The Lives of the Novel: A History by Thomas Pavel. Princeton University Press, 2013. 360 pp. Writ... more The Lives of the Novel: A History by Thomas Pavel. Princeton University Press, 2013. 360 pp. Writing books about the evolution of the novel is in vogue. Pavel's The Lives of the Novel: A History is a substantially revised version of his La pensee du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Before Pavel produced his English version, Steven Moore published The Novel: Beginnings to 1600 (London: Continuum, 2013) and The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). One way in which Pavel's work differs from Moore's is that it does not attempt to cover the non-European lineage of the novel. Later Michael Schmidt published The Novel: A Biography (Harvard U. Press, 2014). While Schmidt restricts himself to novels written in English, Pavel, whose background and expertise is essentially European, writes mainly about European novels--from countries like England, Scotland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Portugal--with forays into, for instance, Russia and North A...
In an essay entitled "One's Perception of Life is Shaped by Concepts Already Established in One's... more In an essay entitled "One's Perception of Life is Shaped by Concepts Already Established in One's Mind", the Indian philosopher and spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti argues that an individual's thought can never be adequately captured by one national culture, any more than it can be rooted entirely in one political system or religion. He notes too that "Thought has separated the world into the Americans, the Communists, the Socialists, the Germans, the Swiss, the Hindus, the Buddhists, and all other religious divisions" (Krishnamurti 2000, p. 59); and two paragraphs later he continues:
This chapter explores differing concepts of “the literary mind” articulated in the sixth century ... more This chapter explores differing concepts of “the literary mind” articulated in the sixth century in Wen Hsin Tiao Lung by Liu Hsieh and more recently in The Literary Mind by Mark Turner. After sketching these authors’ contrasting views of the interplay between “mind”, “language”, and “literature”, the chapter places Turner’s instrumental view of the literary mind alongside Liu Hsieh’s more spiritual view. Using Liu Hsieh’s term “thinking with the spirit”, the chapter questions how Shahrazad (Turner’s exemplar of the literary mind) can possibly have a relaxed disposition when poor storytelling can mean an instant death sentence. Although very provocative, Turner’s model of the literary mind is shown to be less rich and convincing than that provided by his Chinese precursor, which benefits immensely from reliance on the silence of the Tao.
Critique: Studies In Contemporary Fiction, Mar 19, 2023
This article reads Don DeLillo' two novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) as hig... more This article reads Don DeLillo' two novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) as highlighting the relationship between cinema and time. The stories are examined especially through the lens of philosopher Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2 (first pub. 1985). Key characters (Lauren in The Body Artist; Finley in Point Omega) are caught up in the Deleuzian time image as they sift through sheets of past. Serving also as fictional filmmakers, they live imaginatively in the interplay between virtual past and actual present. In The Body Artist the mysterious figure of Mr. Tuttle emerges as personifying the Deleuzian time image as well as the possible present tense of cinema. In Point Omega techniques like point-of-view and doubling are seen to be subsumed by the power of the time image. In sum, the two novellas offer excellent examples of cinematic literary writing, a promising field in which film is above all a way of thinking which persistently engages with time images.
Fateh Azzam, whose parents were refugees from Haifa, was born in Beirut in 1950. He is a Palestin... more Fateh Azzam, whose parents were refugees from Haifa, was born in Beirut in 1950. He is a Palestinian with a broad background in theater, having been a member of a mime performance ensemble which toured the US and Canada in the 1970s and having worked at various times as an actor, director, choreographer, and theater consultant. He has also taught mime, movement, and improvisation both in the US and in Ramallah and East Jersualem. Between 1985 and 1987 he served as director of the Nuzha/El Hakawati Theater in East Jerusalem. Azzam also became the director of the first Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq, based in Ramallah. Since 1987 Azzam has been working primarily in human rights and legal activism. In September 2003 he became the director of the Center for Forced Migration & Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. Azzams' experience as a refugee, an exile, and a human rights activist as well as his extensive immersion in the theater have provided him with a unique combination in the domain of artistic expression. In 1991 he turned to writing plays and with Nidal Khatib, Ismael Dabbagh and Abbed Ju'beh co-authored Ansar: A True Story from an Israeli Military Detention Center. The play, which came about mainly as a result of the live testimony of Nidal Khatib, was produced in workshop. Initial performances were so well received that an English version of the play was subsequently taken on tour in the UK, Canada, and the US. Later Azzam went on to write a one act play, Baggage, which was published with Ansar in Short Arabic Plays: An Anthology (2003) edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Baggage was first performed in Arabic in early 2003 at the American University in Cairo as part of the university's annual festival of one-act plays. In October 2003, an English version of the play was performed by Golden State Thread Productions in San Francisco, and in May 2005 it was performed in the Eastern Mediterranean Cultural Center in Famagusta, Northern Cyprus.
