This article situates the early career of Fredric Jameson in relation to the emergence of (literary} theory as a movement in the 1960s and 1970s. It does so through the perspective of the author, who is a decade Jameson's junior, as he found his own path toward conversation and colleagueship with Jameson. It touches on the puzzle of Jameson's years at Harvard (1959-67), where the author was a student (1963-73).

Critical QuarterlyEarly View Original Article Stress: A keyword for today? Jonathan Arac, Corresponding Author Jonathan Arac [email protected] Search for more papers by this author Jonathan Arac, Corresponding Author Jonathan Arac [email protected] Search for more papers by this author First published: 26 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12725Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

In Matthew Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864), the duty to refuse warrants the critic’s independence. Rather than a timid inertia, refusal, resistance, make the critic’s rejection of partisanship a sharply styled decision. In defining the new social role of the critic, Arnold sets loose that disquieting figure, the independent leftist, who stands apart from those you’d think of as being on the same side. In the history of criticism in the US, this role for the critic provided important opportunities for otherwise marginalized or minoritized figures such as Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said. It still has a future, if we dare. In defining the new social role of the critic, Arnold sets loose that . . . disquieting figure, the independent leftist, who stands apart from those you’d think of as being on the same side.

In a long career of practicing literary history, the author has found large-scale historians increasingly unconcerned with literary history, illustrated by contrasting E. J. Hobsbawm's trilogy to more recent work by C. A. Bayly and others. The rise of national literatures and their study in school is a world-wide feature of the nation-state ignored by recent world historians. Even recent historians of the book seem to neglect the global spread of the novel, which scholars of world literature, such as Franco Moretti, have increasingly illuminated. The conclusion suggests that Sheldon Pollock's work offers possible benefits to world historians: its approach and findings may prove applicable beyond the time and place directly addressed.Keywords: Bayly, C. A.; Hobsbawm, E. J.; Pollock, Sheldon; world history; world literature

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.

Love's Shadow, Tragedy, and Beloved Jonathan Arac (bio) Love's Shadow has a problem with tragedy, wrongly convicting it of melancholy. The book exiles melancholy by embracing instead, in loving detail, great works of human imagination—Wallace Stevens' poetry, Rembrandt's painting, and Shakespeare's comedy and romance—art that strengthens and supports our lives in a secular world. To win this affirmation, Love's Shadow strives against a prestigious, powerful critical view, deriving from Walter Benjamin, which links allegory, redemption, and melancholy. The attack on melancholy thereby eliminates tragedy—it's just collateral damage. The book sides with Plato and against itself. Love's Shadow rejects philosophy as a path of life and chooses poetry, most polemically in its splendid third chapter on Plato's Symposium. Yet Love's Shadow, like Plato, rejects tragedy. Wait! Banish Antony and Cleopatra, Moby-Dick, Beloved? Tragedy doesn't have to feed melancholy. D. H. Lawrence insisted, "Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery" (Lawrence 1979, 1:459). W. B. Yeats wrote in "Lapis Lazuli," "Hamlet and Lear are gay; / Gaiety transfiguring all that dread" (Yeats 1996, 294). In Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards brought Aristotle together with Coleridge. Richards argued that the tragic emotions of pity and terror, the impulse to approach and the impulse to flee, form a balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities. For Coleridge this balance marks the act of imagination in its full power. Therefore, Richards concluded, tragedy brings not melancholy but invigoration. I hope these citations clarify that tragedy comprehends far more of human experience than melancholy. Toni Morrison's Beloved offers a specific instance of tragic art that performs the very achievement Love's Shadow seeks beyond melancholy: imaginative art made in the service of secular life, But first, a key moment from Benjamin that does not appear in Love's Shadow. Writing in danger of his life, menaced by the Third Reich, in "On the Concept of History" Benjamin envisioned the transfer of culture, the passing on of tradition, as a Roman triumph in which the winners display the spoils [End Page 559] of victory. Against this, he spoke on behalf of the losers: we must not forget the "anonymous toil" of all those upon whose labor the "cultural treasures," the masterpieces, depend. This brutal historical inequality meant that every "document of culture" is also a "document of barbarism" (Benjamin 2003, 391-92). For America, chattel slavery underlines the relevance of Benjamin's insight. Benjamin forces us to face this hard question: What do masterpieces contribute to a good life far more widely shared than it has been in any society that we know of? Can we still have masterpieces if we imaginatively affirm the anonymous toilers? Beloved answers: Yes. Morrison faced a great challenge: how to give the life of imagination to the brute fact of a world, specifically, the United States of America, in which one person could own another and possess absolute power over them. What does it mean, humanly, to live as object or subject of such power? Some white American authors created enduring works that represent and challenge life under slavery, works as various as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Absalom, Absalom! All deviate from central norms of the British novel in the extremes they convey, whether of sentiment, marginality, or Gothic horror. Morrison drew from this tradition, but she also accessed older and foreign resources. Greek tragedy beautifully imagined terrible things. From the slaveholding democracy of Athens, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides looked back to when the power of the gods more fully exercised sway over human beings. The arbitrary inexorability of such power resonates with the power of slaveholding. Morrison felt a sharp affinity with tragedy in her important essay from the time of Beloved, "Unspeakable Things Unspoken." She found "similarity" between Greek tragedy and "Afro-American communal structures (the function of song and chorus, the heroic struggle between the claims of community and individual hubris) and African religion and philosophy" (Morrison 2019, 163). Her perception invites me to think further with Aristotle. The emotional pressure of pity and terror defines an opposition that must not become...

At MLA 2020 in Seattle, I joined a roundtable event, organized by Eleni Coundouriotis and Lauren M. E. Goodlad on behalf of the Forum on Literary History, to celebrate Marshall Brown’s thirty years as editor of MLQ: A Journal of Literary History. The remarks that follow expand my ten-minute presentation while retaining some trace of the original occasion, which was public and honorific (as befits the MLA) but also intimate and affectionate (as used to be possible prior to the pandemic when people could meet together in person).With such an editor in sight, right at the table as he was, celebratory remarks must be analytic, historical, and crisply written. All of us who have worked with Marshall as advisers, as authors, and as collaborating editors know that his dedication to the discipline of prose invigorates the journal’s offerings. This body of “us” is not small. In his illuminating and touching valedictory as editor, Marshall has reckoned the number of submissions he read over his editorship as roundly twenty-five hundred (Brown 2021b: 144).Marshall and I met in 1974 at a wonderful conference in Toronto, “Romanticism and Historicism,” organized by Marshall’s Doktorvater, Cyrus Hamlin. Amid many remarkable speakers, Hayden White energized the event (and his death in 2018 continues to be felt). Metahistory had just appeared in 1973, heralded by an essay in New Literary History, “Interpretation in History” (White 1973). Marshall, a brilliant new voice in German Romantic studies, and eighteenth-century studies more largely, was an invited participant. I was there as a kibitzer, a beginning assistant professor, alerted by a friend in Toronto that this would be fun.Another connection occurred in March 1984, when Marshall invited me to Colorado for a small conference—the other guests I remember as Ralph Cohen, Stephen Greenblatt, and Donald Marshall. I had the challenging opportunity to comment on a version of Greenblatt’s “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” then still a work in progress (see Greenblatt 1988). I realized that what was just becoming known as New Historicism was not what I meant or aspired to as “new literary history.” Already Cohen’s journal had set a daunting standard, as I have discussed in “Reckoning with New Literary History” (Arac 2009). Representations, which had just begun appearing (1983) with Greenblatt as cochair of its Editorial Board, took a delightful path very different from where Marshall has led MLQ. Note that Representations is not subtitled A Journal of Cultural History! Yet many would say that’s what it is. By the same token, as New Literary History moved on from the 1970s, it became ever more what its subtitle names “a journal of theory and interpretation,” ranging widely across the humanities, and much less a place for focused literary study.These titles mark a fact of literary history. During the long 1970s, the years from 1967 to 1983, scholar-critics launched quite a number of journals that have remained important some four or even five decades now, throughout the careers of my generation, and Marshall’s, and that show every sign of persisting. These journals are university based and professorially staffed. In that sense they’re academic, but they’re not institution bound, and they offer innovative opportunities especially appealing to younger scholars. At least in their early days, for a scholar-critic to shape an essay in the hope of its landing in their pages meant doing something different from your professors or senior colleagues.I’ll touch on several more such journals in what follows, and this roundtable makes me pause to reflect. Over the last dozen years, this is the fifth piece I’ve written focusing on important journals from this group, their trajectories and impacts. Following Marshall’s lead in his manifesto for journals (Brown 2021a), I’ll offer my own credo, which explains why I have worked closely with several