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Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Whither Literary Writing?
This post is in two parts. The second part is written by John Emerson, proprietor of Idiocentrism and frequent commenter at The Valve. John takes exception to a trend toward positivist thinking he sees, not only in my work, but in much of the work in the literary academy for the past 50 years. This first part of the post is my introduction to John’s remarks.
As should be obvious to anyone who’s read a number of my posts here at The Valve, or who has read some of my work (e.g. here) I’m interested in encouraging lines of inquiry that might, one day, emerge into a science of literature. The ambition is not a novel one; after all, I. A. Richards was conducting research on student response to poetry in the early 20th century. I think that a lot of good and interesting work can be done in this direction, and I have some fairly specific ideas on how to go about it.
At the same time I wonder about limits and purpose: Should all of literary studies go this way? Would it even be possible, at least in principle, for this to happen? The problem is that this line of investigation asks that we treat literary texts and literary experiences as specimens to be described, analyzed, probed, and modeled. Though the word “specimen” causes me to cringe a bit, it nonetheless seems apt. I can deal with that.
But is that how we want undergraduates to think about poems, plays, novels, movies, and so forth: as specimens?
Is that why we ask them, in some cases even require them, to take a course or two in literature? Surely not. Surely we wish, first of all, for them to enter into the texts as deeply and empathetically as they can. I do not see how discussions grounded in a discourse of text-as-specimen can help that process.
Consider a different, and perhaps more focused, problem. I’ve become very interested in Disney’s Fantasia and recently presented a paper in which I discussed it in cognitive terms. I also believe that Fantasia is one of the great imaginative works of the 20th century. How would I make that case, and why? While I could draw on cognitive discourse in mounting such an argument, that alone would not be sufficient. The argument requires a different kind of language, for it is about value and beauty, not so much attempting to explicate value and beauty in cognitve terms, but to say that this film is beautiful and therefore valuable. Why would I want to make such an argument? Because I believe that a world that values Fantasia is better for us than one that dismisses it as a cartoon, or as an insult to great music, or as an expression of patriarcal capitalist hegemony, or for whatever other reason.
I give you John Emerson.
by
John J. Emerson
Over the last several months I’ve made scattered grumbly remarks at the Valve, especially in response to posts by Bill Benzon, Franco Moretti, and Cosma Shalizi. By and large my gripes are part of a general dissatisfaction with the academy as it is, and Moretti, Benzon, and Shalizi have primarily served as instantiations of what I see as the real problem.
I’m a literary guy, and I write and think in a literary way. I’m not a scientist and I don’t produce facts, truths, or testable theories. I write non-fiction almost exclusively, but my non-fiction is not scientific. While often enough I do write about literature, mostly I write about other things. Perhaps I can make my point by saying that I sometimes write literature about science (for example, here and here), whereas I see my three targets aiming for a science of literature. Not the same things at all.
A lot of my argument is ultimately about turf or opportunity cost. Arguments of this kind are hard to make, because in defense of your own turf you usually end up attacking interlopers who are themselves not intrinsically bad or wrong, and this can seem intolerant, bigoted, or anti-intellectual. On the other hand, academic turf wars have been one of the main forces shaping the university for a long time (driving out pragmatism and political economy about forty years ago, for example). The real problem with my attacks is that I’m “not a gentleman”—not really part of the ball game at all. Academics often are unaware of the brass-knuckle politics that has formed their world, but this is something that of which I am all too aware (since my faction has consistently lost).
My perception is that literary ways of writing and thinking have been under attack for centuries. During the first part of this period (the transition from Montaigne to Descartes, for example), the move away from literature can be seen as a good thing (and I say this as an admirer of Montaigne.) But there’s some point at which I think that the process became harmful, and I would say that in the US that point was reached no later than 1950. (The increasing exclusion of literary writing from the university has happened at a time when independent scholarship and writing outside the university also were becoming less common.)
Literature departments have been among of the few places in the university where literary (non-positivist) writing has remained possible, and for this reason I resent attempts to put literary studies on a scientific basis—at least within English departments. Philosophy has already been lost; many of my most admired philosophers were also men of letters (Whitehead, James and Nietzsche, for example), but their examples are not to be followed, and as I understand, Whitehead and James aren’t even taught much anymore. There’s been a similar direction of movement in many other areas—economics, history, and Asian studies come to mind.)
Part of the purge of the academy has been the exclusion of normativity and a ban on subjectivity, evaluation, appreciation, engagement, and advocacy. Often this ban is justified by positivist rhetoric which is really quite crude, and at times the boo-hurrah theory seems almost ready to emerge again.
I think that one problem with non-normative approaches to literature is that literature is normative in intent, or ontologically normative. Writers really want their books to be better than other authors’ books, and contrary what occasionally seems to said at the Valve, often enough a consensus about quality is formed rather quickly. The arts do have intelligible public standards, even though they are not quantifiable the way sports standards are, and evaluating music, for example, isn’t really comparable to deciding what your favorite flavor of ice cream is, or saying that you prefer one species of bird to another.
The technically-best study I’ve seen in English of the Diamond Sutra completely brackets out the question of the real meaning and intrinsic worth of the sutra. This amounts to saying that the message of the Diamond Sutra is of no real value. To bracket out the intention of intentional objects (liberation is the intention of the Diamond Sutra) is to reject that intention—if you are in bed with a naked woman and don’t touch her, you’re either saying that she isn’t attractive, or that to you no women are attractive. (I at least could disagree with a direct statement of the worthlessness and meaninglessness of the Diamond Sutra, but you can’t argue with an assumption.)
I really wouldn’t object to a book about sports which lumped all competitors together regardless of their level of performance—unless that kind of sports-writing started to crowd out the normative kind showing who won and who lost. And likewise for literary studies—we’re down to turf and opportunity cost again.
Along with the positivism, the contemporary university seems to have an abhorrence of mixed writing. This is probably the heritage of the methodologism and paradigmatization which flourished during the fifties and thereafter. There’s no real reason that a single book on a piece of literature couldn’t be structuralist, historicist, appreciative, politically engaged, and post-modernist (fill in your own isms)—all at the same time or in alternation. It might also even be well-written and fun to read. But this would be harder to do than the supposedly rigorous single-track expositions that the university demands. (And again, single-track writing has a lot to do with turf wars.)
Literary writing is always mixed, and I’ll leave it at that for the moment. At some other point I will explain why I think that literary writing, even though it doesn’t produce truths and facts, is unavoidable and intrinsically valid, and not simply a defective form of proto-science.
Appendices
Probably the same kinds of moves toward unmixed purity which have damaged philosophy, literary studies, and other areas of scholarship have also damaged literature itself, which seems to have become specialized in fantasy, self-obsession, exquisite nuances of sensibility, and fuck narratives.
Theoretically I should like continental philosophy, but I don’t much like the way it mixes literature, scholarship, philosophy, social science, subjectivity, and politics all into one big glob—sort of like St Francis’s disciple Brother Juniper, who dumped all the food in the house into one big pot and boiled it. Everything doesn’t have to be connected to everything else, and you don’t have to do everything all at the same time. But I definitely think that a properly-mixed discourse is better than a monoparadigmatic one, and in particular I am convinced that mixed discourse is one of the important things missing today.
Comments
As I understand it, the task of a literary scholar qua LITERARY SCHOLAR is, well, to study literature, not to produce it her/himself. I think there is a necessary distinction to be drawn between literary writing (and thinking) and scholarly writing (and thinking); it seems to me the latter must be necessarily empirical, while the former obviously need not be.
I’m contesting that understanding. For one thing, the choice need not be made; a literary piece can present all sorts of analytic and descriptive insight without renouncing literary writing. Plenty of well-written, literary writing, not just in literary studies but (for example) in history, is contentful. You can walk and chew gum at the same time.
When literary writing is forbidden to literary scholars (and judging by several books I’ve read recently, it seems to be), you really raise the question “Why bother with literature at all, if it’s a bad thing that will contaminate our scholarly work?” Literary studies ends up seeming like pathology—like cancer studies or Nazi studies.
I think that the antiliterary imperative comes from the positivist (or perhaps structuralist) assertion that literature is always misleading and false. I haven’t developed the idea right here, but I believe that literary writing can enhance and strengthen scholarly writing. It’s not just a source of bias and illusion.
"I think that the antiliterary imperative comes from the positivist (or perhaps structuralist) assertion that literature is always misleading and false.”
I thought that it was just because most scholars can’t write interesting prose.
I understand that, John—I’m contesting your contestation. I disagree w/ your assertion that “anti-literary” thinking has pervaded academic literary studies; if anything, there has been a decidedly anti-positivist, anti-science (or “anti-scientism") slant to most literature departments in the US since at least the ascension of the New Criticism in the 1940’s and 50’s (cf. CP Snow’s infamous “Two Cultures” essay).
Maybe I don’t really understand what you mean by “literary writing”—would you mind clarifying/qualifying that phrase a bit? Are you simply contesting the absence of beautiful prose from scholarly writing? If that’s the case, I would simply counter that the goal of scholarly writing is not to be beautiful for its own sake (unlike literarture), but to communicate the results of scholarly inquiry. If the writing happens to be beautiful and highly readable, so much the better, but I’ve ploughed through more than a few pieces of good, insightful scholarship whose prose read as if it were written by some mad love child of Kant and Hegel.
(I at least could disagree with a direct statement of the worthlessness and meaninglessness of the Diamond Sutra, but you can’t argue with an assumption.)
