Vicki Mahafffey
         The Case against Art: Wunderlich on Joyce
         Much has been written over the last decade on the urgency of
            expanding the canon, although the imperialist overtones of such a
            movement (which itself rallied under an anti-imperialist banner
            resisting the hegemony of white, male, Western writers) have not
            always been registered. A great deal of attention has pooled at the
            borders of the canon, as we aim to erode or extend those borders,
            but crucial assumptions about the privileged status of the subject
            matter that we as critics choose, whatever that subject matter may
            be, canonical or extracanonical,have not been questioned with
            comparable intensity. Although the hegemony of the subject and the
            concomitant transformation of the "other" into an
            object have been attacked theoretically from several different
            directions (deconstructive, feminist, Marxist), we nevertheless
            lack a widespread practical, professional awareness of the extent
            to which the status of what we "criticize" and teach
            silently reproduces a subject/object economy of privilege. In the
            pages that follow, my contribution to the case against the
            sacralized status of art (a case that several avant-garde modernist
            writers committed themselves to building) emerges out of the
            implicit dialogue that Paul Wunderlich initiates with James Joyce
            on the "subjects" of sexism, anti-Semitism, art, and
            politics, set against the background of the Holocaust. My target is
            neither Wunderlich nor Joyce nor is it any of the groups that
            they might be said to represent but the political
            implications of artistic privilege, a priveilege that criticism,
            even "resistant" criticism, may seek to redistribute
            but not to challenge. My aim is not to desecrate Joyce's
            authority nor to objectify him (from a subjective elevation of my
            own) as a stereotypical sexist or anti-Semite, but to deauthorize
            and rehumanize his monumental status by recontextualizing the
            grounds of his achievement, climbing down to (where all the ladders
            start," the "foul rag-and-bone shop" of
            vulnerability.
             
            Vicki Mahaffey,associate professor of English at the University of
            Pennsylvania, is the author of Reauthorizing Joyce (1988). She is
            currently working on a book about the politics of representation.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
         Masterpiece Theatre: An Academic Melodrama
         We'd like to do a little hypnosis on you. Imagine that
            you're ensconced in your own family room, your study, or your
            queen-sized bed. Settling back, you pick up the remote, flick on
            the TV, and naturally you turn to PBS. This is what you hear:
            Host 1:Good evening. Welcome to Masterpiece Theatre. Because
            Alistair Cooke is away on assignment in Alaska, we've agreed
            to host the show tonight, and that's both a pleasure and a
            privilege because our program this evening marks the beginning of a
            fascinating new series, a first on television: Masterpiece Theatre
            will present you with a docudrama entitled "Masterpiece
            Theatre."
            Host 2:Like "The First Churchills," this show analyzes
            the situation of real-life people tonight, people in the
            academy. Names have not been changed to protect either the innocent
            or the guilty, but all the situations are fictive and at times
            words that may never have been spoken are put into the mouths of
            people who did not speak them. Other lines, however, are direct
            quotations from various written sources, although none of the
            characters, as we depict them, should be confused with any
            "actual" persons, whether or not those persons would
            scribe to the idea of their own reality. Like "Upstairs/
            Downstairs," this program will introduce you to a spectrum of
            characters from many walks of life. What's different about
            tonight's episode, though, is that all these characters have
            passionate opinions about the show itself. Why, the very idea of
            Masterpiece Theatre drives some of them to Guerrilla Theatre,
            others to Theatre of the Absurd. Yes, you've always already
            guessed it: we focus tonight on a drama involving what we used to
            call humanists now for some a dirty word and most of
            our characters are in deep trouble.
             
            Sandra M. Gilbert,professor of English at the University of
            California, Davis, and Susan Gubar,professor of English at Indiana
            University, are coauthors of No Man's Land: The Place of the
            Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the
            Words (1987) and Volume II: Sexchanges (1988), the first
            installments of a three-part sequel to their Madwoman in the Attic:
            The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
            (1979). They have also coedited The Norton Anthology of Literature
            by Women: The Tradition in English (1985).
Marie-Hélène Huet
         Monstrous Imagination: Progeny as Art in French Classicism
         The monster and the woman thus find themselves on the same side,
            the side of dissimilarity."The female is as it were a
            deformed male," added Aristotle (GA,p. 175). As she belongs
            to the category of the different, the female can only contribute
            more figures of dissimilarities, if not creatures even more
            monstrous. But the female is a necessary departure from the norm, a
            useful monstrosity. The monster is gratuitous and useless for
            future generations. Aristotle's seminal work on the
            generation of monsters posited a rigorously physical definition
            that was not necessarily linked to deformities:
            "Monstrosities," he wrote, "come under the class
            of offspring which is unlike its parents" (GA,p. 425).
            Further, while a "monstrosity, of course, belongs to the
            class of &lsquo;things contrary to Nature,' … it is contrary
            not to Nature in her entirety but only to Nature in the generality
            of cases" (GA,p. 425).
            The monster, defined repeatedly by its lack of resemblance to its
            legitimate parents, is also monstrous in another important way, one
            that Aristotle described as a false resemblance to different
            species: "People say that the offspring which is formed has
            the head of a ram or an ox; and similarly with other creatures,
            that one has the head of another.… at the same time, in no case are
            they what they are alleged to be, but resemblances only"
            (GA,pp. 417-19; emphasis added). The monster is thus a double
            imposture. Its strange appearance a misleading likeness to
            another species, for example belies the otherwise rigorous
            law that children should resemble their parents. Further, monsters
            offer striking similarities to categories to which they are not
            related, blurring the differences between genres, and disrupting
            the rigorous order of nature. Thus, if the monster were defined in
            the first place as that which did not resemble him who engendered
            it, it nevertheless displayed some sort of resemblance, albeit a
            false resemblance to an object external to its conception.
             
