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Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Theory Dead, Heidegger Dull, The Chronicle Reports
[Note: Title intended to needle John and is not representative of the substance of either article.]
From the article:
It may be neither fair nor accurate, decades after Theory hit its high-water mark, to keep using it as a whipping boy for everything that has gone wrong with literary studies. “The problem of the humanities is funding, lack of institutional support, lowering enrollments, lowering numbers of hires, the rise of part-time labor,” says Andrew Parker, a professor of English at Amherst College. “This is the real crisis, not whether we have theory with a capital T or a small T.”
Many others interviewed for this article echo those sentiments. “I was astonished when Theory’s Empire was published,” Paul H. Fry, a professor of English at Yale University, writes in an e-mail message. “Literary theory is now a topic that interests a few people as a matter of intrinsic importance and matters to a few more as an object of historical research. Why continue to view it as a national threat? What empire?”
[snip]
In branching out, or reaching out, theory risks losing some of what made it powerful and seductive in the first place. In his essay “Theory Ends,” Mr. Leitch offers up one final definition of theory: “a historically new, postmodern mode of discourse that breaches longstanding borders, fusing literary criticism, philosophy, history, sociology, psychoanalysis, and politics.” The result, he says, is a “cross-disciplinary pastiche” that falls under the increasingly wide banner of cultural studies.
This post does not constitute an endorsement. John’s thrown these balls in the air. I’m only here for the show. Another article on literary aesthetics may also be of interest.
[Updated links to the free versions of both articles.]
Comments
On the question of the state of literary studies in America, I’m going to have to defer to the judgment of a philosophy professor living in Singapore. Sorry, Scott.
Adam: “On the question of the state of literary studies in America, I’m going to have to defer to the judgment of a philosophy professor living in Singapore.”
Yeah, because everyone knows that Holbo is the only person who has ever written something similar, and that in fact he edited and wrote all of the essays for _Theory’s Empire_.
“The problem of the humanities is funding, lack of institutional support, lowering enrollments, lowering numbers of hires, the rise of part-time labor,” says Andrew Parker, a professor of English at Amherst College.”
All of these all empirically determinable factors. Do they actually follow downward trends? The rise of part-time labor is real, but doesn’t seem unique to the humanities.
“Paul H. Fry, a professor of English at Yale University, writes in an e-mail message. “Literary theory is now a topic that interests a few people as a matter of intrinsic importance and matters to a few more as an object of historical research. Why continue to view it as a national threat? What empire?””
Because Theory is not over; nothing has replaced it in its function of upper-level meaning-definer for literary studies. It’s kind of like saying, why worry about economic theories that economists really know must be wrong? Because old theories, until replaced, still determine a lot of what people do. It doesn’t matter how many people are interested in them or how many are doing research on them; until someone comes up with something else that covers the same area of things-to-be explained, they are a dead hand.
Rich, I’m just saying that my ultimate authority for whether all those people are presenting the situation accurately (rather than all the people who believe basically the opposite) is John.
I don’t see the disagreement here.
Scott, your title, clever as it is, probably doesn’t fully represent the complex picture suggested by the article.
Howard has responses from about a dozen people, including a number of folks who seem to be somewhere in the middle: theory is doing something different today from what it was doing 20 years ago at Yale, or 37 years ago in Paris.
I think we should probably talk about the specifics of the Vincent Leitch article she mentions, perhaps after it goes up electronically at IngentaConnect.
Hi. Normally I wouldn’t weigh in on this discussion, having had my say in print, but I’d like to note that--contrary to the impression given by Scott’s headline for his post--the article does *not* conclude that theory is dead. In fact it states clearly that theory is still very much alive and that it has worked its way into the DNA of literary studies. I did, by the way, follow the Valve’s online discussion of “Theory’s Empire” earlier this year. Thanks.
Amardeep and Jennifer,
I merely meant the title to be clever, not representative of the content of either article. (I’m mostly needling John. Mostly.) In other words, Jennifer, I enjoyed the article and thought it a means to focus some of the conversations we’ve had of late. Amardeep, I think we should grab the Leitch article when it’s published. Every week a new, event, says I.
After the end of Jennifer Howard’s article “The Fragmentation of Literary Theory,”
notice the gap in the timeline of “theory” roughly between the two world wars:
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i17/17a01201.htm#timeline.
That gap comprises much of easily one of the most vital periods of U.S. literary
criticism, a time that Bernard Smith overviews and analyzes in the last two, and
most interesting, chapters in his important (and forgotten) book, Forces in
Literary Criticism: A Study in the History of American Literary Thought (1939).
At one point, Smith notes, “The ideological issues - moral, political, social,
and the rest - ... are the sine qua non of literary criticism. Devoid of them,
criticism is likely to be a game of words - abstractions which can have no
meaning to men and women who laugh or weep at a play because their feelings as
human beings are touched.”
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ve nothing necessarily against some of the abstruse
writing of so-called theory, nor against various other types of criticism, but
why shouldn’t there be more of a focus at The Valve, and elsewhere, on critical
writing about literature that is, as Smith puts it: not a “literary
criticism...[that] tends to create a literature that will express the
sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men...[but a criticism] that
tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of
those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality
- to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind...”? Or,
at this stage of history, to its survival.
