Sleepwalking may seem a plausibly deconstructive notion, and some commentators have adopted it as such. But, until quite late in Derrida's writing, it figured as something against which deconstruction defined itself. Sleepwalking was emphatically the sleepwalking of the other: it was an accusation, and even a little polemical, naming the premature certainty and complacency of method. In this paper, I trace the turn that takes place around 1999, whereby Derrida departs for this othering of sleepwalking to make it deconstruction's own problem so that, in his acceptance speech for the 2001 Adorno Prize, he even assumes it in the first person: je somnambule. This happens at the confluence of two late ethical preoccupations: with the animal and with the scene of prize-giving. What is at stake in all of this, I argue, is Derrida's ongoing negotiation with totalising and mastery, even unto the sovereignty of his own critical subject. The sleepwalker, it transpires, is one of the less obvious figures to which justice must be done.

Feminist scholars interested in the political ideas of Giorgio Agamben have had to negotiate the 'gender-blindness’ of his writing and the absence from his theory of women’s bodies. They are nevertheless sometimes prepared to appropriate the concept of 'bare life’ as if it were in itself relatively unaffected by its original frame, and easily extricated from it. On the contrary, I argue that gender difference poses fundamental problems for the schema of 'bare life’. Female bodies are not simply missing from Homo Sacer, but included as an absence in the universalising 'man’ that is the protagonist of Agamben’s discourse. As such they play an occluded role in founding Agamben’s authority. I explore the implications of this further in more recent works where the female body does play an explicit role, in the form of the 'nymph’. Here I show that this insistently feminine figure, whose political implications have not often been considered, acts as a specular supplement to an ostensibly universal, but implicitly masculine, 'man’. I conclude by exploring the drama of castration in Agamben’s work on art as a function of the mastery to which his writing aspires, and which sits uneasily with his critique of sovereignty.

With Sleep and the Novel, Michael Greaney makes a valuable contribution to an under-researched area of the novel and makes a good case for ways in which attention to sleep—and expressly not dream sleep—might, despite its marginal position in narrative, have wider-ranging effects on our reading. Greaney’s argument is theoretically informed without being doctrinaire and coherent without being reductive or monolithic. He marks out his itinerary from Austen, through Dickens, Goncharov, Proust, and variety of contemporary works, with reference to the emergence of a speculative new genre, the Schlafroman; a novel that would not only make sleep its prime theme but do justice to the topic and perhaps even from within its own terms. But this is, for reasons of which Greaney reminds us at various points throughout, something of a McGuffin. It is not just that sleep is resistant to narrativization, lacking the capacity for agency, striving, and development upon which the dominant novelistic tradition, notably the Bildungsroman, rests; there is a danger that the very effort to rescue sleep might effect a colonial takeover from a (necessarily) waking perspective. In a sense, one just cannot do narrative justice to sleep without betraying it. At any rate, even in the best case, ‘the sleeping narrator’ does not ‘become a reality’: even Proust cannot get farther than beating the bounds of ‘the fringes of sleep’ (pp. 145, 146). Greaney’s approach is thus asymptotic, using the vanishing point of an impossible goal to probe the limits of this resistance. He occasionally flirts with something like a ‘subversive politics of sleep’ (p. 95). So, with typical wit, Oblomov’s incorrigible refusal of waking may be seen as ‘narcoleptic dissidence’ against ‘technocratic modernity’ (pp. 121, 124). And maybe there is ‘no more fitting response to modernity than to take to one’s bed’ (p. 149). Certainly Oblomov’s refusal to ‘present a coherent narratable self to the waking world’ (p. 112) has some resonance for contemporary debates on social media and identity politics. But Greaney is surely right, having floated the idea that Fanny Price’s tiredness might be seen as ‘passive resistance’, to draw back from recuperating it as a ‘hidden Levinasian superpower’ (pp. 60, 61). And indeed, his analysis generally concerns power relations too tense and tangled to accommodate such neat dialectical turnarounds. Thus, Albertine’s sleep is at once what holds her ‘helpless hostage to Marcel’s gaze’ and ‘what shields her from his desperate probing’, and even this is at the expense of sacrificing her own agency in the wakeful world’ (p. 166). Such pithily articulated pay-offs are a great strength of this book. And while, across the span of the book, Greaney charts some broad shifts—such as the one from the idea of sleep as a great leveller to an appreciation of the ways in which it is culturally mediated—the most thought-provoking ideas emerge from the detail of analysis. Perhaps the key thesis around which the others orbit comes in a welcome discussion of the too often overlooked Barnaby Rudge: ‘those who “overlook” sleep in Dickens are fated to discover a blind spot at the heart of their fantasies of visual mastery’ (p. 99). The double sense of ‘overlook’ here neatly encapsulates a great deal of what Greaney has to say about sleep-watchers of all sorts, the equivocal and shifting power of their relation, and, not least, the ‘fantasies of mastery’ that are at stake.

