly, has been for too long “cloistered around a fixed canon of literary and artistic masterpieces.” What’s needed is the extension of our critical energies outward into what he calls “Humanities in the expanded field.”

The encounters that might be generated by putting theoretical texts into conversations about “climate change and techno-science” will be exciting. But we also hope that The CI Review, in its desire to present work that is “conceptually ambitious” and “important, challenging, and innovative,” will manage not only to extend older ideas into new terrains but to reserve some space for considering ways we might expand the canon of theory itself. As essays from Eve Sedgwick, Anne-Lise Francois, Natalie Melas, and Elizabeth Povinelli reveal, theory might have had a different chronology; as Simon Jarvis, Pheng Cheah, Irene Tucker, Jordan Stein, and Karen Beckman demonstrate, whole approaches and methodologies have been left outside of what we commonly recognize as theory; and as William Flesch, Mark Hansen, Heather Love, and Frances Ferguson show, there is much to be learned by revisiting thinkers whose moment seems to have passed (e.g., I.A. Richards, Irving Goffman, Alfred North Whitehead) as well those many of us have yet to meet (e.g. George Ainslie, A.N. Veselovsky). As Ian Balfour argues, our prosecutions of the theoretical canon might demand that we write theory in a new way.

We have, we’re suggesting, more options than we’ve tended to acknowledge. “Sometimes there is an idea whose time has come, and come again.” But there are also theoretical ideas that never registered as important. We should give our attention to those, too.

Volcanic Eruptions and Environmental Disasters in Literature and History

Cataclysmic events, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which happened on this day, have fascinated people for thousands of years. Individuals have attempted to express this captivation in various ways from Pliny the Younger, who survived the Vesuvius eruption and subsequently wrote in detail about his experience, to the leaders of the French Revolution, who invoked the powerful symbolism of a natural, unstoppable force that volcanoes represent. Writing about natural disasters helps people move on, but not forget, these catastrophes. As these experiences are immortalized over time, they come to symbolize hope, survival, power and destruction. Poetics Today and French Historical Studies delve further into these instances of expression and demonstrate the link between why people write about natural disasters such as Mount Vesuvius’ eruption and how that calamity empowers and embodies events long after.

In Francoise Lavocat’s “Narratives of Catastrophe in the Early Modern Period: Awareness of Historicity and the Emergence of Interpretative Viewpoints,” he discusses the reasons and ways people write about natural disasters:

Braccini’s narrative of the Naples volcanic eruption illustrates the narrator-witness’s need to explain his personal, intellectual, and even emotional perception of a given event. The 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius gave rise to many narratives that emphasized the contrast between “the curiosity” of the witness-narrator and the credulity of Neapolitans nurtured by legends. This contrast was inspired by Pliny the Younger’s attitude toward the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. It is also by reference to Pliny that the taste for observation, even close to the eruption site, is asserted and staged, as can be seen in Braccini’s writing. Another priest, Angelo Eugenii da Perugia, compares his “experience” of the “natural effects” of the eruption to the “extravagant exaggerations” of his contemporaries, who interpret the phenomenon as the beginning of the Apocalypse. No one denies the existence of divine causes, but nor does this prevent the consideration of secondary causes. Braccini goes to a library in Naples and does a public reading of Pliny’s letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, declaring to his fellow citizens: “Here is a description,58 1550 years old, that corresponds exactly to what you have before your eyes today”. In the case of the eruption of Vesuvius, the repetition of this catastrophe and the comparison it invites between AD 79 and 1629 beg for demystification: at least, the repetition suggests that this eruption, similar to a previous one in antiquity, is not the last and so very unlikely to be the Apocalypse. Braccini’s rational point of view thus partly secularizes the interpretation. The historical dimension is fundamental to this new approach to catastrophe, expressed several times around 1630, regarding the eruption of Vesuvius and the plague in northern Italy. Most narratives include an appendix that lists previous catastrophes in chronological order,60 focusing on disasters that occurred in the recent past (especially the sixteenth century) while ignoring biblical and mythical accounts. Catastrophes are no longer prophetic of other catastrophes.

Read more from “Narratives of Catastrophe” here.

