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Monday, August 04, 2008
Among the Disciplines: Literary Science?
Scientific American has an article on The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn and Language Log has a post on Literary Evolution & other things. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reviews a collection of articles from canonical mid-20th-century critics, Trilling, Wilson, Tate, Brooks and others.
Comments
That WSJ article opens with the claim that “literature was once at the center of American cultural life,” but there’s an interesting slippage from that to the claim that (once upon a time) “literary merit was discussed and hotly debated by critics whose essays, in Garrick Davis’s words, “courted the educated public with their elegant prose.”
In other words, Seaton’s hopeful claim is that “American cultural life” was once identical with the “educated public,” which, if you add the framing with words like “elegant” and even “courted,” makes it seem a lot more like nostalgia for an imagined ancien regime, rather than anything like a real vision of an inclusive public sphere. After all, is he nostalgic for a time when “America” was interested in literature, or a time when the American upper class was interested in literature? The “educated public” was pretty small back then, compared to now. And with that in mind, the amorphous “middle of the 20th century” he describes might not have been a society plagued (as we are) by the terrible blogs and facebook and what-not, but it’s hard to make the argument that it was a time when TV and movies didn’t dominate “American cultural life” unless you let a relatively small “educated public” stand in for the whole public. So it’s interesting (and revealing) that he wants to make that argument; it’s an excellent example of the class asymmetry that so often characterizes “good old days” arguments in conservative culture-mongering.
“‘Everyone has a natural detector for psychological realism,’ says Raymond A. Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. ‘We can tell when something rings false.’”
And this is why no one ever followed L. Ron Hubbard. And we all lived happily ever after.
(Personally, I’m going to get my Khreenons tested to make sure my Morkluk level is at Adept-Red-Five.)
Is there anything more to the new “scientific study of literature” than a bunch of smug scholars patting themselves on the backs for asserting that yes, Dorothy, everything you’ve ever believed to be common sense is true and no, Toto, we never left Kansas in the first place?
"Is there anything more to the new “scientific study of literature” than a bunch of smug scholars patting themselves on the backs for asserting that yes, Dorothy, everything you’ve ever believed to be common sense is true and no, Toto, we never left Kansas in the first place?”
No. There isn’t. At least, all I’ve seen so far is rubbish similar to the following: “We conducted a poll that conclusively disproved the ‘death of the author’ thesis. It turns out over 92.4% of people who read books believe that they book they are reading was written by an author who was alive at the time it was written. So, take that, critical theorists.”
Finding problems in a WSJ article is like shooting pickles in a barrel with monkeys and ducks, but still, why not give it a try?
First, we get this doozy: “The differences between the Trilling-Wilson camp and the New Critics seemed so momentous a half-century ago. But it is the similarities that are so striking now.”
Good to see that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic is alive and well in the book reviewing camp. God forbid we pay attention to the actual intellectual issues at stake. Wilson, fer Chrissakes, writes about Marxism (Finland Station), popular culture (Commercials), and Southern belles and generals (Patriotic Gore). Sounds a lot like “cultural theory” to me.
Then we hear this bruiser of a claim: “The expansion of the canon in recent decades to include writers of diverse nationalities and ethnicities is not, it should be emphasized, a break with the New Criticism but rather the logical result of its insistence that literary merit alone should determine literary standing.”
Can one be more wronger? Mostly not, mostly. I mean, some canon expansion took place on the grounds that great work had been neglected because of racial or gender or national biases. But much of the critique of the canon came from historicists who wanted the freedom to examine texts of all sorts; from Marxists and feminists who wanted to reconceptualize what “great literature” was; and from cultural studies scholars who wanted to turn English departments into media studies departments.
Then Edward Said becomes an anti-humanist. Said, a man who teamed up with a Jewish conductor to put together concerts of Western classical music in a kind of “We Are the World” with violins and tubas. Said, whose second most enduring work is *Culture and Imperialism* which, despite its title, is very much an appreciation of central work in the Western literary tradition.
But the main problem with the article is that Seaton uses a very selective body of work (300 pages of essays) to counter critiques about an entire movement that dominated the entire profession of English for decades. Sure, the best of the New Criticism will be, well, the best. But this doesn’t excuse NC from the critiques of Eagleton or Said. It doesn’t excuse NC from critiques of my undergrad professor who worshiped New Criticism and had us discuss poems shorn of titles and authors, who wouldn’t allow students to cite any text in their papers besides the poem to be analyzed. If Theory has to account for its worst moments, so too must New Criticism.
Seaton also has a tin ear for the similarities between Beardsley and Barthes on the author (and neglects to mention that Barthes references the New Criticism in “The Death of the Author"). In fact, Barthes is simply pushing a New Critical insight to its logical conclusion: if there’s more meaning in a work than its author intended, then we cannot just stop at the Critic’s assertion of a meaning. For Barthes, distancing the author means freeing up the reader from both the Author and the Critic. As Barthes wrote, “it is hardly surprising that historically the Author’s empire has been the Critic’s as well, and also that (even new) criticism is today unsettled [by experimental literature] at the same time as the Author.”
