Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print by Terry Cochran (review)

humanities 345 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 an interpretive community to decide whether such repetition constitutes theft, allusion, negligence, homage, imitation, or unoriginality. By upholding or dismissing charges of plagiarism, the literary institution determines what qualifies as literature and who can be an author, and in so doing works to guard its borders against upstarts who threaten its authority. Quarrels over plagiarism, Randall proposes, are contests for legitimacy, but, as only the institution has the power to grant legitimacy, it can never lose. Randall thus uses Foucault and Bourdieu to describe the cultural functions served by the idea of plagiarism, which helps to make the line between art and non-art seem a matter of ethics rather than hegemonic control. Unlike previous accounts of the topic, Randall=s deals not with specific findings of theft or the psychology of plagiarists. Instead, she examines a number of critical controversies, mainly French and AngloAmerican disputes from the past two centuries, for what they reveal about the interests and beliefs of the combatants, the metaphors used to characterize acts of plagiarism, and the appropriative strategies of postmodern authors seeking to challenge the cult of originality. Randall=s argument is clear and compelling, but it reads like a position paper that has been inflated into a book. Points and examples are worked over more than once. Some of the areas covered, such as the history of copyright, seem not entirely pertinent. Above all, constructionist arguments like hers can be salutary in their deflating of moral pieties but they don=t lead us very far. Once it is conceded that battles over plagiarism are driven by professional interests, not only do the accusations and excuses begin to look drearily familiar but we are no closer to understanding why some charges carry force in certain situations while others redound upon the accuser. Randall is concerned primarily with the >transhistorical constants= that inform judgments of plagiarism; as a result, she tends to treat the institution as monolithic and impervious to risk, with the only alternative being an imaginary future of >post-authorship.= Yet, as she implies, the literary field has always had to adjust to changing conditions for writing. When Randall attends to these historical changes, as in her sections on Poe=s and Balzac=s struggles to position themselves within an increasingly >industrialized= profession, her work is informative and not just provocative. (TREVOR ROSS) Terry Cochran. Twilight of the Literary: Figures of Thought in the Age of Print Harvard University Press. x, 288. US $39.95 The first difficulty facing readers of Terry Cochran=s Twilight of the Literary is that of refusing to be misled by the title or the subtitle. Aside from operating under a general assumption that the end of modernity is at hand, Cochran has little to say about endings. Neither is >literary= a key term, 346 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 though it merits some cameo mentions. Finally, though the period with which Cochran is concerned is roughly coterminous with the age of print=s dominance, his book touches only obliquely on what we have come to call >print culture.= What Cochran is concerned with is modernity and the figures of thought in which it expresses itself. >Figures= has a dual force in Cochran=s argument. Figures are rhetorical tropes (the key players being personification and prosopopeia); figures are also >figura,= one of >the bases of historical understanding prior to modernity.= Citing Erich Auerbach, Cochran opposes figura both to allegory and to symbol on the grounds of its inherent historicity: >[F]igura is something real and historical which announces and renders something else that is real and historical.= Cochran further opposes that form of historicity to those dominant modes of understanding the historical in modernity. Figure in this sense becomes a sedimented, spectral other, persisting through the age of print as a minority report, lingering in the wings, the argument hints, to flourish again post-print. The veiled presence of this sense of figure is essential to Cochran=s argument that history is made by thetic structures of language that make thought possible and that...