Stanford University Press Blog

History and Literature Entwined

Foucault suggests that the relationship between the two subjects is more complex than we often think.

by ROBERT LEHMAN 

Public domain via Pixabay.

In The Order of Things, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, Michel Foucault describes the birth around the turn of the nineteenth century of two new epistemological or linguistic forms, forms, he suggests, that his contemporaries have taken for granted. The first of these, which pervades all of the soft sciences, is history, here the name not only for the awareness that events and our experience of events occur in time but also for the peculiarly modern belief that a thing’s most fundamental truth can be revealed through an interrogation of the temporal processes by which it came to be. The second is literature, now in the emphatic sense of the term as it unfolds from Hölderlin to Mallarmé, Roussel, and Beckett, a mode of language concerned not with adequation to reality but with its own intransitive existence: “a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being.”

Foucault wants to show how we’ve moved away from an earlier moment guided by the rationalist ideal of clear and distinct ideas.

History and literature, then: two uniquely modern forms. Although expressed in the sometimes oracular language typical of his milieu, Foucault’s claim about the roughly coincident birth of these forms is not, I think, especially controversial. History was indeed “born” in the nineteenth century, not only in the grand sense that Foucault intends but also in the more prosaic sense that it was codified as a discipline almost simultaneously at the University of Berlin (1810) and the Sorbonne (1812), and very much in the wake of the French Revolution. And it was certainly present to the consciousness of the age. Literary critic and philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, for example, could write in 1798 to his brother August that “I am disgusted by any theory that is not historical”; half a century later, Flaubert would write to the Goncourt brothers that “the historical sense dates from yesterday. And it is perhaps the best thing about the nineteenth century”; and Nietzsche’s warning in the second essay of the Untimely Meditations that “there is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of historical sense which injures every living thing and finally destroys it, be it a man, a people, or a culture” would hardly have seemed as urgent a century earlier.

The 85th California Book Awards

Stanford University Press receives the 2016 Notable Contribution to Publishing Prize.

James Karman accepts the 2016 Prize for Notable Contribution to Publishing from the Commonwealth Club of California.

Last night Professor James Karman and Stanford University Press were honored at the 85th Annual California Book Awards. The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers—the third and final volume of which debuted last year—was recognized by the Commonwealth Club of California with their 2016 Notable Contribution to Publishing Prize.

The publication of the third installment of the letters of poet Robinson Jeffers dovetailed with the publication of a biography of the seminal Californian poet’s life and works, also written by Karman (and reviewed glowingly in The Wall Street Journal). Together they marked the culmination of a 15-year collaboration between the Chico-based author and professor and Stanford University Press. This comprehensive series of letters in tandem with Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet unveil the hidden worlds of one of the most reclusive, controversial, and artistically divergent poets of the 20 century. His letters and Karman’s biography afford an intimate view not only into Jeffers’ own oeuvre, but to the literary culture of California writ large, during a tumultuous chapter in American history.

A Poetry Month Reading List

6 new books on poets and poetry, from British Romanticism to Moroccan Leftism.

CC BY-2.0 via Flickr.

In honor of National Poetry Month—a now 20-year strong tradition—we’ve pulled together a few of our latest books celebrating the genre and its many diverse cultural traditions, including an anthology, a novel, a biography, and a bevy of poetry analysis and criticism. 

 

1

The Full Severity of Compassion »
The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

by CHANA KRONFELD

The late Yehuda Amichai, widely considered one of the greatest poets of our time and perhaps the most important Jewish poet since Paul Celan, was, in life, never interested in playing the role of the Great Poet. Such is the observation of Chana Kronfeld whose account of Amichai and his work (described as “penetrating” by the New York Times) blends a critical literary perspective with personal insights derived from her own lifelong friendship with him. Lionized by the literary canon, Amichai became required reading in Israel and beyond. Yet despite his notoriety, he remained always the “everyman” of the genre, whose accessible poetic style contained profound political and theological reflections, the nuances of which are often lost in prevailing interpretations of his work. But “in a series of crystalline readings,” writes James Wood in the New Yorker, Kronfeld restores the “cultural dangerousness” of Amichai's poetry in this volume.

ALSO OF INTEREST:
The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials
by PAUL CELAN, edited by Bernhard Böschenstein and Hein Schmull, translated by Pierre Joris

 

2

Watchwords »
Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention

by LILY GURTON-WACHTER

Drawing on the works of the darlings of British Romanticism—Blake, Coleridge, Cowper, Keats, Wordsworth, and Charlotte Smith—Watchwords explores the Romantic tradition’s preoccupation with attention, particularly against the backdrop of the great national events that surfaced during this period: war, invasion, surveillance, and general national alarm. Lily Gurton-Wachter contends that the Romantic poets explode the deceptively simple question of what we attend and how we attend by formally managing, deflecting, and distracting the reader’s attention in their own verse. Her account offers a persuasive argument for how the poetics of attention reflect the political debates and technological innovations of the time. “This book,” says Nancy Yousef (author of Romantic Intimacy), “will be important to all Romanticists interested in the dynamic relationship between aesthetic form, affect, and cultural milieu.”

ALSO OF INTEREST:
Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War
by ERIC C. WALKER

Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism
by JOHN BUGG

The Truths Fiction Tells

What literary invention can reveal about the reality of the Iranian Revolution.

by ROXANNE VARZI

Iranian theater, 2006. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia.

Thirty-seven years ago on February 11, 1979, on my eighth birthday, Iran, my country, went through a radical shift. My family left Iran a year after the Revolution, and I have been trying either to understand what happened or to explain it ever since. My latest attempt is Last Scene Underground, an ethnographic novel of life in contemporary Iran.

What’s real? They want to know where the boundary lies (literally “lies” in a non-truth-telling sense) between fiction and non-fiction.

If the Q&A at book readings is anything to go by, when you’ve written a book that’s both a novel and an ethnography, the question on most people’s minds is: What’s real? They want to know where the boundary lies (literally “lies” in a non-truth-telling sense) between fiction and non-fiction. Ethnography and literature have in common a very fluid boundary between the real and the fictive. Even in science fiction, a writer creates a work of fiction based on his or her own understanding of human relations, impulses, and desires from lived experiences and factual knowledge that feeds the imagination.

If an anthropologist were to set-up a camera and begin to record a “scene” of life somewhere, the very decision of where to place the camera frames the scene with a subjective and therefore not fully honest view. This does not mean that what was recorded is not real or the “truth,” but in excluding major parts of the scene, it skews and changes “reality.” If I focused my camera on one section of students in a lecture where only men are sitting, one may have the mistaken impression that only men take my anthropology class. The camera recorded “reality,” but it was not an honest representation of the class. When we social scientists translate and write about an “objective world” through our subjective positions, we may be factual but not necessarily honest about all the ways in which we are creating a new meaning or a fiction, possibly even a fantasy.

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.”