’ s Column : What ’ s Wrong with These Terms ? A Conversation with Barbara

How do we know when critical terms lose their power? Could it be that some of the fundamental notions of literary and cultural studies have been adopted so broadly in so many contexts and disciplines that they explain too much, and thus not enough? This is true for terms such as textuality, discourse, narrative, and representation, some of our colleagues have claimed. If critical terms originating in our field are imported, or some may say appropriated, by the social sciences, the arts, architecture, even law and the sciences, it is surely because they enable new ways of thinking and new modes of analysis. Can they be too open, too prevalent? Last May, at a colloquium I attended, titled Mediating Anne Frank, this paradox came alive for me as I witnessed, with some consternation, the critique of a term I use productively in my teaching and writing. The event was organized by the Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion, which is part of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. Jeffrey Shandler introduced the colloquium by explaining the choice of “mediating” rather than “representing” in the title. Mediation is more dynamic, he stated; it is transactive and multiply relational, as opposed to representation, which still implies a relation of at least desired fidelity to an original, and thus still suffers from a burden of accuracy. In her introductory remarks, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Shandler’s conference coorganizer, reiterated some of these cautionary words, which she already had mentioned to me in conversation at another conference, Visual Culture and Jewish Identity, the previous month. Identity is like representation in that it no longer means very much, she had told me. I tried to explain what representation meant for me when I lectured on “gender and representation” in the introductory course for 1 2 0 . 5 ]