This article reads Don DeLillo's two novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) as hi... more This article reads Don DeLillo's two novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) as highlighting the relationship between cinema and time. The stories are examined especially through the lens of philosopher Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2 (first pub. 1985). Key characters (Lauren in The Body Artist; Finley in Point Omega) are caught up in the Deleuzian time image as they sift through "sheets of past." Serving also as fictional filmmakers, they live imaginatively in the interplay between "virtual" past and "actual" present. In The Body Artist the mysterious figure of Mr. Tuttle emerges as personifying the Deleuzian time image as well as the possible present tense of cinema. In Point Omega techniques like point-of-view and doubling are seen to be subsumed by the power of the time image. In sum, the two novellas offer excellent examples of cinematic literary writing, a promising field in which film is above all a way of thinking which persistently engages with time images.
Those who have tried to explain the evolutionary origins of human engagement with the storytellin... more Those who have tried to explain the evolutionary origins of human engagement with the storytelling that is found in literature often foreground the appeal of the traditional devices-character and plot. In On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, for instance, Brian Boyd presents convincing evidence to support the view that authors are frequently engaged in the task of "shaping audiences' attention by appealing to their evolved cognitive predisposition to foreground and respond to-automatically, amid all the possible patterns in a story-the patterns of character and plot" 1. Using Homer's the Odyssey as his prime example, Boyd insists that these key patterns explain to a large extent how throughout human history authors of literary narratives have been able to trigger and retain readers' interest and give them enduring pleasure. Here I highlight another pattern as I propose that readers are attracted to literary narratives not just because these narratives are character-or plot-driven but also because they are thing-driven. Thus, I argue that one reason why literary narratives appeal to so many people can be explained through "thing theory" 2. The term "thing theory" was coined in 2001 by the American Bill Brown who was trying to speak out in favor of things as a possible alternative to the endless abstraction associated with "theory". Brown's bold initiative may be regarded as prefiguring such events as the British Museum's recent exhibition "A History of the World in 100 Objects" and the current tendency among literary biographers like Paula Byrne to write books around objects 3. These events, however, cast a glance far further back than Brown's work to, for example, the writings of Martin Heidegger who may be regarded as the grandfather of "thing theory". Brown refers to Heidegger, but here I discuss Heidegger's work on "things" in more detail, and I begin by detecting a lineage in the theory of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky.
POST SCRIPT - Essays in Film and the Humanities, 2002
What is the relation between film and music? This question merits interrogation from a variety of... more What is the relation between film and music? This question merits interrogation from a variety of angles, for it is not just a question of film music, but also of film history and musical history and above all of interdisciplinarity. Here the film Tous les Matins du Monde (dir. Alain Corneau; 1991) is examined with this question in mind and also in the light of Roland Barthes' often overlooked meditations on music.
The principle members of the Geneva School tended, in varying degrees, to collapse the boundaries... more The principle members of the Geneva School tended, in varying degrees, to collapse the boundaries between their own work and the literature they were discussing. Thus, observers quickly began to compare their writings to, for instance, French symbolist poetry and sometimes
The Lives of the Novel: A History by Thomas Pavel. Princeton University Press, 2013. 360 pp. Writ... more The Lives of the Novel: A History by Thomas Pavel. Princeton University Press, 2013. 360 pp. Writing books about the evolution of the novel is in vogue. Pavel's The Lives of the Novel: A History is a substantially revised version of his La pensee du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Before Pavel produced his English version, Steven Moore published The Novel: Beginnings to 1600 (London: Continuum, 2013) and The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). One way in which Pavel's work differs from Moore's is that it does not attempt to cover the non-European lineage of the novel. Later Michael Schmidt published The Novel: A Biography (Harvard U. Press, 2014). While Schmidt restricts himself to novels written in English, Pavel, whose background and expertise is essentially European, writes mainly about European novels--from countries like England, Scotland, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Portugal--with forays into, for instance, Russia and North A...
