Stephen Bann

Stephen Bann is a reader in modern cultural studies at the University of Kent.

Genette

Stephen Bann, 2 October 1980

To judge by our literary periodicals, something is in the air this summer. The forbidding term ‘Deconstruction’, formerly whispered behind closed doors, has been flung to and fro in the public arena. British readers who had mildly hoped that the ‘challenge of Structuralism’ would simply vanish of its own accord have awoken to find a more formidably astringent dogma hotly disputed in Paris and in Yale. As Roger Poole pointed out in a recent number of this journal, they are as yet barely equipped to take part in the ‘debate being carried on … with such verve and panache’.

Return of Oedipus

Stephen Bann, 4 March 1982

Jacques Derrida once defined his intellectual project with the aid of an image from the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. It was a question, he suggested, of ‘vomiting up’ philosophy and restoring her to the ‘sea of texts’ from which she had proudly withdrawn. Those who would like to take the allegory further might reflect that Jonah was not in fact precipitated into the sea but onto dry land, and lost no time in prophesying doom to the great city of Nineveh. Derrida’s message has indeed caused increasing disarray in the citadels of Academe over the past decade, and particularly in those of America. If American philosophers, such as John Searle, have reacted dismissively, the same has not been true of those restless denizens of the sea of texts, the literary critics. Geoffrey Hartman’s Saving the Text, whose subtitle hopefully sandwiches Derrida between the two bastions of ‘Literature’ and ‘Philosophy’, is a recent and highly impressive example of the recuperative effort which has been expended in responding to the challenge.

Letter

Reprosuction

4 March 1982

SIR: I do not disagree with Geoffrey Hartman (Letters, 15 April) when he points out the debt of both Derrida and the Tel Quel group to Georges Bataille. But I am concerned at what seems to me the excessive burden of demonstration which he places on Derrida’s shoulders. To be a modern master of explication de texte is one thing. To be the living incarnation of Nietzsche’s antithetical no-saying...

Female Relationships

Stephen Bann, 1 July 1982

Simone de Beauvoir had to change her original title for When things of the spirit come first, because it had been unexpectedly pre-empted by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The new title which she picked (Quand prime le spirituel) was a simple variant of the other (Primauté du Spirituel), and the difference has in any case become insignificant in the English translation. But the episode remains both revealing and amusing. Written nearly forty years ago, and rejected for publication at the time, this group of linked stories conveys an implicit faith in the power of fiction to act as a prophylaxis against false philosophy and perverted dogma. The irony of the title is expected to act as a solvent upon such artificial and old-fashioned constraints.

Plots

Stephen Bann, 4 November 1982

You have only to glance at the icing-sugar pink dust-jacket of The Prince buys the Manor to realise that there is a factual basis for Elspeth Huxley’s ‘extravaganza’. There, nestling in the wooded Cotswolds, is the familiar facade of the rather ordinary country house which has recently been dignified by the arrival of A Royal Personage. The gossip columns of the evening papers have confirmed, as the reader suspects, that the aliases scattered throughout the novel are transparent to someone with no more than a modest knowledge of the society and geography of Tetbury. The fictional ‘Ah Wong Chinese Takeaway’, not to mention ‘Pellett, the Health Food Shop’, turn out to have their counterparts in the authentic Cotswold world. Scratch the surface a little, frequent the disguised ‘Goat and Compasses’, and you will perhaps succeed in unveiling ‘Lady Evers’, the socially energetic wife of an ex-Governor of the ‘Laxative Islands’, or ‘Judy Mustard’, whose ecological fervour does not shrink from the extreme of offering her fellow believers home-made wine derived from ‘Purging Buckthorn’.

Agh, Agh, Yah, Boo: Ian Hamilton Finlay

David Wheatley, 4 December 2014

Writing​ to his friend Stephen Bann, then a graduate student, in 1964, Ian Hamilton Finlay outlined his plans to treat readers of his brash new journal, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, to a free...

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Time of the Assassin

Michael Wood, 26 January 1995

‘And so,’ Bréhal said, ‘love would be time become available to the senses.’ Julia Kristeva, Les Samouraïs The genuine charm and considerable strength of Julia...

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