It seems to me that there should be more discussions of the sort arising, both
figuratively and literally, from that gap in the timeline - discussions that
relate to urgent concerns today, as they intersect with literature,
especially the literature of today.
Thanks for changing the links to the free version—I couldn’t read the non-free version.
In the non-free version I note the following:
“But this definition, set forth by Mr. Leitch, most closely mirrors what one hears from those who teach theory: ‘Theory is widely considered a toolbox of flexible, useful, and contingent devices, judged for their productivity and innovation.’”
Or, in other words, eclecticism.
Also, productivity for what? To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so a person looking for nails might just take the hammer out of the toolbox right from the start.
Is there really any other form of theory that’s thought of as a toolbox of methods?
It’s not my field, but this doesn’t seem right to me:
why shouldn’t there be more of a focus [...] on critical writing about literature that is, as Smith puts it: not a “literary criticism...[that] tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men...[but a criticism] that tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality - to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind...”?
I mean, it seems wrong in a lot of ways. I don’t think that literary criticism should create literature - one would hope it comes *after*. Secondly, if one’s concerns are predominantly social and political, aren’t there better disciplines (sociology, political science?) for pursuing them? And thirdly, just on a practical note, when the revolutions have harnessed literature to their cause, whatever the political efficacy, the result hasn’t been great literature.
Surely we’d like literary criticism to be largely about things literary, wouldn’t we? And if literary criticism isn’t going to take on literature from a literary perspective, then who should?
The strength of Jennifer Howard’s article is that it gave a variety of people the chance to voice their opinion on the place of theory in the humanities. In letting so many people speak, we got a lot of illuminating remarks, such as Frye’s ridiculous feeling of surprise at the publication of Theory’s Empire.
A better example is Parker’s comment: “The problem of the humanities is funding, lack of institutional support, lowering enrollments, . . .” A nice list, one that flatters the humanists’ grievance, but the points he mentions affect many other parts of the campus just as much. Besides, how do the pieces fit together? What is the relationship between falling enrollments and funding?
Apart from that, Parker doesn’t admit any responsibility on the part of humanities professors, theorists or non-theorists, for the problems. More denial from the professorate certainly won’t help.
I found myself nodding in assent at Fry’s remark, personally.
The last time I made a bet on the future of literary criticism, I lost. Badly. So I’m not inclined toward much prognostication, though I certainly have my own intellectual hopes and interests.
I do think certain forms of writing and thinking about literature, forms that emerged into view in the mid-to late 60s and after, have become moribund. They will die out, in time. The question is what will replace them. I do not think we will return to a time when the wide reading and sophistication are regarded as sufficient preparation for the analysis of literary texts and phenomena. The impossibility of such a return is to be credited to Theory or theories, whichever you prefer.
My own preference if for, at least in part, a more rigorous formalism that is commensurate with the newer psychologies. By formalism I mean simply a commitment to the description, analysis and, ultimately, the explanation of literary forms. Formalism, as the notion has been understood in the past, has not entailed any particular commitment to the understanding of literary forms. Rather, it was a commitment to the notion of textual autonomy. That simply is not adequate. I think there is far more to literary form that we appreciate, something I have dealt with in my recent practical criticism (on Coleridge, and on Osamu Tezuka); I would also point to anthropologist Mary Douglas’s recent work on ring structure in Old Testament texts.
By “commensurate with the newer psychologies” I mean just that, that we couch our descriptive and analytical work in terms that are commensurate with those currently being used to understand thought, language, and emotion in the cognitive and neurosciences. I do not think this is a particularly daunting requirement.
In a way, the point of using the word “commensurate” is to indicate indirectly that we cannot look to those psychologies for the textual phenomena to be analyzed—in the way, for example, psychoanalytic criticsm has drawn on psychoanalytic theory and theraputic practice. Those psychologies simply don’t study the sorts of things we must deal with in literary texts, at least not centrally. And so we must look to the texts themselves, and to the body of practical criticsm that has accumulated over the years, for the phenomena to be noted in our descriptions and analysis.
We need to systematize that lore, make it more rigorous, and augment it with newer observations. As the body of descriptive material grows, we can begin to formulate new theories, but theories of literature, not of its criticsm.
I would think that the Lindsay Waters piece in the B Section would make for some interesting discussion around here. In a sense, he dissolves the bond between two positions found often found (blurred together) on the Valve: the Walter Benn Michaels post-theory angle and the Literary Value angle. Waters finds theorists (some of them, the good ones) to be holding up the aesthetic end of the deal in a way most post-theory lit academics are failing to do.
Anyway, I like what Waters is up to there…
It’s true, Heidegger is dull. But that’s not exactly what Mark B. said to the Chronicle. He said, “times have changed, and people are bored by a reading of a paragraph in [Heidegger’s] Being and Time.”
I hope I’m not the only person who sees a little humor in this. Last time I checked, people really got into the whole paragraph-of-Being and Time thing. Five thousand visitors and 49 comments can’t be wrong. OK, it wasn’t as exciting as when Heidegger opened for the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, but still.
Heidegger is indeed dull. Just ask David Markson.
