Comparative Literature 79500

Theory and Practice of Literary Scholarship and Criticism

Professor David Richter

Fall 2005

Syllabus

Required Texts are or will be online in the form of PDF files on GC BlackBoard; these files are taken from first page proofs to my anthology, The Critical Tradition 3/e (2006). Many more texts are available than will be assigned.

In general: Please read the introductions to Formalism, Structuralism, etc., for the appropriate weeks of class.

Tentative Schedule

September 1: Professor Richter involuntarily detained in New Orleans….

September 8: Introduction to the course. An orientation lecture on the varieties of literary theory before the twentieth century; theory and post-theory; the problem of unpacking. Readings will be distributed in class.

September 15: Modernism and Anglo-American New Criticism. Readings: Cleanth Brooks: “My Credo” and "Irony as a Principle of Structure" (804-13); T.S. Eliot: "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (537-42); Wimsatt and Beardsley: "The Intentional Fallacy" (817-24); Counterstatements by R.S. Crane (813-15) and Susan Sontag (746-51).

September 22: Russian Formalism: Readings:Victor Shklovsky: "Art as Technique" (781-91); Vladimir Propp: Transformations of the Wondertale (791-802); Yuri Tynyanov: "On Literary Evolution" (to be posted); Mikhail Bakhtin: "Discourse in the Novel" (478-94)

September 29: Structuralism and Semiotics: Readings: Ferdinand de Saussure: From Course in General Linguistics (847-58); Roman Jakobson: “Linguistics and Poetics” (858-65); Claude Levi-Strauss: "The Structural Study of Myth" (865-74); Roland Barthes: “Striptease” and “The Structuralist Activity” (879-885); Umberto Eco: "The Myth of Superman" (956-67)

October 6: Deconstruction: Readings: Jacques Derrida: "Structure, Sign and Play" (921-32) and “Difference” (938-55); Roland Barthes: "From Work to Text" (875-79); Paul de Man: "Semiology and Rhetoric" (888-99); Counterstatement: Lawrence Lipking: “The Practice of Theory” (899-909).

October 13: Yom Kippur—GC Closed.

October 20: Psychoanalytic Theory I: Readings: Sigmund Freud: "Creative Writers and Daydreaming", “The Interpretation of Dreams” , “The Uncanny” (497-533); Counterstatement: Carl Gustav Jung: "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" (506);

October 27: Psychoanalytic Criticism II: Readings: Lacan and Neo-Freudianism: Jacques Lacan: “The Mirror Stage” (1129-35), “The Meaning of the Phallus”(1155-61); “The Instance of the Letter” (try it, be prepared to give up); Laura Mulvey: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1178-86); Slavoj Zizek: “Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing” (1186-1202).

November 3: Earlier Twentieth Century Marxist Literary Theory: Read Marx chapter for background if Marx is unfamiliar to you, pp 397-412, especially "Consciousness derived from Material Conditions" from the Grundrisse (388); Readings: Georg Lukacs: “The Ideology of Modernism” (1223-38); Walter Benjamin: "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1238-55); Bertolt Brecht: “The Popular and the Realistic” (1256-60); Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1260-69).

November 10: Althusser and Neo-Marxism: Readings: Louis Althusser: “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1270-78); Raymond Williams: “Marxism and Literature” (1278-96); Terry Eagleton: "Categories for Materialist Criticism" (1313-25); Fredric Jameson: From The Political Unconscious (1296-1312);

November 17: New Historicism/Cultural Studies: Readings: Michel Foucault: "Las Meninas" (1363-72); Clifford Geertz: "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture" (1373-89); Stephen Greenblatt: Introduction to The Power of Forms and "King Lear and Harsnett's Devil-Fiction" (1448-54); Hayden White: “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (1390-1404); Pierre Bourdieu: "Introduction” to Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1404-09).

November 22: Thanksgiving Day; GC Closed.

November 29: Feminism and Gender Studies: Readings: Virginia Woolf: From A Room of One’s Own (596-610); Simone de Beauvoir: From The Second Sex (679-85); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: "Infection in the Sentence" (1537-51); Toril Moi: from Sexual/Textual Politics (1551-56); Julia Kristeva: “Women’s Time” (1569-85)

December 7: Gender Studies and Queer Theory: Readings: Guy Hocquenghem: “Homosexual Desire” (1662-69); Michel Foucault: from Introduction to the History of Sexuality (1633-43); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: From Introduction to Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet (1689-97); Judith Butler: "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" (1713-27)

December 14: Postcolonialism and Ethnic Studies: Readings: Edward Said: Introduction to Orientalism (1807-20); Homi Bhabha: “Signs Taken for Wonders” (1881-96); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: “What Is Minor Literature?” (1783-89); Benedict Anderson: “The Origins of National Consciousness” (1821-26). Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: “Preface to Blackness” (1910-12) and Houston A. Baker: “Blues, Ideology and African American Literature,” (1912-15); Rey Chow: “The Irruption of Referentiality (1916-25).

