The present essay turns the received view of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on its head, arguing that Orwell's dystopian classic mobilizes the modernist techniques of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to lampoon the ideological fatalism of Eliot and other cultural conservatives. Via a painstaking close reading of the puns and other literary devices that Orwell makes use of, the essay shows how the plot of the novel amounts to an example of doublethink in practice, inviting the reader to see through the limited point of view of Winston Smith that is being satirized throughout. Such a view of the novel makes evident that Orwell's dystopian story is fully consistent with his socialist vision that recognizes the faux-revolutionary pathos of Winston as little but a bad joke.

When 'political correctness' became a public concern in the USA in the early 1990s, it was almost immediately suggested that the term had long been something of a self-ironic slur in left-wing circles. While a number of people testified to this, the evidence advanced was almost entirely anecdotal, and to date no systematic attempt to gauge the reliability of these testimonies has been made. The present article seeks to rectify this. On the basis of a statistical account of politically correct (PC) terms - 'politically correct', 'politically incorrect', 'political correctness', 'political incorrectness' - in the Stockholm University version of the JSTOR database up to 1990, it challenges the received view that the term originated as a left-wing in-group marker which was used self-ironically. The evidence suggests, on the contrary, that the modern understanding of political correctness as a form of censorship first emerged in debates internal to the North American women's liberation movement. The article tables all uses of PC terms in JSTOR up to 1990. Before 1980, PC terms are used very sparingly and practically always non-ironically, with the possible exception of the one area in which the term gains ground in the 1970s: feminism. In JSTOR, prior to 1990, PC terms appear most frequently in feminist activist journal Off Our Backs (OOB). Usage in OOB makes evident that the notion of political correctness in the feminist context at the time was tied to a theoretical discussion concerning female sexuality. Climaxing at an academic conference arranged at Barnard College in 1982, this debate was pivotal for establishing the ironic understanding of political correctness we live with today, including the modern understanding of the concept as a means for the 'closing of debate'. In sum, evidence suggests that the received view of the origins of the term 'political correctness' must be reconsidered.

About two thirds into Nathaniel Hawthorne's romance about a man seeking to produce an elixir of life, Septimius, the protagonist, finally encounters that singular flower he hopes will enable him to realize his pursuit. When his friends examine it, they find it is spotted with dewdrops or some moisture oozing out of its heart that "resemble drops of blood."1 The flower has, indeed, grown out of the grave of a young Englishman whom Septimius kills at the onset of the story, which is also the onset of the American Revolutionary War, a circumstance the narrator subtly underlines.

The present article critiques the so-called postcritical position for refusing to acknowledge the literariness of literature. As a case in point, it considers Toril Moi’s Revolution of the ordinary: literary studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, which has been greeted as a pivotal specimen of postcritique. Like other practitioners of postcritique, Moi would replace literary theory with an art of judgment, based upon good faith in, rather than suspicion of, the literary text. In theory, all that is needed to practice this art of judgment is a willingness to pay close attention to the specifics of the particular case. In practice, however, the postcritical claim to go beyond ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ is compromised by its refusal to confront the literariness of literary text, as the present essay demonstrates by subjecting Moi’s own reading of the particular cases of Paul de Man and Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik to rhetorical analysis.

The Fascist as Anti-Fascist. Teratologen, Literary Criticism, and the Literary Commodity

The present article takes as its point of departure the debate that ensued when antiracist magazine Expo revealed that Swedish writer Niklas Lundkvist (a.k.a. ”Nikanor Teratologen”) over several years as ”Ezzelino” had published massive amounts of racist and anti-semitic writings in an online forum. The article suggests that Ezzelino’s ideological stance is in fact detectable in Teratologen’s critically acclaimed literary works as well, and asks why Swedish literary critics have been prone to read the latter as an anti-fascist parody of fascist ideology rather than as an attempt to promote fascist views by rendering them aesthetically acceptable. It traces this inclination to the critics’ adherence to a Barthesian conception of textuality, which delivers the critic from having to think of the author as the historical origin of the literary text. The article goes on to suggest that this textual principle is trumped by the fact that literary texts today appear to us as literary commodities, that is, in a form that re-inscribes the authorial function into the literary text as the very product that is on sale. While critics quite rightly point out that one cannot equate Teratologen with Lundkvist, it is not our understanding of Lundkvist’s intentions that are affected by the revelation that Ezzelino and Teratologen are the same person, it is our understanding of how the Teratologen-commodity functions that changes – or at least, that should change, if we want literary criticism to be a means to resist fascist ideologies.

Taking issue with recent "post-critical" attempts to valorize the aesthetic aspects of literature, the present article suggests that Lloyd Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation is a more productive means to approach the question of the ideological and aesthetic dimensions of literature. Through readings of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Nathaniel Hawthorne's prefatory remarks to Our Old Home, it suggests how the concept of the rhetorical situation may help us bring out the interdependence of the rhetorical and the aesthetic dimensions of the texts in question. Rather than think of text and context as distinct, we had better think of them as joint aspects of a literary situation comprising both. Both texts deal explicitly with the Civil War, but while Lincoln's address turns the conflict into a model for future-directed hope, Hawthorne's remarks turn the war into a problem of the past that refuses to go away.