DOCSLIB.ORG

Kafka : Toward a Minor Literature

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Kafka : Toward a Minor Literature Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature This page intentionally left blank Kafka Toward a Minor Literature Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Translation by Dana Polan Foreword by Réda Bensmai'a Theory and History of Literature, Volume 30 University of Minnesota Press MinneapolLondon The University of Minnesota gratefully acknowledges translation assistance provided for this book by the French Ministry of Culture. Copyright © 1986 by the University of Minnesota Originally published as Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure Copyright © 1975 by Les éditions de Minuit, Paris. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Seventh printing 2003 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deleuze, Gilles. Kafka: toward a minor literature. (Theory and history of literature ; v. 30) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924—Criticism and interpretation. I. Guattari, Felix. II. Title. III. Series. PT2621.A26Z67513 1986 833'.912 85-31822 ISBN 0-8166-1514-4 ISBN 0-8166-1515-2 (pbk.) The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Foreword: The Kafka Effect by Réda Bensmai'a ix Translator's Introduction xxii 1. Content and Expression 3 2. An Exaggerated Oedipus 9 3. What Is a Minor Literature? 16 4. The Components of Expression 28 5. Immanence and Desire 43 6. Proliferation of Series 53 7. The Connectors 63 8. Blocks, Series, Intensities 72 9. What Is an Assemblage? 81 Notes 91 Index 101 Theory and History of Literature Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse Volume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics Volume 2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception Volume 3. Hans Robert Jauss Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics Volume 4. Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde Volume 5. Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore Volume 6. Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America Volume 7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism 2nd ed., rev. Volume 8. Mikhail Bakhtin Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics Volume 9. Erich Auerbach Scenes from the Drama of European Literature Volume 10. Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Volume 11. Edited by John FeketeThtructuraAllegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought Volume 12. Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction Volume 13. Tzvetan TodorovMikhaiBakhtinheDialogicalPrinciple Volume 14. Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 Volume 15. Peter SzondiOnTextuaUnderstandingndtherssays Volume 16. Jacques Attali Noise Volume 17. Michel de Certeau Heterologies Volume 18. Thomas G. Pavel The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama Volume 19. Jay Caplan Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy of the Beholder Volume 20. Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud Just Gaming Volume 21. Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem Volume 22. Klaus TheweleitMaleFantasies, Volume 1. Women, Floods, Bodies, History Volume 23. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies, Volume 2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror Volume 24. Héléne Cixous and Catherine Clement The Newly Born Woman Volume 25. Jose Antonio Maravall Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure Volume 26. Andrej Warminski Readings in Interpretation: Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger Volume 27. Stephen Melville Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruc- tion and Modernism Volume 28. Edited by Jonathan Arac Postmodernism and Politics Volume 29. Peter Szondi Theory of the Modern Drama Volume 30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature This page intentionally left blank Foreword The Kafka Effect Reda Bensmai'a Translated by Terry Cochran Writing is born from and deals with the acknowledged doubt of an explicit division, in sum, of the impossibility of one's own place. It articulates an act that is constantly a beginning: the sub- ject is never authorized by a place, it could never install itself in an inalterable cogito, it remains a stranger to itself and forever deprived of an ontological ground, and therefore it always comes up short or is in excess, always the debtor of a death, indebted with respect to the disappearance of a genealogical and territorial "substance," linked to a name that cannot be owned. —Michel de Certeau, L'Ecriture de ITiistoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), p. 327 In December 1934, the Jüdische Rundschau published an important text on Kafka by Walter Benjamin, in which we can read these decisive words: "There are two ways to miss the point of Kafka's works. One is to interpret them natu- rally, the other is the supernatural interpretation. Both the psychoanalytic and the theological interpretations equally miss the essential points."1 In 1974, when Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari devoted a book to Kafka's work, they took their point of departure from the same principle: one misses the mark in Kafka either by putting him in the nursery—by oedipalizing and relating him to mother- father narratives—or by trying to limit him to theological-metaphysical specula- tion to the detriment of all the political, ethical, and ideological dimensions that run through his work and give it a special status in the history of literature. At ix xFOREWORD the least, this initial convergence between Benjamin's approach and that ad- vanced by Deleuze and Guattari seems worthy of note. When we read each of the studies carefully, we cannot help being struck by the care taken in each case to avoid what might be called a