Stanley Corngold | Princeton University (original) (raw)
Papers by Stanley Corngold
boundary 2, 1976
The effect upon poetics of Sein und Zeit during the fifty years of its history now has a history ... more The effect upon poetics of Sein und Zeit during the fifty years of its history now has a history of its own. Explicit references to literature in Sein und Zeit are in fact very few. For this reason Beda Allemann speaks of an "essential absence of connection between Sein und Zeit and the ...
Books abroad, 1974
An academic directory and search engine.
South Atlantic Review, Sep 1, 1990
German Studies Review, Feb 1, 1979
Comparative Literature, 1989
Stanford University Press eBooks, 2000
The German Quarterly, 1996
transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2021
In this chapter Stanley Corngold is dedicated to the question of Kafka's employment of hermen... more In this chapter Stanley Corngold is dedicated to the question of Kafka's employment of hermeneutics. Kafka dramatizes hermeneutic process; in Kafka, hermeneutic process does not function as a method for producing genuine knowledge. At the same time, such interpretation is necessary, even as an act of desperation. Corngold studies dramatized hermeneutics in Die Verwandlung, Der Process, »In der Strafkolonie,« and Das Schloss. In each instance, a successful interpretation does not take place, let alone, to cite Thomas Mann's Joseph, der Ernährer, as proof of the goodness of the hermeneut who produces a pious outcome.
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Mar 1, 1996
In his response to the 1987 English Coalition conference, Peter Elbow writes," It's abo... more In his response to the 1987 English Coalition conference, Peter Elbow writes," It's about time we finally don't know what we are"(What Is English?[New York: MLA, 1990] v). For many beleaguered humanists this statement is almost a battle cry for the miasma and apparent relativism that they believe has been eroding, like acid rain, the edifice of this still-new discipline. Assembling a composite definition of the discipline as bricolage, which many would find annoyingly undisciplined, Elbow goes on to make the coy suggestion that" the ...
Cornell University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2018
Kafka's Context Graf. .. defends the literary historians, who bring us the "day's residue," as it... more Kafka's Context Graf. .. defends the literary historians, who bring us the "day's residue," as it were. Sadger's question as to how one can explain the poet's psyche from his works, which are distorted, is settled by the answer that science is not meant to explain anything but rather to give descriptions which leave no gaps. Minutes, Meeting 33, Psychoanalytical Society, 1907 The task of defining literary history in a sufficiently distinctive way becomes on reflection curiously difficult; for, as its degree of definiin bias can be said to produce literary historical miniatures. Indeed, very few formalist interpreters would deny the historical reference in their narratives in the sense of the political power at work in their own critical rhetoric, and so writing's delay (as between style and referent) seems always susceptible to relay, to reference. Converse ly, not all kinds of literary history writing are (in principle) so deliberately antiformal ist: a literary history might proceed immanently with respect to works of art, texts of style. Wellek and Warren agonize over this point. Their concern is to conceptualize a literary history that will not reify the literary phenomenon as an empirical fact and submit it to the power of sequences elaborated by "political, social, artistic and intel lectual" historians. Therefore, they write, "our starting point must be the develop ment of literature as literature .... [The] history [of a period] can be written only with reference to a scheme of values [that] has to be abstracted from history itself .... A period is not a type or class but a time section defined by a system of norms embedded in the historical process and irremovable from it" (TL 264-65). But this distinction is unclear. First problem: to what extent can "a scheme of values" be abstracted from "the historical process" and yet be exhibited as embedded in it and irremovable from it? Abstraction requires the mediation by concepts extrinsic to the matrix, the bed. Second, what precisely constitutes the bed? The answer for Wellek and Warren is individual literary works, but how does a group of works constitute a "historical process"? In this instance the historical process could refer only to the concrete differences between one work and another, but to identify differences does not constitute a process, which requires a theory of change, and this motive will not be found inside literary works. Later, in discussing the Russian formalist's historical venture of explaining changes in convention, Wellek and Warren write: "Why this change of convention has come about at a particular moment is a historical problem insoluble in general terms .... Literary change is a complex process, partly internal ... but also partly external, caused by social, intellectual and all other cultural changes" (TL 266; my italics). We have returned to a poetics essentially shared by Gustave Lanson and, let us say, Ernst Robert Curtius and Rudolf Unger and Erich Auerbach. See in this connection