Jonathan Arac
Biographic Data
| ID | 557045 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Arac |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Arac |
| SIGNATURE | ARAC J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Touch and Voice inAbsalom, Absalom
William Faulkner constructed Absalom, Absalom! with techniques that allowed him to reach beyond his time and place to a historical grasp of problems that arise from a long past and that continue to shape our world nearly a century after the novel's publication. This essay explores that achievement through a double focus: touch and the intricate phenomenology of human sensory experience, combined with voice and the interplay of writing, speaking, …
Empson Here and Now
In light of Oxford University Press issuing two volumes in The Critical Works of William Empson (Some Versions of Pastoral [1935] and The Structure of Complex Words [1951]), this essay thinks over Empson's career and major works to consider what his value may be nearly a century after his first book, with special attention to problems that Empson's Englishness may pose to readers in the United States
Stress: A Keyword for Today
Stress: A Keyword for Today?Stress may not prove a keyword, but it emphatically colors our current moment and the last half century.Take as a landmark the psychiatric legitimation in 1980 of post-traumatic stress disorder.Stress has a range of quite precise meanings and usages, but its burgeoning usage comes from all the ways it links mind and body, in reciprocal discomfort.Stress may provide the successor to what W. H. Auden in 1947 termed The A…
Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel
In 1976 there appeared a landmark book by the Welsh European socialist intellectual Raymond Williams (1921–1988) titled Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. With an expanded second edition in 1983, Keywords has remained in print continuously and during these years has proved its value for scholars of the novel. Now in a new volume, Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by Colin MacCabe and Holly Yanacek, a multidisciplin…
The Golden Notebook: A masterpiece among its Isms
Ways of Working with Language
With reference to the author’s experience with English and other languages, this essay reflects on the problem of American monolingualism and explores modes of learned critical attention to the work language does in society, examining writing by Kenneth Burke, Raymond Williams, Erich Auerbach, and Sheldon Pollock
Theory, Cultural Studies And Cross-Disciplinary Research: A Dialogue With Jonathan Arac
Jonathan Arac is one of the leading American post-modernists who once taught at Columbia University and served as Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English as well as the founding director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He is considered to be one of the most notable “New Americanists” with an eclectic range of interests in literary theory, US literature (with an emphasis on the controversy of Huckleberry Finn). His research…
Joseph Frank
Joseph Frank (1918–2013) achieved fame as a literary scholar first with his three-part essay “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945) and then with his five-volume critical biography Dostoevsky (1976–2002). This essay traces his career, emphasizing its divergence from the practices both of New Criticism at its start and of the theory movement in the 1970s and 1980s, and noting the crucial role played by Allen Tate and the Sewanee Review. Unfash…
Emily Dickinson: Length and the Liberal Imagination
To understand and evaluate Emily Dickinson's poetry forces criticism to reflect on issues of length, for which Aristotle and Edgar Allan Poe are two of the major theoretical resources, with further citation from Victor Hugo and Gustave Flaubert. Giuseppe Ungaretti's extraordinarily brief “Mattina” leads to consideration of Dickinson, through the critical encounters with her work by R. P. Blackmur and Lionel Trilling
Studies in Words: A report on a 21st‐century Keywords seminar
Creative Strife
William V. Spanos’s most recent book, Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” (2013), offers the occasion to reflect on the distinctive quality of his long, productive career. His work stands out for its continuing capacity to engage productively with arguments by his juniors, including some so eminent as Sacvan Bercovitch and Edward Said. This new b…
Social Resilience in the Neo-Liberal Era
What is the impact of three decades of neoliberal narratives and policies on communities and individual lives? What are the sources of social resilience? This book offers a sweeping assessment of the effects of neoliberalism, the dominant feature of our times. It analyzes the ideology in unusually wide-ranging terms as a movement that not only opened markets but also introduced new logics into social life, integrating macro-level analyses of the …
A New Literary History of America
America is a nation making itself up as it goes along-a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, A New Literary History of America brings together the nati…
What does a professor do when he retires
From north Indian vernaculars to a new world philology Introduction
Jonathan Arac, ‘From north Indian vernaculars to a new world philology’ Aamir R. Mufti, ‘Orientalism and the language of Hindustan’ Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, ‘What's Braj got to do with the Hindi–Urdu divide?’ Mehr Afshan Farooqi, ‘ Āb‐e gum , or “Disappeared Water” as a metaphor for language, location, and loss This cluster of papers carries forward Critical Quarterly's emphasis on language in society and history. They offer incisive, innovative pe…
Imperial Eclecticism in Moby-Dick and Invisible Man: Literature in a Postcolonial Empire
Drawing on Edward Said's method of “contrapuntal” criticism relating culture and empire, and also on Frank Kermode's understanding of the “classic” in relation to empire, this essay addresses two major American works a century apart to suggest a pattern that joins important American works with works from more recent postcolonial nations. Imperial eclecticism names the technique by which writers in a new national culture freely manipulate the mate…
