Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel

(Romina) #1

50 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel


us to think beyond the “univocal” view of history Zierler seeks to
deconstruct.^67
Although Gallagher and Greenblatt’s new historicist approach
does not always neatly dovetail with that of Macherey, there are
interesting parallels that appear to converge on the literary concerns
for subjectivity. Their argument that the sheer “vastness of the tex-
tual archive” of history provokes an “aesthetic appreciation of the
individual instance” is a prime example.^68 Gallagher and Greenblatt
then stress the need to investigate what they call “a history of pos-
sibilities” and find alternative individual perspectives that might
present modes of seeing and being that deviate from prevailing his-
torical accounts (or prevailing interpretations of those accounts).^69
This argument bears a theoretical resemblance to Macherey’s pro-
ject of seeking subjectivity in instances where individuals challenge
the established epistemic frameworks of their respective historical
moments. Both theories therefore converge upon an idea of the indi-
vidual expressing subjectivity through a departure from received
(and historically specific) codas of meaning.
To a certain extent, Stern’s narrative achieves such a break in the
form of an undesirable disjuncture (what Gilroy would label “dou-
ble consciousness”) in her conception of the social world, in which
she becomes increasingly distanced, paranoid, and dysfunctional.
However, it bears reiterating that there is another, more substan-
tial (and less psychologically damaging) “break” that takes place
here. This is the one that occurs within the mind of the reader, and
which works toward much more positive ends. By encouraging a
reconstitution of received aesthetic presentations of the Holocaust
in this way—that is, by alienating the reader through an encoun-
ter with an uncanny intertextual rendition of the Shoah —Phillips
shocks the reader into a heightened sense of awareness to the dan-
gers involved in allowing events of such magnitude to become
ossified into overly familiar “univocal” narratives. For Walter
Mignolo, acts of this kind yield substantial intellectual benefits
that are highly conducive to critical cosmopolitan vision because
they promote what he terms “Epistemic [... ] diversity,” which
enables “new forms of imagining, ethically and politically,” from
alternative perspectives.^70

Free download pdf