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Agon: The Iliad
Drafted as the foundational first chapter of Volume One, the last to be written, of Jameson’s monumental Poetics of Social Forms. A richly rewarding study of the Iliad, located within the ‘immense transition’ from the great imperial cities of the Bronze Age. The logic of agon—a multi-sided struggle—as governing principle of the great poem.
Between History And Theory
From Signs Taken for Wonders to The Bourgeois, Franco Moretti has developed a changing, multifaceted sociology of the novel. In this critical reconstruction, Enrica Villari parses the theory that unfolds from his pioneering account of the form’s evolution—through Goethe, Stendhal, Balzac, Eliot, García Márquez—and considers its political implications.
What to Do With the Past?
Above the fray of mediatized controversy, a classicist situates the heritage of the ‘West’ in the long view. A culture forged by the interplay of ecclesiastical, capitalist and emancipatory forces; the catastrophes of European world conquest and their weight on the present. Does Benjamin offer a way through the impasse?
Jameson after Post Critique
Radical literary theory has defined itself in opposition to a ‘historical-contextual’ approach said to be exemplified by Fredric Jameson. Is this a misreading? Leo Robson on the author of The Political Unconscious as appreciator of plot and popularizer of a positive hermeneutics of globalization.
Notes on Tone
An aetiology of flatness, traced through close readings of three radical American poets. In tension with the expressive subjectivity of lyric and the forceful register of political commitment, resonances of the muted, withdrawn or deadpan affect of this poetry with a broader cultural mode, as the sound of the historical present.
Critic, Historicize Thyself!
Blueprint for a ‘total historicism’ in literary studies, reconciling political commitment with aesthetic judgement amid the slow death of humanities departments. Benjamin Kunkel continues the discussion of critical strategy focused around Joseph North’s Literary Criticism.
Brecht In L.A.
From the author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, a rediscovered appraisal of Bertolt Brecht’s war-time exile in California. Tracing the swirl of interconnections between salonnières and stars, exiles and dissidents, artists of stage and screen. Beyond Hollywood frustrations, what of a Brechtian cinema?
A Brazilian Comi-Tragedy
A vivid account of Roberto Schwarz’s new play, Rainha Lira, staging the political turmoil of contemporary Brazil. Intricacies of class conflict and Caesarist reaction, bourgeois rejoicing and favela discontents, in a polyphonic epic that foretells the troubled conditions of Lula’s return.
The Politics of Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa was one of the greatest and strangest poets of the 20th century, famous for the elusive profusion of his ‘heteronyms’. Yet in light of the first biography worthy of him, and recent Portuguese studies of his work, he emerges as perhaps the most passionate—and productive—political writer of all the original modernists, as Portugal lurched from the noisy overthrow of its monarchy to the quiet tyranny of Salazar.
By Their Epithets Shall Ye Know Them
In response to Paul Claudel’s dictum—‘fear of the adjective is the beginning of style’—a defence of adjectival extravagance, mobilizing Nabokov and Mann, Joseph Roth and Herta Müller, to showcase the literary power of the epithet, and its ability to alchemize the noun.
The Roads to Rome
Twenty years after ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, Franco Moretti reassesses the research methodologies of close and distant reading in literary studies. Interpretation and measurement, history and textuality, struggle and discovery—how practicable a synthesis of their approaches?
Mathematics and Modern Literature
If modernist literature has been fascinated by the possibilities of mathematical formalism, mathematicians have repaid the compliment in their use of that paramount avant-garde form: the manifesto. Here we publish extracts from Alice Bamford’s bravura treatment of experimentation at Bourbaki and Oulipo.
The Bond of Shame
Is shame for one’s country, not love of it, the truer mark of belonging? Lineaments of a political emotion, at the intersection of biology and history, from Nestor’s invocation on the battlefield of Troy to Primo Levi’s remembrance of the Red Army. How might we imagine the boundaries of a shame-based community?
The Ends of Criticism
In response to the recent debate between Francis Mulhern and Joseph North on the means and purposes of literary criticism, Lola Seaton examines the play of method and personal experience in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City and its contemporary rebound in the ‘hauntology’ of K-Punk’s Mark Fisher.
Art and Revolution
Commissioned by Eric Hobsbawm for Einaudi’s Storia del marxismo, a synoptic survey of avant-garde movements in the era of 20th-century revolutions. Disputing the received view of a series of chaotic, short-lived experiments, John Willett traces the emergence of an internally coherent cultural renaissance, stretching from Moscow and Vitebsk to Mexico City.
Belated Reunion?
One of China’s greatest modern writers, Eileen Chang reframed its traditional fictional forms to grapple with post-1919 realities: decline of the Qing aristocracy, price of female emancipation, devastation of the Sino-Japanese war. Jiwei Xiao asks how publication of her long-suppressed last novel alters understandings of Chang’s work.
Critical Revolutions
In response to a bold reconstruction of Anglophone literary studies challenging the political self-understanding of the reigning historicism and looking to a new, interventionist departure on the left, some critical considerations on disciplinary history, the place of ‘knowledge’ in the fictional order, as well as the discourses that address it, and the precedent of Leavis and his followers.
Against the Universal Library
A librarian reflects on her profession’s destructive and preservative urges, from microfilming of newspaper archives in the 1940s, via stress-testing experiments and de-acidification gassings to digitization and the coming of the ebook, as the library becomes a hollowed-out portal onto the private sector.
Antonio Candido 1918–2017
Pioneer analyst of a Brazilian literary space, Candido surveyed Western cultural centres and their contending theories, not simply to measure up local experience, but to test them against it. Portrait of a gifted teacher and literary critic, subtle master of his country’s complex ex-colonial condition.
Happy Dystopians
Fears of mass culture generating visions of rule not by fear, but by the narcotics of conformity and abolition of privacy, in the fiction of Huxley and Eggers—‘total sociability’ resistable only by figures of the doomed individual. The fading even of high culture as notional refuge in the passage beyond the Brave New World.