In an essay entitled "One's Perception of Life is Shaped by Concepts Already Established in One's... more In an essay entitled "One's Perception of Life is Shaped by Concepts Already Established in One's Mind", the Indian philosopher and spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti argues that an individual's thought can never be adequately captured by one national culture, any more than it can be rooted entirely in one political system or religion. He notes too that "Thought has separated the world into the Americans, the Communists, the Socialists, the Germans, the Swiss, the Hindus, the Buddhists, and all other religious divisions" (Krishnamurti 2000, p. 59); and two paragraphs later he continues:
This chapter explores differing concepts of “the literary mind” articulated in the sixth century ... more This chapter explores differing concepts of “the literary mind” articulated in the sixth century in Wen Hsin Tiao Lung by Liu Hsieh and more recently in The Literary Mind by Mark Turner. After sketching these authors’ contrasting views of the interplay between “mind”, “language”, and “literature”, the chapter places Turner’s instrumental view of the literary mind alongside Liu Hsieh’s more spiritual view. Using Liu Hsieh’s term “thinking with the spirit”, the chapter questions how Shahrazad (Turner’s exemplar of the literary mind) can possibly have a relaxed disposition when poor storytelling can mean an instant death sentence. Although very provocative, Turner’s model of the literary mind is shown to be less rich and convincing than that provided by his Chinese precursor, which benefits immensely from reliance on the silence of the Tao.
Critique: Studies In Contemporary Fiction, Mar 19, 2023
This article reads Don DeLillo' two novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) as hig... more This article reads Don DeLillo' two novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) as highlighting the relationship between cinema and time. The stories are examined especially through the lens of philosopher Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2 (first pub. 1985). Key characters (Lauren in The Body Artist; Finley in Point Omega) are caught up in the Deleuzian time image as they sift through sheets of past. Serving also as fictional filmmakers, they live imaginatively in the interplay between virtual past and actual present. In The Body Artist the mysterious figure of Mr. Tuttle emerges as personifying the Deleuzian time image as well as the possible present tense of cinema. In Point Omega techniques like point-of-view and doubling are seen to be subsumed by the power of the time image. In sum, the two novellas offer excellent examples of cinematic literary writing, a promising field in which film is above all a way of thinking which persistently engages with time images.
Fateh Azzam, whose parents were refugees from Haifa, was born in Beirut in 1950. He is a Palestin... more Fateh Azzam, whose parents were refugees from Haifa, was born in Beirut in 1950. He is a Palestinian with a broad background in theater, having been a member of a mime performance ensemble which toured the US and Canada in the 1970s and having worked at various times as an actor, director, choreographer, and theater consultant. He has also taught mime, movement, and improvisation both in the US and in Ramallah and East Jersualem. Between 1985 and 1987 he served as director of the Nuzha/El Hakawati Theater in East Jerusalem. Azzam also became the director of the first Palestinian human rights organization, Al-Haq, based in Ramallah. Since 1987 Azzam has been working primarily in human rights and legal activism. In September 2003 he became the director of the Center for Forced Migration & Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. Azzams' experience as a refugee, an exile, and a human rights activist as well as his extensive immersion in the theater have provided him with a unique combination in the domain of artistic expression. In 1991 he turned to writing plays and with Nidal Khatib, Ismael Dabbagh and Abbed Ju'beh co-authored Ansar: A True Story from an Israeli Military Detention Center. The play, which came about mainly as a result of the live testimony of Nidal Khatib, was produced in workshop. Initial performances were so well received that an English version of the play was subsequently taken on tour in the UK, Canada, and the US. Later Azzam went on to write a one act play, Baggage, which was published with Ansar in Short Arabic Plays: An Anthology (2003) edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Baggage was first performed in Arabic in early 2003 at the American University in Cairo as part of the university's annual festival of one-act plays. In October 2003, an English version of the play was performed by Golden State Thread Productions in San Francisco, and in May 2005 it was performed in the Eastern Mediterranean Cultural Center in Famagusta, Northern Cyprus.
