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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATUREVolume 6, Number 2 (Fall 2007) |
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BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATUREVolume 6, Number 2 (Fall 2007) |
Reviews of three texts in this issue attest to the continued scholarly interest in affect, emotion, and sensation, indicating that what Eu Jin Chua terms the "affective turn" in the humanities may not only continue to provoke new ways of understanding historical experience, but disclose important histories of cross disciplinary work. As Tamara Ketabgian remarks in her review of Catherine Gallagher's The Body Economic, "[w]hile today it may be easy to view the social sciences and humanities as distant -- if not opposed -- camps," The Body Economic shows that the "new economic criticism," which combines research from economics, literature and psychology, is informed by "a complicated and largely forgotten history of disciplinary formation, [one] in which political economists and literary authors …. shared and promoted two economic "plots": "bioeconomics" -- how economy circulates life -- and "somaeconomics" -- how emotions and sensations shape economic activity and are in turn shaped by it." Ketabgian situates Gallagher's work within the context of recent scholarship that expands notions of Victorian organicism to include "emerging concepts of mechanical coordination" (networking, regulation, for instance), and further argues for broadening and refining contemporary comparative categories "which may themselves obscure the kind of cultural retrieval necessary to practice alternative modes of historical scholarship." Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850 joins work that trains a critical eye on an early modern moment when "reason became the heart of modern politics and the public sphere by exploring ways in which the premodern self and body experiences and understood the passions," as John Staines writes. At the same time, Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano and Daniela Coli's collection of essays reminds us that the critique of the "privileging of public over private, male over female, and reason over passion" that often marks many of the disparate works engaged in an "affective turn," nevertheless can occlude important areas as well: namely public politics. For Staines, the book, concerned as it is with the "philosophical understanding of the emotions and their place in modern political institutions," can promote dialogue between historians of the body and emotion and scholars "writing on the history of republicanism and early modern political theory." Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings makes clear that even in the wake of the prolific consideration of sensory registers deemed less noble in the light of reason, more remains to be charted. As Eu Jin Chua's review underscores, in late capitalism "strong emotions are less revealing than weak ones like "anxiety" that Ngai analyses in her book, for the very elusiveness of such feelings is often "directed [by structures and institutions] toward oppressive ends." Echoing concerns raised by other recent studies considered in BMRCL, such as Teresa Brennan's The Transmission of Affect, Chua ultimately questions, however, whether affects which bespeak the very "sapping of political agency" can themselves be turned to as sources for such agency. As a counterpoint to these studies, Catherine Labio's Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant poses an analogous tension. Here human consciousness and reason face their limits. As Jennifer Davis recounts, unlike the triumphalism found in many accounts of the Enlightenment, Labio's version has links to the kinds of critiques found in Foucault's "What is Enlightenment?" or Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.
In this issue two works reviewed examine the construction of literary contexts. As Peter Briggs notes, "James English's The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value takes up the complex systems of influence, evaluation, and cultural accommodation … [that] sustain and legitimize the awarding of prizes" or what contributes to the shaping of cultural standards. Drawing on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, English's study, playing on the literal and metaphoric meanings of "economy," focuses in particular on "the market . . . of general intellectual commerce … where cultural values are hammered out and disseminated." Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters considers the prize as but one gesture in a much broader economy of prestige and positioning that functions to place, shape, and indeed "aggrandize [world] literature as symbolic capital," as Bali Sahota notes. Eschewing the reduction of literature to a symptom of the historical or the sociological, Casanova's text anatomizes how the local -- "the discrete figures and structures of a single literary work" overlap but remain distinct from economic and political geographies," writes Sahota. For Casanova, these figures and structures can be traced by exploring the particular position a literary work assumes within the context of a "world literary space" that is always being "restructured by the different struggles taking place between works in the peripheries and centers." Such an exploration remains especially relevant to colonialism and its legacy, but while Casanova's study explores the particular strategies -- the "literary or symbolic revolts" -- of a wide range of writers (including those from South America to North Africa, Eastern Europe to East Asia), and emphasizes the importance of the city as a prestige-conferring space, her exclusive focus on three Western cities risks itself, as Sahota writes, "shut[ting] out whatever might literarily exist autonomously of world literary space."
