Poe’s adherence to a strict aesthetic formalism used to be problematic for studies of the relationship between his work and its American context; the methodology of New Historicism has helped to surmount this problem but sometimes with excessive emphasis on socio-historical contexts. This essay examines critical practices at work in the interpretation of Poe’s canonical piece “The Man of the Crowd” in light of the recent debates in literary studies around the problem of context and contextualization in general and the “hegemony” of new historicism in particular. It then suggests an alternative method of reading literary texts and their contexts — one based on Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts. It offers an analysis of “The Man of the Crowd” as an illustration of this method.

June 2017: Iulian Cananau is a lecturer in American literature at the University of Gävle. Before moving to Sweden in 2011, he was an assistant professor at the English Department of the University of Bucharest, where he coordinated the American Studies undergraduate program. He is a Fulbright alumnus (2007/2008 research grant at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge). His latest publication is Constituting Americanness: A History of the Concept and Its Representations in Antebellum American Literature (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015). His research interests lie with literary history writing, literary theory, and conceptual history, as well as, more recently, education theory and the methodology of teaching literature.

This essay argues that the linguistic turn in literary theory, often seen as just a declarative and, in the view of some, catastrophic veering into deconstruction, actually had three 20^th-century phases. The first was associated with a reaction to Romantic linguistic excess and dominated the early part of the century, manifesting itself in the work and theories of Eliot, Hofmannsthal, and the logical positivists. The second phase was centered on semantics and was above all a reaction to what was seen as the misuse of language by midcentury totalitarian regimes in Europe. The New Criticism dominant in America during this era can be seen as part of this paradigm and therefore less oriented toward an aesthetic formalism than a defensive inoculation against linguistic abuse. The third phase is dominated by deconstruction and its promulgation of — following the earlier example of Roman Jakobson — a language radically independent of anterior reference and signification. Yet, paradoxically, the era, which was the ultimate unmooring of language from prudence and caution, also saw the elevation of a linguistic approach to all the disciplines, prompting speculation that perhaps the rhetoric of transgression concealed a reality of linguistic plenitude. In the twenty-first century, the epistemological primacy of language, though, seems to have yielded to empiricism and speculative ontology. Yet despite the new appeal of what Best and Marcus call “surface reading,” and though the linguistic turn cannot return as it was in the 20^th century, its multiple legacies are important. 

Developing in a specifically religious register a poetic epistemology, this essay argues for rehabilitating revelation as a model of knowing that challenges some of our modern and especially postmodern prejudices against striving to envision truth as a whole. It aligns these results with some of the recent advances in critical theory, for example, by Frederic Jameson, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Zizek, who likewise attempt to break through the confinements of strictly scientific epistemology. Extending the range of such contemporary critiques in directions suggested by Rosenzweig, Benjamin, and Blanchot, the essay exposes the deep roots in canonical and classical humanities tradition of such revisionary thinking of knowledge as finally a form of “revelation.” The kind of wholeness and the ideal of universality embodied in the epic and in humanities knowledge in general appear in a striking new light based not on the concept, with its inevitably exclusionary logic (A versus not-A) but rather on a negative-theological thinking of the not-All which involves, nevertheless, a relatedness to all without restrictions or exclusions.  This thinking-beyond-the-concept is shown to drive the dynamics of imaginative expression striving towards epic wholeness.

January 2013: Dr. Roman Katsman is a researcher of Hebrew and Russian literature and of literary theory and poetics. He is an author of the books: The Time of Cruel Miracles: Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon (2002), Poetics of Becoming: Dynamic Processes of Mythopoesis in Modern and Postmodern Hebrew and Slavic Literature (2005), At the Other End of Gesture. Anthropological Poetics of Gesture in Modern Hebrew Literature (2008), and 'A Small Prophecy': Sincerity and Rhetoric in the Works of S.Y. Agnon (2013, in Hebrew, in press).

In these pages I present my interpretation of Iser’s model of emergence. I emphasize that what I am presenting is my understanding and exemplification of the relations among the chief terms in Iser’s model, namely, recursion, negativity, and emergence. At the same time, what I offer is, I believe, an extrapolation from what we know of Iser’s terms. I propose that the recursive relations and emergences traced by Iser in effect constitute an interactive experience of that which he called the “imaginary.” This recursive experience is a way of collectively taking part in the emergence of imagined being. This is to suggest that in his theoretical work Iser was moving from a theory of the individual act of reading to a theory of cultural and artistic transformation that is necessarily a shared activity. In its fully specified form I believe that this theory must have profound ontological implications, in other words, for how we participate in the being that, via negativity and the imaginary, we are presently helping to bring into being. Iser, I believe, had begun to explain how the greatest works of art and culture enact an interactive, transformative, and emergent way of being in recursion. The exemplifications of emergence that I analyze are from the works of Sophocles, Milton, and Kant.

This paper discusses the challenges posed by the Holocaust and its representations to the practices of the Humanities. The nature of these challenges is brought through an examination of the German Historikerstreit and the French controversies surrounding Heidegger’s relation to the Nazis. The nature of historical representation and its relation to affect are examined in works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Humanities cannot appropriate the Holocaust but they cannot ignore it either. They face the daunting task of learning how to remember it.

