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Thursday, August 25, 2005
Literary Interest, Part III: Crossed Fingers & Muddled Minds
Welcome to Part III of my continuing attempt to understand Steven Knapp’s Literary Interest and come to terms with its implications. (In what follows it’s possible that I demonstrate a constitutional inability to do either. Feel free to say so without worrying about my feelings. You could stuff my pride in a thimble and still have plenty of room for a thumb, i.e. I would rather be right eventually than wrong in perpetuity.)
Commenting on my second (still muddled) attempt to pin down Knapp’s argument, Adam Stephanides argues
The primary question Knapp is asking in this chapter is whether it is possible for a work of literature to necessarily mean something other than what the author intended it to mean, using Paradise Lost as a test case. As would be expected from the co-author of “Against Theory,” Knapp’s answer is “no."
I read that section under the same assumption and came to the same conclusion (though I neglected to mention it in that post). My entire discussion assumed that the point toward which Knapp marched would marshal against all arguments resembling “the Romantic Argument,” i.e. ones in which the critic rescues the coherence of the intended world at the expense of the author’s intentions. On The Valve, HZ forwards a different but not necessarily contradictory interpretation:
So, Knapp wants to know: What is the payoff of treating literary works as if they had a a “special kind of representational structure, each of whose elements acquires, by virtue of its connection with other elements, a network of associations inseparable from the representation itself.” What are we interested in when we are interested in THAT?
HZ’s account diminishes the importance of the prescriptive angle Adam and I believe to be entailed by his local statements. Granted, assessing these statements outside the global context of Literary Interest encouraged the speculation that led to my misrepresentating Knapp’s larger claims. (The first person who acknowledges the resemblence of my misinterpretation to the type of misinterpretation Knapp calls “the Romantic Argument” wins August’s Meta-Award for Meta-Awareness.) While HZ almost convinces me that Knapp’s interest in “literary interest” is disinterested, my experience reading Walter Benn Michaels suggests otherwise. (Not that I think there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the two. However, given the vehemence with which they argued in “Against Theory“ and their response to responses to it, not to mention “Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, I find it difficult to believe that their initial positions and mode of argumentation could be that different.) I cannot accept the proposition that Knapp validates the argument that “literary interest” is the better or possibly even only way readers approach literature. That there are valid and invalid interpretive strategies must be the point of Literary Interest. Right? Right? Otherwise the entire book would be nothing more than a sophisticated account of the solipsism any engagement with literature entails:
Literary interest offers an unusually precise and concentrated analogue of what it is like to be an agent in general. For part of what being an agent is (always) like, apparently, is being caught up in an irreducible oscillation between typicality and particularity: between (on one side) the forms of action that an agent must understand in order to make sense of herself as the possible performer of certain actions, and (on the other side) the concrete history without which the agent could not distinguish herself from those who might, otherwise, just as well replace her. And this, once again, resembles the structure of mutual implication that characterizes the relation between the typicality of literary object-types and the particularity of the complex scenarios in which the literary work inserts them. (139)
The reason that our interest in literature takes the historical form Knapp calls “literary interest” is that the encounter with literature replicates the dynamics of human agency. We relate to the text in the same manner we relate to our selves. Since literature isn’t valuable so much as interesting, the only defense available to Knapp would be to tie its value to its interest. (If gardening could be proven to entail the same interesting relation to human agency, this argument suggests, then gardening would be as valuable as literature.) His defense of the literary amounts then to a defense of all engagements like the literary, in which the oscillation between type and particularity mirror (or poorly parrot) the oscillation endemic to the experience of human agency. Stephen King’s latest tome may be unliterary because its characters are too typical, never approaching the particular, never starting the swinging characteristic of literature. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, easily qualifies as literary. (Not a bad thing, mind you, only a conventionally unliterary one.) [Edit: When I speak of “types” I refer back to discussion of “the concept Chevalier” in the earlier post, i.e. to a constellation of characteristics identifiable with a particular person and/or narrative but instantiated, in part, in another.] I (admittedly) fudge Knapp’s argument here, attributing to the object the experience it excites in the reader (or viewer), but I fudge because I believe I can:
Knapp’s argument demands that the reader have a knowledge of types. How else would a reader know whether what they encounter in Situation A is a particular instantiation of a more general type? Were one to compile a complete catalog of types, distinguishing works which inspire literary interest from ones which don’t becomes a simple matter of correspondence. Then the Canon--or, more precisely, some canon--slips in the back door. Given the works of literature whose engagement served as the foundation of his argument, this canon would largely resemble the Canon, only with the addition of the Whedonverse. (I must admit that I fancy this notion both generally and to the degree it would depoliticize the continuing Canon Wars.) All of which brings me to this:
What does this mean for people who interpret literature for a living?
