Literary criticism

Speaking of The French Revolution…

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

…It’s as if the TLS just knew Novel Readings would be talking about Carlyle this week. They’ve posted a lively piece on his French Revolution by Ruth Scurr, described as “an edited version of the introduction to a selection from Carlyle’s French Revolution, published by Continuum later this month.” Like me, Scurr considers Carlyle’s “the most exciting account of the Revolution there has ever been.” An excerpt from the essay:

He has brilliant visual sense, cutting for example, from the flow of blood outside the prison walls to the great Bastille clock in its inner court, ticking at its ease “as if nothing special, for it or the world, were passing!” After the action is all over, he pauses to consider “what precisely these two words, French Revolution, shall mean; for, strictly considered, they may have as many meanings as there are speakers of them”. Carlyle’s answer to this question is revealing of his narrative purpose:

“For ourselves we answer that French Revolution means here the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disimprisoned Anarchy against corrupt worn-out Authority: how Anarchy breaks prison; bursts up from the infinite Deep, and rages uncontrollable, immeasurable, enveloping a world; in phasis after phasis of fever-frenzy; – ’till the frenzy burning itself out, and what elements of new Order it held (since all Force holds such) developing themselves, the Uncontrollable be got, if not reimprisoned, yet harnessed, and its mad forces made to work towards their object as sane regulated ones.”

You can read the whole piece here, if you want, but because, inevitably, the best bits are the quotations from Carlyle himself, your best bet for a wild reading experience is really just to go and read The French Revolution.

Happy to Be Here!

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Though I’ve been blogging for over three years now, today’s post is my first as a member of the Open Letters family. So I’d like to use it, first, to thank my hosts for the invitation to join them here–they’re a great bunch of readers and writers, and I’m happy to become a regular part of the excellent fare they offer at Open Letters.

My plan is to go on doing pretty much what I’ve been doing; those of you who have kept up with Novel Readings so far, then, should feel at home here despite the new address. For new readers, here’s a quick introduction to me and to Novel Readings. From the beginning, my blog has reflected my identity as both an academic (I’m an English professr) and an avid reader.These are not always roles that go comfortably together. In fact, one of the main reasons I began blogging was to experiment with a style of criticism that might reconcile my two selves. Academic criticism can feel claustrophobic, because of its intense specialization and its dissociation from the concerns and experiences of ‘common’ readers (though there are some good reasons for this, and some good results from it); at the same time, clubby book chat (pleasurable, even valuable, though it is for us personally) can be distressingly solipsistic and indifferent to both the details of the words on the page and important literary, historical, and political contexts. I thought it would be a good thing to participate in critical conversations that crossed those boundaries: that respected both expertise and love, that relished insight as well as different points of view. Blogging makes these conversations possible to an unprecedented extent–and the comment box makes sure they are conversations, not just pronouncements.

I didn’t realize all of this about blogging at first, mind you. I had to feel my way, through an unfamiliar medium, out into the wider world. This was not a movement that came easily: although in some ways the academy  is one of the most intellectually rigorous environments imaginable, it’s also very insular. Even in our most public activity, teaching, we’re alone in the classroom with our students, rarely exposed to the judgmental eye of our peers, much less the general public. We debate each other under very particular conditions: Robert’s Rules of Order, for instance, for internal governance (including curriculum debates), or the well-established etiquette of seminar rooms and conference panels. The often ruthless process of peer review is carried on anonymously–and without the opportunity to reply to your judges. Blogging is different! You put yourself out there–your ideas not always fully formed, your readings often still provisional, your audience diverse, unpredictable, and armed with the “Leave a Comment” option. (At least in blogging, I always have the option to reply!)  Writing up reviews of my recent reading (often of books far outside my official “field,” which is Victorian literature) has therefore been both nerve-wracking and exhilirating. Happily, in my experience, most blog readers are there for the same reason I am: they like developing ideas about books and reading. It’s not a competitive sport! And while I enjoy the exchange of views that sometimes follows a review, one of the main benefits is the intrinsic value of having thought hard about a book before putting it back on the shelf.

Because I am both a reader and an academic, I do post about both kinds of things. As I’ve puttered along, in fact, one idea that grew on me was that another good use of this form could be to make my academic work more transparent. One of my longest-running series, with the unimaginative label “This Week in My Classes,” was inspired by disturbing hostilities I encountered to the very idea of English professors. It has never been an overtly polemical series, though: it’s just a record of my week’s work with my students, with associated musings. I’ve come to value the exercise a lot, for reasons I explain in this post. I’ve also written a number of posts about general academic issues, and some about academic literary criticism–what it is, what it could be, why it sometimes irks or bores me, what’s at stake in it. I’ve done a series of posts looking specifically at books about books aimed at non-academic audiences, too, because I wanted to get a clearer sense of how else, or why else, people read. If you’re interested, that material is  all in the archives, or can be retrieved by searching the list of categories, if you’re interested. I’m sure I’ll be posting more on those topics in the future, too.

