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Becoming Unbearable: an Interview with Slavoj Zizek CJLC Volume IV The 2005-2006 CJLC After Hours Discussion Series4 Rescuing the Past from History: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime 6Liz Maynes-Aminzade Creating a Renaissance: Matthiessen, Fiedler, and an American Literary History 17Ashley L. Cohen Flaubert and the Mirror: Character and Style in A Sentimental Education 28Jonathan Blitzer Marie NDiaye: Translating the Surface 42Liesl Yamaguchi Premeds and Puritans: An Interview with Molly Murray and Rebecca Stanton Conducted by Noah Block-Harley 49and Isabel Bussarakum Becoming Unbearable: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek 56Conducted by Avi Alpert The Consolation of Philosophy: An Interview with Elaine Scarry 64Conducted by Noah Block-Harley Page 2 Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism Dear Readers: e are proud to present you with the fourth issue of the WColumbia Journal of Literary Criticism, which represents CJLC the culmination a year of discussion, editing workshops, semi- nars, research and writing. This year saw a remarkable expansion Columbia Journal in scope for our Journal, and on behalf of the Executive and of Literary Criticism Editorial Boards, we thank our contributors, supporters, and Volume IV, Spring 2006 friends for making this possible. The Journal’s activities began this year with the creation of our “After Hours” seminars, in which we invited faculty to Executive Board speak to students about their current writing projects. We are grateful to all the of professors who shared their time, stories, Editors-in-Chief work and dreams with us: Professor Ann Douglas, who inau- Kate Meng Brassel gurated the series, Professors Nicholas Dames, Neguin Yavari, Ling Tiong Jenny Davidson, Amanda Claybaugh, and Professors James Shapiro and Andrew Delbanco, who closed the series for this academic year. Publisher In this issue, we offer four outstanding papers by Columbia Gautam Hans undergraduates. Liz Maynes-Aminzade assesses the relation- ship between history and fiction in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Ashley Cohen examines the role of Matthiessen’s American Managing Editors Renaissance in the formation of the American literary canon. Noah Block-Harley Jonathan Blitzer gives us a reading of free indirect discourse Jenny Kane in Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education alongside Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies Bergère. Liesl Yamaguchi examines the problems of “the surface” in Marie NDiaye’s “Papa doit manger” and what Associate Editors it means for the translator. Liz Vastola Also included are three discussions with academics and Tamar Zeffren thinkers: Professors Molly Murray and Rebecca Stanton, who came to Columbia as undergraduates, discuss their experiences of returning here to teach; Avi Alpert interviews the philoso- Associate Publisher pher Slavoj Zizek on his thoughts on religion and politics; final- Joyce Hau ly, Noah Block-Harley speaks with Elaine Scarry, an acclaimed Harvard professor and author, about her writings and their im- plications for the university. Editorial Board We gratefully acknowledge the hard work put in by our Ex- Jason Allegrante ecutive and Editorial Boards in supporting the Journal’s activi- ties this year. We would especially like to thank our faculty advi- Avi Alpert sor, Professor Amanda Claybaugh, for her guidance, confidence Jon Blitzer and support. We are also grateful for the support that we have Isabel Bussarakum received from the Department of English and Comparative Lit- Iggy Cortez erature, the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Columbia University Arts Initiative. Cora Dean It is our highest hope that the spirit of critical engagement Patrick Jarenwattananon that produced this issue will extend to our readers. We welcome Alex Platt your comments, and invite you to participate in the Journal’s Julian Smith-Newman ongoing conversation. Yours, Faculty Advisor Kate Meng Brassel and Ling Tiong Professor Amanda Claybaugh Editors-in-Chief, CJLC [email protected] For more information and back issues: www.columbia.edu/cu/english/cjlc/ Table of Contents Page 3 Volume IV CJLC Table of Contents The 2005-2006 CJLC 4 After Hours Discussion Series 6 Rescuing the Past from History: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime Liz Maynes-Aminzade 17 Creating a Renaissance: Matthiessen, Fiedler, and an American Literary History Ashley L. Cohen 28 Flaubert and the Mirror: Character and Style in A Sentimental Education Jonathan Blitzer Marie NDiaye: 42 Translating the Surface Liesl Yamaguchi Premeds and Puritans: 49 An Interview with Molly Murray and Rebecca Stanton Conducted by Noah Block-Harley and Isabel Bussarakum Becoming Unbearable: An Interview with 56 Slavoj Žižek Conducted by Avi Alpert The Consolation of Philosophy: An Interview 64 with Elaine Scarry Conducted by Noah Block-Harley Page 4 Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism The 2005-2006 CJLC After Hours Discussion Series The After Hours Discussion Series was started in Fall 2005 by the CJLC to en- courage dialogue between students and faculty outside of the classroom on topics such as intellectual research, higher