Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman, or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from (...) Afrikaans to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Waiting for Godot in New Orleans A tragicomedy in two acts, a project in three partsPaul Chan Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of “stage” (2007) (Page 2) Click for larger view View full resolutionOrganizing map of New Orleans 1 (2007) (Page 14) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of bicycle for Pozzo (2007) (Page 28) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of shopping cart (...) for Lucky (2007) (Page 40) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of tree (2007) (Page 54) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of disaster tour bus for boy (2007) (Page 68) Click for larger view View full resolutionStreet sign on St. Claude (2007) (Page 81) Click for larger view View full resolutionStreet sign in Lower Ninth Ward (2007) (Page 93) Click for larger view View full resolutionStreet sign in Gentilly (2007) (Page 107) Click for larger view View full resolutionFlyer (2007) (Page 124) Click for larger view View full resolutionDancing before the 1st Lower Ninth Ward Performance (2007) (Page 138) Click for larger view View full resolutionJ. Kyle Manzay and Wendell Pierce in Act I (2007) (Page 150) Click for larger view View full resolutionDrawing of entire project as a musical score (2007) (Page 165)ImagesPaul Chan lives and works in New York. His recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2008); Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2006); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2005); and ICA Boston (2005). Group exhibitions include The 2006 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Work / New Acquisitions, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Eighth Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France (2005); Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2004). Chan is also well known for his political interventions—in 2002 he broke US sanctions and federal law to visit Baghdad, and in 2004 he garnered police attention for The People’s Guide to the Republican National Convention, a free map distributed throughout New York to help protesters to get in or out of the way of the RNC. Most recently Chan collaborated with the Classical Theatre of Harlem and Creative Time to produce a site-specific outdoor presentation of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in New Orleans.Artist statementWaiting for Godot in New Orleans A tragicomedy in two acts, a project in three partsby Samuel BeckettEstragon Vladimir Lucky Pozzo a boy City of New Orleans in 2007ACT IEight months research. Four months teaching and street organizing. Five free site-specific performances.ACT IIA country road. A tree. Evening.Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

While both Isaiah Berlin and William James are widely seen as pluralists, this paper contends that neither is a pluralist tout court. Berlin certainly is a pluralist when it comes to morality and politics, but he is a monist when it comes to nature. And James is, paradoxically, both a pluralist and a monist as regards all of reality. These claims are advanced by showing how both thinkers’ approaches contrast with those of monists, not least Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche. They (...) are also shown to be associated with different narrative genres: tragedy in Berlin’s case, and tragicomedy in James’. The paper then concludes with a brief discussion of an alternative approach, one that treads a path in between monism and pluralism and, because of this, favours a particular form of comedy. (shrink)

In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Comparative Relativisim,” Smith argues that relativism is a chimera, half straw man, half red herring. Over the past century, she shows, objections to the supposed position so named have typically involved either crucially improper paraphrases of general observations of the variability and contingency of human perceptions, interpretations, and judgments or dismaying inferences gratuitously drawn from such observations. More recently, the label relativism has been elicited by the display, especially by anthropologists or historians, (...) of attitudes of epistemic tolerance or efforts at explanatory or evaluative symmetry. Objections here commonly involve mistaken, unwarranted universalizing of those attitudes or recommendations. Purported refutations of what is identified as relativism commonly have no force for alleged relativists because relativism-refuters commonly deploy and depend on the very concepts (e.g., truth and reason) and relations (e.g., between what are referred to as facts and evidence) that are at issue. The result is circular argumentation, intellectual nonengagement, and perfect deadlock. Although there are signs that this tragicomic episode of intellectual history has run its course, two contemporary sites of antirelativist energy are worth noting. One is the claim that so-called cultural relativism is refuted by the existence of cognitive universals. The other is the fear that evaluative symmetry leads to ethically or politically debilitating neutrality. Consideration of the nature of cognitive universals indicates that their existence does not contradict observations of the significance of cultural variability. Consideration of anxieties about the supposed quietistic implications of commitments to epistemic tolerance or symmetry indicates that such anxieties are misplaced. (shrink)