Well, sure, since assumptions are the things that you’ve agreed not to argue about.
It could well be the case that the author of that study wanted to be equally helpful to those for whom “liberation” in the Buddhist sense is a paramount goal, and also to those for whom it isn’t, but who feel that they might nonetheless have something to learn from the Diamond Sutra.
I’m puzzled by your assertion that what you primarily write is “non-fiction” but that you don’t produce “facts” or “truths.” Presumably you want the reader to take you seriously in some nonaesthetic sense, but you don’t feel compelled to produce “arguments.” This sounds a bit like theology, doesn’t it?
O, and about being normative: anyone who hands out grades in a university is being normative. It hasn’t disappeared at all.
Rich, I’m convinced that scholars are effectively encouraged to write badly. I don’t believe at all that it’s incidental. Paranoia about violating methodological no-nos leads to defensive writing and forbids venturesomeness. A certain scholarly persona is expected which writes badly.
Rocco, another of my points is that literary scholarship should normally take into account the esthetic qualities of the works studied, and that “appreciation” should not be barred.
Part of what I mean by literary writing is just ordinary good writing meant to be understood—for example, Stephen Jay Gould’s writing about biology and many other topics. Gould presented scientific facts and theories, but but he made them intelligible and did not at all forbid himself to wander outside strict science. His stuff could be read at several different levels—it was entertaining and ranged broadly into philosophical, historical and other fields where Gould was not an expert.
The worst writing seems to be found in areas which are trying to prove that they are really do have specialized knowledge, in the face of widespread doubts that that is true. Literary studies seem definitely to be suffering from that now, as psychology often does, and some areas of history and much of economics.
So part of what I mean by “literary writing” is just plain, straightforward writing which is not constrained by the attempt to fit entirely within prescribed methodologies.
I don’t think of Snow as a positivist, though he had a scientific background. I think that the positivists ca. 1950 were the driving force, but I ultimately think of methodologism or paradigmaticism as the real villains—not all methodologies are positivist in the strict sense.
Rich C.: normative in the writing. Appreciation and evaluation of works written about. Come on.
The book about the Diamond Sutra was not written in a way that anyone could profit from. It just summarized and compared six interpretations of the work, with generic conclusions about the process of interpretation. The book was only for people who either a.) wanted to say they knew something about the Diamond Sutra or b.) wanted to know something about Buddhist textual studies and meta-interpretation. Someone who wanted to know what the Diamond Sutra, or any of the six interpretations, was trying to say, would find the book useless.
Non-fiction without facts or truths: non fiction can be constructed of existing facts and truths without producing a new fact or truth. My two science studies at the links I gave are based on scientific facts, but they don’t add to the body of scientific fact. They’re literary presentations of science.
John,
Per your last comment:
Could you give me an example of a positivist literary critic in the US in the 20th century? I don’t think you can seriously count any of the fathers of New Criticism (Brooks, Tate, Ransom, Blackmur, Warren) as positivists. IA Richards in the UK is the only example I can come up w/ off the top of my head (but then again Richards wasn’t a New Critic).
Also, it’s all well and good to advocate for scholars to be better writers, but as I said, I think prose quality is somewhat incidental to scholarship. Granted, Stephen Jay Gould is a good writer, but as I understand it, most mainstream evolutionary biologists do NOT consider him a good scholar or thinker. Gould is in the same boat as Richard Dawkins—a good writer about science whose own science is somewhat questionable.
In the literary realm, there have been many good scholars whose respective prose styles, while not exactly aspiring to the heights of Parnassus, are enjoyable and highly readable (at least to me)—among more notable scholars of the last 40 years, Hazard Adams, Angus Fletcher and Northrop Frye come to mind.
I’ll have to ask you to clarify your concept of literary “appreciation” before I can really comment. There have been many literary scholars, both past and present, who have attended to aesthetic qualities in their writing (indeed, figuring out how individual poems and novels functioned aesthetically was one of the major projects of the New Criticism). Maybe you’re thinking of cultural studies scholars when you state that literary “appreciation” has been excluded from scholarship. Cultural studies people aren’t really concerned w/ the establishment and study of literature as a separate discipline, but rather w/ the study of culture through the literature (as well as other media).
I’m thinking especially about three recent publications in fields I’m interested in. I’ve written about two of them. They are all about non-Anglo poets almost unknown in the US who are worthy of attention (the third is the Portugeuese poet-king Dom Dinis). They’re all overwhelmed and strangled with theory and methodology, and only one of them gives any idea at all what the poems are like.
In Chinese studies it’s now a rule, set down by Schafer in Berkeley, that translations should not aim for literary quality.
Rocco, what I’m talking about is certainly post-1950, and in literary studies probably considerably more recent.
Gould’s case isn’t as clear as that. Less-good writers who disagree with him feel he gets too much credit, but he’s still a player.
That’s because you understand it wrong, Rocco, on both counts.
What have I misunderstood, Johnathan? Please explain.
Rich C.,
Theology has lots of arguments. Do you think that Aquinas (for example) managed to write so much by just saying whatever popped into his head? Or by just recopying the Nicene Creed over and over?
I believe that what you’re thinking of is actually called Schwärmerei.
normative in the writing. Appreciation and evaluation of works written about. Come on.
Look, evaluation takes place all the time in most disciplines. The ideal is that the basic standards by which we evaluate the work of our colleagues are ultimately the same as those by which we hand out grades. I would feel uncomfortable doing otherwise (obviously I’m not referring to “level of difficulty” here. In mathematics, the basic standard would be “is it correct?” Other disciplines have different criteria but the principle is the same).
As for the issue of “appreciation,” I’m sure everyone here knows something of the debates surrounding the origin of literary studies as a university subject, and the famous quote to the effect that “we cannot examine in tastes and sympathies.” Or, it would seem, in “appreciation,” presumably because there’s no basis for an objective decision in such matters, but if so, then why is this OK in scholarly work?
I confess I haven’t looked closely at the two examples you gave of your scientific writing, and in any case I’m not a biologist. But it’s one thing to say that you’re not adding anything to the body of scientific fact (neither do most calculus textbooks) and quite another to say that what you wrote doesn’t belong to the category of non-fiction. Nor is that to say that what you did isn’t worth doing.
If you think that “non-fiction” implies a certain lack of literary qualities or interest, then you might want to look at what Italo Calvino had to say about Galileo ("Two interviews on science and literature”, in “The Uses of Literature").
Evaluation, once more: in writing about literature a dimension never to be ignored is our evaluation of the work discussed. By and large we should write more about better works, because they’re better, though from certain points of view worse works, considered as such, can be of interest. And of course some works are controversial, and some are of mixed value.
What I said is that my writing is literary non-fiction using scientific materials, but it’s not science and doesn’t produce new science, or really facts and knowledge at all.
My writing about science is not especially for scientists or people knowledgable about science, though some of them like it. It’s for anyone with a brain and a bit of curiosity.
I think that the decision in the debate about the foundation of literary studies was wildly wrong. It’s the very thing I’m arguing against. And it looks positivistic as all get out.
Imagine a guy who’s an expert on sports cars and auto racing and writes about sports cars all the time. And then you find out that he drives a 20-year-old Ford beater, even though he could easily afford much better.
I would not trust a writer like that. That’s how I feel about bad writers writing about literature.
Theology has lots of arguments. Do you think that Aquinas (for example) managed to write so much by just saying whatever popped into his head? Or by just recopying the Nicene Creed over and over?
It also has lots of things it’s not allowed to argue about (which was what I had in mind). Take a look at the condemnations of 1277 some time: about 200 things you’re not allowed to say (including a number of Aquinas’s opinions, if my memory is correct).
Or the more recent condemnation of Hans Kung.
<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/318?email">"We cannot examine in tastes and sympathies"> was said by an opponent of the very idea of literaru studies.
You seem to be confusing theology as an intellectual activity with the church authorities who attempt to police it (often with limited success—Hans Kung is still a working theologian, for example, and quite an influential one).
Actually there’s something charming about the idea of a sports car writer who drives an old junk heap.
Perhaps a more apposite example would be any of a number of Roman Catholic scholars who have produced excellent studies of ancient (pagan) philosophy (Reale on Plato and Aristotle, Hadot on the neoplatonists), who you would think ultimately have to have a negative evaluation of their subject matter on account of their religious convictions. I think they really do refrain from “evaluation” in the sense you mean, and yet there is a lot to be learned from their writings. I suppose one could speak of an “implicit” evaluation, shown by their devotion to the subject.
“We cannot examine in tastes and sympathies” was said by an opponent of the very idea of literary studies.
Well, by someone who didn’t believe that such a thing could exist. The positivist viewpoint, if you will. The jury is still out, isn’t it?
Roman Catholics have a lot of flexibility about things like that. I wouldn’t expect it of a hard-shell Baptist.
In the case of the closed-minded and dogmatic, you’d probably prefer that they bracket out their judgements. But the problem is closedmindedness, not judgement. In other cases, someone with a similiar point of view might be best fitted to understanding certain groups, e.g. Mennonites. Even though a person with certain biases might be blind to some things, he could be alert to others in a way that a purely “objective” writer couldn’t.
John—Just out of curiousity, are there are any current (say, just around or after the New Critics) literary scholars who are writing the kind of stuff you like? I know Gould was already mentioned, but I’m thinking more of someone who writes a lot on (but not exclusively) literature.
Snails are fundamentally unsound, I take it.
