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An Interview with Robert T. Tally, Jr.

‘Critical theory and practice is essential
to our very existential condition today’

Aswin Prasanth & Krishnaja T.S.

Robert T. Tally Jr. is a distinguished American scholar specializing in American literature, literary theory, and spatial studies. A professor at Texas State University, he is well-known for his extensive research on the relationship between geography and literature, especially how ideas of location and space affect and are represented in literary works. His scholarship frequently examines the ways in which spatial dimensions influence thematic concerns and narrative structures in American literature, offering new insights into the interplay between literary landscapes and cultural contexts. Tally has authored books on various prominent authors, including Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Vonnegut, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He has written a critical introduction to the work of renowned literary critic and theorist Fredric Jameson. He is actively engaged in the emerging academic fields of geocriticism, literary geography, and the spatial humanities.

In Melville, Mapping, and Globalization, you argue that Herman Melville’s literary cartography challenges traditional American Renaissance narratives by engaging with global spaces and anticipating post-national forces. How does your interpretation of Melville’s work as ‘baroque literary cartography’ contribute to our understanding of American literature’s evolution in the context of globalization? What implications does this interpretation create while redefining the canon of American Studies in the twenty-first century?

It’s complicated. I was playing with the idea, from art historians (Heinrich Wölfflin, Jacob Burkhardt, Henry Focillon, etc.) that the baroque named the excess and fragmentation that followed from the relative unities of Renaissance art, something then taken up by such diverse figures as Georg Lukács and Michel Foucault with respect to narrative forms and representation, all of which coincides (in Europe at least) with the rise of modern cartography, among many other things. Also, I was playing with the term “American Baroque” as a counter to “American Renaissance,” the title of F.O. Matthiessen’s foundational, field-establishing study. While a certain kind of literary writing was being tied to a nationalist project, I argue, Melville’s work resisted and went beyond, projecting a postnational world system in which the ostensibly dominant national power is already subsumed within the emergent globalization. That’s in the nineteenth-century, but I also have a running critique of the nationalism of American literary studies in the twentieth-century, especially the ways that Melville’s work was used (in my view, misused) to serve those ends. Melville thus proleptically undermines the nationalist project of mid-twentieth-century American Studies by projecting a postnational, global system (and “world literature”), both formally, through his linguistic extravagance and contextually, through his insistence upon a multinational or global frame of reference.

I did not really address the question of a canon, although I was looking at the “hypercanonization” (Jonathan Arac’s term) of Moby-Dick and its role in helping to establish American literary studies as a kind of nationalist ideological and aesthetic program in the twentieth century. But I was arguing, along with such early studies as Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) and C.L.R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1953), that Melville’s work escaped from and looked beyond this nationalist project, establishing the world system and a world literature as the appropriate frames of political and artistic reference. Moby-Dick attempts to “map” this world system in its emergence.

In Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography, you contend that Kurt Vonnegut’s novels navigate between modernist aspirations and postmodern sensibilities, using unconventional narrative techniques to capture the complexities of American society in the twentieth century. How does this characterization of Vonnegut as a ‘modernist wrestling with a postmodern condition’ challenge the traditional understandings of literary categorization? How do Vonnegut’s narrative experiments like metafiction and temporal slippages contribute to his portrayal of the ‘American Century’ as both comprehensible and inherently fragmented?

Vonnegut has often been considered a “postmodern” or “postmodernist” writer, largely because of his metafictional technique and blending of autobiography and fiction (and perhaps science fiction) in his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Its sequel, Breakfast of Champions (1973), is perhaps Vonnegut’s most overtly postmodernist work, “bringing chaos to order” (as he puts it) in a sprawlingly fragmentary narrative in which he himself (his persona, at least) co-stars with a famous fictional character he’d created (Kilgore Trout). But even there, and more so throughout his other works, I found Vonnegut to be profoundly modernist, as those distinctions used to be made. He was facing the ostensible loss of organic culture, the social and psychological fragmentation, the “breakdown of the signifying chain,” but rather than reveling in it or celebrating these things, as some supposed postmodernists would, Vonnegut consistently attempted to re-establish some form and unity through his own art. It is modern and modernist sensibility, the idea that form, structure, and meaning can be given through art in a world that no longer has any transcendent or absolute form. Moreover, because Vonnegut is operating in an almost exclusively American, postwar landscape, he is witnessing the emergence and eventual dominance of a postmodernity that he confronts with his modernist project. Vonnegut was too young to be a Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, or Faulkner, but he attempts a similar project amid vastly different cultural forms and problems.

