Comments on: It happens in Berkeley, but only because it happened in Paris first

By: The Solitudes of Von Humboldt « zunguzungu

The Solitudes of Von Humboldt « zunguzungu — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:41:13 +0000

[...] beginnings, and, second, the “Faulknerian revolution” story that Pascal Casanova has been putting forward. In interviews, García Márquez has contributed liberally to both narratives. But here’s another [...]

By: More Pedogogies and More Oppresseds « zunguzungu

More Pedogogies and More Oppresseds « zunguzungu — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:39:50 +0000

[...] about the power of centers over peripheries to be problematic in exactly the ways that I find Casanova’s world system of literature to lose persuasiveness: the world is just a lot more complex than that, [...]

By: Franco Moretti and the Chinese Novel « zunguzungu

Franco Moretti and the Chinese Novel « zunguzungu — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:54:03 +0000

[...] the foreclosures of his formulation are not as limiting as they are in the hands of someone with a similar project but not as much of a sense of critical responsibility. Capitalism seems to be a place-holding [...]

By: Reviewing Reviewers « zunguzungu

Reviewing Reviewers « zunguzungu — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:44:12 +0000

[...] It happens in Berkeley, but only because it happened in Paris first [...]

By: Natalia

Natalia — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:14:46 +0000

Regarding “consecrated”: perhaps she meant “canonized”?

By: zunguzungu

zunguzungu — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 18:04:27 +0000

Yeah, it is Arguedas, she mentions him in her book too. I like the look of Echenique, though; I’m going to try to look up the book with Tarzan in the title, to feed my own personal obsession with that figure. Man I get so fed up when people act like “naturalism” and “modernism” aren’t as connected as heads and tails, as if Joyce isn’t naturalist and Upton Sinclair isn’t modernist. Anyway.

Rama sounds totally up my alley. I can’t believe I haven’t read him yet; in fact, I distinctly recall checking the book out while I was thesis-writing in the bowels of battelle tomkins (or maybe you loaned me a copy, come to think of it), but I never actually got to it. I’m lame. Also Mufti, actually; so little time…

Anyway, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that I’m doing a clumsy hatchet job on her theory, so I’d love to hear your guys’ take on her if you get around to it. But while I’m not sure she so simply opposes cosmopolitan to rural and internationalist to naturalist in the way I was suggesting, it does seem that after her subtlest points and most careful qualifications fade away (like dew in the morning sun…) all that is really left is that kind of clumsy binarism, where there are intellectuals that sell out to the system and noble peasant-intellectuals that suffer and write nobly and silently, all mute and inglorious and stuff. Only in French.

By: Middento

Middento — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 05:02:21 +0000

Arguedas sounds right as the “other, naturalist” Peruvian writer. Working further against her theory: the case of Alfredo Bryce Echenique who writes in a very similar style to Vargas Llosa — and therefore probably could be called “internationalist” through her terminology — and yet no one outside Peru has really heard of him. Heck, Arguedas has more translated than Bryce into English.

This is why I will never be a famous academic: because I’m too cautious with my sweeping theories. (It took me forever to get the central crux of my book to work because I wanted it to be right, hahaha.) Then again, I’m the king of designing courses that spend the first half building up the ideal theory, only to completely tear it down in the second half.

Have you read Angel Rama’s The Lettered City, Aaron? It’s not too long and, while based much in Latin America, it’s an interesting glance back at the colonial period relating modernity with urbanity and both with the privileging of writing. This could be why she’s relating the urban with writing, dismaying you doubly at once. (Or, maybe not.)

Ahh, Aamir Mufti. Reminds me of my Michigan days, even if I didn’t have him. I think I’ll go look up some of the other Armani Marxists of my days right now to see what they’re up to.

By: zunguzungu

zunguzungu — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:16:49 +0000

I have to admit that I’ve not read the thing in its entirety. I probably should at some point, partially because one of my committee members thinks it’s worht it, but then its interesting that the both of you (like me) feel the need to read her without actually expecting to agree with much. Why is that? To me, it seems like her work shares in the same class of flaws as someone like Moretti, with his similarly grand ambition: when I try to apply the unified field theory to something I know better (such as the African novel or American naturalism) it fits markedly more badly than the special theories that critics have developed for those movements. Naturalism, for example, is one of those words (like “modernism” itself) that critics need to use, but shouldn’t really take too seriously: it has little basis in the novelists themselves, you can trace how it came into critical parlance via a particular niche it filled for critics at a certain point in time, and it significantly obscures important cleavages within what gets called American naturalism, unifying and rendering coherant something which was neither. People working in American naturalism understand that, usually. But Casanova, for example, had to use the figure of naturalism as a way to describe texts which stayed local, as opposed to the “modern” texts that achieve world currency by being “consecrated” in Paris, and so there was a moment when she discribed two Peruvian authors (Vargos Llosa and someone I didn’t know, maybe Arguedas or something like that? Does that sound right Jeff?) as being international and naturalist, respectively; her point was that everybody has heard of the former and nobody has heard of the latter. And in the question and answer period (conducted in French, because she’s only comfortable making sweeping generalizations about all languages, not in conversing in them), a faculty member noted that three of her colleagues had written about this mute inglorious Peruvian who was supposed to be toiling in obscurity and soledad. Casanova appeared to not take this as a critique (and I sort of did). If you need naturalism and modernity to be different (so you can build a grand unified field theory out of that distinction) then you have to pretend that naturalism and modernity are completely distinct. And so she does. It reminds me of a passage in one of Moretti’s earlier World Literature essays, where he refers to the first generation of postcolonial African writers as “nationalist,” and he cites a set of sure nuff African studies critics to that point (since he’s not himself actually read them). I read that, having actually read the writers in question, and though to myself: “Gosh, what a lousy and oversimplistic way to describe these writers.” So while I appreciate the desire for some kind of way to talk intelligently about literature and globalization (and the admission that that’s nothing new), the fact that one cannot actually read every book from every period speaks to the unlikeliness of being able to actually do it well, so there seems to be a lot of square hole jamming with round pegs for the sake of doing so (and not, as I would prefer, paying attention to the roundness of those pegs).
I also have a major problem with her privileging of the “literary,” both since many of the texts I’m most interested in in my own work are not, by conventional “consecration fo Paris” standards, literary, and because it seems to give pride of place to a currency that’s devaluating as fast as the dollar these days. Seems like now would be a good time to think about that, about how texts of all sorts relate to each other (whether literary or not), but then maybe I just say that because there’s something in the water here at new historicist Berkeley.

PS — Mmm.. El boom… I never read *novels* anymore. Maybe I’ll go crack one those that I bought after Jeff’s class but never read.

By: phoenixcomplex

phoenixcomplex — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:41:31 +0000

I still have to read this book. (I admit to finding it very amusing that absolutely no one here buys the Paris-as-center thing, no matter what she says.) I’m glad you’re uneasy with it too: it’s a good old-fashioned paradigm-shifter, riddled with flaws and loose ends and yet highly engaging, like so many formalisms and structuralisms past. I should share with you my notes from her talk at Stanford in 2006, with Moretti and Aamir Mufti as respondents and Margaret Cohen asking everyone in the audience, “You all speak French, don’t you?” before allowing Casanova to continue in French; of course no one admitted ignorance of the language of culture. I do not speak French.

By: Middento

Middento — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:28:55 +0000

Nice piece here — and thanks for pointing out this book, which I now think I’ll have to read (but not purchase, heh) just to be hip with what others in the department who are very much based “in the center” are likely to say. (And funny enough, I cleaned out my office today and found all of the Boom articles from our class! How topical!)