Stanford University Press Blog

Who Writes Iran?

Better US-Iranian relations could usher in more diverse portrayals of Iran—in popular literature and scholarship.

by AMY MOTLAGH

A mural at the former US Embassy in Tehran. Photo by Ninara—CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

With the signing of a nuclear agreement between Iran and the U.S., years of sanctions on Iran have ended and I hope a new era in U.S.-Iran relations begins, an era which will enable both Iranian and American scholars to complicate their notions of the other nation through fieldwork and research. Up to now, it has been very difficult for non-Iranians to visit Iran, let alone spend time there as researchers, creating a peculiar situation in which the majority of Iran scholars in the U.S. are first- and second-generation Iranian immigrants. While these scholars have produced some excellent research, we must nonetheless acknowledge the strange nature of a field in which citizenship (or parents’ citizenship) in the country is a necessary credential.

Scholarship in the first twenty years following the revolution was principally concerned with why the revolution happened. It was primarily authored by Iranians who left during the revolution, or learned (while in graduate school in the U.S.) that they could not return. This scholarship, while often excellent, also often reflected a (strong) political bias. In time, those discourses began to change. For better or worse, the past ten years have been defined by what we might call the “autobiographical turn,” best symbolized by Azar Nafisi’s controversial Reading Lolita in Tehran. Reading Lolita’s incredible commercial success enabled the publication of a spate of other memoirs, which capitalized on similar themes, traded in similar stereotypes, and generally promulgated the idea of Iran as a place that was mysterious and foreign. Critics accused Nafisi of promoting a neo-conservative agenda. This was, of course, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, when Washington insiders were bandying about phrases like “Real men want to go to Tehran” and fear of an imminent invasion of Iran was running high.

If one’s degree of “Iranianness” is now inevitably part of Iran scholarship, is there a way to be reflective about it without becoming autobiographical in all the ways that offend scholarly notions of objectivity?

The Everyman of Poetry

The quiet subversiveness of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry has been too long overlooked.

by CHANA KRONFELD

Yehuda Amichai reading at Tmol Shilshom café in Jerusalem, June 1994. Photo by Yair Medina. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

My first meeting with Yehuda Amichai, in the fall of 1970, was what we call in Hebrew a chavaya metakenet, a “corrective” or “healing experience,” one that mends a messy or unpleasant earlier experience. Overeager and all too young, I was trying to put together a series called “Rendezvous with an Author” for Israeli Educational Television, which would allow high school students to meet with cutting-edge Hebrew writers in a relaxed roundtable discussion of the writers’ work. I was still reeling from a failed attempt to produce the series’ pilot: an author whose stories I adored was so sadistically cruel to the young students that we had to stop the taping! And then it came to me—Yehuda Amichai, of course.

He was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet.

Having gotten into the habit of reading his poetry daily for my own emotional sustenance since age fifteen, I was sure: Yes, Amichai would be the one to start with. He would know how to connect with the students and put them at ease; he would be able to talk about the most complex poetic issues with utter simplicity and without egocentric affectation. I had never met him before, but from everything I heard, he was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet—even though by 1970 his status as the most revolutionary, indeed the most important poet of the Statehood Generation (dor ha-mdina) had solidified and he was acquiring an international reputation. Regardless, he was synonymous with unpretentiousness. And indeed, in his Everyman appearance and unaffected manner, Amichai proceeded to treat the students as his equals, joking his way into all our hearts, and thus the series was off to an exciting start. That experience was the beginning of my lifelong friendship with the man and the catalyst for my dedication to study and teach the work of the poet.

Why Study Literature?

Reading expands our social imaginations and literary criticism can tell us why.

by PAULA M. L. MOYA

Public domain via Pixabay.

Since the beginning of my career I have worked extensively on issues concerning race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, in the context of modern thought and literature. As such, I have been challenged (by students, colleagues, institutional mandates, and other pressures) to demonstrate how literary criticism might contribute to an understanding of these world-making social fictions. This question has been made all the more poignant, on the one hand, by the strides in the natural and social science literature on these issues, and on the other, by the perceived crisis in humanities writ large and the role of literary studies in particular in contemporary education.