Paul de Man's "Modern Poetics," in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972) , pp. 518-20: "Social, intellectual and political history play a large part" in the works of Lanson; and like him, the German authors mentioned above "all start from the literary work as an unquestionable empirical fact." * * * Kafka's critique of antithesis, of the antithetical logic of literary history, has more restrictive consequences. About "antitheses" Kafka wrote, "My repugnance for [them] is certain .... They make for thoroughness, fullness, completeness, but only like a figure on the 'wheel of life' [a toy with a revolving wheel]; we have chased our little idea around the circle. They [antitheses] are as undifferentiated as they are different" (DI 157). Kafka's repugnance for antitheses at once undifferentiated and different impugns the procedure of literary history, for the opposition that literary historical language will go on
The German Quarterly, 2009
Bridgham, Fred, ed. The First World War as a Clash of Cultures. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. 33... more Bridgham, Fred, ed. The First World War as a Clash of Cultures. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. 334 pp. $80.00 hardcover. This volume consists of ten stylish and informative essays of varying scope and depth on a period of great, if poisonous, cultural ferment, carefully edited by Fred Bridgham. The title indicates the polemical direction of the book. We have heard of the First World War as driven by competing economic interests and again as a sort of "Betriebsunfall" in a mechanical process arising from "an unbroken [German] conservative and nationalist tradition" (1-2). The view of this book on the Great War is different and amounts to an exponential heightening of the power of culture (and of the work that cultural studies can do), for here the war is seen as a "Kulturkampf." The subject of these essays is less the cultural memory of this historical catastrophe than the culture of war mongering, the literature of antagonism that sounded the drumbeat accompanying the entry of Great Britain and Germany into a war of mutual destruction. The long, learned introductory essay by Bridgham is as fair-minded as it is dense with detail. The convolutions of relationship in paragraphs that contain the names of a dozen different authors and books can make for strenuous guesswork - or surprise. But out of (occasional) gneiss one plucks the flower illumination, viz. a keener understanding of the twists and turns of minds bent on justifying a rival's destruction, especially marked by the drumbeat of German fury, based on its alleged ?Ian vital, at an unmerited English claim of national superiority. The authors gathered together in this volume are UK Germanists of distinction. Iain Boyd Whyte contributes a capacious piece on "Anglo-German Conflict in Popular Fiction 1870-1914," quoting H.G. Wells in 1914, who offers an implicit justification of this book's project: "All the realities of this war are things of the mind. This is a conflict of cultures and nothing else in the world" (44). Whyte 's essay discusses, as a typical case, the wavering views of Ford Madox Ford (Huef fer), eminent author of The Good Soldier: passionately pro-German in 191 1 and fiercely critical in 1915. As Whyte and several of the other contributors show, a good deal of German war propaganda attempted to distinguish between an "authentic" England, "which we love and have learnt to admire," and the new nation of petty Handler stigmatized by Werner Sombart. Here, Whyte points up the knee-jerk, dismal "link between English capitalism and Jewishness [as] a recurring feature in anti-English propaganda in Germany" (87). Another sort of fiction evokes cross-Channel marriage as the solution to the conflict; a fine exemplar is supplied rightly - and surprisingly - by E. M. Forster's Howard's End (though it is somewhat early, published in 1910). In the end, White concludes that of the two types of popular novel he considers, "the invasion novels actually encouraged the war psychosis on both sides of the Channel, " whereas "there is little evidence that the novels of reconciliation [through marriage] had any effect as an antidote" (93). Helena Ragg-Kirkby's sprightly piece "Perversion and Pestilence: D. H. Lawrence and the Germans" gives usa predictable view of Lawrence's ambivalence, married as he was to the cousin of the German ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen. …
A comparative history of literatures in European languages, 2007
Bookkeeping in the Modernist Novel STANLEY CORNGOLD Princeton University and Columbia University ... more Bookkeeping in the Modernist Novel STANLEY CORNGOLD Princeton University and Columbia University As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; Hart Crane," The Bridge"([1986], 43) " Art should have no more sex than mathematics," wrote ...
boundary 2, 1976
The effect upon poetics of Sein und Zeit during the fifty years of its history now has a history ... more The effect upon poetics of Sein und Zeit during the fifty years of its history now has a history of its own. Explicit references to literature in Sein und Zeit are in fact very few. For this reason Beda Allemann speaks of an "essential absence of connection between Sein und Zeit and the ...
Books abroad, 1974
An academic directory and search engine.