December 21 (or make-up class):

The Reader in the Text: Reader Response and Cognitive Theory. Readings: Peter Rabinowitz: from Before Reading (1048-63); Stanley Fish: “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” (1029-37) and James Phelan: “Data, Danda, and Disagreement” (1037-40); Elaine Scarry: On Vivacity (1063-82); Lisa Zunshine: “Theory of Mind and Representations of Fictional Consciousness (1094-1110).

The entire reading list for the course, aside from the recommended readings and the specialized reading that will be required by your term essay, comes to 600-700 pages. But some of the readings are difficult or obscure and show an extraordinary range of method, both within and between categories. The best way of keeping things straight will be to take notes on the reading, and to participate in the class discussions. Let me recommend the following procedures as an aid to better understanding and longer retention:

1. Take advantage of the introductory essays (which "place" the writers within their groups) and the bibliographies for further reading.

2. Ask yourself what issue s/he is addressing. In other words, if this is the answer, then what was the question? (Or as we used to say in Talmud class, “What’s bothering Rashi?”)

3. Isolate the principal terms the critic uses, and locate their definitions--if they are explicitly defined--or try to reconstruct their definitions if only defined through context.

4. Ask yourself what general unstated assumptions about the nature of literature and about the critic's task underlies the essay.

5. Try to get a fix on the critic's method or mode of reasoning. Is s/he a lumper or a splitter. Does s/he think that all studies are to be approached in more or less the same way, or does subject-matter dictate methodology? What is "really real"? Is everything "discourse" or is there something deeper than the way we talk about things.

6. Mark down questions that occur to you. Note problematic passages you don't understand; speculate on the application of theories to imaginative works; note seeming inconsistencies or apparent self-contradictions within the essays; note discrepancies between the critic's views on literature and your own intuitive ideas. Mark passages in the text that you think need further explication in class.

Class Discussion

My classes tend to be relatively informal. My "lectures" on formalism and so on are in your book as the introductory essays to each section. If I've changed my mind or understand something better than when I wrote, I'll let you know, but otherwise I think your time is too valuable for me to just repeat myself. I like to use class time to help students read the text, to clear up questions, problems, contradictions, sometimes to explain the context of a given essay or how critics later changed their minds....

Questions: Student questions are very important and you should never be afraid to ask a question because you are afraid you will be revealed as naïve. Naïve questions are generated by real curiosity or confusion. Never be afraid to ask them in my class. But let me know if the informality gets beyond what you can tolerate.

One half of each period will be devoted to analyzing closely a single text or passage from a single text; the other half will be general discussion on the mode of theory in the readings. I’m not sure whether it will be better to start or end with close readings. I’ll try to indicate which text will be the “key” essay for the day

Written Work

I’d like to delay formulating this too rigidly till I get a sense of where the class is. At the MA level at Queens, where students are usually innocent of theory, I usually assign a “passport essay” asking students to apply three modes of literary theory to a single short work of literature or film. The focal text needs to be cleared with me in advance. Pick your text because you genuinely enjoy it (you better: you'll be encountering it over and over) and not because you think it will deconstruct well or fit in with some other theory you're interested in. Such a paper should be turned in in stages so I can give you feedback that will let you rethink and revise before turning in the final paper. Give me a draft of one reading on October 20, another on November 10, and the final paper on December 14.

But for those past their comps, or who have had theory courses already, this may not be the best approach. You may want to do an analytical essay on a single school, author or text, or the relations between developments in imaginative literature and trends in literary theory– and naturally then working out between us a creative assignment tailored to your individual interests and ideas will be necessary.

Readings for Unpacking Exercise

Jay Ladin: “So Anthracite – to live”: Emily Dickinson and American Literary History9

It was R. P. Blackmur who described the phrase “So Anthracite – to Live” as “Beyond bearing awkward to read” (42)10. Even now, when we have had seven more decades to grow accustomed to Dickinson’s peculiar diction, “So Anthracite – to Live” is a shockingly awkward phrase, one of many in Dickinson’s unruly oeuvre. Twentieth-century American poetry experiments with norm-defying diction, but how did a woman in the early 1860’s come to write phrases such as “So Anthracite – to Live”? To put it differently, how should American literary history account for Emily Dickinson?