What is the power of a work of literature to affect a reader’s perception of his or her world?

When I began graduate school, there was a shared belief among a sizeable portion of the profession regarding the political efficacy of cultural critique. Throughout the late 1980s and into the ’90s, this excitement was manifested in the rock star status within literary criticism of a few academics, of whom Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Edward Said, and Fredric Jameson were the most prominent. But by the late 1990s the shine of these academic luminaries had faded, and the time of theory and its attendant methods seemed to be in retreat. In response we’ve seen a variety of new approaches that constitute nothing less than a field-wide search for method—from broadening the purview of the discipline (to include video games, graphic novels, and electronic media) to pioneering new methodologies (including the emergent field of quantitative literary analysis).

Yet not all literary critics have responded to the sense of crisis by looking beyond the traditional objects or boundaries of our discipline. Some have retrenched, turning their gaze inward, in order to advocate a kind of a “doing what we do, but doing it better.” The questions they raise are theoretical and methodological: What is the power of a work of literature to affect a reader’s perception of his or her world? How might a nuanced and insightful interpretation of a given text affect our perception of that text—and by extension, of the worlds it represents?

Decolonizing Culture

What a leftist Moroccan journal from the 60s can teach us about today’s cultural crises.

by OLIVIA C. HARRISON and TERESA VILLA-IGNACIO

Front cover of "Africa, a Single Struggle," special issue of Souffles (no. 19; Rabat, 1970).

Next March will mark the fifty-year anniversary of Souffles, a short-lived but incendiary publication founded in the wake of the brutally repressed March 1965 student protests that inaugurated the decades-long period known as “the years of lead” in Morocco. Initially a poetry and culture review, Souffles and later its Arabic-language twin Anfas became the unapologetic platforms for the disgruntled Moroccan youth that took to the streets in 1965. In 1971 the journal’s editor-in-chief, Abdellatif Laâbi, and dozens of fellow Souffles-Anfas activists were arbitrarily arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, effectively putting an end to this remarkable journal, if not to political dissidence, which continued unabated in the jails of Hassan II.

Moroccan writers and artists broke with stagnant French models and Arabic canons in order to forge new artistic forms.

A repository of seminal 1960s texts from across the colonized and postcolonial world, Souffles-Anfas provides a window onto the transnational cultural and political movements that mark the heyday of Third Worldism and anticolonial theory. The sentiments and political grievances expressed in Souffles-Anfas are precursors to contemporary progressive movements—from the pro-democracy revolts collectively termed the Arab Spring to struggles for racial justice in the West. The journal proved instrumental in establishing dialogues between writers, artists, and activists from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. It published seminal works by tricontinental writers and political activists the likes of Haitian writer René Depestre, the Syrian poet Adonis, and Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the struggle for independence from Portugal in Guinea-Bissau, as well as key revolutionary and postcolonial texts, such as the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program or the Argentine manifesto for a Third Cinema.

French Theorist: René Girard

A brief note on the life and works of a seminal philosopher, historian, and literary critic.

by EMILY-JANE COHEN

René Noël Théophile Girard, 1923-2015. Photo by Norris Pope.

On November 4th, venerated Stanford French Professor René Girard died in his sleep at age 91. The historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science was known around the world for his hypotheses of “mimetic desire” and of “the scapegoat mechanism,” which have been taken up in fields as disparate as anthropology, sociology, theology, and economics. Entire foundations exist to further the insights and implications of Professor Girard’s research. His impact is such that he was hailed as “The Darwin of the Human Sciences” upon his election to the Académie Française in 2005.

Stanford University Press is proud to count René Girard among its authors. His seminal Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a controversial bestseller in France, was published in English translation in 1987 and remains highly influential today. The same year saw the publication of his Job, The Victim of His People and Violent Origins, to which he was a key contributor. More recently, the press issued two collections of his essays, Oedipus Unbound and Mimesis and Theory. Professor Girard’s work has also been the impetus for that of other Stanford Press authors, including Stanford Professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s Mark of the Sacred and two books by UCLA’s Eric Gans.

