with the poetic my th of Er, as if to let us know that despite all the good
reasons to the contrary, for Plato, poetry is ¤nally the highest calling.
In distinguishing mimesis (representation) from diegesis (straightforward
exposition or narrative in the author’s own person), Plato, and Aristotle after
him, isolate the ¤ctive as the essential characteristic of the poetic construct:
not what has happened but what might happen either possibly or probably. In
his celebrated Metahistory, Hayden White taught us that, contra Aristotle,
historical writing, even the “simplest” chronicle, also has a ¤ctive element.^16
White places nineteenth-century historiography from Hegel and Michelet
to Nietzsche and Croce within the larger tradition of narrative ¤ction. But
Metahistory was published thirty years ago (1973), and since then a major
reversal has set in. For even as the notion of text as representation continues
to be operative (there being no “reality” outside textual representation that
one can access), in practice the emphasis on representation has created, ironi-
cally enough, a situation where the what of mimesis has become much more
important than the how. Subject matter—whether divine-right kingship in
Renaissance England or the culture of condoms in early-twentieth-century
America—becomes all.
At its best, the alignment of poetic and cultural practices has given liter-
ary study a new life. Ulysses, for example, was originally read as a parodic
modern-day Odyssey or as an elaborate experiment in which plot and char-
acter are subordinated to the investigation of the possibilities of language.
The structure of the novel, with its astonishing network of leitmotifs, allu-
sions, cross-references, and symbolic threads, was examined from every pos-
sible angle. From the perspective of the new cultural studies, however, Ulysses
is more properly read as an examination of the dynamics of race, power, and
empire as these play themselves out in the colonial Ireland of the early twen-
tieth century—an Ireland whose very consciousness has been created by its
subaltern position vis-à-vis its English oppressors. As such, Joyce’s novel pro-
vides us with rich material about nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism
as well as speci¤c gender and racial inequities: for example, the Joycean dia-
lectic that regards woman as either virgin or whore. In the same vein, Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Nostromo are now read primarily as depic-
tions of the horrors of colonial oppression under capitalist expansion, this
time with respect to race in Africa and Central America; and here too the
representation of gender (e.g., Kurtz’s African woman versus his “Intended”)
has become the subject of interesting and useful critique.
The past decade has witnessed dozens of books on these subjects, there
being plenty of room within cultural studies for debate on such issues as the
relative complicity of Joyce himself with his colonial oppressors or the iden-
Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century 11