Vonnegut’s notorious sentimentality and religiosity—he characterized himself as a “Christ-loving agnostic”—reflect this untimeliness. As its worst, it would become mere nostalgia, even reactionary (as with “Make American Great Again,” a sense the reader often gets with Vonnegut’s frequent appeals to the mores of his own youth). But it is more likely that Vonnegut wishes to transcode that upbeat vision of yesteryear’s Americana onto a scene in which it is no longer possible or perhaps even desirable. That may be the most science-fictional element of his work in the end. All of his talk of “artificial families,” for example, are really examples of a kind of time/space-travel, with the Edenic vision of a “nation of two” being the heart of human social relations in a world in which meaningful connections between individual subjects are more and more difficult to forge or maintain.

In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, you propose a shift in understanding utopia from a future-oriented ideal to a mode of literary cartography mapping the complexities of contemporary global capitalism. How does this conception of utopia as a critical practice challenge traditional notions of utopian literature, and enable our understanding of the role of literature in interrogating the uncertainties of the present? In what ways does this framework contribute to broader discussions on the relationships among literature, globalization, and social critique?

I am not sure that “utopia” as a literary genre was ever about the future, strictly speaking, although the idea a temporal break or rupture offers a useful way of dividing the actually existing state of affairs from an imagined alternative, just as a spatial break does. In Thomas More, the “island” of Utopia is discovered on one of Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages, and then we learn that it was actually part of a peninsula before King Utopus had a trench dug to separate it from the mainland. Thus it was at a doubly spatial remove from 1516 England, off in the Atlantic somewhere but then also cut off from any “New World” continent. The “break” is what makes it utopian, not the futurity. Indeed, even in those utopian narratives (such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887) that are ostensibly set in the future, these works are really about the present; that is, they are generally attempts to imaginatively solve present day problems, and their use of the spatially or temporally distant society is mostly a means by which to figure forth an alternative to the closer, more familiar one in which the reader lives. Drawing upon Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, I suggest that utopia is itself more of a means for mapping the present system than for sketching a vision of the future, which, in any case, is not really possible, since—as Karl Marx observed—we cannot know what the people of the future will require and the people of the future cannot be burdened with “blueprints” drawn up by others from the past.

Utopia in the Age of Globalization does not really talk much about utopian fiction, but more about the theory or simply the idea of utopia in our time. It focuses much more on Jameson and Marcuse than on fiction writers, for example. I also wanted to register the degree to which contemporary utopian thought had to shift away from the model of the nation-state, which had been at the core of utopia from More up through the 1960s (as Phillip Wegner’s brilliant study Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity had explored so insightfully). Rather than imagining a different form of state as the basis for an “ideal” society, utopia now must register the postnational condition of a largely inescapable world system, giving form to this system and empowering the imagination to project alternatives. Literature, theory, and critique jointly operate in this process, which is itself ultimately utopian in its attentiveness to the non-existent or not-currently-existent and to the desire for something better.

While exploring the significance of spatiality in the work Spatiality, you point out the ‘spatial turn’ as a significant shift in literary theory. Could you elaborate on how your analysis of spatiality challenges or expands traditional approaches to literature, particularly in relation to concepts like literary geography and geocriticism? How does this examination of spatiality across various theoretical frameworks contribute to the understanding of the evolving role of space in literary and cultural analysis today?

The “spatial turn,” as it became more widely known in the 1990s, was in my view more about a recognition of the importance of space, spatial relations, mapping, and so on, than the sudden “turn” toward such things. The idea was that time and temporality had been more dominant, particularly in modernism and modernist theory, while various factors in postmodernity, postcolonialism, structuralism, etc., had emphasized space, as a number of key theorists, including literary critics Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, had asserted. It is really more a matter of space and time, of spatiotemporality, but understandably some thinkers who felt that space had been given short shrift relative to time wished to reassert the importance of spatiality. Spatiality, my book, was an introduction to these matters with respect to literary studies, and one of the things I wanted to do there was to show a deeper history to these developments. Hence, while many dated the “spatial turn” to the 1980s or so, I wanted to show how earlier theorists had been grappling with the issues in way that we can find productive for our work in the twenty-first century.

