Archives | Literature
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
De Man, Fish, and Simulation
Though de Man was at Hopkins when I was there, I never studied with him, nor even read him. However, prompted by this and that, I decided to pick up Blindness and Insight and read around. The first (though not quite the only) essay I read is “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism.” Consider this passage (p. 25 in Blindness and Insight, 2nd Edition, Revised):
“Intent” is seen, by analogy with a physical model, as a transfer of a psychic or mental content that exists in the mind of the poet to the mind of a reader, somewhat as one would pour wine from a jar into a glass. A certain content has to be transferred elsewhere, and the energy necessary to effect the transfer has to come from an outside source called intention.
This much is what cognitive linguists would later identify as the conduit metaphor. The key text is Michael Reddy’s “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language” (in Andrew Ortony, ed. Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edition, pp. 164-201). Reddy’s article is based on 53 examples sentences. Here are the first three (p. 166):
(1) Try to get your thoughts across better
(2) None of Mary’s feelings came through to me with any clarity
(3) You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean
Reddy’s argument is that many of our statements about communication seemed to be based on the notion of sending something (the thought, idea, feeling) through a conduit, hence he calls it the conduit metaphor. He knows that communication doesn’t work that way, but that’s not is central issue. His central concern is to detail the way we use the conduit metaphor to structure our thinking about communication.
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Monday, December 12, 2005
From Frye to the Buffisstas, with a glance at hermeneutics along the way
BEYOND HERMENEUTICS?
While Culler’s 1975 Structuralist Poetics was obviously influenced by structualism and semiotics, it was also influenced by Chomskyian linguistics. Thus the book’s first chapter is entitled “The Linguistic Foundation.” It ends with the assertion: “Linguistics is not hermeneutic. It does not discover what a sequence means or produce a new interpretation of it but tries to determine the nature of the system underlying the event” (p. 31). I think that Culler is correct, even if we allow for a linguistics with a robust semantics. It’s not clear that we have such a linguistics, but considerable work has been done on it since Culler wrote his book.
But, as the book was being published, structuralism was giving way to deconstruction and other post-structuralist methods. From my point of view, that is to say, in view of my particular intellectual interests, that was a choice in favor of continued hermeneutics and against the prospect of a non-hermenutic study of literature. That’s what I’ve been up to.
But it’s one thing to say that “linguistics is not hermeneutic,” it’s quite something else to understand what that means, what it entails as an intellectual practice. That’s not what I’m trying to do right here and now. Here and now I want to look at hermeneutics, perhaps so the space of a non-hermeneutic criticsm can emerge through opposition.
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Thursday, December 08, 2005
Miriam’s Hrair Limit; or, How to Shelve Intelligently to Feel More Intelligent
Miriam J. shared her edifying despair with Valve readers yesterday. I have had enough despair of late (and face the possibility of more tomorrow). So tonight I offer hope. But first a pinch of despair:
I read on average 50 pages per hour. That’s around a book a day (life will intervene), 365 a year. If I squeeze out another 40 years, that’s a mere 14,600 books, which simply will not do. For every classic you haven’t read and should, there are at least five new books you’ll want to read as well.
So says LA Times staff writer Susan Salter Reynolds. To which Miriam responds:
My mortality is never closer than when I make the mistake of thinking too clearly about the ratio of the ever-burgeoning number of books in the world, to the sliver of books I have read or am yet likely to read.
Miriam has a problem. She is unable to imagine how large a number 14,600 is. That’s not surprising. Not because I think Miriam deficient, mind you, but because we all have our hrair limits
Some people can juggle five balls but not six. When someone tosses him a sixth, they all inevitably hit the floor. Other people can juggle six but not seven . . . you see where this is headed. Now consider Miriam’s desperation. She will only read 14,600 hundred more books in her life. That statement is approximately 2085 times her hrair limit. She would need 2085 other brains to be able to wrap her mind around her absurd fear of not reading enough.
Doesn’t everyone feel better already?