Two texts that address slavery (or its legacy) and the "New World" revisit what may once have been framed as relatively regional histories, but have now been implicitly or explicitly situated within more expansive categories. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn's Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, as Jessica Adams relates, unsettles conventional thinking that narrowly equates "the United States" with "America," and that cordons off the south not only "from national norms," but from its legacy as "part of a larger, international region shaped by the experiences of colonialism and slavery." The collection of essays instead works to reintegrate the south into theories of the New World, "foreground[ing] longstanding cultural relationships between the south and the Caribbean and Latin America that have been obscured by the production of national narratives." Placing Smith and Cohn's collection beside Peter Kitson and Debbie Lee's Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, a voluminous collection of verse, drama, novels, theories of race and parliamentary speeches on the distinctive British controversy over slavery, serves to substantiate Look Away!'s call for thinking more expansively about the legacy of regional and cultural relations. Writings by Robert Wedderdon, the son of a Jamaican slave woman and an English planter, and Olaudah Equiano, who argued for "solidarity among black peoples" in far reaching places, suggest something of the broader scope on experience adopted by some who helped shape, to varying degrees, the abolitionist cause. What is more, as Robin Blackburn emphasizes, charting the legacy of a "culture of anti-slavery … [that] heralded the [historical] awakening of a popular understanding of the long-distance havoc that could be wreaked by the market" can expand our understanding of the contemporary human costs of production. In an age of "rampant commodification," Blackburn finds the legacy of the culture of anti-slavery especially timely; for instance, he hears echoes of abolitionist "insight and imagination" in the critics of the Bank of England's [recent] decision to dump gold regardless of its impact on South Africa and Russia," and in scholarly works like Kevin Bales's Disposable People, which delineates other "sources of vulnerability" (like age and sex) in enumerating the seven million new slaves (children) in the world today.
Two texts examined in this issue consider (directly or indirectly) the notion of writing both within and outside the nation. As Jeanne Garane notes, Reda Bensmaïa's Experimental Nations: Or, the Invention of the Maghreb, while taking seriously the question as to whether the non-Western writer or scholar (working within the West) can transcend Western categories, nonetheless demonstrates, in Garane's account, that the answer is yes. Indeed, Bensmaïa draws on the work of Barthes, Blanchot, de Certeau, Derrida, and others in order to explore the "originality of the literary strategies deployed by postcolonial Maghrebi writers and filmmakers," including Merzak Allouache, Hélé Béji, Tahar Djaout, Assia Djebar, Nabile Farès, and Kateb Yacine. For Bensmaïa, the concept of "depays" (un-homing) as performed in the films of French director Chris Marker, for instance, works to dislodge Western reductions of Maghrebi literature and film to mere ethnographic material, directing attention instead to what Garane describes as "the 'experimental' or 'virtual' spaces, nations or 'transnations' [that] are being created today through the literary works of contemporary Francophone writers from the Maghreb and beyond." By exploring the issue of translation in the work of Abdelkebir Khatibi's work, for example, Bensmaïa, as Garane writes, "proposes that Maghrebi (and other Francophone literatures) have … created their own language while using French as an appropriated medium, and that Francophone literatures are contributing to the formation of a new global literary consciousness." Rachel Gabara's book, From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person, offers a more critical reading of the conceptions of autobiography to be found in texts by Western writers like Barthes and Sarraute than does Bensmaïa, and argues for more attention to including a specifically "African conception of the genre" within studies of autobiography. Yet, as Fazia Aitel writes, for Gabara, Francophone autobiography as represented in the work of Algerian writer Assia Djebar, for instance, nonetheless ultimately challenges conventional notions of national and personal identity. Djebar, according to Gabara, places issue of selfhood and writing within the important "framework of domination based on gender, language, and colonial power" and, moving between "first, second, and third persons, between past and present, the personal and the historical, and between French and Arabic," thereby challenges, in Aitel's account, expectations of uncomplicated historical reference. While Aitel questions whether figures such as Barthes fail at allowing for the kind of Djebarian "fragmented self which cannot cohere and which thus allows the coexistence of multiple voices" to emerge in autobiographical writing and film, she nonetheless takes Gabara's text as a welcome call for "autobiographies to be more inclusive and liberated from the conventions of writing and history."
In this issue, we append a list of Books Received in 2007. We would be glad to hear from readers interested in reviewing any of them.
PAST ISSUES
Volume 6, Number 1 (Winter 2007)
Volume 5, Number 2 (Winter 2006)
Volume 5, Number 1 (Spring 2005)
Volume 4, Number 2 (Spring 2004)
Volume 4, Number 1 (Summer 2003)
Volume 3, Number 2 (Fall 2002)
Volume 3, Number 1 (Fall 2001)
Volume 2, Number 2 (Spring 2001)
Volume 2, Number 1 (Summer 2000)
Volume 1, Number 1 (Summer 1999)
GUIDELINES FOR REVIEWERSThe usual length for reviews is 1,000-4,000 words, or about 4-10 pages. Reviews should note author, title, place and date of publication as well as name of publisher, number of pages (100+ x....) and ISBN number. If the review copy is a paper edition, note this immediately after the ISBN number.
We prefer to incorporate bibliographical references directly into the texts. Reviews should employ footnotes only if they are absolutely necessary. In other respects, reviews should follow the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing.
Please send reviews in Microsoft Word attachments. We will contact reviewers about changes in their texts. Each issue of the Review will be copyrighted.
The main purpose of reviews is to foster intellectual dialogue by informing readers about books and issues of interest in the field of comparative literature. These books may include texts that focus upon the literature of a single country but nevertheless focus upon questions or topics important to comparatists. The editors welcome proposals for reviews of books, and for longer review essays, that fall within this framework. Books listed in "Books Received" are also available for review.
BOOKS RECEIVED