The staff of Stanford University Press extends its deep condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Professor Girard. He was a vital asset to the Stanford community and to the broader community of scholars and students we serve, and his impact will endure through all of his books and those of the many people he continues to inspire.

 

Emily-Jane Cohen is Executive Editor at Stanford University Press, acquiring in literature and literary criticism, philosophy and theory, and religious studies and theology.

Litonomics

Economics and literary criticism are far from mutually uncomprehending strangers.

by PAUL CROSTHWAITE

In David Lodge's 1988 campus novel Nice Work, the protagonist, Robyn, comes across her literary theorist boyfriend, Charles, reading a book that appears, on the face of it, to be a far cry from his usual fare of Derrida and Lacan. Spotting the title, The Financial Revolution Robyn expresses surprise that Charles "could ever get interested in business." He replies: "This isn't business … It’s not about buying and selling real commodities. It’s all on paper, or computer screens. It’s abstract. It has its own rather seductive jargon—arbitrageur, deferred futures, floating rate. It’s like literary theory”. Charles is planning “an article about what’s going on in the City”; later, he will succumb to the lure of London’s financial district and take a job as a strategist at an investment bank.

A “literarity-inflected” sensibility might be well placed to offer some genuine analytical traction on the world of finance.

Lodge’s novel points, then, to a certain—all-too-ready—affinity between the practice and rhetoric of high finance and the theoretical discourses central to the study of literature. In positing the “seductiveness” of finance for the literary theorist, Nice Work anticipates recent critiques by the likes of Joshua Clover and Annie McClanahan (themselves literary critics and, in Clover’s case, a poet) of what Clover calls “literarity-inflected economics." For Clover, McClanahan, and others, approaches to contemporary finance informed by the concerns of literary studies are liable merely to reproduce the ideology of their object of study, rhapsodizing over the weightlessness, opacity, and abstraction of a new “economy of signs,” and occluding the resolutely material processes that continue to underlie the financial system and place limits on its expansion.

The End of An Illusion

Economic theory is deeply theological; to imagine otherwise makes it a dangerous knowledge.

by JOSEPH VOGL

"In God We Trust." Photo by Kevin Dooley. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

Let me begin with a few remarks concerning the figure of Eric Packer in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. In a certain way, he is not only an allegory of contemporary finance capitalism but also the fallen angel of an illusion—of the illusion that markets and especially financial markets tend towards equilibrium, that they assure perfect allocation and the best distribution of information, that they finally create a sort of social order. This illusion represents the kernel of liberal market theories from Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” up to the present and still characterizes what economists have named the “efficient market hypothesis.”

This theory—which has been developed since the 1970s and became dominant or hegemonic in the knowledge of financial markets—holds (to put it very briefly) that it is financial markets which depict market activity in their most beautiful purity. Unburdened by transaction costs, unencumbered by transport and by the tribulations of production, they are the ideal stages for pricing mechanisms and perfect competition.

The Economic Imagination

The magical thinking of economists is a pathology of thought with deep historical roots.

by MIKE HILL & WARREN MONTAG 

God's hand from "The Creation of Adam," Michelangelo's world famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

To apply the term “magical” to modern economic thought is to suggest that, despite the extensive formalization of the discipline, above all, its use of econometric models to analyze its data, there remains within it an unassimilated and unexamined residue of irrational thought. Moreover, the irrationality is most evident in its basic assumptions: not only the assumptions about human action, but even more about what is increasingly acknowledged to be the theoretical Achilles heel of economics since its inception in the eighteenth century, the concept of the market itself. It is here that the term “magical,” which allowed us to see the irrationality that is reproduced rather than eliminated by its formal apparatus, may, if we’re not careful, prevent us from seeing how the magical thinking of economists is not simply a pathology of thought, but is historically determined in ways that are so profoundly embedded in economic theory that they have proven to be remarkably resistant to analysis.

The theological underpinnings of economic theory are becoming increasingly obvious.