Descartes's Fictions traces common movements in early modern philosophy and literary method. Emma Gilby reassesses the significance of Descartes's writing by bringing his philosophical output into contact with the literary treatises, exempla, and debates of his age. She argues that humanist theorizing about poetics represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes's work. She offers readings of the controversies to which this poetic theory gives rise, with particular reference to the genre of tragicomedy, questions of verisimilitude or plausibility, and the (...) figures of Guez de Balzac and Pierre Corneille. Drawing on what Descartes says about, and to, his many contemporaries and correspondents embedded in the early modern republic of letters, this volume shows that poetics provides a repository of themes and images to which he returns repeatedly: fortune, method, error, providence, passion, and imagination, for instance. Like the poets and theorists of his age, Descartes is also drawn to the forms of attention that people may bring to his work. This interest finds expression in the mature Cartesian metaphysics of the Meditations, as well as, later, in the moral philosophy of his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia or the Passions of the Soul. This volume thus bridges the gap between Cartesian criticism and late-humanist literary culture in France. (shrink)

This response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, “The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy,” presents some thoughts on how the debates about “relativism” upon which Smith comments could be refigured in the light of this symposium's theme of “comparative relativism.” If the notion of relativism can be rendered relative unto itself, as the notion of a “comparative” relativism would seem to suggest, then how might one understand its “position” within the kinds of debates in which Smith's paper, by way of (...) commentary, also participates? In particular, if part of Smith's aim is to defuse some of the unfair thoughts that have fueled the antirelativist industry in academia, then how might one think of the character of such “anti-anti-“moves themselves? What manner of academic debate does a properly relative notion of relativity allow for? The response herein to these questions takes off from the obvious thought that, properly squared, relativism cannot be understood as a “position”—one that should or could be “defended,” albeit in the Geertzian “anti-anti-“mode that Smith's article seems sometimes to adopt. Rather, it would imply a somewhat different way out of the tribal deadlocks that Smith so elegantly helps put to rest (relativists vs. positivists, etc.); namely, a manner of debate in which a generalized relativity of thinking, including the relativity of that thought itself, would make a merit of academic opposition at all levels. This piece suggests, in other words, a manner of debating in which the “anti-” would be both proffered and received as a manner of compliment rather than attack. (shrink)

This piece is a response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, “The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy,” in the Common Knowledge symposium on “comparative relativism.” The theme is complexity—as distinct from simple contrast or binarism of any kind—similarities as well as differences are observed in ancient Chinese and ancient Greek responses to cultural difference; also the significantly different views of these matters among the Greek philosophers. In the same vein, discussing studies of cultural/linguistic variability or counterclaimed universality among humans in (...) color perception, the essay stresses the complexity of such cognitive activities, including the ongoing interactions among the multiple variables presumably involved. Noting the challenge that such intrinsic complexity and inevitable interactivity present to standard dichotomies of universality and cultural relativity, the essay concludes that these and other familiar dualisms have been made obsolete by a century of research in genetics, ethnography, and related empirical disciplines. (shrink)

In the paper I try to define some basic ideas and sketch a style of Marek Siemek’s epistemological reflection and its influence on the notion of do called “meaning of history”. I referee some elements of his interpretation of Kant and Hegel as a background to paradox of “meaning of the history”—the paradox of its necessary transcendence and immanence, the contradiction between a history as an eschatology, and history as a “project”, a dialectic of sense and non-sense. The conclusion is (...) following: the “history” for Siemek is the becoming of self-sufficiency of the “modern spirit” and therefore a tragicomedy in the Hegelian sense. It excludes any transcendent point of view or any utopia. (shrink)