This essay tracks the place of Descartes in Derrida's writing, from ‘Cogito et histoire de la folie’ to the late seminars on the beast and the sovereign. Through a heterodox reading of the Cogito, privileging its negative moment, Derrida's Descartes plays an important role in unsettling narratives of philosophical lineage, as well as complicating deconstruction's relationship with method, and with the questions of mastery which haunt Derrida's later work with particular emphasis. What is at stake is not just the mastery of method, but also the mastery that would be involved in escaping or undoing it. Although the aim is not simply to rescue the honour of Descartes, it is suggested that a response to the problems of mastery cannot go without a certain respect for the complexities and uncertainties of an œuvre that is often too easily discarded as the already-read par excellence.

The limited coverage of servants in nineteenth-century literature may plausibly be ascribed to the tenuous nature of the roles they play in primary texts, and especially to the problematic nature of their agency. This idea is implicit in the arguments of Bruce Robbins, whose The Servant's Hand remains the most cogent approach to giving servants a palpable role in critical narrative: for Robbins, the agency that acts through the servant 'prosthesis' rebounds on the master, granting the servant figure a sometimes exorbitant textual agency. The figure of the sleepwalking maid, and the analogies between sleepwalking and domestic service implicit in it, will help to complicate this picture. In anecdotes of spontaneous sleepwalking, and their subsequent appropriation by mesmerists, maids are cast as non-agents in terms of ownership of narrative: their subjectivity is immaterial to the public fate of the story which their acts generate. But this apparent non-agency is itself derived from their spontaneity; from an autonomous, albeit unconscious, self-will. As such, sleepwalking subjectivity is a gift to paternalism; a mastery it does not have to produce. In conclusion, it is this undetermined quality, rather than a simple lack of agency, that characterises the maid in the novel, and which continues to exclude domestic servants from critical narrative.

When we first encounter the narrator of Austerlitz, he is wandering around the unfamiliar town of Antwerp with, he tells us, “unsicheren Schritten” (1; 9). As well as reflecting the unfamiliarity of the locale, these “uncertain steps” evince a proud modesty characteristic of the classic Sebaldian narrator, a wanderer who discreetly relays the stories of the people and places he is privileged to encounter. Although Sebald does not use the phrase, steps of this sort, unpurposed yet unerring, are made with what is commonly known in German as somnambule Sicherheit: the legendary surefootedness of the sleepwalker. The convergence of sleepwalking and certainty in a single phrase poses an interesting challenge to one of the central tenets of the English-language canonization of Sebald, for his writing has been most highly valued for its ability to move the reader through apparent certainties towards a salutary uncertainty. But somnambule Sicherheit also presents the possibility that the current may be reversed, that narrative may move under cover of uncertainty towards certainty. That Sebald criticism has not been more troubled by this possibility is in no small part due to the fact that it tends to deploy the notion of sleepwalking with a minimum of reflection on its theoretical ramifications. To evoke some of the complexities of this matter, I first offer a brief cultural history of sleepwalking, as well as a brief account of the topic of uncertainty in Sebald criticism. Most of my argument, however, involves an extended comparative analysis of sleepwalking in Sebald's Austerlitz and Hermann Broch's 1933 trilogy The Sleepwalkers. Although these writers have not previously been the object of any sustained comparison, sleepwalking in Broch's novels illuminates much that is left implicit on the topic in Sebald's fiction and points toward some difficult questions regarding the role of aesthetics and agency in Sebald's work.

This article examines the doubtful status of the Boy in as a 'character', and relates this to questions of the reduction of character as representation, the idea of being on stage as 'presence', and the relation of stage space to an off-stage. Exploring what it means for the Boy to be a child, seen as something secondary and dependent, will shed some light on these classic questions of criticism of Beckett's theatre.