I won’t answer yet because I don’t feel I can answer yet. Suggestions will be welcomed and appreciated.
Comments
Are you using King as a generic example or do you have a particular book in mind?
You’d really embarrass those folks who wrote Buffy by implying that they were more literary than King--a former literature professor and part-time critic and scholar regarded by some as his generation’s Dickens.
I’m using King to stand in for the generic examples thrown around by self-identifying aesthetes (complete with pitch-black turtle-necks, berets and autographed first editions of Nausea). That said, I don’t myself like King, even though I’ve read every book he’s ever written (ducks), and I especially abhor the trope of Big Giant Spiders that he invokes with astonishing regularity.
Still, Buffy possesses far more of the literary qualities Knapp values than the King novels I’ve read. (Which, kidding aside, is a goodly number.) King’s novels--and most horror novels, for that matter--work because they exploit the typicality of types for horrifying effect. (This fact points to one of the weaknesses of Knapp’s argument I don’t want to address just yet, but I will say that Knapp may encourage the sort of de rigueur “individualism” practiced by strident individualists like every pseudo-Pearl Jam who hit the charts circa 1995. Or Good Charlotte. Or practically every emo band around today. About which, I insist, more later.)
I haven’t read the Knapp book, and thus can’t really follow what you’re talking about, but most of Buffy was mildly clever hackery, turned out on a weekly basis, and, it should be mentioned, a TV show. How this comes out to be more literary than long novels with Wallace Stevens epigraphs, whose supernatural elements are subordinate to their often skillful domestic realism, I don’t see.
I haven’t read the Knapp book, and thus can’t really follow what you’re talking about
me neither, but I think if you substitute Dan Brown for Stephen King you might get somewhere. I have heard rumours of an exclusive highup King subcult amongst those annoying beret-wearing bongo-players. Dan Brown deals exclusively in types of the most typical kind, and he’s also a really, really baaaad writer.
For one, epigraphs do not a literary work make. For two, if you think Buffy “mildly clever hackery” you must have watched, percentage-wise, as many episodes as I’ve read Wolfe novels.
By all standards, the second and third seasons of Buffy take television’s literary cake. I don’t want to start a fanboy argument here, but you’re this close to a chapter-length disquisition on how Buffy (Seasons 2 & 3), Twin Peaks (Season 1) and Homicide: Life on the Streets (Seasons 1-3 & the Stephen Gyllenhaal directed “The Subway") represent the most “literary” television ever produced. (And Laura, you’re right, I should’ve used Brown. A more awful prose stylist can barely be imagined.)
Sadly, I’ve watched every single Buffy episode and at least four seasons worth of Angel, not to mention Firefly. The second season was too sentimental for my taste, though I thought the third was the best. The bulk of it was, as I wrote, mildly clever hackery, with the episodes that Wheedon wrote being a little more clever than the others. It’s not really fair to compare it to The Sopranos or the Lynch-directed episodes of Twin Peaks, however. You can’t confuse your enjoyment of something with its sophistication, and both of these are something distinct entirely from being “literary.” I enjoy the “Jiggle-Billy” episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force more than perhaps all but ten or so Buffys--primarily for the deftness of its deployment of Badiou (a provocative move, clinamenatic of its defigured swerveject [for every “commence to jigglin’” is always a recommencement of jigglitidy {the revenant |swervejectlichkeit|, Heraclitus reminds us, watches the quick |Jiggle-Billy| and the dead |Happy-Time Harry|}] dejects the unconstituted and yet figural mise en scène--and when you put “The Emperor of Ice Cream” at the beginning of a novel about vampires, hell, that’s got to count for something.