political-ideological recuperation of Kafka or, perhaps, to avoid falling back upon what Deleuze and Guattari call a hard segment: the binary machine of social classes, sexes, neuro- sis, mysticism, and so on. In both cases, we find ourselves face to face with the same attempt to avoid making Kafka just another great litterateur. Both pinpoint the need to make way for new philosophical, literary, and even psychological categories to come to terms with this unique work and to lead readers out of the impasse created by so many readings of exegesis. First, let us read and consider what Benjamin would have us think about Kafka: What is the substance of what he says? What is he attempting to have us experience, and not simply interpret or read? What writing machine— already! —does he want to connect us to? Recall that the study begins withap litical apologue: Potemkin was having a crisis and was therefore inaccessible, but affairs of state were pending. There was a stack of documents that urgently needed to be signed, and the high officials were at the end of their rope; but a or clerk named Shuvalkin who was informed of the problem took hold of the documents, impassively marched into Potemkin's bedroom, presented the papers to him, and pressed him to sign them. Without blinking—at least, so it seemed—Potemkin signed all the documents presented to him one after the other. Everyone knows what happened: when the high officials finally had the famous documents in hand, they were stupefied to decipher in each instance the name Shuvalkin. Benjamin continues in a way that is highly significant for us: This story is like a herald racing two hundred years ahead of Kafka's work. The enigma which beclouds it is Kafka's enigma. The world of offices and registries, of musty, shabby, dark rooms, is Kafka's world. The obliging Shuvalkin, who makes light of everything and is finally left empty-handed, is Kafka's K. (p. 112) The "reading" that Benjamin proposes for Kafka's work is clear from the out- set and is characterized-no less than that of Deleuze and Guattari—by never trying to find archetypes that claim to have "qualified" Kafka's "imaginary" or to interpret his work by moving from the unknown back to the known: the Castle is God, the world of the father, power that cannot be grasped; the cockroach is anxiety, castration, the dreamworld and its multiple metamorphoses, and so forth. But what is still more striking, neither does Benjamin try-he doesn't con sider it useful or necessary—to relate Kafka's work to a structure with preformed formal oppositions and a signifier of the kind in which "after all is said and done, xefers to y"! Not at all. The reading of Kafka both in Benjamin and in Deleuze and Guattari is determined by the prominence they give to a politics of Kafka; FOREWORDxi but, as Deleuze and Guattari go on to articulate, this politics is "neither imagi- nary nor symbolic." In characterizing the hordes of messengers, judges, assistants, intermedi- aries, and lawyers who haunt Kafka's text, Benjamin never takes refuge behind a symbolic, allegorical, or mythical interpretation: he considers Kafka's ances- tors to be the Jews and Chinese of ancient or contemporary history, or even the Greeks, rather than considering Kafka to be the descendant of "Atlases" who would carry the globe of the world on the back of his neck. Refuge behind myth, recourse to myth as the last hope, is radically rejected: Even the world of myth of which we think in this context is incom- parably younger than Kafka's world, which has been promised redemp- tion by the myth. But if we can be sure of one thing, it is this:Kafka did not succumb to its temptation, (p. 117; my emphasis) Nor would Benjamin have yielded to the temptation to take refuge behind myth; to do so would be to inject mythical meanings into Kafka's work-to say that Kafka is to modernity what classical myth was to traditional society.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Literary Criticism and Theory in the African Novel
    LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY IN THE AFRICAN NOVEL: . CIDNUAACBEBE AND ALI MAZRUI by AyoMamudu 'It simply dawned on me two mommgs ago that a novelist must listen to his characters who after all are created to wear the shoe and point the writer where it pinches' - lkem in achebe's Antbllls of the Savannah The successful creative writer is also in an obvious and fundamental sense a critic; he possesses the critical awareness and carries out the self-criticism without which a work of art of respectable quality cannot be produced. Indeed, T.S. Eliot, as is well-known. was led to opine that "it is to be expected that the critic and the creative artist should frequently be the same person" .1 In contemporacy Africa, the view is widely held that the creative sensibility is other than and superior to the critical; and, in the tradition of the wide-spread and age-long "dispute" between writers and critics. that the critic is a junior partner (to the writer), even a parasite.2 Yet the evidence is abundant that some of Africa's leading writers have also produced considerable and compelling criticism: Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka, to name a few. Their independent criticalworks aside, African writers have continued in their creative works to give information and shed light on critical and literary theory. The special attraction ofthis practice ofembedding, hinting at or discussing critical and literary ideas or views in creative writing is that the cut and thrust of contemporacy critical debates. the shifting sands of critical taste and fashion, and the interweaving of personal.opinion and public demands are gathered up and sifted through the imaginative process and the requirements ofthe particular literacy genre; its greatest danger is to be expected from a disregard for the imperatives of form.