No more snappy headlines for you lot! From now on it’s all painfully literal. What did you just say to me? Don’t make me pull this car over and retitle this “Two Articles From the Most Recent Chronicle of Higher Education to Which I Will Link 1) For Your General Edification, 2) Because They Discuss Matters Often Discussed Here by People Like 3) John, Who I Implicitly Criticized With one Nudge, Three Winks, and an Unspecified Number of Nods.” Because I will.
On a serious note, I intend on writing about the Waters article tomorrow afternoon, i.e. when this stack of papers-to-be-marked has dwindled away.
Three winks may be a bit excessive in this case. But I’ll wait for the update to cast final everlasting judgement.
> It’s not my field, but this doesn’t seem right to me:
>
> why shouldn’t there be more of a focus [...] on critical writing about
> literature that is, as Smith puts it: not a “literary criticism...[that]
> tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and
> experiences of a few fortunate men...[but a criticism] that tends to create
> a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look
> forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality - to the
> material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind...”?
>
> I mean, it seems wrong in a lot of ways. I don’t think that literary
> criticism should create literature - one would hope it comes *after*.
Well, anonymous tim, I think it’s understood here that criticism itself is a type of literature, right along with “imaginative” works, fiction and so on. And of course various types of literature, etc, often help feed, and inform, and even shape one another.
> Secondly, if one’s concerns are predominantly social and political, aren’t
> there better disciplines (sociology, political science?) for pursuing them?
I think it’s not inappropriate, especially at this point in time, that all broad and general fields in the humanities and social sciences have a very strong, possibly even a predominant focus on social, political, and cultural criticism - not least as it relates to power, justice, freedom (and survival, human rights) and a number of other traditionally core concerns, ("happiness," etc....).
> And thirdly, just on a practical note, when the revolutions have harnessed
> literature to their cause, whatever the political efficacy, the result
> hasn’t been great literature.
No one has said anything about “revolutions harnessing literature to their cause” - whatever that metaphor is supposed to mean.
And in fact the criticism I’m talking about has a rich history, with roots in the enlightenment, at least. And I think part of the result has been some great, extremely intriguing and important criticism, as well as some great imaginative literature, though maybe not always as delicately turned aesthetically as some may prefer, but with plenty of intriguing aesthetic twists and turns also. I think in particular of Jack London’s, The Iron Heel, and a number of other works. Plus, there has always been great socio-political satire - “imaginative” and otherwise. And teach the play Waiting For Lefty sometime, if you have the opportunity, and I think you’ll be surprised at the quality of the writing – found in much of Odet’s writing – and maybe even by the enthusiastic student response, of those who find it stirring and uplifting.
Imaginative literature that aims in large part to have social and political and cultural effects dates back to antiquity, easily. Quite a number of such works are considered to be among the greatest of the classics. Possibly there is also such a critical tradition that goes back that far. Haven’t purposefully studied it. Plato’s Republic, both an imaginative and critical work, I suppose would qualify - not that I would necessarily agree with his positions on the effects of art in society.
And if one thinks there isn’t much to explore in regard to revolution and literature, I think one would do well to consider, say, the intriguing opening paragraph or so of Kenneth Burke’s essay, “War, Response and Contradiction” – written in the thirties and published in the book noted below:
“The various arguments in recent years as to the relation between art and propaganda may have struck some observers as purely a haggle among literary specialists. Yet the issue is a vital one, and carries far beyond a matter of mere literary fashions. Aesthetical values are intermingled with ethical values – and the ethical is the basis of the practical. Or, put more simply: our ideas of the beautiful, the curious, the interesting, the unpleasant, the boring are closely bound with our ideas of the good, the desirable, the undesirable – and our ideas of the desirable and undesirable have much to do with our attitudes towards our everyday activities. They make us ask ourselves, more or less consciously: Are we doing the things we want to do? to what extent is there a breach between what we must do and what we should like to do? Probably for this reason, even the most practical of revolutions will generally be found to have manifested itself first in the “aesthetic” sphere.
“Then it is no academic matter to concern oneself with the implications of books…. Points of view first make themselves apparent in the realm of “fancy.” In time they come to be carried into the structure of our sciences….”
> Surely we’d like literary criticism to be largely about things literary,
> wouldn’t we?
Sure, broadly defined. Anything less than a study and creation of literature broadly defined would seem rather anti-intellectual, etc.... For merely one such broad-based criticism of literature produced during this “gap” of time that I’ve referred to, see Vernon Louis Parrington’s landmark work (Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920). Or see Kenneth Burke’s book The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (1941), excerpted above. More excerpts of both books available here: http://www.politicalnovel.org/politicalliterarycriticismfull.html [slow link for dial-up]
> And if literary criticism isn’t going to take on literature
> from a literary perspective, then who should?
No one has said that it would not focus at least in part on whatever this slice of study is meant to be understood as, but it seems to me that you are slicing rather thin and arbitrarily excluding much of importance.
Rich, Translation theory in China, and I suspect in other places too, is currently trying to overcome a “toolbox of methods” approach and establish itself as a full fledged (relatively) independent discipline. China missed out on Theory in the 60’s 70’s and 80’s and translation theorists here are currently reevaluating traditional ideas in the light of the various contemporary -isms. I like the metaphor, and I think it provides a good way of articulating my lingering uneasiness with the whole project: namely the possibility that Chinese academics (in translation studies and other fields) in their eagerness to learn from the West will end up trading in one inadequate box of tools for another. In the particular case of translation studies, I have no doubt that the broader scope of Western Theory and the fact that it is, if nothing else, actual theory rather than just translation guidelines, will be an improvement.