            Marie-Hélène Huet is William R. Kenan Professor of Romance
            Languages at Amherst College. She is the author of Rehearsing the
            Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death, 1793-1797 (1982)
            and is currently completing a book on literature and tetratology.
James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian
         Editor's Introduction: Questions of Evidence
         We think the present moment is a timely one for debating the
            relation between evidentiary protocols and academic disciplines.
            Since academic practices for constituting and deploying evidence
            tend to be discipline-specific, the much-discussed crisis of the
            disciplines in recent years (the so-called blurring of the
            disciplinary genres) has given rise to a series of controversies
            about the status of evidence in current modes of investigation and
            argument: deconstruction, gender studies, new historicism, cultural
            studies, new approaches to the history and philosophy of science,
            the critical legal studies movement, and so on. Unfortunately,
            these controversies too often devolve into oversimplified debates
            about who has the evidence and who does not, who did their homework
            and who did not, or about the dangers of an ill-defined academic
            relativism. Attention needs to be better and otherwise directed: at
            the configuration of the fact-evidence distinction in different
            disciplines and historical moments, for example; or at the relative
            function of such notions as "self-evidence,"
            "experience," "test,"
            "testimony," and "textuality" in various
            academic discourses; or at the ways in which the invoked
            "rules of evidence" are themselves the products of
            historical developments, and themselves undergo redifferentiation
            and reformulation.
             
            James Chandler,professor of English at the University of Chicago,
            is the author of Wordsworth's Second Nature (1984). He is
            currently completing England in 1819,studies in and of romantic
            case history. Arnold I. Davidson,executive editor of Critical
            Inquiry,teaches philosophy and the history of science at the
            University of Chicago. He is currently working on the history of
            horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations
            and is editing a collection of essays on Heidegger, philosophy, and
            National Socialism. Harry Harootunian,a coeditor of Critical
            Inquiry and professor of history and East Asian languages and
            civilizations at the University of Chicago, is the author of Things
            Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokigawa (1988) and
            editor, with Masao Miyoshi, of Postmodernism and Japan (1989).
Terry Castle
         Contagious Folly: "An Adventure" and Its Skeptics
         The question of the so-called collective hallucination (as it has
            come to be known to psychical researchers) is neither as arcane nor
            as irrelevant to everyday life as it might first appear. On the
            contrary, it illuminates a much larger philosophical issue. In
            Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,his 1921 book devoted
            to the relationship between individual and group psychology,
            Sigmund Freud lamented that there was still "no explanation
            of the nature of suggestion, that is, of the conditions under which
            influence without adequate logical foundation takes place."2
            What the science of psychology lacked, in other words, was an
            understanding of ideological transference the process by
            which one individual imposed his or her beliefs and convictions on
            another. How did an idea spread, so to speak, from one person to
            the next, resulting in the formation of a group consciousness? The
            phenomenon of the collective hallucination puts the issue
            starkly if ambiguously in relief. If a ghost or
            apparition can be said to represent, in Freud's terms, an
            idea "without adequate logical foundation," a
            delusion,then the process by which two people convince each other
            that they have seen one and in turn attempt to convince
            others might be taken to epitomize the formation of ideology
            itself.
            In what follows I shall examine a case of collective
            hallucination certainly the most notorious and well
            documented in the annals of modern psychical
            research precisely as a way of spotlighting this larger
            problem. My goal in so doing is not so much to expose the folly of
            people who claim to see ghosts (though the notion of folly will
            play a crucial part in what I have to say) but the difficulty that
            inevitably besets anyone who attempts to debunk such claims on
            supposedly rationalist grounds. For in the absence of any
            satisfying explanation of how such "folly"
            spreads how a private delusion becomes a folie à deux (or
            troisor quatre) the labors of the skeptic are doomed to
            result only in a peculiar rhetorical and epistemological impasse.
             