And so, on to that future! I look forward to writing more about the things I read and the work I do, with the occasional digression into whatever else catches my interest or makes me want to post about it. I will probably try a few new things here, inspired by the general atmosphere of change that comes with the new site (I’ve been thinking, for instance, about an occasional series on old favorites, or what I think of as “comfort reading”–or what about an “ask the English professor” thread once or twice? if I don’t know the answer, I probably know someone who does!). I thought I might also furnish my new home here with some familiar pieces by re-posting a few things from deep in the archives–maybe just to air them out, or perhaps with some updates, to give them a fresh new look. We’ll see. I hope you’ll stop by and read, and I especially hope you’ll contribute to the conversation.

The Case for the Humanities

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In response to my previous post, a lurking friend sent me a link to a rousing piece by Mark Slouka from laast September’s issue of Harper’s. (Thank you! Also, you should comment here some time. Choose a sly pseudonym; we’ll never know it’s you.) Some excerpts:

You have to admire the skill with which we’ve been outmaneuvered; there’s something almost chess-like in the way the other side has narrowed the field, neutralized lines of attack, co-opted the terms of battle. It’s all about them now; every move we make plays into their hands, confirms their values. Like the narrator in Mayakovsky’s “Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry,” we’re being forced to account for ourselves in the other’s idiom, to argue for “the place of the poet/in the workers’ ranks.” It’s not working. . . .
What is taught, at any given time, in any culture, is an expression of what that culture considers important. That much seems undebatable. How “the culture” decides, precisely, on what matters, how openly the debate unfolds—who frames the terms, declares a winner, and signs the check—well, that’s a different matter. Real debate can be short-circuited by orthodoxy, and whether that orthodoxy is enforced through the barrel of a gun or backed by the power of unexamined assumption, the effect is the same.
In our time, orthodoxy is economic. Popular culture fetishizes it, our entertainments salaam to it (how many millions for sinking that putt, accepting that trade?), our artists are ranked by and revered for it. There is no institution wholly apart. Everything submits; everything must, sooner or later, pay fealty to the market; thus cost-benefit analyses on raising children, on cancer medications, on clean water, on the survival of species, including—in the last, last analysis—our own. If humanity has suffered under a more impoverishing delusion, I’m not aware of it. . . .

It can be touching to watch supporters of the arts contorting themselves to fit. In a brochure produced by The Education Commission of the States, titled “The Arts, Education and the Creative Economy,” we learn that supporting the arts in our schools is a good idea because “state and local leaders are realizing that the arts and culture are vital to economic development.” In fact, everyone is realizing it. Several states “have developed initiatives that address the connections between economic growth and the arts and culture.” The New England states have formed “the Creative Economy Council . . . a partnership among business, government and cultural -leaders.” It seems that “a new economy has emerged . . . driven by ideas, information technology and globalization” (by this point, the role of painting, say, is getting a bit murky), and that “for companies and organizations to remain competitive and cutting edge, they must attract and retain individuals who can think creatively.”

You can almost see the air creeping back into the balloon: We can do this! We can make the case to management! We can explain, as Mike Huckabee does, that trimming back funding for the arts would be shortsighted because “experts and futurists warn that the future economy will be driven by the ‘creative class.’” We can cite “numerous studies” affirming that “a student schooled in music improves his or her SAT and ACT scores in math,” and that “creative students are better problem solvers . . . a trait the business world begs for in its workforce.” They’ll see we have some value after all. They’ll let us stay. . .

The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult—to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization—not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their “product” not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their “success” something very much like Frost’s momentary stay against confusion. . . .

Alas, despite our eagerness to fit in, to play ball, we still don’t belong, we’re still ignored or infantilized. What we’ve earned is the prerogative of going out with a whimper. Marginalized, self-righteous, we just keep on keeping on, insulted that no one returns our calls, secretly expecting no less.
Read the whole thing here, if, like me, you missed it when it first came out, and then send it to anyone you know with an interest in truly higher education–or any influence! To be sure, Canada is not the United States, and some of the details don’t apply here in quite the same way, but the basic idea–that we are making a painful and ultimately self-defeating category mistake when we try to justify our work in the terms provided by, suited for, something altogether different, is just as important in our context. It may be more important here, in fact, because we lack the habit of vigorous public debate and public spiritedness that is such a longstanding part of the American identity. We lack a national myth of self-assertion to buoy (or sell) any revolutionary rhetoric. But on all sides our current political landscape surely displays the inadequacies of our collective sense of “how to be.”

