Cheryl Herr
         The Erotics of Irishness
         Like all fields of inquiry, Irish studies has its own traditions,
            its own ways of organizing information. even the most adventurous
            of the native practitioners tend carefully to maintain disciplinary
            boundaries when presenting evidence to sustain a thesis, and
            American scholars have used Irish practice as their frame of
            reference. This essay, which engages with the time-honored and
            increasingly vexed enterprise of defining "Irishness,"
            introduces play into these traditions both in spirit and in
            methodology. An alternative approach to analyzing Ireland might
            foreground the underlying assumptions about social relations and
            historical patterns that link Irish art and writing across diverse
            fields of inquiry. Exploring the many rhetorics of Ireland might
            make it impossible, for example, for those involved in the
            essential task of historical and scientific inquiry to
            overlook the submessages of popular Irish representations.
            I begin, obliquely, with a contrast between American and Irish
            censorship of music videos. My inquiry targets some fundamental
            differences between American and Irish appropriations of the body,
            from which the essay suggests symmetries between the psychological
            development of individuals in Ireland and one stage in what might
            be termed the psychohistory of Irish culture. As an experimental,
            semidisruptive piece that challenges disciplinary lines in the
            field and introduces fresh theoretical categories, this essay
            reaches toward a new Irish studies.
             
            Cheryl Herr,associate professor of English at the University of
            Iowa, has published Joyce's Anatomy of Culture (1986) and For
            the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890-1925 (1990).
            Two of her current projects involve spatial organization in Ireland
            and the syntax of English modernism.
Arnold I. Davidson
         Introduction to Musil and Levinas
         During the last several years, we have witnessed a reopening of
            questions concerning National Socialism whose full scope and
            implications have yet to be determined. The Historikerstreit has
            provoked new discussions of the problem of the specificity or
            uniqueness of Auschwitz. While raising general methodological
            issues about the nature of historical explanation and
            understanding, the Historikerstreit has also revolved around
            specific questions concerning the role of moral concepts and memory
            in assessing National Socialism.1 Disclosures about Paul de
            Man's wartime writings and further examination of Martin
            Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism have led to
            broader consideration of the relations among philosophy, theory,
            and politics, and have forced us to rethink the problem of
            intellectual responsibility with renewed urgency.2 These and
            related topics were at the center of a major international
            conference, "Nazism and the Final Solution," organized
            by Saul Friedlånder last April, which took as its organizing theme
            the limits of ethical, aesthetic, and historical representation of
            the Final Solution.3
            In light of these continuing discussions, we are publishing two
            remarkable essays written during the early years of National
            Socialism. To the often-posed challenge, how could one be expected
            to respond lucidly to Nazism in the early 1930s?, these essays by
            Robert Musil and Emmanuel Levinas constitute, by the sheer power of
            their insights, decisive answers. Although significantly different
            in approach, these essays show not only that one could recognize
            the reality of National Socialism as it was coming to power, but
            indicate further that analyses of permanent value could be
            formulated virtually from the beginning. Musil and Levinas serve to
            remind us concretely of the capabilities of the human mind and of
            its responsibilities capabilities and responsibilities that
            even the most severe political circumstances need not overwhelm.
             
            1. For documents from and discussion of the Historikstreit,see the
            special issue of New German Critique44 (Spring/Summer 1988).
            2. On Paul de Man, see  14 (Spring 1988): 590-652,
            and  15 (Summer 1989): 704-44, 764-873. On Martin
            Heidegger, see  15 (Winter 1989): 407-88.
            3. The proceedings of this conference are forthcoming.
             
            Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of  and
            associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, is
            currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities
            Center.
Robert Musil
         Ruminations of a Slow-Witted Mind
         The orientation and leadership of the revolutionary "renewal
            of the German mind," whose witnesses and participants we are,
            point in two directions. On, after seizing power, would like to
            talk the mind into helping out with internal development and
            promises it a golden age if it joins up; indeed it even offers it
            the prospect of a certain voice in decision making. The other
            direction, on the contrary, attests its mistrust of the intellect
            by declaring that the revolutionary process will continue
            indefinitely, and (especially in the short run) has room for the
            mind in its task; or it might also assure the intellect that it is
            not needed at all because a new mind has already turned up, and
            that the old one might as well jump into the fire and either burn
            to ashes or purify itself into its elements. What has happened up
            to the moment these words are being written leaves no doubt that
            the second direction is on the march, the first its musical
            accompaniment. Nor can it be otherwise than that a Movement
            [National Socialism] that has manifested itself so powerfully
            demands above all that the intellect complete assimilate and
            subordinate itself to the Movement. But then again, it is possible
            that the intellect cannot do this without renouncing itself. Surely
            there must be some sort of boundary here, since nothing happens
            that is not contingent; so it is a good test for the intellect that
            today it has everywhere been saddled with a kind of kangaroo-court
            mentality that judges it not according to its own laws, but
            according to the law of the Movement.
             
            Robert Musil (1880-1942) made a decisive contribution to twentieth-
            century European literature. Among his works available in English
            are Young Törless, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author,and The Man
            Without Qualities.Burton Pike is professor of comparative
            literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New
            York. With Sophie Wilkins, he has edited and translated a new
            edition of Musil's novel The Man without Qualities,available
            in 199. He is the author of Robert Musil: An Introduction to His
            Work (1972) and The Image of the City in Modern Literature(1981).
            David S. Luftteaches modern European intellectual history at the
            University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Robert
            Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880-1912 (1980).
Emmanuel Levinas
         Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism
         The philosophy of Hitler is simplistic [primaire]. But the
            primitive powers that burn within it burst open its wretched
            phraseology under the pressure of an elementary force. They awaken
            the secret nostalgia within the German soul. Hitlerism is more than
            a contagion or a madness; it is an awakening of elementary
            feelings.
            But from this point on, this frighteningly dangerous phenomenon
            becomes philosophically interesting. For these elementary feelings
            harbor a philosophy. They express a soul's principal attitude
            towards the whole of reality and its own destiny. They predetermine
            or prefigure the meaning of the adventure that the soul will face
            in the world.
            The philosophy of Hitlerism therefore goes beyond the philosophy of
            Hitlerians. It questions the very principles of a civilization. The
            conflict is played out not only between liberalism and Hitlerism.
            Christianity itself is threatened in spite of the careful
            attentions or Concordats that the Christian churches took advantage
            of when Hitler's regime came to power.
            But it is not enough to follow certain journalists in
            distinguishing between Christian universalism and racist
            particularism: a logical contradiction cannot judge a concrete
            event. The meaning of a logical contradiction that opposes two
            forms of ideas only shows up fully if we go back to their source,
            to intuition, to the original decision that makes them possible. It
            is in this spirit that we are going to set forth the following
            reflections.
             
            Emmanuel Levinashas been professor of philosophy at the Ecole
            Normale Superieure Israelite de Paris and at the University of
            Paris I (Sorbonne). Among his books that have been translated into
            English are Totality and Infinity, Ethics and Infinity, Otherwise
            Than Being or Beyond Essence, and The Levinas Reader. His essay "As
            If Consenting to Horror" appeared in the Winter 1989 issue of
            . Sean Hand is lecturer in French at the University
            College of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the editor of The Levinas
            Reader (1989) and the translator of Levinas's Difficult Freedom
            (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book on Michel Leiris.
Michael Camille
         The Très Riches Heures:An Illuminated Manscript in the_Age_of
            Mechanical Reproduction
         This new nonexistence of the Très Riches Heures is, I would argue,
            crucial to the existence of its replications. It is essential for
            each numbered copy of the limited facsimile edition that the
            original manuscript not be available for all to see. Most art
            historians, no matter how "contextual" or theoretical, would still
            emphasize the necessity of looking at the objects they study with
            that oddly singular, egocentrically well-trained "eye"/I. Left,
            however, with only the piles of reproductions I am forced to ask
            myself and my students not what is the Très Riches Heures (a
            nonentity hidden somewhere in a museum vault) but what are the
            books, pamphlets, postcards, facsimiles, and the laser discs that
            scholars working on the manuscript at Chantilly are now shown
            instead of the original? The manuscript now has the status of one
            of those hypothetical "lost prototypes," beloved of scholars of
            manuscript illumination, that can only be seen refracted in its
            subsequent copies. Just as hypothesizing on the influence of early
            medieval "lost models" on existing works has always seemed to me a
            futile approach to medieval book painting, and preferring to view
            every manuscript as an object in its own right, I am not concerned
            with the lost and now forever invisible Très Riches Heures itself
            but rather with the power of its many reproductions.
             