In “Mountain, Become a Volcano: The Image of the Volcano in the Rhetoric of the French Revolution,” Mary Ashburn Miller establishes a relationship between the language of natural history and the political rhetoric of the French Revolution by tracing the iconography of the volcano throughout the revolutionary period:

Le jugement dernier des rois, a play written by Sylvain Maréchal, opened to enthusiastic reviews at the Theater of the Republic in Vendémiaire of Year II. Maréchal subtitled his play ‘a prophecy in one act.’ The journalist Prudhomme also embraced the future foreseen by the playwright and hoped for by the supportive Committee of Public Safety. ‘The theatrical fiction will soon become historical fact,’ he wrote. The overthrow of Europe’s kings, their return to an ‘uncivilized’ state, and their ultimate destruction by natural forces was fiction presented to, and patronized by, a broad French public, playing in Beauvais, Compiègne, Grenoble, Le Mans, Lille, Metz, and Rouen. And the volcano, symbol of revolutionary fervor and destruction, became the ultimate demonstration of nature’s justice, annihilating the monarchs in a single, terrifying, and glorious moment described in the play’s liner notes: ‘The explosion takes place: the fire attacks the kings from all sides; they fall, consumed in the innards of the opened earth.’ The quite literal fall of the monarchs, although enabled by the French Revolution itself, was portrayed as the work of natural forces.

Read more from “Mountain, Become a Volcano” here.

American Literature Article Wins Prize

Congratulations to Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue for winning the Don D. Walker Prize sponsored by the Western Literature Association! The Don D. Walker Prize is given annually to the best essay published on western American literature during the previous calendar year.Sae-Saue's article, "Aztlán’s Asians: Forging and Forgetting Cross-Racial Relations in the Chicana/o Literary Imagination," appeared in the September 2013 issue of American Literature (85:3).  Curtis Marez's piece from American Literature (85:4) was given an honorable mention for the same award.

To read Sae-Saue's article, made freely available, click here.

Happy Birthday, Emily Brontë!

Happy birthday, Emily Brontë! Celebrating what would have been the author’s 196th birthday, we have selected several journal articles in honor of her work. Her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights, was poorly received when it was first published and Bronte died of tuberculosis just a year later. Today, Wuthering Heights is considered a classic and a masterpiece of literature.

In “Postcolonial Life and Death: A Process-Based Comparison of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Ayu Utami's Saman,” Tiffany Tsao examines the two novels' respective treatments of internal colonization,a shared thematic concern that only becomes apparent with critical attention to the similarities between scenes found in each work. Read an excerpt below:

Viewing Wuthering Heights and Saman as alike in their portrayals of the violence of domestic colonization inevitably illuminates and augments key aspects of each work. That is, when we focus on the features that the two works have in common, the differences we discover about those features, ones that previously meant little in a sea of innumerable differences, gain new significance. More specifically, we find that the two works diverge in their portrayals of the extent to which the colonization process may transform the “savage” and, consequently, the extent to which a post-colonial life based on pre-colonial ways of life is possible. Whereas Wuthering Heights portrays colonization as enacting a total transformation of the savage into the civilized, Saman portrays “savage” pre-civilization as an enduring and powerful reality that remains unaltered by the attempts of civilizers to change it. As a result, Wuthering Heights regards resistance to civilization as a reversion to a non-existent, pre-civilized past; Saman, by contrast, envisions it as the product of a way of life that has always been ongoing, independently, beneath civilization’s veneer. To put it another way, unlike Wuthering Heights, Saman posits the existence of an alternate reality an unseen primordial realm that continues untouched and undisturbed by the incursion of a so-called civilization that is oppressive.

Read more from “Postcolonial Life and Death” here.

In “'Whose Injury is Like Mine?’ Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and the Sincere Postures of Suffering Men,” Kevin A. Morrison argues that these authors, focusing on the transition from a traditional yeoman economy to a system of capitalist property ownership, present male suffering as authentic and histrionic, indicative of both power and powerlessness, and as an attempt to manage perceived threats to the self. Read an excerpt:

I employ the term sincere postures to describe Brontë’s and Eliot’s efforts to figure the gestural and rhetorical modes of male suffering as suffering while also recognizing them as calculated strategies. Representing male suffering as both authentic and histrionic, indicative of both powerlessness and power, enables these novelists to acknowledge the emotional violence that men inflict on women but then to assign a specific cause for it largely outside men’s individual control. This is less an effort to excuse such behavior than it is, I think, an attempt to authorize Brontë’s and Eliot’s own respective projects of establishing sympathy as the foundational virtue of the new bourgeois owning class whose hegemony they help to bring about. If men’s behavior toward women can be seen as emanating from genuine distress rather than inherent misogyny, women can play an active role in offering the kind of succor that might heal the wound and stop the violence that male suffering produces. However, this paradox, in which suffering is at once both a symptom of masculine precariousness and incoherency and an asset for a man’s preservation and reassertion of authority, allows Brontë and Eliot to resolve one problem only to introduce another. If suffering is constitutive of masculine dominance, then the concept of reparative compassion is incoherent because male authority relies on appeals to female sympathy to keep it intact. In my reading, these novels are poised between conservation and critique, producing an ambivalence that can be reconciled only through “imaginary or formal ‘solutions’” to the disquieting paradox of liberal masculinity.

