The Art of Criticism

Greetings, all! I hope this finds you doing well and perhaps starting to dig out a bit from the wreckage of the semester's nutty final weeks. I expect to post again about some LIT 500 matters (a Trumpet retrospective and other final thoughts, perhaps), but since I recently chanced upon this interesting interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, I figured I'd send it along to you. In particular, near the end of the interview, you may find his thoughts on the role of literary theory in the undergraduate curriculum (e.g., "I think undergraduates should be kept away from Theory at all costs") to be especially interesting. Then, in answer to a subsequent question, he asserts that "it's better that [students] should be reading Pauline Kael reviews in the New Yorker than Derrida."

a PM p.s.

Good luck as you try to manage the semester's crazy endgame, the last two-to-three frenzied weeks out there in "the matrix" -- ah, yes, I had to invoke the text/film that we almost automatically associate with Baudrillard's theorizing. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker some years ago (2003) wrote this: "Although the movie was made in 1999, its strength as a metaphor has only increased in the years since. The monopolization of information by vast corporations; the substitution of agreed-on fiction, imposed from above, for anything that corresponds to our own reality; the sense that we have lost control not only of our fate but of our small sense of what's real--all these things can seem part of ordinary life now. In the mood of Dickian paranoia, one can even start to wonder whether the language we hear constantly on television and talk radio ("the war on terror," "homeland security," etc.) is a sort of vat-English -- a language from which all earthly reference has been bled away. This isn't to say that any of us yet exist within an entirely fictive universe created by the forces of evil for the purpose of deluding a benumbed population -- not unless you work for Fox News, anyway. But we know what it's like to be captive to representations of the world that have, well, a faintly greenish cast."

I enjoyed the discussion of postmodernism this past Thursday (and I hope the two U2 clips helped bring some illumination to some of the operative issues). There was some question about how to date postmodernism. It's probably worth noting that Baudrillard has elsewhere traced the emergence of the simulacra as far back as the Renaissance (focusing on the counterfeit in the early modern period, which first destabilized the notion of the sign). Poststructural thinking would tell us that the conditions that allow for Baudrillard's most extreme formulations have always been there (i.e., that there are no reliable centers to our structures, no core realities or objective truths, etc.), but by the time of Baudrillard's stage of hyperreality we've completely lost the notion of any difference between reality and simulation -- that is, in this "fourth stage" signs no longer even claim to represent reality but instead offer themselves in its place.

Oh, to explain my reference to the "fourth stage," and to give you still another temporal frame for postmodernism: According to Baudrillard, there are four basic historic phases of the sign (recall, of course, that a sign is composed of any signifier and signified): (1) There is a truth, a basic reality that is faithfully represented (by a sign, by language, etc.); (2) This truth/reality still exists, but it is distorted, warped, or perverted through representation; (3) This truth/reality has gone, though we still try to cling to it by masking its disappearance through representation; (4) There is no relationship between the sign and reality, because there is no longer anything to to reflect. Western society, according to Baudrillard, has now entered this 4th stage and is unambiguously in the age of simulation. U2's "Satellite of Love" might be one modest way of suggesting that there might be at least some degree of recovery possible. By the way, Baudrillard even provides occasions to revisit the questions about gender and sexuality raised in previous weeks. That is, via Baudrillard's logic, normal sexual desire is no longer a personal response to a person we meet and engage: instead, it's created and stimulated by images of beauty and desire with which the media bombards us.

Well, it's all enough to make the head spin! Baudrillard died in 2007, and if any of you are so inclined you could always check out his bold post-9/11 essay, "The Spirit of Terrorism," or even seek out that slim but even more controversial book, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, which discusses the marketing of the war and argues that the reality of the war disappeared into a televised presentation that made it something like a video game (eating popcorn in one's livingroom, one could turn the channel from an episode of The Simpsons or a vacuous sitcom to watch a cruise missile landing on Main Street to the strains of a CNN theme song).

(By the way, regarding that semester endgame, I wish for you all at least a few hours of rest over the holiday later this week. If you're traveling, be safe! See you for Jackie Kay and Trumpet upon our return).

Comic Interludes

Greetings, all. You may be needing a chuckle or two over the coming weeks to alleviate the stress. Here are a couple offerings. First, via The Daily Show, consider Sir Archibald Mapsalot's contribution to our discussion of postcolonialism (via a cartography lesson that reminds of the confluence of maps and power). Then, following our discussion of teaching this past Thursday, there's this rather hysterical take on "What it's like to be a new TA".

