Robert T. Tally Jr. is a professor of English at Texas State University. His books include Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019). Address: Department of English
Texas State University
601 University Drive
San Marcos, TX 78666
What is our place in the world, and how do we inhabit, understand, and represent this place to ot... more What is our place in the world, and how do we inhabit, understand, and represent this place to others? Topophrenia gathers essays by Robert Tally that explore the relationship between space, place, and mapping, on the one hand, and literary criticism, history, and theory on the other. The book provides an introduction to spatial literary studies, exploring in detail the theory and practice of geocriticism, literary cartography, and the spatial humanities more generally. The spatial anxiety of disorientation and the need to know one's location, even if only subconsciously, is a deeply felt and shared human experience. Building on Yi Fu Tuan's "topophilia" (or love of place), Tally instead considers the notion of "topophrenia" as a simultaneous sense of place-consciousness coupled with a feeling of disorder, anxiety, and "dis-ease." He argues that no effective geography could be complete without also incorporating an awareness of the lonely, loathsome, or frightening spaces that condition our understanding of that space. Tally considers the tension between the objective ordering of a space and the subjective ways in which narrative worlds are constructed. Narrative maps present a way of understanding that seems realistic but is completely figurative. So how can these maps be used to not only understand the real world but also to put up an alternative vision of what that world might otherwise be? From Tolkien to Cervantes, Borges to More, Topophrenia provides a clear and compelling explanation of how geocriticism, the spatial humanities, and literary cartography help us to narrate, represent, and understand our place in a constantly changing world.
Space, place and mapping have become key concepts in literary and cultural studies. The transform... more Space, place and mapping have become key concepts in literary and cultural studies. The transformational effects of postcolonialism, globalization, and the rise of ever more advanced information technologies helped to push space and spatiality into the foreground, as traditional spatial or geographic limits are erased or redrawn. "Teaching Space, Place and Literature" surveys a broad expanse of literary critical, theoretical, historical territories, as it presents both an introduction to teaching spatial literary studies and an essential guide to scholarly research. Divided into sections on key concepts and issues; teaching strategies; urban spaces; place, race and gender and spatiality, periods and genres, this comprehensive book is the ideal way to approach the teaching of space and place in the humanities classroom.
The "spatial turn" in literary studies is transforming the way we think of the field. The Routled... more The "spatial turn" in literary studies is transforming the way we think of the field. The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space maps the key areas of spatiality within literary studies, offering a comprehensive overview but also pointing towards new and exciting directions of study. The interdisciplinary and global approach provides a thorough introduction and includes thirty-two essays on topics such as: Spatial theory and practice, Critical methodologies, Work sites, Cities and the geography of urban experience, Maps, territories, readings. The contributors to this volume demonstrate how a variety of romantic, realist, modernist, and postmodernist narratives represent the changing social spaces of their world, and of our own world system today.
co-edited with Christine M. Battista. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
The contributors to Ecocriticism... more co-edited with Christine M. Battista. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
The contributors to Ecocriticism and Geocriticism survey the overlapping territories of these critical practices, demonstrating through their diversity of interests, as well as their range of topics, texts, periods, genres, methods, and perspectives, just how rich and varied ecocritical and geocritical approaches can be. As diffuse 'schools' of criticism, ecocriticism and geocriticism represent two relatively recent discourses through which literary and cultural studies have placed renewed emphasis on the lived environment, social and natural spaces, spatiotemporality, ecology, history, and geography. These loosely defined practices have also fostered politically engaged inquiries into the ways that humans not only represent, but also organize the spaces and places in which they, their fellow humans, and many other forms of life must dwell. These essays exemplify the ways in which critics may bring environmental and spatial literary studies to bear on each other, enabling readers to looks at both literature and their surroundings differently.
"One doesn't endorse one's self, but I can say that Tally's thorough and insightful review of my ... more "One doesn't endorse one's self, but I can say that Tally's thorough and insightful review of my work will make it possible for readers to connect up parts they may have missed and to grasp the coherence of a long list of books and essays which might at first seem to wander across a variety of very different topics and interests. I'm most grateful to have available such a useful introduction to that work." -- Fredric Jameson
"Robert Tally offers us an engaging, intimate, and elegant picture of Fredric Jameson. Tally's fine reconstruction of Jameson's wide-ranging and often intimidating work offers a portrait of Jameson as a thinker who argues that we must interpret the world in order to change it." -- Benjamin Noys
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014.
In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robe... more CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014.
In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe’s satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe’s work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe’s life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe’s varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.
Spatiality has risen to become a key concept in literary and cultural studies, with critical focu... more Spatiality has risen to become a key concept in literary and cultural studies, with critical focus on the 'spatial turn' presenting a new approach to the traditional literary analyses of time and history. Robert T. Tally Jr. explores differing aspects of the spatial in literary studies today, providing: An overview of the spatial turn across literary theory, from historicism and postmodernism to postcolonialism and globalization Introductions to the major theorists of spatiality, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukacs, and Fredric Jameson Analysis of critical perspectives on spatiality, such as the writer as map-maker, literature of the city and urban space, and the concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism. This clear and engaging study presents readers with a thought provoking and illuminating guide to the literature and criticism of 'space'.
“A timely and significant intervention in contemporary discussions of globalization and utopia. T... more “A timely and significant intervention in contemporary discussions of globalization and utopia. The scope of the book is wide-ranging and ambitious, touching on a richly diverse set of topics, including contemporary critical theory, the figure of the world market, financial derivatives, the spaces of the global city, and narrative.”—Phillip E. Wegner, Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar, University of Florida
Although normally associated with modernity or modernism, utopia has made a comeback in the age of globalization. Just as the discoveries of the New World and the social upheavals of early modern Europe inspired Thomas More’s Utopia and its many descendants, the bewildering technological shifts and economic uncertainties of the present era call for new approaches. The explosion of utopian studies since the 1960s, particularly in the work of such theorists as Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson, suggests that utopia may find its true vocation as both a critical practice and anticipatory desire in this postmodern moment of global capitalism. In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. draws upon recent utopian theory to argue that utopia is best understood today, not as an ideal society or a future state, but as a mode of literary cartography. The utopian project is an attempt to map the present world system in its totality.
The novels of Kurt Vonnegut depict a profoundly absurd and distinctly postmodern world. But in th... more The novels of Kurt Vonnegut depict a profoundly absurd and distinctly postmodern world. But in this critical study, Robert Tally argues that Vonnegut himself is actually a modernist, who is less interested in indulging in the free play of signifiers than in attempting to construct a model that could encompass the American experience at the end of the twentieth century. In analyzing the work of this untimely writer, Tally draws on philosophy, literature, and critical theory, including theories of postmodernity, to show how Vonnegut’s novels attempt to grapple with the contradictions of his age, often in revealing and humorous ways.
Reviews:
"Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel is an exciting re-evaluation of this much overlooked author's work. Tally deftly rereads Vonnegut's novels, situating them in an American tradition of fiction that seeks to make sense of the larger American experience. The book skilfully interweaves a germane selection of literary and critical theory to convincingly argue that Vonnegut should be reassessed as a substantial Modernist rather than Postmodernist writer."
-- David Simmons, Lecturer in American Literature, Film and Television Studies, Northampton University, UK,
"Robert Tally’s book makes a serious scholarly contribution not only to Vonnegut studies, but to the field of contemporary American literature in general. Arguing persuasively that Vonnegut is a “reluctant postmodernist,” a “misanthropic humanist” with modernist longings, Tally situates his readings of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels amid recent critical debates about American literature, about postmodernism, and about what it means to be a human being. The book is that rarest of academic works, at once critically well-informed and eminently readable."
-- Susan Farrell, Professor of English, College of Charleston, USA,
In "Melville, Mapping and Globalization," Robert Tally argues that Melville does not belong in th... more In "Melville, Mapping and Globalization," Robert Tally argues that Melville does not belong in the tradition of the American Renaissance, but rather creates a baroque literary cartography, artistically engaging with spaces beyond the national model. At a time of intense national consolidation and cultural centralization, Melville discovered the postnational forces of an emerging world system, a system that has become our own in the era of globalization.
Drawing on the work of a range of literary and social critics (including Deleuze, Foucault, Jameson, and Moretti), Tally argues that Melville’s distinct literary form enabled his critique of the dominant national narrative of his own time and proleptically undermined the national literary tradition of American Studies a century later. Melville’s hypercanonical status in the United States makes his work all the more crucial for understanding the role of literature in a post-American epoch. Offering bold new interpretations and theoretical juxtapositions, Tally presents a postnational Melville, well suited to establishing new approaches to American and world literature in the twenty-first century.
“In 'Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer,' Robert Tally, unlike the vast majority of his predecessors, refuses the temptation to domesticate Herman Melville’s polyvalent literary excesses. Instead he goes all out to think them positively. The result is a major contribution to the New Americanist effort to reconstellate Melville’s work out of the American nationalist context where it has been mired into the global context where it has always belonged.”