Read more from “’Whose Injury is Like Mine?’” here.

Celebrate Bloomsday!

James Joyce set his classic novel, Ulysses, on the 16th of June, 1904. The day, nicknamed “Bloomsday” after the protagonist Leopold Bloom, has since become a commemoration of the life and work of James Joyce. In honor of Bloomsday 2014, sample several recent articles on James Joyce and Ulysses.

Beth Blum’s article “Ulysses as a Self-Help Manual” examines Declan Kiberd’s “Ulysses” and Us, a guide for the common reader of Ulysses, that attempted to “pry Joyce’s masterpiece from the grip of the ‘corporate university.’” Read an excerpt:

‘It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people,’ Kiberd declares. Instead of tracing Homeric parallels or poring over skeleton keys, we should, he suggests, approach Joyce’s text as nothing other than a ‘self-help manual.’ Ulysses, he explains, ‘is a book with much to teach us about the world--advice on how to cope with grief; how to be frank about death in the age of its denial; how women have their own sexual desires and so also do men; how to walk and think at the same time.’ Kiberd’s book was received favorably in the popular press and, perhaps unsurprisingly, less so in the academic journals. Scholars appreciated his lucid, jargon-free prose but recoiled at his brash claims, his reliance on ‘anecdotal’ evidence, and the text’s ‘gossipy biographical flourish.’ If Joyce’s goal was really to reach the ‘common reader,’ reviewers wondered why he did not write more simply.

To read more of “Ulysses as a Self-Help Manual,” click here.

In “Non serviam: James Joyce and Mexico,” Brian L. Price juxtaposes Mexican authors and James Joyce and considers how Joyce is “assimilated into their own cultural projects as literary object and literary experience.” Read an excerpt:

Non serviam is Lucifer’s declaration that he will not serve the God of heaven. It is a challenge to authority, a declaration of autonomy, and--at least since Blake--it was become a motto for embattled artists. Thus, near the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce’s fallen angel, Stephen Dedalus, declares that he will not answer the Church’s call to serve a priesthood to which he had earlier dedicated himself following the spiritual retreat in the third chapter…. Despite Stephen’s explicit declaration that he will not serve either Irish nationalism or the British literary canon, however, he is ‘supersaturated’ with that in which he says he does not believe: Ireland, Catholicism, and Shakespeare plague him throughout A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. This tension between the desire for unfettered artistic exploration and the omnipresence of national concern is one of the hallmarks of Mexican cosmopolitan writing.

To read more of “Non serviam: James Joyce and Mexico,” click here.

For a comprehensive list of all Duke University Press journal articles on James Joyce, click here.

Articles:

“Ulysses as a Self-Help Manual? James Joyce’s Strategic Populism,” by Beth Blum in Modern Language Quarterly, volume 74 and issue 1 (March 2013)

“Non serviam: James Joyce and Mexico” by Brian L. Price in Comparative Literature, volume 64 and issue 2 (Spring 2012)

Digital and New Media Issues from Duke Journals

 

Within the past year, several journal issues have tackled the topic of digital and new media in literature, humanities, and culture. Sample these articles and issues below.

The most recent issue of differences, "In the Shadow of the Digital Humanities," includes articles on opening the genealogy of the digital humanities, gaming the humanities, and working the digital humanities. Read an excerpt from Fiona M. Barnett's article, "The Brave Side of the Digital Humanities," featured in this issue:

While standing against the wall in a windowless conference room and scrolling through the tweets for the "Dark Side of the Digital Humanities" conference session, the tone of the real-time digital conversation was so counter to my understanding of the panelists' discussion that I briefly wondered if I was in the wrong room or following the wrong Twitter stream. Even after confirming the correct hashtag for the session, the uncertainty persisted until I recognized the same scholars in the room and in the Twitter stream. The concept of recognition and misrecognition has provided a useful framework for many questions in feminist theory, gender studies, and political theory, and it continues to offer a useful framework for considering disciplinary boundaries and the conversations that thake place in the lore of field formation.

Read the rest of "The Brave Side of the Digital Humanities," made freely available, here.

Other journal issues on this topic include American Literature's "New Media and American Literature" and Radical History Review's "Radical Histories in Digital Culture." Read the introductions to these special issues, made freely available, by clicking the links above.

For further reading on American Literature, check out "Chavez Behind the Camera," a guest post by Emily Dings, managing editor of American Literature, here. The post details the relationship between several articles in "New Media and American Literature" and Scalar, a multimedia authoring and publishing web platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.