Because China is not and has never been in the grips of Theory, right now there is a real opportunity to learn from Theory, to take what is good, reject what is bad, and hopefully create something better - better in the sense of better suited to both China and the 21st century. I keep reading The Valve partially in the hopes of uncovering what that ‘something’ might be.
” . . . why shouldn’t there be more of a focus . . . on critical writing about literature that is, as Smith puts it: not a ‘literary criticism...[that] tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men...[but a criticism] that tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality - to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind...’? Or, at this stage of history, to its survival.”
I agree that “create” is a problem. But change “create” to “celebrate” or “promote” and the answer is simple: the material focusing on such goals is common enough that there’s no need to offer it a special venue.
I just want you all to know I’m too jetlagged and otherwise ‘tis the seasoned to rise to the challenge. But I have to agree with Mark - and therefore disagree with Jonathan - about the Fry remark. I think the ‘see no Empire’ stance is sort of a cheeky jab at an arguably ill-chosen title, not much more. (Is it surprising that the Norton Anthology was publsihed? I wouldn’t say so.) I suppose the short version of the rebuttal to Fry runs: of course Theory isn’t monolithic (if that’s what you are taking Empire to connote). It’s a rhizomatic wossname. I don’t think anyone really argues that Theory isn’t at least a rhizomatic wossname. And of course it isn’t a threat to national security. But then, many books in literary studies are published about things that aren’t. There seems to be consensus that’s OK.
Having just finished rereading Leitch’s book, “Theory Matters”, while composing parts I & II of that big ole thing I just posted, I’m interested in seeing his new article. I think it would be very helpful if the debate were parsed with Leitch’s help, like so: unless Leitch has changed his tune since 2001, he and the contributors to TE are in substantial (obviously not total) agreement about the ubiquity and general extent and character of Theory’s domination. He thinks this is on balance a good thing, they think it is a bad thing. Therefore, critics of TE - who think the very subject matter is nonexistent or too insignificant even to be a subject of specialized academic inquiry - might start by explaining what they think is wrong with Leitch. This would solve for the following unfortunate variable: suspicion that TE is a feint in eternal culture wars, and that Theory is just a reification for target-practice purposes. Leitch pretty clearly isn’t a conservative catspaw, so it might be best to start with the question of what is wrong (or right) about what he says about the intellectual character and institutional status of Theory. So I’d be up for reading his article when it is available.
Final note: one thing that is interesting about Leitch’s definition of Theory is that it is very similar to one offered by Jonathan Culler as early as 1980. Admittedly, it’s a pretty open-ended definition, but what the two have to say is really quite similar. (See part II of my long recent thingy. Search ‘Culler’. It’s towards the end of §1.) Anyway, all this suggests to me 25 years with a high degree of continuity in the character of Theory. Which is suggestive of some degree of cohesive existence.
Final FINAL note: in the early 80’s, at the time he was saying much the same that Leitch says now, Culler was quite frank that Theory is ‘imperialistic’ in the sense of ‘expansionistic’ - seeking to dominate a very large range of subject matters. I have to agree that this is the case about Theory, at least in its expansive, go-go 80’s ascendancy, furthermore that in principle trying to grasp as much as you can, with your mind, is nothing to be ashamed of. It does seem to me to provide some warrant for “Theory’s Empire” as a title, even though that was bound to lead to trouble. (Well, what title wouldn’t have?)
Rich and Lennet, on the eclectic’s toolbox, let me offer the example of Haj Ross. As some of you may know, there was a time when Ross was the golden boy of generative grammar—almost literally so, in the sense of Jack Nicklaus being the “golden bear,” & Ross looks a bit like Nicklaus. He was a graduate student of Chomsky’s in the 1960s, but he also went across the river to Harvard, where he studied poetics with Roman Jakobson. It seems that, of late, that the Jakobson in Ross is in ascendent over the Chomsky, and he devotes most of his intellectual energy to analylzing poems.
At a recent conference Ross remarked that a poem is like a language. No matter how many tricks and devices he’s assembled in the process of analyzing languages, Ross found that, when he approached a new language, he had to invent a new tool or two to handle that language. So, he finds, it is with poems. Whenever he takes on a new poem, he trys everything in his toolkit. That gets him so far, and then he has to come up with a new tool.
I’ve found the same thing. Each text requires a new tool or two. I suppose that when I’ve been through enough texts it might be possible that I will have found all the necessary tools and thus have a complete kit. But, that is by no means obvious. And, in fact, I rather suspect that, as long as new texts are being written, it will be necessary to create new tools to accommodate them.
So if we wish to theorize that domain, we’ve got to theorize an open-ended toolset. Looks rather like the world of biology and of Godel.
> I agree that “create” is a problem. But change “create” to “celebrate”
> or “promote” and the answer is simple: the material focusing on such
> goals is common enough that there’s no need to offer it a special venue.
The point of refuting a PR proposal never put forth, while avoiding a perceived “problem” of an actual claim can be left as an exercise....