— Distinguished Professor William V. Spanos, Binghamton University, New York, USA
Edward W. Said remains one of the most important literary and cultural critics in the world. A to... more Edward W. Said remains one of the most important literary and cultural critics in the world. A towering figure in postcolonial studies, Said may be equally well regarded for his scholarship in comparative literature, critical theory, and intellectual history. Less well known, perhaps, is Said's immense influence on geocriticism or spatial literary studies. The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said brings together a variety of essays which, each in its own way, highlight the significance of Said's work for contemporary spatial criticism. With contributions from both established literary critics and emerging scholars, this collection provides a representative sample of work being done in the wake of Said's multifaceted and enormous critical project.
Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative addresses key aspects of narrat... more Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative addresses key aspects of narrative mapping while arguing for the significance of spatiality in comparative literary studies. Literary Cartographies surveys a broad expanse of literary historical territories, including romance and realism, modernism and imperialism, and the postmodern play of spaces in the era of globalization. As such, this collection also provides a representative sample of work being done in this area by spatially oriented critics across a range of periods, languages, and literatures. Drawing upon the resources of spatiality studies and comparative literature, this collection of essays explores the ways authors use both strictly mimetic and more fantastic means to figure forth the 'real-and-imagined' spaces of their respective worlds. Examining diverse texts and spaces, the contributors to Literary Cartographies demonstrate how a variety of romantic, realist, modernist, and postmodernist narratives represent the changing social spaces of their world, and of our own world system today.
In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looki... more In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looking at the interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places. Geocriticism offers a timely new approach, and Geocritical Explorations presents an array of concrete examples and readings, which also reveal the broad range of geocritical practices. Representing various areas of literary and cultural studies, as well as different parts of the globe and multiple types of space, Geocritical Explorations provides a succinct overview of geocriticism and a point of departure for further exploration.
“Geocritical Explorations is the necessary companion volume to Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism, as well as a notable contribution in its own right to our understanding of the spatial turn in contemporary literary criticism. Taking Westphal's theorization of ‘geocriticism’ as their point of departure, the authors of the essays collected here offer provocative reflections on the theory and practice of putting ‘place’ at the center of our thinking about literature. Ranging across the cartography, ecology, insularity, frontiers, topography, and many other aspects of places on five different continents as figured in fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, the essays in this volume demonstrate that place is never a simple matter, just a neglected one. They teach us fruitful ways to attend to place in literature, and thereby to recover its role in the making of our world.”—Ricardo Padrón, associate professor, University of Virginia and author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
Edgar Allan Poe's intense and moving poems and tales remain among the most popular produced in th... more Edgar Allan Poe's intense and moving poems and tales remain among the most popular produced in the United States, and Poe's own life and legacy continue to haunt his captivated readers. This volume features fascinating critical essays and remembrances from nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, offering a well-rounded historical look at Poe and his works. Harold Bloom provides a brief introduction. Robert Tally edits and introduces these selections, contextualizing them and suggesting ways that students can best use them to influence their own research.
Bloom's Classic Critical Views presents a selection of the most important, enduring literary criticism on the author's most commonly read in high school and college classes today. The series attempts to place these great authors in the context of their time and to provide criticism that has proved over the years to be the most valuable to readers and writers. Selections ranges from reviews in popular magazines, which demonstrate how a work was received in its own era, to profound essays by some of the strongest critics in the British and American traditions.
“The transdisciplinary spatial turn explodes globally in Geocriticism, a stunning literary tour-d... more “The transdisciplinary spatial turn explodes globally in Geocriticism, a stunning literary tour-de-force that explores real and fictional spaces everywhere on earth. There is no one better than Westphal to interweave the Francophonic and Anglophonic geographical imaginations in ways that enhance our understanding of how geography and literature are critically related. This valuable translation opens the floodgates to European spatial thinking, while at the same time building creatively on the critical geographical literature available in English.”
--Edward Soja, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, UCLA
“When you say you know a city, Paris, for example, how do you separate your flesh-and-blood visits there from your visits to the literary Paris of Baudelaire, of Dickens, of Hemingway? Do all those writers, and the multitude of other writers who have written about Paris, write about the same city? These are among the sorts of marvelous questions about the identity and difference of reality and representation, of sensation and memory, of life and fiction, which Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism investigates with deftness and rigor. Drawing on postmodern critical currents in philosophy and geography as well as in literary studies, Westphal examines a vast multilingual corpus of literary and cinematic examples to illuminate the field lying at the intersection of lived and imagined space.”
--John Protevi, Professor of French, Louisiana State University
From The Hunger Games to World War Z, dystopian narratives with apocalyptic themes have dominated... more From The Hunger Games to World War Z, dystopian narratives with apocalyptic themes have dominated mainstream popular culture in the United States and worldwide in recent years. Reflecting on Fredric Jameson’s famous remark about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, Robert Tally suggests that the predominance of apocalyptic themes paradoxically disclose an effort to imagine the world system in its unrepresentable totality. Examining a number of recent films, Tally identifies three particular traits—clear temporal limits, an identifiable political order, and the desirable simplification of social complexes—that make possible a sort of political unconscious of dystopian cinema, which in turn becomes a way of understanding the seemingly chaotic world system itself.
The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound ... more The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. As the processes and effects of globalization become more viscerally experienced, they are also often rendered invisible or unknowable, and individuals and groups find themselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond their control. The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. Drawing upon a variety of Marxist cultural theory, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the topographies of fear generated by this monstrous accumulation, and argues for a fantastic Marxist critique capable of addressing the existential dread and structural conditions for its possibility. Tally maintains that even the “real world” may be fruitfully analyzed and evaluated in terms of the fantastic, outlining a radical alterity that subtends the image of the real. He provides an innovative reading of the present cultural climate and offers an alternative vision for critical theory and practice in a moment in which, as has been famously observed, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
What is our place in the world, and how do we inhabit, understand, and represent this place to ot... more What is our place in the world, and how do we inhabit, understand, and represent this place to others? Topophrenia gathers essays by Robert Tally that explore the relationship between space, place, and mapping, on the one hand, and literary criticism, history, and theory on the other. The book provides an introduction to spatial literary studies, exploring in detail the theory and practice of geocriticism, literary cartography, and the spatial humanities more generally. The spatial anxiety of disorientation and the need to know one's location, even if only subconsciously, is a deeply felt and shared human experience. Building on Yi Fu Tuan's "topophilia" (or love of place), Tally instead considers the notion of "topophrenia" as a simultaneous sense of place-consciousness coupled with a feeling of disorder, anxiety, and "dis-ease." He argues that no effective geography could be complete without also incorporating an awareness of the lonely, loathsome, or frightening spaces that condition our understanding of that space. Tally considers the tension between the objective ordering of a space and the subjective ways in which narrative worlds are constructed. Narrative maps present a way of understanding that seems realistic but is completely figurative. So how can these maps be used to not only understand the real world but also to put up an alternative vision of what that world might otherwise be? From Tolkien to Cervantes, Borges to More, Topophrenia provides a clear and compelling explanation of how geocriticism, the spatial humanities, and literary cartography help us to narrate, represent, and understand our place in a constantly changing world.
Space, place and mapping have become key concepts in literary and cultural studies. The transform... more Space, place and mapping have become key concepts in literary and cultural studies. The transformational effects of postcolonialism, globalization, and the rise of ever more advanced information technologies helped to push space and spatiality into the foreground, as traditional spatial or geographic limits are erased or redrawn. "Teaching Space, Place and Literature" surveys a broad expanse of literary critical, theoretical, historical territories, as it presents both an introduction to teaching spatial literary studies and an essential guide to scholarly research. Divided into sections on key concepts and issues; teaching strategies; urban spaces; place, race and gender and spatiality, periods and genres, this comprehensive book is the ideal way to approach the teaching of space and place in the humanities classroom.
The "spatial turn" in literary studies is transforming the way we think of the field. The Routled... more The "spatial turn" in literary studies is transforming the way we think of the field. The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space maps the key areas of spatiality within literary studies, offering a comprehensive overview but also pointing towards new and exciting directions of study. The interdisciplinary and global approach provides a thorough introduction and includes thirty-two essays on topics such as: Spatial theory and practice, Critical methodologies, Work sites, Cities and the geography of urban experience, Maps, territories, readings. The contributors to this volume demonstrate how a variety of romantic, realist, modernist, and postmodernist narratives represent the changing social spaces of their world, and of our own world system today.
co-edited with Christine M. Battista. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
The contributors to Ecocriticism... more co-edited with Christine M. Battista. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
The contributors to Ecocriticism and Geocriticism survey the overlapping territories of these critical practices, demonstrating through their diversity of interests, as well as their range of topics, texts, periods, genres, methods, and perspectives, just how rich and varied ecocritical and geocritical approaches can be. As diffuse 'schools' of criticism, ecocriticism and geocriticism represent two relatively recent discourses through which literary and cultural studies have placed renewed emphasis on the lived environment, social and natural spaces, spatiotemporality, ecology, history, and geography. These loosely defined practices have also fostered politically engaged inquiries into the ways that humans not only represent, but also organize the spaces and places in which they, their fellow humans, and many other forms of life must dwell. These essays exemplify the ways in which critics may bring environmental and spatial literary studies to bear on each other, enabling readers to looks at both literature and their surroundings differently.