Seaton can then simply misrepresent Barthes: “For those who agree with Barthes, the close attention that the New Critics devoted to literary works is ‘quite futile,’ since all readings are equally arbitrary—and equally meaningless.” I can’t think of a critic who gave closer attention to literary texts than Roland Barthes. Seaton proves that loving New Criticism does not entail the ability to read closely or accurately.
Luther, I was just about to indulge in a bit of amateur problem-finding myself; you beat me to it. I came across this article yesterday through Arts & Letters Daily, which I hadn’t visited in a while, and I was reminded why I hadn’t: although I appreciate the site, it always seems to be linking to the same essay on the decline of humanistic criticism, over and over, and I rarely find it more convincing than this. (Although I will say that it’s nice to see Trilling mentioned.)
Seaton counters Said’s critique of the “ahistorical, manifestly religious aestheticism of the New Criticism” with Cleanth Brooks’s assertion that literature is not a surrogate for religion, and then, two short paragraphs later, approvingly cites Allen Tate’s claim that poetry matters because “the full language of the human situation can be the vehicle of truth.” And the paragraph in between contains these sentences:
Even those who now feel that the New Critics went too far with their textual intensity have found it hard to resist the “close reading” that it championed. The deconstructive method of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, for instance, is little more than close reading aimed at finding “unstable” meanings...
Given that neither Derrida nor de Man is still alive (and that deconstruction is no longer what it was when they were), I think this is a strange “now”; more importantly, I don’t understand at all how either of them could be considered an opponent of “textual intensity.” It feels similar to the misreading of Barthes that you point out.
crazy, I’d say the most fruitful ground for applications of cognitive sciences to aesthetics will be found in disruption of general theory rather than production of specific readings. Just as was the case when applying Lacan, Heidegger, Marx, Matthew Arnold, or the Book of Common Prayer, interpretations too easily devolve into cherry-picked re-illustrations of the already-assumed-to-be-known.
John Robert, the Valve exists in what might be called “The Long Now.”
...interpretations too easily devolve into cherry-picked re-illustrations of the already-assumed-to-be-known.
That’s pretty much what film-critic David Bordwell has argued in Making Meaning and in this article (13 MB PDF download). Given that the universe of admissible meanings is now known, why waste time and energy foisting them on individual texts?
Bill, we can’t say that “the universe of admissible meanings is now known.”
It may seem like that when we mistake the ideas in the Critic’s head for the ideas in the Author’s head or “in” the text. This is precisely what Barthes cautions us against in “The Death of the Author,” where he argues that all texts are bundles of quotations and fragments from past discourses, and the Reader must be free from both the Author and the Critic to reassemble one text into another text.
A few years ago, SEK, Sean McCann, and I used to argue about this sort of thing re Benn Michaels. I was of the persuasion that true criticism is a creative rewriting of another text, that the line between criticism and art is not a very helpful line. I now acknowledge the danger of that position, and I’m happy to admit that what scholars call “interpretation of meaning” is, as WBM suggests, a statement about the author’s intentions.
But I still believe that criticism—thoughtful writing about art—need not be interpretive, need not restrict itself to authorial intention (or the other acceptable grounding for criticism, historical context).
Over at Ron Silliman’s blog, you can find links to a recent Barrett Watten talk on the subject of the poet/critic’s relationship to the work of art. After the New American Poetry, he seems to argue, we’ve learned not to treat the poem or text as a terminal object, but rather as a sort of score for the reader’s own performance of linkage, meaning making, framing, imagination, fancy, whathaveyou.
Bordwell argues that, while this is the way the Surrealists approached film criticism, it’s not the way ordinary viewers approach film. I think that’s completely wrong. Anyone who has ever taught film (or literature) knows that viewers and readers “read” very different texts than close reading professors or teachers. They have no trouble making their own meanings, ignoring or selecting details willfully, imposing character types onto characters, etc. (Woody Allen tells us as much in the *The Purple Rose of Cairo*.)
Some texts, especially after modernism, demand that the reader dedicate his or her time to “solving the crime” of the author’s intentions. The stories in *Dubliners* too often seem to me to be exercises in playing a carefully orchestrated game of connect the dots to see what picture Joyce wants us to see. And that’s how we usually teach reading and writing these days. Check out Foster’s *How to Read like a Professor* or Prose’s *Reading like a Writer*. Not only does this restrict the possible models for writing and reading—writers who primarily want to move the reader, to allow the reader an escape, to provide affect, to stir the imagination are ignored—but it restricts the ways in which we can read and write.
(To return to the WSJ article, one major difference between New Criticism and the Trilling/Wilson mode of criticism might be along these lines. Trilling and Wilson had no problem using literature as a jumping off point for their own musings, while New Criticism was, in theory anyway, quasi-scientistic about these things. We can certainly see this in critics like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, who come out of the Trilling and Wilson terrain.)