Intertexts

Intertexts: AStatement of Purpose David H. J. Larmour and Paul Allen Miller Societies do not offer everyone the same insertion in the symbolic order: people who are, so to speak, between symbolic systems—in the interstices, out of bounds—they are stricken with adangerous symbolic mobility. (Catherine Clement, Lajeune nee 17) /wfemjctf is ajournal of comparative literature and theoretical reflection. Much of the most engaging and challenging work in the humanities and the study of culture today is being done in the spaces between texts—be they disciplinary, social, literary, or linguistic—^rather than within their bo[u]nds. To seize and occupy this space is to stand between epistemic formations, and that act itself makes possible the discovery of new align¬ ments of discourse, power and history, as well as the recognition of the contingent and coercive nature of our existing formations. Comparative literature, as it is generally practiced today, is an uneasy compromise between traditional disciplinary categories and an emerging sense of those very categories’ factitiousness. If comparative literature is to thrive as avalid cultural enterprise it must relocate itself in the semiotically charged inter¬ stices between texts. Intertexts is aforum for all those whose intellectual reflection draws them into this inter-textual space. More specifically. Intertexts is dedicated to the twin propositions that the concept of national literatures is no longer tenable, if it ever was, and that an unreflected presentism too often reigns in those areas not still laboring under the dead weight of along discredited formalism. The first of these vices is the product of an undertheorized positivism that takes the existence of the nineteenth-century nation state as asimple, empirical given and then, in the service of various national ideologies, interprets all cultural productions within that framework. The second, presentism, reflects an ahistorical theoreticism that, in an often understandable reaction to the pieties of new criticism, fails to test its own constructs against amore informing body of texts and contexts, which it can only understand as ‘Tradition.’ We are looking for work that situates itself between theory and history, between texts and contexts, between languages and between literatures. We are seeking mutually informative and transformative dialogues between disciplines, ideologies, genders, and subject positions. In short. Intertexts is committed to akind of comparative literature that exists neither to preserve tradition nor to celebrate naively the new. The need for this new sort of comparative literature is not just being felt on the academic or scholarly level, where comparative literature programs 3 4 I N T E R T E X T S are constandy threatened with reabsorption into national language depart¬ ments (from which they never truly broke away), but is also imperative on the pragmatic political front. Nationalism today is agrowing reactionary force at work on all cultural levels. Whether one wishes to speak of mass graves in Bosnia, genocide in Rwanda, German skinheads, the French National Front, or American campaigns against immigration, bilingual education, and the feared polyglot world of the United Nations, the attack on the Other and the attempt to draw firm and ineradicable boundaries between cultures, nations, and texts is everywhere on the rise. Comparative literature, while not adirect political force and no substitute for political action, nonetheless has the potential to exercise aformative influence on both our students and the institutions of higher learning that shape our ambientculture.ThepurposeofIntertextsistohelpensurethatcompara¬ tiveliteratureactualizesitsprogressivepotential. The editorial board of the journal has been chosen to reflect the broad scopeofcontemporaryscholarshipinthefieldtoday.Inaddition,thereis an advisory board made up of the members of the Texas Tech University CommitteeonComparativeLiterature.Togethertheirareasofexpertise mclude all the major literatures of Europe, theAmericas,Africa, andAsia, as well as the full range of culmral periods from the Bronze Age to cyberspace. Theoretical perspectives include: cultural studies, feminism, filmtheory,gender,Marxism,psychoanalysis,post-colonialism,post¬ structuralism, and sexuality. Intertextsv