Robert Tally
Robert T. Tally Jr. is a professor of English at Texas State University. His books include Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019).
Address: Department of English
Texas State University
601 University Drive
San Marcos, TX 78666
Address: Department of English
Texas State University
601 University Drive
San Marcos, TX 78666
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Books by Robert Tally
The contributors to Ecocriticism and Geocriticism survey the overlapping territories of these critical practices, demonstrating through their diversity of interests, as well as their range of topics, texts, periods, genres, methods, and perspectives, just how rich and varied ecocritical and geocritical approaches can be. As diffuse 'schools' of criticism, ecocriticism and geocriticism represent two relatively recent discourses through which literary and cultural studies have placed renewed emphasis on the lived environment, social and natural spaces, spatiotemporality, ecology, history, and geography. These loosely defined practices have also fostered politically engaged inquiries into the ways that humans not only represent, but also organize the spaces and places in which they, their fellow humans, and many other forms of life must dwell. These essays exemplify the ways in which critics may bring environmental and spatial literary studies to bear on each other, enabling readers to looks at both literature and their surroundings differently.
"Robert Tally offers us an engaging, intimate, and elegant picture of Fredric Jameson. Tally's fine reconstruction of Jameson's wide-ranging and often intimidating work offers a portrait of Jameson as a thinker who argues that we must interpret the world in order to change it." -- Benjamin Noys
In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe’s satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe’s work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe’s life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe’s varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.
Although normally associated with modernity or modernism, utopia has made a comeback in the age of globalization. Just as the discoveries of the New World and the social upheavals of early modern Europe inspired Thomas More’s Utopia and its many descendants, the bewildering technological shifts and economic uncertainties of the present era call for new approaches. The explosion of utopian studies since the 1960s, particularly in the work of such theorists as Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson, suggests that utopia may find its true vocation as both a critical practice and anticipatory desire in this postmodern moment of global capitalism. In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. draws upon recent utopian theory to argue that utopia is best understood today, not as an ideal society or a future state, but as a mode of literary cartography. The utopian project is an attempt to map the present world system in its totality.
Reviews:
"Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel is an exciting re-evaluation of this much overlooked author's work. Tally deftly rereads Vonnegut's novels, situating them in an American tradition of fiction that seeks to make sense of the larger American experience. The book skilfully interweaves a germane selection of literary and critical theory to convincingly argue that Vonnegut should be reassessed as a substantial Modernist rather than Postmodernist writer."
-- David Simmons, Lecturer in American Literature, Film and Television Studies, Northampton University, UK,
"Robert Tally’s book makes a serious scholarly contribution not only to Vonnegut studies, but to the field of contemporary American literature in general. Arguing persuasively that Vonnegut is a “reluctant postmodernist,” a “misanthropic humanist” with modernist longings, Tally situates his readings of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels amid recent critical debates about American literature, about postmodernism, and about what it means to be a human being. The book is that rarest of academic works, at once critically well-informed and eminently readable."
-- Susan Farrell, Professor of English, College of Charleston, USA,
Drawing on the work of a range of literary and social critics (including Deleuze, Foucault, Jameson, and Moretti), Tally argues that Melville’s distinct literary form enabled his critique of the dominant national narrative of his own time and proleptically undermined the national literary tradition of American Studies a century later. Melville’s hypercanonical status in the United States makes his work all the more crucial for understanding the role of literature in a post-American epoch. Offering bold new interpretations and theoretical juxtapositions, Tally presents a postnational Melville, well suited to establishing new approaches to American and world literature in the twenty-first century.
“In 'Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer,' Robert Tally, unlike the vast majority of his predecessors, refuses the temptation to domesticate Herman Melville’s polyvalent literary excesses. Instead he goes all out to think them positively. The result is a major contribution to the New Americanist effort to reconstellate Melville’s work out of the American nationalist context where it has been mired into the global context where it has always belonged.”