Lennet Daigle, that’s really interesting.
Bill: “At a recent conference Ross remarked that a poem is like a language.”
I don’t think that you can ever go wrong in literary studies by saying that something is like a language. It’s probably a universal rule of literary theory statements.
Bill: “I’ve found the same thing. Each text requires a new tool or two.”
Well, isn’t the analogy getting a bit overstretched here? People who use tools do not often make new tools for each job. I guess you might be able to find some specialized job somewhere where this is the case, but it’s generally not the case for people with actual toolboxes. It is the nature of tools in toolboxes that they are designed to be of general use.
Therefore I’d say that this kind of slippage means that you probably should stop representing your different thoughts about texts as “tools”.
Well . . . I think it’s better than trying to think in terms of a formal system where you have a finite number of basic elements of one sort or another and from which you can construct an infinite number of objects. At the level of phonemes language (and even literature) may be like that. But not, I think, otherwise.
No one has said anything about “revolutions harnessing literature to their cause” - whatever that metaphor is supposed to mean.
Well, anonymous Tony, I apologize - I didn’t realize the metaphor would be so obscure. I’ll try to be a little more plain-spoken then. It seems to me that the production of literature should primarily concered with producing literary things. Literature which is overwhelmingly concerned with forwarding a political agenda is likely to suffer as literature. Thus a study of literature which is really a study of how well some particular literary object advances a political or social end is hardly a study of literature at all and, were writers concerned about the opinions of such critics, would lead to works of increasingly less literary merit. Of course, not everyone cares about literary merit, but one would hope that professors of literature do. If your real interest is social questions, study sociology or political science. If your real interest is activism, make a career of that.
Furthermore, making the study literature a tool of social or political struggles is fundamentally wrong-headed. I can’t understand why an argument about contemporary social questions by someone who has studied literature and based on Jack London’s fictional representations is desireable at all (to anyone seriously interested in the social questions[*]), let alone preferable to one by someone trained in sociology and grounded in real data. That kind of an argument tells you nothing especially interesting about Jack London’s fiction (except that it is available to be drafted), and what it says about the contemporary social questions is based on a fraudulent notion of expertise, as neither Jack London nor the student of literature is any kind of an expert on contemporary social questions. It’s a fallacious appeal to authority: the social argument gains nothing from Jack London’s unwitting participation in it.
-----------------
* This is not the same as arguing that understanding Jack London’s social or polical views has no relevance to understanding London’s fiction.
I want to address anonymous tim’s remarks (not just because I resemble them) from the beginning, since they point to some fundamental questions about what it is we do. (This may be a draft of a future post. We’ll see.)
Secondly, if one’s concerns are predominantly social and political, aren’t there better disciplines (sociology, political science?) for pursuing them?
The “study things in their proper discipline” model of intellectual pursuits assumes that all things relevent to a particular discipline will be studied by its disciples. That doesn’t happen. To use your London example (since whatever else I am at this point, I’m certainly a London expert):
He was one of the most popular novelists of his day. If you buy the idea that popular culture shapes the way people understand their lives (and I do), then you have to study popular culture to understand that particular cultural moment. Rarely do you see historians delve into the complete works of Jack London, however, so their understanding of how people thought lacks whatever influence those works had. To counter the claim that they aren’t missing much, keep in mind that Roosevelt and London feuded, in public, over the veracity of London’s worldview and his claims to authority while Teddy was President. The President thought London important enough to chastise before the entire country. That’s one indication of his influence. (This is a tad unfair of me, slamming together “Great Men and Bloody Wars” historiographical model with the one advocated by social historians, but it hammers home the point despite being an outlier.)
So when I study London’s work as a means to better understand how people would have reacted to it at the time, I’m not (as Waters would have it) aspiring to write criticism that rivals literature, I’m using the tools of literary analysis to better nuance historical accounts of the period in question. (Sometimes I even discover stuff.) In other words, I think the literature speaks to the history in ways that historians aren’t qualified to analyze. They don’t know narrative like we know narrative, for one; for another, they don’t seem to be interested in knowing it like we do. But it’s there, it’s knowable and it’s important (albeit not always self-evidently).
Who can resist it: a Clash over London’s Calling.
So when I study London’s work as a means to better understand how people would have reacted to it at the time, I’m not (as Waters would have it) aspiring to write criticism that rivals literature, I’m using the tools of literary analysis to better nuance historical accounts of the period in question.
Look, I’m perfectly open to being convinced, but from where I’m sitting, I don’t see the literary in the historical. I see two distinct questions from two distinct academic pursuits. On the one hand, I see the historical: how people reacted to London’s work. On the other hand, I see the literary: how London crafted the effect. And while you can connect those two things - the former historical, the latter literary - doing so doesn’t seem to add much to either debate. I’ll go one step further: to the extent that London’s work was polemical - yoked to some cause of social justice, say - no amount of literary analysis is going to say anything about the justness of his cause or the correctness of his argument. (And vice versa.) I am prepared to yield this much ground, however - if you want to know about Jack London’s literary career, you will be interested in his historical context and his literary devices. (But at that point, we have drifted pretty far from teaching London in order to further the cause of social justice or “stir and uplift” the students. And surely literary biography, interesting as it is, isn’t the main attraction in literature departments any more than scientific biographies are in physics departments. There’s nothing wrong with historical accounts of physics or biographies of physicists, but no physicist is confused about the role of such things in the study of physics.)
