Notes to pages 1–3 265 Notes Introduction Epigraph. Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berke ley: California UP, 1996), 78 (hereafter cited in text as RS). 1. When Lévi- Strauss narrates his academic trajectory again four years later in that wonderful genre of the inaugural lecture at the Collège de France (the genre, that is, that involves each lecturer construing how his field used to be organized before his own decisive entrance into it), he will stress the “scope” of anthropology, its extension beyond the discrete study of so- called primitive cultures. 2. Edmund Leach notes that Lévi- Strauss read his first specialist work in anthropology as late as 1934, Claude Lévi-Strauss (New York: Viking, 1970), x. 3. Patrick Wilcken, Lévi- Strauss’s biographer, notes that the anthropologist and his wife, Dina, also a professor at the University of São Paulo, were “earning three times their salary in France,” Claude Lévi- Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (New York: Penguin , 2010), 54. 4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (1955; repr., New York: Penguin, 1992), 185 (hereafter cited in text as TT). 5. Now Jean-Paul Sartre, we know, didn’t need to father a new discipline at the point in his career at which he wrote his famous preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. But his vignette does have the same logic. 6. This is so even if they are designed, like Lévi- Strauss’s, to extend far beyond their immediate context of creation. Europeans were treated to another scene of encounter six years later (in 1961) when Sartre welcomed them into the world of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). “Europeans ,” Sartre exhorts, “you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your trading centers and to the hired soldiers who defend them,” 13. To claim that this moment has a foundational disciplinary status is to suggest something about its troubling relation both to Fanon’s text and to those of Aimé Césaire and others prior to Fanon. 7. As early as 1967, Jacques Derrida had articulated two primary objections: first, that pure bricolage, free of all a priori assumptions, is impossible (“the already- there- ness of instruments and of concepts cannot be undone or reinvented,” Of Grammatology, 266 Notes to pages 3–14 trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 138–39; sec ond, “Then, even supposing that, by bricolage, one conserves the idea of bricolage , one must know that all bricolages are not equally worthwhile. Bricolage criticizes itself,” 139. That is, the claim to limit oneself entirely to the given tools of a particular situation also needlessly constrains analy sis. 8. Able to touch only the familiarly textual before, the Auerbachian mise-en-scène has benefitted from its contact with the discipline of anthropology, which has toughened and matured it, “returning our own professional skills to us as more important, more vital,” and more able to make contact with “reality,” Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),20–21. 9. Ibid., 15. 10. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 63. 11. Susanne Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 194. 12. But this process should not be seen entirely apart from attempts through literal construction of buildings and environments to achieve the same effect; or, more commonly , to sell the fantasy of this effect while refusing to acknowledge a specific built environment ’s failure to deliver it. As Buell notes, “Up to a point, world history is a history of space becoming place. . . . But modern history has also reversed this process,” The Future of Environmental Criticism, 63–64. 13. Buell confirms this: “Traditional writing about place tends to interest itself especially in bounded areas of small size,” ibid., 77. 14. Paul de Man, Critical Writings, 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 64 (hereafter cited in text as CW). 15. After naming poetry—in a true de Manian pithy linguistic vortex—as the failed naming of being, de Man rests briefly...