YES, 34, 2004 YES, 34, 2004 understandingof the body as material and dependent upon social conventions: 'a way of thinking about the body that is grounded in a notion of representation understoodas shiftingsemblance' (p. 4). The baroque body is staged, not a natural given: thus its meanings are dependent upon context and subject to change. Although such a model of embodiment may resonatewith currenttheories,it is not taken as the origin of a modern conception of the self because it was supplanted by a more influential tradition: Cartesian rationalism. Descartes (1596-I650) introduceda model of the self that privilegesthe operationsof reason to the exclusion of embodiment. This understandingof the self as rational necessarilyleads to Descartes's mind-body dualism, creating a 'redefinitionof the body as a machine whose objective reality is sundered from its subjectiveexistence' (p. 5). Judovitz conducts illuminatinganalysesof the Discourse onMethod (i637), Treatise on Man (written I629-33, publishedI664), and Meditations onFirstPhilosophy (I64I).Just as the cave gives Platonic idealism an 'allegoricalapparatusfor the projection of truth', so for Cartesian rationalism the body offers 'a horizon and apparatus of projection that stages the elaboration of rational subjectivity' (p. o16). Despite the differencesbetween Platonic idealism and Cartesianrationalism,in both cases, we are told, the senses give access only to the shadow of reality. The rationalist tradition rather than that based on semblance became the point of departurefor new culturalparadigms that simultaneouslyperpetuated and subverted its legacy. The third part of TheCulture oftheBodypursuesthe implicationsof the mechanistic and dualist understanding of the self through the cultural transformations of Cartesian rationalismin the plays of Corneille (i606-84), the materialisttheory of La Mettrie (1709-5I ), and the fiction of Sade (I740-I814). Judovitz's expertise in both Renaissance texts and contemporary philosophy means that 'rather than functioningas the insigniaof historicalarchaism [...] earlierconceptualframeworks can be redeployedin contemporarydiscoursein orderto provide new ways for conceiving and representingthe body as a plural entity whose multiple embodiments attest to its embeddedness in the fabric of the world' (p. 12). She relies upon Foucauldianarchaeologyand genealogy as well as Merleau-Ponty'sphenomenology to show the relevance of Renaissance models of the self to contemporaryeffortsto representthe body as material,overdetermined,and relational. Genealogy renders the clash between competing culturalmodels more obvious. Phenomenologyrelates it palpably to our consciousnessof the world. Merleau-Ponty's ThePhenomenology of Perception (1945)is particularlyrelevant to Judovitz's project because it rejectsthe rationalistduality of body and soul. It also rejectsempiricalrealism.The 'philosophyof ambiguity'enablesJudovitz to create a bridge between external reality and subjective experience, reasoning and perception , culturalconstructsand how we processthem, convincingus of the relevanceof French Renaissance narrativesto our contemporaryunderstandingof embodiment. UNIVERSITYOF MICHIGAN CLAUDIA MOSCOVICI Disturbingthe Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. By ROBERTA SEELINGERTRITES. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2000. xv + 189 pp. [25.50. ISBN:0-8774-5732-8. Roberta Trites'sbook is interestedin elaboratingan allegedly'poststructural' theory of'power'. To this end it looksto various'definitions'culledfromWeber, Althusser, understandingof the body as material and dependent upon social conventions: 'a way of thinking about the body that is grounded in a notion of representation understoodas shiftingsemblance' (p. 4). The baroque body is staged, not a natural given: thus its meanings are dependent upon context and subject to change. Although such a model of embodiment may resonatewith currenttheories,it is not taken as the origin of a modern conception of the self because it was supplanted by a more influential tradition: Cartesian rationalism. Descartes (1596-I650) introduceda model of the self that privilegesthe operationsof reason to the exclusion of embodiment. This understandingof the self as rational necessarilyleads to Descartes's mind-body dualism, creating a 'redefinitionof the body as a machine whose objective reality is sundered from its subjectiveexistence' (p. 5). Judovitz conducts illuminatinganalysesof the Discourse onMethod (i637), Treatise on Man (written I629-33, publishedI664), and Meditations onFirstPhilosophy (I64I).Just as the cave gives Platonic idealism an 'allegoricalapparatusfor the projection of truth', so for Cartesian rationalism the body offers 'a horizon and apparatus of projection that stages the elaboration of rational subjectivity' (p. o16). Despite the differencesbetween Platonic idealism and Cartesianrationalism,in both cases, we are told, the senses give access only to the shadow of reality. The rationalist tradition rather than that based on semblance became the...