Here’s three passages from the multiple book review John linked to ("The Decline and Fall of Literature” by Andrew Delblanco in the NY Review of Books, 1999):
English has become, as Louis Menand says (following a suggestion from David Bromwich) in What’s Happened to the Humanities?, “‘hard’ and ironic at the same time,” emphasizing “theoretical rigor and simultaneously debunk[ing] all claims to objective knowledge"—an inner conflict that has proven costly to its standing in the modern university. . . .
The field of English has become, to use a term given currency twenty-five years ago by the redoubtable Stanley Fish, a “self-consuming artifact.” On the one hand, it has lost the capacity to put forward persuasive judgments; on the other hand, it is stuffed with dogma and dogmatists. . . .
But full-scale revival will come only when English professors recommit themselves to slaking the human craving for contact with works of art that somehow register one’s own longings and yet exceed what one has been able to articulate by and for oneself. This is among the indispensable experiences of the fulfilled life, and the English department will survive—if on a smaller scale than before—only if it continues to coax and prod students toward it.
Well, I liked Stephen Owen’s “Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics”.
Really, I like anything that’s intelligible, eclectic, helpful, and not overwhelmed with methodology. I’m not a lit specialist at all, just a reader, so when I read about literature I think of criticism as a hopefully-usable tool.
In the two pieces I linked I sometimes mistakenly said “theory” when I meant “methodology”. “Theory” has relatively specific meanings in lit studies.
I love Kenneth Burke and Kenneth Rexroth. (Two of the “three terrible Kenneths” deplored by Bill Buckley.) Neither is at all contemporary.
"Snails are fundamentally unsound, I take it.”
Huh???
I liked this old article of yours. Basically, if methodologism is what you object to, I see no chance of really changing things within academia. As has been written here many times before, incoming students must be taught how to read and write for the purposes of job preparation, and the people doing this have to be given standard academic roles in order to maintain the academic system. So, yes, they have to professionalize.
What you proposed as an alternative, a sort of bohemian do-it-yourselfism, I envisioned as a sort of varient of punk ideology. (See, perhaps, the comments on “Contra Contra” here.) I vaguely remember some miscommunication around a parody of a punk song that I wrote. But in any case, it does seem likely that there are going to be more and more people with time, education, and interest who are not in academia. Look at The Valve, for instance. I count 2.5 out of 15 posters who are apparently not academics (counting Ray Davis as 0.5 since he left but is still listed). If work weeks shrink to a greater extent (yes, I know, good luck on that) I think that there could well be an increasing subculture of amateurs who are interested in the classic issues of aesthetics that are what attract most people to literature in the first place.
Bill & John...I came to the (university-level) Humanities after already studying zoology & psychology at that level, then majored in comparative studies in history & literature - which was an admirably fence-sitting exercise, now killed-off (at least at that university) by the “Theory"-mongers. It was taught half & half by historians & traditional scholars of literature, and was a great way of attempting to balance more “positivist” agendas & the kind of “normative” approach that John’s arguing for.
Admittedly, it was far from perfect. There was v.little in the way of economic history - I’ve had to make up for that on my own - and we really could’ve used an introductory unit in contemporary zoology/psychology so’s the students (and the lecturers, too, by the way) wouldn’t have been so ill-informed on that stuff...but, I do think the basic premise was sound, as it gave us a real taste of the virtues of both ways of thinking.
Do we really need to choose, then, or can we sensibly try for the best of both worlds? This is where John’s advocacy of “mixed” styles is a very apt one - because, the best writing, to my mind, never makes such wholesale choices...it is by nature rhetorically-flexible.
By the way - and, speaking of rhetoric - has anyone here read Richard Lanham’s latest, “The Economics of Attention” yet? I’m wondering whether I should spend some of my (v.little) spare cash on it...and it might make a good talking-point for the Valve, too, I suspect.
Anyway - I also (wholeheartedly) agree w/John that scholars are “effectively encouraged to write badly”, but it’s hardly restricted to literary studies (see Medawar on scientific papers, for example), albeit it’s particularly indefensible there...t’was why (along w/the “Theory” takeover) that I got out.
all the best
Rich...thanks for the link to John’s old article - which, funnily enough, rather exactly describes my position today. So, speaking as an “érudit maudit” myself, I certainly don’t see any reason for excluding scientific approaches to culture. In fact, I spend much of my time on them. My personal suspicion is that this is also a perfect way to drive-out the bad writing...since no publisher in their right mind would consider a book by a non-academic on such a subject, unless it was engagingly-written, at the very least. Bill, I know you have some thoughts re a possible de-academicizing of the Humanities…
all the best
I’m a writer with no pretensions to academia, though some wobbly pretensions towards critical thinking. And I’ve had one or two too many wines after seeing an excellent production of a very interesting play (by Marius von Mayenburg, a young hotshot from the Schaubuhne in Berlin). And I come home and log on and read that literature is a “specimen” and that “scholars are ‘effectively encouraged to write badly’”, and I wonder what the fuck literature is for, if beauty is not part of what matters in the experience and response. I also don’t know, to be contrary, what “intelligible public standards” means either, if it doesn’t mean the sort of thing that meant that Hopkins and Blake were considered in their day minor and eccentric writers. In fact, I’m feeling totally contrary. Is it all about protecting oneself against literature altogether?
The thing about “intelligible public standards” was a response to a seeming assumption that there’s no public way to judge artistic productions, since it’s all just subjective reaction. In fact within a given artistic community, it’s usually pretty clear who’s best.
There’s a problem when styles change and when one artist or a subgroup goes off on its own while supporters of the previous style sneer and jeer, but it’s not as relativistic as ice cream flavors.
Be forewarned, I’m wading into this debate with a minimum of rigor. It seems to me that John is looking for a community of people who want to engage works of literature on their own terms. What I mean by the terms of a given work of literature, or collection of such works, would be non-systematic, speculative, informed by individual experience (this especially), making reference to emotion. I think its the quality, relative to a given community, of thinking in these terms that we experience as literary beauty. People want to be right about things and scientifically qualified thought is the best way of arriving at statements that are more less easily impeached or discredited, so it’s hard, especially for an academic, to embrace modes of expression that are catalyzed by logic whose mechanisms aren’t fully specified. Nonetheless, this kind of logic exists and it plays a role in our experience of things. It seems to me unwise to abandon or stigmatize the effort to create works in this manner that resonate with the communities they address. Or to respond to their efforts in these terms.
Take The Great Gatsby, for instance. It’s as “primitive” as a rain dance, relative to science, but the non-subtextual social meanings in which it traffics--history, morality, desire, sex--are social meanings in which non-fictive social networks traffic. In fact, the primitive cosmology of the Great Gatsby is more sophisticated than the cosmology, I would say, of many politicians, businessmen, poets, farmers, writers, english professors, scientists, whose consequential, positivistically measurable actions are informed by that cosmology. To some extent, this reaches toward the perfect map problem.
I don’t mean by any means to say that a scientific approach to the study of literature (wouldn’t this be a subset of anthropology or linguistics?). I like this sort of thing too. But I would be sad if we were to lose the sort of literary, conversational forms of expression I’ve argued that John Emerson is arguing for.
Well, now I’m more sober. “Intelligible public standards” are precisely the thing that artists argue about all the time. It’s always a question of which artistic community, and it would have to be pretty focused to reach consensus on such standards - maybe within a particular theatre company one might find an agreeable consensus and even then… I don’t mean that there are not ways in which you can argue for “standards”, in fact I think they’re very important to articulate, but I think one can only do so by assuming a subjective position that is arguable. Gesturing towards authority of one kind or another as an ultimate argument, whether it’s science or public opinion, is kind of evading the issue, I think.
It seems to me that literary writing has duties to be intelligent, formally conscious, consciously felt, with all the complexities those things imply. But it has no duty to be right.
Perhaps if you harnessed some of the sciences of complexity you might find a model you could roughly apply to literature? - though that’s a pretty perilous exercise. Sometimes I have thought poetry might be thought to work on principles akin to non-linear dynamic systems, ie highly structured, multiple dynamic relationships, unpredictable behaviours, and so on. But that’s more about maths than science, and seems more interesting as a model to be (violently and inappropriately) appropriated for writing than for analysis.
I may not have made my point clearly here, but in any case you have apparently missed it. I was objecting to the argument that “Since everyone can have their own opinion about what’s good and bad, nothing meaningful can be said about the value of artistic works, and we should just bracket out questions of value as subjective.”
Many artists are attracted by that kind of relativism, because it frees them from critics. It has the disadvantage of saying that everyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s, so if Britney Spears sells alot of records, she must be good (we have an objetive measure, for one thing—sales).
Artists are often pretty competitive, and often they come to a consensus about who’s really good and who’s not. Sometimes they can explain their reasons, sometimes not, but I don’t think we can conclude that it’s all intangible and subjective.
No, I got your point, John. I am suggesting something else: that it is possible to argue for artistic standards and for aesthetic quality only from a subjective viewpoint. All the best criticism, or the stuff I like anyway, is in fact very subjective. I don’t mean in the sense of an extreme relativism, that everything is just an “opinion” which sits equally with all other “opinions” (I’ve often thought that opinion is the least of it). I mean that any argument for any kind of aesthetic “standard” has to come from an acknowledged subjectivity, if it is to have any authority at all. (That is, beyond the question of skill or technique, ie, a musician has to be able to play the notes, but that stuff, as Celan said, ought to be taken for granted, like hygiene.) How else is an aesthetic to be registered, if not in a subject? And what is the point of art, if it doesn’t have an aesthetic dimension?