Is Arguing for the Practical Utility of Literary Studies Ultimately Self-Defeating?

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

There’s a review of Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas up at Slate:

The Marketplace of Ideas is a diagnostic book, not a prescriptive one, and Menand’s proposals for how we might invigorate the academic production of knowledge are added as afterthoughts. He thinks we ought to shorten the length of study required for graduate students; the fact that it takes three years to get a law degree and close to a decade to get a humanities doctorate, he writes, is just another symptom of professors’ anxiety about the worth of their trade. We also ought to invite more applications from students who might not have self-selected as academic specialists. The notional aims of the academy—the lively and contentious production of new scholarship—would be better served by making academic boundaries more permeable rather than less.

But in the end, Menand’s proposals, smart and coherent though they are, seem less important than the case study provided by his career. He has managed to stay accountable at once to his colleagues in English departments and to his audience of general readers, and he has pulled this off without sacrificing either rigor or range. Menand is proof that an academic can be a great prose stylist, and that a journalist doesn’t have to be a dilettante—and that having a commitment to one community enriches one’s contribution to the other. He makes it hard to take seriously the rhetoric of crisis, and helps us get on with the important business of creating the problems of the future.

Reading it led me to look back at the excerpt from it published in Harvard Magazine last fall. I had a few ideas in response to it which I wrote about then. One of my remarks at that time was this, made in the context of the difficulty of defining a coherent curriculum when our discipline has become so undisciplined that there is really no way to justify doing one thing rather than another, and thus it becomes increasingly challenging to justify doing any of the things we do at all:

Too often, I think, we resort to a rhetoric of skills (critical thinking!) that (as Menand points out with his remark about the dubious efficiency of studying Joyce to achieve more general ends) rather strips away the point of working through literature to achieve such general, marketable ends.

I heard similar arguments being made again this week as we worked on setting up a “capstone” course for our honours students: in response to my observation that some proposed ingredients were designed to groom the students for graduate school in English (something about which I am currently filled with anxiety, thanks to the kinds of discussions underway here and here and here and here, not to mention these classics of the scarifying ‘just don’t go’ genre), I was reminded that good research and writing skills, as well as oral presentation skills, would benefit students in “law school or publishing or journalism or really any other jobs.” And don’t forget that we can teach them how to write a cv and a resume, and writing grant applications is not just for SSHRC but something you may have to do in many different contexts.

First of all, I totally agree. Research and writing and oral presentations are all excellent things to be good at, as are synthesizing a range of material and learning to build a strong evidence-based argument and proofreading and making a persuasive case for the value of a project you want other people to pay for and filling out forms and all the other transferable skills we know are part of what our students are learning and practising through their work in our classes.

That said, the more I think about it the more I wonder whether, in playing the game of “we’re useful too” we don’t actually end up rendering ourselves irrelevant by so happily setting aside the specificities of our work. Isn’t literary analysis (not to mention the extensive reading of, you know, literature, that it requires) a fairly roundabout route to those practical goals? If that’s what the students really want from us, we could save them a lot of time by not making them read so much Chaucer or Dickens or Joyce or Rushdie, that’s for sure. If we play the game that way, it seems to me we are bound to lose eventually. Yes, like writing, critical thinking requires content: “writing across the disciplines” makes sense because you need something to write about, and you can’t teach critical thinking unless you have something to think about either. But if you can learn to write anywhere, you can learn to think (and all the rest of it) anywhere too. Why English?

We need a pitch for ourselves that makes literature essential, but not in the self-replicating terms Menand rightly identifies as characteristic of professionalized literary studies (that is, by contributing to our profession according to existing norms and as judged by the profession itself, and the profession alone). We need to justify the study of literature for reasons literature alone can satisfy. We need to stand up, not for our methodology (doing so, after all, has meant warping that methodology to make it look as much as possible like some kind of science, or being so inscrutable that outsiders can’t tell what we’re doing anyway), but for the poems and novels and plays we take with us into the classroom every day. We need to be arguing, not that studying literature is just another way to do the same things every other discipline does (what university major won’t help you with critical thinking, research, writing, and presentation skills?), but that there are things–valuable things–about literature that you just can’t get any other way.

I’m thinking the way there is through aesthetics, on the one hand, and ethics on the other, and that the pitch should somehow involve a commitment to the importance of cultural memory and cultural critique, to character building and self-reflection, and to the needs as well as the ideals of civic society. If that sounds old-fashioned, I guess I don’t mind, though I’m not sure it needs to be.

In his account of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill famously urges us away from too narrow a notion of the pleasures to be valued under his system:

Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable: we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them.

