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 have been promised abstracts/CVs for the following figures or movements:

Benjamin, Walter
Bhabha, Homi
Ecocriticism
Fetterley, Judith
Lachmann, Karl
Spinoza, Baruch de
Spivak, Gayatri
White, Hayden

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

St. Augustine
Bakhtin, Mikhail
Cixous, Helene
Digital Humanities
Eliot, T.S.
Fanon, Frantz
Fish, Stanley
Iser, Wolfgang
New Criticism or individual figures
Rubin, Gayle
Russian Formalism or individual figures
Said, Edward

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

James Rovira

1. Summarize the central ideas of its major figure.
2. Locate this figure within any two of the following contexts: intellectual history, political history, cultural milieu, social history, and/or personal history. We expect the typical submission to combine an intellectual history with at least one of the others.
3. Explain the importance of its major figure to the practice of textual interpretation or to the rise of literary theory.
4. Argue a thesis about the ways in which the author’s work dialectically engages his/her historical context.

We are initially marketing this volume as a companion volume for literary theory courses, so we also request that contributors write in a manner that is as clear and accessible for upper division undergraduate and graduate students as possible.

Thank you,

Jim

As stated previously, we will continue to accept abstracts and CVs until posted otherwise.

Thank you,

Jim Rovira

*****

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

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

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

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

Thank you,

Jim

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.