This article reads Don DeLillo's two novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) as hi... more This article reads Don DeLillo's two novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) as highlighting the relationship between cinema and time. The stories are examined especially through the lens of philosopher Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2 (first pub. 1985). Key characters (Lauren in The Body Artist; Finley in Point Omega) are caught up in the Deleuzian time image as they sift through "sheets of past." Serving also as fictional filmmakers, they live imaginatively in the interplay between "virtual" past and "actual" present. In The Body Artist the mysterious figure of Mr. Tuttle emerges as personifying the Deleuzian time image as well as the possible present tense of cinema. In Point Omega techniques like point-of-view and doubling are seen to be subsumed by the power of the time image. In sum, the two novellas offer excellent examples of cinematic literary writing, a promising field in which film is above all a way of thinking which persistently engages with time images.
Those who have tried to explain the evolutionary origins of human engagement with the storytellin... more Those who have tried to explain the evolutionary origins of human engagement with the storytelling that is found in literature often foreground the appeal of the traditional devices-character and plot. In On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, for instance, Brian Boyd presents convincing evidence to support the view that authors are frequently engaged in the task of "shaping audiences' attention by appealing to their evolved cognitive predisposition to foreground and respond to-automatically, amid all the possible patterns in a story-the patterns of character and plot" 1. Using Homer's the Odyssey as his prime example, Boyd insists that these key patterns explain to a large extent how throughout human history authors of literary narratives have been able to trigger and retain readers' interest and give them enduring pleasure. Here I highlight another pattern as I propose that readers are attracted to literary narratives not just because these narratives are character-or plot-driven but also because they are thing-driven. Thus, I argue that one reason why literary narratives appeal to so many people can be explained through "thing theory" 2. The term "thing theory" was coined in 2001 by the American Bill Brown who was trying to speak out in favor of things as a possible alternative to the endless abstraction associated with "theory". Brown's bold initiative may be regarded as prefiguring such events as the British Museum's recent exhibition "A History of the World in 100 Objects" and the current tendency among literary biographers like Paula Byrne to write books around objects 3. These events, however, cast a glance far further back than Brown's work to, for example, the writings of Martin Heidegger who may be regarded as the grandfather of "thing theory". Brown refers to Heidegger, but here I discuss Heidegger's work on "things" in more detail, and I begin by detecting a lineage in the theory of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky.
POST SCRIPT - Essays in Film and the Humanities, 2002
What is the relation between film and music? This question merits interrogation from a variety of... more What is the relation between film and music? This question merits interrogation from a variety of angles, for it is not just a question of film music, but also of film history and musical history and above all of interdisciplinarity. Here the film Tous les Matins du Monde (dir. Alain Corneau; 1991) is examined with this question in mind and also in the light of Roland Barthes' often overlooked meditations on music.
The principle members of the Geneva School tended, in varying degrees, to collapse the boundaries... more The principle members of the Geneva School tended, in varying degrees, to collapse the boundaries between their own work and the literature they were discussing. Thus, observers quickly began to compare their writings to, for instance, French symbolist poetry and sometimes
This work is both a meditation on the theory of literary biography and an examination of the rela... more This work is both a meditation on the theory of literary biography and an examination of the relationship between Tennessee Williams and the texts attributed to him.
This book proposes that the genre par excellence for examining the confluence of literature and t... more This book proposes that the genre par excellence for examining the confluence of literature and theory of mind is science fiction.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Following his death in 2004, the explosion of interest in Jacques Derrida as reflected in the ple... more Following his death in 2004, the explosion of interest in Jacques Derrida as reflected in the plethora of journal articles, conferences, and books devoted to his legacy amply demonstrates that he need not have feared, as he expressed in his last interview, that "two weeks or a month after [his] death there would be nothing left." There remains and always will remain a great deal to be said about this prolific, complex, and controversial figure. Surely, the process of exappropriation has only just begun.
Humanities faculty-even more so academics in general-tend to be political liberals and institutio... more Humanities faculty-even more so academics in general-tend to be political liberals and institutional reactionaries. It is a major point of Douglass C. North's Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge U. Press, 1990) that people at the top of any hierarchy have few incentives to change ways that served them well in the past. Innovation therefore often spreads from the periphery to the center. For any particular university, the relevance of McGann's dystopic remarks may be inversely proportionate to its position on the Shanghai ranking of world universities. Some of the more coherent solutions to the problems that McGann acutely and eloquently diagnoses are found at universities that are not in the top 100. There is hope that some institutions have responded imaginatively to the call for action that is an important part of this book. It may be that McGann sometimes errs on the side of bleakness. But there can be no doubt McGann is right in calling on the citizens of the Republic of Letters to exercise their distinctive virtue of philology. The integrity of the documentary infrastructure for their research depends on that exercise.
