Critical Summary of Literary Theory Journals



Andrew Ervin

English 401

Oct. 25, 2002

Beyond the Postmodern:

A Critical Summary of Interdisciplinary Journals on Literary Theory

Introduction

In his essay “Writing the Life Postmodern,” Curtis White posits:

UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

YOU ARE IN THE

POSTMODERN CONDITION

(Address all inquiries to the appropriate French authority.)

Indeed we are in such a condition, if we’re to believe the many journals dedicated to the study of postmodernism as an aesthetic movement. Like all historically situated movements, however, postmodernism will one day be eclipsed in some way by a different aesthetic approach to the production and study of literature. It’s telling that White’s pronouncement first appeared in a literary journal, because that’s where the “appropriate French authorities” or their equivalents will no doubt herald the advent of what John Barth has called “the best next thing” or perhaps—to echo White’s tongue-in-cheek pronouncement—postpostmodernism.

It is my belief that the next aesthetic will derive from some source outside of traditional academic discourse or even, as Hardt and Negri suggest (following the lead of Deleuze and Guattari), from the elimination of the distinction between inside and outside. Inside the postmodern condition, as we are, it is difficult to see beyond its confines. Few scholars or journals have attempted to predict what a subsequent aesthetic movement might look like, or how it might behave. Therefore, my findings aren’t promising.

Here, I have collected some information about English-language journals dedicated to the study of postmodernity but have concentrated on finding those interdisciplinary resources best positioned to someday notify us—if such notification is possible—that we’re no longer in the postmodern condition. If any academic journals will be capable of giving voice to those appropriate authorities, I imagine it will be one of the following.

Critical Inquiry

Critical Inquiry, founded in 1974, is one of the best known and most widely respected of the journals relating to literary theory. Under the editorship of W.J.T. “Jay” Mitchell, it has remained flexible enough in its scope to remain up to date with current thought. In a 1982 essay titled “Critical Inquiry and the Ideology of Pluralism,” Mitchell described the journal’s ideological stance:

“The ideology usually associated with Critical Inquiry is that of "pluralism," a term which has had a rather mixed press in recent years. The problem with avowing an ideology of pluralism in a time that seems to demand alignment, commitment, and polemical certitude is that it looks like a false or evasive neutrality. Pluralism is often regarded at best as an aimless eclecticism and at worst as a disguised form of regresive [sic] tolerance which pretends to listen to many points of view while actually suppressing or watering down their content. There seems to be some sort of fundamental contradiction involved even in bringing terms like "ideology" and "pluralism" together, for pluralism is so often regarded as a sort of nonposition, beyond ideology, a stance which is regarded as smug self-deception by the ideologue and as a commitment to free inquiry and intellectual liberation by the pluralist. The notion of an "ideology of pluralism" seems self-contradictory, for the ideologue must deny the possibility of pure pluralism, and the pluralist must affirm the possibility of transcending ideology. The chances of communication, much less reconciliation or identification of these two positions, would seem rather small. And yet this small chance of mediation between alien or conflicting positions has been precisely the opportunity and goal of Critical Inquiry.”

Later, in a 1995 essay titled “Twenty Years of Critical Inquiry,” Mitchell elaborated upon the benefits of the journal’s pluralistic approach and also confessed to deviating from that ideological stance when the need did arise:

“It would be nice to be able to say that a set of firm, consistent, and rigorous principles have guided us throughout this itinerary, that we have never been guilty of opportunism or an unprincipled pandering to fashion. The truth, however, is a bit more complicated, and more difficult to summarize. The fact is that our editorial principles have been multiple, sometimes conflicting, often improvised and ad hoc. […] We have felt that it was crucial for this journal to engage in a process of continuous reinvention of its mission and identity. We have resisted the temptation to become a journal of nothing but special issues, each of which require years of planning and foresight. (A certain laziness may also have a providential function here). We have tried to maintain the smallest possible backlog so that we can get new essays in print quickly. […] We have tried not to be too clear about what exactly is an appropriate topic for CI, preferring to let our contributors lead us on.”

It’s worth noting that neither of these essays can be easily found from Critical Inquiry’s web site. I contacted Mitchell via e-mail and he sent me a URL that connected to these essays. Critical Inquiry, based out of the University of Chicago, appears quarterly in print and can be found online at . The web site features excerpts of sample articles and an index of back issues arranged by date, which appear in HTML frames that tend to malfunction and make navigation difficult.