You can’t confuse your enjoyment of something with its sophistication, and both of these are something distinct entirely from being “literary."
Wow, way to insult my intelligence! I never thought I ought to differentiate between my enjoyment of a series and my evaluation of it according to a set of criteria I’ve spent the past three weeks thinking about. I couldn’t possibly not confuse one with the other, or be able to defend my position on the genre-bending, particularity-defying-type quality of the second season of Buffy, so I’m glad you gave me this out.
Really, in the future you really ought to differentiate between your opinion and schematic models of the sort that Knapp suggests we erect...because if you do, you’d realize that the idea of “sentimentality” flies out the window when what’s valued isn’t some traditional definition of what is or isn’t literary and what is valued is a very specific concept of what provokes particular reactions from an informed audience. Seriously, consider the terms of the argument presented then tell me, honestly, that you don’t think the second season of Buffy fits said criteria. Then we can continue this conversation.
(For the record: a Wallace Stevens epigram isn’t nearly so impressive as you think it is. Many students have taken literature classes, and some of them are bound to earn B.A.s or M.A.s and write novels. The fact that they choose a half-remembered high-falutin line from a poem they studied as an undergraduate isn’t all that impressive. All my kids can quote Joan Didion...but some of them are terrible writers. If “that” counts for “something,” your evaluation’s less than useless.)
I don’t think it’s that impressive, myself, but Joss Wheedon couldn’t tell the difference between Wallace Stevens and Edgar Wallace. And that’s fine, really. Not his business.
It’s a soap-opera, Scott. Dark Shadows, with some pomo winks, and occasionally clever dialogue. Is it literary because Angel turns into a vampire after tender love? (What’s the Greek for that?) Isn’t that the most typical thing in the world? Is this the typicality that dare not speak its name?
[Comment partially eaten and edited.]
That’s right Jonathan, it’s really exactly the same as Dark Shadows. Not that that matters to Knapp, or the conversation we’re having here. But please, continue to apply generalist criteria to the specific argument Knapp forwards and I’ve elaborated on. You will score many points redeemable at your local 7-11 or Circle K! Hoo-Ray! More Slurpees for Jonathan!
Seriously, what Knapp’s talking about, and what I’m building on, is his theory that the “literary” consists of object which when investigated bear a family resemblance to his account of the experience of individual human agency. Buffy‘s predicated on the oscillation between generic types and the particularities of the situations which arise when these types come into conflict, and is therefore precisely the sort of composite work which generates what he calls “literary interest.” You can claim--incorrectly, I’d wager, but since it isn’t germane I’ll gladly grant you the point--that Whedon merely pits one set of generic conventions against another...but that’s Knapp’s definition of the literary, and thus accounts for the inclusion of Buffy, be it by the front door, the back or the kitchen window, in the canon he’s implicitly constructing. (And really, snide allusions to Wilde don’t score you any points here...unless the keeper keeps count of bald but unsubstantiated assertions of superiority, in which case YOU MAY ALREADY BE A WINNER!)
I can’t understand Knapp’s argument from what you’ve written about it here, but I’ll try to read it and return to this at some point.
I think that any given thing you can imagine could be construed as “literary” by the criteria as you describe them--as it all depends upon the reader/viewer’s generic expectations and their identification of the “particularities of situation.” You could talk about the average response, though I’m not sure if median or mean would be better.
A little off-topic, but mcpeepants.com is the best Aqua Teen site out there, and I just found it yesterday. You can get frames and sounds from “Dumber Dolls,” which is the episode Jonathan mentioned, and lots of others.
For part of what being an agent is (always) like, apparently, is being caught up in an irreducible oscillation between typicality and particularity: between (on one side) the forms of action that an agent must understand in order to make sense of herself as the possible performer of certain actions, and (on the other side) the concrete history without which the agent could not distinguish herself from those who might, otherwise, just as well replace her.