    [Show full text]
  • Chaosmosis : an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm I Felix Guattari ; Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis
    Chaosmosis an ethico-aesthetic paradigm Felix Guattari translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS BLOOMINGTON & INDIANAPOLIS English translation© 1995, Power Institute, Paul Bains, and Julian Pefanis Chaosmosis was originally published in French as Chaosmose. © 1992, Editions Galilee All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolutions on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39 .48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guattari, Felix. [Chaosmose. English] Chaosmosis : an ethico-aesthetic paradigm I Felix Guattari ; translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-253-32945-0 (alk. paper). - ISBN 0-253-21004-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Psychoanalysis-Philosophy. 2. Subjectivity. I. Title. BFl 75.G81313 1995' 95-31403 194-dc20 1 2 3 4 5 00 99 98 97 96 95 On the planking, on the ship's bulwarks, on the sea, with the course of the sun through the sky and the ship, an unreadable and wrenching script takes shape, takes shape and destroys itself at the same slow pace - shadows, spines, shafts of broken light refocused in the angles, the triangles of a fleeting geometry that yields to the shadow of the ocean waves.
    [Show full text]
  • Interpretation of Dreams and Kafka's a Country Doctor: a Psychoanalytic Reading Sara Mirmobin1, Ensieh Shabanirad2 1M.A
    International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Online: 2015-11-30 ISSN: 2300-2697, Vol. 63, pp 1-6 doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.63.1 2015 SciPress Ltd, Switzerland Interpretation of Dreams and Kafka's A Country Doctor: A Psychoanalytic Reading Sara Mirmobin1, Ensieh Shabanirad2 1M.A. Student of Language and English Literature, University of Semnan, Iran 2PhD Candidate of Language and English Literature University of Tehran, Iran Corresponding Author: [email protected] Keywords: Kafka, A Country Doctor, Freud, dreams, psychological approach. ABSTRACT. Dreams are so real that one cannot easily distinguish them from reality. We feel disappointed after waking up from a fascinating dream and rejoice to wake up knowing the nightmare is ended. In some literary works the line between fancy and reality is blurred as well, so it provides the opportunity to ponder on them psychologically. The plot of some of the poems, novels, novellas, dramas and short stories is centered on the minds, thoughts, or generally speaking, human psyche. This essay elaborates upon the "nightmarish"-rather than dreamlike-story, Kafka's A Country Doctor, by applying psychological approach. It seeks to discuss the interpretation of some of the incidents of the story according to Freud's "The Interpretations of Dreams". Also, the id, ego and superego, the three parts of Freudian psychic apparatus, as well as their identification with the related characters are discussed. 1. INTRODUCTION Franz Kafka, one of the most influential writers of 20th century, was a German-language writer with the significant style of writing known as Kafkaesque. His stories are thoroughly bizarre, digging into psychological state of the characters as well as characterizing different aspects of human psyche.
    [Show full text]
  • Bakhtin's Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives
    literary.chronotope.book Page 3 Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM BAKHTIN'S THEORY OF THE LITERARY CHRONOTOPE: REFLECTIONS, APPLICATIONS, PERSPECTIVES Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, Michel De Dobbeleer, Kristoffel Demoen, Koen De Temmerman & Bart Keunen (eds.) literary.chronotope.book Page 4 Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM © Academia Press Eekhout 2 9000 Gent T. (+32) (0)9 233 80 88 F. (+32) (0)9 233 14 09 [email protected] www.academiapress.be The publications of Academia Press are distributed by: Belgium: J. Story-Scientia nv Wetenschappelijke Boekhandel Sint-Kwintensberg 87 B-9000 Gent T. 09 255 57 57 F. 09 233 14 09 [email protected] www.story.be The Netherlands: Ef & Ef Eind 36 NL-6017 BH Thorn T. 0475 561501 F. 0475 561660 Rest of the world: UPNE, Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA (www.upne.com) Nele Bemong, Pieter Borghart, Michel De Dobbeleer, Kristoffel Demoen, Koen De Temmerman & Bart Keunen (eds.) Bakhtin's Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives Proceedings of the workshop entitled “Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives” (27-28 June 2008) supported by the Royal Flemish Academy for Sciences and the Arts. Gent, Academia Press, 2010, v + 213 pp. ISBN 978 90 382 1563 1 D/2010/4804/84 U 1414 Layout: proxess.be Cover: Steebz/KHUAN No part of this publication may be reproduced in print, by photocopy, microfilm or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. literary.chronotope.book Page i Tuesday, May 4, 2010 5:47 PM I CONTENTS Preface .
