Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Framed as a critique of Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism and focusing on classic novels by Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, and Zora Neale Hurston, this article provides a genealogical analysis of and argument for the significance of free indirect style for the development of intersubjectivity in the modern era. Furthermore, it offers close third as a better term for the technique, which is more about facilitating imagined intimacy than effecting the kinds of freedom Bewes and Kornbluh focus on. Close third, I argue, opens up a spectrum of sympathetic identification and ironic disdain within which we situate ourselves as readers of prose narrative.

Inspired by Michael Riffaterre’s Fictional Truth (1990), this article brings computational mechanisms of the first generation of LLMs using the transformer architecture in conversation with literary and philosophical theories of language to show that their calculation of meaning sits fundamentally differently in our world than the language produced through communication of meaning, even though on the surface they might look alike. Given the well-known fact that LLMs calculate meaning from distributed semantics—in other words, from analyzing form alone, bare of any relation to the outside world and its things—the article turns to the particular role of things in communicated language (fiction and nonfiction) as discussed for literature by Bill Brown and for language philosophy by Hilary Putnam. Reading their different takes together allows us to see that the language used in the communication of meaning is calibrated rather differently than the language used when calculating meaning, and that LLMs’ generated writing is a new and different mode of production with its own and different strengths, capabilities, concerns, and needs for care when making meaning. This observation indicates a need for a more detailed understanding of the transactional border linking calculation to communication, allowing researchers to explore the relationship between language and mathematics to understand and surface the inner mechanisms of generated writing.

At a time when the United States is falling back on an isolationist and neo-imperialist doctrine, world literature is a remarkable lens through which to observe contemporary political and geopolitical debates.

Machine translation has improved to such an extent that a time can be predicted when most, if not all, translation will be performed by machine. Both translators and translation studies scholars have reacted to this development with questionable thinking about translation as well as human creativity. Definitions of creative translation generally assume an instrumentalist model: translation understood as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, whether its form, meaning, or effect. When joined to such other discourses as Gricean pragmatics, the Bourdieusian habitus, or empirical psychology of reception, this model actually limits the translator’s creativity because it constitutes an impoverished conception of what translation is and how it might be appreciated. Technological progress that enables machines to attain a basic literary translational competence can foreground the hermeneutic function of human translators—but only if we assume a hermeneutic model where translation is understood as the inscription of an interpretation which inevitably varies source-text form, meaning, and effect according to intelligibilities and interests in the receiving culture. Harnessing the machine through computational text analysis and large language models to serve the translator’s interpretative act can redefine translation by foregrounding the tasks that make it at once scholarly and creative. The idea is to construct a collaboration with the machine that redefines and enlarges the scope of involvement for the human translator, increasing its learning and sophistication.

Contemporary poets have leveraged lateral approaches to the poetics of translation in response to certain formal and conceptual constraints that became codified during the archival turn. These approaches position their work outside of the discursive and methodological categories of poetics of the archive that were codified in the 1990s and 2000s (such as Michael Dowdy’s “shakeout poetics” and Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation”) and suggest a radical departure. In particular, I track the nearly metabolic conversions that occur when source materials are embodied and carried across from one textual condition to another, first derived, then revisioned, revoiced, retouched. These conversions can involve shifts from one language to another but also shifts from one subjective scope or residency to another—one that is not, so to speak, one’s own—and demonstrate what translations through dreamwork and erasure can make possible for appropriative poetics after the archival turn. I argue that the translateral poetics of Heriberto Yépez, Don Mee Choi, Edgar Garcia, and Myung Mi Kim constitute emergent experiences and articulations of intersubjectivity and invent nonreducible and unassimilable forms of opposition.

In this article, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in particular the set of theses Benjamin discarded as he edited, I argue that trans embodiment constitutes a form of living in a messianic moment of simultaneous past, present, and future. What we trans people have been, are, and will be opens a horizon of potentiality for embodiment against emerging forms of anti-trans animosity.

Part 2 of this essay focuses on a recessed but palpable thread that runs through the entirety of Erich Auerbach’s philology, though most strikingly in his two most celebrated writings, “Figura” (1938) and Mimesis (1946). All his writings speak directly to his own historical circumstances. But they do so by underscoring the ineffaceable Jewish inheritances of Western literature and culture. In the process, his writings also do something else: they model Jewish survival. By dwelling on the lingering traces of this heritage in the present, they mimic what they recall: tenacious Jewish spectrality, which gives the word mimesis a new twist. If the Jews were disappearing in Auerbach’s contemporary world, they do not disappear in his writings. Instead, they survive as irrepressible ghosts, as mysterious riddles and enigmas, and as unanswerable question marks and disturbing problems that are more implicit than explicit, audible between the lines, in brackets, and under erasure. “Figura” is the theory of this irrepressibility, which is argued out in theological terms, while Mimesis stages the spectral afterlife of the Jews by grounding their presence in the concrete historical foundation of literary and ethical realism in the Hebrew Bible: they haunt the book with a persistence that has meaning in its own right. In fleshing out the trope of the Jews as a living yet ineradicable ghost-people, Auerbach is aligning himself with a tradition that reaches back to Heinrich Heine and forward to Leon Pinsker, Gershom Scholem, and Benjamin Fondane.

Drawing on an unexplored archive of texts related to theories of punishment, ranging from Antiphon to Nietzsche, the article makes a case for rethinking transmission and propagation of ideas as a distinct mode of transhistorical community building. Incorporate fellowships cannot be conceived of either as sections of an amorphous intertext, à la Kristeva, or as traditions handed down within authoritative canons. They may include agents that are pseudonymous or fictional and that are often unidentifiable to some or even most members of the community in question. Yet these fellowships are invariably animated by an agglomerated human presence composed of men and women thought of as embodied even though they interact incorporeally. Based on a close analysis of texts and figures that debated the death penalty, and that are overlooked in Michel Foucault’s influential discussion in Discipline and Punish, the article seeks to offer a theoretically grounded argument against the long-standing dominance of the social sciences in the study of the history of ideas.