The “forms of action” idea seems vague and in a sense begs the question of how and/or why agents do act: yes, literature might present scenarios where characters are confronted with “tough choices"--ethical puzzles more or less-- and then the writer might sort of reveal the characters’ personality through the choices (or apparent choices) that a character decides upon, but the quality or “verisimilitude” of the analogue is undefined--A Raymond Chandler might provide many Los Angeles “agents” with fictional situations/scenarios analogous to their own life, whereas “Macbeth” doesn’t. Nor does Homer, or, say, fiction written by Robert Heinlein; are those literary situations closer to/more analogous to an agent’s own “particularity” --i.e Raymond Chandler or any 20th cent. realist-- superior? Questionable.
And typicality and particularity would not seem to be too easily demarcated. Who/what is a type? The stock figures of Shakespeare or greek myths or perhaps Oedipa Maas or Nefastis from Pynchon ‘s Crying of Lot 49? Luke Skywalker? Types evolve/mutate and are generally more complex than LitLand tends to views them as: villains or heroes or whores may still exist but whether such stock types have any relation to current technocracy is quite debatable: a 21st century Iago does not seem so connected to the 16th cent type. Iago of the play ruins some people’s lives with lies and clever strategems; Cyber-Iago has some great gear and sabotages say msn.com...and in ironic readings, Iago or cyberIago--some great hacker ruining the careers of various Othellos or Desdemonas-- might be heroic? Is Dirty Harry villain or hero...anti-heroes--John Dillinger--Aileen Wuornos--Tupac-- are obviously now more chic and kewl than Gary Cooper or John Wayne...."types" are as subject to as much irony and ambiguity as any literary situation, and placing some value on types (or agents) decisions would often be difficult if not misguided.........
yet does an Iago or Raskolnikov fit neatly in any such categories as “agent” or “type”: the character determines the type; the existential situation with which he’s confronted--i.e. Raskolnikov feverish, brooding on his couch, “should I whack and rob this wretched crone and landlady or not"--is not easily specified as some jungian or freudian myth, “coming of age” crap--a literary crisis of this type is more individual specific, as is our own life. One could call it ethics, mention “intentionality,” free will, et al.--is Raskolnikov perhaps reacting naturally (or not) to some stimulus-- yet in some sense there are no outside frames of reference that the character (or agent) can extract from a realm of right actions, some platonic realm of “goodness” or obligation, which Raskalnikov can insert into his mind---Raskalnikov until his imprisonment does not realize or acknowledge a Kantian imperative, and he’s refusing any sort of liberal social contract--neither rationalist or empiricist, he more or less refuses to make the liberal association--the “identity function” that precedes an ethics discussion or any putative social contract--that he has some characteristics in common with his fellow humans: you could perhaps call him a sort of Nietzschean uebermensch and he is--Die Raubtiere---one who cares little for helping either the starving or the bourgeois: he chooses to subvert all “normal” bourgeois values (and any imagined marxist ones as well really)), though still beset with some anxiety, and whack the hag, content that his reality is a subjective and solipsistic construct.
Jonathan,
I think that any given thing you can imagine could be construed as “literary” by the criteria as you describe them--as it all depends upon the reader/viewer’s generic expectations and their identification of the “particularities of situation.” You could talk about the average response, though I’m not sure if median or mean would be better.
That’s partly my point (and implicitly, I beieve, his): once “the literary” is defined as an experience instead of an inherent or immanent quality of a given work, you can then turn around and identify the quality that gives rise to the experience...and claim that it’s an inherent or immanent quality of the work. I say this somewhat tentatively, because other implications can be drawn from that final chapter, but I think this is a reasonable account of Knapp’s argument.
mysterio & hysterio,
I’ve done an inadequate job explaining Knapp’s account of the typical vs. the particular by swaddling it with talk of genre. He’s talking abot a constellation or cluster of characteristics that a given character simultaneously instantiates ("the concept Chevalier” from the earlier post).
ok, but I think a powerful character such as Iago or Raskolnikov would resist any reduction to an “agent,” as if he were some hypothetical x in a philosopher’s system. “Agent” sort of sets up the entire scenario: is Iago an agent? Agency assumes rationality and intention. Iago may be rational in some sense, but in another sense he is utterly mad (but Othello and Desdemona are also mad in a different manner). Iago is more like an animal: though a clever, witty animal to be sure, like the machiavellian bourgeois really--most of us are Iagos more or less, or if too stoopid or naive, Othelloes, excepting females, who tend to Desdemona or perhaps Mistress Quickly at the drop of a viente, eh).