Although the relationship between Charles Sanders Peirce and German philosophy was a very close one, it remained rather one-sided for a long time. This story would make for a philosophical tragicomedy in three acts, but in what follows I will keep it as sober and short as possible. * 1. As is well known, Peirce came into contact with philosophy via Kant and German Idealism (especially Schelling and Hegel). He read Kant in German from the age of 14 on (...) and his own philosophical works – the earl... (shrink)

Abstract“[…︁] mein Recht muss mir werden!” Hermann Bahr’s Tragicomedy­ Der Querulant­ (1914). At the end of the eighteenth century, people who became notorious for their excessive engagement in legal proceedings started being labeled as “querulents” or “paranoid litigants”. The term “querulents” first appeared in the General Order of the Court for the Prussian States (Allgemeine Gerichtsordnung für die Preußischen Staaten) from July 6, 1793. From there on, the spectrum of juridical measures undertaken against the so‐labeled litigators included classifying these (...) persons as ineligible for legal action and psychiatric hospitalization. The paper discusses to what extent Hermann Bahr rearranges psychiatric and legal knowledge about this special type of the complainer in his tragicomedy Der Querulant, premiered in 1914. This concerns, first, the theatricality of the body and speech, secondly, the use of cultural techniques of writing and, thirdly, conflicting notions of justice. Therefore, the paper analyzes the aesthetic function of querulous behavior in the dramatic structure of the play from the point of view of both media theory and literary theory. (shrink)

The article provides an analysis of the “Spanish code” inscribed in the text of Lesia Ukrainka’s drama Kaminnyi hospodar. The constituents of the code include: 1) conventions of 17th century Spanish baroque drama, in particular, use of the dialectics of the concepts of dignity and reputation as a driving mechanism for confl ict throughout Lesia Ukrainka’s play and transformation within the classical scheme of characters suggested by Lope de Vega and his followers; 2) stereotypes of “Spanishness” through which the playwright (...) produced a heteroimage of Spain. Lesia Ukrainka’s variant of the famous legend of Don Juan is a sophisticated modernist drama. The “Spanish code” serves as a prism through which the playwright examines the world. Lesia Ukrainka created an astonishing modernist tragicomedy of dishonesty, full of the spirit of uncertainty. (shrink)

In responding to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, “The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy,” this essay addresses a number of recently published research papers attempting to identify the neuronal correlates of cultural selves. However, underlying these studies of the “cultures of human nature” are some very strong assumptions about the nature of human culture. Current discussions of cultural effects on the brain are therefore not simply about reducing identity to brain states; they also show how a notion of identity is (...) transformed and reconfigured by its relation to a brain domain of knowledge making. Understanding these dynamics, both at a discourse level and at a brain level, this piece suggests, may provide a useful case for a contemporary discussion of relativism. (shrink)

In the paper I try to define some basic ideas and sketch a style of Marek Siemek’s epistemological reflection and its influence on the notion of do called “meaning of history”. I referee some elements of his interpretation of Kant and Hegel as a background to paradox of “meaning of the history”—the paradox of its necessary transcendence and immanence, the contradiction between a history as an eschatology, and history as a “project”, a dialectic of sense and non-sense. The conclusion is (...) following: the “history” for Siemek is the becoming of self-sufficiency of the “modern spirit” and therefore a tragicomedy in the Hegelian sense. It excludes any transcendent point of view or any utopia. (shrink)

