The Literal and Allegorical in the Bible

It is interesting that 'true believers' tend to read Genesis literally---thinking the events there were historical, as seen by me recently in the Creation Museum in Kentucky--whereas 'skeptics' tend to read it metaphorically, especially the first eleven chapters, saying this is mythical language uS ed to described cosmic primeval processes. Whereas with the Song of Songs it is reversed, 'true believers' say it can't just be about sex, it must be allegorical, whereas 'skeptics' say, it is totally about sex, no allegorical interpretation needed. It is so clearly a matter of ideological convenience, showing that the literal and allegorical are just arbitrary rhetorical labels; or, conversely, it shows that a truly inclusive approach to the Bible needs BOTH the literal and allegorical.

On Taking The Lord's Name In Vain

With respect to the last comment, a true story (not a joke). A Rabbi I knew (I actually knew the synagogue's secretary) served a prominent New York synagogue. He had just built and designed a country house in Connecticut, totally made to order on his specification--his dream house he had bought with all the savings from his years of serving the synagogue. He  was preparing to cook a big Thanksgiving dinner in his house, with a specially bought turkey, his wife's wonderful stuffing, and all the works. Suddenly, Thanksgiving morning, the secretary calls. The President of the Synagogue, who had raised money and guided the congregation for years, had suddenly and unexpectedly died. Under Jewish burial customs, the burial had to be that day. The Rabbi would have to come all the way down from Connecticut to perform the service

The Rabbi's response, in loud tones of despair: "Jee-sus CHRIST!" 

Romanticism Sessions at MLA

There will be FOUR fantastic panels sponsored or co-sponsored by the Division on the English Romantic Period at the upcoming MLA:  MARK YOUR CALENDARS and support romanticism!
As some of you may know, the MLA, in a burst of consolidating energy (as they saw it), floated the idea of "absorbing" our division either into an 18th C. or 19th C. division: which proposal we (the Divisional Committee) roundly resisted, apparently successfully thus far.  But it's all the more important for us to demonstrate what we needs must feel: the ongoing vitality, unpredictability, and generativity of "romanticism" in all its modalities: your colleagues hope to see you at the panels (esp the ones scheduled at awkward times, e.g. the first day of the convention) and also at the Cash Bar co-hosted with the Victorian Division: to "Nature"! "Life"! "Now"! "Meta-physics"! "Romanticism"!  

all best,
Maureen McLane
NYU, Chair of the MLA Division on the English Romantic Period

SESSIONS AND EVENTS

Cash Bar Arranged by the Division on the Victorian Period and the Division on the English Romantic Period:  Saturday, 11 January, 7:00–8:15 p.m., Los Angeles–Miami, Chicago Marriott 

35. The Romantic Now

Thursday, 9 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Chicago D, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on the English Romantic Period
Presiding: Marjorie Levinson, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor
1. "'Now with Treble Soft,'" Jonathan Culler, Cornell Univ.
2. "What's in a Name? Romanticism and Terror," David E. Simpson, Univ. of California, Davis
3. "Taunting with Gavroche: Activist Deployments of Poetry," Lyn Hejinian, Univ. of California, Berkeley
"In this session, we offer and invite discussion of that temporality – the present --which cannot be spoken, only enacted, and we consider “enactment” from the perspectives of politics and poetic form"
348. Nature: Meta-physics
Friday, 10 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., Chicago C, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on the English Romantic Period
Presiding: Miranda Jane Burgess, Univ. of British Columbia
1. "String Theory and Sideways Growth: The Ecology of Romantic Poetics," Sean Dempsey, Univ. of Arkansas, Fayetteville
2. "Miss Bates and the Nomadic Space of Emma," Yoon-Sun Lee, Wellesley Coll.
3. "Keats and the Country Green," Jonathan D. Mulrooney, Coll. of the Holy Cross

470. Nature

Saturday, 11 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., Belmont, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on the English Romantic Period
Presiding: Miranda Jane Burgess, Univ. of British Columbia
1. "Now No More," Jacques Khalip, Brown Univ.
2. "Romantic Posthumanism: The Horror of Interspecies Community in Romantic England," Ted Geier, Univ. of California, Davis
3. "Goya's Scarcity," David L. Clark, McMaster Univ.

SPECIAL SESSION with the Late-18th C Division:

235. Life: Before and after 1800

Friday, 10 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., Addison, Chicago Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on Late-Eighteenth-Century English Literature and the Division on the English Romantic Period
Presiding: Kevis Goodman, Univ. of California, Berkeley
Speakers: Amanda Jo Goldstein, Cornell Univ.; Heather Keenleyside, Univ. of Chicago; Catherine Packham, Univ. of Sussex; Andrew Piper, McGill Univ.
Session Description:
“Until the end of the eighteenth century . . . life does not exist: only living beings.” Our two divisions will revisit Foucault's still influential, periodizing thesis to question its validity in the light of recent work in the field and to think about what we do and do not share.

Borges In The USA

Borges In The USA

(my parody of Miley Cyrus, Party In The USA, conceived while working on a guest lecture on Jorge Luis Borges's US literary reception).