The editorial board includes Edward Said, Michael Fried and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

A free, full text version of the current issue, Vol. 28, No. 3, is presently available online. It includes, among other entries, an essay titled “Did Philosophers Have To Become Fixated on Truth?” by Francois Julien, one on media theory, and articles about Kant and the history Viking culture in the Americas. The next issue will feature an essay by Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” one by Timothy Brennan called “On Empire” and entries about abstract art and postcolonial humanism.

Cultural Critique

Like Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique “brings together some of the most important work within cultural analysis, investigating culture from a theoretically broad perspective and from an international point of view.”

In addition, it “provides a forum for international and interdisciplinary explorations of intellectual controversies, trends, and issues in culture, theory, and politics. Emphasizing critique rather than criticism, the journal draws on the diverse and conflictual approaches of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, political economy, and hermeneutics to offer readings in society and its tranformation [sic].”

Cultural Critique is published three times a year, in Winter, Spring and Fall. The three editors, Keya Ganguly, Jochen Schulte-Sasse and John Mowitt, are on the faculty of the University of Minnesota.

The web site, , provides an index of authors and titles from the current and previous issues but there are no sample articles available.

The current issue, No. 51, features two book reviews; a piece on “Deleuze and Faces” by Richard Rushton, “Sovereignty, or the Art of Being Native” by Stephen Turner, “DuBois on Trauma: Psychoanalysis and the Would-Be Black Savant” by Christina Zwarg and “Of Mimicry and White Man: A Psychoanalysis of Jean Rouch's Les maîtres fous” by Kien Ket Lim. The next issue will contain an essay by Tita Chico called “Privacy and Speculation in Early-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” one by Scott McCracken called “The Completion of Old Work: Walter Benjamin and the Everyday” and Eric Ruth’s “The Blasphemer's Art de faire.”

New Literary History

New Literary History, based out of the University of Virginia, “focuses on theory and interpretation—the reasons for literary change, the definitions of periods, and the evolution of styles, conventions, and genres.”

As the title would suggest, history and historiography are crucial elements of the publication’s mission. An international scope makes it relevant to my study of (or search for clues to) postpostmodernism. “By delving into the theoretical bases of practical criticism, the journal reexamines the relation between past works and present critical and theoretical needs. A major international forum for scholarly interchange, NLH has brought into English many of today’s foremost theorists whose works had never before been translated.

When editor Ralph Cohen founded the quarterly over thirty years ago, he intended to create “a journal that is a challenge to the profession of letters.” E.D. Hirsch is a current member of the editorial board, and the journal boasts Fredric Jameson as an advisory editor.

According to the web site, , the journal “welcomes two types of contributions: theoretical articles on literature that deal with such subjects as the nature of literary theory, the aims of literature, the idea of literary history, the reading process, hermeneutics, the relation of linguistics to literature, literary change, literary value, the definitions of periods and their uses in interpretations, the evolution of styles, conventions, and genres, and articles from other disciplines that help interpret or define the problems of literary history or literary study.”

As is the case with all journals posted via Muse, sample articles are only available online from subscribing libraries and institutions and can be downloaded as HTML pages or PDF files. The site does however feature an index of back issues from 1995 to the present, and each entry features a few handy subject keywords (e.g. “Bible -- Hermeneutics” or “French Poetry -- History and Criticism.”) The recent Summer 2002 issue featured essays on Hamlet, Derek Wolcott, existentialism, and new French lyric poetry.

Representations

Representations is unique among journals presently under consideration because its coeditors are women. Under the editorship of Carol J. Clover and Carla Hesse, both of the University of California at Berkeley, the quarterly bills itself as an “interdisciplinary journal” that “publishes trend-setting articles in a wide variety of fields - literature, history, art history, anthropology and social theory.” Furthermore, the journal claims to have “set the standard for bringing together work that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries” and provide “the best in what is now a vigorous -- and often turbulent -- field of its own.”

The current issue, No. 79, can be found online at . It features: Debarati Sanyal on “A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism," Ricardo Padrón on "Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space, and Hispanic Modernity,” Maurice Samuels on "Realizing the Past: History and Spectacle in Balzac's Adieu" and an essay called “Vampire Religion” by Christopher Herbert.

The forthcoming issue will include a forum on “Crimes, Lies, and Narrative” featuring Ken Alder, Carol J. Clover, Todd Herzog, and István Rév, as well as articles by Margaret Olin and Daniel Cottom.