In this erudite new work, Elliot R. Wolfson explores philosophical gnosis in the writings of Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod. The juxtaposition of these three extraordinary, albeit relatively neglected, philosophers provides a prism through which Wolfson scrutinizes the interplay of ethics, politics, and theology. The bond that ties together the diverse and multifaceted worldviews promulgated by Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod is the mutual recognition of the need to enunciate a response to the calamities of the twentieth century based (...) on an incontrovertible acknowledgment of the decadence and malevolence of human beings, without, however, succumbing to acrimony and despair. The speculation of each of these philosophers on melancholia and the tragicomedy of being is unquestionably intricate, exhibiting subtle variations and idiosyncrasies, but we can nevertheless identify a common denominator in their attempt to find the midpoint positioned between hope and hopelessness. As Wolfson articulates, Taubes, Rose, and Wyschogrod exemplify a philosophical sensibility informed by a nocturnal seeing, which is not merely a seeing in the night but rather a seeing of the night. Ultimately, the book reveals the potential for these thinkers' ideas to enhance our moral sensitivity and to encourage participation in the ongoing struggle for meaning and decency in the present. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“El secreto oficio de la abeja”A Sociopolitical Metaphor in the CelestinaCristina Guardiola (bio)Rojas returns again and again in La Celestina to the theme of the disruption of human relationships.—Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de RojasEnabled by the old bawd Celestina, the loco amor felt by the clandestine lovers Calisto and Melibea exposes a society living in disorder and conflict. Calisto and Melibea’s transgressive desire, and those who make (...) it possible, may be seen as directly contradicting moral and social laws upon which the tragicomedy claims to be predicated. Most of the characters in the work live their lives as transgression; their disorderly conduct leads inevitably to their death and destruction [Baranda 9]. The negative example offered by this work was, according to Maravall, what led early readers such as Quevedo to understand how the work: “debaxo del nombre de Comedia, enseña a vivir bien, moral y políticamente, acreditanto las virtudes y disfamando los vicios [under the title of Comedy, teaches one to live well, both moral and politically, accrediting virtues and discrediting vices]” [qtd. in Maravall 19].1 The Celestina lays bare its social and moralistic message by exposing the corruption of social and moral values prevalent in this late fifteenth-century work. Bringing together the aristocratic world of courtly love (already brought low through the Calisto’s crass treatment of waspish Melibea) and the bawdy world of the whorehouse, Rojas debases the people and passions therein. Connecting both worlds through her comings and goings is Celestina. Characterized as abeja, a political animal used in the Middle Ages and early modern period that informs the ideal structure of society, Celestina exposes a satire of society and its corruption of moral values.As the Síguese and prologue indicate, the tragicomedy was written with a dual and moral intent. The author wrote to disabuse the many “galanes y enamorados mancebos [handsome young men and enamored youth]” of his country from the cruel and evil fires of love, but also to expose “engaños de las alcahuetas y malos y lisonjeros siruientes [the deceptions of procuresses and evil sycophantic servants].” In the Celestina, the deceits of the bawd and servants Sempronio and (later) Pármeno complicate the narrative and move it to its tragic conclusion. As Celestina and Sempronio set out to profit by Calisto’s lovesickness, they are met with opposition from Pármeno. The initial resistance Pármeno puts up to defend himself and his master from the economic lust felt by Celestina and Sempronio serves to expose a conflict in social class. The heedless attainment of wealth demonstrated by the servants contradicts a more aristocratic principle that was perceived to guide economic thought in the Middle Ages [Maravall 60]. Celestina’s spoken adage, “[a] tuerto o a derecho, nuestra casa hasta el techo [by hook or by crook, our house [End Page 147] through the roof],” exposes her unmitigated greed and contrasts sharply with Calisto’s more courtly (if yet parodic) examples of largesse. The alcahueta’s greed is not merely opportunistic, it belies a certain Schadenfreude felt for Calisto’s woes. Like “cirurjanos [ante] los descalabrados [surgeons before patients with head trauma],” Celestina pursues Calisto in search of money, which at this particular moment in history was slipping through the hands of her real-life counterparts and into those of state-appointed brothel keepers. As Lacarra notes, the granting of royal mercedes for the incomes derived from prostitution to royal towns or notable persons became prevalent during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel [40]. One must imagine women such as Celestina doubly feeling the pinch from this seemingly “catholic” imposition. Income from the alcahueta livelihood from all of Castile certainly must have been dwindling. At the same time, the alcahueta’s dishonest way of living was being usurped by speciously honorable citizens who no doubt maligned the prostitutes on whom their wealth was gained. Despite the growing danger of her increasingly clandestine profession, Celestina shows little shame or fear. Indeed, her sense of “honor” for the putería is so brightly and enthusiastically expressed in the work bearing her name that one wonders if it might not stem from... (shrink)

Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between parole and langue has greatly helped linguists to clarify the relationship between particular speech events and the underlying reservoir of verbal signs and combinatory rules. The relationship emerges from Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale as one between concrete instances of employed language and a slowly but permanently changing virtual system.1 It seems to me that the more recent literary distinctions between the implied author of a work and its actual author and between the implied and (...) the actual reader point to similar relationships along the rhetorical axis of communication.2 For example, the respective authors implied by The Comedy of Errors and by The Tempest are in a sense fixed, concrete manifestations of the actual author whose permanently shifting potential of manifesting himself in literary works or otherwise was only partially realized between 1564 and 1616; his full potential has thus forever remained virtual. The congenial readers implied by the respective plays are in turn two of many "roles" which an actual reader may attempt to slip into for the length of time it takes him to read one work or another. Even a book like Mein Kampf will be adequately understood only by men and women able and willing temporarily to become Adolf Hitler's implied readers. The price may be high, but having shed the mental mask and costume required for the proper "performance" of the text, a discerning person will emerge from the ordeal with a keener sense of the despicable part assigned to the book's actual readers. I hardly need to add that works of imaginative literature tend to imply readers whose intellectual, emotive, and moral response is far less predetermined than is the response of the reader implied by the typical work of assertive discourse. · 1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale , 4th ed. . Since this book was posthumously compiled from the notes of students attending three different sets of lectures, I am not overly troubled by the fact that the letter of at least two sentences seems to contradict my characterization of langue as a virtual and changing system: "La langue n'est pas moins que la parole un objet de nature concrète" and "tout ce qui est diachronique dans la langue ne l'est que par la parole" . See also Wade Baskin's English trans., Course in General Linguistics , pp. 15 and 98.· 2. See esp. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction and Wolfgang Iser Der implizite Leser , trans. as The Implied Reader . Paul Hernadi is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. His book, Beyond Genre: New Direction in Literary Classification, is soon to appear in Spanish translation. He has edited a collection of essays titled What is Literature? and written a book on modern historical tragicomedy. "On the How, What, and Why of Narrative" was contributed to Critical Inquiry in the Autumn 1980 issue. (shrink)

Why, then, do we huddle in the dark around the campfires of our flickering narratives? There are obviously many different reasons for doing so. Yet, having heard various récits—whether "stories" or "accounts"—during the narrative conference, I am more inclined than ever to see self-assertive entertainment and self-transcending commitment as two kinds of ultimate motivation for our countless narratives. Stories and histories and other narrative or descriptive accounts help us to escape boredom and indifference—ours as well as that of other people. (...) Those nearly vacant states of mind at the zero degree of entertainment and commitment bring us frightfully close to the experience of nonexistence. Hence our desire to replace boredom by thrilling or gratifying entertainment and to replace indifference by the social or cosmic commitment either to change the world or to change ourselves. In a world of unmixed colors and pure literary genres, tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance might answer distinct needs for thrill, gratification, indignation, and admiration. But, as Roy Schafer and Victor Turner have reminded us, the private and social dramas underlying psychoanalytical and anthropological accounts are even less pure than most works of literature. Couldn't we conclude that life's internal and external dramas stem from a compound desire for self-assertion and self-transcendence—a desire which, in the realm of literary entertainment and commitment, motivates the emergence and appreciation of tragicomedy? Paul Hernadi teaches English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification and the editor of What is Literature? and What is Criticism? His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics," appeared in the Winter 1976 issue. (shrink)