            Michael Camilleis associate professor of art history at the
            University of Chicago and the author of The Gothic Idol: Ideology
            and Image- Making in Medieval Art (1989). He is working on a study
            of medieval marginal images entitled Image on the Edge
            (forthcoming).
Jack Amariglio, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff
         Division and Difference in the "Discipline" of Economics
         The existence and unity of a discipline called economics reside in
            the eye and mind of the beholder. The perception of economics's
            unity and disciplinarity itself arises in some, but not all, of the
            different schools of thought that we would loosely categorize as
            economic. Indeed, as we hope to show, the presumption of unity and
            disciplinarity the idea that there is a center or
            "core" of propositions, procedures, and conclusions or
            a shared historical "object" of theory and
            practice is suggested in the concepts and methods of some
            schools of economic thought, but is opposed by others. Further, we
            argue that the portrayal of economics as a discipline with distinct
            boundaries is often a discursive strategy by one school or another
            to hegemonize the field of economic discourse. In this way, the
            issue of the existence of an economics discipline and its
            principles of unity or dispersion is in part a political question.
            Its effects are felt in the hiring and firing of economics
            professors and practitioners, the determination of what comprises
            an economics curriculum, the determination of what is a legitimate
            economic argument and what is not, the dispensation of public and
            private grant monies, and the differential entry into or exclusion
            from ideological, political, and economic centers of power and
            decision making.
            Our view is that no discipline of economics exists. Or, rather, no
            unified discipline exists. The "discipline" of
            economics is actually an agonistic and shifting field of
            fundamentally different and often conflicting discourses. The
            dispersion and divisions that exist between the schools of thought
            we discuss here as "economic" may have some
            regularities. But we do not see closer contiguity of these economic
            schools when placed on a horizontal scale than, to take just one
            example, among all of the many different "disciplinary" forms of
            Marxian thought. That is, in our view, Marxian economic thought
            shares more concepts, approaches, and methods may have more
            discursive regularity with Marxian literary theory than do
            Marxian economic thought and neoclassical economic theory.
             
            Jack Amarigliois associate professor of economics at Merrimack
            College and the editor of Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of
            Economics, Culture, and Society. He is working on a book entitled
            Modernism and Postmodernism in Economics with Arjo Klamer.Stephen
            ResnickandRichard Wolffare professors of economics at the
            University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Their recent coauthored books
            are Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy
            (1987) and Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical (1987).
Walter Frisch
         Music and Jugendstil
         The most common approach in writings on music and Jugendstil has
            been to isolate several aspects of the visual art, either of
            technique or of subject matter, and to seek parallels in music of
            the fin de siècle. Historians of art and design seem to agree on at
            least three basic elements of Jugendstil: the primacy of the
            dynamic, flowing line; flatness or two dimensionality (Jugendstil
            has been called a Flåchenkunst); and the profuseness of ornament.
            All these features are neatly embodied in a 1900 drawing by Theodor
            Heine (fig. 1), in which the ostensible subject matter, the dancing
            lady, is dissolved in the undulating linearity of her dress and the
            swirling smoke or incense. In this example, as in the celebrated
            "Cyclamen" tapestry by the Munich artist Hermann Obrist (fig. 2),
            line and ornament are largely liberated from their representational
            obligations and are manipulated in an almost abstract fashion. As
            Robert Schmutzler has remarked, the tapestry is "on the borderline
            dividing the symbol and the ornament, between abstract dynamism and
            the representation of a distinctive organism."4
            This aspect of Obrist's tapestry was realized as early as 1895 by
            the critic Georg Fuchs, who wrote in the journal Pan, "'These
            embroideries do not intend to "mean" anything, to say anything.'"
            Fuchs went on to describe the dynamic motion of the image in terms
            that have nothing to do with cyclamens per se: "'This racing
            movement seems like the abrupt, powerful convolution of the lash of
            a whip. One moment it appears as the image of a forceful outburst
            of natural elements; it is a lightning bolt. Another moment it
            resembles the defiant signature of a great man, a conqueror, an
            intellect who decrees new laws through new documents.''"5 Fuchs's
            metaphor of the whiplash or Peitschenhieb, has stuck; Obrist's
            tapestry is today known principally by that name.
             
