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).

The Discus Throw and the Public Sphere

Yunus Tuncel, Agon in Nietzsche. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press 2013. $29.00, ISBN 978-0-87462-823-4 271 pp. + index.

This new book by my New School colleague Yunus Tuncel is the most authoritative and revelatory study of the concept of agon in Nietzsche so far. In his previous book, Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle, Tuncel, within a more general discussion of spectacle,  went into ancient sports and competitions in themselves; here, he concentrates on their manifestation in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche; along with the recent work of Herman Siemens, this is the major study of the subject. . Nietzsche used agon to represent an active spirit of conflict that for Nietzsche avoided the sterilities of bourgeois transcendence, including not just modernity and Christianity but the givens of the very classical philology in which Nietzsche had trained. 

            Agon, meaning conflict, is emblematically tied to Nietzsche’s thought and all subsequent uses of it—such as Harold Bloom’s in the influence books, are thoroughly Nietzschean. (I remember smiling when I saw that Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence had been translated into Modern Greek, with anxiety being rendered agonia). But it is often misinterpreted as simply meaning conflict or competition. Tuncel argues that agon is not a universalization of war, a rendering of all phenomena in the spirit of a Schmittian ‘state of emergency,’ but rather a “transfiguration of war.” (91) It is interesting to note that (unlike in the twentieth century) the Olympic games went on for the entire course of the Peloponnesian War, though Sparta was banned from the 89^th Olympiad, shades of more recent Olympic boycotts. Even as nearly every city-state in the Greek world took one or another side, the contest that existed in a “chiasmatic relation” (91) to war — both like and unlike it — held steady.

For Tuncel, agon is not indeed so much about one-on-one combat but about multiplicity: as expressed in polytheism, human-animal hybridity (as seen in the metamorphoses and apotropaic totmes of Greek mythology, art, architecture), and the differing political configurations (monarchies, tyrannies, oligarchies, democracies) that coexisted within the overall umbrella of Greek culture. Tuncel, following Nietzsche, does not romanticize agon, reminding us that most of the games the Greeks played were “cruel and violent” (70). Indeed, latent throughout Tuncel’s exposition is a link between agon and agony, the arena of athletic competition and the amphitheater of tragic drama being the two public spaces where contests took place that resembled war but in the aforementioned chiasmatic relation.

            Yet if athletics was a way to have physical combat, and all its frightening, dynamic, and cathartic implications, in a clearing-space outside of war with its literal life-and-death struggle, agon is not just diversion, and despite its similar contrastive qualities, is very different from ‘play’ in the Derridean sense. Early on in Thucydides, we find the historian's great rendering of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, where the Athenian statesman raises the richness of Athenian culture (as opposed to Spartan) by saying that Athenians have meaningful leisure time, they have space in their life for sports and games, that while still able to perform well in war, war is not their life as opposed to the regimen of Sparta.  Yet Pericles was still seeing athletic contest as meaningful to society.  Whereas today, sports, for all people’s involvement with them, is a form of ’getting away from it all’ and, importantly, a place where, in the US for instance, Democrats and Republicans can find common ground talking about the World Series, and so on. In the ancient world, sports did not mean getting away from it all; it meant taking an irreducible sense of conflict and struggle and, in the deepest sense of the word, aestheticizing it. This is why, if we take stock of what truly mattered to the Greeks, Pindar (a poet extensively mentioned by Tuncel in both books) becomes nearly as important as Homer.

       Just as sports and political consequences were not cordoned off from each other, the same was true of sex. The recent headlines generated by the coming-out of basketball player Jason Collins as a gay man demonstrate how sports has been seen as a sex-free zone, that what goes on within the arena is for us as asexual as it is apolitical. For the Greeks, on the other hand, male sexuality, at least, was very much in play, and part of the drama of agon is its partaking not just of the energies of war but those of sexuality, of bodies in close juxtaposition to each other, soliciting both Eros and Thanatos.

          Nietzsche valued these aspects because, for him, even as agon demonstrated individual excellence and jutted out against the herd mentality he discerned in modern mass movements, he did not want unfettered individuality, and the famous Apollonian-Dionysian dyad of his early masterwork The Birth of Tragedy was an attempt to corral the individual within a more implicated and nuanced sphere of mystery and desire. In the later work, Nietzsche embodies agon more formally: in his practice of aphorism (emulated vigorously by Tuncel) where each saying is a thrust or parry, an invitation to contest. Tuncel's discerning of agon in the very technique of aphorism places a different cast on many of Nietzsche’s later utterances. Rather than pronouncements spoken authoritatively, they are invitations to dialogue: we can disagree with them just as we could, in theory, have striven to throw the discus further than the athlete depicted in the Myron statue. Tuncel illuminates what puzzles the modern reader about the later Nietzsche, that maxims of rapier cogency are interspersed with seemingly preposterous statements. Nietzsche is not closing out a game but beginning it. In taking Nietzsche seriously, we can say—as was said in a very different context—“Credo quia absurdam.”