— Distinguished Professor William V. Spanos, Binghamton University, New York, USA
“Geocritical Explorations is the necessary companion volume to Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism, as well as a notable contribution in its own right to our understanding of the spatial turn in contemporary literary criticism. Taking Westphal's theorization of ‘geocriticism’ as their point of departure, the authors of the essays collected here offer provocative reflections on the theory and practice of putting ‘place’ at the center of our thinking about literature. Ranging across the cartography, ecology, insularity, frontiers, topography, and many other aspects of places on five different continents as figured in fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, the essays in this volume demonstrate that place is never a simple matter, just a neglected one. They teach us fruitful ways to attend to place in literature, and thereby to recover its role in the making of our world.”—Ricardo Padrón, associate professor, University of Virginia and author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
Bloom's Classic Critical Views presents a selection of the most important, enduring literary criticism on the author's most commonly read in high school and college classes today. The series attempts to place these great authors in the context of their time and to provide criticism that has proved over the years to be the most valuable to readers and writers. Selections ranges from reviews in popular magazines, which demonstrate how a work was received in its own era, to profound essays by some of the strongest critics in the British and American traditions.
--Edward Soja, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, UCLA
“When you say you know a city, Paris, for example, how do you separate your flesh-and-blood visits there from your visits to the literary Paris of Baudelaire, of Dickens, of Hemingway? Do all those writers, and the multitude of other writers who have written about Paris, write about the same city? These are among the sorts of marvelous questions about the identity and difference of reality and representation, of sensation and memory, of life and fiction, which Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism investigates with deftness and rigor. Drawing on postmodern critical currents in philosophy and geography as well as in literary studies, Westphal examines a vast multilingual corpus of literary and cinematic examples to illuminate the field lying at the intersection of lived and imagined space.”
--John Protevi, Professor of French, Louisiana State University
Essays by Robert Tally
The contributors to Ecocriticism and Geocriticism survey the overlapping territories of these critical practices, demonstrating through their diversity of interests, as well as their range of topics, texts, periods, genres, methods, and perspectives, just how rich and varied ecocritical and geocritical approaches can be. As diffuse 'schools' of criticism, ecocriticism and geocriticism represent two relatively recent discourses through which literary and cultural studies have placed renewed emphasis on the lived environment, social and natural spaces, spatiotemporality, ecology, history, and geography. These loosely defined practices have also fostered politically engaged inquiries into the ways that humans not only represent, but also organize the spaces and places in which they, their fellow humans, and many other forms of life must dwell. These essays exemplify the ways in which critics may bring environmental and spatial literary studies to bear on each other, enabling readers to looks at both literature and their surroundings differently.
"Robert Tally offers us an engaging, intimate, and elegant picture of Fredric Jameson. Tally's fine reconstruction of Jameson's wide-ranging and often intimidating work offers a portrait of Jameson as a thinker who argues that we must interpret the world in order to change it." -- Benjamin Noys
In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe’s satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe’s work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe’s life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poète maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe’s varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.
Although normally associated with modernity or modernism, utopia has made a comeback in the age of globalization. Just as the discoveries of the New World and the social upheavals of early modern Europe inspired Thomas More’s Utopia and its many descendants, the bewildering technological shifts and economic uncertainties of the present era call for new approaches. The explosion of utopian studies since the 1960s, particularly in the work of such theorists as Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson, suggests that utopia may find its true vocation as both a critical practice and anticipatory desire in this postmodern moment of global capitalism. In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. draws upon recent utopian theory to argue that utopia is best understood today, not as an ideal society or a future state, but as a mode of literary cartography. The utopian project is an attempt to map the present world system in its totality.
Reviews:
"Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel is an exciting re-evaluation of this much overlooked author's work. Tally deftly rereads Vonnegut's novels, situating them in an American tradition of fiction that seeks to make sense of the larger American experience. The book skilfully interweaves a germane selection of literary and critical theory to convincingly argue that Vonnegut should be reassessed as a substantial Modernist rather than Postmodernist writer."
-- David Simmons, Lecturer in American Literature, Film and Television Studies, Northampton University, UK,
"Robert Tally’s book makes a serious scholarly contribution not only to Vonnegut studies, but to the field of contemporary American literature in general. Arguing persuasively that Vonnegut is a “reluctant postmodernist,” a “misanthropic humanist” with modernist longings, Tally situates his readings of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels amid recent critical debates about American literature, about postmodernism, and about what it means to be a human being. The book is that rarest of academic works, at once critically well-informed and eminently readable."