            4. Robert Schmutzler, Art Nouveau (New York, 1962), p. 193.
            5. Georg Fuchs, quoted in Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The
            Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton, N.J., 1979), p. 33;
            hereafter abbreviated KM; translation modified.
             
            Walter Frisch is associate professor of music at Columbia
            University and author of Brahms and the Principle of Developing
            Variation (1984). He is presently completing a book on the early
            tonal works of Arnold Schoenberg.
Bruce F. Murphy
         The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the Politics_of_the_Other(s)
         The marginality of poetry in American culture has been taken for
            granted at least since the dawn of the modernist period, when Walt
            Whitman printed his first volume of poetry at his own expense. More
            recently, it has become an article of faith that there is a real
            popular audience for poetry, but somewhere else-in the East.
            Literary journals, the popular press, and publishers have made
            household names of a handful of Eastern European writers: Czeslaw
            Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert. One is regaled with
            chestnuts about ordinary people in the Eastern bloc who care about
            "the Word," manuscripts passed from hand to hand, even poems
            preserved orally. Inevitably, the questions are revived: Where are
            the great American poets? Has American poetry been reduced to
            private confessions and personal trivia? Why is it that our poetry
            lacks that public, political relevance? The answer to such
            questions is often that we do not have the weight of History on our
            backs, the state oppression under which, as Milosz says, "poetry is
            no longer alienated," no longer "a foreigner in society," and can
            become more important than bread.1 But what has not surfaced in the
            vaunted "poetry and politics" debate is the extent to which our
            homage to victims of censorship everywhere has become a
            fetishization of totalitarianism, and a self-serving one at that.
            The mythology of our freedom, unbounded and unmediated, depends
            precisely on this other world, on what happens over there.
             
            1. Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1983),
            p. 95; hereafter abbreviated WP.
             
            Bruce F. Murphy's work has appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod,
            and An Gael. He has completed a manuscript of poems and with
            Friedrich Ulfers is writing a study of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Lee Clark Mitchell
         Face, Race, and Disfiguration in Stephen Crane's "The_Monster"
         What does it mean to be black in America, to exist as a dark
            physical body, a "colored" voice, a stigmatized being in a society
            that sees, hears, and acts according to a set of bleaching
            assumptions? Versions of that question have echoed across our
            historical landscape ever since James-town, but rarely have they
            figured so forcibly as in the 1890s, when the Supreme Court upheld
            Ferguson over Plessy, Jim Crow laws spread through the South,
            degenerationists elaborated the "problem of the Negro,"
            imperialists hoisted the "white man's burden" of "little brown
            brothers" abroad, and racial lynching peaked at an all-time high
            that incited a national scandal. Any radical hopes for
            Reconstruction after the Civil War had long since vanished by the
            years of the fin de siècle. And a century later, the gains of a
            "Second Reconstruction" movement for civil rights have likewise
            eroded, with unparalleled "hypersegregation" accentuating new
            patterns of black poverty, unemployment, family disintegration,
            homelessness, and addiction.1 Being black, in other words, has
            meant and, to a considerable degree, continues to
            mean being excluded from white society, white prerogatives,
            even white discourse itself, in a process whose effects insidiously
            appear to legitimate the very causes that produce them.
             