The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison
Book Review| September 01 2009 The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison Jonathan Arac Jonathan Arac Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2009) 81 (3): 639–641. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2009-039 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan Arac; The Rites of Identity: The …
Violence and the Human Voice: Critique and Hope in Native Speaker
Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995) demonstrates the work a novel can do in speaking (up) for the human in the current life of the United States, even though the novel as an institution has become residual, as print literature yields to other media forms. Through his epigraph from Walt Whitman and his structural echoes of American first-person narratives such as Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, All the King's Men, and Invisible Man, Lee troubles th…
Reckoning with New Literary History
Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age
Babel and Vernacular in an Empire of Immigrants: Howells and the Languages of American Fiction
Research Article| May 01 2007 Babel and Vernacular in an Empire of Immigrants: Howells and the Languages of American Fiction Jonathan Arac Jonathan Arac Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2007) 34 (2): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2007-001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan Arac; Babel and Vernacular in an Empire of Immigrants: Ho…
Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man after Fifty Years
Research Article| May 01 2003 Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man after Fifty Years Jonathan Arac Jonathan Arac Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2003) 30 (2): 195–216. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-30-2-195 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan Arac; Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse…
Anglo-Globalism
Does Franco Moretti’s new programme for a study of world literature carry global English in its pocket, as the ticket to leave close reading behind? The cost and benefits of Auerbach’s philology and Said’s sociology, as alternative approaches
Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power
For at least two decades the career of Edward Said has defined what it means to be a public intellectual today. Although attacked as a terrorist and derided as a fraud for his work on behalf of his fellow Palestinians, Said’s importance extends far beyond his political activism. In this volume a distinguished group of scholars assesses nearly every aspect of Said’s work—his contributions to postcolonial theory, his work on racism and ethnicity, h…
Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time
Journal Article Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. By Jonathan Arac. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. x, 254 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-29915530-7. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-299-15534-X.) Get access John S. Whitley John S. Whitley University of Sussex Sussex, England Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 2, September…
Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism: A Symposium
Between the appearance of Orientalism in 1978 and Culture and Imperialism in the spring of 1993, there have been some interesting and paradoxical years. Edward Said has done a great deal of political writing about the Palestinians and American foreign policy, and he has become a public figure in a sense that would apply to very few literary critics, however respected. But he has not had the sort of public influence he desired. American policy tow…
Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man after Fifty Years
Research Article| May 01 2003 Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man after Fifty Years Jonathan Arac Jonathan Arac Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2003) 30 (2): 195–216. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-30-2-195 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan Arac; Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse…
Imperial Eclecticism in Moby-Dick and Invisible Man: Literature in a Postcolonial Empire
Drawing on Edward Said's method of “contrapuntal” criticism relating culture and empire, and also on Frank Kermode's understanding of the “classic” in relation to empire, this essay addresses two major American works a century apart to suggest a pattern that joins important American works with works from more recent postcolonial nations. Imperial eclecticism names the technique by which writers in a new national culture freely manipulate the mate…
Violence and the Human Voice: Critique and Hope in Native Speaker
Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995) demonstrates the work a novel can do in speaking (up) for the human in the current life of the United States, even though the novel as an institution has become residual, as print literature yields to other media forms. Through his epigraph from Walt Whitman and his structural echoes of American first-person narratives such as Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, All the King's Men, and Invisible Man, Lee troubles th…
Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age
Anglo-Globalism
Does Franco Moretti’s new programme for a study of world literature carry global English in its pocket, as the ticket to leave close reading behind? The cost and benefits of Auerbach’s philology and Said’s sociology, as alternative approaches
Why Does No One Care about the Aesthetic Value of Huckleberry Finn
New Literary History - Volume 30, Number 4, Autumn 1999
Chinese Postmodernism: Toward a Global Context
I welcome the challenge Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong have set me, to situate in a global context these challenging and informative essays on Chinese postmodernism. Yet my task seems somewhat odd. The other contributors are all expert in Chinese materials-which I am not-and they are all also very actively in dialogue with Western, primarily U.S.-based, lines of theoretical inquiry. So in obvious and important ways, the essays on which I am comment…