Review of Contemporary Fiction

Founded in 1981, the Review of Contemporary Fiction is “devoted to discussions of contemporary fiction and authors, including selections from works-in-progress and interviews, as well as a lengthy book-review section.” Editor Robert L. McLaughlin, a member of the faculty of Illinois State University, has done a remarkable job of finding contributors active in writing both literature and literary theory, including David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, William T. Vollmann and Richard Powers, four authors I personally look to for signs of postpostmodernism. Issues dedicated to the literature of different countries (e.g. Latvia, Denmark) provide a hugely valuable insight into aesthetics formulated and steeped in other traditions.

The journal appears three times a year, typically in January, June and September. It can be found online at , but the site only includes full text versions of the interviews conducted with various literary authors. Curtis White’s essay, quoted above, first appeared in a special issue in 1996 dedicated to the “future of fiction” (vol. 16, No. 1).

The current issue, just published last week and not yet mailed to subscribers, includes essays on Louis Zukofsky, Nicholas Mosley and Coleman Dowell. The entirety of the next issue, due in a few months, will be dedicated to a casebook study of Sorrentino’s 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Personally, I would like to see more space dedicated to essays by and about authors born after 1970 but otherwise RCF provides a constant source of inspiration and insight.

SubStance

Founded in 1971, SubStance is a self-described “interdisciplinary journal with a reputation for excellence. It is an international nexus for discourses converging upon literature from a variety of fields, including philosophy, the social sciences, science, and the arts. Readers have come to expect the unexpected from SubStance, and to experience a sense of participating in the formation of emerging theories.”

Editors David F. Bell and Sydney Lévy are based out of the University of California at Santa Barbara. The index on the web site, , makes it easy to find articles of relevance and interest, including a Spring 1999 special issue dedicated to the study of texts by Marcel Bénabou. Again, the complete articles are only available with a subscription.

Theory & Event

According to its web site, the e-journal Theory & Event “applies the strengths of electronic publication to the fields of political theory and political science, allowing theory to be confronted by the surprises of current events, analysis to be tested against the immediate, and interpretation to wrestle with the ongoing sweep of change.” Now in its fifth year, it boasts its status as one of the first online-only journals dedicated to the study of social thought

Furthermore, “Theory and Event interrogates the dynamic interplay between power and discourse, events and their divergent narratives, social movements and the politics of everyday life. Theory and Event is an interdisciplinary publication.”

A further indication of the politico-literary sensibilities at play can be witnessed in the quote from Gilles Deleuze atop the homepage: “Philosophy’s sole aim is to become worthy of the event.” Perhaps in deference to Deleuze and Guatari’s rhizome metaphor, the journal does not appear in print and maintains no centralized editorial office. One editor, William Chaloupka, is based at the University of Montana and the other, Paul Patton, is on the faculty of the University of Sydney. Michael Hardt is a member of the editorial board, and one of the consulting editors, Jane Bennett, is the Goucher College professor with whom I read Hegel for the first time.

There are three free sample articles available at and the full archives are accessible with a subscription. The current issue features a symposium titled “Philosophical Considerations of Some Recent Facts” and an essay, “Liberalism, Narrative, and Identity: A Pragmatic Defense of Racial Solidarity” by Melvin Rogers. Among the current reviews is one by Christopeher C. Robinson, “The Political Philosopher and The City, that applies directly to contemporary fiction insofar as it discusses Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, among with two works of critical theory.”

Conclusion

Clearly, I’m working within the realm of pure speculation. To some extent, the above-mentioned journals are capable of providing enough insights into the pending postpostmodern condition to rope me further into what might be a fool’s errand. Like modernism, postmodernism is an invention created by cosmopolitan culture for its own presumed edification. One possible way to move beyond postmodernism therefore is to get outside the confines of cosmopolitan society. None of these journals do that. I’m not sure if any journals anywhere do that. But while I remain here—inside the postmodern condition—my only recourse is to look for the theories and ideas that will inspire me to establish my own epistemological position as an exile of cosmopolitan culture and therefore find a discursive space in which I can write new literature.

Additional Works Cited

Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment.” The Friday Book. New York: Putnam’s Sons,

1984.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “Critical Inquiry and the ideology of Pluralism.” Critical Inquiry, Summer 1982.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “Twenty Years of Critical Inquiry.” Critical Inquiry, Spring 1995.

White, Curtis. “Writing the Life Postmodern.” Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.

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