For my part, I was interested in the question of what I called literary cartography, or the ways by which writers “mapped” the real and imagined spaces of the world through narrative. Mapping here is partly metaphorical, but it does register a sense that all social life is inevitable spatial (as well as temporal), and that a form of mapping—I later refer to this in terms of topophrenia and “the cartographic imperative”—is thus a crucial element of poetics. Geocriticism, in my somewhat expansive use of this term, indicated an approach to texts that would highlight these elements and issues. I see it less as a method and more as a sort of comportment toward the works under consideration. Space is now something to be considered along with other concepts and practices, whether or not one calls one’s work geocritical. I also feel that spatial literary studies needs to be somewhat ecumenical in this respect, making way for lots of different approaches to questions of space or spatiality in relation to literature.

In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, you observe that Edgar Allan Poe’s works operate as a form of satire and fantasy that challenge emergent nationalist discourses in America. How does this interpretation of Poe’s literary and critical writings expand our understanding of American literature beyond conventional narratives of national identity?

Poe and the Subversion of American Literature was to have been my second book, after the one on Melville (but obviously other projects intervened), and in my mind it is a kind of sequel. I start with Charles Olson’s provocative statement that Melville and Poe represented the two alternatives when it came to American literary attempt to deal with the central “fact” of SPACE, as he wrote it. In some senses, I agree, but the Poe book is less obviously “spatial.” I view Poe’s project as fundamentally one of critique, and particularly a critique of the burgeoning nationalism in both the view of literature and in the country at large. His mode of critique was satire, and I argue that he engaged in satirical critique in nearly all his works, effectively viewing writing as a practical joke. His stories are fantastic forms of confidence games, captivating the reader and undermining the reader’s sense of the normal state of affairs. Poe effectively bursts the ideological bubbles of American national narratives, thus showing them to be false, or like Nietzsche, demonstrating the hollowness of the “idols.” Unlike Melville, whose works have been read as being preeminently American or representative of the national narrative—the Great American Novel, and all that—Poe was never seen as quintessentially American. He was always viewed as being marginal to its mainstream culture, notwithstanding his consistent popularity. In this way, he escaped most of the nationalization of his writing, of the sort that Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain encountered, making Poe all the more suited to an anti-nationalist program of satire and critique. Another way of thinking of this: whereas Melville sought to go beyond the national, Poe stood athwart it. Poe has thus been a figure beloved by writers who themselves wish to avoid being thought of as tied to any national literature or project.

In Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism, you explore Fredric Jameson’s commitment to dialectical criticism and utopian thought across the diverse body of his work. How does your analysis illuminate the enduring relevance of dialectics in literary and cultural studies, especially in the context of contemporary critique of postmodernism and globalization?

Unsurprisingly, my book on Jameson is intended as an introduction to his work, and as such is supposed to be a useful guide to those reading his work on their own. But it also makes a couple of arguments concerning both Jameson’s career (to date in 2013) and critical theory and practice more generally. One thing I wanted to show, which Jameson fans likely know already, is the remarkable consistency of his project over 20 (now nearly 30) books and hundreds of essays, going back to his early work on Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, a Sartreanism pervades his work even now. I argue that this overall project is eventually one we can call, after Jameson’s own term, cognitive mapping, which is intimately tied to narrative and to the theory and criticism of narrative. From this, I argue that a Jameson-inspired dialectical criticism is best suited for mapping our condition, for it allows us to connect the individual and the collective, the subjective experience and the structural conditions beyond any subject’s perception, the local and the global, one’s situation with respect to a broader system, and the ways of representing all of these things in various attempts to give form to or make sense of our condition. This all would be relevant for prior historical epochs and social formations, but dialectical criticism seems all the more valuable in a moment of globalization, where the most local—even psychological—experiences are bound up in a network of relations that is literally worldwide.

Jameson, who turned 90 this year, continues to be remarkably productive and insightful. Since I finished my study in 2013, he had published another nine new books, including two this year (Inventions of the Present: The Novel in Its Age of Globalization and The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present). His consistency remains—the influence of Sartre, if we can call it that, is still present, along with his characteristically generous attention to all manner of thinking, schools, genres, and media—while he has also addressed both new topics and older ones from a fresh perspective. Jameson continues to be a resource and a model for critics today.

You describe topophrenia as a condition that encompasses both a sense of place-consciousness and a feeling of disorder and anxiety about our spatial environments. How can the principles of geocriticism and literary cartography, as explored in your work Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination, be leveraged not only to understand our real-world geography but also to construct alternative narratives that challenge conventional perceptions of space and place?

