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This article situates the early career of Fredric Jameson in relation to the emergence of (literary theory as a movement in the 1960s and 1970s. It does so through the perspective of the author, who is a decade Jameson's junior, as he found his own path toward conversation and colleagueship with Jameson. It touches on the puzzle of Jameson's years at Harvard (1959–67), where the author was a student (1963–73).

Tragedy doesn't have to feed melancholy. D. H. Lawrence insisted, \"Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery.\" In Principles of Literary Criticism, I. A. Richards brought Aristotle together with Coleridge. Richards argued that the tragic emotions of pity and terror, the impulse to approach and the impulse to flee, form a balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities. For Coleridge this balance marks the act of imagination in its full power. Therefore, Richards concluded, tragedy brings not melancholy but invigoration. Here, Arac examines the tragic art in Toni Morrison's Beloved.

This book records a major critic's three decades of thinking about the connection between literature and the conditions of people's lives-that is, politics. A preference for impurity and a search for how to analyze and explain it are guiding threads in this book as its chapters pursue the complex entanglements of culture,politics, and society from which great literature arises. At its core is the nineteenth-century novel, but it addresses a broader range of writers as well, in a textured, contoured, discontinuous history.The chapters stand out for a rare combination. They practice both an intensive close reading that does not demand unity as its goal and an attention to literature as a social institution, a source of values that are often created in its later reception rather than given at the outset. When addressing canonical writers-Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain, Keats, Melville, George Eliot, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Ralph Ellison-the author never forgets that many of their texts, even Shakespeare's plays, were in their own time judged to be popular, commercial, minor, or even trashy. In drawing on these works as resources in politically charged arguments about value, the author pays close attention to the processes of posterity that validated these authors' greatness.Among those processes of posterity are the responses of other writers. In making their choices of style, subject, genre, and form, writers both draw from and differ from other writers of the past and of their own times. The critical thinking about other literature through which many great works construct their inventiveness reveals that criticism is not just a minor, secondary practice, segregated from the primary work of creativity.Participating in as well as analyzing that work of critical creativity, this volume is rich with important insights for all readers and teachers of literature.

Examining changes in the study of the novel since began publication in 1967, this essay focuses on the current importance of world literature as a topic for debate and exploration and suggests that complex relationships with the study of postcolonial literature have helped to bring this about, paying special attention to works by Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fredric Jameson, and Aijaz Ahmad.

Jonathan Arac is one of the leading American post-modernists who once taught at Columbia University and served as Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English as well as the founding director of the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He is considered to be one of the most notable \"New Americanists\" with an eclectic range of interests in literary theory, US literature (with an emphasis on the controversy of Huckleberry Finn). His research methods range from theoretical framing, cultural study to interdisciplinary study. This interview, which was conducted in oral and written form at the University of Pittsburgh from December 2019 to December 2020, touches upon such topics as Arac's academic connection with Chinese academia, the essence of literary theory and its relationship with cultural studies and interdisciplinary research. Arac perceives his studies on literary theory, \"new literary history,\" and cross-disciplinary research since the 1960s as an integrated whole which \"opens boundaries\" and \"extends our powers.\"

If racially offensive epithets are banned on CNN air time and in the pages of USA Today, Jonathan Arac asks, shouldn’t a fair hearing be given to those who protest their use in an eighth-grade classroom? Placing Mark Twain’s comic masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn , in the context of long-standing American debates about race and culture, Jonathan Arac has written a work of scholarship in the service of citizenship. Huckleberry Finn , Arac points out, is America’s most beloved book, assigned in schools more than any other work because it is considered both the “quintessential American novel” and “an important weapon against racism.” But when some parents, students, and teachers have condemned the book’s repeated use of the word “nigger,” their protests have been vehemently and often snidely countered by cultural authorities, whether in the universities or in the New York Times and the Washington Post . The paradoxical result, Arac contends, is to reinforce racist structures in our society and to make a sacred text of an important book that deserves thoughtful reading and criticism. Arac does not want to ban Huckleberry Finn , but to provide a context for fairer, fuller, and better-informed debates. Arac shows how, as the Cold War began and the Civil Rights movement took hold, the American critics Lionel Trilling, Henry Nash Smith, and Leo Marx transformed the public image of Twain’s novel from a popular “boy’s book” to a central document of American culture. Huck’s feelings of brotherhood with the slave Jim, it was implied, represented all that was right and good in American culture and democracy. Drawing on writings by novelists, literary scholars, journalists, and historians, Arac revisits the era of the novel’s setting in the 1840s, the period in the 1880s when Twain wrote and published the book, and the post–World War II era, to refute many deeply entrenched assumptions about Huckleberry Finn and its place in cultural history, both nationally and globally. Encompassing discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Archie Bunker, James Baldwin, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Mark Fuhrman, Arac’s book is trenchant, lucid, and timely.

Essay originally written for the journal 'Diaspora' in response to Franco Moretti, 'Conjectures on World Literature', NLR (1) Jan/Feb 2000 pp.54-68. Does Moretti's programme for a study of world literature carry global English in its pocket, as the ticket to leave close reading behind? The cost and benefits of Auerbach's philology and Said's sociology, as alternative approaches. (Original abstract - amended)

Framed by the problematic of postcolonial studies, this talk explores consonances between the perspectives of Henry James and a major postcolonial critic, Edward W. Said. Taking the novel as a form \"worldly\" in Said's sense, and guided by emphases important to Said in the work of Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, the talk explores Said's defense of literature, even when it arises from privilege. It brings this to the difficult case of The Golden Bowl , working especially with James's analysis of Adam Verver's self-recognition, in dialogue with Keats's sonnet on Chapman's Homer, as possessing \"the spirit of the connoisseur.\"