The physiocrats saw the market as a “second providence,” an extension of God’s design (with or without God) through the unintended consequences of human activity. As Martijn Konings has noted, later critics of this idea saw it as a kind of idolatry: the market could be granted autonomous agency and knowledge only on the basis of a forgetting and a repression of the fact that it was a product of and dependent on human activity. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein explores the fear that such an idol inspires: the idea that a mute and unmoving Golden Calf could become a Golem, that is, come alive, free itself from human control, and destroy its creator.

A Religion of Unbelief

On the rift between mundane money and its mystical financial shadow.

by NOAM YURAN

CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I have always been somewhat suspicious of attempts to theorize money in linguistic terms. Though the symbolic and conventional aspects of money make a parallel with language seem attractive, such attempts usually refrain from considering the consequences of the fact that money belongs to the order of private property, which is strictly opposed to the common sphere of language. Wouldn't conceiving of money as language force us to confront the abhorrent, monstrous possibility of words that can be owned?

That is the big achievement of Martijn Konings's The Emotional Logic of Capitalism, which conceptualizes money as an icon, drawing from the religious meaning of the term, as a symbol that represents through absence what cannot be represented, as well as from its place in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory, as a sign based on a similarity to what it signifies. The full significance of this attempt becomes clear in the last chapter of the book, where Konings addresses the deepest political-economic riddle of our time: the sweeping victory of neoliberalism. Given that the neoliberal order is most harmful to the material prosperity of most people, some writers tend to think it was established "from above" by an alliance of capitalists, politicians, economic think tanks, and the media. Konings confronts the mystery such explanations evade, namely, how neoliberalism was embraced by those people whose prosperity it threatens.

Money’s Other Worlds

On the magical underpinnings of our ostensibly rational economies.

by AMIN SAMMAN

Since at least the nineteenth century, economists have imagined the market as a profoundly rational way of organizing society. Unlike other modes of economic organization, the market is governed by natural laws that ensure the most efficient possible allocation of resources. Modern financial economists take this logic even further, seeing new financial instruments as a means of efficiently managing risk. These visions betray a mechanical conception of economy. Like a well-oiled machine, buyers and sellers play their part in a larger whole, balancing each other out and enabling practical reason to lead societies to ever-greater levels of prosperity.            

There is something irrational, something supernatural—even magical—about the way global finance operates.

In many ways the contemporary financial economy does look like a machine. Think, for example, of its Bloomberg terminals, its automated trading systems, and its algorithm wars. But if global finance is a machine, then there is something irrational, something supernatural—even magical—about the way it operates. It’s not just the periodic bouts of mania, panic, and crisis; nor is it the apparently endless drive to accumulate, to conjure more and more wealth out of a void. It’s that in these and other processes, a range of psychic investments are at work—curious attachments that bind us to money, to projected futures, to imaginary orders, and ultimately, to the modes of power upon which capitalism depends. The magical parts make and move the mechanical whole. This, at least, is the controversial idea developed in a string of new books to which this forum is dedicated.

Heterodox Economics: A Blog Series

Markets are too important to leave to economists alone.

Economics structure human society so thoroughly and so profoundly that, just as it cannot be expected to remain the sole purview of mainstream economists, it cannot but benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. The tumult of boom-and-busts, the global reach of today’s markets, the inequitable distribution of the economy’s fruits, the increasingly dizzying financial maneuvers that speculate on and simultaneously manufacture our realities, have all coalesced—along with many other pertinent questions—into an increasing demand for a more pluralistic view of this enigma we call “the economy.”

Rediscovering a Great American Poet

Why it’s high time for a Robinson Jeffers renaissance.

A 1932 Time magazine cover, featuring poet Robinson Jeffers.

With contemporaries like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, it is little wonder that the name of poet Robinson Jeffers rings far fewer bells, even in the ears of avid poetry fans. Jeffers, who was born at the twilight of the 19^th century and wrote most prolifically throughout the first half of the 20^th, joined an audaciously talented chorus of American poets who—then, as now—were regarded as literary celebrities and cultural icons.

Jeffers is essential to understanding ourselves, the twentieth century, and the world.