If you “bracket” out subjective responsiveness (I guess as unreliable? not authoritative enough?), you also edit out any meaningingful engagement with the artwork. Of course, such a subjective engagement then has to earn - through work and thought and feeling - any authority it might have, if it wishes to be valued above Britney Spears. But that seems to me quite fair enough. It should have to earn it. A critic is not a priori an authority, even if s/he thinks so.
I mean that any argument for any kind of aesthetic “standard” has to come from an acknowledged subjectivity, if it is to have any authority at all.
Beauty doesn’t exist except for a subjectivity. That does not, of course, necessarily imply that different subjects will have wildly and essentially random differences. They may or may not, but you’re right, beauty entails subjectivity.
Meanwhile I’m trying to figure out just what the introduction of explicit evaluation would do for academic literary studies or for the teaching of literature. The problem is that the body of texts used are mostly of pretty high quality, which is taken for granted. It’s not clear to me that much is to be gained by explicitly saying “this is good stuff.”
OTOH, I’ve been spending a great deal of time with anime and manga. That body of work has not be codified; though there are some monuments—e.g. Miyazaki, Tezuka, Takahashi—there is no established canon and no substantial body of critical work, with or without value judgments. So I’ve pretty much got to come to terms with the material on my own.
Alison, I think that you’re mixing me up with people I’m arguing against. There’s a point of view that all subjectivity is relativistic and undecidable, and thus literary scholars should eschew evaluation of literary works, since it’s subjective. I don’t think that, though some of my summaries of what others think may have made it seem that I did.
However, I think that the retreat into subjectivity that a lot of artists make is self-defeating. You have the freedom to do whatever you want to, but at risk of being declared irrelavant by the serious thinkers who think of themselves as objective.
I don’t talk about subjective vs. objective myself much at all, except in the context of individual attempts to become, or claims to be, objective. What I talk about is public vs private, and I claim that artistic appreciation is public and not purely private (which is what “subjective” often is taken to mean.)
John, I was being contrary, I admit, since I probably agree with you more than not. To be clear, yes, I agree that art is a public act, and I have little patience with the defensive subjectivity you describe. This is perhaps because I spend a lot of time in the theatre, as a critic mainly, and if it theatre isn’t a public act then it doesn’t exist as theatre.
But it bothers me alot that the common reaction to the mess of utter relativism is a retreat to a so-called objectivity (in reality, a nostalgia for unimpeachable authority), which makes no sense in relation to art. Instability goes with the territory. The fact remains, as I said earlier, that there are too many artists now considered serious by serious “objective” thinkers who were dismissed as irrelevant oddballs in their day by contemporary serious “objective” thinkers. While this is no excuse for the vanities of self-ascribed misunderstood genius, it also shows that perceptions, public and private, are not fixed in some sort of canonical stasis, but are constantly contested.
I don’t know how explicit evaluation would work in teaching, Bill. But teaching young people to respond passionately to art - even if they’re completely wrong about it - seems to me a very valuable thing. All else surely follows from that.
While I think it’s important (and ultimately inevitable) that readers and creators of literary works evaluate and debate the aesthetic value of those works, I don’t see why it’s necessary or even desirable for scholars QUA SCHOLARS to engage in aesthetic evaluation. As I mentioned above, it seems to me at least that the task of the literary scholar is to study literature in all of its variety and variability, REGARDLESS of its aesthetic value. It also seems to me that that’s probably a minority point of view.
I agree entirely with what John and Bill have said here about getting over the subjectivity of things. If you want an experience or a truth that’s not socially mediated you basically can’t talk or read or write or listen to anybody. There’s so much data out there in the universe that it’s impossible to do it justice even by our most parsimonious modes of discourse. So why, if the only ideas we’re going to allow in our club are pristinely “objective” viewpoints, should we separate evaluation from alternative, perhaps quantitative, methods of understanding literature that fall (inconsequentially close to) equally short of our standards?
There’s some reason why we study works of art rather than piles of rubble or landfills.
Of course, there are people who study landfills and rubble, and good for them, but we don’t have whole departments full of them in every university.
The premise of literary studies is that literature is, for some reason, worthy of study because of its goodness or merit. Presumably each work studied has some of that.
I think that the burden of proof should be on you, to show that evaluation that is its permissible or even preferable to bracket out evaluative questions from the study of works which have been chosen for study specifically for their value.
And also why it should be permissible or even preferably for scholars studying good writing to write badly.
"to show that it is permissible or even preferable”
With an as-yet-uncritiqued form, conversation with other admirers of the genre would be the best way to hash out questions of evaluation.
The fact that normative questions are public doesn’t mean that there’s universal agreement about them, especially about anything new. But at a manga convention you would have a lot of talk about who’s the greatest and which new stuff is exciting, and there’s be a degree of consensus about who the champs were. The fact that these questions are still open is part of the fun.
I see that it is perfectly possible to study works of literature as one might study other objects of human production, like baked beans. And perhaps in some ancillary subjects it might be useful to do so. But I totally fail to see why one would study literature QUA literature as if questions of aesthetic or subjective response were so beside the point they are not raised at all, or are something to “get past” rather than to question, deepen and refine. I understand totally how it might be useful to study texts in order to be able to perceive better their complexities or contexts or formal challenges, and I also understand that one should get past prejudices of superficial personal preference (this is not what I mean by subjectivity); but I also begin to see why I am not a scholar. If destroying subjective responsiveness in the pursuit of a faux “objectivity” is the essence of scholarship, it seems to me wholly hostile to the experience and gift of art. And I hope to God that no one studies my texts that way.
I don’t understand either why responses that are based in subjectivity are not socially mediated, if they occur in a public sphere. Isn’t human communication precisely about making private experience communicable?
Alison and John,
I see aesthetic evaluation of literary works as a personal and subjective matter, one that we all engage in as readers and (for some of us) producers of those works. I really don’t see the point of literary scholars making aesthetic evaluations of the works they study—to what end would they do so? Stating that Hemingway is a “better” writer than, say, Christopher Morley or Tom Clancy is all well and good, but I don’t see how such an evaluation by a scholar would expand our knowledge of literature. A more interesting and, to me, scholarly question is how literary works and authors ARE valued, how they acquire (and often lose) aesthetic value over time—a question of the production or construction of literary value and literary norms through history. To me, that’s a viable area of scholarly inquiry b/c it’s ultimately empirical and “objective” (i.e. publically verifiable), while aesthetic evaluations ultimately are subjective and unverifiable.
As I see it, the burden of proof seems to be on you, John, as to why scholars should not study aesthetically “inferior” works—most of the literature published in the 19th and 20th centuries would seem fall into that category. For scholars only to study what they see at the moment to be the “greatest hits” of a given historical period only impoverishes our knowledge of literature ("literature" as a category considered in a broader, more sociological and non-Arnoldian way). There seems to be a bit of an Arnoldian or neo-Arnoldian tinge to your arguments, John, an implication that literary works of high aesthetic quality are in some capacity—morally, spiritually, socially, etc—objectively and consistently ennobling. I simply don’t believe that literary works of high aesthetic quality have a consistently civilizing or moralizing or whatever effect on their readers, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree when it comes to the importance of evaluation.
Also, questions of aesthetics are obviously important, and I think literary scholars have an important role to play in approaching and answering them (especially where it concerns the construction of literary norms, as I mentioned above), but questions of comparative literary value strike me as ultimately unscholarly, and best left to those communities who delight in posing and answering them—the readers, writers, and reviewers of literary works.
As for bad scholarly writing, that complaint is an old war horse of anti-academicism—of course scholars should make an effort to write clearly, but I don’t see why you would want them all to address themselves in their scholarly writing to a non-professional, non-scholarly audience. One wouldn’t castigate a physicist or biologist for authoring a research paper that could be read only by other physicists or biologists in their field, so I don’t think a double standard should be applied to literary scholars. As Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Edward O. Wilson, Brian Greene, and many other scientists have demonstrated, there’s both room in the world of science at large and an audience to be found in the general population for popular treatments of scientific work. I think literary scholars and critics could and probably should consider writing in a similar vein about their subject, w/out abandoning the practice of their professional discourse.
I see aesthetic evaluation of literary works as a personal and subjective matter, one that we all engage in as readers and (for some of us) producers of those works. I really don’t see the point of literary scholars making aesthetic evaluations of the works they study—to what end would they do so? Stating that Hemingway is a “better” writer than, say, Christopher Morley or Tom Clancy is all well and good, but I don’t see how such an evaluation by a scholar would expand our knowledge of literature. A more interesting and, to me, scholarly question is how literary works and authors ARE valued, how they acquire (and often lose) aesthetic value over time—a question of the production or construction of literary value and literary norms through history. To me, that’s a viable area of scholarly inquiry b/c it’s ultimately empirical and “objective” (i.e. publically verifiable), while aesthetic evaluations ultimately are subjective and unverifiable.
Ok, Rocco, that sounds eminently reasonable to me. One immediately thinks of Bloom as a scholar who does just that (assign value) and that magisterial aplomb just doesn’t do it for me...but then, so much interesting critical thought (whether it’s scholarly or not I have no idea) is about valuation - Sontag on Camp, say, or Paz on the formation of a literature in Alternating Currents, or a wonderful essay I read recently by David Lloyd thinking about the poetry of Yeats. Unscholarly though I certainly am, I have my own problems with Arnoldian ideas, and my own interests in the formation of literary norms, and I can see the point in having tools to analyse these things.