Perhaps Iago or Raskolnikov situated in the behaviorist lab, responding to given stimuli would be interesting, but how to apply that to any fictional setting seems sort of pointless: that seems to be big problem with people taking a strong determinist viewpoint towards lit: do the fictional analogues first represent real social environments and second are they acting/responding in some predictable or measurable way.
(yr far too civil, Scottski. )
Leave “quality” out of it for now: Literature is art made of written language; murals are art made of colored walls; Buffy is art made of serialized television. I do agree that art involves both typicality and particularity, and that art seems essential to human beings because it literally is essential: what art does is inherent in human experience. But now I’m back to not wanting to read Knapp’s book. God, I’m easy.
First, as noted before, if you hunt the author’s intent too intently, rather than reading a book you end up trapped between two mirrors—you break the written contract in favor of a verbal agreement which one party never made. You also tend to look sillier and sillier (or feel less and less interested) as the literature lies farther from your own quotidian.
Second, and related, this distinction between “typicality” and “particuarity” must be drawn from the reader’s point of view rather than the unknowable writer’s. Now, I agree that a reader who excitedly explains how she’s just finished the most daring novel ever, where you can actually travel through time!, or you find out Jesus wasn’t really resurrected!, what an imagination!—I would describe this reader as a bad critic. A fine enthusiastic reader, mind you. (The more common problem is under-distinction: an immediate revulsion against bourgeois racist repressed Victorians, or pop culture junk, or that black-and-white shit.) But a pretty terrible critic. And a pretty terrible scholar, if she then starts teaching a seminar on the subject. Someone who credits canonical works with a “distinctiveness” arising from lack of attention to less canonical works, I’d also describe as a poor scholarly critic. And also someone who credits Wittgenstein with authorship of a Longfellow poem. (Ah, peer review!)
Still, even deliberate ignorance in a reader can stimulate new worthwhile work, and some of that worthwhile work has even been criticism. Just not what we tend to describe as good scholarly crticism—which is only one reader’s game among many, with fairly recently established rules, and incapable of modelling the entire scope of literary response.
Finally, to also quote from Adam Stephanides’s comment (I hope Adam doesn’t mind!):
Knapp rejects this option, basically on the grounds that once you allow the critic to “imagine additional states of affairs” that are not part of the author’s intention, there is no reason to limit the allowable “supplements” solely to those that enhance the work’s coherence, and in fact no way to limit the allowable supplements at all, thus allowing any work to trivially possess an infinite number of “meanings.”
1) Yes, there is a reason to limit supplements to those which enhance the effect of the work (whether the desired effect is increased coherence or not): because we find effective works more interesting and more pleasurable! That is the critic‘s game, as distinguished from the scholar‘s game. There are also critics who devote themselves to making effective coherent writing seem duller and less coherent, but that’s a goal I try for less often. In neither case, though, do I feel a need to write something like, “And if John Dryden was standing right here, he’d agree with me!” That’s not criticism; that’s name-dropping. If Dan Brown or Francis Ford Coppola should phone me and say, “Ray, you ignorant oaf, you failed to grasp my profundity,” all I could answer would be, “I worked with what I got.”
2) Having limited our interest to useful supplements, is it really a problem to claim that a work may “possess” (i.e,, instigate) an innumerable (let’s avoid “infinite” for now) number of “meanings” (i.e., useful supplements)? I don’t think so myself. But if Knapp does, I assume that Knapp will call for a moratorium on criticism about Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Lawrence. Not necessarily a bad idea, but is that how he ends his book?
"I cannot accept the proposition that Knapp validates the argument that “literary interest” is the better or possibly even only way readers approach literature.”