journals over many years. Much of the most important thinking about literature happens in essays, and journals provide the means by which essays appear, become known, and make things happen.When Marshall began his work with MLQ in 1990, joining as coeditor with John C. Coldewey, their shared statement in volume 51, number 1, at the turning point for the journal’s second half century, read, “Founded in 1940, the journal has consistently striven to provide the best of literary criticism, scholarship and reviews” (Coldewey and Brown 1990). The original journal was edited from Parrington Hall, named after Vernon Louis Parrington, author of a landmark three-volume argumentative account of American literary history, Main Currents in American Thought. Parrington taught at the University of Washington from 1908 until his death in 1929 (leaving the third volume still incomplete). The left-populist political edge of his work hugely influenced the 1930s, making it a major target for Lionel Trilling’s critique in The Liberal Imagination (1950). The first issue of MLQ evokes a long-past era of literary scholarship but includes two pieces by authors I recognize as stars eighty years later. Kemp Malone (1940), the legendary Johns Hopkins Germanic philologist, author of over five hundred publications, was visiting at the University of Washington in 1940 and contributed a piece on Beowulf’s father, Ecgtheow. More striking to most current followers of MLQ, Leo Spitzer (1940), another great Hopkins philologist, but in Romance studies, contributed a piece in French with the polemical title “Étude ahistorique d’un texte,” that is, an “ahistorical study of a text.”It’s as if Marshall found his mission in rectifying what motivated Spitzer. Too often literary history excludes analytic reading, a problem that bedeviled Paul de Man in his later career and led him to renounce literary history—wrongly, I think (Arac 2002). For thirty years in MLQ: A Journal of Literary History both history and theory are always present and at work, but neither causes the text to disappear. MLQ under Marshall’s leadership formed a workshop to forge the practice of an unprecedented, collective, necessarily fragmentary literary history, “federated along one keel” (in Melville’s phrase) conjoining these three components of text, theory, and history. A workshop gets things done and makes things happen, unlike a shop window, which displays what’s in fashion (Arac 1997).Thirty years is a long time and a lot of work. It’s much longer than the twenty years F. R. Leavis gave to Scrutiny (1932–53), which stopped dead when he gave it up, and it’s nearly half of the sixty-plus years William Phillips edited Partisan Review (1937–2002), which sputtered out the year after his death. Scrutiny and PR are dinosaurs, now extinct. How has the current field of journals evolved, especially the cluster I’ve suggested as marking Marshall’s generation? Cohen founded New Literary History and edited it for forty years (1969–2009), and W. J. T. Mitchell exceeded that count, taking on Critical Inquiry (launched in 1974) after the unexpected death of its founder, Sheldon Sacks, in 1977 and stepping down in 2020, after forty-three years. Directly emulating Cohen, but adding several sharp limits of time and place, Gordon Hutner founded American Literary History and has edited it since 1989. ALH’s twentieth anniversary provoked my first reflection on the role of the journal, “What Good Can Literary History Do?” (Arac 2008), placing ALH in dialogue with the issues raised by Lionel Trilling (1950) in “The Function of the Little Magazine,” originally his introduction to an anthology of pieces from the first decade of Partisan Review.Marshall did not found a journal, but he drastically refashioned what he inherited. Editorially speaking, he found an edifice of brick and left it marble. He reshaped a journal already fifty years old, presenting the new model in volume 54, number 1 (1993). This launch largely featured contributions from members of the Advisory Board that Marshall had newly constituted and that I had signed on to. As inheritor and remaker, a counterpart to Marshall might be Paul Bové. In 1989 Bové took on boundary 2 seventeen years after its founding by William V. Spanos (like Hayden White, another generative figure recently lost). Several differences strike me. As Marshall has discussed, MLQ had lost direction when he took it on (Brown 2021b: 142–43), while Bové succeeded a charismatic founder. Marshall’s focus on literary history gave substance to a journal whose remit had become too miscellaneous, while Bové changed the subtitle of boundary 2 from a journal of postmodern literature to an international journal of literature and culture. This small change in wording announced a great, still ongoing expansion in the journal’s range, most evident in its array of special issues including China, Cuba, eastern Europe, Ireland, Japan, Taiwan, and Tunisia. I have discussed some aspects of this generational transfer in “Creative Strife” (Arac 2015). Nancy Armstrong also counterpoints Marshall as an inheritor who made something much more imposing. Novel: A Forum on Fiction was completing its third decade when she took over as editor in 1996. In “Getting to World Literature,” written for Novel’s fiftieth anniversary (Arac 2017), I remembered a world of English studies, the one I was trained in, where the novel barely existed as an object of serious study. The journal has not simply benefited from the novel’s greater academic prominence but also strongly contributed to it, following Armstrong’s vision to found the Society for Novel Studies.There’s an important difference between journals with regularly rotating editorship and those that offer marathon opportunities to one person. Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, founded in 1971 and for some years the most exciting venue for the theory boom, exemplifies the success possible with rotation. What has remained relatively constant is the editorial base in Cornell’s Department of Romance Studies, with personnel only gradually shifting. One possibility for long-haul editors comes when those who have admired your accomplishments seek to join your project, not just as authors but as editors. This process may account for what I find the most striking change over Marshall’s editorship at MLQ—the increasing number of special issues. Eleven appeared in the first fifteen years, ten more in the next nine years, and six in the last four years (as of December 2020). The early special issues were generated by Marshall, often with collaborators whose expertise differs from his own, while many of the more recent come from proposals for packages at least in part already structured by the proposing special editor. Certain highly successful editors inspire ever more work by others until the point comes that others are doing the work, and all that remains for the editors is to receive the gratitude of those who have worked with them. Thank you, Marshall!

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 multidisciplinary and international team of fourteen scholars revises and updates Williams's classic. On this occasion, Novel has invited us to sketch for its readers something of the continuing resource an updated keywords approach offers.Williams began work on Keywords in the 1950s, while writing the book that first won him renown: Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958). Culture and Society demonstrates how British writers, living amid the immense social and political changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, repurposed words to characterize these tumultuous changes, to think about them, and to act on them. Among its great virtues, Culture and Society treats works of nonfiction with the close attention to language and its complications usually reserved for works of fiction and poetry.Williams made a startling discovery, gleaned from the vast resources of the Oxford English Dictionary (only completed in 1928). Around 1800, a crucial cluster of English words—he highlights industry, democracy, class, art, and culture—drastically changed their meanings as new conditions of life emerged. These terms already suggest an exemplary narrative of modernity: as industry and democracy remade the world, a new class challenged both in the name of art and culture. Williams found also a much larger group of new words (such as intellectual) or transformed words (such as experience) that required attention within the overall argument. Originally intended as an appendix to Culture and Society, this larger cluster of around 130 words eventually formed Keywords.Keywords for Today adds about eighty words that the twenty-first century requires (for example, appropriation, faith, secular, trans), retains about forty of Williams's words (such as art, literature, nature), adds "Recent Developments" to update them, and eliminates about eighty of Williams's words that nowadays no longer register crucial aspects of social change (including alienation, mechanical, utilitarian). Finally, a few of Williams's words were retained but with wholly newly written entries (image, native, sexuality, theory, West).Williams's vantage point in the middle twentieth century looked back over the great age of print culture, now superseded by new media. Therefore the Keywords Project, which produced Keywords for Today, also maintains a website: https://keywords.pitt.edu/. Keywords for Today carries forward Williams's fundamental project while expanding the field of reference for language usages to the digital corpora now available to scholarship. In The Bourgeois, Franco Moretti invoked Williams's Keywords while also making use of digital corpora, combining the best of close and distant reading.Both over time and at a given moment, Williams argued, social conflict between groups produces stresses that lead different people to use the same word in different ways. Williams's entry on democracy (retained and updated in Keywords for Today) demonstrates this conflict and change with a force likely to startle many readers. Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates that novels can build their form from the interplay of different discourses identified with conflicting social groups. Keywords works at a finer grain. Williams gained his academic training in the Cambridge English tradition of I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism [1929]) and William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930], and The Structure of Complex Words [1951]). This Cambridge philology intensely focused on the potential plurality of meaning within single words, and to this Williams added the Marxism that mobilized his politics and view of history. In the United States, Williams's older contemporary Ralph Ellison learned a similar lesson of politically acute verbal analysis from Kenneth Burke, and he shaped the