To strike a more serious note: this anxiety can be overcome by dispensing with the "to read" shelf and creating a "have read" shelf in its place. You will be amazed daily by how much you have read instead of despairing over how much you haven’t. The sense of self-satisfaction such a shelf creates positively intoxicates.
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Bad book math
[As Jonathan just posted on reading lists:]
In an otherwise fluffy piece for the LA Times, staff writer Susan Salter Reynolds disturbs that deep river of anxiety felt by all readers at one time or another: that “so little time, so many books” anxiety that is at the bottom of the widespread irritation, yet perverse fascination, with the ubiquitous lists of “best,” “most influential,” or “must have read in order to be considered even basically literate” lists of books. Damn her, she even runs the numbers:
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Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Who Owns Shakespeare?
Prelude: Before getting down to business, I would like to thank John Holbo and his fellow Valvists (Valvologists? Valvolytes? Valvoholics?) for inviting me here for a run of guesting.
As some of you may know, I am an independent scholar. For the past three decades or so I have been working out how to use the newer psychologies - the cognitive sciences, neurosciences, primate ethology - in framing the study of culture, with literature being my main but not my only focus. I got interested in these psychologies as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins back in the middle and late 60s. I was there when the French landed, though I didn’t attend any of the sessions of the 1966 Structuralist symposium. I saw de Man in the halls, took a course with Hillis Miller, and took several courses and independent studies with Richard Macksey. But Chomsky and Piaget - and later Eric Lenneberg, Sydney Lamb, Karl Pribram, and ultimately David Hays - interested me more than Derrida or Lacan. So that’s what I studied.
One of my first articles was published in the Centennial Issue of MLN, dated October 1976. The issue was edited by Richard Macksey and reflected his sense of the lay of the critical land. Northrup Fry had the lead essay, with a reply by Samuel Weber. Other contributors include Edward Said, Walter Benn Michaels, Eugenio Donato, and Stanley Fish. I was thus in august company, and honored for it. But that elevation is not why I mention the issue.
I mention it because my essay, on “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics,” was unlike any of the others. And yet Macksey thought it appropriate to a survey of the contemporary critical scene. Whatever it was that was going on back then, it had not ossified into what is now sometimes known as Theory. It was flexible enough to include hard-core cognitive science, which is what my essay was.
Obviously, my work did not catch on, nor, as far as I know, was there anything like it in literary circles at the time. The winds of critical interest and desire blew in different directions. It was to be two decades before literary critics would decided to give cognitive science a spin, and the cognitive science they’ve been spinning is, for better or worse, rather different than what I was doing back then.
My objective in these guest posts is not so much to make a direct case for what I did back then, or even for what I am doing now. That work must make its own case. Rather, I’m more interested in exploring how that work - then and now - fits in, where it lies in the disciplinary topography. To that end I have more or less planned out two commentaries that take observations by Northrup Frye, Geoffrey Hartmann, Paul de Man, and Stanley Fish as starting points.
Before I get around to either of those, however, I want to contemplate a question that ran up and bit me in the face a couple of weeks ago:
Who Owns Shakespeare?
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Saturday, November 19, 2005
Decrepitude
While I’ve always liked to think of myself as what a Hyde Park bookdealer once called the "blessedly pragmatic" type--in search of a working text instead of a collector’s item--I nevertheless have had a hard time overcoming my aversion to less-than-intact bindings. That’s a remarkably foolish aversion, given my line of work: cheap texts generally feature cheap bindings, and cheap bindings generally survive...cheaply. Let’s not even mention 1880s and 1890s paper, which has a dismaying tendency to (at best) turn autumnal shades of brown and (at worst) crumble into nothingness at the slightest touch. Recently, though, I’ve started acquiring vast quantities of sermons, and Victorian sermons usually come in states of collapse ranging from the nude (no covers) to the discombobulated (no stitching). So much for attractive-looking bookshelves.