            2. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
            Ego,trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York, 1959), p. 22.
             
            Terry Castle is professor of English at Stanford University and the
            author of Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in
            Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (1986). She is
            currently working on a new study entitled Lesbians and Other
            Ghosts: Essays on Literature and Sexuality.
Joan W. Scott
         The Evidence of Experience
         There is a section in Samuel Delany's magnificent
            autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water,that
            dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of
            difference, the history, that is, of the designation of
            "other," of the attribution of characteristics that
            distinguish categories of people from some presumed (and usually
            unstated) norm.1 Delany (a gay man, a black man, a writer of
            science fiction) recounts his reaction to his first visit to the
            St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. He remembers standing on the threshold
            of a "gym-sized room" dimly lit by blue bulbs. The room
            was full of people, some standing, the rest
                        an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall
            to wall.
                                    My first response was a kind of heart-
            thudding astonishment very close to fear.
                        I have written of a space at certain libidinal
            saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather
            that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible.2
            Watching the scene establishes for Delany a "fact that flew
            in the face" of the prevailing representation of homosexuals
            in the 1950s as "isolated perverts," as subjects
            "gone awry." The "apprehension of massed
            bodies" gave him (as it does, he argues, anyone, "male,
            female, working or middle class") a "sense of political
            power":
            what this experience said was that there was a population not
            of individual homosexuals … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but
            rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and
            already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and
            bad, to accommodate our sex. [M,p. 174]
             
            2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science
            Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 (New York, 1988), p.
            173; hereafter abbreviated M.
             
            Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for
            Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author, most
            recently, of Gender and the Politics of History (1988) and is
            currently at work on a history of feminist claims for political
            rights in France during the period 1789-1945 as a way of exploring
            arguments about equality and difference.
Mark Kelman
         Reasonable Evidence of Reasonableness
         Questions of how we claim to know the things that we know and whose
            claims to knowledge are treated as authoritative are inescapable in
            reaching legal judgments. I want to illustrate this generalization
            by referring to a pair of hypothetical self-defense cases that, I
            argue, require fact finders to judge both how
            "accurately" each defendant understood the situation in
            which he found himself and how accurately policymakers can assess
            the consequences of alternative legal rules.
            The first case I will deal with is one in which the defendant
            shoots and kills her sleeping husband. The husband had physically
            abused her over a long period. While the defendant will of course
            acknowledge that she was in no immediate danger at the moment she
            killed the man, her preliminary claim (we will explore variations
            as well) is that she needed to act self-defensively at that moment
            for fear that she subsequently would be incapable of defending
            herself against life-threatening attacks that she was convinced
            would inevitably be made.
            The second case is one in which a white defendant shoots and kills
            a black teenager who has confronted him on the subway, in a
            situation in which the teenager's "threats" were
            ambiguous. The shooting victim had brandished no weapon and made no
            physical contact with the defendant, but he had "asked"
            the defendant for money and, in the defendant's mind,
            displayed a generally threatening demeanor. I will presuppose that
            this defendant unlike Bernhard Goetz, the defendant in the
            notorious New York subway vigilante case on which I partly base
            this hypothetical model overtly acknowledges that the race of
            the victim played a substantial role in his assessment of the
            danger of the situation. (It is important to note as well that the
            defendant in my model shoots the victim only once and does not
            shoot while his victim is retreating from the scene, as Goetz
            almost surely did.)
             
            Mark Kelman,professor of law at Stanford University, is the author
            of A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (1987) as well as a number of
            articles on law and economics, taxation, criminal law, and legal
            theory.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
         Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl
         There seems to be something self-evident irresistibly so, to
            judge from its gleeful propagation about the use of the
            phrase, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," as the
            Q.E.D. of phobic narratives about the degeneracy of academic
            discourse in the humanities. But what? The narrative link between
            masturbation itself and degeneracy, though a staple of pre-1920s
            medical and racial science, no longer has any respectable currency.
            To the contrary: modern views of masturbation tend to place it
            firmly in the framework of optimistic, hygienic narratives of all-
            too-normative individual development. When Jane E. Brody, in a
            recent "Personal Health" column in the NewYork
            Times,reassures her readers that, according to experts, it is
            actually entirely possible for people to be healthy without
            masturbating; "that the practice is not essential to normal
            development and that no one who thinks it is wrong or sinful should
            feel he or she must try it"; and that even
            "'those who have not masturbated … can have perfectly
            normal sex lives as adults,'" the all but perfectly
            normal Victorianist may be forgiven for feeling just a
            little out of breath.3 In this altered context, the self-
            evidence of a polemical link between autoeroticism and narratives
            of wholesale degeneracy (or, in one journalist's historically
            redolent term, "idiocy")4 draws on a very widely
            discredited body of psychiatric and eugenic expertise whose only
            direct historical continuity with late twentieth-century thought
            has been routed straight through the rhetoric and practice of
            fascism. But it now draws on this body of expertise under the more
            acceptable gloss of the modern, trivializing, hygienic-
            developmental discourse, according to which autoeroticism not only
            is funny any sexuality of any power is likely to hover near
            the threshold of hilarity but also must be relegated to the
            inarticulable space of (a barely superceded) infantility.
             