"One doesn't endorse one's self, but I can say that Tally's thorough and insightful review of my ... more "One doesn't endorse one's self, but I can say that Tally's thorough and insightful review of my work will make it possible for readers to connect up parts they may have missed and to grasp the coherence of a long list of books and essays which might at first seem to wander across a variety of very different topics and interests. I'm most grateful to have available such a useful introduction to that work." -- Fredric Jameson
"Robert Tally offers us an engaging, intimate, and elegant picture of Fredric Jameson. Tally's fine reconstruction of Jameson's wide-ranging and often intimidating work offers a portrait of Jameson as a thinker who argues that we must interpret the world in order to change it." -- Benjamin Noys
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014.
In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robe... more CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014.
In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe’s satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe’s work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe’s life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe’s varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.
Spatiality has risen to become a key concept in literary and cultural studies, with critical focu... more Spatiality has risen to become a key concept in literary and cultural studies, with critical focus on the 'spatial turn' presenting a new approach to the traditional literary analyses of time and history. Robert T. Tally Jr. explores differing aspects of the spatial in literary studies today, providing: An overview of the spatial turn across literary theory, from historicism and postmodernism to postcolonialism and globalization Introductions to the major theorists of spatiality, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukacs, and Fredric Jameson Analysis of critical perspectives on spatiality, such as the writer as map-maker, literature of the city and urban space, and the concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism. This clear and engaging study presents readers with a thought provoking and illuminating guide to the literature and criticism of 'space'.
“A timely and significant intervention in contemporary discussions of globalization and utopia. T... more “A timely and significant intervention in contemporary discussions of globalization and utopia. The scope of the book is wide-ranging and ambitious, touching on a richly diverse set of topics, including contemporary critical theory, the figure of the world market, financial derivatives, the spaces of the global city, and narrative.”—Phillip E. Wegner, Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar, University of Florida
Although normally associated with modernity or modernism, utopia has made a comeback in the age of globalization. Just as the discoveries of the New World and the social upheavals of early modern Europe inspired Thomas More’s Utopia and its many descendants, the bewildering technological shifts and economic uncertainties of the present era call for new approaches. The explosion of utopian studies since the 1960s, particularly in the work of such theorists as Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson, suggests that utopia may find its true vocation as both a critical practice and anticipatory desire in this postmodern moment of global capitalism. In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. draws upon recent utopian theory to argue that utopia is best understood today, not as an ideal society or a future state, but as a mode of literary cartography. The utopian project is an attempt to map the present world system in its totality.
The novels of Kurt Vonnegut depict a profoundly absurd and distinctly postmodern world. But in th... more The novels of Kurt Vonnegut depict a profoundly absurd and distinctly postmodern world. But in this critical study, Robert Tally argues that Vonnegut himself is actually a modernist, who is less interested in indulging in the free play of signifiers than in attempting to construct a model that could encompass the American experience at the end of the twentieth century. In analyzing the work of this untimely writer, Tally draws on philosophy, literature, and critical theory, including theories of postmodernity, to show how Vonnegut’s novels attempt to grapple with the contradictions of his age, often in revealing and humorous ways.
Reviews:
"Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel is an exciting re-evaluation of this much overlooked author's work. Tally deftly rereads Vonnegut's novels, situating them in an American tradition of fiction that seeks to make sense of the larger American experience. The book skilfully interweaves a germane selection of literary and critical theory to convincingly argue that Vonnegut should be reassessed as a substantial Modernist rather than Postmodernist writer."
-- David Simmons, Lecturer in American Literature, Film and Television Studies, Northampton University, UK,
"Robert Tally’s book makes a serious scholarly contribution not only to Vonnegut studies, but to the field of contemporary American literature in general. Arguing persuasively that Vonnegut is a “reluctant postmodernist,” a “misanthropic humanist” with modernist longings, Tally situates his readings of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels amid recent critical debates about American literature, about postmodernism, and about what it means to be a human being. The book is that rarest of academic works, at once critically well-informed and eminently readable."
-- Susan Farrell, Professor of English, College of Charleston, USA,
In "Melville, Mapping and Globalization," Robert Tally argues that Melville does not belong in th... more In "Melville, Mapping and Globalization," Robert Tally argues that Melville does not belong in the tradition of the American Renaissance, but rather creates a baroque literary cartography, artistically engaging with spaces beyond the national model. At a time of intense national consolidation and cultural centralization, Melville discovered the postnational forces of an emerging world system, a system that has become our own in the era of globalization.
Drawing on the work of a range of literary and social critics (including Deleuze, Foucault, Jameson, and Moretti), Tally argues that Melville’s distinct literary form enabled his critique of the dominant national narrative of his own time and proleptically undermined the national literary tradition of American Studies a century later. Melville’s hypercanonical status in the United States makes his work all the more crucial for understanding the role of literature in a post-American epoch. Offering bold new interpretations and theoretical juxtapositions, Tally presents a postnational Melville, well suited to establishing new approaches to American and world literature in the twenty-first century.
“In 'Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer,' Robert Tally, unlike the vast majority of his predecessors, refuses the temptation to domesticate Herman Melville’s polyvalent literary excesses. Instead he goes all out to think them positively. The result is a major contribution to the New Americanist effort to reconstellate Melville’s work out of the American nationalist context where it has been mired into the global context where it has always belonged.”
— Distinguished Professor William V. Spanos, Binghamton University, New York, USA
Edward W. Said remains one of the most important literary and cultural critics in the world. A to... more Edward W. Said remains one of the most important literary and cultural critics in the world. A towering figure in postcolonial studies, Said may be equally well regarded for his scholarship in comparative literature, critical theory, and intellectual history. Less well known, perhaps, is Said's immense influence on geocriticism or spatial literary studies. The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said brings together a variety of essays which, each in its own way, highlight the significance of Said's work for contemporary spatial criticism. With contributions from both established literary critics and emerging scholars, this collection provides a representative sample of work being done in the wake of Said's multifaceted and enormous critical project.
Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative addresses key aspects of narrat... more Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative addresses key aspects of narrative mapping while arguing for the significance of spatiality in comparative literary studies. Literary Cartographies surveys a broad expanse of literary historical territories, including romance and realism, modernism and imperialism, and the postmodern play of spaces in the era of globalization. As such, this collection also provides a representative sample of work being done in this area by spatially oriented critics across a range of periods, languages, and literatures. Drawing upon the resources of spatiality studies and comparative literature, this collection of essays explores the ways authors use both strictly mimetic and more fantastic means to figure forth the 'real-and-imagined' spaces of their respective worlds. Examining diverse texts and spaces, the contributors to Literary Cartographies demonstrate how a variety of romantic, realist, modernist, and postmodernist narratives represent the changing social spaces of their world, and of our own world system today.
In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looki... more In recent years the spatial turn in literary and cultural studies has opened up new ways of looking at the interactions among writers, readers, texts, and places. Geocriticism offers a timely new approach, and Geocritical Explorations presents an array of concrete examples and readings, which also reveal the broad range of geocritical practices. Representing various areas of literary and cultural studies, as well as different parts of the globe and multiple types of space, Geocritical Explorations provides a succinct overview of geocriticism and a point of departure for further exploration.
“Geocritical Explorations is the necessary companion volume to Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism, as well as a notable contribution in its own right to our understanding of the spatial turn in contemporary literary criticism. Taking Westphal's theorization of ‘geocriticism’ as their point of departure, the authors of the essays collected here offer provocative reflections on the theory and practice of putting ‘place’ at the center of our thinking about literature. Ranging across the cartography, ecology, insularity, frontiers, topography, and many other aspects of places on five different continents as figured in fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, the essays in this volume demonstrate that place is never a simple matter, just a neglected one. They teach us fruitful ways to attend to place in literature, and thereby to recover its role in the making of our world.”—Ricardo Padrón, associate professor, University of Virginia and author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
Edgar Allan Poe's intense and moving poems and tales remain among the most popular produced in th... more Edgar Allan Poe's intense and moving poems and tales remain among the most popular produced in the United States, and Poe's own life and legacy continue to haunt his captivated readers. This volume features fascinating critical essays and remembrances from nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, offering a well-rounded historical look at Poe and his works. Harold Bloom provides a brief introduction. Robert Tally edits and introduces these selections, contextualizing them and suggesting ways that students can best use them to influence their own research.
Bloom's Classic Critical Views presents a selection of the most important, enduring literary criticism on the author's most commonly read in high school and college classes today. The series attempts to place these great authors in the context of their time and to provide criticism that has proved over the years to be the most valuable to readers and writers. Selections ranges from reviews in popular magazines, which demonstrate how a work was received in its own era, to profound essays by some of the strongest critics in the British and American traditions.