dynamic of Invisible Man (1952) through the keyword identity, newly included in Keywords for Today (see Arac). Important recent American novels obviously amenable to keywords analysis include two with title terms newly included in Keywords for Today: Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995), and Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (2010).Williams's Keywords has proved continuingly valuable for the study of the novel because the words it analyzes often immediately enrich critical reading and also because its method proves generative for analytic inquiry exploring words beyond those it includes (consider Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping [1981]). Moreover, it has benefited novel scholars' capacity to think historically, even suspiciously, about the words we use in our own writing, which threaten to become unreflective second nature. Williams had already drawn attention to art, history, literature, and realism, and Keywords for Today adds, among others, gender, narrative, representation, and text. The intellectual perspective and political commitment that give Keywords its strength allowed Williams to produce a body of important criticism of novels, novelists, and the institution of the novel.Williams's signature formulation, structure of feeling, calls out for meshing with keywords analysis. He never quite did it himself, but the potential remains live and great. Williams begins his introduction to Keywords with an anecdote from 1945, when he returned to complete his BA at Cambridge after four and a half years of combat service against the Germans as an antitank officer. Cambridge was the same place, but he found it "strange." Talking with a friend from four years before, also a veteran, he reports, "[W]e both said, in effect simultaneously, 'They don't speak the same language'" (11). The structure of feeling had changed, and painstaking linguistic analysis of keywords proved one resource for understanding the difference—but Williams does not invoke the formulation. He preferred to use it when coming to terms with cultural works rather than practices, and one of the ways a new work, or genre, affects us comes through changes it makes in the language.Part of the haziness concerning structure of feeling—Williams attempted to codify it in a chapter of Marxism and Literature (1977), too didactic and abstract for most readers—comes because neither of its terms merited entry as a keyword. Keywords does include structural, which seemed too tied to the brief vogue for "structuralism" to be retained in Keywords for Today. A moment in the discussion indicates the problem structure of feeling hoped to resolve. Discussing the emergence of structural linguistics, Williams observes, "Structure was preferred to process because it emphasized a particular and complex organization of relations, often at very deep levels. But what was being studied were nonetheless living processes, while structure . . . from its uses in building and engineering . . . expressed something relatively fixed and permanent, even hard" (Keywords 303). Structure of feeling used its second term to loosen things up and bring the structure back to living human process.The formulation begins to take shape in Culture and Society, in conjunction with that book's only major engagement with novels. The chapter titled "The Industrial Novels" (which include Mary Barton, North and South, Hard Times, Sybil, Alton Locke, and Felix Holt), just about the book's longest, does not get very close to the language of these nineteenth-century novels, but it does try to elucidate a "structure of feeling," by which Williams means "certain common assumptions" that framed the authors' attempts at "direct response" to "life in an unsettled industrial society" (87). Each novel receives quick discerning comment, but Williams reaches a negative assessment. Read together, the novels show the "criticism of industrialism, which the tradition was establishing"; but even more important, they illustrate a "structure of feeling" that is "determining": "Recognition of evil was balanced by fear of becoming involved. Sympathy was transformed, not into action, but into withdrawal" (109). At this stage, structure of feeling seems no more than a synonym, or even a euphemism, for ideology. As Williams continues in later works, the term names more an exploration than a determination, a path forward more than a limit.In The Long Revolution (1961), structure of feeling comes to life, not only in the long final chapter where Williams attempts to read the signs of his own times—the early 1960s—but already in the second chapter, "The Analysis of Culture," focusing on the 1840s. Just a few years earlier, Kathleen Tillotson's great work of literary history, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1954), had characterized a new literary culture for this decade and had begun to specify a canon, with extended chapters on Mary Barton, Dombey and Son, Vanity Fair, and Jane Eyre. These titles remain familiar to scholars and readers, teachers and students a long lifetime later, but the major previous work of academic novel study, The Great Tradition (1948), by F. R. Leavis, had simply ignored them. In Williams's lifetime some opponents dismissively taunted him as offering no more than left Leavisism, but this second chapter of The Long Revolution, and the whole book, show him analyzing and assessing the possibilities within cultural