Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:17:54.042Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Boundaries of Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kwame Anthony Appiah
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

So begins Constantine Cavafy's classic poem of November 1898, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard's assured translation. Cavafy was a writer who tested all manner of boundary conditions. His every identity came with an asterisk. He was a Greek who never lived in Greece. A government clerk of Greek Orthodox upbringing, in a tributary state of a Muslim empire, he spent his evenings on foot, looking for pagan gods in their incarnate, carnal versions. He was a poet who resisted publication, save for broadsheets he circulated among close friends; a man whose homeland was a neighborhood, and a dream. Much of his poetry is a map of Alexandria overlaid with a map of the classical world—modern Alexandria and ancient Athens—as Leopold Bloom's Dublin neighborhood underlies Odysseus's Ithaca. And I conjure Cavafy because, as I want to persuade you, he is representative precisely in all his seeming anomalousness.

Type
Presidential Address 2017
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 513 - 525
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adler, Hans. “Herder's Concept of Humanität.” A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder, edited by Adler, and Koepke, Wulf, Camden House, 2009, pp. 93–116.Google Scholar
Aidoo, Ama Ata. Our Sister Killjoy. Longman, 1994.Google Scholar
Allington, Daniel, et al. “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 May 2016, lareviewoftooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/.Google Scholar
Amichai, Yehuda. “Memorial Day for the War Dead.” The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited and translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, U of California P, 1996, pp. 95–96.Google Scholar
Andersen, Tom. This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound. Yale UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Aristotle. Politics. Translated by Rackham, H., Harvard UP, 1932.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. Smith, Elder & Co., 1869.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” 1867. Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43588.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. edited by Poster, Mark, Stanford UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Bernhard, Thomas. Walking: A Novella. Translated by Northcott, Kenneth J., U of Chicago P, 2003. Trans. of Gehen, 1971.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Bromwich, David. A Choice of Inheritance. Harvard UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Butler, Marilyn. “Romanticism in England.” Romanticism in National Context, edited by Porter, Roy and Teich, Mikuláš, Cambridge UP, 1988, pp. 37–67.Google Scholar
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Cavafy, C. P. “Waiting for the Barbarians.” 1904. Collected Poems, edited by Savidis, George, translated by Keeley, Edmund and Sherrard, Philip, revised ed., Princeton UP, 1992, p. 18.Google Scholar
Cavafy, C. P. “Walls.” Collected Poems, Translated by Mendelsohn, Daniel, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, p. 9.Google Scholar
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Rendall, Steven, U of California P, 1984.Google Scholar
Child, Francis James, editor. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Dover Publications, 1965.Google Scholar
Coetzee, J. M. Waiting for the Barbarians. Penguin Books, 1980.Google Scholar
Cole, Teju. Open City. Random House, 2011.Google Scholar
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwish, Mahmoud. “The Stranger Finds Himself in the Stranger.” Unfortunately It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, translated and edited by Munir Akash and Caroline Forché, with Sinan Antoon and Amira el-Zein, U of California P, 2013, pp. 106–07.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso, 1995.Google Scholar
Dorfman, Ariel. Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980–2004. Seven Stories Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Eckermann, Johann Peter. Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. 1835. 3.d ed., F. A. Brockhaus, 1868.Google Scholar
Elazar, Daniel J. “Althusius' Grand Design for a Federal Commonwealth.” Politica: An Abridged Translation of Politics Methodically Set Forth, and Illustrated with Sacred and Profane Examples, by Althusius, Johannes, edited and translated by Frederick S. Carney, Liberty Fund, 1995, pp. xxxv-xlvi.Google Scholar
Englund, Axel. Still Songs: Music in and around the Poetry of Paul Celan. Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Farah, Nuruddin. Maps. Arcade Publishing, 1986.Google Scholar
Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gracq, Julien. The Opposing Shore. Translated by Howard, Richard, Columbia UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “The Origins of Literary Studies—and Their End?” Stanford Humanities Review, vol. 6, no. 1, 1995, web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/6–1/html/gumbrecht.html.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. The Future of Human Nature. Polity Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Hequembourg, Stephen. “The Harvard English Department: A Brief History.” 2012–13. Harvard University, english.fas.harvard.edu/about/department-history/.Google Scholar
Herder, Herder Johann Gottfried. “Results of a Comparison of Different Peoples' Poetry in Ancient and Modern Times (1797).” The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present, edited by Damrosch, David et al., Princeton UP, 2009, pp. 3–9.Google Scholar
Herder, Herder Johann Gottfried. Sämmtliche Werke zur Philosophie und Geschichte. Part 5, Johann von Muller, 1806.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. 2nd ed., Cambridge UP, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Houellebecq, Michel. La carte et le territoire. Flammarion, 2010.Google Scholar
Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. U of Chicago P, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keats, John. “Lamia.” 1819. Bartleby.com, www.bartleby.com/126/37.html.Google Scholar
Kermode, Frank. Forms of Attention. U of Chicago P, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leader, Zachary, and O'Neill, Michael. Introduction. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, edited by Leader, and O'Neill, , Oxford UP, 2009, pp. xi-xxiv.Google Scholar
Liu, Alan. Local Transcendence: Essays in Postmodern Historicism and the Database. U of Chicago P, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahfouz, Naguib. Miramar. Translated by Mahmoud, Fatma Moussa, Anchor Books, 1993.Google Scholar
Manto, Saadat Hasan. “Toba Tek Singh.” Words without Borders, Sept. 2003, www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/toba-tek-singh.Google Scholar
Meinecke, Friedrich. Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates. 1908. 6.h ed., R. Oldenburg, 1922.Google Scholar
Miller, Kei. “What the Mapmaker Ought to Know.” The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, Carcanet Press, 2014, p. 15.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Müller, Wilhelm. “Wanderschaft.” Sieben und siebzig Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten, Christian Georg Ackerman, 1821, p. 7. Deutsches Textarchiv, www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/mueller_waldhornist_1821?p=19.Google Scholar
Patten, Alan. “‘The Most Natural State’: Herder and Nationalism.” History of Political Thought, vol. 31, no. 4, Winter 2010, pp. 657–89.Google Scholar
Richardson, Alan. The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Johns Hopkins UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge UP, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, Trevor. “The Emergence of ‘Literature’: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century.” ELH, vol. 63, no. 2, Summer 1996, pp. 397–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Walter. The Lay of the Last Minstrel. 6th ed., James Ballantyne, 1807.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. U of California P, 1990.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke UP, 2003, pp. 123–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Queen Mab. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, edited by Leader, Zachary and O'Neill, Michael, Oxford UP, 2009, pp. 10–87.Google Scholar
Sloterdijk, Peter. “Anthropo-Technology.” New Perspectives Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 1, Jan. 2014, dx.doi.org/10.1111/npqu.11419.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. Penguin Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Taïa, Abdellah. Infidels: A Novel. Translated by Strayer, Alison L., Kindle ed., Seven Stories Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Taïa, Abdellah. Un pays pour mourir. Éditions du Seuil, 2015.Google Scholar
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Bantam Classics, 1981.Google Scholar
Weimar, Karl S. “Paul Celan's ‘Todesfuge’: Translation and Interpretation.” PMLA, vol. 89, no. 1, 1974, pp. 85–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/461671.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford UP, 1977.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? U of Minnesota P, 2009.Google Scholar