My first excursion into the realm of what’s politely called "the reading copy" took place during graduate school, when I acquired my "dilapidated Disraeli." To be more precise, I acquired Edmund Gosse’s deluxe limited edition of Disraeli’s novels. At one point, this was a remarkably pretty set (see here and here); now, alas, poor Dizzy has become spineless. It doesn’t help that the leather is slowly but surely crumbling, producing random showers of colored dust. For many years, this set hosted the only truly decrepit books in my collection, but it is acquiring a multitude of new friends. The sermons, for example. My copy of the British Pulpit, Vol. II, has covers; if only they were attached to the text block. As it now stands, when I’m forced to choose between not having an important text and having one that looks like a special guest corpse on Law & Order, the corpse wins every time. I’m delighted to finally have a decent complete set of John Lingard, even if he seems determined to prove that a book and its binding are soon parted; similarly, I’m pleased to have Neander on my shelves, even if his spines have a nasty habit of falling on the floor. Obviously, a book on the verge of imminent collapse can make for awkward reading experiences--it’s most unnerving to watch one silently disintegrate over the course of an evening. (There are times when "deconstruction" takes on a whole new meaning.) Still, better a book in fragments than no book at all.
[X-posted from The Little Professor.]
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Wednesday, November 16, 2005
A Derridian Skull-Peeling; or, Damn This Foul Effluvium!
Walter Benn Michaels brings out the weird in everyone. What do I mean? In academia, he is considered Anti-Christ by the Theory crowd, even though the manner in which he engages Theory is, by any reasonable definition, "theoretical." His shrewd readings of Derrida do to Him what He did to Rousseau and Plato, i.e. he addresses the argument on its own terms and grants all its assumptions. Then he nabs the bat it brought to beat him and beats it insensate. Just like Derrida did. Despite siding with the Searle camp on matters Limited & Incorporated and the Michaels on material matters, I admire the tactical mind of Derrida and am reminded of it more the more I read Michaels. Though he shuns the conclusions Derrida drew, Michaels imbided the method and the message . . . and deploys it with the same subtle strokes Derrida once did.
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Adam Gopnik on C.S. Lewis: Fairy Tales and the Religious Imagination
I’ve tried and failed to get into C.S. Lewis’s writings on religion. I read Surprised by Joy as a grad student, and a student recently gave me The Abolition of Man. While the latter work didn’t do much for me at all, I found Surprised by Joy quite readable, if occasionally puzzling. Needless to say, despite my disappointment with Lewis’s essays for grown-ups, the name C.S. Lewis still brings up happy memories, from when I devoured the Narnia books as a child—completely oblivious to the Christian allegory I was supposed to be imbibing.
This other C.S. Lewis has been a mystery to me—an avowedly Christian writer whose account of his religious beliefs isn’t even especially convincing. In Surprised by Joy, one sees a writer whose imaginative life is apparently animated primarily by fairy tales, but who turns to religion as a way to amplify and order the joy his imaginative worlds give him. One finds passages like the following:
I also developed a great taste for all the fiction I could get about the ancient world: Quo Vadis, Darkness and Dawn, The Gladiators, Ben Hur. It might be expected that this arose out of my new concern for my religion, but I think not. Early Christians came into many of these stories, but they were not what I was after. I simply wanted sandals, temples, togas, slaves, emperors, galleys, amphitheaters; the attraction, as I now see, was erotic, and erotic in rather a morbid way. . . . The idea of other planets exercised upon me then a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite different from any other of my literary interests. Most emphatically it was not the romantic spell of Das Ferne. “Joy” (in my technical sense) never darted from Mars or the Moon. This was something coarser and stronger. The interest, when the fit was upon me, was ravenous, like lust.
Lewis’ account of the role of literature in the development of his religious imagination seems confused. For one thing, since the passion for science fiction and fantasy was so intense, why worry about “Joy” (which has a specifically religious meaning for Lewis) altogether? And since his own imagination is so often the story of Surprised by Joy, why not design his own religion based on the fantastic alternate worlds that had already created and populated by him in his own mind? Why the Anglican framework exactly?
