Updated List of Figures or Movements Covered

To date, we have abstracts and contributor CVs for the following figures:

Adorno, Theodor
Adorno-Derrida-Foucault on Aesthetics
Blanchot, Maurice
Butler, Judith
Derrida, Jacques
Du Bois, W.E.B.
Dryden, John
Foucault, Michel
Freud, Sigmund
Frye, Northrop
Greenblatt, Stephen
Hayley, William
Hegel, G.W.F.
Heidegger, Martin
Jameson, Fredric
Kristeva, Julia
Lacan, Jacques
Liu, Lydia
Marion, Jean-Luc
Marx, Karl
Object-Oriented Ontology
Plato
Rorty, Richard
Rosenblatt, Louise
Sedgwick, Eve
Wellhausen, Julius
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Wordsworth, William
Žižek, Slavoj

We are interested in abstracts on the following figures, but of course this list is not comprehensive:

St. Augustine
Bakhtin, Mikhail
Benjamin, Walter
Bhabha, Homi
Cixous, Hélène
Digital Humanities
Ecocriticism or major figures
Eliot, T.S.
Fanon, Frantz
Fetterley, Judith
Fish, Stanley
Iser, Wolfgang
New Criticism or individual figures
Rubin, Gayle
Russian Formalism or individual figures
Said, Edward
Spivak, Gayatri

Letters Sent

I’ve emailed response letters to all contributors who have sent me abstracts. If you have any questions, please email me at jamesrovira at gmail dot com. If you need a print copy of your letter, email me and I will arrange to have one sent to you. If you’ve promised an abstract but have not yet sent it, don’t worry, there is still time.

Thank you all for your willingness to contribute to this volume.

James Rovira

Latest Dissemination of the CFP

The following email:

*****

Dear Colleagues:

The editors of Interpretation: Theory: History continue to welcome abstracts and CVs well into January of 2012.  For this volume, are seeking 6000 word essays focused upon figures important to the rise and development of literary theory and to the history of textual interpretation that present each figure within his or her social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts. The full CFP is available here:

http://interpretationtheoryhistory.wordpress.com/about/

And a list of figures for whom we have already received abstracts is available here:

http://interpretationtheoryhistory.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/current-status-of-interpretation-theory-history/

Further information is available on the blog.

This volume is focused on figures from Marx and Freud to the present, but we are also interested in major figures from Plato to the nineteenth century. Feel free to email any questions or comments directly to jamesrovira@gmail.com.

Jim

*****

was circulated yesterday to the following listservs:

18th Century Interdisciplinary Discussion (C18-L@lists.psu.edu)

Christianity and Literature Discussion (christlit@lists.bethel.edu)

Discussion of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (theory-frankfurt-school@srcf.ucam.org)

John Milton Discussion List (milton-l@lists.richmond.edu)

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR-L@listserv.wvu.edu)

If you’re a member of any literature, theory, social science, human science, or cultural studies listserve and wish to support this project, please copy and paste the email above to an email to your list if such posts are allowed.

Many thanks again to those who have helped us recruit contributors and who are working with us on this volume.

Jim

Updated List of Figures or Movements Covered

To date, we have abstracts and CVs for the following figures:

Adorno, Theodor
Butler, Judith
Derrida, Jacques
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Foucault, Michel
Freud, Sigmund
Greenblatt, Stephen
Jameson, Frederic
Kristeva, Julia
Lacan, Jacques
Marion, Jean-Luc
Marx, Karl
Object-Oriented Ontology
Rorty, Richard
Shohat, Ella
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Zizek, Slavoj

We have been promised abstracts/CVs for the following figures:

Benjamin, Walter
Bhabha, Homi
Dryden, John
DuBois, W.E.B.
Frye, Northrop or Eve Sedgwick
Hogarth, William
Spinoza, Baruch de
Spivak, Gayatri

Submissions Will Be Accepted Past the Deadline

Although the Call for Papers for Interpretation: Theory: History lists a deadline of December 31st, we will continue to accept submissions well past the deadline.  At present, the real deadline will be either with a signed contract or with the first full draft of the manuscript sent to the publisher.  I won’t know until I have secured a publisher and examined their terms.  When I have secured a publisher and have a fixed deadline for submissions I will post an update here. Until then, if you have an idea for an essay on any major figure or movement not already covered please email it to jamesrovira@gmail.com.