All the same, it seems to me that the idea that scholarship is wholly disinvested from subjective experience when it explores questions of aesthetics or the arts is a bit suss. Even if it’s picked up with tongs, it’s still someone dealing with that unverifiable subjective experience, and sorting it through her own subjectivities. If scholars claim they are above such subjectivities, how are they not either denying something essential about what they are studying or, on the other hand, moving into some parallel Arnoldian empyrean, only it’s scholarship, not culture, than transcends and arbitrates all? I guess I don’t believe that scholars are pure intelligences moving in spheres beyond the sweat and dust of the rest of us, and I’m not even sure that it’s desirable that they should be.
"As for bad scholarly writing, that complaint is an old war horse of anti-academicism”
Quit whining. It’s a warhorse because it’s too true—I just read 3 wretched books on interesting topics. And no one will ever believe that literary scholars are like physicists, or that they should be. If literary scholars continue to try to play the physicist game, they will continue to be the least respected of the academic professionals.
I have never written a book by a physicist which was deliberately badly written, with the intention of being unintelligible—and I read a moderate fair number of them. They do their best to write well at the level they’re at. But literary scholars do that all the time, believing that if they do so people will think that they’re smart.
The burden of proof is on me for bureaucratic reasons. You guys do the hiring. You will never, ever, have to justify yourselves to me, any more than the pedants at the Sorbonne had to answer to Rabelais and Montaigne.
I see aesthetic evaluation of literary works as a personal and subjective matter, one that we all engage in as readers: This is the ancient positivist cliche that I propose rejecting, so please don’t present it as though it were a profound insight, common sense, or in some way conclusory.
There would be more to writing about aesthetic qualities of books than rank-ordering them (which is, in fact, a crude way of transforming qualitataive information into quantitative information.)
I have nothing against studying works of lesser or worse authors. If there’s anything to like about them, fine. If they’re vividly bad, fine. If you want to write about literature as an industrial
Being an Arnoldian must be a taboo in your small world. I’m pretty much Arnold-neutral insofar as I know anything about him, but you can’t scare me off with that accusation.
As I have said, I have nothing against a well-written mixed work which is both evaluative / appreciative and analytic. But I believe that there is a dynamic in academia which favors bad (defensive, methodologically-burdened) writing, and another dynamic which forbids evaluative and appreciate writing. I see no reason for this.
I’ve heard the same thing from a philosophical ethicist (Velleman). For him philosophical ethics is one thing, and ethical behavior and ethical responses to concrete situations is something quite different, and there’s not necessary connection between them. An expert ethicist is exactly the same as anyone else when an actual ethical choice is faced.
To me this is like making a hard line of separation between physics and engineering. If you did that, both physics and engineering would be weaker.
"If you want to write about literature as an industry, I think that it belongs in the history department along with the history of the rubber goods industry or the history of railroads. Part of my intention here is to carve out a niche in the university where literary reading, writing, and thinking are preferred or required, rather than forbidden or discouraged. As I’ve been saying, turf.”
But I believe that there is a dynamic in academia which favors bad (defensive, methodologically-burdened) writing, and another dynamic which forbids evaluative and appreciate writing.
Does methodological burden always produce bad writing, is this a necessary connection?
As for evaluative and appreciative writing, it seems to me that this is one thing when dealing with “the classics” and another when dealing with a new body of work. For example, Joseph Carroll, a Darwinian literary critic, has written appreciatively about Pride and Prejudice. That aspect of his work (roughly the last half of the linked article) reads like it was written 50 years ago. I can see teaching undergraduates how to do that, but I’m not sure it represents a contribution to our knowledge of Jane Austen or of literature.
If you are dealing with new work, then things are different. Now you’re establishing standards of observation and modes of evaluation and appreciation.
. . . but questions of comparative literary value strike me as ultimately unscholarly, and best left to those communities who delight in posing and answering them—the readers, writers, and reviewers of literary works.
You may be right about those questions being unscholarly, but does that mean they have no place in the university? And if they do, what is that place?
I’m reminded of Cornel West and his run-in with Lawrence Summers at Harvard. As I remember, one of Summers’ reservation about West’s work is that it wasn’t scholarly. I think that’s a fair assessment. West’s early The American Evasion of Philosophy was scholarly and read like a clearing-of-the-decks in preparation for a major piece of academic philosophy. But that never happened. West got into his public intellectual mode and has pretty much stayed there, producing a pile of articles and books. While I have reservations about that work, taken on its own terms, it is nonetheless and impressive body of work. It’s not clear to me that there’s no room in the academy for someone who does that kind of work.
I think that someone who has developed their own methodology, or who is enthusiastic about the one they’ve adopted, could write readable methodology. I like to think that I do that myself sometimes.
But the tea leaves I read tell me tht a lot of grad students have a methodology imposed on them on an “or else” basis. I’ve read any number of published PhD theses where the methodology seemed intrusive, and in fact I have two or three favorite books whose methodological obbligatos I just skipped. This kind of thing leads to bad writing, for somewhat Orwellian reasons.
Methodology can also be used as an artificial barrier, to limit understanding to the proper sort of people. Literary writing can be used that way too, of course. A lot of so-called postmodernist stuff combines methodologism and a deliberately elusive writing style.
OK, I’m officially tired of this bloggerly back and forth, that and a rerun of “Frasier” is coming on soon, so I’ll try to make my final comment brief.
I did not say nor did I imply that scholarship is above or beyond the subjectivity of its practicioners—we’re all post-Kuhnians here (I’m assuming), and so I take it for granted that a certain subjectivity in scholarship and science is inescapable. However, that does not mean that literary scholars are incapable of overcoming their own prejudices, aesthetic or otherwise, to work on texts or authors that they may not personally like (witness Scott Kaufmann’s dissertation on Jack London) but nonetheless recognize as important for some reason in the history of literature. As I said above, to what end would a scholar evaluate a given author or text? To what ultimate purpose is that aesthetic evaluation in service to? Unless you somehow believe as Arnold did that literature has some kind of “civilizing” or ennobling effect on its recipients, I don’t see what the point is of scholars aesthetically evaluating the works they study.
Obviously, if you’re teaching a rhetoric or comp course and you want to hold up a particular text as exemplary of a particular kind of writing (or denigrate a text as anti-exemplary) that you’re trying to teach to your students, then evaluation would definitely play a role. I think what we’re confusing here is scholarship w/ criticism (or at least I know I’m occasionally confusing the two)—criticism isn’t necessarily empirical, and necessarily involves aesthetic evaluation and subjective conjecture and speculation. Sontag and Paz wrote criticism, not works of scholarship, and I don’t think their work should be held to the same standards as works of scholarship—“Against Interpretation” has a very different aim and agenda then, say, RWB Lewis’ critical study of Hart Crane. Different kinds of writing naturally have different standards applied to them. If you want to mix the two, then by all means, mix what you wanna mix—I just think it’s dangerous to conceptually confuse the two ways of approaching literature. I’m not saying the “literary” as a category of experience or a mode of thinking is w/out value; all I’m saying is that, as a mode of thinking about literature, it doesn’t seem as if it would be particularly productive for scholars to employ in their work as scholars.
“If you want to write about literature as an industry, I think that it belongs in the history department along with the history of the rubber goods industry or the history of railroads. Part of my intention here is to carve out a niche in the university where literary reading, writing, and thinking are preferred or required, rather than forbidden or discouraged. As I’ve been saying, turf.” If by literary thinking you mean reasoning and making pronouncements about phenomena in the world w/out first looking outside one’s own subjective, anecdotal experience for the requisite data necessary to make meaningful inferences about those phenomena, then this already exists and thrives in the univeristy—“literary thinking” seems to be exactly what Theory is at its roots.
One can bandy about the term all one wants, but I don’t see how branding someone a “positivist” is 1) a legitimate critique of their views or 2) an effective way of contributing to a larger discourse. I’ve seen professors and other students effectively shut out other students from whole discussions in grad seminars by simply calling them or their views “positivist” or “scientistic”—it seems to have replaced “fascist” as a default term of disapproval whenever anyone espouses or defends the idea that a commitment to inductive reasoning and empirical methodologies might be good things in relation to humanistic research and teaching.
I only mentioned the comparison between physicists and literary scholars to highlight the fact that both groups have a professional discourse which outsiders to those respective professions may interpret as “bad writing.” I never said nor implied that literary scholars should be more like physicists.
One man’s bad writing is another man’s masterpiece—I think Cormac McCarthy’s prose is godawfully pretentious, quasi-lyrical sludge. Over the years, I found many people who agree w/ that assessment, and many others who think it’s me who’s full of shit, not McCarthy’s writing. Is McCarthy a bad writer or not? I have no idea how to meaningfully answer that question; I only know that, for myself, it is not pleasurable to experience. I’ve only answered the question for myself, and in the aesthetic evaluation of different kinds of writing, I think that’s the most we can hope for. “Normative standards” are largely historically and culturally contingent (although I will concede that there may be an underlying, universal cognitive mechanism involved in the formation of those standards—a sort of “universal aesthetic grammar” a la Chomsky’s Universal Grammar?), and as such change over time. B/c of the protean nature of aesthetic standards and values over time, I don’t see the need for scholar’s to engage in evaluation as a part of their work if their aim is to produce a relatively stable body of knowledge about the various phenomena we collectively label “literature.”
I’ll shut up now.
On second thought, the comparison between Sontag and Lewis’ book is a bad example—replace the Lewis w/ Suzanne Nalbantian’s “The Symbol of the Soul from Holderlin to Yeats”.