South Atlantic Review, Sep 1, 1990
German Studies Review, Feb 1, 1979
Comparative Literature, 1989
Stanford University Press eBooks, 2000
The German Quarterly, 1996
transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2021
In this chapter Stanley Corngold is dedicated to the question of Kafka's employment of hermen... more In this chapter Stanley Corngold is dedicated to the question of Kafka's employment of hermeneutics. Kafka dramatizes hermeneutic process; in Kafka, hermeneutic process does not function as a method for producing genuine knowledge. At the same time, such interpretation is necessary, even as an act of desperation. Corngold studies dramatized hermeneutics in Die Verwandlung, Der Process, »In der Strafkolonie,« and Das Schloss. In each instance, a successful interpretation does not take place, let alone, to cite Thomas Mann's Joseph, der Ernährer, as proof of the goodness of the hermeneut who produces a pious outcome.
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Mar 1, 1996
In his response to the 1987 English Coalition conference, Peter Elbow writes," It's abo... more In his response to the 1987 English Coalition conference, Peter Elbow writes," It's about time we finally don't know what we are"(What Is English?[New York: MLA, 1990] v). For many beleaguered humanists this statement is almost a battle cry for the miasma and apparent relativism that they believe has been eroding, like acid rain, the edifice of this still-new discipline. Assembling a composite definition of the discipline as bricolage, which many would find annoyingly undisciplined, Elbow goes on to make the coy suggestion that" the ...
Cornell University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2018
Kafka's Context Graf. .. defends the literary historians, who bring us the "day's residue," as it... more Kafka's Context Graf. .. defends the literary historians, who bring us the "day's residue," as it were. Sadger's question as to how one can explain the poet's psyche from his works, which are distorted, is settled by the answer that science is not meant to explain anything but rather to give descriptions which leave no gaps. Minutes, Meeting 33, Psychoanalytical Society, 1907 The task of defining literary history in a sufficiently distinctive way becomes on reflection curiously difficult; for, as its degree of definiin bias can be said to produce literary historical miniatures. Indeed, very few formalist interpreters would deny the historical reference in their narratives in the sense of the political power at work in their own critical rhetoric, and so writing's delay (as between style and referent) seems always susceptible to relay, to reference. Converse ly, not all kinds of literary history writing are (in principle) so deliberately antiformal ist: a literary history might proceed immanently with respect to works of art, texts of style. Wellek and Warren agonize over this point. Their concern is to conceptualize a literary history that will not reify the literary phenomenon as an empirical fact and submit it to the power of sequences elaborated by "political, social, artistic and intel lectual" historians. Therefore, they write, "our starting point must be the develop ment of literature as literature .... [The] history [of a period] can be written only with reference to a scheme of values [that] has to be abstracted from history itself .... A period is not a type or class but a time section defined by a system of norms embedded in the historical process and irremovable from it" (TL 264-65). But this distinction is unclear. First problem: to what extent can "a scheme of values" be abstracted from "the historical process" and yet be exhibited as embedded in it and irremovable from it? Abstraction requires the mediation by concepts extrinsic to the matrix, the bed. Second, what precisely constitutes the bed? The answer for Wellek and Warren is individual literary works, but how does a group of works constitute a "historical process"? In this instance the historical process could refer only to the concrete differences between one work and another, but to identify differences does not constitute a process, which requires a theory of change, and this motive will not be found inside literary works. Later, in discussing the Russian formalist's historical venture of explaining changes in convention, Wellek and Warren write: "Why this change of convention has come about at a particular moment is a historical problem insoluble in general terms .... Literary change is a complex process, partly internal ... but also partly external, caused by social, intellectual and all other cultural changes" (TL 266; my italics). We have returned to a poetics essentially shared by Gustave Lanson and, let us say, Ernst Robert Curtius and Rudolf Unger and Erich Auerbach. See in this connection Paul de Man's "Modern Poetics," in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972) , pp. 518-20: "Social, intellectual and political history play a large part" in the works of Lanson; and like him, the German authors mentioned above "all start from the literary work as an unquestionable empirical fact." * * * Kafka's critique of antithesis, of the antithetical logic of literary history, has more restrictive consequences. About "antitheses" Kafka wrote, "My repugnance for [them] is certain .... They make for thoroughness, fullness, completeness, but only like a figure on the 'wheel of life' [a toy with a revolving wheel]; we have chased our little idea around the circle. They [antitheses] are as undifferentiated as they are different" (DI 157). Kafka's repugnance for antitheses at once undifferentiated and different impugns the procedure of literary history, for the opposition that literary historical language will go on