-- Susan Farrell, Professor of English, College of Charleston, USA,
Drawing on the work of a range of literary and social critics (including Deleuze, Foucault, Jameson, and Moretti), Tally argues that Melville’s distinct literary form enabled his critique of the dominant national narrative of his own time and proleptically undermined the national literary tradition of American Studies a century later. Melville’s hypercanonical status in the United States makes his work all the more crucial for understanding the role of literature in a post-American epoch. Offering bold new interpretations and theoretical juxtapositions, Tally presents a postnational Melville, well suited to establishing new approaches to American and world literature in the twenty-first century.
“In 'Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer,' Robert Tally, unlike the vast majority of his predecessors, refuses the temptation to domesticate Herman Melville’s polyvalent literary excesses. Instead he goes all out to think them positively. The result is a major contribution to the New Americanist effort to reconstellate Melville’s work out of the American nationalist context where it has been mired into the global context where it has always belonged.”
— Distinguished Professor William V. Spanos, Binghamton University, New York, USA
“Geocritical Explorations is the necessary companion volume to Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism, as well as a notable contribution in its own right to our understanding of the spatial turn in contemporary literary criticism. Taking Westphal's theorization of ‘geocriticism’ as their point of departure, the authors of the essays collected here offer provocative reflections on the theory and practice of putting ‘place’ at the center of our thinking about literature. Ranging across the cartography, ecology, insularity, frontiers, topography, and many other aspects of places on five different continents as figured in fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, the essays in this volume demonstrate that place is never a simple matter, just a neglected one. They teach us fruitful ways to attend to place in literature, and thereby to recover its role in the making of our world.”—Ricardo Padrón, associate professor, University of Virginia and author of The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain
Bloom's Classic Critical Views presents a selection of the most important, enduring literary criticism on the author's most commonly read in high school and college classes today. The series attempts to place these great authors in the context of their time and to provide criticism that has proved over the years to be the most valuable to readers and writers. Selections ranges from reviews in popular magazines, which demonstrate how a work was received in its own era, to profound essays by some of the strongest critics in the British and American traditions.
--Edward Soja, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning, UCLA
“When you say you know a city, Paris, for example, how do you separate your flesh-and-blood visits there from your visits to the literary Paris of Baudelaire, of Dickens, of Hemingway? Do all those writers, and the multitude of other writers who have written about Paris, write about the same city? These are among the sorts of marvelous questions about the identity and difference of reality and representation, of sensation and memory, of life and fiction, which Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism investigates with deftness and rigor. Drawing on postmodern critical currents in philosophy and geography as well as in literary studies, Westphal examines a vast multilingual corpus of literary and cinematic examples to illuminate the field lying at the intersection of lived and imagined space.”
--John Protevi, Professor of French, Louisiana State University
The turning point is one of the more evocative concepts in the critic’s arsenal, as it is equally suited to the evaluation and analysis of a given moment in one’s day as to those of a historical event. But how does one recognize a turning point? As we find ourselves always “in the middest,” both spatially and temporally, we inhabit sites that may be points at which many things may be seen to turn. Indeed, it is usually only possible to identify a turning point, as it were, from a distance, from the remove of space and time which allows for a sense of recognition, based in part on original context and in part of perceived effects. In this article, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that the apprehension and interpretation of a turning point involves a fundamentally critical activity. Examining three models by which to understand the concept of the turning point―the swerve, the trope, and peripety (or the dialectical reversal) ―Tally demonstrates how each represents a different way of seeing the turning point and its effects. Thus, the swerve is associated with a point of departure for a critical project; the trope is connected to continuous and sustained critical activity in the moment, and peripety enables a retrospective vision that, in turn, inform future research. Tally argues for the significance of the turning point in literary and cultural theory, and concludes that the identification, analysis, and interpretation of turning points is crucial to the project of criticism today.
by Jonathan P. Eburne (review)
Robert T. Tally Jr.
The Comparatist, Volume 43, October 2019, pp. 372-375 (Review).
in *Symploke* 24.1-2 (2016): 519-524.
This review originally published in Theory & Event, vol. 11, issue.2 (2008).(E-ISSN: 1092-311X)