LAUSR

Paring blank space into a world, clipping and trimming endless possibility in order to make or perhaps make visible the particularly real, as the epigraph above suggests—is this not the disciplinary work of literary studies when we arrange texts to produce a literary history? When we write literary history, or more modestly, when we make claims about particular texts as part of specific literary categories, we necessarily, if unwittingly, engage a mechanism and a metaphysics of creating order out of blankness, mobilizing banner terms and the objects arranged beneath them necessary for that history to materialize. These mechanisms are part of the daily project of disciplinary and professional practice, as most of us learn, for instance, from having taught the same text in very different sorts of classes. Place Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979) in an introductory literature course, a survey of the American novel, or a course on Jewish American writers, and the shifting context can yield dramatically different accounts of the novel. The novel remains the same, ever resourceful in its capacity to form to so many molds, or even to remain unmolded, yet its status as a literary object shifts from course to course. What changes is the pedagogical, perhaps critical context,