Topophrenia brings together a number of my thoughts on space, representation, literature, and cultural criticism. I felt that the term was needed to supplement others that I found less satisfactory, such as the topophilia of Gaston Bachelard and Yi-Fu Tuan, which is marvelous but which tends to downplay the less lovable aspects of place. (Similarly, topophobia or misotopia seem to “negative.”) I was interested in a sort of “place-mindedness” that I believe is with us constantly, if at times more pronounced than at others; this is not always a sense of well-being or of menace, but can involve many affective responses to one’s situatedness in space or to a given place. Topophrenia characterizes our pervasive, even unconscious, sense of place and sense of situatedness in space, which in turn leads to the impulse and need to “map,” which I referred to as “the cartographic imperative.” This is not necessarily a literally mapping, and it certainly need not involve drawing up chart with its figured surface and orientation and so on. It can be more a form of “cognitive mapping” in a broad sense, that is, of gaining one’s bearings in relation to a complex social and spatial ensemble of which we are a part.

Literary cartography is connected to this through poetics, inasmuch as it is a way of mapping via writing or storytelling. Geocriticism, as I use the term, would involve various critical approaches that are attuned to the cartographic or spatial nature of the poetic / literary project. Just as the epic, novel, or other literary forms help us to make sense of or engender meaning in our world in various ways, the more spatially attuned reading of these form aids us in orienting ourselves in the different spatialities and temporalities in which we are situated, whether we think of that in terms of geography and history, or in terms of other spaces and times (e.g., architectural or hourly, etc.). As in fiction, whether “realist” or more speculative, the stories we tell that give us a sense of our world also foster imaginative explorations of alternative formations.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’: Realizing History Through Fantasy, you analyze Tolkien’s works through the perspective of Marxist literary criticism and narrative theory and highlight how Tolkien appropriates and subverts the heroic romance genre. Could you explain specific instances where Tolkien’s portrayal of the hero challenges traditional narratives of heroism, particularly in the context of social and historical forces within his fictional world?

In The Hobbit, Bilbo is the protagonist, but he is decidedly not a hero, something that is mentioned many times in the text. Now, obviously, there are lots of stories about unlikely heroes or “ordinary” people who become heroic in some sense, but Tolkien’s story takes that a step further by making Bilbo utterly incongruous with the world, an anachronism—he is an Edwardian bourgeois in a world of medieval fantasy-romance—who thus becomes a means by which the “historical” itself can be grasped as a reality. I read The Hobbit as a historical novel (based largely on Lukács’s great study, The Historical Novel) in which Bilbo serves, like Walter Scott’s Waverley, as an intermediary between the reader and the grand events featuring “world-historical individuals” (in this case, say, Thorin Oakenshield or even the dragon-slayer Bard). Just as Bilbo comes to recognize his place in this grander historical and geographical world system, the reader through Bilbo’s adventure may come to see the historical interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated places, people, and events, which then opens up the prospect of understanding our own historicity and its relationship to History tout court.

This is in some respects part of the dual Marxist programs of ideology critique, on the one hand, and class consciousness on the other. In the former case, it involves the ruthless analysis of all that exists, thus showing how what people may take for granted or view as natural is in fact historical, socially constructed, and subject to manmade transformations. With respect to the latter, the dawning upon us of our own historicity can be figured as a form of class consciousness as well, in terms not just of bourgeois versus proletarian, but of socially formed collectivities and their own historical being. Tolkien himself was no Marxist, of course (neither was Scott), but through the narrative of The Hobbit, these elements can be gleaned, perhaps as part of what Jameson has referred to as the “political unconscious” of the text and of the form.

In For a Ruthless Critique of All that Exists, you call for a revitalization of critical theory and a rejection of ‘capitalist realism.’ How can cultural critics effectively apply Marxist perspectives to challenge the dominant neoliberal ideologies that influence both higher education and broader societal structures? What role do you assign to speculative or theoretical energy in this endeavor?

For better or worse, this was my most polemical book, because it began as a critique of various approaches to literary studies that emphasize what I take to be anti-theory and anti-interpretive positions. I view the “postcritical” movement, which is apparently akin to those calling for “surface reading,” “just reading,” “thin description,” “weak theory,” “ordinary language,” or “reparative” (as opposed to “paranoid”) readings, as implicitly supporting an attack on the humanities more generally, by undermining expertise, eschewing theory and methodology, and ultimately promoting fandom and other forms of corporate publicity, which thus aligns these methods (or anti-methods) with a broader neoliberalism that views cultural forms like novels as mere commodities and all of us individualistic consumers who act based on “feelings” or other affective registers that appeal above all to advertisers. What in English departments (happily, other languages and Comparative Literature have been more immune) in the U.S. were being called “the method wars” was, in this view, part of a larger political and economic battles over higher education and, more broadly still, the culture wars.