Adam Gopnik’s long piece on Lewis in this week’s New Yorker clears up many questions. The whole piece is worth reading to people interested in Lewis, but perhaps the final two paragraphs are especially intriguing, as Gopnik bridges the gap between a secular reader’s passion for fairy tales (or more generally, for the otherworldly) with the religious believer’s investment in them (generally as a stimulant to spiritual growth).
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Monday, November 14, 2005
Not-Knowing
J. Peder Zane thoughtfully considers the “knowledge deficit” among today’s college students. Citing a dinner conversation with some University of North Carolina professors, Zane observes:
Continue reading "Not-Knowing"All of them have noted that such ignorance isn’t new—students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, “It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t care about what they don’t know."
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Sunday, November 13, 2005
How to Negotiate the MLA; or, Seriously, How?
As I browse through the catalogue for the upcoming MLA, I see that there will be a number of unpleasant decisions to be made. All of them boil down to: “Here or here?”
Do I seat myself at promptly 10:15 on Wednesday morning at the panel on “Citizenship and United States Writing” on which Brook Thomas, one of my dissertator adivors, sits; or do I attend the special session on “Covering Academe,” during which Scott McLemee will be discussing what it’s like to be “Outside, Looking In”? This anecdote pretty much sums up the panic I’ll feel when I hit my hotel room on Monday and try to decipher the highlighting schemes I’ve concocted--yellow for “of interest, takes precedence over hunger,” orange for “of interest, but doesn’t,” &c.
One panel contributors and readers of the Valve will want to attend is the one on “Walter Benn Michael’s Our America Ten Years Later.” Presenters include Wai Chee Dimock, Kenneth Warren (who spoke at Irvine last year and who I cannot recommend highly enough), and our very own Sean McCann; Michaels himself will respond.
Quick questions of a more general nature: How many panels before you burn out? (At the International James Joyce conference a couple of years ago, I drove everyone, myself included, insane by attending three panels a day for four days straight. I think that may cross the line between “responsible” and “unhealthy.") What exactly is a “cash bar”? How do I get invited to all the best parties? Is dress “business casual,” and if so, what exactly does that mean? Which David Lodge novels should I re-read before attending? Or has Lodge been superseded? Is it considered bad form to slip quietly out of the Q&A session, or is a convincing enough cough fit a better tactic? (I kid, I kid. If I left during the Q&A session, I wouldn’t be able to ask the question I’d spent the last half of each presentation perfecting.)
Finally, if you can think of any panels of general interest, feel free to offer suggestions. I’m thinking “Web Logs as Witness” (Friday, 8:30-9:45) may interest may of us, since we think about the relation of scholarship to blogs to community regularly. I’m tempted to forget, temporarily, what I learned during nine years of speech therapy and pull rank at the “Deaf Critical Theory and Practice” panel . . . but then I remember that I’m a scholar, not a performance artist, and that such a performance would be considered offensive. (Then again, had I not written this, they wouldn’t have known about the corrective therapy and could’ve mistaken me for the man I would’ve been without it. But that, my friends, would be cruel. When I speak as I once spoke, I am utterly unintelligible. One summer after I’d completed S.T., I volunteered to help train the speech therapists at the unfortunately acronymed LSD [The Louisiana School for the Deaf]. They said that the particular combination of what I heard vs. what I produced was one of the most bizarre pronunciation schemes they’d ever encountered. But I sound like Tom Brokaw now, so none of you need worry that you’ll come down with a case of the “come agains” if we meet at the MLA.)
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Wednesday, November 09, 2005
On Fathers & Sons; or, “He’d Already Rather Be Bow-Hunting”
[Warning: This post may not appeal to everyone. Just saying, you know, ‘cause I’m polite and all. Also, I hope (but believe I’ve failed) to’ve communicated the complexity of the fictional interplay I identify below. In other words, let the suggestiveness of the situation guide your criticism . . . because it is complex. I may have oversimplified it in the telling.]