For the most part, as Margaret Dickie points out, it hasn’t. “[E]ven when she is acknowledged as a great writer, Dickinson has never found a central place in American literary history . . . Dickinson remains an anomaly . . . fit into a largely masculine history . . . as an eccentric woman isolated from the main concerns of the day” (186, 187)11. Dickinson is fortunate to have achieved even anomaly status. Though the nineteenth century was a boom era for American women poets—as Paula Bennett notes, “by the last decades of the century, women poets were beginning to out-publish men even in the most exclusive and prestigious venues”—none but Dickinson have entered the canons of American literary history (216). Dickie argues that the marginalization of Dickinson and eclipse of other nineteenth-century women authors are symptoms of the same androcentric astigmatism and that allotting Dickinson a central role in American literary history will bring other women’s achievements into proper focus: “[A] literary history that would include women writers should start with Dickinson and redo the conventional story by fitting literary history around the poet, considering both how she defines the period and how literary history might be redone if she were placed at its center” (187). But fitting American literary history around Dickinson is easier said than done, because both Dickinson’s claim to a place in that history and her relegation to its margins derive in large part from the innovative approach to poetic language apparent in phrases such as “So Anthracite – to Live”—an approach unparalleled among female (or, for that matter, male) nineteenth-century American poets.

For the most part, scholars have swerved around the question of how Dickinson’s use of language relates to that of her contemporaries.12 Studies that focus on Dickinson’s language tend either to treat her innovations as unique idiosyncrasies or to present her as a sort of wrinkle in time, a modernist poet born fifty or a hundred years early.13 Both these approaches avoid relating Dickinson’s poetics to those of her contemporaries; both isolate Dickinson from her milieu. Historicizing studies that locate Dickinson in cultural context generally ignore the peculiarity of Dickinson’s poetic language.14 Even studies that focus on aspects of Dickinson’s poetics, such as Christine Ross’ recent “Uncommon Measures,” which places Dickinson’s prosody in the context of practices promoted in nineteenth-century textbooks, tend to overlook her deviant diction.15 But to move Dickinson to the center of American literary history—and, by extension, to fashion “a literary history that would include women writers” as central rather than peripheral figures—we must understand how Dickinson’s “anomalous” treatment of language relates to the more normative language of her contemporaries. That is, we must read Dickinson’s work as an example of, rather than an exception to, nineteenth-century women’s poetry, before we can take up Dickie’s challenge to “consider both how [Dickinson] defines the period and how literary history”—i.e., the history which leads to and through Dickinson into the feverish poetic innovation of the twentieth century—”might be redone if she were placed at its center.”

To bring the common ground between Dickinson’s treatment of language and that of her peers into focus, this essay, like many other recent studies of Dickinson, adapts concepts introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin for the study of novels to poetic analysis.16 Specifically, I argue that Dickinson transfigures common nineteenth-century linguistic materials, themes and rhetorical modes into previously unheard-of diction such as “So Anthracite –to live” by tipping the balance of what Bakhtin calls “centripetal and centrifugal forces” from the centripetally-weighted modes characteristic of most nineteenth-century poetry to centrifugally-weighted modes that became a mainstay of twentieth-century American modernist poetry. Building on recent work by Paula Bennett, I argue that Dickinson’s precociously modernist treatment of language represents not an isolated literary mutation, but a conscious engagement with — and reaction against — the flourishing mid-nineteenth-century American women’s poetry scene. By examining Dickinson’s early letters and poems, I show that Dickinson’s precociously modernist configuration of centripetal and centrifugal forces evolved from a technique that Bakhtin calls “novelization” which was common in nineteenth-century prose, and had already been adapted to poetic uses by other nineteenth-century women poets by the 1850s, when Dickinson began to write seriously. Finally, I consider how American literary history looks when Dickinson is placed

at its center, focusing on Dickinson’s crucial but complex relation to the tradition of American women’s poetry, and the deep continuities between nineteenth-century American verse and the twentieth-century poetic practices that Dickinson’s work prefigures.

8Emily Dickinson Journal 13, no. 1. (2004): 19–50.

9From Emily Dickinson’s poem “More Life - went out - when He went,” Fr415. [Ladin]

10Blackmur, R. P. Language as Gesture. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962.

11Dickie, Margaret. “emily Dickinson in History and Literary History.” Challenging Boundaries:Gender and Periodization. Eds. Joyce W. Warren and Margaret Dickie. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).