Re John/Bill...I don’t think methodological concerns necessarily produce bad writing - but, methodological defensiveness almost certainly does. Look at the social sciences, for example. The more defensive they are on this score - sociology being the classic example - the worse the writing gets...as many highly-distinguished sociologists have lamented, since the 60s at least…
There’s, by the way, a v.simple lesson to be taken from this...but, it does require that one first have some real understanding of just how seriously hierarchical (and hence, complex) the biological sciences are. Add on top of that the social/psychological complexities of the human sciences (more levels to the hierarchy, no question) - which attempt, mainly, to study non-individual commonalities - and, THEN try to build a genuinely useful approach to ethics & aesthetics on top of same, taking individual differences seriously...and, you have (in many respects) a recipe for truly intractable complexity.
The “simple” lesson?
Pretty much all Humanities-level wide-scale theory (with the partial exception of that delivered by truly-knowledgable historians) is likely to be bunk. To my mind, truly Humanistic enquiry needs to dump “methodology” - on this (falsely-rigorous) level, at least - and reconfigure itself around a different target...albeit its most (potentially) rigorous aspects should be reconceived as more properly part of the human sciences.
That given...what “we” should be aiming for - that is, the rest of us w/more limited theoretical aspirations - is to serve as synthesist/gatekeepers (based, mostly, on our historical understandings) for the veritable plethora of useful micro-theories (as opposed to “Theory") from the surrounding disciplines...that are actually much more likely to deliver useful insights, on this level.
And, rocco, I certainly don’t see why the same doesn’t apply to such things as aesthetic judgement. My ideal, in this regard, would be a teacher of the Humanities that could (usefully) discuss the theories emerging from the various sciences w/students, and could also situate their own aesthetic/ethical preferences w/in same...and, what’s more, debate these w/out unneccessary technical terms - all in terms of some work of literature (or other aesthetic “object” that was set for the course).
Anything else, to my mind, is simply NOT doing the job properly…
Lastly, John, I’d have to say that the kind of full engagement w/literary works that you support is a crucial part of what we (as Humanists) could bring to such an endeavour...an endeavour, I suspect, that very few in the academic Humanities appear to be open to - or, indeed, well-qualified for…
all the best
Rocco:
“To what ultimate purpose is that aesthetic evaluation in service to? Unless you somehow believe as Arnold did that literature has some kind of “civilizing” or ennobling effect on its recipients, I don’t see what the point is of scholars aesthetically evaluating the works they study."
As I said, I ain’t scared of Uncle Matthew. There are others than him, anyway, who argued that literature can be appreciated for its aesthetic values. You sound like you’re repeating something that was drilled into you as dogma in early grad school.
I don’t believe that scholars should rise above their aesthetic judgements in order to reach an objective, scientific understanding of literature; I believe that that is a ludicrous idea. It’s like saying that sportswriters should ignore won-lost records. Even in philosophy (e.g. Reichenbach, who talks all the time about emotion as something to purge) I think that that investigative principle is misleading. But more so in lit studies.
I think that scholarship should be separated from criticism only rarely, perhaps in the case of historically significant bad authors. Not as an ideal.
Branding someone a positivist is a legitimate critique if positivism is erroneous. And, in fact, you Are a positivist by what you say. Others may have been wrongly branded, but not you. In the context of today’s university, positivists seem to be trying to gain turf, and if successful they will be branding people who “reason and make pronouncements about phenomena in the world w/out first looking outside one’s own subjective, anecdotal experience for the requisite data necessary to make meaningful inferences about those phenomena.” Which of course, is NOT my definition of literary thinking; what I am advocating is mixed studies. (I have different criticisms of Theory, which to me combines methodologism with a unique form of literary bad writing).
Some bad writing is just plain bad writing. I would say that when you study Cormac McCarthy, you should respect your dislike of his writing as a valuable clue as to what’s going on with Cormac McCarthy. It might lead you to a profitable investigation of his badness. Your gut instinct might well be right. And even if you’re wrong, if you succeed in articulating your negative judgement, you might uncover some facts about McCarthy which wouldn’t otherwise be found. Erroneous negative aesthetic judgements are all over the place in the history of criticism, and they have a rather different status than erroneous scientific theories.
I think that bracketing out aesthetic judgement of literature in literary studies is a bit like bracketing out evolution in biology, or history in economics. Appreciation of a literary work provides clues and a context for interpretation, and a way of understanding what was going on when it was made. I’m not saying that you should start with your own first snap judgement of a work and let it dominate your analysis; aesthetic self-education is often necessary.
Probably we’ve said all we have to say, as you’ve suggested. For argument’s sake, it’s been nice having an advocate of the exact opposite of my position.
JHC: “Serve as synthesist/gatekeepers (based, mostly, on our historical understandings) for the veritable plethora of useful micro-theories (as opposed to “Theory") from the surrounding disciplines...that are actually much more likely to deliver useful insights, on this level.
One thing I’ve argued elsewhere is that theorizable areas of study are components of reality, and that reality as a whole is not theorizable. Thus, the most inclusive discussion of reality cannot be rigorous, scientific, or definitive. Literature (and I include the classic historians, like Gibbon or Herodotus in literature—I’m actually a non-fictionist)—literature is how you write about uncertainly-known and imperfectly-defined reality. Fiction is a sort of parallel, deliberately unreal mockup or model of reality whose relationship to non-fictional reality is uncertain but not non-existent.
Valve editors...I’m damn-well logged on, I’m trying (THREE TIMES NOW!) to post the comment below...my account details don’t indicate that there’s any problems (barring & such)...but, absolutely nothing happens.
SO...WHAT GIVES?
It’s about time - in fact, it’s damn-well overdue, to judge by this experience - that the Valve had an email address for queries like this. Because, I’ll be damned if I’ll WASTE my time doing this a second time. Either this forum works...or, quite frankly, it’s a waste of my time…
“Welcome John Henry Calvinist”, indeed…
Especially since an early comment of mine (before I registered) seems to have got lost - despite the fact that it was certainly pertinant, and not at all gratuitous…
Anyway...my comment is below - now, let’s see if it survives my last attempt:
John...re the bracketing “history in economics” - that (enormously powerful) trend is now, thankfully, beginning to recede. And so, I do think that genuinely-thoughtful professional scholars in the Humanities should (similarly) take a good, HARD, look at what they currently dismiss...lest the winds of change sweep them from the ranks of the favoured?
And, v.glad to see you seem to agree w/my notion about the useful relation of verifiable theories to the Humanities. Sadly, though, the current is still (strongly) against genuine theoretical pluralists/generalists…
Albeit, should it (chaotically?) turn around in short order, we can have GREAT retributive glee in summarily dismissing many from their posts - simply due to their culpable ignorance re the full diversity of cultural history & the real theoretical bases/debates in the v.varied relevant more-exact disciplines?
I only wish…
John,
Just two minor points:
1) From Wikipedia: “Positivism is a philosophy developed by Auguste Comte in the beginning of the 19th century that stated that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge.”
All I can say is that I do not believe that scientific knowledge is the only form of “authentic” knowledge. There are obviously different kinds of knowledge that are true and valid in different contexts. My own metaphysical and epistemological views are very similar to what George Lakoff once called “experientialism”.
I believe literary scholars and literary critics/writers have different aims and means, and so a certain division of labor is essential to what both groups wish to accomplish. Anne Carson’s work would seem to be a good example of the kind of writing you’re advocating, a mix of literary writing w/ humanistic scholarship, and if that’s all you meant, then I’m all for it.
2) “You sound like you’re repeating something that was drilled into you as dogma in early grad school.”
No, just harping on a point I thought important. FYI, I’m a grad school drop out.
Positivism has an almost 200-year history with many variants. Many of the things you say are positivistic, particularly the part about bracketing out personal esthetic responses in order to attain objectivity, or drawing a line between literary scholarship and criticism, or the claim that literary skill is irrelevant to scholarship.
Lakoff may be a positivist of sorts, I don’t know much about him.
As I’ve said, I think that literary writing and thinking have been increasingly excluded from the academy and from life in general, and I think that that is a good thing. Having anti- or non-literary people move into English departments strikes me as a very bad thing, because there really aren’t many refuges for literature anywhere else. (For me the question is, “How can I lay down the law and expell these anti-literary literary scholars?” It’s more like “How can I defend this place where literary thinking is fostered and encouraged?”
If taken seriously, anti-literary literary scholarship would be self-defeating, since someone could easily go to step two and ask “Why bother studying literature at all?” Without respect for literature as a form of discourse, literary studies are somewhat downgraded.
"not a good thing”
If taken seriously, anti-literary literary scholarship would be self-defeating, since someone could easily go to step two and ask “Why bother studying literature at all?”
Judging from the general tenor of your remarks, I’d guess you’d say that my recent work on “Kubla Khan" and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" is anti-literary likterary scholarship. It draws heavily on the cognitive and the neurosciences, is concerned about objectivity (though I don’t make a song and dance about eschewing value judgments) and is rather technical at points. But someone who wants to arrive at your step two on the basis of that work, or work similar to it, has to argue past the concluding paragraphs of my “Kubla Khan” piece (not to mention what I do in the articles themselves):
Human life is extraordinarily complex. Intellectual specialization is necessary to cope with the manifold details that must be observed, ordered, and interpreted if our understanding is to deepen. Specialization cannot be avoided. Yet for much of my career I have listened to people bemoan the deleterious effects of specialization, the production of more and more knowledge about less and less. Our libraries are thus replete with earnest essays and books storming the breech between the sciences and the arts and humanities. These sorties generate much sound and fury, but have left few passable bridges behind. I acknowledge that specialization has grave dangers, that science needs a richer account of human life, and that these dangers threaten to turn our intellectual progress into a series of unsatisfying side-trips. But good intentions and hard work will not fix this problem, for it is not primarily one of professional perversion, whether willful or inadvertent.