           Tuncel is an embodied thinker; his thought is lived out in the page. Though philosophically rigorous, his prose sparkles with wit, sprezzatura, and an earned sense of the tentative. My one reservation about the book is there are times he contradicts his own insight, discussed above, and hews too closely to a “Nietzsche” line. For instance, Tuncel says, that, unlike ‘the modern world, for the ancient Greeks spectacle was an event within the larger world of the festival”; one could riposte that Bakhtin saw carnival, certainly at least analogous to the festival as an (early) modern phenomenon, and contemporary instances of spectacles, like rock concerts, are often surrounded by festivals, whether spontaneously at Woodstock or more concertedly at Lollapalooza or the Lilith Fair or Bonnaroo, or even something like Burning Man; all of these are attempts to revive some sort of festival spirit. The difference is, presumably, the state does not sponsor these; but should the state sponsor them? When it is a macro-state, not a city-state, do we really want these things to be so public, so part of the polity? This leads to the other area where Tuncel is too Nietzschean: though not at all sharing Nietzsche’s utter disdain for democracy, explicable in his own contest as a gesture of disdain for bourgeois modernity and false transcendence, he does say that “such concepts as democracy” exist “only on the surface” (234). I would prefer the views of two thinkers Tuncel cites, Chantal Mouffe and Lawrence Hatab, that we can have both Nietzschean ontological pluralism and a ramified democratic commonwealth; though certainly one wants to shy against any dismissal of thinkers just because they do not wholly endorse the particular version of democracy certain countries have now, an error often made when thinkers such as Schmitt, Heidegger, Nietzsche are discussed in general-interest periodicals. Thinkers comparable to Nietzsche—Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, William James, and even the not-exactly populist-Huysmans, Pater, Leopardi, Ortega, Unamuno, Croce—were able to assert idiosyncrasy and celebrate wayward excellence without resorting to explicitly antidemocratic rhetoric as the centerpiece of these assertions. Just as agon simulates war while integrating war’s psychological truth, cannot it also, as it were, simulate democracy while integrating democracy’s psychological truth? In addition, Nietzsche’s agonism can only be sharpened by juxtaposition with quite non-agonistic thinkers such as Tolstoy or, in a different way, Dostoyevsky, who though hardly ‘democrats' in a literal sense did affirm mutuality with the same dignified determination that Nietzsche affirmed radical individualism while jettisoning mere egoism or even subjectivity or voluntarism as we usually employ the terms. An individualism that leads to the Overhuman is, as Tuncel points out, qualitatively different from a narrow and expedient selfishness.
        Tuncel concludes by examining what forces dispelled agon in the late ancient world, and comes up with two: medicine and mime.  Medicine asserted its authority over the body, a clinical and taxonomic one as opposed to the experiential mode of athletics; mime made agon into mere entertainment (as also is thought to have generally occurred with respect to tragic drama). Although the arc of this analysis is Nietzschean—as antiquity lengthened, false transcendence obtruded and fractured dynamic being—the research and insights are specific to Tuncel. Ideally, one might look to Foucualt to address these questions, and indeed the medical and embodiment issues Tuncel brings up solicit both Foucault’s eaerly work on madness and the clinic and his later work on the history of sexuality.

           Nietzsche’s thought is itself agonic, invites agon, and that his aphorisms are intended to generate counter-aphorism, to open debate, not to close it. Nietzsche may not coddle a limp-wristed pluralism, but in the wider arena the way his work is rendered eventually invites counter-thrusts whose ultimate ambit can constitute a deeper pluralism. Yunus Tuncel’s exploration of agon in Nietzsche opens up Nietzsche’s deeper pluralism in a way few books have done before. It shows us that competition—brutal and violent as it may be—is necessary not only to a sense of beauty but also to a fully justified notion of conscience.

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Gatsby, Austen, and the author function

The New Yorker review made the new Gatsby movie sound dreadful, but I am going to see it. Interesting the need to represent the author function (The Great Gatsby, by Nick Carraway; Carraway actually seen writing the book not just narrating the story within Fitzgerald's book) much as in the Jane Austen films of past two decades a character always has to be seen writing the book she is in, even though this is hardly the narrative technique or formal vision of Austen's books. I think this is attributable to some sort of anxiety about or alienation from the very idea of the printed book, a feeling that books are so alien to the lives of their prospective audience they have to be physically represented on screen.