Rather than a comparison of one literary text or national literature and another, the main focus ... more Rather than a comparison of one literary text or national literature and another, the main focus of David Damrosch's Comparing the Literatures is the discipline of comparative literature itself. Here and elsewhere Damrosch champions comp. lit as a scholarly alternative or supplement to an overly-narrow and generally monolingual focusing on one national literature. Although he sympathizes with the French comparatist René Étiemble's upholding of the right of literary scholars to participate in discussions concerning works of literature written in languages with which they were not familiar; Damrosch implicitly urges those drawn to comp. lit to immerse themselves (as he himself has done) in a variety of languages and cultures-both Western and Eastern. Throughout Comparing the Literatures Damrosch thus espouses the idea of comp. lit as a lively transnational, multilingual discipline.
Throughout Ronald Arnett's latest book, the work of Emmanuel Levinas is carefully juxtaposed with... more Throughout Ronald Arnett's latest book, the work of Emmanuel Levinas is carefully juxtaposed with that of other prominent thinkers. This is nowhere more apparent than in the last three chapters, all of which deal with Levinas's tortuous relations with Martin Heidegger. Crucially, Arnett highlights a key moment in European twentieth-century intellectual history when he draws attention to the famous debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer that took place in Davos, Switzerland in 1929. As a member of the audience, Levinas found himself siding with Heidegger against Cassirer, and after the debate this preference was reflected in a play staged by students in which Levinas himself indulged in a mocking portrayal of Cassirer. Arnett follows others in drawing attention to the regret that would trouble Levinas throughout and following his lengthy internment in a Nazi concentration camp, a regret eventually reflected most poignantly in his desire to seek out and apologize personally to Cassirer's wife during a trip to New York in 1973. This small detail serves Arnett well in illuminating not only the deep sensitivity of Levinas, the man, but also provides a fine example of Levinas's philosophy in action. Arnett's Levinas-inspired version of communication ethics involves three rhetorical demands: the face of the Other, an ethical echo, and response to the Other in conjunction with distinctive personal, historical, and social concerns. After the Davos debacle, Levinas was repeatedly haunted by his failure to pay attention to the face of Cassirer, a man whose words exemplified the voice of the human and whose humanity would serve as a synecdoche for all those who would be trampled on and in many cases slaughtered by the Third Reich. Although for Levinas in the early 1930s, Cassirer's voice tended to be drowned out by Heidegger's 'voice of Being,' later Levinas would come to see that his own position had actually always been much closer to Cassirer's. Levinas became acutely conscious that 'humanism' exists primarily not in relation to 'Being' but in relation to an obligation that all human beings share: a responsibility toward the Other. First philosophy, therefore, for Levinas has to consist of ethics, not ontology. As Arnett shrewdly explains, from Levinas's perspective, "Being without a questioning temper of the primacy of ethics is simply dangerous," and Heidegger's "focus on Being eclipses the 'face' of the Other which is … the primordial counter to elemental evil" (212, 214). It is of course not Cassirer's face in particular but the face of the Other in general that makes Levinas's ethics possible; but as Arnett also explains, "Levinas's eventual recognition of Cassirer's face moved him from being a spectator in a social game that ignored the face of the Other to having an unending ethical obligation" (196). Although as Levinas points out, Heidegger was highly critical of a herd-like mentality, he nevertheless tended to place the 'we' before the 'I.' This relegating of the 'I' to a secondary position meant that Heidegger's philosophy could find no place for a derivative 'I' which, according to Levinas, "is called forth by a separate and distinct Other" (216) which gives birth to ethics. Arnett paints a convincing picture of Levinas making "the Other which holds the 'I' hostage" as both the starting point of his philosophy and a challenge to the "originative 'I'" of the West. Levinas is also rightly described as following Immanuel Kant in identifying a need to temper the inclinations of the ego but as going much further than Kant in denouncing the tyranny of reason. Arnett clearly shows Levinas's awareness that "one cannot control the self-centered focus of the ego with an enlightened reasoning" (121).
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