The problem is that we do not have a way of bringing these disparate specialties to bear on one another. The study of literature and the arts is one way to provide a focal point for such integration. But literary analysis can serve in this way only if it is conducted in terms commensurate with these other disciplines. We must learn enough from these new psychologies so that we can ensure that will happen. Thus informed we can create a body of detailed textual analysis that others can use in formulating their research agenda. Any model of the human mind, or some aspect of it, must be consistent with literary analysis. A linguistics of sentences that cannot account for the sentences of “Kubla Khan,” and for the entire discourse as well, is not an adequate linguistics. A neuroscience of feeling that cannot account for our wonder and joy in “Kubla Khan” is not an adequate neuroscience. If we do our work well, investigators in neighboring disciplines will be more fruitful in theirs.
We need to know: What is the nature of the human mind such that it continually inquires into its own nature, into its place in the world? What is the nature of a poem such that it stills, for the moment, such questioning? A science that fails to address such questions may indeed be a science, but it will not be profoundly of man. As humanists it is our responsibility to see that the new sciences of man are adequate to these questions.
If we’re going to study the human mind and culture, then everything within that scope is available for our scrutiny. Over the past half-century or so we’ve created many new intellectual tools and methods—ideas, technologies for observation—for the study of the mind and brain. If these tools haven’t been much used in the study of literature, for example, that’s because the people who have created the tools aren’t centrally concerned with literature and because literature is so complex that it is difficult to see how those tools can be used. But I find it very diffcult to get from there to conclude that we’ll never be able to do so or that it is impossible, in principle, to do so.
One thing I’ve argued elsewhere is that theorizable areas of study are components of reality, and that reality as a whole is not theorizable. Thus, the most inclusive discussion of reality cannot be rigorous, scientific, or definitive. Literature ... is how you write about uncertainly-known and imperfectly-defined reality. Fiction is a sort of parallel, deliberately unreal mockup or model of reality whose relationship to non-fictional reality is uncertain but not non-existent.
This may be the most interesting thing you’ve said, John, at least for me. More narrowly, the notion that we can arrive at a unified framework encompassing all the sciences strikes me as dubious. There have been several attempts at such enterprises, and at least one by positivists. I’m thinking of Encyclopeadia of Unified Science.
Just how is it that we arrive at a general and comprehensive view of the world, and one that is accessible to a wide range of people, not just intellectual specialists? I think this is an important and pressing issue.
And part of my argument for Fantasia, which I mentioned in my introduction, is along these lines. In the space of two hours it encompasses and wide variety of worlds. I’m not sure that we’ve got anything else like it, in any medium.
I have come to this table far too late, of course--but then, like that irritating guest who can only regard himself at the worst of times as ‘fashionably late’, caring little for tokens of etiquette, I throw in my pennies:
It has become enormously hard in these times (and I agree with John in this regard) for many students to justify non-scientific, humanist endeavours. When their brethren are curing cancer or solving FTSE problems, or tackling Issues, poddling along with Shakespeare or what have you seems irredeemably… pointless.
More and more I have tried to find in academic pursuits not a goal, not a pursuit of objectives, by which I mean knowledge, but more as an activity. An energeia, as von Humboldt would have said, not an ergon. And the full use of the language is part of the pleasure of such an activity. As a student I’ve generally been discouraged from really writing, really engaging not just with the subjects of my essays, but with the heritage of our language. I was ticked off, for instance, for writing in one paper that “Plato’s Phaedrus is a work whose themes and settings might best be characterised as Attic, erratic, erotic, erotetic, aretaic, and oratoric.” Which, despite its playfulness, is in fact a very good description of the work.
“Play” in scholarship has been co-opted by French punsters since Derrida, who (at least in translation) are no good at it--playful writing has thus been equated with bad writing, in a Sokal kind of a way. But I see no reason to assume that an engaged prose should be ‘bad’ or obscure.
So long as we reduce our literary scholarship to the status of information-hunting, our discipline becomes a poor substitute for the natural sciences. Let us therefore engage in the business of writing, which I do not readily dissociate from the business of thinking.
That having been said, I agree with (whomever it was) that evaluation has no place in academic scholarship. Richards’ experimental approach to the business of poetry is interesting as a case-study, but ultimately he has nothing to offer us, other than pure rhetoric, to convince us that his literary judgements are correct (or that they even could be ‘correct’).
For me the move away from exegesis is deplorable; in this regard, Joyce scholarship has been the perfect lit. crit., being exegesis (unpacking) of a text as exegesis of the entire world. And with Joyce as your subject, one can unpack and unpack, leaving interpretation (as it was 1,000 years ago) as one’s best insight into that warm, ‘untheorizable’ world of ours.
Why is evaluation of literature a no-no but it seems ok to evaluate like mad when literary criticism is the object?
Once you’ve decided to pay attention to James Joyce and not to Dan Brown you’re already up to your neck in evaluationist waters.
Derrida doesn’t own the concept of play. Another model is offered by the British psychoanalytic tradition
And, for a genuinely useful attempt to examine all of the different versions of play (and all the concepts used to discuss them) I can recommend Brian Sutton-Smith’s “The Ambiguity of Play”. Sutton-Smith is a leading researcher in the area of children’s play, and his book is a brilliant attempt to actually get to grips w/the very real diversity of play.
"Once you’ve decided to pay attention to James Joyce and not to Dan Brown you’re already up to your neck in evaluationist waters.”
I never said that one shouldn’t evaluate; we evaluate all the time about everything. I said it had no place in scholarship. I may like Joyce over Dan Brown, etc etc.--but I wouldn’t fill up a book, or even include in a book, this type of fact. (If you’re going to suggest that the mere fact of writing about Joyce as opposed to Brown implies an evaluation, well, that’s just a sophism.)
Thanks, JHC; I’ll check out BSS.
That is what I am suggesting and you need to explain to me how it is just a sophism.
It’s a sophism because it may be true in a narrow sense, but it’s not very enlightening. Every decision I make in life is governed by an evaluation, including, say, writing a book about Joyce as opposed to Brown or as opposed to anyone else. So it’s just a truism, a specious argument, that literary scholarship in this sense is based on prior evaluation.
It doesn’t imply that evaluations should form the content of one’s writing. Consider pure mathematics: Mr. Jones writes a textbook on combinatorial theory, as opposed to spherical trigonometry. This implies an evaluation that the one is more interesting/appealing/unexplored/etc. than the other; but Jones doesn’t need to include (and hopefully will not) such a judgement in his work, nor any judgement about the merits of doing combinatorial theory, nor any judgements of merit whatsoever. Because they would not have any bearing on the content of combinatorial theory.
Does that explain my point of view?
I would rather you used an example from literary studies, since that is what we are talking about. I don’t know anything about maths.
You don’t have to know anything about maths, that’s not really the point; I was trying to make the key element of my argument clear, but it seems to have been ignotum per ignotius. I substitute for you:
“Mr. Jones writes a critical work on James Joyce, as opposed to Dan Brown. This implies an evaluation that the one is more interesting/appealing/unexplored/etc. than the other; but Jones doesn’t need to include (and hopefully will not) such a judgement in his work, nor any judgement about the merits of James Joyce’s writing, nor any judgements of merit whatsoever. Because they would not have any bearing on the content of James Joyce’s work.”
Whether John Bishop thinks JJ is the greatest or the worst writer who ever lived is immaterial to his analysis of how ‘Finnegans Wake’ works. Exegesis, which to me is the model of what scholarship should be (this is a taste, joygrantit), has no need of value judgements: it’s just discovering what can be discovered, in the same way that a chemist doesn’t make value judgements about chemical elements. I’m using a science example there, as it is becoming hackneyed to do, here and elsewhere, because I think it does reveal an important aspect of what we’re talking about. As I said in my earlier comment, I certainly do not believe that humanities scholarship should reduce to empirical information-hunting (as is the practice in one half of the natural sciences); one ‘unpacks’ from Joyce, rather than deducing falsifiable conclusions from him.
As said earlier, the science analogy is misleaading *if taken too far*; literary studies do, I think, become impoverished if they are not made part of a catholic project of literary thinking and writing. Such studies are not, to my mind, goal-oriented.
I seem to have succeeded in drawing out the opposition.
When I wrote my original piece I actually had never heard anyone say “evaluation has no place in scholarship” or “If by literary thinking you mean reasoning and making pronouncements about phenomena in the world w/out first looking outside one’s own subjective, anecdotal experience for the requisite data necessary to make meaningful inferences about those phenomena” or “I don’t see why it’s necessary or even desirable for scholars QUA SCHOLARS to engage in aesthetic evaluation.”
I had just surmised, conjectured, or deduced from the general run of scholarship that there must be people who thought that way.
For the record, I am a proponent of mixed writing, which can include as much detached analysis as you might want. But there’s something anti-literary about writing deliberately badly about literature, or insisting on a value-neutral, non-literary point of view about it. That sort of anti-literary literary scholarship is like Protestant scholarship about Catholicism, or Roman imperial scholarship about the Gauls.