12Dickie’s efforts to recenter American literary history focus on establishing Dickinson as a writer engaged with the major political event of her era — the Civil War. Like most content-oriented studies of Dickinson, Dickie says little about how Dickinson uses language.[Ladin]

13For example, Cristanne Miller’s landmark study Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar catalogues and analyzes the interpretive implications of Dickinson’s idiosyncratic diction and punctuation with little attempt to relate Dickinson’s techniques to those of other nineteenth-century poets. David Porter’s Dickinson: The Modern Idiom, the most extended presentation of Dickinson in relation to twentieth-century modernist poetry, argues that Dickinson should be read as the “first practitioner” of “an extreme . . .American modernism” (1). [Ladin]

14See for example Domhnall Mitchell’s fine Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception, which notes Dickinson’s polysemy but does not address the difference between her poetic language and that of her contemporaries. [Ladin]

15For example, Ross’ discussion of “My Reward for Being - was this” (Fr375) does not note the oddity of language such as “When Thrones - accost my Hands - / With ‘Me - Miss - Me’ - / I’ll unroll -Thee -.” [Ladin]

16Bakhtin-influenced scholars of poetry have long noted that Bakhtin’s insistence that poetry is monoglossic does not hold true for many texts. Indeed, Gerald Bruns has suggested that American poetry is inherently heteroglossic. [Ladin]

Gayatri Spivak: Introduction to Ranajit Guha, ed. Subaltern Studies (New York, 1988):

The work of the Subaltern Studies group offers a theory of change. The insertion of India into colonialism is generally defined as a change from semi-feudalism into capitalist subjection. Such a definition theorizes the change within the great narrative of the modes of production and, by uneasy implication, within the narrative of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Concurrently, this change is seen as the inauguration of politicization for the colonized. The colonial subject is seen as emerging from those parts of the indigenous elite which come to be loosely described as ‘bourgeois nationalist.’ The Subaltern Studies group seems to me to be revising this general definition and its theorization by proposing at least two things: first, that the moment(s) of change be pluralized and plotted as confrontations rather than transition (they would thus be seen in relation to histories of domination and exploitation rather than within the great modes-of-production narrative) and, secondly, that such changes are signaled or marked by a functional change in sign-systems. The most important functional change is from the religious to the militant. There are, however, many other functional changes in sign-systems indicated in these collections: from crime to insurgency, from bondsman to worker, and so on.

The most significant outcome of this revision or shift in perspective is that the agency of change is located in the insurgent or the ‘subaltern’. A functional change in a sign system is a violent event. Even when it is perceived as ‘gradual,’ or ‘failed,’ or yet ‘reversing itself,’ the change itself can only be operated by the force of a crisis. Yet, if the space for a change (necessarily also an addition) had not been there in the prior function of the sign-system, the crisis could not have made the change happen. The change in signification-function supplements the previous function. The Subaltern Studies collective scrupulously annotates this double movement.

They generally perceive their task as making a theory of consciousness or culture rather than specifically a theory of change. It is because of this, I think, that the force of crisis, although never far from their argument, is not systematically emphasized in their work, and sometimes disarmingly alluded to as ‘impingement,’ ‘combination,’ ‘getting caught up in a general wave,’ ‘circumstances for unification,’ ‘reasons for change,’ ‘ambiguity,’ ‘unease,’ ‘transit[ion],’ ‘bringing into focus;’ even as it is also described as ‘switch,’ ‘catching fire’ and, pervasively, as ‘turning upside down’—all critical concept-metaphors that would indicate force. Indeed, a general sobriety of tone will not allow them to emphasize sufficiently that they are themselves bringing hegemonic historiography to crisis. This leads them to describe the clandestine operation of supplementarity as the inexorable speculative logic of the dialectic. In this they seem to me to do themselves a disservice, for, as self-professed dialecticians, they open themselves to older debates between spontaneity and consciousness or structure and history. Their actual practice, which I will argue, is closer to deconstruction, would put these oppositions into question. A theory of change as the site of the displacement of function between sign-systems — which is what they oblige me to read in them — is a theory of reading in the strongest possible general sense. The site of displacement of the function of signs is the name of reading as active transaction between past and future. This transactional reading as (the possibility of) action, even at its most dynamic, is perhaps what Antonio Gramsci meant by ‘elaboration,’ e-laborare, working out. If seen in this way, the work of the Subaltern Studies group repeatedly makes it possible for us to grasp that the concept-metaphor of the ‘social text’ is not the reduction of real life to the page of a book. My theoretical intervention is a modest attempt to remind us of this. (3–4)