developments—such as mass literacy and the popular press—that Leavis preferred simply to disdain.Williams builds up to "structure of feeling" (64) through the "key-word" (63) of pattern, meaning what one must notice in order to recognize culture actively and creatively taking shape. This insistence on formative social practice links Williams to the masterwork of his younger contemporary and sometime comrade, the historian E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class (1963). The structure of feeling is what makes possible the "communication" among the diverse "actual communities" (65) that coexist within a given society and that through their interaction produce a culture. Williams zooms in tighter in his 1978 essay "Forms of English Fiction in 1848," and he adds to the analysis the terms dominant, residual, and emergent, developed in what may be his most influential essay, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" (1973).Williams gives his largest attention to the novel in two closely related books, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970; including important pages on Joyce) and the more comprehensive, polemical, and transformative The Country and the City (1973), which incorporates much of the previous book while adding attention to the eighteenth-century novel, science fiction, and colonial/postcolonial writing, all counterpointed to other literary forms such as pastoral and georgic poetry, plays, protest, and memoir. The whole of The Country and the City grows from a keywords analysis, involving the contrasting title terms and their interaction charted from the sixteenth century into the twentieth. Williams envisions a future in which their contrast may disappear, along with the division of labor and the capitalist world economy that has shaped them.The Country and the City's analysis requires Williams to make "critical discriminations" to distinguish and analyze the various "important structures of feeling" (12) by which people shaped their grasp of the world in different genres at different times. Part of the work's energy comes from seeing the contrasts across genres. The chapter on the eighteenth-century novel, "The Morality of Improvement," locates Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson under a crucial term (improve would appear in Keywords) that links the moral and the economic, and then it contrasts their works to those of the agricultural writer Arthur Young. The discussion of Jane Austen follows upon that of her older contemporary William Cobbett, whose Rural Rides (1830) registers a very different England than hers, although geographically proximate. In Austen, Williams spotlights a keyword contradiction between production and consumption: "There is the improvement of soil, stock, yields, in a working agriculture. And there is the improvement of houses, parks, artificial landscapes, which absorbed so much of the actually increasing wealth" (115–16).To see keywords analysis as an avowed way of working with the complexities of important novels far beyond Williams's ken, we may turn to ongoing work on the language of German fiction around 1900 by Holly Yanacek, coeditor of Keywords for Today. In his introduction to the first edition of Keywords (1976), Williams highlighted the need for even more discussion of linguistic developments in other languages: "Many of the most important words that I have worked on either developed key meanings in languages other than English, or went through a complicated and interactive development in a number of major languages" (20). And yet Williams also acknowledged, "To do such comparative studies adequately would be an extraordinary international collaborative enterprise, and the difficulties of that may seem sufficient excuse" (20).Williams's keywords analysis has opened a path to studying emotions as represented in German literary fiction. His concern with language "not as a shared understanding but rather as a site of division," as discussed in the introduction to Keywords for Today (xi), helps to elucidate the contestation of different emotional styles in German novels published around 1900—the subject of Yanacek's book in progress, "Rethinking Feeling: Nietzsche, Emotion, and fin-de-siècle German Literature." The fin de siècle in German society was a period of rapid cultural change when the question of how one should feel in different situations was disputed. Particularly the social or moral emotions, such as compassion, love, honor, pride, shame, and pity, were topics of public and intellectual debate, and German novels of this period renegotiated these emotions by making them a central subject of literary discourse and depicting the insufficiency of nineteenth-century emotional styles. Yanacek proposes "heteropathia" to name the conflict among differing ways of feeling in a single literary work (see Yanacek 13–14). While heteropathia is indebted to Bakhtin's heteroglossia, the project as a whole follows Williams in its concern with specific words in German novels and extraliterary discourses around 1900.Close attention to language—especially to historically complex, polysemous keywords in a novel—can enrich critical reading and open up new interpretations, even of canonical texts. The capacity for literary scholars to think historically and skeptically about complex words in novels and in our own writing is especially important when addressing vocabularies of feeling in different languages. In