In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Preface 1. Ross Chambers, Mélancolie et opposition: Les débuts du modernisme en France (Paris: Librarie José Corti, 1987); Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 2. Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, xi; Chambers, Mélancolie et opposition, 11. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben,” in Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe I: Die Geburt der Tragödie, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen I–IV, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 268; Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 105. (Gray gives it as “mania to collect.”) 4. James Livingston presses this point fruitfully. “The cultural function of the modern historian,” Livingston writes, “is to teach us how to learn from people with whom we differ due to historical circumstances. . . . But these people with whom we differ, and from whom we must learn, are, to begin with, other historians; for there is no way to peek over the edges of our present as if they aren’t there, standing between us and the archive, telling us how to approach it. . . . No one gets to the ‘primary sources,’ whether they are constituted as the historical record or as the literary canon, without going through the priests, scribes, librarians, professors, critics—the professionals— who created them in retrospect, in view of their own intellectual obligations and political purposes. In this sense, history is not the past as such, just as the canon is not literature as such; it is the ongoing argument between historians, among others, about what qualifies as an event, a document, an epoch.” See Livingston, “On Richard Hofstadter and the Politics of ‘Consensus History,’” boundary 2 34, no. 3 (2007): 34–35. 175 Notes 176 Notes to Preface 5. Against such a reflex—and in context of “the historicist idiom now dominating literary studies”—Ellen Rooney invokes Peggy Kamuf’s useful tropism “historicality ”: “A literary work has a historical context, as we call it, but no more or less than any document or artifact produced in the past; but the work, if it is still read and studied when this ‘context’ will have subsided into archival compost, has a relation as well to a future, by which it remains always to some extent incomprehensible by any given present. This is the dimension of the work’s historicality, which is therefore not to be simply confused or conflated with historical ‘context.’” See Kamuf, The Division of Literature; or, The University in Deconstruction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 164; qtd. in Rooney, “The Idiom Doesn’t Go Over,” in “Forum: Conference Debates; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Influences: Past, Present, Future; MLA Annual Convention, 28 December 2006, Philadelphia,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008): 242. 6. Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, xi; Chambers, Mélancolie et opposition, 11. 7. Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, xi; Chambers, Mélancolie et opposition, 11. 8. “Verschmelzung von ‘linker’ Ethik und ‘rechter’ Erkenntnistheorie.” See Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans: ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der grossen Epik, Sammlung Luchterhand, 36 (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1989), 15; Gyorgy Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 22. 9. See Martin Heidegger, “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1957), 69–104; Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 57–85 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 10. “Working with Mary Trouille on an English version of Mélancolie et opposition has been an enriching experience. It has taught me something I was unable to acknowledge five years ago: that in the melancholy experience of writing about melancholic writing there was also an intense pleasure, derived in large part from devising critical texts whose own linguistic texture had something in common with the texts they were about” (Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, xv). 11. Elizabeth Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 44, 47. 12. Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, xi; Chambers, Mélancolie et opposition, 11. 13. See Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, xiii; Chambers, Mélancolie et opposition , 13. Also see Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver...

Share