I don’t actually object to writing about second-rank or inferior writers either, though I would hate for English departments to become absolutely objective and value-free about the writers they select.
And form me evealuation doesn’t really mean rank-ordering. It just means keeping in mind that various things writers are trying to do, and how well they did them, the way sportswriters keep in mind who performs better and who worse. (Sportswriters actually do write about Marv and Faye Throneberry now and then, but the bulk of sportswriting is about the better athletes, and that’s as it should be.)
"That sort of anti-literary literary scholarship is like Protestant scholarship about Catholicism”
That’s a bad analogy, as is Romans on Gauls. If anything we want disinterested, not negatively biased. A better one would be atheist (or ‘free thinking’) scholarship about Christianity. And you know what? The most brilliant book (just to take an example) on Christianity in the 19th century was written by someone who was widely accused of atheism, and who might as well have been, on the basis of his work--I mean Strauss’ “Life of Christ”. Just as a good book on Plato needn’t be written by a Platonist.
“the way sportswriters keep in mind who performs better and who worse”
Again, a bad analogy, because there are objective criteria for sports ability, ie. goals scored or home-runs hit. There are no such objective criteria in the world of humanities, which is presumably why it’s so much more interesting.
I understand now. I agree with John when he says “evaluation doesn’t really mean rank-ordering. It just means keeping in mind that various things writers are trying to do, and how well they did them.” If something in a literary work functions well enough to have a meaning which can be glossed and interpreted, it is because somebody made it. (The writer did not make the meaning, only its setting.) The only way I can see that this can be analogised with chemistry is if you are talking only about the most aleatory of texts, Hopscotch or something. By noticing the smooth workings of a text you are noticing work that some person did well.
"By noticing the [smooth] workings of a text you are noticing work that some person did [well].”
This may be true, but so what? Why should the fact that a book was Intelligently Designed (I use this to designate the product of a mind, rather than specifically a good mind--that would be begging the question) affect your analysis of it? One’s initial suspicion that something was done well would only, as I said, stimulate an analysis of it--not constitute that analysis. And as someone else said here, one might be just as well inclined to analyse the awkward workings of a badly-written (in their opinion) text.
I hope this doesn’t run down to a semantic quibble: one can, *of course*, evaluate evidence and arguments. One could hardly dispute that.
An intelligently designed book will affect your analysis in that it will continue to yield significant answers to questions you ask of it, whereas after a certain point a poorly made, incoherent, or shallow work dries up, or only gives you back facility or nonsense.
Why should the fact that a book was Intelligently Designed (I use this to designate the product of a mind, rather than specifically a good mind--that would be begging the question) affect your analysis of it?
Why would our awareness that certain events in count as “runs” and are attributed to “teams”, and that one of the “teams” will win and the other lose—why should that affect our interpretation of the physical events on the field? Isn’t it ethnocentric and subjective to apply the normative framework of “baseball” to these events?
"An intelligently designed book will affect your analysis in that it will continue to yield significant answers to questions you ask of it, whereas after a certain point a poorly made, incoherent, or shallow work dries up, or only gives you back facility or nonsense.”
Yes, but there’s nothing at all to say that what I find significant, or facile, is the same as what you find such. And there’s no reason why I would care about your judgements on these matters, beyond your ability to spin material out the book in question. I don’t, by the way, look for answers in lit crit (most of the time).
“Why would our awareness that certain events in count as “runs” and are attributed to “teams”, and that one of the “teams” will win and the other lose—why should that affect our interpretation of the physical events on the field? Isn’t it ethnocentric and subjective to apply the normative framework of “baseball” to these events?”
Gosh, this smells very familiar; who was it, Rorty or someone? Remind me, I’m a bit rusty.
Anyway, yes, ultimately. If you could spin as much exegetical material out of the Red Sox vs. the Yankees (are those baseball teams? Remind me, I’m a bit rusty) as you could out of Ulysses, then bring it on, I say. Most, I think, would be challenged to do so. Obviously, most people watch baseball, and are interested in baseball qua teams and winning, because (in most people’s minds) there’s not much more to be gotten out of watching assemblages of atoms collide with each other in such ways; but it is not necessarily the same case with literature. Literature is not based on rules (pace OuLiPo) or teams (pace Bloomsbury), and certainly not on winning. It is not fundamentally goal-oriented at all. And it is much more sophisticated--I use this word non-normatively, to mean that one can spend a lot longer describing how even the simplest literary book works than one can describing every existent rule of baseball.
Stanley Fish, that was it. Meh.
Conrad, don’t be an idiot. I was not saying that literature is like baseball. I was saying that our understanding of baseball events is enhanced by our understanding what baseball players are trying to do. Similiarly for literature.
I actually asked myself whether I should spell out exactly what I meant, but I decided not to. That was a mistake; rhetorical questions and sarcasm are wasted in some quarters.
Rorty and intelligent design have nothing to do with this. Don’t float silly little irrelevant digs, OK?
At this point, I actually do not care about your judgments about literature, and don’t expect you to care about mine or Laura’s. The significance I give to these two unconcerns, is different than the significance you would give to it. There are many whose judgements I find worthy of consideration, but not yours.
Continuing to reiterate that literary judgements are all subjective, unknowable, and meaningless is not a powerful argument in the context of this discussion.
"I was not saying that literature is like baseball. I was saying that our understanding of baseball events is enhanced by our understanding what baseball players are trying to do. Similiarly for literature.”
So, in other words, literature is like baseball. Bravo, John!
Despite your suggestion that I don’t understand rhetoric/sarcasm, I responded exactly to the (implied) statement above, demonstrating that the analogy you draw between baseball and literature is invalid. Literature is not enhanced by ‘an understanding of what writers are trying to do’, even if that were possible, because literature is not played according to agreed-upon rules, and is not goal-oriented; if I thought that lit crit was about finding answers, I would despair as much as Kant did of metaphysics. It was Stanley Fish (I mistakenly remembered Rorty) who talked about baseball in terms of sign-functions ("Sonny, it ain’t nothing ‘til I call it"), and ID was a humorous reference. Do you do humour?
And, please do listen if you’re going to bother to respond next time. While I do believe that statements of evaluative judgement are subjective (not unknowable, and not meaningless, but IRRELEVANT to others, except on a ‘if you like X you might like Y’ level), this is *very far* from being all that I’ve said, and hardly the main substance of what I was trying to get across.
As for ‘powerful arguments’, I don’t think you’ve made many. Your original post, which ironically is highly unoriginal, is more of a whinge.
Literature is not enhanced by ‘an understanding of what writers are trying to do’.
That’s silly.
The stuff you’re saying is all generic positivism. Sure, you’re not the same as every other positivist, but what your saying is one of the things I’m arguing against, and you just keep reiterating it.
I always enjoy a frank exchange of views, and I think that we’ve arrived at a stable mutual understanding.
It was not my aim to put in a dull positivist oar with the others. Some of my views might be positivist, whether ‘generic’ or not--and how would something be non-generic positivism?--but I don’t think that is a useful or accurate term for views such as:
“So long as we reduce our literary scholarship to the status of information-hunting, our discipline becomes a poor substitute for the natural sciences. Let us therefore engage in the business of writing, which I do not readily dissociate from the business of thinking.”
(the first statement of that, in fact, is close to your own statement that “literary writing, even though it doesn’t produce truths and facts, is unavoidable and intrinsically valid, and not simply a defective form of proto-science")
“literary studies do become impoverished if they are not made part of a catholic project of literary thinking and writing”.
The whole notion of lit crit as a process or activity, rather than as something goal-oriented like the sciences, is fundamentally anti-positivist. Your understanding of my position is certainly stable if you pigeonhole me as a ‘positivist’, but it is not an accurate one. Please, therefore, do not treat me as if I’m peddling party dogma.
I was ticked off, for instance, for writing in one paper that “Plato’s Phaedrus is a work whose themes and settings might best be characterised as Attic, erratic, erotic, erotetic, aretaic, and oratoric.”
I just taught, briefly, the Phaedrus, and this should have been ticked off for being exactly what people have in mind when they use “clever” perjoratively.
Yeah, that’s why academia’s so bloody dull. I like wit, myself.
Still got the highest first in my class, though.
Is that wit, though, or mere cleverness? Only time will tell.
What a world, in which ‘cleverness’ could ever be ‘mere’!
There’s always anarchy, remember.
I write to communicate, what literary value my writing may have is for others to determine.
For an example of what my fiction is like…
“The day came for the Imperial Chinese battleship Golden Lotus to be blessed. Buddhist, Daotist, Christian, Jewish, and Moslem clerics stepped up and made their dutiful noises. Then came the turn of the Imperial shaman. A man of advanced age known of his sagacity.
“He looked at the ship as she was being fitted out for her maiden voyage. With a sigh he turned away saying, ‘This ship is doomed. I cannot in good conscience bless her, for she is already damned.’
“All there agreed he was being rather negative.”
A Lotus Fades: The Death of the Imperial Chinese Superbattleship The Golden Lotus
So critical thought isn’t scholarly? Hmmm. I’ll remember that. I will say, Bill, that as soon as you claim that Kubla Khan is “a poem ...that ... stills, for the moment, such questioning”, you are making a critical evaluation and argument: and it seems to me that what you are writing wouldn’t be at all interesting if you weren’t.
Nobody’s answered my question about scholarship’s privileged “objectivity” (funny how it’s so embraced by those who object to Arnold’s privileged sphere of Culutre), which like Laura I question as being rather a case of unaknowledged agendas. But there we are.