education, and academic pedagogy. The sessions are informal conversations in small groups that the CJLC hopes will become a fixture for discourse on issues regarding to the teaching and research in the liberal highlights at Columbia. November 17, 2005 Ann Douglas Parr Professor of Comparative Literature Professor Douglas described her academic trajectory as one of the first female academics in the country, and discussed her recent research into American Cold War culture and her focus on film noir. December 1, 2005 Nicholas Dames Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature Reflecting on the way we read Victorian novels today, Pro- fessor Dames explained his inspiration for his recent inves- tigation into Victorian reading practices and shared with us chapters from his recent manuscript. January 26, 2006 Neguin Yavari Assistant Professor of Religion Professor Yavari shared with us her experiences in coming to academia as an Iranian woman, and described how Columbia has changed since her arrival. The After Hours Discussion Series Page 5 February 9, 2006 Jenny Davidson Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature Working as a book critic and a novelist in addition to her academic position, Professor Davidson described the ways in which her various writing projects intersect, and the pleasures and perils of academia. February 16, 2006 Amanda Claybaugh Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature Professor Claybaugh described the inception of her current book project, which focuses on United States Reconstruc- tion, and discussed her writing and research methodologies. April 5, 2006 Andrew Delbanco Director of American Studies Julian Clarence Levi Professor of the Humanities James Shapiro Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature Professors Delbanco and Shapiro discussed their recent biog- raphies of Herman Melville and William Shakespeare respec- tively, and the challenges and rewards in writing these uncon- ventional projects. Page 6 Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism Rescuing the Past from History: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime Liz Maynes-Aminzade “ o articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment Tof danger.” Among all of today’s novelists, perhaps no one has taken Walter Benjamin’s maxim more to heart than E.L. Doctorow. Certainly, it was during what the American Left regarded as a moment of danger that Doctorow chose to write his now-classic historical novel, Ragtime. To many who had participated in the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, 1975 felt post-utopian. The civil rights movement had bro- ken down into militant, racially-divided factions; administration-friendly labor unions had become alienated from the anti-War intellectuals of the New Left; “socialism with a human face” had widely failed abroad. Given that all of these political themes found their way into Doctorow’s historical novel, set 70 years earlier, Doctorow seems to have followed Benjamin’s urging: the keyword of the New York Times’ 1975 review of Ragtime was “resonance.”1 To many critics, Ragtime was a historical novel in guise only. In essence, it was a novel about the dangers of the present. But there is a problem with this opposition. The history depicted in Ragtime was also (and is still) fascinating to audiences because of its difference from their present times. The novel owes its popular success, in no small part, to its appeal to a mytholo- gized past – to our belief that the dawn of the American Century was a “unique” time, an exceptionally dynamic and exciting moment in world history. Yes, we still have racial strife and exploitation of labor, but gone are the days of Model-Ts, player pianos, and magic lantern movie books. In setting his novel in a different historical era, Doctorow capitalizes on two opposing impulses in our relationship to history: to identify, and to fetishize. Ragtime’s historical moment may possess striking resonance, but it also boasts fascinating alterity. Ragtime’s concern with how we relate to history in the present has led many critics, notably Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon, to emphasize the novel as a work of “historiographic metafiction” which takes as its premise the belief that the past can never be accessed wie es eigentlich gewesen. For these critics, Ragtime stands out as a liter- Rescuing the Past from History Page 7 ary response to the postmodern “crisis of representation”: a novel documenting the mimetic attempt gone awry, whether driven there by an increasing alienation from the “real” in a culture of simulacra, the representational limits inherent to any linguis- tic system, or the ideological nature of narrative. Jameson and Hutcheon focus on Ragtime’s concern with this epistemological situation, and what it implies, specifically, about attempts to represent the past.2 The novel certainly undertakes to explore the tenuous relationship between historical reconstruction, based on documentary traces, and social memory – the non-documented past that nonetheless stays with us. But the Doctorow criticism in this vein often gives the impression that Ragtime is simply post- structuralist theory translated into novel form.
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