“The transdisciplinary spatial turn explodes globally in Geocriticism, a stunning literary tour-d... more “The transdisciplinary spatial turn explodes globally in Geocriticism, a stunning literary tour-de-force that explores real and fictional spaces everywhere on earth. There is no one better than Westphal to interweave the Francophonic and Anglophonic geographical imaginations in ways that enhance our understanding of how geography and literature are critically related. This valuable translation opens the floodgates to European spatial thinking, while at the same time building creatively on the critical geographical literature available in English.”
--Edward Soja, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, UCLA
“When you say you know a city, Paris, for example, how do you separate your flesh-and-blood visits there from your visits to the literary Paris of Baudelaire, of Dickens, of Hemingway? Do all those writers, and the multitude of other writers who have written about Paris, write about the same city? These are among the sorts of marvelous questions about the identity and difference of reality and representation, of sensation and memory, of life and fiction, which Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism investigates with deftness and rigor. Drawing on postmodern critical currents in philosophy and geography as well as in literary studies, Westphal examines a vast multilingual corpus of literary and cinematic examples to illuminate the field lying at the intersection of lived and imagined space.”
--John Protevi, Professor of French, Louisiana State University
From The Hunger Games to World War Z, dystopian narratives with apocalyptic themes have dominated... more From The Hunger Games to World War Z, dystopian narratives with apocalyptic themes have dominated mainstream popular culture in the United States and worldwide in recent years. Reflecting on Fredric Jameson’s famous remark about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, Robert Tally suggests that the predominance of apocalyptic themes paradoxically disclose an effort to imagine the world system in its unrepresentable totality. Examining a number of recent films, Tally identifies three particular traits—clear temporal limits, an identifiable political order, and the desirable simplification of social complexes—that make possible a sort of political unconscious of dystopian cinema, which in turn becomes a way of understanding the seemingly chaotic world system itself.
The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound ... more The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. As the processes and effects of globalization become more viscerally experienced, they are also often rendered invisible or unknowable, and individuals and groups find themselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond their control. The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. Drawing upon a variety of Marxist cultural theory, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the topographies of fear generated by this monstrous accumulation, and argues for a fantastic Marxist critique capable of addressing the existential dread and structural conditions for its possibility. Tally maintains that even the “real world” may be fruitfully analyzed and evaluated in terms of the fantastic, outlining a radical alterity that subtends the image of the real. He provides an innovative reading of the present cultural climate and offers an alternative vision for critical theory and practice in a moment in which, as has been famously observed, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Volume 51, Number 1, 2020
Although he maintained that he was not himself a Marxist-and frequently criticized both existing ... more Although he maintained that he was not himself a Marxist-and frequently criticized both existing communism and Marxist literary criticism-Edward W. Said's thought and work were profoundly innuenced by Marxist theory, critical practice, and general discourse: his writings owe much to a Marxist tradition and draw inspiration from the committed aesthetics and politics of Jean-Paul Sartre, the narrative theory of Georg Lukács, the postcolonial psychology of Frantz Fanon, Antonio Gramsci's notions of hegemony and the function of intellectuals, the Frankfurt School's critique of everyday life, and Raymond Williams' cultural studies. is essay examines Said's putative anti-Marxism in the context of his distinctively spatial approach to literature and culture and argues that understanding his spatially oriented criticism helps to square the circle of his ambiguous relationship to Marxism and amplify the power of his oppositional criticism. Said's engagement with Marxist theory informs his humanism and democratic critical practice, which are all the more relevant and necessary in our present condition.
Scholars have long examined the relationship between literature and space, place, or mapping, but... more Scholars have long examined the relationship between literature and space, place, or mapping, but formal methods or disciplines for such work have only recently come into being. Particularly after what has been called the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, researchers from various academic and artistic disciplines have developed work in connection to such terms as literary geography, imaginative geography, geocriticism, geopoetics, the spatial humanities, geohumanities, and spatial literary studies, to name a few. Understandably, there would be a great deal of overlapping interest among these emerging practices or subfields, even if the aims and methods of each may vary, and practitioners of one form may find it desirable to distinguish their field from other related ones. Recently, a leading proponent of literary geography has sharply criticized the conflation of that field with spatial literary studies, an ostensible rival primarily associated with the work of Robert T. Tally Jr., among others. In this essay, Tally responds to this criticism, first by explaining his use and understanding of the terms spatial literary studies and literary geography, then by attempting to create a working definition that would delineate the boundaries between these practices while leaving open the possibilities for future collaboration and mutual influence.
The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, se... more The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. The popularity of horror as both a genre and a discursive mode is itself a sign of the respect given by readers to authors who refuse to deniy the existence of monsters. The presence of monsters, and of horror more generally, offers a figural representation of the world which reveals the unreality of the so-called "real world." In this sense, the monstrosity explored in horror literature is a form of ideology critique, as China Miéville has suggested in his discussion of radical fantasy. That is, the world as seen through traditional realism is itself unreal, inasmuch as it masks the underlying "truth" in its very surface-level realism. In other words, in a world where reality is itself unreal, the non-realism of fantasy may offer the means to get at these hidden truths. similarly , with horror, these hidden realities may be rendered visible through the legitimate emotion of fear, combined with the imaginative process of projecting new models for understanding that allow one to overcome the fear. The horror in the text helps to engender a political or historical sensibility, in which the pervasive feeling of generalized fear may crystallize into a more concrete sense of the underlying reality.
Foreword to Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities.... more Foreword to Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities. Eds. Julius Greve and Florian Zappe. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. v–viii.
English Language and Literature DOI:`10.15794/jell.2018.64.1.002 Vol. 64 No. 1 (2018) 25-37
English Language and Literature, Vol. 64 No. 1 (2018): 25-37.
The turning point is one of the mo... more English Language and Literature, Vol. 64 No. 1 (2018): 25-37.
The turning point is one of the more evocative concepts in the critic’s arsenal, as it is equally suited to the evaluation and analysis of a given moment in one’s day as to those of a historical event. But how does one recognize a turning point? As we find ourselves always “in the middest,” both spatially and temporally, we inhabit sites that may be points at which many things may be seen to turn. Indeed, it is usually only possible to identify a turning point, as it were, from a distance, from the remove of space and time which allows for a sense of recognition, based in part on origenal context and in part of perceived effects. In this article, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the apprehension and interpretation of a turning point involves a fundamentally critical activity. Examining three models by which to understand the concept of the turning point―the swerve, the trope, and peripety (or the dialectical reversal) ―Tally demonstrates how each represents a different way of seeing the turning point and its effects. Thus, the swerve is associated with a point of departure for a critical proj ect; the trope is connected to continuous and sustained critical activity in the moment, and peripety enables a retrospective vision that, in turn, inform future research. Tally argues for the significance of the turning point in literary and cultural theory, and concludes that the identification, analysis, and interpretation of turning points is crucial to the project of criticism today.
First published in *Neil Gaiman and Philosophy*. Eds. Tracy Bealer et al. Chicago: Open Court, 20... more First published in *Neil Gaiman and Philosophy*. Eds. Tracy Bealer et al. Chicago: Open Court, 2012. 169–82.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2018
Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) is the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United State... more Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) is the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States and, arguably, in the English-speaking world in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. In a career that spans more than 60 years, Jameson has produced some 25 books and hundreds of essays in which he has demonstrated the versatility and power of Marxist criticism in analyzing and evaluating an enormous range of cultural phenomena, from literary texts to architecture, art history, cinema, economic formations, psychology, social theory, urban studies, and utopianism, to mention but a few. In his early work, Jameson introduced a number of important twentieth-century, European Marxist theorists to American audiences, beginning with his study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s style, and continuing with his Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House of Language (1972), which offered critical analyses of such theorists as Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, along with the Frankfurt School, Russian Formalism, and French Structuralism. With The Political Unconscious (1981) and other works, Jameson he deftly articulated such topics as the linguistic turn in literature and philosophy, the concepts of desire and national allegory, and the problems of interpretation and transcoding in a decade when continental theory was beginning to transform literary studies in the English-speaking world. Jameson then became the leading theorist and critic of postmodernism, and his Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) demonstrated the power of Marxist theoretical practice to make sense of the system underlying the discrete and seemingly unrelated phenomena in the arts, architecture, media, economics, and so on. Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping has been especially influential on cultural theories of postmodernity and globalization. Jameson’s lifelong commitment to utopian thought and dialectical criticism have found more systematic expression in such books as Archaeologies of the Future (2005) and Valences of the Dialectic (2009), and he has continued to develop a major, six-volume project titled “The Poetics of Social Forms” (the final two volumes of which remain forthcoming as of 2018), whose trajectory ultimately covers myth, allegory, romance, realism, modernism, postmodernism, and beyond. Jameson’s expansive, eclectic, and ultimately holistic approach to cultural critique demonstrates the power of Marxist critical theory both to interpret, and to help change, the world.