Research Article| September 01 2003 The Instance of the Veil: Bourdieu's Flaubert and the Textuality of Social Science STEPHEN THOMSON STEPHEN THOMSON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2003) 55 (4): 275–292. https://doi.org/10.1215/-55-4-275 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation STEPHEN THOMSON; The Instance of the Veil: Bourdieu's Flaubert and the Textuality of Social Science. Comparative Literature 1 September 2003; 55 (4): 275–292. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-55-4-275 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. University of Oregon2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

444 Reviews Conrad's idea of Englishness is found to be inadequate because, in Heart ofDark? ness,he at once intimates the imminent collapse of liberal values at the centre (London) and denies that universalizing British standards can apply in Africa or anywhere else. Unviable either at the centre or on the periphery, his national idea 'has no future' (p. 125). The difference between Proust and Conrad is that Conrad's Marlow rejects truth (the lie to the Intended about Kurtz's death) because he has been falsely attracted to Kurtz by feelings of friendship and brotherhood, feelings that Proust could endorse. Conrad admired, in his own words, 'that giftof good or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations' (p. 121, quoting 'Youth'). This is 'racial determinism'rather than a 'racial theory of history'(p. 121), but both theories, Lewis argues, are unacceptabie. The conflict of determinism and will is exposed in Conrad's inconsistent attempt to construct a deterministic and racialized English version of himself in Marlow, while retaining the option of acquiring his own differentEnglish? ness by choice. Lewis's exploration of Gabriele D'Annunzio's 77 notturno (Nocturne) is particu? larly valuable. This poem-novel was drafted in hospital in 1916 after the author was blinded in an air crash, and was published, significantly revised, in 1921. The work devises a pre-Fascist politics out of its author's stunning egotism (he imitates Dante, and compares himself to Christ). Lewis's discussion focuses upon the question ofthe narrator, the T for whom 'only highly subjective perceptions are possible' (p. 206). No objectivity, no interpretation, no third-person narration is permitted here. By contrast, Proust is both subjective (ethical), and sociological, and wishes to redeem no one. Consequently his narrative generates a viable idea of Frenchness. Theorization is achieved through a chapter entitled 'The Crisis of Liberal National? ism', which skilfully elaborates a distinction between discourses of national character and of national will out of a discussion of Rousseau, Burke, Mill, and Renan. How? ever, there is no reference to the outstanding recent examination of liberalism, James Meadowcroft's Conceptualizing the State: Innovation and Dispute in British Political Thought i88o-igi4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), and this is a serious omission. I am not convinced that Pericles Lewis has found a method successfully to bridge the gap between the weaknesses of liberalism and the seriously disruptive radical individualism of Joyce, Conrad, and D'Annunzio, for whom internationalism , socialism, and anarchism were also important matters. But the least alienated and most liberal, as he shows, was Proust. University of Plymouth Alan Munton Eliot'sDarkAngel: IntersectionsofLife and Art. By Ronald Schuchard. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. xiii + 268 pp. ?39.95 (pbk ?17.99). ISBN 0-19-510417-x (pbk 0-19-514702-2). What is the status of biographical criticism? Is it declining? Resurgent? Or has it never gone away? Ronald Schuchard, outlining his critical position, contends that 'postmodern' criticism has led to most critics losing 'all confidence in exploring the difficult and delicate relation of art and life' (p. 21). This volume of biographical essays is thus meant to redress the balance. In response to this, one might question whether criticism that looks to the 'life' of the artist for illumination had ever gone away. Leaving this question aside, however, I want to ask in what ways Schuchard's book writes what it terms 'intersections of life and art'. Whatever else it hopes to do, a new biographical criticism must necessarily claim to offer 'new life'. This may mean the discovery of some fresh material, or a new interpretation of existing material, or some combination of the two. Either way, the MLRy 98.2, 2003 445 promise is that this will revitalize our reading. So Schuchard offersto reinstate 'What has been missing from the record of Eliot's intellectual life' (p. 25). But what results will not be mere addition: for,by 'gradually erasing fromterra incognitathe grotesque emblems of reductive criticism' (p. 22), the revised biographical account will change the spirit in which the ceuvre is viewed. Phrases such as 'Thus, we can now begin to see' (p. 118) or...