The Struggle for the Cultural Heritage: Christina Stead Refunctions Charles Dickens and Mark Twain
T he received values with which we academic literary intellectuals most closely involve ourselves are the values of the cultural treasures,' the canonized masterpieces, for which we serve our students as intermediaries. In the years between the first and the second world wars, the established canon and its transmission faced strenuous challenge and probing discussion, not just, as our training leads us to expect, because of modernism, but also th…
Romanticism, the Self, and the City: The Secret Agent in Literary History
The dilemma that continues to pose for literary history emerges in the juxtaposition of statements by two of his best critics. Ian Watt moves from a close analysis of the Preface to The Nigger of the IVarcissus to generalize: Conrad represents the same central tradition of Romanticism of which is perhaps the most representative figure. Both men were by nature antipathetic to the more extreme forms of romantic individualism; and Conrad's theory in…
The House and the Railroad: Dombey and Son and The House of the Seven Gables
Reading the Letter
Rhetoric and Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Hyperbole in the Mill on the Floss
Bounding Lines: The Prelude and Critical Revision
Even century now after Pater suggested it, Wordsworth remains exemplary for the initiation he offers us into between the lines.l But what should we make of our interlinear relationship? We might try to hold the lines ever more closely together through adding our presence to them, engage in glossing that knits parts into comprehensive totality.2 Such reading of Prelude would find example in the expansion from two parts in 1798-99 to five and then …
Repetition and Exclusion: Coleridge and New Criticism Reconsidered
Jonathan Arac, Repetition and Exclusion: Coleridge and New Criticism Reconsidered, boundary 2, Vol. 8, No. 1, The Problems of Reading in Contemporary American Criticism: A Symposium (Autumn, 1979), pp. 261-274
Romanticism, the Self, and the City: The Secret Agent in Literary History
The dilemma that continues to pose for literary history emerges in the juxtaposition of statements by two of his best critics. Ian Watt moves from a close analysis of the Preface to The Nigger of the IVarcissus to generalize: Conrad represents the same central tradition of Romanticism of which is perhaps the most representative figure. Both men were by nature antipathetic to the more extreme forms of romantic individualism; and Conrad's theory in…
To Regress from the Rigor of Shelley: Figures of History in American Deconstructive Criticism
Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne
Aesthetics, Rhetoric, History: Reading Nietzsche with Henry James
Jonathan Arac, Aesthetics, Rhetoric, History: Reading Nietzsche with Henry James, boundary 2, Vol. 9/10, Vol. 9, no. 3 - Vol. 10, no. 1, Why Nietzsche Now? A Boundary 2 Symposium (Spring - Autumn, 1981), pp. 437-454+456-457
The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism
The Arnoldian Prophecy: Making Critical History
Jonathan Arac, The Arnoldian Prophecy: Making Critical History, boundary 2, Vol. 12/13, Vol. 12, no. 3 - Vol. 13, no. 1, On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism (Spring - Autumn, 1984), pp. 143-155
The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America
The Struggle for the Cultural Heritage: Christina Stead Refunctions Charles Dickens and Mark Twain
T he received values with which we academic literary intellectuals most closely involve ourselves are the values of the cultural treasures,' the canonized masterpieces, for which we serve our students as intermediaries. In the years between the first and the second world wars, the established canon and its transmission faced strenuous challenge and probing discussion, not just, as our training leads us to expect, because of modernism, but also th…
Postmodernism and Politics
F. O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance
Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson
Of Related Interest
After Foucault
The essays in this collection assess the impact of Michel Foucault’s work on the conditions of disciplinary knowledge in humanistic studies and speculate on the directions we might take from his work. They cover a wide range of fundamental concerns: from philosophy of knowledge in both theoretical and applied forms to philology, history, psychoanalysis, feminism, and politics. The result is a lively debate and further probing beyond disciplinary …
Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character
Research Article| April 01 1988 Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character Jonathan Arac Jonathan Arac Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1988) 87 (2): 311–328. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-87-2-311 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan Arac; Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character. South Atlantic Quarter…
Postmodernism and Politics
Postmodernism and Politics
A Romantic Book: Moby-Dick and Novel Agency
The quoted phrase of my title is a generic characterization; it might respond to a question like What is Moby-Dick? For in working on midnineteenth-century prose narrative for the Cambridge History of American Literature, I have found a generic approach the most useful. In pursuing such an approach in this essay, I will relate Moby-Dick to a kind of prose fiction typically troubled by the problems of agency and action, and I will then set this ge…
The Poetics of Critical Reading
Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism
Increasingly in the last decade, macropolitics--a consideration of political transformations at the level of the state--has become a focus for cultural inquiry. From the macropolitical perspective afforded by contemporary postcolonial studies, the essays in this collection explore the relationship between politics and culture by examining developments in a wide range of nineteenth-century writing.The dozen essays gathered here span the entire era…
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