            1. C. Vann Woodward first warned of this unsettling repetition of
            nineteenth-century patterns in his 1965 suggestion that the civil
            rights movement might constitute a "Second Reconstruction"
            (Woodward, "From the First Reconstruction to the Second," Harper's
            Magazine, Apr. 1965, pp. 127-33). In his recent reassessment of the
            troubling implications of that prediction, he notes how ghetto
            speech is growing more distinct from standard English: "The result
            is a vicious circle in which the longer blacks are made victims of
            the white stereotypes that foster hypersegregation, the more they
            appear to conform to the stereotypes that were used to justify
            segregation in the first place, and the deeper victims sink in
            isolation" (Woodward, "The Crisis of Caste," The New Republic, 6
            Nov. 1989, p. 44).
             
            Lee Clark Mitchell,professor of English at Princeton University, is
            the author of Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-
            Century Response (1981) and Determined Fictions: American Literary
            Naturalism (1989). He is currently working on the formula western
            in a book tentatively titled "Writing Westward: Imagining America
            beyond the Frontier."
Michael Fried
         Almayer's Face: On "Impressionism" in Conrad, Crane, and_Norris
         My basic supposition is that the destruction of the little Jew's
            face and hands in Vandover and the Brute images the irruption of
            mere (or brute) materiality within the scene of writing-that
            instead of Crane's double process of eliciting and repressing that
            materiality, what is figured in the shipwreck scene is a single,
            unstoppable process of materialization, involving both the act of
            representation (the beating of the helpless Jew) and the marking
            tool and actual page (the stump of the oar, the Jew's "white and
            writhing" face), the result of which can only be the defeat of the
            very possibility of writing (as embodied in the chilling phrase,
            "When his hands were gone").
            Here it might be objected that such a reading derives whatever
            plausibility it has from the comparison with Crane, and in a sense
            this is true: my claim is precisely that it's only against the
            background of Crane's seemingly bizarre but, in this regard,
            normative or centric enterprise that the wider problematic of late
            nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary "impressionism"
            can be made out. In another sense, however, the comparison with
            Crane involves an appeal to issues notably that of
            materialism which have long been basic to Norris criticism
            and which the recent work of Walter Benn Michaels has brought to a
            new level of conceptual sophistication and historical refinement.
            Specifically, the title essay in Michaels's book, The Gold Standard
            and the Logic of Naturalism, interprets both McTeague and Vandover
            and the Brute in terms of a conflict between materiality and
            representation that found contemporary expression both in the
            debates over the gold and silver standards versus paper money and
            in the vogue for trompe l'oeil painting (in which the objects that
            a given picture represents are as it were directly contrasted with
            the paint and canvas the picture is made of)." In this regard a
            crucial moment in Vandover's regression from man to beast is his
            discovery that, as a painter, he has lost the ability to represent
            nature three-dimensionally; Michaels treats this development as
            equivalent to "replac[ing] the painting with nature itself" (that
            is, with the shallowly three-dimensional canvas), and goes on to
            remark: "But this ... is ultimately a distinction without a
            difference. Vandover the artist can so easily devolve into Vandover
            the brute precisely because both artist and brute are already
            committed to a naturalist ontology in money, to precious
            metals; in art, to three-dimensionality. The moral of Vandover's
            regression, from this standpoint, is that it can only take place
            because . . . it has already taken place. Discovering that man is a
            brute, Norris repeats the discovery that paper money is just paper
            and that a painting of paper money is just paint" (GS, pp. 166-67).
            My reading of the shipwreck passage would thus be consistent with
            what Michaels calls Norris's "trompe l'oeil materialism" (GS, p.
            167), though the nearly sadomasochistic violence of that passage
            may be taken to imply that materialism's consequences for writing
            threaten to be even more disastrous than they are for painting. But
            rather than analyze the role of writing as such in Vandover, which
            would involve an intricate discussion not just of that novel and
            McTeague but also of Michaels's essay, I want to turn to another,
            lesser-known book by Norris, in which a thematic of writing plays a
            conspicuous and more nearly univocal role: A Man's Woman (1899).
             
            Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and
            director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University.
            His most recent book is Courbet's Realism (1990). He is currently
            at work on a book to be titled Manet's Modernism.
