World Literature and Its Discontents

( Robert T. Tally,Jr ) 한국영어영문학회 2014 영어 영문학 Vol.60 No.3

Although the concept can be traced back to the nineteenth century or earlier, world literature has become an increasingly significant part of English and comparative literature in the past two decades. While the inclusion of works from different cultures and nations has greatly enhanced the study of literature, some critics have lamented the consumerist impulse underlying the project of world literature, as with Emily Apter’s provocative book, Against World Literature, which has challenged the field’s inability to account for “untranslatability.” In this essay, Robert Tally discusses the use and disadvantages of world literature, citing both proponents and the detractors, and discussing his own attraction to Weltliteratur as a way of subverting the intensive nationalism of American Studies. Drawing upon earlier visions of Goethe, Marx, Auerbach, and Said, along with recent critics such as Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and David Damrosch, Tally traces the trajectory of his postnationalist vision of a world literature that may simultaneously preserve cultural specificity without fetishizing it and engender transcultural connections without effacing difference, thus serving comparative literary studies in an age of globalization.

World Literature and Its Discontents

Robert T. Tally Jr. 한국영어영문학회 2014 영어 영문학 Vol.60 No.3

Although the concept can be traced back to the nineteenth century or earlier, world literature has become an increasingly significant part of English and comparative literature in the past two decades. While the inclusion of works from different cultures and nations has greatly enhanced the study of literature, some critics have lamented the con- sumerist impulse underlying the project of world literature, as with Emily Apter’s provocative book, Against World Literature, which has challenged the field’s inability to account for “untranslatability.” In this essay, Robert Tally discusses the use and disadvantages of world litera- ture, citing both proponents and the detractors, and discussing his own attraction to Weltliteratur as a way of subverting the intensive national- ism of American Studies. Drawing upon earlier visions of Goethe, Marx, Auerbach, and Said, along with recent critics such as Franco Moretti, Pascale Casanova, and David Damrosch, Tally traces the trajectory of his postnationalist vision of a world literature that may simultaneously pre- serve cultural specificity without fetishizing it and engender transcultural connections without effacing difference, thus serving comparative liter- ary studies in an age of globalization.

Swerve, Trope, Peripety: Turning Points in Criticism and Theory

( Robert T. Tally Jr. ) 한국영어영문학회 2018 영어 영문학 Vol.64 No.1

The turning point is one of the more evocative concepts in the critic’s arsenal, as it is equally suited to the evaluation and analysis of a given moment in one’s day as to those of a historical event. But how does one recognize a turning point? As we find ourselves always “in the middest,” both spatially and temporally, we inhabit sites that may be points at which many things may be seen to turn. Indeed, it is usually only possible to identify a turning point, as it were, from a distance, from the remove of space and time which allows for a sense of recognition, based in part on original context and in part of perceived effects. In this article, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the apprehension and interpretation of a turning point involves a fundamentally critical activity. Examining three models by which to understand the concept of the turning point―the swerve, the trope, and peripety (or the dialectical reversal) ―Tally demonstrates how each represents a different way of seeing the turning point and its effects. Thus, the swerve is associated with a point of departure for a critical project; the trope is connected to continuous and sustained critical activity in the moment, and peripety enables a retrospective vision that, in turn, inform future research. Tally argues for the significance of the turning point in literary and cultural theory, and concludes that the identification, analysis, and interpretation of turning points is crucial to the project of criticism today.

In the File Drawer Labeled `Science Fiction`: Genre after the Age of the Novel

( Robert T. Tally Jr. ) 한국영어영문학회 2017 영어 영문학 Vol.63 No.2

In 1965, Kurt Vonnegut famously complained of being labeled a science-fiction writer, but he also predicted that so-called science fiction would become mainstream as more writers incorporated the effects of technology into their literary fiction. By the time of his death in 2007, the “subliterary” genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and a combination of the three presented under the banner of children`s literature dominated the literary marketplace. In this essay, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the continuing expansion of capital has, perhaps indirectly, affected the literary marketplace by demanding greater and greater levels of commodification. Genres are, in many respects, marketing labels, and the need to slot fiction into recognizable market niches undoubtedly drives much of the publishing industry. However, even at the formal level, the commodification of forms has tended to uproot the “literary” in the literary marketplace. As that market has become more global, genre fiction predominates. Using Vonnegut as a point of departure, Tally argues that the ambitions of “literary” writers of postwar American fiction increasingly turned to generic forms since the 1970s. The celebrated hybrid genres today might be considered as literary versions of financial derivatives, drawing their “value” from other commodities, and Tally suggests that such fiction reflects the postnational world market after the “age of the novel.”

Spatial Literary Studies versus Literary Geography?

Robert T. Tally Jr. 한국영어영문학회 2019 영어 영문학 Vol.65 No.3

Scholars have long examined the relationship between literature and space, place, or mapping, but formal methods or disciplines for such work have only recently come into being. Particularly after what has been called the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, researchers from various academic and artistic disciplines have developed work in connection to such terms as literary geography, imaginative geography, geocriticism, geopoetics, the spatial humanities, geohumanities, and spatial literary studies, to name a few. Understandably, there would be a great deal of overlapping interest among these emerging practices or subfields, even if the aims and methods of each may vary, and practitioners of one form may find it desirable to distinguish their field from other related ones. Recently, a leading proponent of literary geography has sharply criticized the conflation of that field with spatial literary studies, an ostensible rival primarily associated with the work of Robert T. Tally Jr., among others. In this essay, Tally responds to this criticism, first by explaining his use and understanding of the terms spatial literary studies and literary geography, then by attempting to create a working definition that would delineate the boundaries between these practices while leaving open the possibilities for future collaboration and mutual influence.