Updates on lists of figures covered will be posted daily or as needed.

Thank you,

Jim

Theorizing History: Historicizing Theory

I conceived of Interpretation: Theory: History while writing my monograph, Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety. The idea for that book started with the first Matrix film, when after a couple of viewings I noticed that The Matrix was yet another permutation of Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein in a long line of permutations: R.U.R., Metropolis, I, Robot,  A.I., Bicentennial Man, Stealth.  The list could go on.  Once I noticed the pattern, my first question was why?  Why has the Frankenstein story persisted so tenaciously from Shelley’s day to the present?  The western creative imagination consistently expects disaster, apocalypse, and rebellion should we ever create a life form that is fully self-directed — intelligent, creatively reasoning, learning, and independent, something that thinks as we can think.

I called this expectation Creation Anxiety and soon realized that William Blake was Shelley’s predecessor, explicitly embodying this anxiety in his mythological works of the 1790s, especially in The [First] Book of Urizen and The Four Zoas.  I originally intended to write chapters on Blake, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley (Promethus Unbound), and William Wordsworth (because he is the most free of Creation Anxiety of any of the English Romantics), but soon Blake took over the project.

Blake, however, does not yield his own theoretical lens.  Blake conceptualizes his philosophy and theology in aesthetic terms: his God is a Poetic Genius and his only ontology is a phenomenology.  I lacked a theorization of anxiety but didn’t want to draw on any theorization that fit.  I sought a theorization of anxiety proceeding from a figure responding to a historical and cultural milieu similar to Blake’s.  Søren Kierkegaard‘s The Concept of Anxiety fit my needs, theorizing anxiety from a cultural, political, and intellectual history that he shared with Blake.  I identify tensions between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and artifice as motivating both Blake’s creation myths and Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety, while I identify similarly motivated modifications of the Socratic tradition as part of their shared intellectual history.

So in practice, my book attempted to simultaneously theorize history and historicize theory.  But I felt that I had few precedents though I had a few fellow travelers, and I felt that I wasn’t in control of the process.  The nature of Blake criticism doesn’t help, which until recently has been intensely divided between theoretical/conceptual approaches and historical approaches, perhaps even more so than in the case of many other authors.  Schorer vs. Damon or Yeats, or Erdman vs. Frye seem to represent irreconciliable approaches to Blake.  What I wanted to discover was a way to consciously theorize history while historicizing theory, to discover principles guiding a Hegelian synthesis of these two processes.

Added to these considerations has been my experience teaching upper division literary theory classes over the last several years.  I have always been drawn to both literature and philosophy, and as you see my work combines both (along with history), but I chose literature as my field over philosophy because I believe that the concrete and particular is more real than the abstract and conceptual.  However, when I teach theory, the difficulty of the material along with the seduction of learning advanced concepts often effaces the literature that theory is meant to illuminate.  Furthermore, students tend to invest so much time and effort mastering the difficult texts presented in my theory classes — I teach from primary texts even in upper division undergraduate classes — that they never evaluate them critically.  I have also been bothered by the tendency of theoretical approaches to reduce literature to a series of conceptual templates yielding pre-determined results, erasing the particularity and individuality of the most sophisticated literary works, even in published scholarship.

I believe that a cure for many of these ills is to historicize theory.  I do not seek to trivialize theory by reducing it to its historical contexts, but to recognize that its development was motivated by human beings acting in response to very specific cultural and historical pressures.  Sometimes these pressures are self-evidently represented in the work itself, as is the case with Gayle Rubin’s work.  But more often it is much less so.  I seek by historicizing theory to rehumanize literature: from T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to Barthes’s death of the author to Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence literature has been dehumanized and departicularized in a great holocaust of authors.  We have not been killing authors’ bodies but their authorial identities, and our understanding of literature suffers as a result.

I am not advocating here for a return to authorial intent as a guiding principle for textual interpretation.  Historicizing theory leaves theory intact, which therefore continues to function independently of any literature not written with theory in mind.    However, I have for the present abandoned the hope for a Hegelian synthesis in favor of Blakean contraries: theory and history remain discrete, independent, autonomous, and in dialog, so that with these contraries there can be progression.  I look forward to what more I can learn from contributions to this volume.

