This article addresses the problem of sound in literature and the challenges it poses for literary criticism. The analysis focuses on Boris Vian’s 1959 play Les Bâtisseurs d’empire ou Le Schmürz (The Empire Builders or The Schmürz), in which a bourgeois family is terrorized by an unspecified and intermittent noise that forces them to flee their home, losing belongings, family members, and the memories of past events along the way. All the while, they are accompanied by a silent character referred to as “le Schmürz,” whose presence remains unexplained. The article argues that the play’s use of sound across a broad spectrum from noise to music to silence is both an invitation and a deterrent to listening and, by extension, literary criticism. The article’s contention is that Vian’s play takes listening to its crisis point, to what the article calls “critical listening,” that calls into question language, thought, and identity. The broader aim of the study is to explore how sound can be used in both the creation and the destruction of subjectivity.
Has critique run out of steam, as Bruno Latour famously proclaimed? Or has critique, like all historical practices, simply evolved? Latour's mention of steam suggests that critique may be regarded as a form of energetics with specific modes of productivity, movement, dysfunction, and even exhaustion. In this essay, I follow this hint by turning to several key moments of critique, to reflect on the forms of energies they bring to humanistic studies and the intellectual implications involved. Major theorists discussed include Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Catherine Malabou.
Felix Feneon (1861-1944) was a key figure in the cultural and intellectual life of the Belle epoque. His position as the indispensable editorial secretary of the Revue blanche from 1894 until it ceased publication in 1903-as well as his work as critic and editor earlier and later in his career (promoter of symbolism and post-impressionism, friend and publisher of Mallarme, unfailing ally of Seurat, regular contributor to anarchist journals)-made him a kind of hub for late nineteenth-century culture and politics in France. He was also an enigma: both well known and unknown. Jean Paulhan considered him a unique embodiment of that ultra-rare figure, "le critique." In this article, the author describes his commitments, his activities, and his singular style, the better to try out a Feneon perspective on a number of general questions such as relations between art and politics, high culture and labor, refinement and roughness, distinction and indifference.
In the winter of 1912, an audience of acculturated German-speaking Jews gathered in Prague's Jewish Town Hall to listen to a recital of Yiddish poetry. An introductory lecture that preceded the recital was delivered by none other than Franz Kafka. The lecture centered on the dread that Yiddish (Jargon, as Kafka called it) invoked in its listeners and discussed its borderline position in between languages. This article approaches the question of the language of critique through a close reading of Kafka's lecture on the Jargon. Focusing first on the monstrous linguistic figure that Kafka attributes to Yiddish, the analysis later zooms in on the relationship between Yiddish and German, a conflictual relationship, according to Kafka, in which Yiddish cannot be translated into German. To better grasp these relations of untranslatability, I turn to Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida's work on translation, drawing attention to the proximity between Kafka's perception of Yiddish and Benjamin's famous reflections on translation. Kafka's monster Jargon, I argue, opens up an alternative linguistic position, in which language is experienced performatively, as a translation of sorts. As such, it helps theorize an idea of a language that enfolds a critique of identity from within its own vulnerability.
This article addresses the problem of sound in literature and the challenges it poses for literary criticism. The analysis focuses on Boris Vian's 1959 play Les Batisseurs d'empire ou Le Schmurz (The Empire Builders or The Schmurz), in which a bourgeois family is terrorized by an unspecified and intermittent noise that forces them to flee their home, losing belongings, family members, and the memories of past events along the way. All the while, they are accompanied by a silent character referred to as "le Schmurz," whose presence remains unexplained. The article argues that the play's use of sound across a broad spectrum from noise to music to silence is both an invitation and a deterrent to listening and, by extension, literary criticism. The article's contention is that Vian's play takes listening to its crisis point, to what the article calls "critical listening," that calls into question language, thought, and identity. The broader aim of the study is to explore how sound can be used in both the creation and the destruction of subjectivity.
