Jerome J. McGann
         The Cantosof Ezra Pound, the Truth in Contradiction
         … [T]he scandals surrounding the work of these men are as nothing
            compared to the scandal of Ezra Pound's Cantos.We are amused
            to think that anyone ever felt Byron might have been mad, bad, and
            dangerous to know. We are not amused by the Cantos. Like
            Pound's letters and so much of his prose, the Cantos is
            difficult to like or enjoy. It is a paradigm of poetic obscurity
            because its often cryptic style is married to materials which are
            abstruse, learned, even pedantic. The poem also makes a mockery of
            poetic form; and then there are those vulgar and bathetic sinking
            which it repeatedly indulges through its macaronic turns of voice.
            All that is scandalous, but the worst has not been said. For the
            Cantosis a fascist epic in a precise historical sense.1 Its racism
            and anti-Semitism are conceived and pursued in social and political
            terms at a particular point in time and with reference to certain
            state policies. Those policies led to a holocaust for which the
            murder of six million Jews would be the ultimate exponent. That is
            truly scandalous
            For anyone convinced that works of imagination are important to
            human life, however, the scandal takes a last, cruel twist.
            Pound's magnum opus is one of the greatest achievements of
            modern poetry in any language. That is more a shocking than a
            controversial idea. It shocks because it is outrageous to think so;
            but it is in fact a commonplace judgment passed on the poem by
            nearly every major writer and poet of this century. The greatness
            of the Cantoswas an apparent to Pound's contemporaries as it
            has been to his inheritors, to his enemies as to his friends, to
            those who have sympathized with Pound's ideas and to those
            who have fought against them.
             
            1. See John Lauber, "Pound's Cantos: A Fascist
            Epic," Journal of American Studies12 (1978): 3-21; Victor C.
            Ferkiss, "Ezra Pound and American Fascism," Journal of
            Politics 17 (May 1955): 173-97.
             
            Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University
            of Virginia. This essay was originally one of the Clark Lectures
            delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently one of
            the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago.
Terry Castle
         Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern
            Reverie
         In what follows I would like to uncover part of this history [of
            the phantasmagoria], not just as an exercise in romantic etymology
            (or for the sake of a certain Carlylean local color) but as a way
            of approaching a larger topic, namely, the history of the
            imagination. For since its invention, the term phantasmagoria,like
            one of Freud's ambiguous primary words, has shifted meaning
            in an interesting way. From an initial connection with something
            external and public (an artificially produced
            "spectral" illusion), the word has now come to refer to
            something wholly internal or subjective: the phantasmic imagery of
            the mind. This metaphoric shift bespeaks, I think, a very
            significant transformation in human consciousness over the past two
            centuries what I shall call here the spectralization or
            "ghostifying" of mental space. By spectralization
            (another nonce word!) I mean simply the absorption of ghosts into
            the world of thought. Even as we have come to discount the spirit-
            world of our ancestors and to equate seeing ghosts and apparitions
            with having "too much" imagination, we have also come
            increasingly to believe, as if through a kind of epistemological
            recoil, in the spectral nature of our own thoughts to figure
            imaginative activity itself, paradoxically, as a kind of ghost-
            seeing. Thus in everyday conversation we affirm that our brains are
            filled with ghostly shapes and images, that we "see"
            figures and scenes in our minds, that we are "haunted"
            by our thoughts, that our thoughts can, as it were, materialize
            before us, like phantoms, in moments of hallucinations, waking
            dream, or reverie.
             