It is not clear what you mean here. Perhaps the sentence was deformed by revision? (it happens). But as for what follows: “That there are valid and invalid interpretive strategies must be the point of Literary Interest. Right? Right?” I say: show me. Where in this text is the prescription? Where is the “defense”? Where is the tying of interest to value? Where is the canon smuggling? I think you are determined to find some sort of presciption (really _proscription_)-by-association here, and I’m not persuaded.
What I see is a skeptical inquiry into the relationship between a formalist account of literary interest (which is clarified and ultimately defended on logical grounds) and the various goods that have been associated with formalism in the critical tradition, and which Knapp rejects. The first aspect is the really compelling part of the book. The second is energetic, interesting, fun, and, I think, more ephemeral, because aimed at a particular set of arguments that have/had institutional prominence.
Shall we consult the introduction?
“Using a formula whose abstract claims will be justified, I hope, by later arguments, I propose to call “literary” any linguistically embodied representation that tends to attract a certain kind of interest to itself.; that does so by particularizing the emotive and other values of its referents; and that does _that_ by inserting its referents into new “scenarios” inseparable from the particular linguistic and narrative structures of the representation itself....The burden of my argument...will be to show why such an account of the literary, defensible as I will argue it is, nevertheless fails to yield the various cognitive and ethical/political benefits people have claimed for it” (3).
Or shall we turn to the chapter called, promisingly “Literary Value”?
Let’s begin with the intro:
“What good is reading literature? The absurdity lies in the apparent assumption that it might be possible to identify the singly overriding purpose or benefit of a massive, multifarious, and profoundly unstable institution....On the other hand, as soon as one gives up the attempt to arrive at a single answer to the question, it is easy to collect numerous answer of varying degrees of generality. Such answers include, for instance, the satisfaction of curiosity; the garnering of things to quote on the right occasions; the expansion of sympathy; the exploration of new or forgotten social options; the provision of convenient topics for freshman compositions.
I have some sympathy with virtually all the answers I can imagine, as well as with most of the available grounds for distrusting them” (89).
So how to make the question manageable? Certainly not by “prescriptively” defending or rejecting these multifarious answers arguments as “valid or invalid” but by narrowing the question to the terms at hand. “What is the benefit, if any, of literary interest, _as we have come to define it_?” [Emphasis added].
So [Ray, this should settle your mind that Knapp calls for no moratorium on literary interest]:
“It isn’t necessary, for the sake of literary interest, to settle on an intentional or non-intentional explanation-- or any explanation-- of how the relevant structure was produced. Thus the obvious explanatory vagueness of much New Historicist work-- its failure to give any convincing reason for deciding, for instance, whether the theater in a particular era is an effect of a cause of a certain monarchical ideology, or whether a style of legal discourse causes or is caused by analogous features of contemporary medicine-- is beside the point. For the point is to see how theater, as it exists in its hard to define relation to the state, becomes (to someone who notices the right affinities) the theater as suggesting, and suggested by, the state.
But after all (returning to the question of value), why _bother_ to extend the range of literary interest beyond the sphere of literary artifacts in the traditional sense? One powerful answer is that there is no reason not to. A second answer, perhaps equally powerful, is that shifting literary interest from literary artifacts to social context in which those artifacts are produced or received can yield the _indirect and contingent_ benefit of motivating an interest in important social phenomena that might otherwise be forgotten or ignored. A third, more intriguing but also more problematic answer...is that shifting critical attention from literary artifacts to their social and historical contexts is a way of giving literary interest the intrinsic and/or highly general ethical and political importance it otherwise lacks.”
Knapp has no problem with the first two, though they hardly rise to the level of a defense of literary interest (the first for obvious reasons, the second because Knapp means to emphasize that any such benefits are indirect and contingent). And he argues against the 3rd, despite being interested in it. Have we come to anything that could count as a defense yet? Certainly an extended defense of the logic of formalism, but how about a “prescriptive” defense of the value of literary interest? Of literary interest as the only “valid” form of interest?
Shall we turn to the conclusion?
