The interruption of referentiality: Poststructuralism and the conundrum of critical multiculturalism

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 101, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 170-186

  Chow, Rey ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950571747     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-101-1-171     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, intro. Jonathan Culler, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (Glasgow: Collins, 1974), 120, 122; emphases in the original
2. For useful discussions of the problematic of (aesthetic) reflection in Marxist theory, see, for instance, Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978)
3. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1978)
4. For related discussions, see Henri Arvon, Marxist Esthetics, trans. Helen R. Lane, intro. Fredric Jameson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973)
5. Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary, selected and with historical and critical commentary by Maynard Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1973)
6. Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics, afterword by Fredric Jameson, trans. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980)
7. as well as the essays in David Craig, ed., Marxists on Literature: An Anthology (New York: Penguin, 1975)
8. Friedrich Engels, "Letter to Minna Kautsky," in Craig, Marxists on Literature, 268
9. Engels, "Letter to Margaret Harkness," in Craig, Marxists on Literature, 270
10. David Craig, introduction to Craig, Marxists on Literature, 22
11. Pierre Macherey's discussion of Lenin's reading of Leo Tolstoy (and the question of reflection in Tolstoy's works) remains one of the most illuminating accounts in this regard. See Macherey, Theory of Literary Production, 105-35, 299-323
12. See John Bender and David E. Wellbery, "Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric," in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 3-39. The authors see modernist rhetoricality, with its emphasis on the groundlessness of truth, as a legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche
13. Paul de Man, "Form and Intent in the American New Criticism," "The Rhetoric of Temporality," and "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed., rev., intro. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 20-35, 187-228, 229-45. The quotation is on p. 31
14. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953). See especially his perceptive discussion of Virginia Woolf, in whose work, as he notes, external events often have only the vaguest contours while the rich and sensitively registered internal time of the characters has led to the abdication of authorial objectivity and hegemony
15. Geoff Bennington, "Demanding History," in Post-structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17
16. Marian Hobson, "History Traces," in Attridge, Bennington, and Young, Post-structuralism and the Question of History, 102-3
17. I discuss this in greater detail in "The Secrets of Ethnic Abjection," in Traces 2 (2001): 53-77. A few passages from that essay have been incorporated with modifications into the present one
18. For a succinct critique of the contradictions that accompany poststructuralist theory and that have had a profound impact on the multiculturalist trends in the humanities, see Masao Miyoshi, "Ivory Tower in Escrow," boundary 2 27.1 (2000), in particular 39-50
19. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 31; emphasis in the original
20. Carlos J. Alonso, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7
21. Fabian, Time and the Other, x
22. In Miyoshi's terms, this would mean restoring the hitherto discredited function of so-called metanarratives: "The academics' work in this marketized world . . . is to learn and watch problems in as many sites as they can keep track of, not in any specific areas, nations, races, ages, genders, or cultures, but in all areas, nations, races, ages, genders, and cultures. In other words, far from abandoning the master narratives, the critics and scholars in the humanities must restore the public rigor of the metanarratives" ("Ivory Tower in Escrow," 49)