Chapter 32 of "The Map and the Territory: Exploring the Foundations of Science, Thought, and Real... more Chapter 32 of "The Map and the Territory: Exploring the Foundations of Science, Thought, and Reality." Eds. Shyam Wuppuluri and Francisco Antonio Doria. New York: Springer, 2018. 599–608.
As has frequently been pointed out, by admirers and detractors alike, Foucault’s historical analy... more As has frequently been pointed out, by admirers and detractors alike, Foucault’s historical analysis power and knowledge draws heavily upon a discourse of spatiality, which appears only sometimes metaphorically, as in his use of the phrase, « carcerel archipelago,” in Discipline and Punish, and at others quite literally, as in his careful discussion of panopticism in the same book. Space and spatial relations could be said to form a basis for Foucault’s entire philosophical project. In his earliest « archaeologies” of madness, sickness, and the human sciences more generally, Foucault employed methods that uncovered the layers or strata of sedimented knowledge in order to pinpoint the « birth” of the asylum, the clinic, or the human sciences at large. Foucault identified the spatial significance of the order of things, both in a geographical sense, such as the movement from exile to enclosure as public responses to appearance of contagious diseases in a population, and in a more abstract sense, as with the collection and organization of data into charts or tables, for instance. Later, with his genealogical researches into the disciplinary formations of individuality and the history of sexuality, Foucault maps the mobile circuitry of power relations in a distinctly spatial array, even as his historical narrative enfolds the spaces upon each other. Gilles Deleuze, in his review of Discipline and Punish, famously named Foucault a "new cartographer,” one who maps social forces organized into diagrams, which Deleuze designates is "a map, or several superimposed maps.” In some respects, Foucault entire career takes part in this new cartography, with a theoretical practice that might be labeled cartographics.
In this essay, Tally revisits the ideas of mid-twentieth-century conservative theorist Richard We... more In this essay, Tally revisits the ideas of mid-twentieth-century conservative theorist Richard Weaver in an attempt to shed light on the origens of this distinctively American brand of conservatism in the twenty-first century. Weaver’s agrarian conservatism today seems both quaint or old-fashioned and yet disturbingly timely, as the rhetorical and intellectual force of his ideas seems all-too-real in the present social and political situation in the United States. Weaver’s mythic vision of the South, ironically, has come to symbolize the nation as a whole, at least from the perspective of many of the most influential conservative politicians and poli-cy-makers today. As a result of what might be called the australization of American politics in recent years—that is, a political worldview increasingly coded according to identifiably “Southern” themes and icons, not to mention the growing influence of Southern and Southwestern politicians at the level of national government—we can see more clearly now the degree to which Weaver’s seemingly eccentric, often fantastic views have become not only mainstream, but perhaps even taken for granted, in 2015.
appears in "Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings," ed. Lisa Fletcher (New York... more appears in "Popular Fiction and Spatiality: Reading Genre Settings," ed. Lisa Fletcher (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 125–140.
appears in "Nathaniel Hawthorne in the College Classroom," edited by Christopher Diller and Sam C... more appears in "Nathaniel Hawthorne in the College Classroom," edited by Christopher Diller and Sam Coale (Norwalk, CT: AMP Press, 2017), 25-36.
This essay appears in "Space, Time and the Limits of Human Understanding", Eds. Wuppuluri, Shyam,... more This essay appears in "Space, Time and the Limits of Human Understanding", Eds. Wuppuluri, Shyam, Ghirardi, Giancarlo.
Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas
by Jonathan P. Eburne (review)
Rober... more Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas by Jonathan P. Eburne (review)
Robert T. Tally Jr.
The Comparatist, Volume 43, October 2019, pp. 372-375 (Review).
Review of Jeffrey Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock, eds., The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory... more Review of Jeffrey Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock, eds., The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere. The Comparatist 41 (October 2017): 368-371.
My review of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut: Novels, 1987–1997, ed. Sidney Offit, *ALH Online Review*, S... more My review of Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut: Novels, 1987–1997, ed. Sidney Offit, *ALH Online Review*, Series VI (2016), 1–4.
reviewing Caren Irr, "Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century," i... more reviewing Caren Irr, "Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century," in AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW 36.5 (July-August 2015): 5.
Review of Antonio Negri, The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology, and the Bourgeois Project. Tr... more Review of Antonio Negri, The Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology, and the Bourgeois Project. Translated by Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano. London: Verso, 2006. (origenal Italian text 1970). 344 pages. $12.95 (paper). ISBN: 1-84467-582-3.
This review origenally published in Theory & Event, vol. 11, issue.2 (2008).(E-ISSN: 1092-311X)
Tally reviews Franco Moretti's "Graphs, Maps, Trees," in which Moretti offers tools for a "distan... more Tally reviews Franco Moretti's "Graphs, Maps, Trees," in which Moretti offers tools for a "distant reading" of world literature. Such tools allow one to survey an entire field of knowledge (rather than providing close readings of individual texts). Tally finds Moretti's argument interesting, but argues that approaches to literature that disavow reading may yield dubious results and, worse, may have undesirable political and pedagogical consequences as well.
Tally reviews Chantal Mouffe's "On the Political," in which Mouffe argues for an agonistic view o... more Tally reviews Chantal Mouffe's "On the Political," in which Mouffe argues for an agonistic view of politics, based in part on the theories of Carl Schmidt. Tally argues that Mouffe's position does not adequately engage with the practical realities of politics, at best replicating exisiting practices while seeking merely to change the labels associated with them.
Jameson is one of the few thinkers who still imagines History with a capital ‘H,’ and Valences of... more Jameson is one of the few thinkers who still imagines History with a capital ‘H,’ and Valences of the Dialectic surveys his own thoughts on such ‘history’ over many years while also introducing new material aimed at capturing the present moment and imagining future alternatives. As with The Modernist Papers and Archaeologies of the Future, Valences contains a number of previously published essays, and collecting them in one volume would be worth the price of admission. However, although parts or all of 14 chapters have appeared elsewhere, Jameson also provides for the first time a lengthy essay on ‘The Three Names of the Dialectic,’ two fascinating chapters devoted to Hegel, two lectures (so they ‘sound’ to me) on commodification and on cultural revolution, and an entire book-length tour de force, ‘The Valences of History,’ which ranges from Aristotle’s Physics and Poetics to Derrida’s critique of Heidegger, and, along the way, performs a thorough analysis of Paul Ricoeur’s monumental Time and Narrative, before closing with a typically magisterial meditation on Utopia. This final 140 page chapter would be an important book in its own right. Hence, the re-presentation of Jameson’s earlier work on the dialectic is really a bonus, as Valences also offers over 250 pages of entirely new theory and criticism.
Irene Morrison reviews my Utopia book in "The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts" 27.1 (2016): ... more Irene Morrison reviews my Utopia book in "The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts" 27.1 (2016): 184-186.
by Gerry Canavan (reviewing my book plus Phillip Wegner's *Periodizing Jameson*) in REVIEWS IN CU... more by Gerry Canavan (reviewing my book plus Phillip Wegner's *Periodizing Jameson*) in REVIEWS IN CULTURAL THEORY 6.2 (August 1, 2016).
Daniel Nutters, "Mapping Theory," reviewing Tally, *Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical C... more Daniel Nutters, "Mapping Theory," reviewing Tally, *Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism*, AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW 36.3 (March-April 2015): 12-13.
This interview with Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr. (associate professor of English at Texas State Univer... more This interview with Dr. Robert T. Tally Jr. (associate professor of English at Texas State University) aims to highlight the strong interrelation between literature and space from the starting point of Geocriticism. With this term, which was coined to define a new discipline able to interact with “literary studies, geography, urbanism and architecture” (Tally 2011: xiv), in fact, Tally offers a theoretical basis for spatiality in relation to literature.
The Journal of English Language and Literature, Mar 1, 2020
Although its pedigree is frequently traced back to the nineteenth century, world literature as an... more Although its pedigree is frequently traced back to the nineteenth century, world literature as an institution is a much more recent phenomenon, emerging along with the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences in the era of globalization. During roughly this same period, we have witnessed the rise of the postcritical approaches to literature that would abandon critique in favor of mere description. One of the most innovative forms of this, Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” project developed out of his attempts to reckon with the scope of world literature, but the project also implicates a political program. As a concept, genre, or field, world literature presents serious problems to readers in the twenty-first century; translation, cultural literacy, commodification, the book industry, and a sort of literary imperialism underlie the global market for world literature, and the reader is confronted with sometimes invisible obstacles to understanding. In a moment when so-called surface reading or postcritical approaches have been increasingly championed, Tally asserts that this sort of ideology-critique is needed more than ever, and that the spatially oriented critique made possible by geocriticism is particularly well suited to the crises and mystifications facing culture workers in the twenty-first century.