The History of Emotions (2018), Rob Boddice recounts an exchange at a conference where a question from the floor asked if new ideas and methods in the history of emotions "meant that they could no longer read Jane Austen novels, for example, as exemplary accounts of authentic love." Boddice writes, "There is no 'authentic love,' anywhere, any time" (54). Williams's keywords analysis underlines that both "authentic" and "love" are words with long, complex histories and multiple active and competing strands of meaning. Both are, in fact, new entries in Keywords for Today. A keywords approach historicizes language and examines simultaneous senses and semantic change over time; similarly, a history-of-emotions approach understands certain aspects of emotions—their expression, meanings, range, intensity, and so on—as socioculturally shaped. As evident in Emotional Lexicons (Frevert et al.), vocabularies of feeling are often an important starting point for historians and literary and cultural scholars studying emotions.Ideas about the historical and cultural variability of both language and emotion destabilize notions like "authentic love" and challenge assumptions or claims about the universality of emotions in novel studies scholarship. A process of linguistic, cultural, and emotional translation may be needed to access the lost meanings and cultural values associated with a particular emotion word. Novels provide insight into shifting modes of thinking and feeling: by communicating through different narrative techniques and emotion words and metaphors, novels indicate how certain emotions were theorized, expressed, experienced, perceived, and valued in different societies throughout history.Some important German emotion words—including Stolz (pride), Mitleid (compassion; pity), Scham (shame), Ehre (honor), and Liebe (love)—had important meanings and associations in the nineteenth century that were already shifting around 1900. For example, Scham was a nineteenth-century emotional imperative for women from bourgeois families, and masculine Ehre, associated with the practice of dueling, fueled public debates in German-speaking countries at the fin de siècle. Theodor Fontane's most famous novel of female adultery, Effi Briest (1895), addresses the married couple's inability to have what late nineteenth-century Prussian aristocratic society would consider "das richtige Gefühl" (259), or the proper feelings in their situations. Fontane thereby indicates the declining relevance of the emotional imperatives of feminine shame and masculine honor and the need for different, more humane emotional styles. Fontane's concept of "rechte Liebe" (proper love) in Effi Briest, which recalls Arthur Schopenhauer's definition of "reine Liebe" (pure love), suggests not romantic love but a broader sense of love and fellow feeling for all humanity—namely, Mitleid, or compassion. Effi Briest imagines Mitleid as an alternative to the emotional imperatives of shame and honor.Contestation over emotional styles and the meanings of emotion words can also take place between novels. For example, the emotion word Mitleid takes on different connotations and senses in Fontane's Effi Briest and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901). In Effi Briest, Mitleid best translates as "compassion," but in Buddenbrooks as "pity." Effi Briest positively represents Mitleid and performances of compassion, but in Buddenbrooks, Mitleid and performances of pity are more suspect, as Mann adapts Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of pity as a morality of weakness.Keywords analysis of novels also helps us to understand larger changes in language and cultural practices over time, for instance in relation to the three German emotion words Empfindung (sentiment; feeling; sensation), Gefühl (feeling; emotion), and Emotion (emotion). The eighteenth century saw the greatest valuation and usage of the term Empfindung. In literary history the century's major cultural period is called Empfindsamkeit, or "sensibility" (1720–1789). Yet in this period, Empfindung was not alone. Gefühl was also common. Both words appear repeatedly in Goethe's oeuvre, and Das Goethe-Wörterbuch (The Goethe Dictionary) lists seven different main senses of the word Empfindung and seven main senses of the word Gefühl found in Goethe's collected works. In Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sufferings of Young Werther [1774] 1787), a key novel of Empfindsamkeit, these terms are both used and are distinguished from each other. The novel sets up Gefühle as feelings common to all human beings, but individuals have Empfindungen of different kinds and degrees. Sometimes Werther's Empfindung takes the form of overwhelming sensory experience, while at other times it is a developed skill and sign of an artistic genius, as in the letter of May 17: War unser Umgang nicht ein ewiges Weben von der feinsten Empfindung, dem schärfsten Witze, dessen Modifikationen, bis zur Unart, alle mit dem Stempel des Genies bezeichnet waren? (Goethe 22)Wasn't our time together an endless weave of the subtlest feeling, the sharpest wit, whose variations even to the point of misbehavior bore the stamp of genius? (Corngold 26)By the end of the eighteenth century, writers began to reevaluate this culture of Empfindsamkeit. Sensibility and sensitivity, once considered agreeable qualities for both men and women of virtue, began to be viewed as feminine, and eventually