Happy Birthday, Fredric Jameson!

Today is Fredric Jameson's 80th birthday. We thought we'd use the occasion to consider his vast influence on Duke University Press. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Romance Studies here at Duke University, where he has taught since 1985.

Former Executive Editor Reynolds Smith remembers when Duke was considering hiring Jameson. 

 "I remember vividly the excitement around Duke when it began to seem possible, even likely, that Fredric Jameson would come to the university to be part of its faculty. My friend and Duke University Press author, Gustavo Perez Firmat in Romance Studies, was on the hiring committee. When he and I talked about Jameson as a prospective Duke hire, it was as if we were talking about some marvelous, miraculous event like the discovery of gold on West Campus. Jameson was not only the author of acclaimed works like Marxism and Form, and The Political Unconscious, there was now actually a book about him! About he himself! An introduction to his work published by none other than Cornell University Press, in which he got billing in the title alongside Louis Althusser and Karl Marx! Karl Marx! In fact Jameson’s name was first! Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious! That this should be true of any living literary critic, let alone one at Duke University, was astounding. Gustavo and I sat in the audience at Fred’s job talk, watching him hold forth on Madame Bovary in his brown leather motorcycle jacket, and my jaw hung open."

The rest, to use a cliche, is history. In 1991 we published Jameson's book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, which remains our all-time bestseller. Smith says,"What turned out to be most amazing was that the marvelous things were only beginning at Duke. With the strong support of our Provost, Phillip Griffiths--whom, in that era of glasnost and perestroika Fred would come to call 'the Gorbachev of our university'--Fred, Stanley Fish, and all the other intellectual stars they would attract to the university over the coming years would transform the humanities at Duke and at Duke University Press beyond any of our abilities to imagine at that time."

Jameson and Fish started a book series with us, Post-Contemporary Interventions,  which came to include over 120 inflential books, including The Cultures of Globalization (1998), which Jameson edited with Masao Miyoshi, and Jameson on Jameson, a book of interviews with Jameson edited by Ian Buchanan. He has also published in our journals Social Text and SAQ. Jameson continues to support the Press in many ways, including reading manuscripts and recommending scholars.

Editorial Director Ken Wissoker says, "I've often called Duke University Press 'The house that Fred built.' His Postmodernism made possible all that came after.  Like the Duke Literature Program, still filled with brilliant intellectuals, each of whom could trace the threads of their thought to an aspect of Fred Jameson's, the Press's list changes all the time, but the centrality of Jameson's topics, ideas, and questions remains."

Happy Birthday, Fred, and thanks for everything, from all of us here at Duke University Press!

Parties and Awards at the 2014 MLA

We had a great time selling books, meeting authors, and congratulating award-winners at the 2014 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Chicago last week.

Congratulations to the authors and journals who won awards at this year's MLA! Nicole Guidotti-Hernández won the tenth biennial MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Here she is with her book Unspeakable Violence.

Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins won the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures for their book Beyond the Lettered City. Congrats to them! 

 

 

 

 

 

We're also excited that Mel Y. Chen's Animacies won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize given by the GL/Q Caucus of the MLA. Here she is accepting her award. 

 

 

 

Three of our journals also won Council of Editors of Learned Journals awards. See our post on those awards here.

In addition to these great awards, we were excited to launch the new series Theory Q at this year's MLA. Theory Q is the successor series to Series Q, which we closed upon the death of founding editor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The new series is edited by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, who launched it with their own book Sex, or the Unbearable. Here they are posing with their book. Can we start a trend of posing with this fabulous cover? 

The above photo is of Tim Campbell, co-editor of the new collection Biopolitics. Here he is with his own book. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to all the authors and editors who stopped by the booth. Check out more photos on our Facebook page!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Schachterle Prize Goes to boundary 2 Author

We are happy to announce that Bradley J. Fest’s article, “The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Archival Emergence and Anti-Eschatology in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” has won the Schachterle Prize. Presented by the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, the award is given to the best essay on literature and science published in the last year and written by a non-tenured faculty member. Fest is currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. The article appeared in boundary 2, volume 39 and issue 3, published in Fall 2012. Read the article, made freely available, here.

Award for "Death and the Maiden"

We are pleased to announce that Judith Bennett’s article, “Death and the Maiden,” published last spring in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, has won the Berkshire Conference Article Prize. The prize is awarded to the “best article in the fields of women, gender, and sexual history published in 2012 and written by a woman normally residing in North America.” Read the prize-winning article here: http://ow.ly/mfZUG. 

For more on Medieval studies from Duke University Press, take a look at the recent special issue of Pedagogy, “Teaching Medieval Literature off the Grid:” http://ow.ly/mg00c.