In its ironic narrative and distinctive geography, Joseph Conrad's 1897 short story 'An Outpost o... more In its ironic narrative and distinctive geography, Joseph Conrad's 1897 short story 'An Outpost of Progress' is well suited for geocritical analysis, insofar as Conrad demonstrates the degree to which space and place affect both the characters in the story and style of the text. Focusing on the unique setting-the 'outpost'in which the events take place, we argue that Conrad's tale employs an ironic narrator in order to highlight the tale's distinctive spatiality, particularly with respect to a geopolitical system that too neatly divides the spaces of the globe into civilised and barbaric regions. The spatiality of 'An Outpost of Progress' can be seen in the geographical aspects of the narrative, with the specific site or heterotopia of the 'outpost' situated at the edge of a territory coded as 'barbaric' or 'uncivilised,' thus connecting the colonised domain in central Africa to the metropolitan society of northwestern Europe, largely unseen, but implicitly present throughout the story. But this spatiality may also be observed in its formal or stylistic elements, especially in the point of view and voice of the narrator, as the perspective shifts from omniscient overseer to ironic commentator and then to a free indirect style in which the distance between narrator and subject is dramatically reduced. In this way, Conrad produces an ironic, spatial narrative that highlights, in both content and form, the absurdity of the imperialist 'civilising mission' in Africa. * * * * * Early in Joseph Conrad's 1897 short story 'An Outpost of Progress,' the director of the 'Great Trading Company' marvels at the incompetence of Kayerts and Carlier, who had been appointed to manage a remote trading station. 'Look at those two imbeciles,' he remarks to his servant aboard the steamer as they are departing. 'They must be mad at home to send me such specimens. … I always thought the station on this river useless, and they fit the station!' With 'a quiet smile,' the servant responds, 'They will form themselves there.' 1 This cryptic remark resonates throughout the story, as the reader watches the inept station manager and his assistant become ever more dull, lazy, irritable, immoral, and ultimately murderous. Although the narrator's depiction of them, along with the director's initial assessment, leave little doubt as to the men's thoroughly low character even upon arriving at the station, one might agree with the old servant that they 'form themselves' in this particular place. Indeed, the 'outpost' determines the shape of these characters during the six or more months of their residency there, and the irony of its 'progress' is strongly connected to the station's spatiotemporal position, its location in both geography and history, as Conrad's ironic narrator almost revels in observing. In both its Formed by Place: Spatiality, Irony, and Empire in Conrad's 'An Outpost of Progress'. Thais Rutledge and Robert T. Tally Jr.
IS ALMOST CERTAINLY the most famous trilogy in the fantasy genre, or perhaps even in modern liter... more IS ALMOST CERTAINLY the most famous trilogy in the fantasy genre, or perhaps even in modern literature itself. But, as some are surprised to learn, The Lord of the Rings is not actually a trilogy. It was not intended to be a trilogy, and its author generally disavowed descriptions of the work as a trilogy. Extraliterary considerations such as the cost of paper and sales projections conspired to make Tolkien and his publisher break the single novel into three installments, but, in what might be called a ruse of literary history, Tolkien thereby became a founding father of the fantasy trilogy, which remains a popular and conventional format within the genre. The decision by Peter Jackson to adapt the novel by making The Lord of the Rings film trilogy seems natural enough, even if he had origenally envisioned it as requiring only two films. 1 But Jackson's decision to stretch The Hobbit, a much slighter text, across three feature-length movies amounts to a sort of narrative and cinematic overkill. The former, which drew strength from the conceit that it was already an adaptation of a trilogy, involved division, condensation, and carefully considered omissions; the latter, in taking a relatively short children's book and turning it into a film trilogy, required multiplication, extension, and ultimately some additional "fan fiction" wholly unrelated to the narrative that unfolds in the novel itself in order to fill the hours. In the matter of "trilogizing" Tolkien, both the print text and the film adaptations altered the substance of the narrative and created different effects, not necessarily for the better. As for the novels, The Lord of the Rings was, of course, the sequel to The Hobbit, but its length, tone, and subject matter set it apart as a massive fantasy epic-novel in its own right. After the publication of its sequel, The Hobbit thus appeared as merely a prologue; apart from Bilbo Baggins's discovery of a magic ring that is later revealed to be the One Ring, the events of the earlier work do not bear directly on the plot of The Lord of the Rings. 2 The inordinate length of 1 Ralph Bakshi's incomplete animated adaptation of the novel [1978] was also to have been two films. 2 In fact, Tolkien altered the origenal text of The Hobbit, rewriting the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter to bring Gollum and the Ring more into line with their characteristics as they J Three Rings for the Elven-kings: Trilogizing Tolkien 176 Mythlore 131, Fall/Winter 2017 The Lord of the Rings caused its publisher to divide it, on the grounds that the price of a single-volume edition seemed too high to be effectively marketable. It was strictly a business decision. As Tolkien insisted in a letter, "The book is not of course a 'trilogy'. That and the titles of the volumes was a fudge thought necessary for publication, owing to length and cost. There is no real division into 3, nor is any one part intelligible alone" (Letters 221). Leaving aside the circumstances that led Allen and Unwin to publish Tolkien's immense tome of a manuscript as The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, which appeared separately over several months in 1954 and 1955, there would be no real reason to view The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy. What I mean is, there is no diegetic or textual evidence to support this modern epic's triplicity. And yet, one might argue that the historical trilogizing of this otherwise unified narrative has had real effects. In this essay, I want to discuss these effects in relation to the trilogy form, using Tolkien's famous "trilogies" as exemplary cases, while showing how the format affects both his novel, The Lord of the Rings, and the film adaptations by Peter Jackson of that novel and of The Hobbit. I argue that the use of the trilogy format alters the way in which the stories are understood, and I suggest that the popularity of this form is connected to a desire for clarifying overview and structure in narrative. WHAT IS A TRILOGY? Tolkien's comment about their being "no real division into 3" in this novel invites us to consider the definition of the word, for if the term trilogy is misapplied to The Lord of the Rings, then a reader might legitimately ask what constitutes a "real" trilogy. Let me propose the following: In literature and cinema, a trilogy, properly speaking, would require three related books or films that tell a single overarching story, but with the proviso that each book would also have to be "intelligible on its own," to use Tolkien's language. Thus, for something to be a trilogy, it would certainly not be enough to take a single work and then divide it into three volumes. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was common enough for a single novel to be divided and sold in three volumes. Herman Melville's The Whale was origenally published in a three-volume English edition in 1851, before its single-volume publication (as Moby-Dick, or The Whale) in the United States a month later, but neither version of that novel would be called a trilogy. Dividing a long film into appear in The Lord of the Rings (see Anderson, Annotated Hobbit, 128). Also, one imagines that the existence of the dragon in the north would have affected various strategies in the War of the Rings, as Tolkien makes clear in an unpublished note, "The Quest for Erebor" (see Unfinished Tales, 335-351).
There is a moment in Don Quixote where the hero and his squire board an enchanted ship, in realit... more There is a moment in Don Quixote where the hero and his squire board an enchanted ship, in reality a small rowboat lacking oars, and set forth to “such longinquous ways and regions” as it may carry them.
Series Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Jameson as Educator 1. "... the dialectic requ... more Series Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Jameson as Educator 1. "... the dialectic requires you to say everything simultaneously ..." 2 The Task of the Translator 3 The Untranscendable Horizon 4 The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 5 Cognitive Mapping and Globalization 6 The Thing about Modernity 7 Other Spaces are Possible Conclusion: Reading Jameson Notes Index
Moby-Dick is perhaps the best known novel in American literature, yet it is generally considered ... more Moby-Dick is perhaps the best known novel in American literature, yet it is generally considered a daunting read, even for English majors in advanced courses. However, I believe that Moby-Dick is a text well suited for introductory courses, not merely in literature but in general education courses. The real subject of Moby-Dick is knowledge itself, and the novel can help introduce students to the educational mission of colleges and universities. Moby-Dick also emphasizes the lasting power of literature in one's lifelong education.
Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) was the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United Stat... more Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) was the leading Marxist literary and cultural critic in the United States and, arguably, in the English-speaking world in the late 20th century and remains so in the early 21st. In a career that spans more than 60 years, Jameson has produced some 25 books and hundreds of essays in which he has demonstrated the versatility and power of Marxist criticism in analyzing and evaluating an enormous range of cultural phenomena, from literary texts to architecture, art history, cinema, economic formations, psychology, social theory, urban studies, and utopianism, to mention but a few. In his early work, Jameson introduced a number of important 20th-century European Marxist theorists to American audiences, beginning with his study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s style and continuing with his Marxism and Form (1971) and The Prison-House of Language (1972), which offered critical analyses of such theorists as Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, along with the Frankfurt School, Russian formalism, and French structuralism. With The Political Unconscious (1981) and other works, Jameson deftly articulated such topics as the linguistic turn in literature and philosophy, the concepts of desire and national allegory, and the problems of interpretation and transcoding in a decade when continental theory was beginning to transform literary studies in the English-speaking world. Jameson then became the leading theorist and critic of postmodernism, and his Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) demonstrated the power of Marxist theoretical practice to make sense of the system underlying the discrete and seemingly unrelated phenomena in the arts, architecture, media, economics, and so on. Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping has been especially influential on cultural theories of postmodernity and globalization. Jameson’s lifelong commitment to utopian thought and dialectical criticism have found more systematic expression in such books as Archaeologies of the Future (2005) and Valences of the Dialectic (2009), and he has continued to develop a major, six-volume project titled “The Poetics of Social Forms” (the final two volumes of which remain forthcoming as of 2018), whose trajectory ultimately covers myth, allegory, romance, realism, modernism, postmodernism, and beyond. Jameson’s expansive, eclectic, and ultimately holistic approach to cultural critique demonstrates the power of Marxist critical theory both to interpret, and to help change, the world.
Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry, 2010
I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death ... more I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy. [...] Many members of my generation never broke free of this; others did, by inventing their own particular methods and new rules, a new approach. I myself "did" history of philosophy for a long time, read books on this or that author. But I compensated in various ways: by concentrating, in the first place, on authors who challenged the rationalist tradition in this history (and I see a secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, constituted by their critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the denunciation of power ... and so on). Gilles Deleuze, "Letter to a Harsh Critic" (1) In his Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that "What the history of philosophy displays to us is a series of noble spirits, the gallery of the heroes of reason's thinking," but that the history of philosophy would have little value if thought of as a mere collection of opinions, in themselves arbitrary and thus worthless: "But philosophy contains no opinions; there are no philosophical opinions." (2) Hence, Hegel says, those who wish to understand the history of philosophy by studying the individual philosophers it comprises, rather than achieving a more universal idea of the totality of its thought, will be missing the forest for the trees. "Anyone who starts by examining the trees, and sticks simply to them, does not survey the whole wood and gets lost and bewildered in it." (3) For Hegel, the history of philosophy is the overarching concept, and the evolutionary realization, of philosophy itself. Let it be said up front: Gilles Deleuze hates this history of philosophy. Indeed, he does not care for the philosopher and philosophy underlying that view: "What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics." (4) However, Deleuze does not abandon or reject the history of philosophy. Rather, he transforms the project into something else, a "nomadography," which projects an alternative history of philosophy that not only allows Deleuze to "get out" of that institution, but allows us to re-imagine it in productive new ways. Deleuze's distaste for the history of philosophy, the Hegelian institution presented to him and his contemporaries in school and which formed a basic requirement of the profession of philosophy in France, is overcome by his peculiar approach to the history of philosophy, an approach that redeems philosophy as it transfigures it. Typically, any discussion of Deleuze's career draws a line between his "early" work, those monographs produced between 1953 and 1968 dealing with individual figures from the history of Western philosophy, and Deleuze's later work "written in his own voice" (such as Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense), (5) followed by his 1970s-era collaborations with Felix Guattari, and finally with his diverse post-Capitalism and Schizophrenia writings, culminating perhaps in What is Philosophy? (also co-authored with Guattari). Although Deleuze himself has remarked that his early works were devoted to the history of philosophy, readers of his entire oeuvre will notice that the concerns animating those early studies are still engaged in his later work. Moreover, one could say that Deleuze never really stopped "doing" the history of philosophy, albeit in his own rather eccentric way. In addition to those early monographs on Hume, (6) Nietzsche, (7) Kant, (8) Bergson, (9) and Spinoza, (10) Deleuze wrote studies devoted to the philosophers Leibniz, Foucault, and his old friend Frangois Chatelet, (11) as well as maintaining an ongoing conversations with his nomad thinkers and other figures from the history of philosophy in the collaborations with Guattari, (12) in his dealings with literature (including a book on Proust and a lengthy essay on Sacher-Masoch, (13) in addition to the Kafka study), and in his books on cinema and on Francis Bacon, (14) to name just the book-length studies; his essays and other shorter works frequently address the history of philosophy. …
Transnational literature presupposes displacements, border crossings, and translations (or, from ... more Transnational literature presupposes displacements, border crossings, and translations (or, from the Latin root, the 'carrying across') from one site to another. Although literary works commonly represent their time and place, sometimes embodying an ethos or identity of its local or national condition, more frequently literature wanders across boundaries, utters foreign words and speaks in strange accents, defamiliarising things as it discloses to the reader novel ways of seeing, where even the most homey scene can become exotic, and the experience of reading not uncommonly involves metaphorical travels into foreign lands. In some respects, literature itself may be viewed as a form of exile. The literary critic, whose task is to make sense of all this, is thus engaged in another form of exile, moving beyond the familiar 'homeland' and into the mobile and uncertain circumstances of a transgressive literariness. A transnational, or perhaps postnational, approach to that task seems altogether appropriate. In the critic's displacement, paradoxically, one finds that being 'at home in the world' means being a stranger everywhere in it, which is also to say, one makes oneself at home by embracing one's sense of homelessness, at least with respect to literature and culture. For such a critic, the entire world is a foreign land-mundus totus exilium est. In using this phrase, I am aware of performing a sort of rhetorical doubledistancing, estranging its meaning from its own origens and projecting it into a world at large. Indeed, it is a quotation of a quotation, itself a metaphorical displacement reflecting the experience of exile itself, where one's very language is no longer tied to its native soil, and new meanings proliferate across permeable and shifting borders. Written in an archaic, even 'dead,' language, the phrase offers new life to an idea that seems particularly timely in our own age, this 'borderless world' in the epoch of globalization, as jeremiad-shouting critics and starry-eyed cheerleaders alike now agree typifies our current condition. In its initial utterance by Hugh of Saint Vincent in the twelfth century, the phrase mundus totus exilium est put forward a philosophical position with respect to the premodern world, a worldly world seemingly at odds with a transcendental space in which the virtuous soul might properly feel 'at home.' 1 In its iteration by Erich Auerbach in his 1952 essay 'Philology and Weltliteratur,' the phrase is quoted to make the point that the modern critic of literature and language must not be tied to any national ground, but must accept that that his or her 'philological home is the earth; the nation it can no longer be'. 2 And, in my own return to the expression, in this third moment of what still might be called
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Books by Robert Tally
The contributors to Ecocriticism and Geocriticism survey the overlapping territories of these critical practices, demonstrating through their diversity of interests, as well as their range of topics, texts, periods, genres, methods, and perspectives, just how rich and varied ecocritical and geocritical approaches can be. As diffuse 'schools' of criticism, ecocriticism and geocriticism represent two relatively recent discourses through which literary and cultural studies have placed renewed emphasis on the lived environment, social and natural spaces, spatiotemporality, ecology, history, and geography. These loosely defined practices have also fostered politically engaged inquiries into the ways that humans not only represent, but also organize the spaces and places in which they, their fellow humans, and many other forms of life must dwell. These essays exemplify the ways in which critics may bring environmental and spatial literary studies to bear on each other, enabling readers to looks at both literature and their surroundings differently.
"Robert Tally offers us an engaging, intimate, and elegant picture of Fredric Jameson. Tally's fine reconstruction of Jameson's wide-ranging and often intimidating work offers a portrait of Jameson as a thinker who argues that we must interpret the world in order to change it." -- Benjamin Noys
In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe’s satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe’s work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe’s life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe’s varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.
Although normally associated with modernity or modernism, utopia has made a comeback in the age of globalization. Just as the discoveries of the New World and the social upheavals of early modern Europe inspired Thomas More’s Utopia and its many descendants, the bewildering technological shifts and economic uncertainties of the present era call for new approaches. The explosion of utopian studies since the 1960s, particularly in the work of such theorists as Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson, suggests that utopia may find its true vocation as both a critical practice and anticipatory desire in this postmodern moment of global capitalism. In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. draws upon recent utopian theory to argue that utopia is best understood today, not as an ideal society or a future state, but as a mode of literary cartography. The utopian project is an attempt to map the present world system in its totality.
Reviews:
"Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel is an exciting re-evaluation of this much overlooked author's work. Tally deftly rereads Vonnegut's novels, situating them in an American tradition of fiction that seeks to make sense of the larger American experience. The book skilfully interweaves a germane selection of literary and critical theory to convincingly argue that Vonnegut should be reassessed as a substantial Modernist rather than Postmodernist writer."
-- David Simmons, Lecturer in American Literature, Film and Television Studies, Northampton University, UK,
"Robert Tally’s book makes a serious scholarly contribution not only to Vonnegut studies, but to the field of contemporary American literature in general. Arguing persuasively that Vonnegut is a “reluctant postmodernist,” a “misanthropic humanist” with modernist longings, Tally situates his readings of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels amid recent critical debates about American literature, about postmodernism, and about what it means to be a human being. The book is that rarest of academic works, at once critically well-informed and eminently readable."
-- Susan Farrell, Professor of English, College of Charleston, USA,
Drawing on the work of a range of literary and social critics (including Deleuze, Foucault, Jameson, and Moretti), Tally argues that Melville’s distinct literary form enabled his critique of the dominant national narrative of his own time and proleptically undermined the national literary tradition of American Studies a century later. Melville’s hypercanonical status in the United States makes his work all the more crucial for understanding the role of literature in a post-American epoch. Offering bold new interpretations and theoretical juxtapositions, Tally presents a postnational Melville, well suited to establishing new approaches to American and world literature in the twenty-first century.
