Anthem symploke Studies in Theory Series

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies comprises a selection of essays that register the situatedness of critical theory and practice amid various intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts. This book offers examples of situated criticism, which in turn are concerned with the ways in which literary and cultural criticism are and have been situated in relation to a variety of ideological and institutional structures, including those of world literature, American studies, spatial literary studies, cultural critique, globalization and postmodernity. These structures influence the ways that criticism is practiced, and due recognition of their continuing effects is crucial to the success of any meaningful critical practice in the twenty-first century.

Reaganism is a discourse of devotion and disqualification, combining a neoliberal negative theology of the market with a neoconservative demonization of opponents. Reagan’s personality cult shelters the aggressivity of a war of all against all by representing the market as a moralistic standard of perfection, a representation of goodness and freedom. In literary theory and criticism, a homologous valuative system centered itself on the canon, representing culture as a study of perfection. Paul de Man argued for the displacement of this positive moralistic reference, but his proposals ultimately replace it with a negative moralistic reference to literariness. De Man’s premises have been perpetuated in subsequent theory by persistent misrecognitions of dialectic as suspicious hermeneutics, of materialism as reference to materiality, and of demands for democratic equity as identity politics. Tracing this motivated reasoning through misreadings of Eve Sedgwick’s critique of conspiracy theory and Edward Said’s “secular criticism,” we are led back to the unexamined premises of Paul de Man’s negative moralism and the opportunistic competition of academic careerism.

A reading of Theory that in tracing when and where Theory arises in the event of reading proposes how Theory might best be handled in the context of higher education today. Arguing against those who propose to avoid Theory in the name of its putative obsolescence, this text sets out to challenge two aspects of this avoidance. On the one hand, Theory has been set aside in the name of identity politics, that is, the proposition that its intellectual pertinence has been overshadowed by a sense of political urgency construed as at odds with Theory. Theory itself has assumed an identity, a profile. On the other hand, implicit within the avoidance of Theory is a concept of “context” that calls for reflection. Resisting the tendency to treat context as either negligible or obvious, this text sets out to trace, in the when and where of Theory, the rudiments of a “sociographic” (think “historiographic”) account of context. In relation to it, the reading that is Theory can be usefully situated as part of a politics of higher education in the era of the global crisis of the university.

This book reconfigures the history of modern America, showing how multiple and, at times, vulnerable social, economic, literary, and political movements, levels, divisions, and conditions such as the emergent middle class, the labor movement, the Progressive Movement, the socialist and communist parties, the Women’s movements, the NAACP, the Garvey movement, Asian and Native American resistance movements, writers, artists, and intellectuals seized upon social, gender, economic, and racial inequalities and challenged a singularly defined modern America. This book re-represents the modern American novel, accenting the different critical literary voices that come out of the mainstream consumer society but also out of the various unequal social, economic, gender, and political movements and situations. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, class, and ethnic others—who reject the rigidity, the repression, the racial and ethnic stereotyping, the external and internal colonialism, the complication/rejection of the past/nature, and the violence of the institutionalized, conformist norm—in a discussion of the modern American novel, it effects a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm, one that is de-centered, richer, more complex, and more diverse.

The first chapter is an overview of the current “crisis” of literary study, brought about by downsizings following the crash of 2008 (from which literary studies never really recovered), compounded by the Covid pandemic, and rocked by the bedrock questions put to the academic study of literature by the Black Lives Matter protests. This chapter also looks at why theory matters in the present – as an introduction to modes of questioning and ways of life, which the author opposes to the English department’s understanding of literature as a series of disciplinary objects to be understood or appreciated. The second chapter is a specific exploration of the novel, the current reigning form of literature and literary study in both popular and academic contexts, and the novel’s relation to the present (of new materialism) and the past (the European history of the novel as the official form for warehousing bourgeois subjective experience). If new materialism (including anti-racist critiques) questions the world-view of bourgeois Eurocentric humanism, it also brings into question the centrality of that world view’s primary artistic form, the novel.

The interviewees of this volume fall into three groups: the main players who brought about the rise of theory (Fish, Gallop, Spivak, Bhabha); a younger group of post-theorists (Bérubé, Dimock, Nealon, Warren); the anti-critique theorists (Felski); and new order theorists (Puchner, Wolfe). They discuss elemental questions, such as trying to grasp what was logic and what was rhetoric; trying to see down the road while fog and turmoil held visibility to arm’s length; and trying to pick legible meanings out of the cultural blanket of deafening noise. Theorists were not only good thinkers but also pioneers who were seeking profound transformations.

Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images argues that imagery of all kinds has become a definitive force in the shaping of contemporary life. While immersed in public politics and private imaginaries, such imagery also operates according to its own logic, potentialities, and limitations. This book explores viral imagery—the iconopolitics—of the pandemic, U.S. Presidents Trump and Biden, Black Lives Matter, as well as the rise of a “black aesthetic” in white artworlds. Having arrived at the term “iconomy” in the years just prior to 9/11, and tracking its growing relevance since then, Smith argues that its study does not require a discipline serving nation states and globalizing capitalism but, instead, a deconstructive interdiscipline that contributes to the politics of planetary world-making. 

The books collects Daniel T. O’Hara’s half century of essays and review-essays on Yeats and his major poetry an drama and how leading critics and theorists have sought to revise their reception for their periods of time and indeed for the future. Its aim is to trace a critical history of the last fifty years, even as it opens the prospects for the future of critical reading of Yeats and modern poetry.

Roman Jakobson gave a literary translation of the double words and concepts of poetical hyper translation. Language can transmit verbal translation to explore new ways of thinking about music and other arts. Thomas A. Sebeok deconstructed the energy of translation into the duplicated genres of artistic transduction. In semiotics, transduction is a technical expression involving music, theater, and other arts. Jakobson used Saussure’s theory to give a single meaning in a different art but with other words and sounds, later followed by Peirce’s dynamic energy with a floating sensation of the double meaning of words and concepts. For semiotician Peirce, literary translation becomes the graphical vision of ellipsis, parabole, and hyperbole. Ellipsis is illustrated by Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves to give a political transformation of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold. Parabole is illustrated by the two lines of thought of Hector Berlioz. He neglected his own translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, when he retranslated the vocal text to accompany the musical lyrics of his opera The Trojans. Hyperbole is demonstrated by Bertold Brecht’s auto-translation of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. In the cabaret theater of The Three penny Opera, Brecht recreated his epic hyper-translation by retranslating the language of the folk speech of the German working classes with the jargon of criminal slang.