    [Show full text]
  • “English”: the Influence of British and American Thought on His Philosophy Written by Thomas H
    Book Review Nietzsche and the “English”: The Influence of British and American Thought on His Philosophy written by Thomas H. Brobjer (New York: Humanities Books, 2008) reviewed by Martine Prange (University of Amsterdam & Maastricht University) ietzsche did not know English well and he Nnever visited the British Isles. He accused ‘the small-spiritedness of England’ to be ‘now the great danger on Earth’ and he dismissed the English for be- ing ‘no philosophical race’ (BGE 252). Nevertheless, in his new book Nietzsche and the “English” (which term refers to what we now call ‘Anglo-American’ philosophy and literature), Thomas Brobjer, associ- ate professor in the History of Science and Ideas at the University of Uppsala, sets out to show that such statements conceal the fact that ‘many of Nietzsche’s favourite authors were British and American and dur- ing two extended periods of his life Nietzsche was enthusiastic about and highly interested in British and American thinking and literature, and read intensively works by and about British authors’ (12). He further claims that those readings had a much deeper impact on Nietzsche’s philosophy than recognized so far, in both negative and positive ways. On a more general level, he wants to reveal how Nietzsche worked and thought by focusing on his response to his readings. Thus, Brobjer researches what Nietzsche read, when he read it, how seriously he read it, and in which manner his readings influenced his thought. Brobjer’s claims spur curiosity. Who exactly were those British and American
    [Show full text]
  • On Methodology in Medieval Literary Studies
    Oral Tradition, 8/1 (1993): 187-214 Alterities: On Methodology in Medieval Literary Studies Ursula Schaefer The Albert Lord and Milman Parry Lecture for 1991-1992 Prologue Medieval literary studies hold a privileged position in methodological and theoretical argumentation. The privilege is based on the limitedness of and the in-immediate access to their “material.” The latter is created by the philological barrier that virtually keeps theoretical and/or methodological intruders out. In that sense medieval literary studies potentially enjoy a sanctuary privilege: theoretical and methodological novelties may enter the sanctuary only if the philologically trained so warrant. That is, literary medievalists are very much in control of theoretical and/or methodological import because, due to their philological training, they are the only ones who can handle the “material” in the first place.1 Due to the limitedness of their material, medieval literary studies do, however, have another kind of privilege. The concept of some monolithic entity called “the Middle Ages” creates a kind of laboratory situation where new approaches/methods/theories can furnish quick results. Since the Middle Ages—or any period within it, or any ensemble of phenomena from remote periods that are made the object of research—are constructs in the mind of the scholarly beholder to begin with, the (sometimes sparse) building blocks, as it were, out of which the respective constructs are built, can more easily be shuffled about according to one’s (methodologically 1 I am excluding here the possibility of gaining access to medieval texts through modern renderings and am thus arguing within the vein of the “Old Philology.” 188 URSULA SCHAEFER geared) Erkenntnisinteresse.2 When speaking about methodology, there is yet another point that I think necessary to bring to mind.
    [Show full text]
  • Gilles Deleuze's American Rhizome by Michelle Renae Koerner the Graduate Program in Literature
    The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze’s American Rhizome by Michelle Renae Koerner The Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Kenneth Surin, Co-Chair ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Co-Chair ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano ___________________________ Frederick Moten ___________________________ Michael Hardt Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 i v iv ABSTRACT The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze’s American Rhizome by Michelle Renae Koerner The Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Kenneth Surin, Co-Chair ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Co-Chair ___________________________ Wahneema Lubiano ___________________________ Frederick Moten ___________________________ Michael Hardt An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 Copyright by Michelle Renae Koerner 2010 Abstract “The Uses of Literature: Gilles Deleuze’s American Rhizome” puts four writers – Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, George Jackson and William S. Burroughs – in conjunction with four concepts – becoming-democratic, belief in the world, the line of flight, and finally, control societies. The aim of this
    [Show full text]
  • Characters in Bakhtin's Theory
    Studies in 20th Century Literature Volume 9 Issue 1 Special Issue on Mikhail Bakhtin Article 5 9-1-1984 Characters in Bakhtin's Theory Anthony Wall Queen's University Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the Modern Literature Commons, and the Russian Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Wall, Anthony (1984) "Characters in Bakhtin's Theory," Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 9: Iss. 1, Article 5. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1151 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Characters in Bakhtin's Theory Abstract A common focus in many modern theories of literature is a reassessment of the traditional view of the character in a narrative text. The position that this article defends is that a revised conception is necessary for an understanding of the means by which dialogism is said to function in novelistic discourse. Revising the notion does not, however, involve discarding it outright as recent theories of the subject would have us do. Nor can we simply void it of all "psychological" content as suggested by many structuralist proposals. To retain Bakhtin's concept of the notion of character, we must understand the term "psychological" in the context of his early book on Freud. In artificially combining Bakhtin's isolated remarks on the literary character, we arrive at a view which postulates textualized voice-sources in the novel.