            Terry Castle,associate professor of English at Stanford University,
            is the author of two books: Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and
            Disruption in Richardson's "Clarissa"(1982) and
            Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in 18th-Century
            English Culture and Fiction (1986). She is currently working on a
            study of the literature and psychology of apparitions in the
            eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entitled "Spectropia:
            Ghost-Seeing and the Modern Imagination."
Naomi Scheman
         Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of Women
         Connecting the issues of the female gaze and of the female
            narrative is the issue of desire. As [Stanley] Cavell repeatedly
            stresses, a central theme of these films is the heroine's
            acknowledgment of her desire of its true object frequently
            the man from whom she mistakenly thought she needed to be divorced.
            The heroine's acknowledgment of her desire, and of herself as
            a subject of desire, is for Cavell what principally makes a
            marriage of equality achievable. It is in this achievement (or the
            creation of the grounds for the hope of it) that Cavell wants to
            locate the feminism of the genre: it is the "comedy of
            equality" (PH,p. 82). There is, therefore, an obvious
            explanation in Cavell's terms for the anomalous nature of
            these films: if their vision is explicitly feminist in embracing an
            ideal of equality, in approvingly foregrounding female desire, and
            in characterizing that desire as active and as actively gazing,
            then they would not be expected to fit an analysis based on films
            whose view of female desire and the female gaze is passive, absent,
            or treacherous. If we accept Cavell's readings, these films
            provide genuine counterexamples to feminist claims of the normative
            masculinity of film (in general or in Hollywood).
            My affection for these films, and the ways in which Cavell accounts
            for that affection, leads me to want to believe that his account,
            or something like it, is true: that there did briefly emerge a
            distinctively feminist sensibility in some popular Hollywood
            movies, one which unsurprisingly succumbed to the repressive
            redomestication of women in the postwar years. But, for a number of
            reasons, I can't quite believe it. Some version of the
            feminist critical theory of popular cinema does, in an odd way,
            apply to these movies: they are, to use a frequent phrase of
            Cavell's, the exceptions that prove the rule. Though they do
            have some claim to being considered feminist, their feminism is
            seriously qualified by the terms in which it is presented, by the
            ways in which female desire and the female gaze are framed.
             
            Naomi Scheman is associate professor of philosophy and
            women's studies at the University of Minnesota. She is
            currently working on the roles played by bodies and by differences
            in modern and feminist postmodern accounts of knowledge.
Henri Meschonnic
         Rhyme and Life
         Poetry turns everything into life. It is that form of life that
            turns everything into language. It does not come to us unless
            language itself has become a form of life. That is why it is so
            unquiet. For it does not cease to work on us. To be the dream of
            which we are the sleep. A listening, awakening that passes through
            us, the rhythm that knows us and that we do not know. It is the
            organization in language of what has always been said to escape
            language: life, the movement no word is supposed to be able to say.
            And in effect words do not say it. That is why poetry is a meaning
            of time more than the meaning of words. Even when its course is
            ample, it is contained in what passes from us through words. It
            does not have the time of glaciers and ferns. It tells about a time
            of life. Through everything that it names. Even its haste
            transforms. Since it is a listening that compels a listening.
            But traditionally poetry suffers from the effect of the separation
            between the order of language and the order or disorder of life. It
            is that the order in which the thought of language is found is an
            order against chaos. The fabulous is not found in chaos. It is
            found in order. A mythic thought about language is charged with the
            maintaining of order. Thus there is an impassable barrier between
            poetry in terms of life and language in terms of the forms of
            poetry. Its meters and its rhymes. That is what we have to think
            about. Through and for poetry, language, life. Against sentimental
            poetizations of poetry and of life. As much as against
            formalizations.
             
            Henri Meschonnic is professor of linguistics at the University of
            Paris VIII at Vincennes. His penultimate book of poems,
            Voyageurs de la voix (1985), was awarded the Prix Mallarmé. His
            other books include Critique du rythme, anthropologie historique du
            langage (1982) and Modernité, modernité(1988). Gabriella
            Bedetti,associate professor of English at Eastern Kentucy
            University, is completing A Meschonnic Reader.
Zhang Longxi
         The Myth of the Other: China in the_Eyes_of_the_West
         For the West … China as a land in the Far East becomes
            traditionally the image of the ultimate Other. What Foucault does
            in his writing is, of course, not so much to endorse this image as
            to show, in the light of the Other, how knowledge is always
            conditioned in a certain system, and how difficult it is to get out
            of the confinement of the historical a priori, the epistemes or the
            fundamental codes of Western culture. And yet he takes the Borges
            passage seriously and remarks on its apparent incongruity with what
            is usually conceived about China in the Western tradition. If we
            are to find any modification of the traditional image of China in
            Foucault's thought, it is then the association of China not
            with an ordered space but with a space without any conceivable
            arrangement or coherence, a space that makes any logical ordering
            utterly unthinkable. Significantly, Foucault does not give so much
            as a hint to suggest that the hilarious passage from that
            "Chinese encyclopaedia" may have been made up to
            represent a Western fantasy of the Other, and that the illogical
            way of sorting out animals in that passage an be as alien to the
            Chinese mind as it is to the Western mind.
            In fact, the monstrous unreason and its alarming subversion of
            Western thinking, the unfamiliar and alien space of China as the
            image of the Other threatening to break up ordered surfaces and
            logical categories, all turn out to be, in the most literal sense,
            a Western fiction. Nevertheless, that fiction serves a purpose in
            Foucault's thought, namely, the necessity of setting up a
            framework for his archaeology of knowledge, enabling him to
            differentiate the self from what is alien and pertaining to the
            Other and to map out the contours of Western culture recognizable
            as a self-contained system. Indeed, what can be a better sign of
            the Other than a fictionalized space of China? What can furnish the
            West with a better reservoir for its dreams, fantasies, and
            utopias?
             
