John Brenkman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by John Brenkman

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 2000

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2020

Routledge eBooks, Nov 6, 2015

Major psychoanalytic thinkers from Freud to Ricoeur to Lacan considered the Oedipus complex the k... more Major psychoanalytic thinkers from Freud to Ricoeur to Lacan considered the Oedipus complex the key to explaining the human psyche, human sexuality - even culture itself. But, in fact, they were merely theorizing males. In "Straight Male Modern", John Brenkman assesses the benchmark concepts of Freudian thought, building on feminist criticisms of psychoanalysis and the new history of sexuality. Psychoanalytic questions become political questions: How do the norms of hetereosexuality and masculinity emerge within the modern society and culture? How do the institutions of heterosexuality and patriarchy shape identity and desire? What makes heterosexuality compulsory in our society?.

Routledge eBooks, Feb 22, 2022

Presses universitaires du Septentrion eBooks, 2022

Princeton University Press eBooks, Apr 12, 2022

Comparative Literature, 1990

Critical Inquiry, Sep 1, 2021

Jonathan Kramnick opens “Criticism and Truth” with a question as bold as his title: “Does literar... more Jonathan Kramnick opens “Criticism and Truth” with a question as bold as his title: “Does literary criticism tell truths about the world?” (Jonathan Kramnick, “Criticism and Truth,” Critical Inquiry 47 [Winter 2021]: 218). The question immediately acquires two prongs. The question “of telling truths about the world itself” will have to hinge on making “true statements about literary texts” (p. 218). It is axiomatic for Kramnick that “both lines of inquiry take aim at method and therefore at epistemology” (p. 218). I admire Kramnick’s general project of questioning various centrifugal tendencies in literary studies that often weaken the discipline in the name of sweeping but shallow interdisciplinarity. Social theory, political theory, political economy, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science are among the fields that temptingly promise a more worldly discourse but whose own disciplinary complexity, traditions, methods, protocols, and debates are easily bypassed by literary scholars in search of usable axioms and theorems. Kramnick wants to wind the discussion centripetally back from the wide arc of interdisciplinarity to the specificity of the discipline of literary studies. The article seems torn, though, between a polemic against influential theorists of literary studies who do not in Kramnick’s eyes understand method at all and, on the other hand, an emphatically antipolemical intent to identify the common denominator that gathers all us practitioners of literary studies together within a distinct, unique, and justifiable discipline. The common

Narrative, 2016

A century after Georg Lukács launched literary theory as we know it with the publication of The T... more A century after Georg Lukács launched literary theory as we know it with the publication of The Theory of the Novel, that work remains a vital resource for novel theory. Lukács’s famed thesis that the novel is “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” establishes the intimate relation of the novel and nihilism. What is at stake in this relation is intensified by Nietzsche’s suggestion that reality does not take the form of a world except under the watchful eye of a monotheistic God and by the multiple and contradictory meanings of nihilism itself in modern thought. These issues are explored by examining Lukács’s twofold conception of the novel’s “problematic individual” and “contingent reality” and transposing those terms into the question of the “essence of singularity” (Philip Roth) manifest in the creation of novelistic protagonists and the “ordeal of universalism” into which novelists themselves plunge by venturing their creation in the public sphere.

Narrative, 2002

ABSTRACT Narrative 10.2 (2002) 186-192 Is there a "space that 'politics'... more ABSTRACT Narrative 10.2 (2002) 186-192 Is there a "space that 'politics' makes unthinkable, the space outside the frame within which 'politics' appears and thus outside the conflicting visions that share as their presupposition that the 'body politic' must survive" ("Post-Partum" 181)? What is that space? What would it mean to embrace or assume or embody the prevailing figuration of that space in order to disturb or refuse the political realm as such? Having reflected on Lee Edelman's carefully argued response to my criticism of "The Future Is Kid Stuff," I think that the salient issues of contention between us lie in our respective responses to these questions. There are indeed spaces outside the political realm. The form they take varies according to the nature of the political order. In Eastern Europe under communist rule, for example, there emerged a significant refusal of politics. The Hungarian writer George Konrad called it "anti-politics." Communist states, particularly after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the suppression of Solidarity in Poland, denied all avenues for citizens to organize or express themselves within the political sphere. Moreover, the mechanisms of one-party rule made every facet of life political by exerting control over intellectual and artistic life, public opinion, even individuals' choice of occupation and housing and their freedom of movement. The repression of conflict within the political realm went hand-in-hand with the omnipresent reach of politics into the nonpolitical realm. Citizens could counteract the omnipresence of the state, Konrad argued, only by refusing politics and devoting their minds and activities to whatever remaining spaces eluded the reach of the state (see Konrad's Anti-Politics). This withdrawal from politics was painful, precarious, and risky, but had unexpected political effects; the anti-political citizens contributed to the eventual collapse of Soviet-bloc communism by gradually, nearly invisibly, withholding the passive legitimation and motivation that the state had required of them to sustain itself. The communist state, which had wrapped itself from the beginning in the mythology of revolutionary futurism, did not survive. Decades of dissidence in the Soviet bloc helped resuscitate the concept of civil society for Western social critics, especially those in the Marxist tradition, who had in a sense come to take civil society for granted or merely equated it with "bourgeois" society. Stated negatively, "civil society" designated the realms of human activity Eastern Europeans could not freely pursue. How, then, to conceptualize civil society in Western democracies? I take my bearings from Claude Lefort, who took up this question in a framework relevant to the debate between Edelman and me. In modern societies, according to Lefort, the "social" is a field of continual "differentiation, internal opposition and change" (218). Divisions actively and perpetually volatilize all social relations. These social divisions include, first, class divisions (which, contrary to Marx's theorization and expectations, do not distill themselves into an antagonistic polarity between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) and, second, the broader plurality of often-conflicting initiatives undertaken by individuals, communities, and associations pursuing their economic or cultural aims. Just as important as these two aspects of social division is a third: "the differentiation of economic, legal, educational, scientific, aesthetic and other practices, which exist, not simply as given practices (in the pores of society to use the Marxist metaphor), but as practices in which the reality of the social as such is put into play." These various social discourses do not conform to the traditional notion of ideology. First, each social discourse is "concerned to claim a universal truth," but because it is a particular discourse differentiated from the others it cannot lay claim to a knowledge of the social order as a whole. Second, each discourse, as knowledge, exercises power in the social world, but at the same time, as discourse, is susceptible to being contested on account of its tie to some particular force within the general social division; there is an "oscillation . . . between the discourse of power and the power of discourse" that "contains the possibility of a disjunction between power and discourse." Lefort concludes, "in its very deployment each discourse forms a relation to knowledge, the limits...