On the more “positive” side, For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists was intended to celebrate the value of critique itself, and emphasize the joyousness to be found in critical activity, which in literary studies is performed by people with a great love for literature, after all. Criticism is, in fact, the “gay science” Nietzsche celebrates, and I wanted to do my very small part in rescuing this joyful activity from those who would denigrate it. Indeed, I feel that critique—even in the older sense associated with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, along with their various successors—is needed now more than ever, for it is a critical practice that functions hand-in-hand with the poiesis of creative writers in sparking and strengthening the imagination. And a vibrant imagination is absolutely the precursor to making any changes for the better in our time, a moment in which, as the cliché would have it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than any radical change in our current political, economic, and social system.

In The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies, the concept of situated criticism is central to the understanding of how literary and cultural critique interact with ideological and institutional structures. Could you discuss a specific example from the book where an awareness of these structures significantly informs or challenges traditional critical approaches? How does situated criticism contribute to the evolution of critical practice in contemporary literary studies?

The Critical Situation mostly a collection of previously published essays, so the chapters are somewhat heterogenous, with sections devoted to criticism in general, American Studies, and individual critics or theorists. The title is, of course, a play on words that is meant to combine a sense of the “situatedness” of criticism as a practice or field and the idea of a situation being deemed “critical,” as when we find ourselves in times of crisis. The latter meaning is addressed implicitly in the volume, in a rather diffuse or unfocused manner, mostly registering the crisis of the humanities and its relationship to the multiform crises affecting societies and cultures today. The former sense derives from what Jameson has referred to as “the logic of the situation,” which he relates to Jean-Paul Sartre’s thinking. (Sartre’s multivolume collections of essays and reviews are titled Situations, of course.) It is not just that the critics themselves or the critical interventions their work makes are situated within ideological, institutional, historical, and other structures that inform them and condition their character and effects. It is also that criticism, perhaps meta-critically, must itself be cognizant of its situatedness. Criticism, if it is critical at all, is essentially a means by which our situatedness is made manifest and is thus itself subject to critique.

This is also why I characterize these essays as vexed perspectives in postmodern literary studies. To be “vexed” is to be agitated, as the word etymologically suggests being shaken or disturbed, and I view the critical situation as one in which the critic is vexed by the circumstances and objects in need of critical attention. This is all the more so, perhaps, in a postmodern condition in which the various mediating buffers have become obscured or destroyed, as Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy presents in such a timely manner, thus making the “critical distance” all the more difficult to achieve or even to imagine.

As for a single example in the book, I might cite the essay on the work of my former teacher Jonathan Arac, who has always illuminated the various and sometimes overlapping structures in which literary works and criticism are situated. This refers not only the social and historical moment of the work’s creation, but the ways in which the work then circulates in culture and society, the ways that reviewers and critics position it relative to other forms, the establishment and maintenance of institutions that then affect the way the literary work is perceived and used, the relationship between these institutions and other national frameworks or political ideologies, and so on and on. By examining a given writer or work along these different, cascading levels of “situatedness,” the critic more effectively approximates the sense of how literature functions, both within the spheres of cultural production or art, and “out there” in society’s various domains.

The Fiction of Dread examines dystopian narratives across literature, television, and film, highlighting the emergence of angst in contemporary culture. Drawing on works like The Time Machine, American Gods, and The Hunger Games, as well as television and film texts such as The Walking Dead, Black Mirror, and The Last of Us, you explore how these works critique societal norms and systems. What cultural and critical implications do these dystopian narratives have in the context of contemporary society, particularly in relation to the observation that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”?

I had initially envisioned what became The Fiction of Dread as a sequel, of sorts, to my Utopia in the Age of Globalization. I was interested in the ways that dystopia had really come to dominate much of twentieth-century speculative fiction, which inevitably led me to notice just how dominant the genre (or discourse) had become in the twenty-first century. The quote from The Simpsons that I used to begin that chapter on “The End-of-the-World as World System” is quite telling: joking about how there are so few films dealing with post-apocalyptic worlds these days, Homer then names more than twenty just from the past few years that do exactly that! It says something significant that the culture industry and the marketplace it simultaneously curates and serves finds the end of the world and other dystopian scenarios so compelling (and so profitable).

