I don’t know about you but for me, Oedipus at Colonus has always been the most striking and unsettling, even distressing, of all Sophocles’ plays. I would even say that it is the most terrifying of all ancient Greek plays that I read. It might seem puzzling at first if you consider that this is also the least dramatic of the old Greek tragedies. There is hardly any action here, hardly any conflict, and for sure not the usual tragic conflict be...

A couple of days ago, while surfing through the internet, I came across this very fine review of Angus Fletcher’s new book on environmental poetry. What a surprise it was for me, a big fan of his old, now standard work on allegory published in 1964. Somehow you tend to see standard works as lacking any relation to an actual author. Standard works become properties of disciplines or institutions, a type of acknowledgment that you imagine as s...

Pretending, for the occasion, to have a Central Committee, the journal Tel Quel sent a delegation to China in the spring of 1974. Spring 1974: the campaign “to critique Lin Biao and Confucius” was in full spate, and any pauses in the chorus of blame could be filled with the detestable names of Khruschev (revisionist!) and Liu Shaoqi (capitalist-roader!). Mao was still shuffling from palace to palace, Jiang Qing’s Four Model Revolutionary Opera...

As a Russian saying goes, the new is just the well-forgotten old. Let us look at a relatively current debate on universalism. A case in point is Judith Butler's contribution “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism” in her exchange with Ernest Laclau and Slavoj Žižek entitled Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (Verso, 2000). Traditionally conceived as a pure tool of white supremacy and colonial domination, u...

N’est-ce pas parce que nous cultivons la brume? — Rimbaud It’s tempting to try to sort out the good Derrida from the bad but the longer I try the more it all seems bad. Of course, it’s easy to separate the early, middle and late in the hopes of quarantining his earlier and seemingly more lucid works from the deluge which followed, but once the lines have been drawn it is clear that most of his annoying tics were present from the very ...

I was talking about Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis to a bunch of smart young Comp Lit graduate students this morning. My copy of Mimesis is embarrassingly old: bought used in Nashville, circa 1975, it was probably printed around ten years earlier than that. Attention collectors: it has the green geometric border and the tan details on matte paper, in the smaller trade paperback size. My students had bought the current edition, a good bit taller, wid...

After much sexier isms (for example that mixed bag “cultural criticism”) and theory (with or without a capital T) have come on the scene, most tend to find the New Critics, simply put, boring (most likely with a capital B). I'm working on a conference paper on the New Critics and critical history currently, and I've been become captivated by Richards, Ransom, Vivas, and other figures behind the “practical” and “ne...

Madame de Stael's 1813 De l'Allemagne is widely credited with being one of the founding documents of the discipline of comparative literature. The book “described verbal art as the expression of a people, its culture, its spiritual life and institutions,” thereby initiating the kind of literary study that reflects on “national differences through the themes, attitudes, genres, devices, styles, and occasions of imaginative wri...

The dawn of the era of human rights in the West corresponds almost exactly with the dawn of the era of criticizing other people for not respecting human rights. It also corresponds, rather sadly, with the era of saying that certain people can't be granted human rights because they're too uncivilized. For instance: in the early 1800s most European countries were outlawing torture (the first really popular criticisms of torture appear in the mi...