By the way, returning to The Daily Show, and on a more serious note, I referred in class to a recent Huffington Post article (actually an interview with Chris Hedges) about Stewart and Colbert (a pair understood elsewhere to be "a postmodern response to a modern media universe") that claims they've destroyed satire because they've been coopted by the system and the entrenched power interests. Hedges argues that only by stepping outside of the mechanisms of power are we in a position to stage any kind of true revolt. All of this reminds me just a little of Greenblatt's essay that we read (and only briefly discussed) a few weeks ago, particularly that moment when he posits that "the apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be bound up with collective, social energy; a gesture of dissent may be an element in a larger legitimation process, while an attempt to stabilize order on things may turn out to subvert it" (308-9).

The problem with Common Core

As I was cruising through Facebook this morning I came across this little gem: http://www.upworthy.com/a-student-explains-whats-wrong-with-our-school-system-and-why-we-mistrust-teachers-nails-it-6?c=ufb1

Although my experience with pedagogical theory is, admittedly, very limited this speech really resonated with me, especially in light of Margret's critiques of "Why Teach?" and the rather depressing and confusing end to our class last night. He speaks mostly about high school teaching but I think it could also be readily applied to university education as well.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

I hope that our hour talking about the thesis last week tallied more on the helpful rather than the overwhelming side (though I'm sure there was inevitably some of the latter). Kaitlynn, Mark, and Jeremy obviously had a lot of great advice to share, although it may be the type of situation where you appreciate it most a little further on down the road. For now, there are the demands of the semester's endgame to deal with, of course! One would hope, looking ahead, that you'll start to formulate some manner of a thesis idea by the midpoint of the Spring semester. If you can move towards finding a Chair by the end of the year and then do some meaningful work during the summer (which could involve writing some material for a chapter, but it could just as plausibly mean lots of research, consolidating a lot of notes and fragments of text, drafting an outline, etc.), all with an eye towards completing a chapter by this time next year, you'll be well on your way!

When I did my thesis back in '95-96, I didn't quite finish in time for the Spring deadline, but I simply registered for a summer credit and defended in June. That still left me well positioned to move to Oregon and start my PhD work that Fall. Incidentally, I still have a piece of paper my thesis adviser (Virginia Carmichael, a postcolonialist) gave me at the outset, a quote by Isak Dinesen: "When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself."

Of Rubber Islands & Umbrella Drinks

Our discussion of "The Sea is History" this past Thursday, especially that last section with its implied critique of the post-independence period, reminded me of Walcott's 1992 Nobel lecture, "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory." It's such an amazing speech, stunningly blending the poetic with the polemic and suggesting a strikin example of sly civility at work (e.g., when he refers to being "on the raft of this dais," he's very ingeniously figuring himself as a stand-in for an exotic Caribbean island, implicitly but very subtly critiquing, I think, the mostly white male Nobel audience surrounding him with its (patronizing?) "applauding surf"). The speech at times reminds us of the bind faced by these island nations: to sell themselves & the tourist industry, they must almost necessarily promote and encourage the delights of mindlessness (i.e., the privileged tourists must see the islands as a place to flee the colder, more serious climes of the West). Here's one of Walcott's most memorable (and visually striking) sections:

"But in our tourist brochures the Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida as inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float towards her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of necessity must sell themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other, with a future of polluted marinas, land deals negotiated by ministers, and all of this conducted to the music of Happy Hour and the rictus of a smile. What is the earthly paradise for our visitors? Two weeks without rain and a mahogany tan, and, at sunset, local troubadours in straw hats and floral shirts beating 'Yellow Bird' and 'Banana Boat Song' to death. There is a territory wider than this -- wider than the limits made by the map of an island -- which is the illimitable sea and what it remembers."

The agenda of so many postcolonial writers and artists is precisely to articulate and explore that "wider territory." Postcolonial studies, as you might imagine, implies studying and promoting writing by "postcolonial" writers (like Walcott, Rushdie, Kay, Achebe, et al.), but also bringing our critical attention to the discourse and literature of imperialism (as Said does in his nuanced reading of Conrad's Heart of Darkness).

Speaking of Said, and mindful of Rushdie's multi-colored sea of stories and implied indictment of essentialism, here is his call for contrapuntal reading in the stirring last paragraph of Culture and Imperialism:

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems to be no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot's phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the 'other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.' It is more rewarding--and more difficult-- to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about 'us.' But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how 'our' culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter). For the intellectual there is quite enough of value to do without that."

Bhabha Blah Blah

It can seem that every time I return to Bhabha after an interval of time, or -- to use a more Bhabha'esque phrase -- after a "temporal disjunction," it's as if for the first time. Reading it can seem akin to this kind of processing: "Blah blah blah ambivalence blah blah blah hybridity blah blah blah third space." But I'm also being too hard on him, because inevitably I do come back to him, and I find that if I put in the work (arduous though it may be) in trying to assemble and follow the argument, the payoff is often nearly exciting. And you all? What do you think of "Sly Civility"? The idea I always struggle to clarify in this particular essay is that "less than one and double" notion: help?!

