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?