            Zhang Longxi,author of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century
            Theories of Literature (1986), is currently writing a dissertation
            in comparative literature at Harvard University. His previous
            contribution to  is "The Tao and the Logos:
            Notes on Derrida's Critique of Logocentrism" (March
            1985).
David Stern
         Midrash and Indeterminacy
         Literary theory, newly conscious of its own historicism, has
            recently turned its attention to the history of interpretation. For
            midrash, this attention has arrived none too soon. The activity of
            Biblical interpretation as practiced by the sages of early Rabbinic
            Judaism in late antiquity, midrash has long been known to Western
            scholars, but mainly as either an exegetical curiosity or a source
            to be mined for facts about the Jewish background of early
            Christianity. The perspective of literary theory has placed midrash
            in a decidedly new light. The very nature of midrash (as recorded
            in the Talmud as well as in the more typical midrashic collections)
            has now come to epitomize precisely that order of literary
            discourse to which much critical writing has recently aspired, a
            discourse that avoids the dichotomized opposition of literature
            versus commentary and instead resides in the dense shuttle space
            between text and interpreter. In the hermeneutical techniques of
            midrash, critics have found especially attractive the sense of
            interpretation as play rather than as explication, the use of
            commentary as a means of extending a text's meanings rather
            than as a mere forum for the arbitration of original authorial
            intention. Some theoreticians have gone so far as to invoke midrash
            as a precursor, in a spiritual if not a historical sense, to more
            recent post-structuralist literary theory, in particular to
            deconstruction with its critique of logocentrism and the
            metaphysics of presence
             
            David Stern is assistant professor of medieval Hebrew literature in
            the department of Oriental Studies at the University of
            Pennsylvania. He is the author of Parables in Midrash: The
            Intersection of Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature
            (forthcoming) and coauthor, with Mark Jay Mirsky, of Rabbinic
            Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical and Medieval
            Hebrew Literature (forthcoming).
Susan Stewart
         The Marquis de Meese
         The pornography debate occupies a prominent site of apparent
            contradiction in contemporary culture: a site where the interests
            of cultural feminism merge with those of the far Right, where an
            underground enterprise becomes a major growth industry, and where
            forms of speculation turn alarmingly practical. Another more
            problematic confluence occurs as a result of this debate. That is,
            by juxtaposing the 1986 Final Report of the Attorney
            General's Commission on Pornography (known informally as the
            Meese Commission's Report) and the Marquis de Sade's
            120 Days of Sodom,we will see how pornography and the public
            discourse on pornography share the same comparative logic. An
            examination of such a logic shows how the pleasures of
            comparison its gestures toward control, limit, and
            transcendence are always balanced by its failures, even
            tragedies: the realization of the situated nature of all
            measurement, juxtaposition, subordination, and hierarchization.
            Thus this essay is designed to both discuss and illustrate a series
            of issues implicit in pornography's predicament: the
            impossibility of describing desire without generating desire; the
            impossibility of separating form and content within the process of
            sublimation; and, most important, the impossibility of constructing
            a metadiscourse on pornography once we recognize the interested
            nature of all discursive practices. We cannot transcend the
            pornography debate, for we are in it. But by writing through it, by
            examining its assumptions, we can learn a great deal about the
            problems of representing desire and the concomitant problems of a
            cultural desire for unmediated forms of representation.
             
            Susan Stewart,whose most recent contribution to 
            was "Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-
            linguistics" (December 1983), is the author of two books of
            literary theory, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore
            and Literature(1979) and On Longing: Narrative of the Miniature,
            the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984), and two books of
            poetry, Yellow Stars and Ice (1981) and The Hive (1987). She is
            finishing a book on "crimes of writing," of which this
            essay is a part, and a study of the five senses.