Sons only learn about their fathers obliquely. The rituals of father and son relations dictate an insurmountable formality which compels them to seek other avenues of understanding. For most of the 20th Century, those other avenues terminated in weekly sessions with other sons’ fathers (and infrequently mothers) who would tell them about Oedipus’ father (and unfortunate mother) and ask for payment in cash. For reasons which have more to do with the culture of analysis captured by Woody Allen than anything else, I associate this obsession with Freudian psychotherapy and unkempt beards with the 1970s. All of which I offer as introduction to the idea that Noah Baumbach, writer of the recently released The Squid and the Whale (2005) and the brilliant Kicking & Screaming (1995), learned about his father through the fiction of his father, the novelist and short story writer Jonathan Baumbach.
Why do I find this interesting? If Jonathan Baumbach’s fiction is staunchly personal but ultimately fictional, then Noah Baumbach’s depictions of the fathers of his characters don’t refer to his father so much as the narrators of his father’s fictions. In other words, the narrator of Jonathan’s The Life & Times of Major Fiction
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Monday, November 07, 2005
Sticking to the Words
According to Ellis Sharp:
. . .[Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” is] a campaigning song, set in the real world. If you say that it doesn’t matter what the song is about, or whether it’s true or not, and that it’s just great music, then I think you’ve missed a lot of the point of the song. You aestheticise it. You turn it into an artefact detached from real life. That impulse reminds me very much of the American ‘New Criticism’ of the 1950s. The New Critics wanted to remove literature from life and history and regard writing as exclusively a formal structure – a well-wrought urn, an organic artefact, where all you discussed was language. The New Critics rubbished biography. The writer’s life, the writer’s intentions, were an irrelevance. Out with society and history, just stick to the words! But theory is never innocent, and the New Criticism slotted in nicely with the quietism of the age. If you don’t want to talk about history or society, you threaten nothing.
Heaven forbid that we “aestheticize” an ostensible work of art! Sharp’s admonitions here are like saying that the stories in today’s newspaper are too much like journalism or that the trouble with physics is that it contains too many darn equations. Reattach them to life! But just as physics no longer exists without the equations, art must be “aesthetic” in order to be itself in the first place. It’s the attempt to politicize works of art, to make them illuminate history or act as the servants of biography, that distorts them, not regarding them as artifact--which of course they are, first and foremost. If we don’t “aestheticize” art--that is, apprehend it on its own terms as art--we’ve failed to recognize it at all.
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Wednesday, November 02, 2005
Citations & The Damage Done; or, How Much Lacan Before I Resort to Insult and Violence?
A critic establishes trust with his or her readers by citational proxy. Who cites and is cited by whom means everything when evaluating contemporary criticism. So when I run across an article about Nella Larsen’s Passing which cites seven works by Jacques Lacan, three by Freud, ten glosses of Lacan but only five citations from the rich critical history of Larsen’s novel, I hardly need to read the article to know that I do not trust this critic’s ability to evaluate his or her sources. (All that talk of gazing and yet so myopic. Sigh.) A critic who don’t know merde from cirage à chaussures (that sounds so much snappier in English) cannot expect the majority of readers to consider the points he or she forwards with the seriousness befitting academic discourse . . . and by "the majority of readers," I only mean "all those who don’t share the critic’s supremely constricted set of assumptions."
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Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Standing Still
In his essay “Love and Hatred of ‘French Theory’ in America,” Rolando Perez provides this very incisive account of the reception of Theory in the 1980s:
Continue reading "Standing Still"Those of us who were either in the U.S. academy as professors or as graduate students in the early 1980s were weaned on the milk of post-existentialist, French thought. For reasons that had little or nothing to with the individual thinkers behind the different theories, two camps formed all on their own. Or perhaps more accurately, according to the academic interests of the people involved. Those whose interests were primarily literary were attracted to, studied, and wrote on Barthes, Derrida, Jabes, de Man, etc. Much of what we think of as being “French theory” today is the result of the kind of literary criticism that was carried out in prestigious universities like Yale during the 1980s. Academicians and graduate students who were interested in Continental political philosophy found in Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, the necessary keys they needed to critique contemporary, American capitalist society. Some of us attempted to bring these two strains of French thought together, either from the literary or from the political end. And there were good reasons for such attempts, even if at times the actual results were less than satisfactory.
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