The German Quarterly, 2009
Bridgham, Fred, ed. The First World War as a Clash of Cultures. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. 33... more Bridgham, Fred, ed. The First World War as a Clash of Cultures. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. 334 pp. $80.00 hardcover. This volume consists of ten stylish and informative essays of varying scope and depth on a period of great, if poisonous, cultural ferment, carefully edited by Fred Bridgham. The title indicates the polemical direction of the book. We have heard of the First World War as driven by competing economic interests and again as a sort of "Betriebsunfall" in a mechanical process arising from "an unbroken [German] conservative and nationalist tradition" (1-2). The view of this book on the Great War is different and amounts to an exponential heightening of the power of culture (and of the work that cultural studies can do), for here the war is seen as a "Kulturkampf." The subject of these essays is less the cultural memory of this historical catastrophe than the culture of war mongering, the literature of antagonism that sounded the drumbeat accompanying the entry of Great Britain and Germany into a war of mutual destruction. The long, learned introductory essay by Bridgham is as fair-minded as it is dense with detail. The convolutions of relationship in paragraphs that contain the names of a dozen different authors and books can make for strenuous guesswork - or surprise. But out of (occasional) gneiss one plucks the flower illumination, viz. a keener understanding of the twists and turns of minds bent on justifying a rival's destruction, especially marked by the drumbeat of German fury, based on its alleged ?Ian vital, at an unmerited English claim of national superiority. The authors gathered together in this volume are UK Germanists of distinction. Iain Boyd Whyte contributes a capacious piece on "Anglo-German Conflict in Popular Fiction 1870-1914," quoting H.G. Wells in 1914, who offers an implicit justification of this book's project: "All the realities of this war are things of the mind. This is a conflict of cultures and nothing else in the world" (44). Whyte 's essay discusses, as a typical case, the wavering views of Ford Madox Ford (Huef fer), eminent author of The Good Soldier: passionately pro-German in 191 1 and fiercely critical in 1915. As Whyte and several of the other contributors show, a good deal of German war propaganda attempted to distinguish between an "authentic" England, "which we love and have learnt to admire," and the new nation of petty Handler stigmatized by Werner Sombart. Here, Whyte points up the knee-jerk, dismal "link between English capitalism and Jewishness [as] a recurring feature in anti-English propaganda in Germany" (87). Another sort of fiction evokes cross-Channel marriage as the solution to the conflict; a fine exemplar is supplied rightly - and surprisingly - by E. M. Forster's Howard's End (though it is somewhat early, published in 1910). In the end, White concludes that of the two types of popular novel he considers, "the invasion novels actually encouraged the war psychosis on both sides of the Channel, " whereas "there is little evidence that the novels of reconciliation [through marriage] had any effect as an antidote" (93). Helena Ragg-Kirkby's sprightly piece "Perversion and Pestilence: D. H. Lawrence and the Germans" gives usa predictable view of Lawrence's ambivalence, married as he was to the cousin of the German ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen. …
A comparative history of literatures in European languages, 2007
Bookkeeping in the Modernist Novel STANLEY CORNGOLD Princeton University and Columbia University ... more Bookkeeping in the Modernist Novel STANLEY CORNGOLD Princeton University and Columbia University As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; Hart Crane," The Bridge"([1986], 43) " Art should have no more sex than mathematics," wrote ...
Kafka’s stories allude to his culture with a fullness that is astonishing when one considers thei... more Kafka’s stories allude to his culture with a fullness that is astonishing when one considers their economy of form. This work of allusion, a sort of movement through the cultural vehicles or media of his time, conforms to several logics. One such logic—the logic of risk insurance--comes from Kafka’s daytime preoccupation with accident insurance. Between 1908 and 1922, Kafka, a Doctor of Laws, rose to a high-ranking position at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Royal Imperial Kingdom of Austria-Hungary in Prague. Though ensconced in a semi-opaque bureaucracy, Kafka struggled to enforce compulsory universal accident insurance in the areas of construction, toy and textile manufacture, farms, and automobiles. Images from his work world, such as mutilation by machine, the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk, and the disappearance of the personal accident, penetrate “In the Penal Colony,” The Trial, and “The Metamorphosis.” An illustrated lecture will explore these images as they relate to the logic of risk insurance in Kafka’s literary practice.