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The European Legacy
Toward New Paradigms
Volume 5, 2000 - Issue 6
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Original Articles

Intellectual Self-Fashioning: The Case of Frank Lentricchia and Ihab Hassan

Pages 863-874 | Published online: 01 Jul 2010

References

  • Barthes , Roland . 1986 . "The Death of the Author," ” . In The Rustle of Language , 143 New York : Hill and Wang .
  • Foucault , Michel . 1979 . "What Is An Author?," ” . In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism , 141 – 60 . Ithaca : Cornell University Press .
  • Goodwill , James . 1993 . Autobiography: The Self Made Text , New York : Twayne . An excellent overview of the genre is offered by, in his
  • Stam , Roheit . 1988 . "Mikhail Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique" ” . In Postmodernism and Its Discontents , Edited by: Kaplan , Ann . 120 New York : Verso .
  • Eakin , Paul John . 1985 . Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention , Princeton : Princeton University Press .
  • Franklin , Phyllis . 1992 . "The Academy and the Public" ” . In The Politics of Liberal Education , Edited by: Gless , Darryl J. and Smith , Barbara Herrnstein . 214 Durham : Duke University Press .
  • Said , Edward . 1996 . Representations of the Intellectual , 82 New York : Vintage Books .
  • Gramsci , Antonio . 1971 . The Prison Notebooks , 9 New York : International Publishers .
  • Nelson , Gary . 1997 . Manifesto of a Tenured Radical , 2 – 3 . New York : New York University Press . My study focuses on the figure of a literary academic, as it is this scholar that has traditionally been presented as the primary carrier of cultural capital in Anglo-American society; see, for instance
  • Sosnoski , James J. 1994 . Token Professionals and Master Critics: A Critique of Orthodoxy in Literary Studies , 40 New York : State University of New York Press .
  • 1988 . Homo Academicus , Cambridge : Polity Press . The terms "doxic" and "epsitemic" may need some explanation. They are used by Pierre Bourdieu in his sociological analysis of the French academic world, in which he distinguishes between an empirical (doxic) individual and an epistemic (constructed) individual. This epistemic individual is "defined by the position which he occupies in the space which his properties have helped to construct." While the doxic individual is inexhaustible, the epistemic individual "contains nothing evading conceptualization." The reader familiar with the field (that is, having the right "feel" for the game) will recognize himself "easily," says Bourdieu, in the epistemic space.
  • Shumway , David R. 1997 . "The Star System," . PMLA , 112 : 96
  • Shumway . "The Star System," . 96
  • 1980 . Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From Moore to Shakespeare , Chicago : University of Chicago Press . I have of course borrowed the concept of self-fashioning from Stephen Greenblatt as he develops it in his, Greenblatt claims that in the early modem period there was a "change in the intellectual, social, psychological, and aesthetic structures that govern the generation of identities" and that in the sixteenth century there appears to be "an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process." 1 would like to appropriate Greenblatt's claims for my reading of intellectual autobiography.
  • Marcus's , Laura . 1994 . Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice , Manchester : Manchester University Press . Autobiography's special role in this respect has been widely discussed in recent years; see, for instance
  • Gilmore's , Leigh . 1994 . Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation , Ithaca : Cornell University Press .
  • Marcus , Laura . 1994 . Auto/biographical Discourses , Manchester : Manchester University Press . In their resolute refusal to present a coherent story the two texts participate in the questioning of the law of the genre as formulated by critics and theorists of autobiography. For a review of the various constructions of the law of the genre See
  • Jelinek , Estelle , ed. 1980 . Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism , Bloomington : Indiana University Press . These two texts belie also Estelle Jelinek's claim that men's autobiography follows patterns of coherence and unity and deploys a stable and autonomous speaking subject; see
  • Brooks , Peter . 1985 . The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess , 202 New York : Columbia University Press .
  • Hassan , Ihab . 1986 . Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography , 103 – 4 . Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press .
  • Durczak , Jerzy . 1994 . Selves Between Cultures: Contemporary American Bicultural Autobiography , 129 Lublin : Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Sklodowskiej . As Durczak observes, Hassan's book "comes close to a traditional autobiography of childhood and adolescence, rather than the autobiography of Americanization which one might normally expect from an immigrant";
  • Hassan . Out of Egypt 1
  • Lentricchia , Frank . 1994 . The Edge of the Night , 3 – 4 . New York : Random Books .
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 9 – 10 .
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 100
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 16
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 14
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 16
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 14
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 52
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 119
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 56
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 100
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 53
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 100
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 102 – 3 .
  • Hassan . Out of Egypt 25
  • Hassan . Out of Egypt 48
  • Hassan . Out of Egypt 50
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 14
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 6
  • Sutherland , John . 1994 . Book Review , 6 February : 6 . Another reviewer observes: "The Lentricchia of The Edge of Night is hard to like, and he knows it; indeed, he depends on it |…|. He's a performer and an exhibitionist--in this book, literally--and he needs engagement with his audience"; See
  • Wallingford , Kit . 1997 . "The Theater of the Self," . American Quarterly , 49 : 425
  • Hassan . Out of Egypt 27
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 86 This is indeed a curious claim for Lentricchia to make. It is not only that the concept of the "real" is suspect but also that mixing the personal and the intellectual does not amount to an epistemology that could possibly enable access to the real
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 100
  • Lentricchia . The Edge 148
  • Rugg , Linda Haverty . 1997 . Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography , 13 Chicago : University of Chicago Press . Photographs, as Rugg argues, "insist on something material, the embodied subject, the unification … of author, name, and body"; see
  • Gilbert , Sandra M. and Gubar , Susan . 1988 . "The Man on the Dump versus the United Dames of America: Or, What Does Frank Lentricchia Want?" . Critical Inquiry , 14 : 386 – 406 . Gilbert and Gubar read Lentricchia's self-presentation as an attempt to certify his manhood, threatened by the growing presence and importance of women in American culture. Referring to the same photograph, John Sutherland observes: "the Lentricchia chest … has been photographed in what must be the only beefcake pinup of a literary critic ever put into general circulation." This image, claims O'Hara, was "designed both to debunk the stereotype of the shabby-genteel professor and to spoof Lentricchia's own macho reputation among his critics." He admits, though, that while the photograph did indeed do the debunking, its self-ironic spirit has not been recognized
  • O'Hara , Daniel T. 1994 . "On Becoming Oneself in Frank Lentricchia," ” . In National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives , Edited by: Pease , Donald E. 234 Durham : Duke University Press .
  • Shils , Edward . 1972 . The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays , 18 Chicago : University of Chicago Press .
  • Hofstadter , Richard . 1962 . Anti-Intellectualism in American Life , 6 New York : Vintage . Hofstadter situates the entry of the term "anti-intellectualism" into everyday American everyday vocabulary in the decade of the 1950s, although he sees American anti-intellectualism as "older than our national identity";
  • Hofstadter . Anti-Intellectualism 21

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