“Planetary Criticism” Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru, eds., The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015

( Robert T. Tally Jr. ) 한국영어영문학회 2016 영어 영문학 Vol.62 No.2

The Aesthetics of Distance: Space, Ideology, and Critique in the Study of World Literature

Robert T. Tally Jr. 한국영어영문학회 2020 영어 영문학 Vol.66 No.1

Although its pedigree is frequently traced back to the nineteenth century, world literature as an institution is a much more recent phenomenon, emerging along with the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences in the era of globalization. During roughly this same period, we have witnessed the rise of the postcritical approaches to literature that would abandon critique in favor of mere description. One of the most innovative forms of this, Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” project developed out of his attempts to reckon with the scope of world literature, but the project also implicates a political program. As a concept, genre, or field, world literature presents serious problems to readers in the twenty-first century; translation, cultural literacy, commodification, the book industry, and a sort of literary imperialism underlie the global market for world literature, and the reader is confronted with sometimes invisible obstacles to understanding. In a moment when so-called surface reading or postcritical approaches have been increasingly championed, Tally asserts that this sort of ideology-critique is needed more than ever, and that the spatially oriented critique made possible by geocriticism is particularly well suited to the crises and mystifications facing culture workers in the twenty-first century.

Spatiality`s Mirrors: Reflections on Literary Cartography

( Robert T. Tally Jr. ) 한국영어영문학회 2015 영어 영문학 Vol.61 No.4

The project of literary cartography is fraught with peril, as the urge to produce accurate maps confronts the specters of not only the impossible, but the undesirable. As with Borges’s fabulous geographers who developed a perfectly useless map coextensive with the territory it purported to depict, such mimetic scrupulosity thwarts the project of literary cartography as well. The hero’s itinerary is traced along the map that is formed, at least in part, by those itinerant tracings, while the epic narrative gives shape to the world’s spaces. Like Odysseus, the bard who would sing the world into being must connect the itinerary to the map, blending lived experience with that imaginary geography to form a rhapsodic totality. Or like Dante, who pauses to study geography in the midst of his own infernal trajectory, the literary cartographer must construct an architectonic by which the otherworldly system can make sense, such that the spaces revealed are also the spaces produced in the narrative. Or like Ahab, whose relentless pursuit of the “inscrutable thing” at the heart of the white whale inscribes his own mission with indelible markings, as his mapping project proves wholly reflexive. In all these ways, literary cartography represents and produces a world system for the reader to explore. Drawing upon key scenes from the Odyssey, the Inferno, and Moby-Dick for this essay, Tally reflects on literary cartography by examining the interrelations among the itinerary and the map, narrative and description, perception and abstraction, lived experience and the social totality.

“Don’t the Great Tales Never End?”: Tolkien, History, and the Desire Called Marx

( Robert T. Tally Jr. ) 한국영어영문학회 2021 영어 영문학 Vol.67 No.3

In a memorable scene from The Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee suddenly realizes the connections between his own story and those legends he had learned in his youth, marveling “Don’t the great tales never end?” Sam’s reference to such grand récits implicates the great metanarrative of History itself, into the midst of which these hobbits find themselves thrust. In this essay, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the “realization” of history is an important aim of Tolkien’s art. Tolkien’s yearning for a mythic past, despite its clear nationalism and chauvinism at first, reflected a deep desire to connect his modern world with an august, barely accessible past through forms of historical narrative. This is not an escape into a mythical, premodern realm as is frequently imagined. Rather, it is an attempt to take the broken and disconnected fragments of culture and put them together into a meaningful history, evoking what Tolkien would call “the seamless web of story.” Fredric Jameson, following Lyotard, refers to this as “the desire called Marx.” Tolkien’s experiments with different genres and styles betray the difficulties he had in organizing this overall narrative project, but his impulse in producing a grand narrative involving myth, fairy story, romance, history, and the modern novelistic form is to give shape to a world that had, in his view, lost its sense of history. Through his efforts, Tolkien’s great legendarium provides a historical sensibility for a world that had forgotten how to think historically.

Tolkien and Form: Generic Discontinuities in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

Robert T. Tally Jr. 한국영어영문학회 2022 영어 영문학 Vol.68 No.1

With the success of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien has been tasked with writing a sequel, even though he would have preferred to publish The Silmarillion instead, a manuscript which was rejected by his publisher. He set out to write a work, “in a similar style and for a similar audience,” but whatever generic characteristics those various books by Tolkien shared—today, all three might be easily subsumed under the popular marketing label of fantasy—The Silmarillion (not to mention the far more heterogenous and inconsistent “Silmarillion” texts), The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings clearly represent rather different kinds of literary works. Tolkien later attempted to reconstruct these three texts as part of a single, unified story, the “Saga of the Jewels and the Rings,” but in attempting to give shape to this story, he had to experiment with multiple narrative forms. Ultimately, the project is marked by what Fredric Jameson has called “generic discontinuities,” as Tolkien’s writings integrate aspects of the epic, romance, the historical novel, and other genres in order to build his vast world-system. In this essay, I discuss these generic discontinuities in the context of his larger aim to realize and make meaningful History (as examined previously in “‘Don’t the Great Tales Never End’: Tolkien, History, and the Desire Called Marx”). I argue that Tolkien’s writings deploy genre strategically in ways that perhaps even Tolkien may not have intended, making for a richer, multiformal, and multilayered literary map of Middle-earth.