The Salinger Riddle

This essay assesses the curious career of J D Salinger, the beloved and hugely successful American author but ignored and condescended to by critics. The essay explains why by examining a recent oral biography of the writer

“Convert, convert, convert”: A Note on the Shared Aesthetic Imperative of Henry James and Wallace Stevens

Though not literally a part of Henry James's family and its “queer, educative air,” Wallace Stevens, I think, imbibed some of its most fertile lessons

"Trust in One's Nakedness": James Baldwin's Sophistication

Describes James Baldwin's presence in American culture as "sophisticated" and explains the significance of this word in understanding Baldwin

I'm Not There

Perhaps, like me, you have a propensity to collect books without quite knowing why. Over the years I have piled up books by and about, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, George Santayana, Philip Roth, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Franz Rosenzweig, Penelope Fitzgerald, Thomas Bernhard--and not only not read them, but have no desire to do so. I have kept busy working on other things. And for a decade or two at a time, these texts simply gather dust on my shelves. But then, inevitably, I am drawn to these nearly forgotten volumes and, strangely, they prove pivotal to a new project

How It Feels to Be a Problem: Du Bois, Fanon, and the "Impossible Life" of the Black Intellectual

This essay is organized into two parts. The first constructs historical and thematic contexts, including a reading of W. E. B. Du Bois's famous collision with Booker T. Washington as an instance of a larger historical pattern in the late nineteenth century in both the West and in West Africa, a pattern that reveals the social role of the intellectual as founded on a refusal of the ideology of the authentic. This refusal has rarely, if ever, been articulated more strenuously than in the life and work of Frantz Fanon. "Against origins and starting from them," Fanon and Du Bois fashion a performative cosmopolitanism that anticipates the contemporary moment of postidentity. The extremity of Fanon's turn from Negritude to universalism sets in relief Du Bois's own efforts to negotiate the racial particular and the unraced universal. In moving beyond authenticity, they both displace the originary Cartesian subject by deriving identity from action. In Fanon, this shift is analogous to his plea that anticolonial nationalism move rapidly from national consciousness (pre-occupied with who people are) to political and social consciousness (focused on people acting in relation to others). The contexts developed in part one situate the subject of part two--how a figure who had been deemed a freak of nature requiring containment (at least since the attestation affixed to Phillis Wheatley's book of poems in 1773) managed to emerge as a social category. The emergence of black literary intellectuals depended on their devising an aesthetic of deferral, vagueness, and open margin, modes of literary representation that simultaneously became political strategies of denaturalization in a society where racist stereotypes reigned serenely as "nature.

Henry James and the Limits of Historicism

Henry James, in my view, prefigures those of a later generation--W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey--in enacting a pragmatism that turns aesthetics from contemplation to action that cuts against the grain of capitalist efficiency and utility. In neglecting this tradition of pragmatist aesthetics, cultural studies not only depends on a caricatured notion of aesthetic value, but foregoes the opportunity to profit from a tradition that resolves the obdurate conflict between aesthetics and politics

"Don't think, but look!": W. G. Sebald, Wittgenstein, and Cosmopolitan Poverty

This essay has two aims: to bring together the antinovelist Sebald with a figure he revered, the antiphilosopher Wittgenstein, via the theme and form of "desublimed" looking--vision that respects surface and avoids "Cartesian rigidity" (Sebald). The essay weaves these two writers into a larger constellation, inaugurated by the first cosmopolitan Diogenes the Cynic, and which includes his admirer William James, a grouping marked by an esteem of poverty and the desire to find an exit from the refinement of philosophy as metaphysics