Results by title

In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture.
Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the “foreigner-within.” In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant—at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation—displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a “failed” integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders.
In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.

Multilingual literature defies simple translation. Beginning with this insight, Brian Lennon examines the resistance multilingual literature offers to book publication itself. In readings of G. V. Desani’s All about H. Hatterr, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between, Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutterzunge, and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, among other works, Lennon shows how nationalized literary print culture inverts the values of a transnational age, reminding us that works of literature are, above all, objects in motion.

 

Looking closely at the limit of both multilingual literary expression and the literary journalism, criticism, and scholarship that comments on multilingual work, In Babel’s Shadow presents a critical reflection on the fate of literature in a world gripped by the crisis of globalization.

These lectures by one of the most influential and original philosophers of the twentieth century constitute a sustained argument for the philosophical basis of romanticism, particularly in its American rendering. Through his examination of such authors as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, Stanley Cavell shows that romanticism and American transcendentalism represent a serious philosophical response to the challenge of skepticism that underlies the writings of Wittgenstein and Austin on ordinary language.

In this landmark volume, Blanchot sustains a dialogue with a number of thinkers whose contributions have marked turning points in the history of Western thought and have influenced virtually all the themes that inflect the contemporary literary and philosophical debate today.

“Blanchot waits for us still to come, to be read and reread. . . I would say that never as much as today have I pictured him so far ahead of us.” Jacques Derrida

This important collection explores and clarifies two of the most contested ideas in literary theory today, influence and intertextuality.  The study of influence tends to center on major authors and canonical works, identifying prior documents as “sources” or “contexts” for a given author.  Intertextuality, on the other hand, is a concept unconcerned with authors as individuals; it treats all texts as part of a network of discourse that includes culture, history, and social practices as well as other literary works.  In thirteen essays drawing on the entire spectrum of English and American literary history, this volume considers the relationship between these two terms—their rivalry, their kinship, their range of uses.

Debates about these two concepts have been crucial to the “new historicism” and the resurgence of interest in literary history.  The essays in this volume employ a refreshing array of examples from that history—poetry of the Renaissance and the twentieth century, novels of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Old English texts, and postmodernist productions that have served as recurrent “intertexts” for contemporary theory.  The contributors treat such currently vital questions as the role of the author, canon formation, gender, causality, and the social dimension of texts.  They illuminate old assumptions and new ideas about agency that lie behind notions of influence, and they examine models of an anonymous textual field that lie behind notions of intertextuality.

The volume takes much of its character from its own intertextual origin as a group project of the English faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.  Though diverse in their academic interests, concerns, and experience, the contributors particpated in an ongoing intellectual exchange that is a model of how new scholarship can arise from dialogue.

These fifteen essays explore the rich texture of women's diaries written in America and Europe over the past two centuries. The authors use a variety of critical methodologies to examine the diary as a text, as a form of women's self-inscription, as a window to the diarists' historical and contemporary lives, and as a theoretical tool that allows us to question longstanding assumptions.