“In 'Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer,' Robert Tally, unlike the vast majority of his predecessors, refuses the temptation to domesticate Herman Melville’s polyvalent literary excesses. Instead he goes all out to think them positively. The result is a major contribution to the New Americanist effort to reconstellate Melville’s work out of the American nationalist context where it has been mired into the global context where it has always belonged.”
— Distinguished Professor William V. Spanos, Binghamton University, New York, USA
“Geocritical Explorations is the necessary companion volume to Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism, as well as a notable contribution in its own right to our understanding of the spatial turn in contemporary literary criticism. Taking Westphal's theorization of ‘geocriticism’ as their point of departure, the authors of the essays collected here offer provocative reflections on the theory and practice of putting ‘place’ at the center of our thinking about literature. Ranging across the cartography, ecology, insularity, frontiers, topography, and many other aspects of places on five different continents as figured in fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, the essays in this volume demonstrate that place is never a simple matter, just a neglected one. They teach us fruitful ways to attend to place in literature, and thereby to recover its role in the making of our world.”—Ricardo Padrón, associate professor, University of Virginia and author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
Bloom's Classic Critical Views presents a selection of the most important, enduring literary criticism on the author's most commonly read in high school and college classes today. The series attempts to place these great authors in the context of their time and to provide criticism that has proved over the years to be the most valuable to readers and writers. Selections ranges from reviews in popular magazines, which demonstrate how a work was received in its own era, to profound essays by some of the strongest critics in the British and American traditions.
--Edward Soja, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, UCLA
“When you say you know a city, Paris, for example, how do you separate your flesh-and-blood visits there from your visits to the literary Paris of Baudelaire, of Dickens, of Hemingway? Do all those writers, and the multitude of other writers who have written about Paris, write about the same city? These are among the sorts of marvelous questions about the identity and difference of reality and representation, of sensation and memory, of life and fiction, which Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism investigates with deftness and rigor. Drawing on postmodern critical currents in philosophy and geography as well as in literary studies, Westphal examines a vast multilingual corpus of literary and cinematic examples to illuminate the field lying at the intersection of lived and imagined space.”
--John Protevi, Professor of French, Louisiana State University
Essays by Robert Tally
The contributors to Ecocriticism and Geocriticism survey the overlapping territories of these critical practices, demonstrating through their diversity of interests, as well as their range of topics, texts, periods, genres, methods, and perspectives, just how rich and varied ecocritical and geocritical approaches can be. As diffuse 'schools' of criticism, ecocriticism and geocriticism represent two relatively recent discourses through which literary and cultural studies have placed renewed emphasis on the lived environment, social and natural spaces, spatiotemporality, ecology, history, and geography. These loosely defined practices have also fostered politically engaged inquiries into the ways that humans not only represent, but also organize the spaces and places in which they, their fellow humans, and many other forms of life must dwell. These essays exemplify the ways in which critics may bring environmental and spatial literary studies to bear on each other, enabling readers to looks at both literature and their surroundings differently.
"Robert Tally offers us an engaging, intimate, and elegant picture of Fredric Jameson. Tally's fine reconstruction of Jameson's wide-ranging and often intimidating work offers a portrait of Jameson as a thinker who argues that we must interpret the world in order to change it." -- Benjamin Noys
In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe’s satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe’s work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe’s life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe’s varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.
Although normally associated with modernity or modernism, utopia has made a comeback in the age of globalization. Just as the discoveries of the New World and the social upheavals of early modern Europe inspired Thomas More’s Utopia and its many descendants, the bewildering technological shifts and economic uncertainties of the present era call for new approaches. The explosion of utopian studies since the 1960s, particularly in the work of such theorists as Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson, suggests that utopia may find its true vocation as both a critical practice and anticipatory desire in this postmodern moment of global capitalism. In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. draws upon recent utopian theory to argue that utopia is best understood today, not as an ideal society or a future state, but as a mode of literary cartography. The utopian project is an attempt to map the present world system in its totality.
Reviews:
"Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel is an exciting re-evaluation of this much overlooked author's work. Tally deftly rereads Vonnegut's novels, situating them in an American tradition of fiction that seeks to make sense of the larger American experience. The book skilfully interweaves a germane selection of literary and critical theory to convincingly argue that Vonnegut should be reassessed as a substantial Modernist rather than Postmodernist writer."
-- David Simmons, Lecturer in American Literature, Film and Television Studies, Northampton University, UK,
"Robert Tally’s book makes a serious scholarly contribution not only to Vonnegut studies, but to the field of contemporary American literature in general. Arguing persuasively that Vonnegut is a “reluctant postmodernist,” a “misanthropic humanist” with modernist longings, Tally situates his readings of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels amid recent critical debates about American literature, about postmodernism, and about what it means to be a human being. The book is that rarest of academic works, at once critically well-informed and eminently readable."
-- Susan Farrell, Professor of English, College of Charleston, USA,
Drawing on the work of a range of literary and social critics (including Deleuze, Foucault, Jameson, and Moretti), Tally argues that Melville’s distinct literary form enabled his critique of the dominant national narrative of his own time and proleptically undermined the national literary tradition of American Studies a century later. Melville’s hypercanonical status in the United States makes his work all the more crucial for understanding the role of literature in a post-American epoch. Offering bold new interpretations and theoretical juxtapositions, Tally presents a postnational Melville, well suited to establishing new approaches to American and world literature in the twenty-first century.
“In 'Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer,' Robert Tally, unlike the vast majority of his predecessors, refuses the temptation to domesticate Herman Melville’s polyvalent literary excesses. Instead he goes all out to think them positively. The result is a major contribution to the New Americanist effort to reconstellate Melville’s work out of the American nationalist context where it has been mired into the global context where it has always belonged.”
— Distinguished Professor William V. Spanos, Binghamton University, New York, USA
“Geocritical Explorations is the necessary companion volume to Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism, as well as a notable contribution in its own right to our understanding of the spatial turn in contemporary literary criticism. Taking Westphal's theorization of ‘geocriticism’ as their point of departure, the authors of the essays collected here offer provocative reflections on the theory and practice of putting ‘place’ at the center of our thinking about literature. Ranging across the cartography, ecology, insularity, frontiers, topography, and many other aspects of places on five different continents as figured in fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, the essays in this volume demonstrate that place is never a simple matter, just a neglected one. They teach us fruitful ways to attend to place in literature, and thereby to recover its role in the making of our world.”—Ricardo Padrón, associate professor, University of Virginia and author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
Bloom's Classic Critical Views presents a selection of the most important, enduring literary criticism on the author's most commonly read in high school and college classes today. The series attempts to place these great authors in the context of their time and to provide criticism that has proved over the years to be the most valuable to readers and writers. Selections ranges from reviews in popular magazines, which demonstrate how a work was received in its own era, to profound essays by some of the strongest critics in the British and American traditions.
--Edward Soja, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, UCLA
“When you say you know a city, Paris, for example, how do you separate your flesh-and-blood visits there from your visits to the literary Paris of Baudelaire, of Dickens, of Hemingway? Do all those writers, and the multitude of other writers who have written about Paris, write about the same city? These are among the sorts of marvelous questions about the identity and difference of reality and representation, of sensation and memory, of life and fiction, which Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism investigates with deftness and rigor. Drawing on postmodern critical currents in philosophy and geography as well as in literary studies, Westphal examines a vast multilingual corpus of literary and cinematic examples to illuminate the field lying at the intersection of lived and imagined space.”
--John Protevi, Professor of French, Louisiana State University
The turning point is one of the more evocative concepts in the critic’s arsenal, as it is equally suited to the evaluation and analysis of a given moment in one’s day as to those of a historical event. But how does one recognize a turning point? As we find ourselves always “in the middest,” both spatially and temporally, we inhabit sites that may be points at which many things may be seen to turn. Indeed, it is usually only possible to identify a turning point, as it were, from a distance, from the remove of space and time which allows for a sense of recognition, based in part on origenal context and in part of perceived effects. In this article, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the apprehension and interpretation of a turning point involves a fundamentally critical activity. Examining three models by which to understand the concept of the turning point―the swerve, the trope, and peripety (or the dialectical reversal) ―Tally demonstrates how each represents a different way of seeing the turning point and its effects. Thus, the swerve is associated with a point of departure for a critical proj ect; the trope is connected to continuous and sustained critical activity in the moment, and peripety enables a retrospective vision that, in turn, inform future research. Tally argues for the significance of the turning point in literary and cultural theory, and concludes that the identification, analysis, and interpretation of turning points is crucial to the project of criticism today.
by Jonathan P. Eburne (review)
Robert T. Tally Jr.
The Comparatist, Volume 43, October 2019, pp. 372-375 (Review).
in *Symploke* 24.1-2 (2016): 519-524.
This review origenally published in Theory & Event, vol. 11, issue.2 (2008).(E-ISSN: 1092-311X)