Goethe himself dismissed the culture of Empfindsamkeit as a sickness.Nineteenth-century novels continued this distance from earlier emphasis on Empfindsamkeit, and the more neutral word Gefühl became predominant. Might we consider this a change in the structure of feeling? The entries for "Empfindung" and "Gefühl" in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's dictionary (1854) describe Gefühl as more objective and Empfindung as more subjective, suggesting that a preference for objective terms, a partiality still present today, emerged in the nineteenth century. The growing fields of psychiatry, psychology, and evolutionary studies likely fueled this desire for objectivity in the study of human feelings and mental states. Nineteenth-century historical dictionaries and literary texts document a wide variety of compounds or neologisms formed with Gefühl. Works of German realist fiction and psychoanalytic texts in the later part of the century indicate that not all feelings were productive or desirable in society. Methods of categorizing Gefühle, purging negative feelings, and encouraging socially desirable ones were still being developed at this time.In the twentieth century, Gefühl remains the most frequently used emotion word, but the borrowed term Emotion has made its mark in the German language, especially since the mid-1990s. Emotion is now replacing the older term, Gemütsbewegung (emotion), in many German scientific, literary, and philosophical texts. Similar to the word emotion in English, the German Emotion has spawned a variety of compound words, including emotionale Kompetenz (emotional competence), emotionale Intelligenz (emotional intelligence), Emotionsbildung (emotional literacy), Emotionsregulation (emotional regulation), and Emotionsarbeit (emotional labor). When the word Emotion entered the German language in the early seventeenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it carried its historical baggage and negative senses along with it—the term originally meant civil unrest or a social disturbance. This German borrowing, with its recent ability to form compounds like those listed above, reflects a parallel development in English described in Keywords for Today: the understanding that emotions can be objectified—categorized, measured, and controlled.Williams's keywords analysis has much to offer novel studies, especially when scholars avail themselves of digital tools (e.g., linguistic corpora, Google Ngrams) and literary critical practices that combine close and distant reading strategies. This method can alert us to polysemy, contestations of meaning, and semantic change over time, enabling us to rethink our assumptions about language and adding what Williams called "that extra edge of consciousness" (Keywords 24), whether in studies of the novel or in daily speech and writing, especially on social media.

ABSTRACT 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 methods range from theoretical framing, cultural study to interdisciplinary study. This interview, which was conducted in oral and written form at the University of Pittsburgh from December 2019 to December 2020, touches upon such topics as Arac’s academic connection with Chinese academia, the essence of literary theory and its relationship with cultural studies and interdisciplinary research. Arac perceives his studies on literary theory, “new literary history,” and cross-disciplinary research since the 1960s as an integrated whole which “opens boundaries” and “extends our powers.”

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. Unfashionable independence, fidelity to personal fascination, and unremitting effort all play a role in scholarly accomplishment.

Critical QuarterlyVolume 61, Issue 4 p. 137-144 Original Article The Overstory: taking the measure of a major new American novel The Overstory by Richard Powers W.W. Norton & Company|2018|512pp|ISBN 97803935522 Jonathan Arac, Corresponding Author Jonathan Arac jarac@pitt.edu Correspondence: Jonathan Arac, 6101 Kentucky Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA; +1 412-708-3557. Email:jarac@pitt.eduSearch for more papers by this author Jonathan Arac, Corresponding Author Jonathan Arac jarac@pitt.edu Correspondence: Jonathan Arac, 6101 Kentucky Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA; +1 412-708-3557. Email:jarac@pitt.eduSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 February 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12513Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume61, Issue4December 2019Pages 137-144 RelatedInformation

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.

This interview with literary critic Jonathan Arac was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh on May 19, 2015. Arac, a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1979, speaks at length about his life and work. Addressing the impact of theory on his career, he discusses how he came to be associated with the New Americanists, his project of a new literary history, the changes in his own writing, and his involvement with the journal boundary 2. Arac also reflects on his teaching and his directorship of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The interview concludes with a conversation about the 1930s and the period's continuing relevance for the twenty-first century, Arac's recent project on the “Age of the Novel,” and the transformations in the field since he first began teaching.