As readers, we sometimes have the impression that texts “know” more than their authors ever did. The article refers to this type of (supposed) textual knowledge as latency. It argues that, if there is no direct, methodological, deductive or inductive way towards that which appears to be latent, the Stimmung (mood, atmosphere) produced by the text, as a maximally light and yet invariably physical environment, can become a symptom of what remains latent -- without transforming latency into a situation of open excess. Thus, for instance, in Thomas Mann’s novella “Death in Venice” the detailed descriptions of the ever changing weather of Venice produce in the reader what is best described as a mood — a quasi-physical certainty of being in the presence of something latent, that will eventually reveal itself as a longing for death permeating the homoerotic desire that has overcome the protagonist.

In those cases where long processes of crystallization of latency do not lead to situations of evidence, the intervention of our judgment is required -- the intervention of a judgment that can make itself dependent on better or worse reasons but will never be regarded as exclusively true, or exclusively adequate.

If literary theory recently has undergone a fundamental change, the question arises: is it possible that the very nature of theory has itself changed?  This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” provides some strategies that allow us to take up this question. In order to make this clear, one must first bear in mind that Benjamin’s essay implies a new understanding of literary theory by stating that a general theory of understanding has to be designed by using the form of a translation theory that (in contrast to a simple translation) specifies the conditions that must be filled in order for the utterances of one’s own language to be seen as synonymous with those of a foreign language. Thus, like Donald Davidson after him, Benjamin had come to the conclusion that translation must be fused with the interpretational theory of translation in order to avoid infinite regresses. This, however, ultimately means that literary theory is — as pure or true language — the virtual goal, and not the precondition of any cognition that arises from the perspective of literary studies.

An obituary for Wolfgang Iser (1926—2007), a great scholar and a kind and generous person. An overview of the history of Iser’s theoretical thought is followed by a record of an episode of private life.

An obituary for Gershon Shaked (1929—2006), a major authority in Israeli Literary studies and the author of the master-narrative of secular Hebrew literature. The article points to a disparity between Shaked’s recognized status in the country and his view of himself as a subversive, balloon-puncturing eiron, critical of the exalted Apollonian stance in literature as well as in criticism.

With the “cultural turn” English philology has changed in many places into a kind of super-discipline by taking over, at least in part, the work of sociology, history, psychology, and philosophy. The article argues that in order to avoid dilettantism, the excellent qualification for a semiotic or signifying approach to all aspects of culture should be made use of, especially since this approach goes well together with the more recent view of culture as an immaterial construct in terms of an ensemble, or rather a specific hierarchy, of values. In order to discuss the role of literature in and for the wider domain of culture it seems necessary to first delimit this textual corpus, and for that reason a number of recent attempts to define “literature” or “the literary” are considered -- including one of my own that sees its specificity in a validational modesty resulting from a focusing on the particular and the suspension of reference. Due to this modest confinement to the presentation of merely possible worlds, literature is granted a “free space” in culture where it can even intimate the limits of the culture of its origin. For this reason it deserves special attention even at a time when the study of culture and media studies are in vogue.

Defining Lawrence’s “expository writings not as laboratory reports on experiments successfully concluded but as signposts to a road” traveled in his art, H. M. Daleski notes that these “theories were consistently modified by the artistic experience, which in turn led to further formulations.” Indeed, these continually revised and modified formulations of theories about almost everything constituted what Lawrence called “thought adventures”; in themselves they were signs of a yearning toward wholeness-in-duality that that can account for this writer’s special charisma. For Lawrence was not just a novelist, a poet, and a critic; he was also, in our current rather inadequate terminology, a public intellectual.

            To be “on the road” with D. H. Lawrence is to be engaged in an extraordinary thought adventure, accompanied by an unfailingly engaged and engaging commentator whose intellectual wholeness-in-duality was of a sort we rarely encounter on the contemporary literary scene. In developing this point, the article also argues that Lawrence’s great intellectual and creative adventure, though acutely modern, was also astutely anti-modernist. Although his early work was championed by such modernist luminaries as Ezra Pound and Ford Maddox Ford, by the end of his career he had become virtually the polar opposite of the quintessential modernist T. S. Eliot. Not coincidentally, perhaps, by the end of his career this thought adventurer addressed his ideas not just to an exclusively high cultural audience of the “fit though few” but to the masses among whom he could be, as he put it, “in the thick of the scrimmage.”

What links Walter Benjamin and Karl Kraus is a fascination with the dregs of public discourse, its “by-products” or “waste products,” but these to be understood as the negative pole of an exalted ideal of language, though conceived differently by each one. Benjamin was an avid reader of Die Fackel, a polemical gazette focused on Viennese journalism that Kraus published from 1899 to 1936. Benjamin’s 1931 essay on Kraus is one of his most densely woven, recondite productions, filled with formulations that reach back to Benjamin’s 1916 text “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” There, the act of naming designates the dimension of divine creative power in pre-Babelic language. In Kraus’s practice of citation Benjamin found traces of such a primordial capacity of language, a thetic power akin to divine naming. Citing in this sense involves not only the retrieval of a text or a concept, but intervention into the temporal process, the activation of a past in the present: citing as inciting. For Kraus, Benjamin wrote, “justice and language remain founded in each other,” making it clear that while justice in a legal sense (Recht) was often invoked in Kraus’s critique of journalism, what was fundamentally at stake was a reverence for “the image of divine justice [Gerechtigkeit] in language.”

The paper argues for a post-metaphysical reading of Jorge Luis Borges, a reading that would situate the writer’s work in a dimension of substance, presence and space, instead of understanding it exclusively in terms of discursive, metaphysically-anchored meaning. Borges’s poetry is viewed as anticipating the current turn in the humanities, from hermeneutics to the study and cultivation of a sense of the presence of the world and of art -- visual, verbal, or other.