> Well, anonymous Tony,
False, tim, I’m not anonymous, you are. I’m easily looked up on the internet. Neither you, “tim,” nor your hotmail internet address are identifiable.
> I apologize -
No need.
> I didn’t realize the metaphor would be
> so obscure. I’ll try to be a little more plain-spoken then. It seems to
> me that the production of literature should primarily concered with
> producing literary things. Literature which is overwhelmingly concerned
> with forwarding a political agenda is likely to suffer as literature.
Like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”? And Aristophane’s “Lysistrata”? And other such classics? “Political agenda” is your terminology, not mine.
If you’re interested, you might see further these other recent discussions on The Valve on political literature that, in part, take up the point:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/unpolitical_animals/#4919
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/sticking_to_the_words/#5217
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/not_knowing/#5375
Also see some of the long and rich tradition of critical work that conveys much political, and aesthetic, insight, at my Political Novel site (etc).
> Thus
> a study of literature which is really a study of how well some particular
> literary object advances a political or social end is hardly a study of
> literature at all and, were writers concerned about the opinions of such
> critics, would lead to works of increasingly less literary merit.
You’re attributing views to me that I don’t hold. While it obviously is possible to study primarily the social and political impacts of literature, and some good such studies have been done, I also think studies that examine political and aesthetic issues together are crucial. You can easily look up the ones I’ve done.
Insightful political, social, moral, etc, elements often underlie quality aesthetic elements of literature, and give rise to them, though not always. I’ll repeat a quotation from a post of some weeks ago:
Even V.S. Pritchett, a mainstream critic of the sort ridiculed in the film Dead Poets Society, could observe in passing that:
“The fact is that, from the beginning, the English novel set out to protest and to teach. Its philanthropic campaigns in the nineteenth century are paralleled in the eighteenth century by its avowed desire to reform the brutal manners of the age. The explanation is not necessarily that there has been an extra allowance of public spiritedness in our novelists; it is simply that the crucial problems of his own time provide a novelist with his richest material, whether he deals with it directly or by inference. The reform of manners was as vital in the eighteenth century as the reform of the Poor Law was in the nineteenth….”
> Of
> course, not everyone cares about literary merit, but one would hope that
> professors of literature do. If your real interest is social questions,
> study sociology or political science. If your real interest is activism,
> make a career of that.
More straw man. Never said I don’t care about literary merit. Imaginative writers, some of the greatest, have turned to literature as activism and as a means for social and cultural change (also political and even governmental change) - in fact very many of them. I scarcely wish to exclude myself from their company and their work. Again, see the Pritchett quote. There’s a lot of literature (criticism, etc.) on this - a long, distinguished, and vital tradition, some basis of which Pritchett simply acknowledges in passing as being quite evident.
> Furthermore, making the study literature a tool of social or political
> struggles is fundamentally wrong-headed.
On the contrary.
> I can’t understand why an
> argument about contemporary social questions by someone who has studied
> literature and based on Jack London’s fictional representations is
> desireable at all (to anyone seriously interested in the social
> questions[*]), let alone preferable to one by someone trained in sociology
> and grounded in real data.
Who was saying that such studies should be undertaken? Not me. Though as Scott indicates in his note, some insights can be gleaned. Meanwhile, some novelists and other imaginative writers are scrupulous about getting the facts and details, etc, correct - even as much or moreso than some writers of nonfiction. My own political fiction is heavily based on nonfiction - nothing unusual there. It is also based on other sources of information and knowledge, other experiences, including reading fiction.
> That kind of an argument tells you nothing
> especially interesting about Jack London’s fiction (except that it is
> available to be drafted), and what it says about the contemporary social
> questions is based on a fraudulent notion of expertise, as neither Jack
> London nor the student of literature is any kind of an expert on
> contemporary social questions. It’s a fallacious appeal to authority: the
> social argument gains nothing from Jack London’s unwitting participation in
> it.
Literature does not equal aesthetics. You seem to conflate them. See here, and the whole thread - it’s on that point exactly and fairly recent: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/sticking_to_the_words/#5210
London was quite keen about many social and political issues and heavily involved in them outside his fiction (and inside some of it). And many experts are professional liars, etc.... The point is, you have to look at people’s arguments, their reasons and the evidence - it doesn’t matter who they are, or what they are primarily known for, if anything, “expert” or not.
What to do with an argument that opens like this:
I’m not anonymous, you are. I’m easily looked up on the internet. Neither you, “tim,” nor your hotmail internet address are identifiable.
And closes like this:
The point is, you have to look at people’s arguments, their reasons and the evidence - it doesn’t matter who they are, or what they are primarily known for, if anything, “expert” or not.
Look, I’m perfectly open to being convinced, but from where I’m sitting, I don’t see the literary in the historical.
It was produced at a particular historical moment; captures a particular moment in intellectual history; implies a particular contemporary audience with a complementary set of generic and formal expectations...I could go on all day. My point is that the moment of production is integral to understanding what a work of literature was meant to accomplish (aesthetically, politically, &c.). That’s not to say a work can’t be more than that, but on one level it is what it was intended to be at the moment of its production. The historical specificity of that intention--plus all the things the author unintentionally captures--makes it a document of historical import. Why was it written then? What was it responding to? &c.