New Page Added

I’ve added a “links” page (see above) that includes links to editors’ information and some links of general interest to literary theory.  Contributors may want to follow the link to Peter Herman’s Historicizing Theory to obtain a copy for their college or university library, especially those covering figures also covered in Herman’s anthology.

Contributor pages and links will be added when a contributor list has been fixed.

Current Status of Interpretation: Theory: History

So far, the editors of Interpretation: Theory: History have received abstracts and CVs for the following figures:

Butler, Judith
Derrida, Jacques
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Foucault, Michel
Freud, Sigmund
Greenblatt, Stephen
Jameson, Frederic
Kristeva, Julia
Lacan, Jacques
Marx, Karl
Object-Oriented Ontology
Rorty, Richard
Shohat, Ella
Zizek, Slavoj

We have been promised abstracts/CVs for the following figures:

W.E.B. DuBois
Northrop Frye or Eve Sedgwick
Jean-Luc Marion
Spinoza
Spivak
Wittgenstein

As you can see, our volume is coming together well. We have contributors from Canada, Cyprus, India, Malaysia, Poland, Spain, and the United States.

One contributor who had previously promised essays on Fanon and Cixous recently backed out because she is unable to take on a writing project this year. We would like contributions on these figures.

We welcome abstracts in the areas of early twentieth-century Anglophone formalists, Russian formalists, the Frankfurt School, postcolonial criticism (especially central figures such as Fanon and Said), Digital Humanities (we may have a contributor in the wings, but I haven’t heard yet), Augustine and Dante, Early Modern figures, the Romantics, and literature and film.

This list of figures does not yet include my own or my co-editor’s contributions.  My co-editor and I will fill in as needed within the areas of our strengths.

I would like to thank those of you who have worked to help us find contributors.  Since we are still in very early stages, if you know of anyone who might be interested in this project and has expertise in any figure not already taken, please pass along our link to the guidelines and encourage your colleague to send an abstract even if past the deadline.

If you are interested in contributing to this volume, please send both an abstract and a brief CV.   Your CV should highlight your professional experience and either your theory-specific or most significant conferences and publications.  Don’t forget to include your mailing address and phone number as the publisher will need this information.

You may download the current Submissions Guidelines and CFP from my Dropbox.  If you seek to contribute an essay, please keep our goals and projected audience in mind as you write your abstract and then  your essay.  In brief, each essay should

1. Provide a brief overview of the major works and ideas of each author, how those ideas developed over time, and how they have been employed by theory or have contributed to the practice of textual interpretation.
2. Provide an overview of the author’s biographical, cultural, intellectual, and/or socio-political history (at least two from the list above – try not to limit your overview to intellectual history only).
3. Provide a reading of the author’s major ideas as a response to this history.
4. Avoid summaries of the author’s thought that ignore history or reduce an author’s work to its historical context.
5. Approach the author’s work as an engagement with and response to that history, arguing a thesis about how the author’s work dialectically engages his or her historical context.
6. Please follow MLA style (for the present) and include a list of persons, works, and major concepts to be indexed after your works cited page.
7. Since, as you will see below, we will attempt to market this volume as a companion reader to literary theory classes focused on primary texts, please write in a style that makes your subject transparent to upper-level undergraduate or graduate students.

All contributors are encouraged to consult Peter C. Herman’s Historicizing Theory, especially those engaging post-1960s critics.  Routledge’s Critical Thinkers series provides book-length studies of individual figures.

I’m quite excited about this project so far and like the form that it is beginning to take.  I’m seeking abstracts and CVs by December 31st, but if you need more time, let me know.  I would like to get the proposal out before the end of January and would like to receive all completed essays by the beginning of August.

Thank you.  I look forward to reading your work.

Jim Rovira

Call for Papers — Interpretation: Theory: History

The editors are currently accepting abstracts and CVs for the forthcoming anthology Interpretation: Theory: History. This volume seeks to explore major figures who have contributed to the history of textual interpretation within their cultural, social, political, biographical, and intellectual histories. The link above will take you to a full call for papers and submissions guidelines.