richard klein | Cornell University (original) (raw)
Papers by richard klein
Diacritics, 1986
... to the fundamental rule of this specific kind of critical activity, the rule of giddy incompe... more ... to the fundamental rule of this specific kind of critical activity, the rule of giddy incompetence.' The moment an essay adopts the rhetoric of technical competence in the service of establishing historical truth or political certainty, it ceases to be nuclear criticism, and becomes ...
PMLA, 2010
The fuTure of liTerary criTicism will be DerriDean, or iT will noT be. anD if iT is noT, iT will ... more The fuTure of liTerary criTicism will be DerriDean, or iT will noT be. anD if iT is noT, iT will have been DerriDean, since iT was he who first envisioned critically the possibility of a future from which literature-and, a fortiori, literary criticism-might be absent. Derrida noted that the exceptional fragility of literature would become manifest in the event of a nuclear, biological, or nanotechnological holocaust ("No Apocalypse" 27). One can imagine a holocaust survivor producing an epic poem or a lyrical outburst, but literature will have vanished with no hope of ever being reconstituted. Derrida distinguishes literarity, the use of stylized language, which may be as old as civilization, from literature, by which he means the historical institution that began at the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century in Europe, an industry of authors and publishers, readers and booksellers-and literary critics. It is on the grounds of the institution of literature that we academic critics continue, more or less tenuously, to survive. The fragility of literature, its susceptibility to being lost, is linked to its having no real referent. The representations of literature are inherently unreliable; they are not even always fictional, sometimes factual but unreliably. Literature conforms to no referent from which it could be reconstituted if its canons were lost, the way chemistry might in a postnuclear age be rediscovered. It depends for its existence exclusively on the preservation of the archive. The archive consists, Derrida reminds us, not only of physical books or bits and bytes but also in its systems of organization, which create the conditions for and guarantee the chances of intertextuality, the possibility of texts' referring to other texts, as in citation, quotation, allusion, influence between and among texts. Intertextuality was often deemed in the twentieth century to be the essential characteristic of literature, its determining feature, sine qua non, and the specific object of literary criticism. It follows that our principal, our principial duty as literary critics is to preserve the archive, not only as a physical entity but also as practices of reading and commentary richarD Klein is professor of french at cornell university. he is the author of Cigarettes Are Sublime (Duke uP, 1993) and Jewelry Talks: A Novel Thesis (Pantheon, 2001).
Diacritics, 1986
... to the fundamental rule of this specific kind of critical activity, the rule of giddy incompe... more ... to the fundamental rule of this specific kind of critical activity, the rule of giddy incompetence.' The moment an essay adopts the rhetoric of technical competence in the service of establishing historical truth or political certainty, it ceases to be nuclear criticism, and becomes ...
PMLA, 2010
The fuTure of liTerary criTicism will be DerriDean, or iT will noT be. anD if iT is noT, iT will ... more The fuTure of liTerary criTicism will be DerriDean, or iT will noT be. anD if iT is noT, iT will have been DerriDean, since iT was he who first envisioned critically the possibility of a future from which literature-and, a fortiori, literary criticism-might be absent. Derrida noted that the exceptional fragility of literature would become manifest in the event of a nuclear, biological, or nanotechnological holocaust ("No Apocalypse" 27). One can imagine a holocaust survivor producing an epic poem or a lyrical outburst, but literature will have vanished with no hope of ever being reconstituted. Derrida distinguishes literarity, the use of stylized language, which may be as old as civilization, from literature, by which he means the historical institution that began at the end of the seventeenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century in Europe, an industry of authors and publishers, readers and booksellers-and literary critics. It is on the grounds of the institution of literature that we academic critics continue, more or less tenuously, to survive. The fragility of literature, its susceptibility to being lost, is linked to its having no real referent. The representations of literature are inherently unreliable; they are not even always fictional, sometimes factual but unreliably. Literature conforms to no referent from which it could be reconstituted if its canons were lost, the way chemistry might in a postnuclear age be rediscovered. It depends for its existence exclusively on the preservation of the archive. The archive consists, Derrida reminds us, not only of physical books or bits and bytes but also in its systems of organization, which create the conditions for and guarantee the chances of intertextuality, the possibility of texts' referring to other texts, as in citation, quotation, allusion, influence between and among texts. Intertextuality was often deemed in the twentieth century to be the essential characteristic of literature, its determining feature, sine qua non, and the specific object of literary criticism. It follows that our principal, our principial duty as literary critics is to preserve the archive, not only as a physical entity but also as practices of reading and commentary richarD Klein is professor of french at cornell university. he is the author of Cigarettes Are Sublime (Duke uP, 1993) and Jewelry Talks: A Novel Thesis (Pantheon, 2001).