I see two distinct questions from two distinct academic pursuits. On the one hand, I see the historical: how people reacted to London’s work. On the other hand, I see the literary: how London crafted the effect. And while you can connect those two things - the former historical, the latter literary - doing so doesn’t seem to add much to either debate.
Consider a history of the ‘90s that didn’t take into account the rise of the internet. How would a reader understand the significance of the Drudge Report? The popular culture that gave birth to the Drudge Report is an item of interest to historians. Now consider the work of Jack London. Grant the medium and you’ll see that it shaped thought as powerfully as the Drudge Report did--the former warranted a response from a sitting President, the latter almost took one down. That cultural nexus, captured in works of popular literature, should be of interest to historians, but it really hasn’t been.
The best way to say this is “I believe literature to be an historical document of a peculiar sort.” As historical document, it’s been almost completely ignored by historians because of what makes it peculiar, i.e. its literariness. Such knowledge is important, then, for the same reason that “proper” historical knowledge is.
But at that point, we have drifted pretty far from teaching London in order to further the cause of social justice or “stir and uplift” the students.
One problem here is that you think I’m the one who advocated this. I’m not. Because I don’t. I belong to the “if you improve their critical thinking skills, the world’s a better place” school. If I indoctrinate them into anything, it’s the enlightenment ideal of the rule of Reason, Sharp Wit and Unchecked Ego.
And surely literary biography, interesting as it is, isn’t the main attraction in literature departments any more than scientific biographies are in physics departments. There’s nothing wrong with historical accounts of physics or biographies of physicists, but no physicist is confused about the role of such things in the study of physics.
I don’t consider myself doing literary biography, as per above.
> What to do with an argument that opens like this:
>
> I’m not anonymous, you are. I’m easily looked up on the internet.
> Neither you, “tim,” nor your hotmail internet address are
> identifiable.
>
> And closes like this:
>
> The point is, you have to look at people’s arguments, their reasons and
> the evidence - it doesn’t matter who they are, or what they are primarily
> known for, if anything, “expert” or not.
As is evident, my post, like many posts at the Valve and elsewhere, does not consist solely of “an argument.” It opens with an observation, and moves on from there.
My point is that the moment of production is integral to understanding what a work of literature was meant to accomplish (aesthetically, politically, &c.).
I agree with that - but I’m not sure that’s literary study informing history; it looks like the reverse. What I’m objecting to specifically is using literary studies of literary objects to conquer poverty and inequality (or urge others to do so, let’s be realistic). Or the notion that ideological issues are essential to literary criticism. But I’m especially interested in the broader sense in which people use (well, I’d say misuse) literature to make political or social arguments under the guise of a literary analysis.
Consider a history of the ‘90s that didn’t take into account the rise of the internet. How would a reader understand the significance of the Drudge Report?
Okay, let’s take that hypothetical then. Do you think that the key to understanding the Drudge Report or the ‘90s is going to be found in a literary analysis of Drudge’s texts? I guess I don’t.
That cultural nexus, captured in works of popular literature, should be of interest to historians, but it really hasn’t been....The best way to say this is “I believe literature to be an historical document of a peculiar sort.” As historical document, it’s been almost completely ignored by historians because of what makes it peculiar, i.e. its literariness.
Sure, I agree with all of that I just quoted - but is that cultural nexus essentially literary? Or is the part that would be of interest to historians, almost entirely extra-literary? While the document may be peculiarly literary, is it the peculiarly literary aspects of it that matter to the historians? Can you satisfy the interest of the historians without ever asking them to read Jack London? I think maybe you can.
One problem here is that you think I’m the one who advocated this. I’m not.
Rest assured - this is one problem we don’t have. I recognize that you didn’t advocate that, and I’m not trying to pin any positions on you. You are as anonymous to me as Tony, and if you want to argue my points a la carte, that’s okay with me. I’m interested in your responses to any parts and pieces of my questions that you want to take up, and won’t hold you responsible for the rest. (For that matter, I won’t hold you responsible for the ones you do take up. It’s not personal! I’m here for the light, not for the heat.)
But at that point, we have drifted pretty far from teaching London in order to further the cause of social justice or “stir and uplift” the students.
One problem here is that you think I’m the one who advocated this. I’m not. Because I don’t. I belong to the “if you improve their critical thinking skills, the world’s a better place” school. If I indoctrinate them into anything, it’s the enlightenment ideal of the rule of Reason, Sharp Wit and Unchecked Ego.
------------
Many imaginative writers especially write to “stir and uplift” readers for all sorts of reasons, in all sorts of ways, not only the “political.” It doesn’t just magically happen - it’s an art. If a university isn’t an appropriate place to study such matters that are often so integral to an artist’s work, then no place is.
It takes more than quality aesthetics not only to “stir and uplift” but to produce art of any sort - thus, often, the need for knowledge and information and study of wide variety and extensive consideration.
If artists, or critics interested in their art, wish to study to know and glorify or expose the dominant status quo and its relations to aesthetics, their aesthetics, etc, that’s their decision.