            3. Jane E. Brody, "Personal Health," New York Times,4
            Nov. 1987.
            4. Rosenblatt, "The Universities," p. 3.
             
            Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is professor of English at Duke University
            and the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male
            Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990).
Ian Hacking
         Two Souls in One Body
         Bernice R. broke down so badly, when she turned nineteen, and
            behaved so much like a retarded child that she was committed to the
            Ohio State Bureau of Juvenile Research. Its director, Henry Herbert
            Goddard, a psychologist of some distinction, recognized that she
            suffered from multiple personality disorder. She underwent a course
            of treatment lasting nearly five years, after which "the
            dissociation seems to be overcome and replaced by a complete
            synthesis. [She] is working regularly a half day and seems
            reasonably happy in her reactions to her environment."1
            Therapy enabled her core personality and her main alter to make
            contact with each other, and for her to understand her past and, to
            some extent, why she had split.
            Her story prompts questions about evidence, objectivity, historical
            truth, psychological reality, self-knowledge, and the soul. It
            involves that powerful intersection of morality and metaphysics:
            why is it of value to have a self-understanding founded on true
            beliefs about ourselves and our past, or at any rate on memories
            that are not strictly false? To what extent is such self=knowledge
            based on evidence? To what extent is it knowledge at all?
             
            Ian Hacking,a philosopher, teaches at the Institute for the History
            and Philosophy of Science and Technology in the University of
            Toronto, and he is the author of Taming Chance (1990). His most
            recent contribution to  is "The Making and
            Molding of Child Abuse" (Winter 1991).
Charles Bernheimer
         Response to Peter Brooks
         In his article "Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last
            Unveil'd" ( 16 [Autumn 1989]: 1-32),
            Peter Brooks makes the claim that, for a certain dominant mode of
            nineteenth-century narrative, the female sexual organ is the occult
            source of the narrative dynamic. On a superficial reading,
            Brooks's piece might appear to empower women by putting their
            sexuality at the generative origin of the story. But the opposite
            is the case: his argument reflects rather than critiques the
            misogynist strategies of the texts he discusses. I will begin my
            analysis of his article with a brief return to the story by Barbey
            d'Aurevilly whose climactic scene Brooks offers as "a
            kind of allegory of the cultural story [he has] been
            delineating" (p. 29).
             
            Charles Bernheimeris professor of romance languages and chair of
            the program in comparative literature and literary theory at the
            University of Pennsylvania. The author of Flaubert and Kafka(1982)
            and Figures of Ill Repute (1989), he is currently working on a
            study of fin-de-siècle literature and art, The Decadent Subject.
Peter Brooks
         Response to Charles Bernheimer
         I suppose I should be grateful to Charles Bernheimer for setting me
            back on the path of righteousness from which I appear to have so
            grievously strayed. But I think Bernheimer and I are in deep
            disagreement about the purposes of literary criticism, and this may
            make me, in his perspective, a hopeless case. Bernheimer reads my
            article, "Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last
            Unveil'd," as intending "to empower women by
            putting their sexuality at the generative origin of story"
            (p. 868). He ascribes to me the motive of "offering feminists
            a gift" (p. 873). He even suggests, in a particularly
            offensive move: "This offer, I would guess, provides the
            generative energy for Brooks's critical story" (p.
            873). I can do without such attributions of motive. My intent, far
            less ambitious, was to describe some attitudes toward the nude
            female body that I found in novels and paintings of the later
            nineteenth century. I don't believe that criticism need be
            harnessed to the "empowerment" of anyone in particular,
            nor that it need denounce what Bernheimer identifies as
            "patriarchal oppression" (p. 874), "misogynist
            strategies" (p. 868), and the "hegemonic
            privileges" (p. 873) of the male gaze everywhere they are to
            be found (and they are to be found pretty much everywhere in the
            Western tradition). Does criticism really need to burden itself
            with this litany of clichés? Do they tell us anything new?
             
            Peter Brooksis Tripp Professor of Humanities and director of the
            Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. He is nearing
            completion of a book tentatively entitled Storied Bodies.
