In his final interview, given to the French newspaper Le Monde in the spring of 2004, Jacques Derrida spoke of death and writing: “I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: It is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life.” He worried that everything he wrote would simply disappear after he was gone.”Who is going to inherit, and how?” he wondered. “Will there even be any heirs?”
It was a strange anxiety for a man whose role as a pioneer of literary theory brought him international fame. Best known as the father of deconstruction, a playfully aggressive method of analyzing texts, Derrida was also keenly interested in what people leave behind, and how it is stored and remembered. He even devoted one of his many books — Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, published in 1996 — to the subject.
And the philosopher himself left behind a lot. Along with his intellectual legacy, a voluminous paper trail of Derrida’s thought remains. Most of those papers — 116 boxes and 10 oversized folders taking up 47.8 linear feet — are housed at the University of California at Irvine. Derrida, who held a professorship at Irvine, had, more than a decade before his death in 2004, chosen the university’s library as the final resting place for his manuscripts. But there are more papers that remain in the office and attic of his house outside Paris, including his later writings, letters to colleagues, books from his personal library, and so on.
Daily Archives: 17/07/2007
Archive Fever
That Sweet Ironic Smile
The Curtain, by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher, Faber and Faber, 256 pp, £12.99, ISBN: 978-0571232819
From the accomplished past to the striving present, from the epic to the experimental, from the romantic to the realist, a network of threads runs through the history of literature, connecting disparate creations. In the 1970s, Harold Bloom characterised that nexus as a tangle of anxieties and ambivalences, as the necessary neurosis of the poetic process. The contemporary poet, as Bloom saw it, was obliged to confront the echo of previous voices, the shadow of previous pens, and to wage a wearying war with the influences he could not escape, the influences evident in every word of his own, in the hope of realising an original vision. For Bloom, literary influence was “a destruction of desire”, a humiliation, a trial, a difficult adolescence of trying, trying again, and, very possibly, of failing.
In The Curtain, his new study of the art and history of the novel, the Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera takes a different view of influence. Where Bloom spoke of poets, Kundera treats the novel as “the privileged sphere of analysis, lucidity, irony”, as an art which, if it is to have any identity of its own – any force, any future – must exhibit a deep and patent connection with that which has gone before. For Kundera, the weight of past names and past words on the back of the novelist is not only a good thing but a crucial aspect of the art; he refers to it not as influence, but as “continuity”. The “consciousness of continuity”, he says, is “one of the distinguishing marks of a person belonging to the civilisation that is (or was) ours”.
Forward prize shortlists look to youth and experience
Britain’s richest poetry awards today choose by far the youngest poet in their history as a finalist for their most sought-after prize. He is Luke Kennard, 26, whose book of verse The Harbour Beyond the Movie is shortlisted for the £10,000 Forward prize for the year’s best collection.Kennard, who will be told of his achievement today, is said to be at least 10 years younger than any other finalist for the honour in the 16 years since the Forwards were founded. Poets are not usually expected to reach this stage until their late 30s or 40s. more…
The Praises and Criticisms of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
Ever since its publication in 1951, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has served as a firestorm for controversy and debate. Critics have argued the moral issues raised by the book and the context in which it is presented. Some have argued that Salinger’s tale of the human condition is fascinating and enlightening, yet incredibly depressing. The psychological battles of the novel’s main character, Holden Caulfield, serve as the basis for critical argument. Caulfield’s self-destruction over a period of days forces one to contemplate society’s attitude toward the human condition. Salinger’s portrayal of Holden, which includes incidents of depression, nervous breakdown, impulsive spending, sexual exploration, vulgarity, and other erratic behavior, have all attributed to the controversial nature of the novel. Yet the novel is not without its sharp advocates, who argue that it is a critical look at the problems facing American youth during the 1950′s. When developing a comprehensive opinion of the novel, it is important to consider the praises and criticisms of The Catcher in the Rye.
When studying a piece of literature, it is meaningful to note the historical background of the piece and the time at which it was written. Two J.D. Salinger short stories, “I’m Crazy” and “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” were published in periodicals during the 1940′s, and introduced Holden Caulfield, the main character of The Catcher in the Rye. Both short stories were revised for later inclusion in Salinger’s novel. The Catcher in the Rye was written in a literary style similar to prose, which was enhanced by the teenage slang of the 1950′s. It is a widespread belief that much of Holden Caulfield’s candid outlook on life reflects issues relevant to the youth of today, and thus the novel continues to be used as an educational resource in high schools throughout the nation (Davis 317-18).
The first step in reviewing criticism of The Catcher in the Rye is to study the author himself. Before his novel, J.D. Salinger was of basic non-literary status, having written for years without notice from critics or the general public. The Catcher in the Rye was his first step onto the literary playing field. This initial status left Salinger, as a serious writer, almost unique as a sort of free agent, not bound to one or more schools of critics, like many of his contemporaries were. This ability to write freely, his status as a nobody in the literary world, was Salinger’s greatest asset. Rather than to scope inside Salinger’s mind and create a grea tness for him, we are content instead to note him for what he is: “a beautifully deft, professional performer who gives us a chance to catch quick, half-amused, half-frightened glimpses of ourselves and our contemporaries, as he confronts us with his brilliant mirror images” (Stevenson 217). more…