Stumble off the plane at Buffalo
Blind and in a suit-and-tie
Welcome to the land of chicken wings
Am I going to get by?

Got to my lecture,
Gnomic works the first time.
My amanuensis tells me of the Buffalo Bills sign,
Working on my English diction
The avatar of metafiction

Jet-lagged they think I have a llama
Where in the world is Maria Kodama?
That’s when I went to the seminar
And they were parsing a Kafka text
And they were parsing a Kafka text
And they were parsing a Kafka text

So I take questions
On paper slips
And the alienation kicks away
Sphinxlike gaze like yeah
Oracular tone like yeah
Inaudible enigma,
Flavor of the month
And my canonicity is yea.
SÍ, Sí, Sí, it's Borges in the USA.
SÍ, Sí, Sí, it's Borges in the USA.

Lionized, philosophized,
Hailed as the precursor of flarf,
Mooned over by Harold Bloom,
Paul de Man and John Barth.

Ronald Christ and Jaime Alazraki,
Norman Thomas Di Giovanni,
This is not a Calle Florida party
All I see are critics
Why'd I have to be this cryptic?

Jet-lagged and treated like the Dalai Lama.
Where in the world is Maria Kodama?
That's when I went to the seminar
On The Babel library
On The Babel library
On The Babel library

So I take questions
On paper slips
And the alienation kicks away
Sphinxlike gaze like yeah
Oracular tone like yeah
Inaudible enigma
Flavor of the month
And my canonicity is yea.
Sí, Sí, Sí, it’s Borges in the USA.
Sí, Sí, Sí, it's Borges in the USA.

Feel like escaping to Tlön
Or seeking out a compass death
But I am hailed as a postmodern riddler
And I draw one more metaphysical breath

So I take questions
On paper slips
And the alienation kicks away
Sphinxlike gaze like yeah
Oracular tone like yeah
Inaudible enigma,
Flavor of the month
And my canonicity is yea.
SÍ, Sí, Sí, it’s Borges in the USA.
SÍ, Sí, Sí, it's Borges in the USA.

Was my vote for de Blasio not counted?

The vote count for the Sep 10 New York mayoral Democratic primary  on the New York Times web site, premised on 99 percent of the vote being counted.  shows no votes for De Blasio in that precinct and 55 for Quinn--but I voted for de Blasio as did at least one other person in my building. Given that the neighboring precincts were all carried by De Blasio, it seems very odd that Quinn is carrying this precinct by such an overwhelming margin and De Blasio has no votes, particular;y when I know I voted for de Blasio. This does not inspire confidence in the system; next time, I am using an absentee ballot. 

Two Readings by me in NYC, October

Dear friends, i would like to alert you to two readings/talks of mine to be held in prominent Manhattan locations in October. On October 8, I will be speaking on Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn and the Bildungsroman, at the Center for Fiction (formerly the mercantile Library), 17 East 47th st. Tickets can be ordered by clicking on this link

On October 25  from 6 to 8 pm, there will be a reception at the Instituto Cervantes, 211 E. 49th St., for my latest-co-edited book (co-edited with Juan E. De Castro and Will H. Corral). Light refreshments (wine and cheese) will be served and admission is free.

Hope to see you at one or both of those!

The Anglosphere, The Internet, and the Special Relationship

We have all been reading about the perceived decline of the US-British special relationship because of the UK parliament not approving force in Syria.

I think something different is happening. After the Internet began, people across the English-speaking world, reached out to each other, found common interests, suddenly found aspects of literature and culture until then strictly national had become international. Both my work on Anthony Powell and my Australian work could not have happened in quite the same way without the Internet and the way it made people aware of cultural priorities and discourses in their own language.

This may be what happened with Latin America and Spain, as Juan de Castro chronicled in the last chapter of THE SPACES OF LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE. In the 1990s, after the Internet, the valuation of Spain in Latin America became much higher, to the point where it seemed all Latin America was 'happening' in Spain, the Madrid newspaper EL Pais became the place to read about Latin American literature,      

I think after a time this reached a saturation point; the channels were no longer new. Also, translation software becoming better, and an increased interesting and desire for translation to avoid a perceived parochialism of the Anglophone, kicked in. In a sense it is as if people perceived not just the closeness of Bush and Blair but the 'Anglosphere' that was touted as an ideological satisfaction for the US, Britain, Australia, acting in concert in Iraq, as responsible for what went wrong there; so after the Iraq debacle there was a greater interest in translations, in multilingualism.

So I think this, not any quirks of President Obama or Prime Minister Cameron or Ed Miliband, as has been mooted in the press, is really the backdrop here. The relationship of the US and UK is as it has always been--with great commonalities of culture and outlook, with fundamental loyalty, but with national interests that do not always square. It is the hype of Anglophone unity that occurred after the first impact of the Internet that was the exception?

 I think similarities in can be seen in the Spanish speaking world. (The Francophone and Lusophone worlds were so recently political unities the same issues do not apply there I think).