Just as it surely may be the decision of artists and critics to study and know not only the dominant status quo but also the reality and potential for progressive change and its relation to aesthetics, their aesthetics and otherwise.
It’s not a question of indoctrination any more than any class, or purposive experience, involves a form of indoctrination. It seems to me that politically progressive art (and criticism) is one of the most socially useful and socially healthy realms of art (and criticism), and one of the most lively and otherwise appealing realms, as is manifest in quite diverse ways: morally, psychologically, politically, aesthetically, and so on.
Of course there are other areas of focus in art and criticism as well that are important and of quality. I’ve mainly tried to be clear about my primary focus, and its import (of course as I see and understand it).
> What I’m objecting to specifically is using literary studies of
> literary objects to conquer poverty and inequality (or urge others
> to do so, let’s be realistic). Or the notion that ideological issues
> are essential to literary criticism. But I’m especially interested in
> the broader sense in which people use (well, I’d say misuse)
> literature to make political or social arguments under the guise of > a literary analysis.
> It’s not personal! I’m here for the light, not for the heat.
Absolutely. Being realistic is a good way to generate light, not heat. (Though there may be other ways. There’s a famous Einstein quote on the matter.)
That’s why it is absolutely important and realistic to note that “literary criticism,” if meant as “aesthetic criticism,” does not conflate with “art criticism” - that is, criticism of works of art, i.e., critical studies of art.
That’s why it is absolutely important and realistic to see that critical studies of literary objects (that is, of works of art, e.g., novels) can help provide insight into art and society and their relation. This is what I sometimes call political literary criticism. This is knowledge that I for one have found directly useful in creating (including crafting) novels, political and otherwise - thereby enhancing understanding and efforts for change.
This is how I operate as a working artist and activist. This is what I’ve found to be invigorating and effective, both as an artist and as an activist, by way of, call it, political art.
Regarding an objection to “the notion that ideological issues are essential to literary criticism”: understanding, say, Dostoevsky’s ideologies and the ideologies of the time seem to me to be highly useful, if not always necessary, to studying some aspects of Dostoevsky’s novels, including at least some aesthetic elements. The Possessed especially was intended by Dostoevsky to be heavily ideologically informed. How could this not be a useful, if not a necessarily indispensible part of the study of the novel, in relation to its aesthetic elements and otherwise. All ideas/ideologies have some type of aesthetic quality. It would help to know well what those ideas/ideologies are in the first place to be able to understand the aesthetic qualities that are both intrinsic and related to them in works of art.
As far as your special interest goes, it seems plenty obvious that many literary analyses are put forward that claim “to make political or social arguments” when it’s so obvious so often that the claim is bogus, especially those analyses of the more abstruse “theoretical” variety. I just don’t bother with them, on those grounds at least.
a rhizomatic wossname
Frankly, I still prefer Derrida calling it a “purely North American artifact," or something to be resisted by the “deconstruction jetty,” myself. Not much to do with London, really.
"That’s why it is absolutely important and realistic to note that “literary criticism,” if meant as “aesthetic criticism,” does not conflate with “art criticism” - that is, criticism of works of art, i.e., critical studies of art.” But it does so conflate insofar as literature is a form of art. You often come perilously close, Tony, to denying that literature is art, arguing instead that’s it’s another way of doing politics. Or you redifine “art” so that it has some essential connection to politics. If “literary criticism” doesn’t confate with “art criticism” to some significant extent, it’s simply a meaningless term.
A coincidence - I just posted at your weblog, Dan, on another topic, then saw your note here.
> “That’s why it is absolutely important and realistic to note that
> “literary criticism,” if meant as “aesthetic criticism,” does not
> conflate with “art criticism” - that is, criticism of works of art,
> i.e., critical studies of art.” But it does so conflate insofar as
> literature is a form of art.
Well, we’ve had this discussion elsewhere on the Valve, where I’ve explained my understanding.
> You often come perilously close, Tony, to
> denying that literature is art, arguing instead that’s it’s another way of
> doing politics.
Some works of literature - as I understand the term - are not art, nor are meant to be art, e.g., conventional historical studies, or critical studies, etc. Yet as with virtually anything, such works will inevitably have aesthetic qualities, pleasing or not.
Some works of literature seem to me to be art by accident - maybe not intended to be art - but aesthetically intriguing enough to be considered so.
Some works of art (a kind of literature) struggle aesthetically - and so may not be aesthetically important or much exciting - but nevertheless amount to important works of literature, due to other qualities that are strong - social, political, etc....
Some works of art are highly accomplished aesthetically and may also be important (or not) in any number of other substantive ways: emotionally, psychologically, morally, politically, even informationally, and so on.
All of these kinds of literature, art and otherwise, may be politically motivated, actuated, and effective. Just as all such kinds may be emotionally, psychologically, morally, even informationally, and so on, motivated, actuated, and effective as well.
Also, all works of literature (including art) inevitably have political qualities, and many other substantive qualities - implicit or explicit, intended or unintended.
> Or you redifine “art” so that it has some essential
> connection to politics. If “literary criticism” doesn’t confate with
> “art criticism” to some significant extent, it’s simply a meaningless
> term.
On the contrary, as I’ve explained.