    [Show full text]
  • Dialogic Pedagogy and Semiotic-Dialogic Inquiry Into Visual Literacies and Augmented Reality
    ISSN: 2325-3290 (online) Dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality Zoe Hurley Zayed University, Dubai Abstract Technological determinism has been driving conceptions of technology enhanced learning for the last two decades at least. The abrupt shift to the emergency delivery of online courses during COVID-19 has accelerated big tech’s coup d’état of higher education, perhaps irrevocably. Yet, commercial technologies are not necessarily aligned with dialogic conceptions of learning while a technological transmission model negates learners’ input and interactions. Mikhail Bakhtin viewed words as the multivocal bridge to social thought. His theory of the polysemy of language, that has subsequently been termed dialogism, has strong correlations with the semiotic philosophy of American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce’s semiotic philosophy of signs extends far beyond words, speech acts, linguistics, literary genres, and/or indeed human activity. This study traces links between Bakhtin’s dialogism with Peirce’s semiotics. Conceptual synthesis develops the semiotic-dialogic framework. Taking augmented reality as a theoretical case, inquiry illustrates that while technologies are subsuming traditional pedagogies, teachers and learners, this does not necessarily open dialogic learning. This is because technologies are never dialogic, in and of themselves, although semiotic learning always involves social actors’ interpretations of signs. Crucially, semiotic-dialogism generates theorising of the visual literacies required by learners to optimise technologies for dialogic learning. Key Words: Dialogism / signs / semiotics / questioning / opening / augmented reality / technologies Zoe Hurley (PhD, Lancaster University, UK) is the Assistant Dean for Student Affairs in the College of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
    [Show full text]
  • Children's Classics Through the Lenses of Literary Theory
    Children’s Classics Through The Lenses of Literary Theory Adam Georgandis Bellaire High School INTRODUCTION Literary theory is largely absent from high school English courses. While virtually all high school students read and respond to literature, few are given opportunities to analyze the works they read using established, critical methods. This curriculum unit will introduce high school students to four critical approaches, and it will ask students to apply each approach to selected works of children’s literature. Four methods of literary criticism - feminism, Marxism, post-colonial criticism, and reader-centered criticism – are especially useful in understanding the wide variety of texts students study in high school and college English courses. Feminist criticism suggests that readers can fully comprehend works of literature only when they pay particular attention to the dynamics of gender. Many high school readers are naturally drawn to the issue of gender. In several canonical works – The Scarlet Letter and The Awakening are good examples – understanding the roles of key female characters is an important and provocative task. Our use of feminist criticism will produce interesting discussions of traditional gender roles and societal expectations in literature and in the world of daily experience. Marxist criticism suggests that readers must closely examine the dynamics of class as they strive to understand the works they read. Many students focus naturally on the issue of class when they read works which explicitly call attention to it – the novels of John Steinbeck and Richard Wright, for example. Extending this focus to works of literature which do not call particular attention to class struggle will be a challenging and potentially rewarding endeavor.
    [Show full text]
  • An Innocent Abroad: Lectures in China, J
    An Innocent Abroad The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how liter- ature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi- tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit- erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit- erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor A complete list of titles begins on p. 306. An Innocent Abroad Lectures in China J. Hillis Miller northwestern university press | evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2015 by Northwestern University Press. Foreword copyright © 2015 by Fredric Jameson. Published 2015. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Miller, J.
    [Show full text]
  • Culinary Entertainment, Creative Labor, and the Reterritorialization of White Masculinity
    This is a repository copy of Culinary Entertainment, Creative Labor, and the Reterritorialization of White Masculinity. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/150181/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Negra, D and Tasker, Y orcid.org/0000-0001-8130-2251 (2019) Culinary Entertainment, Creative Labor, and the Reterritorialization of White Masculinity. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 59 (1). pp. 112-133. ISSN 1527-2087 © 2019 University of Texas Press. This is a pre-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available through the University of Texas Press. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Culinary Entertainment, Creative Labor and the Re-Territorialization of White Masculinity Abstract This article explores popular cultural themes of masculinity and mobility in the context of post-race and “end of men” discourses.
    [Show full text]