A text provides the elements for a narrative in which, after long years of separation, a man can scarcely believe his eyes to find the daughter he never thought to see again. `A text provides the elements ...': that is to say, criticism acknowledges receipt of a certain number of `images'. These do not tell the story directly: they are `for a narrative'. That is to say, they are in lieu of, or contributions towards, or fragments of, a whole. The narrative in its given form, then, is a screen, a germ, or a wreck. In each case, a present state of incompletion demands to be seen through, brought to maturity, or repaired. In short, the text is found to be deficient in itself. But this weakness is the text's strength: its very fragility only makes us wish all the more fervently for its safe passage and ultimate restitution. Its proper self, the totality, beckons as through a veil. Soon, with a little patience, we may be reunited with it. We may even encounter `grace [...] in a more human form, no longer veiled, but close as family'. (1) The text, then, sets the stage for a recognition scene, the longed-for moment of recovery of a lost loved one. But this reading, peering through the fog of partial images, itself participates in a recognition scene. In criticism, the loss and recovery of a child, and the loss and recovery of a meaning, seem to coincide. I want to trace some ways in which T. S. Eliot's `Marina' (2) lends itself to this little critical drama. In the first instance, this means looking at ways in which a number of existing readings stage the recovery of meaning from this text. The object of this part of my inquiry is thus not the `interpretation', in the sense of `meaning', of the text offered by a given critic. Rather it is the process of interpretation as it is narrated in the critical text; its reckoning of obstacles, their overcoming, and the difficulties that are said to remain. Criticism generally finds `Marina' to be peculiarly equivocal. Indeed, it may even be taken as an exemplary enactment of doubt. In such accounts, then, a certain doubt regarding meaning becomes, precisely, the meaning of the text `Marina'. The meaning of the text that exemplifies doubt is thus not, in itself, in any doubt. The problems of this situation do not seem to have been recognized. Focused on the equivocal knowledge of the `I' of the text, criticism is seemingly blind to another sort of dubiety in its own position. This is what I want to focus on. My comments are not, however, preparatory to the production of some ideal or proper staging of the text. My point is not to rescue `Marina' from the importunity of criticism. Such a gesture would come back to the same, flourishing just one more recognition scene. Inveighing against other readings as misappropriations, it would raise the question of its own, necessary, appropriation of the text. I need, nevertheless, to say something about the stageability of a text. The purpose of looking at other readings is to see what elements they propose as significant, how they stitch them together, and what is at stake in a particular appropriation. For the text, any text, lives only by appropriation. What would it mean, then, to say the text has a life of its own, or that it maintains some identity as it is passed from hand to hand? This life or identity, if it transcends any given reading, simply cannot be something I can show you. Having said that, it makes no more sense to say a text keeps its self somewhere else. What, then, is it that a text `lends' when it `lends itself'? As soon as I claim to deal with this text rather than another, I make a formal appeal to an idea of identity. But how can this idea be thought? Once I have outlined the structure of critical narrative, I want to look further into the facilities and problems that `Marina' might be said to pose for any criticism, my own included. One may find in `Marina' a variety of themes: but does this mean the text has `lent' them? …

Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. By Ellen Pifer. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 2000. x + 272 pp. $55 (paperbound $19.50). `Whether the image of childhood in recent fiction appears intact or in pieces, wholesome or horrifying, its many facets constitute a kind of mirror in which we seek reflections of our naked, or original, selves: what we once presumably were but now can only faintly reconstruct' (p. 3). Ellen Pifer promises to tell the story of different or changing `images' of childhood. At the same time, Demon or Doll narrates the detours and misadventures of a single `childhood'. Indeed, `images of ` already postulates `childhood' as something outside language that is subsequently captured by it. This thing, `childhood', may be perceived differently in different times and places, but the difference is on the side of perception, even if this is said to produce `real' results. As well as being essentialist, Pifer's narrative is also historical and developmental: in line with the great majority of criticism dealing with `the child', it postulates a broad move from a more to a less distorted knowledge of this essential reality of the child. So we move from a `Victorian' idyll of `innocence' that either has decayed, or is itself decay, towards a more `modern' recognition of instability and the dark side. Indeed, innocence is predicated throughout Pifer's text as a lure that it is the modern novelist's task to dismantle: peering beyond the veil, we must descry the `reality' however dark. For only in the recognition of that darkness may we move towards the light. Most chapters end on this note. The first heralds of this recognition, and so of a `cure', are known as `Freud' and `Henry James'. James proves superior in the end, because in What Maisie Knew he `celebrates the child's inner resourcefulness' and thereby `controverts Freud's more deterministic vision' (p. 42). In like fashion, Doris Lessing proves, at a later point, superior to Derrida, because less `optimistic'. Whatever one makes of such judgements, they claim access to a true knowledge of childhood against which to measure not just the veracity of the current `image', but also of a current `reality'. In Pifer's criticism, `character' and `reader' are taken as pyschological entities that are not only coherent and whole in themselves, but are also consonant with each other. The differences are a matter of history. So, apparently, it is `Victorian reticence' that keeps the governess in The Turn of the Screw from `naming the dread thing that she knows' (p. 53). To `contemporary readers', on the other hand, such things are `obvious' (p. 54). Similarly Maisie's `precocity' results from her `parents' disruptive domestic relationships' and the `inevitable inroads' they make into the `innocence' of the child (p. …

(2002). What is Queer Theory Doing With the Child? Parallax: Vol. 8, Random Figures, pp. 35-46.