An Elegy for Literary Studies

It's four years old now, but William Chace's "The Decline of the English Department," which appeared in the autumn of 2009 in The American Scholar, remains a provocative read and would undoubtedly give us much to talk about. It could probably carry a subtitle like "Why Literary Studies is Increasingly Irrelevant, Riven with Strife, and Governed by Incoherence" (!), and to that extent it's part of a group of like-minded laments that tend to be maddeningly generalized, as well as nostalgic and regressive in terms of their understanding of the field. Regardless of the merits of Chace's arguments, though (and there are some), you will no doubt find it to be an interesting essay ...

Revisiting the Enthymeme

I recall Margie asking me so to share the full text of that wonderful Roland Barthes quote on the enthymeme (drawn from "The Old Rhetoric" (1964), an essay that appears in the book The Semiotic Challenge). Here it is:

"The enthymeme has the pleasure of a progress, of a journey: one sets out from a point which has no need to be proved and from there one proceeds toward another point which does need to be proved; one has the agreeable feeling (even if under duress) of discovering something new by a kind of natural contagion, of capillarity which extends the known (the opinable) toward the unknown. However, to produce all its pleasure, this progress must be supervised.... [The] enthymeme is not a syllogism truncated by defect or corruption, but because the listener must be granted the pleasure of contributing to the construction of the argument; it is something like the pleasure of completing a given pattern or grid."

It's an appealing way of thinking about writing because it's both definitive (it suggests a very clear structure for one's argument) and generative (the order/format/length of your argument grows organically out of what you have to say). That is, it provides both a structural framework and a catalyst for initiating the process of thinking. It's a bridge between invention and arrangement.

Seeking a Playful Pluralism

We didn't get to Kolodny's article last week, but I've always admired the gracious and open kind of orientation she espouses and seeks. The feminist, she asserts, claims "her own equivalent right to liberate new (and perhaps different) significances from these same texts" (164) -- far from presuming any degree of "definitiveness" or "structural completeness" (164), she invites us instead into "a dialectical process of examining, testing, even trying out the contexts," in the process "[initiating] nothing less than a playful pluralism, responsive to the possibilities of multiple critical schools and methods, but captive of none" (165). This reminds me a little bit of the final moments of our discussion of Derrida and the process of bricolage, when we proposed that deconstruction doesn't have to be merely destructive (or, worse, nihilistic), but can be celebrated as a way of inspiring creativity and originality by finding news ways of putting elements together.

We only just got started on those five poems, which I distributed with an eye towards providing examples for Showalter's "feminist critique" (via Heaney's "Act of Union" and Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day') and "gynocriticism" (via Gluck's "Mock Orange," ni Dhomhnaill's "We are Damned, My Sisters," and Boland's "What We Lost"). As we finished our time this past Thursday, we had only just started talking about "Mock Orange," which I was trying to propose represents the erotic object -- previously silenced, paralyzed, simplified (see the Shakespeare poem for the model) -- becoming the subject and being given a voice. We might also wonder about the role of nature in this poem, and how it is aligned with a gynocritical sensibility. Anyway, all to say, perhaps some of you might be inclined to comment in this space on this poem, and/or one of the others ("We are Damned"? "What We Lost"?). In what ways do these poems help us to realize Showalter's appeal that we focus on "the newly visible world of female culture" (149)? Do they counteract the tendency of feminist critique "to naturalize women's victimisation" (148), and, if so, in what ways?

Proletariat U.

I chanced upon this article on the NPR website, which seems germane in light of our discussion about Marxism; certainly the politics and realities of class relations are inseparable from academia as well (not surprisingly). This might also be an occasion to cite the new issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, which, in the newest volume, is devoted to "The New Academic Labor Market and Graduate Students" (in his article, Paul Cook even uses Foucault to assess the advice that's provided to graduate students by their mentors and by the profession).

Finally, one more link to send your way: "In Defense of the Humanities Ph.D.", from the newest issue of The Atlantic, which assesses the tension between the "lottery setup" of the graduate school endeavor vs. the necessity of following one's passions.

Remarks on Marx & A Mirror on Lacan

Greetings, all! I thought it might be useful to start a thread on our reading & discussion from last week's class, especially since we didn't manage to get to the psychoanalytical material. On Thursday, in the interests of time and in advance of our discussion of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," I'll likely plan to summarize/consolidate some of the ideas and implications from the Freud piece and then open things up for 30-40 minutes discussion of Lacan.