In the Utopia book, I’d argued that utopia is less about formulating blueprints for some ideal society than about “mapping” the current system, and not surprisingly dystopia here does something similar. Dystopia, as well as many stories of monsters or end-of-the-world scenarios, function somewhat like those conspiracy films that Jameson analyzed in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, operating in such a way as to make the global skein of intersecting relations provisionally visible, often through a kind of oversimplification, but that then allows one to better “map” or figure forth the system one’s actually in. In that sense, “imagining the end of the world” is, perversely, an almost utopian means by which to imagine a radical alternative to the present system. In this way, the “fiction of dread” can serve critical and potentially utopian purposes.

In Representing Middle-earth: Tolkien, Form, and Ideology, you explore the ideological dimensions in Tolkien’s work, especially those regarding power and morality. What are the key ideological themes you identified in “Middle-earth”? How do Tolkien’s personal beliefs and the historical context in which he wrote influence the ideological landscape of “Middle-earth”?

Representing Middle-earth, which also collects a number of essays I’ve written on Tolkien over the past 15 years or so, is my unapologetic attempt to bring Marxist literary criticism to bear on Tolkien’s work and on Tolkien Studies more generally. I do not claim to be the first or only person to do so, of course, but speaking broadly, there does not seem to be a lot of overlap between Marxist critics and the scholars working in Tolkien Studies. For reasons both political and cultural, these communities are separate and often antagonistic toward one another. I am certainly not claiming that J.R.R. Tolkien was himself a Marxist or that his work is intended in any way to support a socialist program, but I maintain that his writings are well suited to a Marxian dialectical criticism. Indeed, I think it is essential that Marxists not cede Tolkien, Tolkien Studies, or fantasy more generally to the conservatives and far-right who wish to claim complete dominion over him. And given Tolkien’s outsized prominence in popular culture, Marxist critics arguably have a duty to engage with this work.

I mostly follow from Jameson’s argument in The Political Unconscious in my overall approach to Tolkien, and Jameson himself had written another magisterial study of an actual fascist writer just before (Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, or, the Modernist as Fascist). Tolkien’s own personal views are mostly conservative politically and religiously, but that does not make his work any less valuable for Marxist analysis or even appreciation. I also draw upon Georg Lukács’s theory of the novel, as well as Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, and others to examine the ways that Tolkien’s work can be read “against the grain” in productive ways, thus making available new vistas for critical theory of fantasy or, to use China Miéville’s helpful idea, the fiction of alterity.

Concluding thoughts from Robert T. Tally Jr.:

It occurs to me that, with questions about my various books, my project or projects can seem a disjointed. I have been lucky to be able to pursue my literary and critical interests over what must appear to be a wide range of areas, including different periods, genres, and media. But I tend to think of my own interests as having been relatively consistent since my days as an undergraduate if not before. These involve questions of space, narrative, and representation that have certainly allowed me to venture into other more-or-less circumscribed academic domains (such as nineteenth-century American literature, the theory of the novel, Marxist theory, spatial literary studies, and so forth), but I have remained somewhat focused on these ideas and their ramifications throughout my career. I confess, I am probably not a very systematic thinker—and I definitely have no “system” to promote—but I have always been fascinated by the ways that humans as individual and collective subjects “muddle through,” using various means such as maps, narratives, or theories to make sense of and give form to their worlds and their places in them. Criticism itself, among many others, is a crucial mode for doing just this sort of thing, and thus critical theory and practice is essential to our very existential condition today. And, for whatever it is worth, this is also a supremely enjoyable activity, an enjoyment we share with our students and colleagues, thus making critical theory and literary criticism all the more valuable to our collective well-being.

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Aswin Prasanth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages at Jain University, Kochi, India. He has a PhD in English Language and Literature from School of Arts, Humanities and Commerce, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Kochi Campus), India. He is the Academic Essay Editor of Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and an Editor at Twelve Winters Journal. His articles, book chapters, columns, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Studies in European Cinema, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Poet, The Cue, Rain Taxi, Asian Lite International, Everybody’s Reviewing, Mathrubhumi, The New Indian Express, and others.

Krishnaja T. S. is a Research Scholar in the Department of English, School of Humanities and Management, National Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh, India. Her area of research includes Feminist Theology, Sexuality Studies, and Film Studies.

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