But, on April 4^th, 1932 the portrait of a reclusive California-based poet named Robinson Jeffers, photographed in contemplative profile, was emblazoned on the cover of Time magazine, nine years after Amy Lowell received a similar honor, and eighteen years before T.S. Eliot would adorn its pages. With the publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924, Jeffers’ fame sprung into being virtually overnight. One decade and multiple collections of poetry later, he had become arguably the most famous poet in the United States.

Despite his prominence and critical success—and the numerous literary honors he accrued notwithstanding—one poet and literary critic writing in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune asked, “Why does so much deep silence surround the name of Robinson Jeffers?”

The Metaphoric Roots of Maker Culture

On the tension and the ground of object repurposing.

by RAYMOND MALEWITZ

A 2008 Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif. Photo by Jon Davis, CC BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

People have long been fascinated by the creative ways that humans repurpose objects to suit their particular needs and desires. Recently, a number of artists, historians, and critics have begun to document the myriad cases of object repurposing and the impulses behind them—myself included. In The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture, I examined some of these practices as they surfaced in literature, art, and other cultural artifacts within the United States from the 1960s to the present. I spent the majority of the book outlining the strange interrelationships that arise among object repurposing, contemporary “Maker” communities such as Instructables, post-apocalyptic literature, and American left- and right-libertarian politics.

If I had to do it over again, I’d add the hit television series Project Runway, which issues an annual “unconventional challenge” asking contestants to fashion clothing out of material scrounged from a hardware store, a grocery store, or a candy store. 

 

Mark Twain, the Chinese Boxer

On the iconic American writer’s avowed anti-imperialism.

by SELINA LAI-HENDERSON

Mark Twain in 1907. Public Domain.

After residing for almost a decade in Europe, Mark Twain sailed back to the United States in October 1900. He had not only combated financial losses from his untimely investment in the Paige typesetter, but he had also made a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic. The sixty-four-year-old writer had become a national hero and a celebrity figure, one whose homecoming was a much-anticipated event across the country. Newspapers lauded his success in overcoming bankruptcy and achieving fame and popularity in Europe, hailing him as “the bravest author in literature.” Harper’s Weekly heralded him as the “the most advertised man in the world.”

While in the United States, Twain is largely viewed as a humorist, in China his principal reputation is that of an anti-imperial polemicist and a cherished advocate.

While writers and reporters were expecting the humorist to delight the American audience with funny stories or the wonders of his travels, Twain took them by surprise with a decidedly pointed political declaration almost immediately after he landed; he remarked to a New York Herald reporter on October 16: “I am an anti-imperialist, I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

Twain would follow up on his unequivocal verdict a month later, speaking up against the foreign occupation in Manchuria and in support of the anti-imperialist uprising in China known as the Boxer Rebellion. “I am a Boxer, too” he announced to a standing room at the Berkeley Lyceum in New York City. The following year, Twain assumed the vice presidency of the American Anti-Imperialist League, an organization which he helped found and included such prominent members as Jane Addams, Ambrose Bierce, and Andrew Carnegie; Twain served in this post until the end of his life.

In Memory of Benjamin Harshav

Stanford University Press remembers a gifted poet, translator, and literary scholar.

Benjamin Harshav, 1928-2015, via Wikimedia Commons.

Benjamin Harshav, poet, author, teacher, translator, and literary scholar, died last week, leaving behind him a remarkable legacy in the fields of Yiddish and Hebrew literary scholarship. A prolific writer and editor of multiple volumes on poetry, literature, and culture, Harshav published no less than eight titles with Stanford University Press—titles that included translations, edited anthologies, and original essays. His life spanned nearly nine decades and three continents—from Eastern Europe, to Israel, to the United States. During his life he was a champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement and worked indefatigably to bring volumes of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry to wider audiences through translation.

A champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement.

Harshav’s Yiddish roots ran deep—he was born in Vilna, Lithuania in 1928, a town which he described as the “self-styled bastion of Yiddish culture.” But in 1941, the year the Germans wrested the city from Soviet control, Harshav and his family fled to the Urals, where—despite that fact that he would eventually follow a calling in literary scholarship—Harshav attended university to study math and physics.