“But why would anyone want to experience a “precise and concentrated” analogue of what being an agent is like? What might this add to the ordinary experience of simply being, or trying to be, an agent? Possibly nothing; after all, the mere fact that two phenomena are analogous doesn’t show that the aalogy plays any role in motivating people’s interest in either one....The most one can venture is a speculation, one that cannot be reliably grounded in logical analysis, and equally one that no empirical survey of people’s multifarious responses to literary artifacts could hope to confirm.”
Here is the speculation:
“[T]he very structure of mutual implication that reveals the impossibility of ultimately fusing particularity and typicality may continue to tantalize us with the promise of fusing them; or at least of fusing them, as we say, for all _practical_ purposes. Since that promise is also the promise of full agency as we are (practically) committed to conceiving it, it may not be surprising, finally, if encountering its literary version should feel like glimpsing the ideal condiditon of practical agency itself” (140).
Is this, as you claim, “nothing more than a sophisticated account of the solipsism any engagement with literature entails”? Maybe. But the meat of the book is its argument, not its admittedly speculative conclusion.
So: “That there are valid and invalid interpretive strategies must be the point of Literary Interest?” Sure-- in the sense that Knapp argues against the idea that “the source of [literary] interest lies in the peculiar ontology of a literary work’s content,” for example, so any interpretation that makes claims for the ontologcial specialness of literary language or form is in that sense “invalid”.
But can there be interest in literature that is not “literary interest”? Of course. Show me where he says-- or strongly implies-- otherwise.
“The burden of my argument...will be to show why such an account of the literary, defensible as I will argue it is, nevertheless fails to yield the various cognitive and ethical/political benefits people have claimed for it”
Das Stimmt--Hail Eris! A shot of everclear and a few grains of chiba for Herr Knapp.
“What good is reading literature? The absurdity lies in the apparent assumption that it might be possible to identify the singly overriding purpose or benefit of a massive, multifarious, and profoundly unstable institution
Aye Professor Knapp, but certainly you know Lit. is Bidness as well as a putative source of knowledge about culture or politics, psychology etc. In fact the primary reason for the Lit. Bidness (including academia, publishing, W.W. Norton Inc. blogging, etc.) may be more self-perpetuation than anything else. Keep da bitch running, have some Harry Blooms assure the bourgeoisie (and their little Biffs or Bunnys studying the Classix at Snoot State) that there is something called a “canon,” and keep any pointy-headed analytical dweebs or social scientists or Sokals from examining the Lit Bidness too closely (i.e a Quine’s work might entail shutting down Lit. Inc. down in a matter of weeks)
HZ,
Where is the “defense”?
I presume you mean “where is the defense of literary interest,” and I would argue that it’s in the final chapter and conclusion, in which he links the experience of literary to the experience of agency; the constituitive nature of the latter would seem to validate the importance of the former, no?
But the meat of the book is its argument, not its admittedly speculative conclusion.
I think this is where you and I ultimately differ. I consider (and will discuss this more later) that final chapter and conclusion to be much like the final section of Benn Michaels’ Our America, in which the formal analysis of essentialist representations of race in the ‘20s and ‘30s turns into a critique of a contemporary identity politics. In the final chapter of Literary Interest, Knapp also undermines the foundations of “progressive” revisionary reading practices like new historicism; combine that with the conclusion and I believe there’s reason to say that his account veers from the merely descriptive part you consider solid to the potentially prescriptive part I have some problems with.
Ray,
I think your description of the problems which arise from Knapp’s reliance on the reader to know the attibutes that start the oscillation between the typical and the universal captures much of what I wanted to say, but to which I want to add this: Knapp stumbles into the same trap many of the New Critics fell for when he fails to recognize the influence of his own education on his description of how readers relate to texts. I’ll write about this at more length later--when I can get to all the notes on the New Critics currently trapped in my nonfunctional laptop--but one of the reasons the New Critics believed texts could be encountered and understood without any historical apparatus is that they had acquired said apparatus so many years earlier that they forgot they had had to acquire it in the first place. They took their own erudition for granted while building a mode of critical engagement upon it. (Again, much more on this later, when I can do stuff like cite.)