Articles by Daniel Nutters
College Literature, 2021
Whether or not Lionel Trilling uttered the words "modernism in the streets" to describe the 1968 ... more Whether or not Lionel Trilling uttered the words "modernism in the streets" to describe the 1968 student uprisings, the phrase widely attributed to him highlights the principal theme of his life and work: the fate of the self in culture. 1 A brief survey of his central essay collections reveals Trilling's evolving understanding of that topic. In The Liberal Imagination (1950), Trilling critiques postwar liberal culture's indifference toward human passions and sentiments. To combat liberalism's instrumentalizing view of social progress-its overly rational understanding of the self and tendency to simplify intransigent cultural contradictions-Trilling espouses literature that discloses dimensions of life inaccessible to political discourse. His next collection, The Opposing Self (1955), turns to writers who present models of selfhood that resist the pressure culture exerts on the individual while also accepting its inevitability. Two decades before Michel Foucault theorized his carceral vision of disciplinary power, Trilling argued that the birth of Dickens's Little Dorrit in a prison is symbolic of the modern self's entrapment. Rather than appeal to subversive literature that shows us how to escape, the defining feature of an opposing self, Trilling esteems writers who enable readers
Cecily. I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them... more Cecily. I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should probably forget them all. Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry with us.
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 2015
The Henry James Review, 2014
Reading and writing have this in common: they are particular distortions of general realities.
Reviews of my books by Daniel Nutters
Daniel Nutters, "Mapping Theory," reviewing Tally, *Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical C... more Daniel Nutters, "Mapping Theory," reviewing Tally, *Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism*, AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW 36.3 (March-April 2015): 12-13.
Reviews by Daniel Nutters
Amanda Anderson's Bleak Liberalism challenges the academic critique of liberal thought by recover... more Amanda Anderson's Bleak Liberalism challenges the academic critique of liberal thought by recovering a version of liberalism characterized by an awareness of the sociological, psychological, and historical impediments to achieving its ideals. Drawing on the work of Lionel Trilling and other bleak liberal thinkers, Anderson explores the culture of cold war criticism and revises traditional accounts of critical history. In addition, she demonstrates how detailed attention to the aesthetic properties of literature can underwrite nuanced political beliefs by theorizing a liberal aesthetic through short readings of Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, E.M. Forster, Ralph Ellison, and Doris Lessing. These readings, in turn, disclose how the novel can express a skepticism toward, and commitment to, liberalism. Keywords: liberalism / Lionel Trilling / the novel / aesthetic humanism / irony
Review of Mark Edmundson's Why Write?
In Communities in Fiction J. Hillis Miller studies fictional representations of community in nove... more In Communities in Fiction J. Hillis Miller studies fictional representations of community in novels by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, and stories by Pynchon and Cervantes, to show how literature can help us understand the agonistic communal structure of the world we inhabit. Miller links rhetorical readings of his chosen writers to poststructuralist theories of community to offer a defense of literature for our digital age. Henry Sussman's Playful Intelligence expresses a similar interest in digital culture, demonstrating how modernism anticipates innovative thought in cybernetic systems theory. Drawing on a range of theoretical discourses, as well as artists and thinkers including Kandinsky, Kafka, Benjamin, Döblin, Winnicott, and Hofstadter, Sussman argues that newly emergent disciplines provide the critic with a language for articulating aesthetic experience that can, in turn, enable creative intelligence to thrive and thus become a provisional palliative for coping with the extreme conditions of modern life. U nable to experience the rise of theory during the scene of its initial unfolding , critics coming of age in the twenty-first century can view deconstruc-tion as an artifact of the past: one of the " Modern and Contemporary Daniel Rosenberg Nutters ([email protected]) recently defended his disserta-tion " Henry James and Romantic Revisionism: The Quest for the Man of Imagination in the Late Work " to earn his PhD from Temple University. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Symploké, Arizona Quarterly, Henry James Review, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a study entitled The Humanist Critic: Lionel Trilling and Edward Said.
Journal of Modern Literature, 2014
the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2013. vii, 279 pp.... more the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2013. vii, 279 pp. $75.00 hardcover; $29.95 paperback.
American Book Review, 2015
The Henry James Review, 2015
Don't tell me that-in this for instance-there are not abysses. I want abysses." -Henry James, The... more Don't tell me that-in this for instance-there are not abysses. I want abysses." -Henry James, The Wings of the Dove If a [thing] is excessive for the imagination (and the imagination is driven to [such excess] as it apprehends [the thing] in intuition), then [the thing] is, as it were, an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself.
Book Chapters by Daniel Nutters
Philosophy and Poetry: A Continental Perspective
Blanchot's fiction and criticism stage an agon between politics and poetics, philosophy and poetr... more Blanchot's fiction and criticism stage an agon between politics and poetics, philosophy and poetry, when affronting death in its various forms in modernity, especially of course th0se modes of death entailed by the catastrophes of twentieth-century political warfare, in particular that of the Final Solution of the Holocaust. In repeating the ancient struggle between philosophy and poetry in this ultimate modern context, Blanchot turns his philosophical criticism and poetic theory into a new mode of fiction or poetry, and his fiction or recits (narratives) into a new mode of philosophy. Blanchot's readings of writers, notably of such poets as Celan, following in Heidegger's considerable wake, sets this stage for imaginative transformation of philosophy and poetry, critical theory and imaginative fiction alike. He thereby models in his work the potentially infinite conversation, creating out of the unvowable, what he calls (along with Foucault) the outside, the authentic space of literature where it is that one may discover the community to come. In this highly ironic and speculative manner, Blanchot develops the implicitly ethical dimensions of literature, thereby responding rather directly to the critical concerns of his life-long friend Levinas, even as he prepares the clearly abysmal ground of transcendent non-transcendence for Derrida's Benjaminian messianicity, to be seen, ironically enough, beautifully at work in his powerfully moving elegiac homage to Levinas, Adieu. This foundationless foundation is that trace of differance opening upon the messianic without a messiah which composes out of death the prolegomenon to any future humans can abide. Guided by this perspective we will read closely, via selective excerpts, such Blanchot's fictions as Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, and The Instant of My Death; and such critical texts as The Space of Literature, The Infinite Conversation, and The Writing of the Disaster. We will then conclude with briefer overviews of The Unavowable Community, a paradoxically utopian statement, and The Step Not Beyond, perhaps his ultimate paradoxical fiction of the ethical ontology of writing/reading, precisely because it performs most completely the mutual ironic self-destruction of the traditions of philosophy and literature in which it works. Consequently, in returning then to his readings of the poets, we will show that Blanchot deconstructs in his own way both the binary of the classical agon between philosophy and poetry and all attempted final solutions of it in any dialectical resolution, thereby outlining his
The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said, 2015
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Articles by Daniel Nutters
Reviews of my books by Daniel Nutters
Reviews by Daniel Nutters
Book Chapters by Daniel Nutters