When Marx and Engels write that "the fundamental form of this activity is, of course, material, from which depend all other forms -- mental, political, religious, etc." (19), they're proposing that culture is not an independent reality -- that, in fact, it's inseparable from the historical conditions in which human beings create material lives. Additionally, these historical conditions are permeated by relations of exploitation or domination, and any sense that you have that you may be a "free" individual is a kind of misrecognition (here you can perhaps see how Marxist theory could be linked with Lacan: our identities are relational, but in this case those relations derive from the social relations of production -- division of labor, distinct social classes, etc.), a result of ideologies working on us and putting blinders on us. This is why the piece you read spends all that time on "fetters": we look back on "accidental fetters" and are not aware of the fetter that is currently circumscribing our own lives and age. Marx, of course, would want us to realize that the capitalist economy is first and foremost a power structure, marked by class oppression.

As you think about applying this to literature, you might begin with a very broad but sill useful question: do characters make their fates or suffer them? Does the "I" freely choose (this question might be useful for Coleridge's Ancient Mariner), or is it determined/circumscribed in its choices? You also might be prone to focus more on group identities -- e.g., oppressed or marginalized groups (such as when Simpson refers to the alienated labor of the crew in "Rime") -- with an eye towards identifying and deploying an emancipatory politics.

The basic question-at-issue that motivates Lacan (a kind of renegade French psychoanalyst who lived from 1901-1981) is to wonder how the organic body is related to the abstractions of representation. He pursues this problem/question by drawing on/adding to Freud as well as to the linguistic insights of de Saussure; additionally, when he sees the mirror stage yielding to "the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations" (193), we also sense a link to what Derrida will eventually articulate as "a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences" (197). If you can see the overlap between Saussure, Lacan, and Derrida here, you'll be well on your way to a profitable coalescence!

Lacan sees the Cartesian cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") occurring later in the formation of the ego, but prior to this there occurs a companion kind of moment when the child recognizes its image in the mirror. This is the moment when the child is first able to recognize a reflection of itself, with the fictional image -- the specular, or mirror image -- now identifying the self ("this jubilant assumption of his specular image" results in the I being "precipitated in a primordial form" (190)). The question for you/us then becomes, though, in what sense (according to Lacan and according to what you now know about poststructuralism) is this in fact a misrecognition? Why does Lacan quickly qualify this by proposing that "this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction" (190, emphasis mine), and that the mirror image of wholeness "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures the alienation destination" (191)? What is this "alienating destination" to which he refers and where is it elaborated on in the essay? Answering this will involve understanding Lacan's belief in a "deflection of the specular I into the social I" (193).

Well, I hope this helpful in at least modest ways, and certainly feel free to share an observation and/or a passage, or to raise a question. How do you feel about Lacan's formulations at this point -- forbidding and impenetrable? Intriguing and persuasive? Are you able yet to situate it against the backdrop of what we've already discussed in the past couple of weeks? I'll try to filter some of the Lacan material through that handout of the opening pages of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and then, of course, we'll have that interesting Lacanian reading of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to discuss. This will likely help us to see the relevance/usefulness of this kind of theorizing when it comes to literary interpretation.

"Time Travel that Works"

Hello again, Literati: on the eve of our third meeting, finally a chance to stop by these parts again to try to get this blog launched. I had promised, I think, to provide links to some of the editorials and articles from recent weeks that have revisited some of those all-too-familiar questions about our discipline and profession (Why study English? What is the value of a humanities education? etc.). You will, perhaps, get used to feeling like you're part of a beleaguered discipline, or a misunderstood one, or an undervalued one, and maybe you'll even find low-level doubts of your own sneaking into your consciousness at various times. Fortunately, there are all manner of effective antidotes that arrive, often unawares, but continuously, in both private and collective moments, inside and outside of the classroom, and that remind us how wonderful, affirming, and important (and, yes, even sustainable) our endeavors in literary studies (and the humanities generally) can be. Contributing to the conversation in this case are The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, in "Why Teach English?", Michael Roth (via a book review of Mark Edmundson's latest work), in "How Four Years Can (and Should) Transform You," and Mark Edmundson himself, in "The Ideal English Major." Perhaps you'll find something worthy of comment in one or more of these columns; do, as well, share any similar essays and articles you may chance upon during our time together this semester!

Parlor Talk

Greetings LIT 500 colleagues! It's hardly a jazz-soaked coffee house, but here's another meeting place for us. We'll see if it serves us (at times we may well need to bridge the Thursday-to-Thursday span), but hopefully it will allow us to mix the serious with the frivolous, the theoretical with the practical; certainly some irreverence will be needed as we get deeper into the semester's readings. For now, perhaps that lovely Kenneth Burke passage from The Philosophy of Literary Form offers the appropriate sentiments for launching this new blog, for readying your oars:

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got here, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."