Manifesting Literature?

BOOK REVIEWS terms of Kipling's "Tory anarchy" and pessimism about the present and future of the British Empire. Although some of Kipling's more realistic stories—"Without Benefit of Clergy," "The Man Who Would Be King," and others—will continue to be read and admired, it is perhaps his fiction for children that expresses most fully and complexly his imperialist politics "of cross-cultural exchange and social tolerance." In The Jungle Books, the Law is inescapable, and yet capacious enough to embrace all species who adhere to it. "There is nothing anti-imperialist about Mowgli's cultural mobility," writes Hagiioannu. "It is an aspect of Kipling's highly sophisticated interpretation of the new imperialism, which translated empire into a global language adjusted to multi-ethnic , liberal-humanist concerns." And for adult as well as child readers, it is without doubt Kim (1901) that best expresses this tolerant, "multi-ethnic, liberal-humanist"—and not simply conservative—imperialism that is Kipling at his best. Though Kipling called his masterpiece "nakedly picaresque and plotless," it was in part its openness to others and lack of teleological structure—typical of the picaresque (the "Great Game" played on the "Road of Life")—that allowed Kim, despite his role as a spy, and Kipling with him, despite his political and cultural conservatism, to be the "Little Friend of all the World." And as Hagiioannu notes, the Teshoo Lama offers still another model of how to approach the world and everything in it: not a possessive, imperialist model, but just the opposite—an unworldly way of appreciating the world and getting along with it, on the Road. In sum, The Man Who Would Be Kipling is an excellent contribution to Kipling studies, but more generally to studies of late-Victorian and early-modern British literature and culture. Kipling emerges from it as more diverse, more colorful , more cosmopolitan (albeit not always more "liberal-humanist"), and more readable than many earlier interpretations have held him to be. PATRICK BRANTLINGER __________________ Indiana University Manifesting Literature? Marjorie Garber. A Manifesto for Literary Studies. Seattle: Walter ChapÃ-n Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2003. 69 pp. Paper $14.95 WHAT IS the state of literary studies at the present time? One way to address this question would be to pose another one: in what state can it be if a critic as canny as Marjorie Garber is moved to write a manifesto about the matter? Never mind that one of the two essays in this 91 ELT 48 : 1 2005 book was originally a lecture in the Katz lecture series at the University of Washington. Never mind that the book is scarcely larger than a pamphlet , and therefore risks being regarded as a sort of addendum to Garber's earlier volume of three essays, Academic Instincts (2003). The very fact that she has chosen in the first place to conceive of her essays here as constituting a "manifesto" is intended to alert us to the fact that "literary studies" may be in worse shape than we had supposed. What exactly is the problem? Of course by now we have all fretted about the usual suspects involved in the "linguistic turn" of Theory of the 1970s and 1980s, and then subsequently the empiricist response of historians from various disciplines. In Garber's narrative, by century's end younger scholars opted for more "scientific" methodologies (sociology of knowledge, cognitive theory) with the result that "[l]iterary study was in the process of disowning itself." This is not good. There is a crisis. Garber believes in "literary study," notwithstanding its openness (not to say vulnerability) to all manner of other forms of study. Hence, her most emphatic point: "The specific contribution of literary studies to intellectual life inheres in the way it differs from other disciplines—in its methodology and in its aim—rather than in the way it resembles them" (Garber's italics). Consider human nature. Or rather, the fateful quotation marks in the title of Garber's first chapter, "Who Owns 'Human Nature'?" What does literary study have to contribute either to removing or reaffirming these quotation marks? Especially since the idea (not to say conviction) of human nature will not...