Abstract
In his discussion of Western reactions to the breakdown of Communism in Greater Europe, Stjepan Mestrovic asks us to consider ‘Balkanization as the breaking up of a unit into increasingly smaller units that are hostile to each other.’1 If something like that definition was what Bloom had in mind when he wrote, in the closing chapter of The Western Canon, that ‘the Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible’,2 then there are at least two possible interpretations of his statement. Bloom points us to both of them. Either literary studies is breaking up into mutually antagonistic schools, or the aesthetic whole, of which literature has traditionally been a part, is decomposing.
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Notes
Stjepan Mestrovic, The Balkanization of the West (London: Routledge, 1994), p. ix.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 517.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 286–7.
Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Public Memory and Its Discontents’, The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1995): pp. 73–92, here p. 73.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 219–54, here pp. 223–4.
Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), pp. 142–3.
Daniela Stok, ed., Kieslowski on Kieslowski (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 212.
Nigel Andrews, ‘struggles for Liberty’, Financial Times 14 October 1993.
An obituary contains the following: ‘one of the things we talked about was how awkward it was to give the characters in a film names. He agreed, but he took it further and talked about the great danger film makers found themselves in, of playing God with their characters.’ (Engel, Andi. ‘Krzysztof Kieslowski: Human Touch of a Master’. The Guardian, 14 March, 1996.) It is hard to know how the writer of serious fiction can avoid that, but perhaps an answer is to ensure that their characters’ desires are not directed at the eternal, meaning that their beings are shown to be demonstrably wound up with multitudinous mortality.
Louise Nesselson, ‘Trois Couleurs: Bleu’, Variety, 20 Sept. 1993.
Other interpretations are, of course, possible. Contrast this interpretation with the following account from Wittgenstein: ‘after Schubert’s death, his brother cut certain of Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave to his favourite pupils these pieces of a few bars each. As a sign of piety this action is just as comprehensible to us as the other one of keeping the scores undisturbed and accessible to no one. And if Schubert’s brother had burnt the scores we could still understand this as a sign of piety.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (Retford: The Brynmill Press, 1979), p. 5.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 196–231, here p. 226.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 70–1.
I explicitly exclude the unsustainable Burckhardtian notion that a specific sense of self-conscious personhood emerged in the Italian Renaissance (see Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’, Rewriting the Self, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997).
‘We have to wait until Augustine before a theory […] where the goods of the soul are stressed over those of worldly action, is formulated in terms of inner and outer.’ (Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 121.
In the Timaeus, Plato distinguished two kinds of cause: ‘[…] the necessary and the divine’, and some scholars (see Godfrey Vesey, ‘Responsibility and Free Will’, Key Themes in Philosophy, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 85–100) have regarded mind as the essence of the divine, and therefore implied that Plato did have a well-formed view of humans as prime movers. The following passage from the Timaeus, however, describes Plato’s view of mortals (and suggests that this is indeed a pre-echo of human causal powers, rather than an early version): ‘[God] ordered his own children to make the generation of mortals. They took over from him an immortal principle of soul, and, imitating him, encased it in a mortal physical globe, with the body as a whole for vehicle and they built onto it another mortal part, containing terrible and necessary feelings: pleasure — the chief incitement to wrong; pain, which frightens us from good; confidence and fear; two foolish counsellors: obstinate passion and credulous hope. To this mixture they added irrational sensation and desire which shrinks from nothing, and so gave the mortal element its indispensable equipment’ (Plato, Timaeus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 95.)
See the discussion of voluntariness, purposive choice and practical reasoning in Anthony Kenny, Aristotle’s Theory of the Will (London: Duckworth, 1979).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 48.
Suzanne Duvall Jacobitti, ‘Thinking About the Self’, Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, eds Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 199–219, here p. 205.
Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 169.
Angela Pope, ‘In Memory’, Sight and Sound 6.8 (August 1996).
See Roy Boyne, ‘Postmodernism, the Sublime and Ethics’, The Politics of Modernity, eds Irving Velody and Arthur Still (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Shoshana Felman, ‘Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching’, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 13–60.
Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 126 and 129.
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Boyne, R. (1999). Memories of Hell: Kieslowski’s Vision of European Subjectivity. In: Fendler, S., Wittlinger, R. (eds) The Idea of Europe in Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27496-3_12
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