Whoever supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness- that the superior being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior- confounds the two very different ideas, of happiness, and content. It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

We should similarly urge our administrators away from too narrow an idea of the useful. Our motto could be, “Don’t be a pig.”

Book Reviews

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As it happens, just before I read Peter Stothard’s post about the ‘decline’ of the book review I had finished my weekly browse through the book section of the Globe and Mail and wondered aloud to my husband what it is that makes this, which should in theory be my favourite section of our “national” paper, so unengaging for me week after week. Or, to look at the question from a slightly different angle, what makes me read a review? I don’t pretend to have a theory about the big picture, but I’m a reasonably bookish person, after all. I wonder, if enough of us bookish types went through this mental exercise and wrote about it, if we might be able to provide some suggestions for those poor struggling editors!

Basically, I think there are really only two reasons I read a book review.

The short version:

  1. I’m interested in the book.
  2. I’m interested in the reviewer.

The long version:

I will pretty much always read a review of a book that’s somehow on my radar, a book I’m already interested in. This, however, is a useless principle to guide the editor of a book review section. Given just how many books are published and just how diverse individual readers’ interests and tastes are, it is impossible for a book section to cater to every reader’s idiosyncratic taste on a regular basis. Indeed, from this perspective, we should probably be more surprised when there is a review we want to read than when there isn’t! Further, while it would be nice for me, in a way, if there were a review section that perfectly reflected my existing taste and interests, on the other hand it would discourage me from challenging my taste and trying new things: my reading life would stagnate. Still, choice of books is surely an issue; I was struck by Stothard’s comment that the TLS reviews a lot of books nobody else does, and perhaps the predictable focus of so many mainstream publications on the same ‘best-selling’ titles is one of the problems. Stothard touches on debates about including ‘popular’ titles along with the more seriously (or at least aspirationally) literary; I’m too much of an outsider to the realities of publishing to know for sure, but I wonder if Dan Brown (to give just one example) is worth reviewing in the NYT, not just because, well, because, but because the vast majority of his readers surely don’t care what the NYTimes has to say about his books anyway, while the majority of NYTBR readers don’t care about Dan Brown. But here, I’m just guessing. If I had any suggestions, it would be, aim higher, not wider. If you try to be all things to all people, you become something like the horrible mish-mash that is now CBC Radio 2. People will tune in–or browse your pages–to see if there’s something they like, but they won’t love and value and (most important) fight for you if you don’t stand for anything in particular.

The second reason I’ll read a review is that it is by a reviewer who has caught my interest and earned my respect by his or her critical (or other) work. Given the impossibility (and undesirability) of a review section focusing exclusively on books I already know I want to know more about, I need the lure of good writing and good thinking: a distinct, engaging critical voice. I want a lot less plot summary than I’m usually offered, and a lot more critical reflection on the book, whether it’s providing historical or literary contexts or doing a more thematically-focused close reading. While I can be caught up in a critic’s more personal approach, I generally prefer to read criticism that does not tend towards the autobiographical (as I’ve said before here, I don’t like critical approaches that assume it’s all about the reader). In the past I have pointed to some of the early work of James Wood as exemplary. Here’s a bit of what I wrote about his review of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go:

He also takes Ishiguro’s offering and gives it a different kind of life: the conversation is not over when the book ends, and Ishiguro’s is not the final word. Now we see something that Ishiguro has shown us, or as he has perceived it, and we can talk about it too. Ishiguro has described the novelist’s work as a way of saying “It’s like this, isn’t it? Don’t you see it this way too?” (I’m paraphrasing)–and so when he’s done talking, we see what we think, or say something back. But Wood is also interested in the novel as an art form, in how and why specific kinds of narration, for instance, create certain effects, or generate (or control) affect and emotion. The trained eye sees better, understands the alternatives better. In the mini-series “From the Earth to the Moon,” there’s a wonderful episode in which a geologist is assigned to train the astronauts to collect rock samples from the moon. The crucial step is getting them to see, not just undifferentiated rocks, but specific kinds of rocks that tell their own stories and accrue meaning and significance through their shapes, composition, and location. Critics (any experts, really) help less experienced readers in the same way, telling them some of the things they can look for and why they might be interesting. They train you in appreciation and make you excited about the aesthetic and intellectual experience of reading attentively.

A great review has the effect of bringing something into focus for you, like a microscope bringing out the details on a biologist’s slide. Mind you, this effect is most powerful in retrospect, once you have read the novel for yourself, though a compelling review also gives you a preliminary (not definitive) guide to carry with you on your first reading, a sense of what you might be looking for, or at, against which to test your own perceptions. A good review gives you a lively sense of what it is like to be involved with the book. Strong subjective opinions or idiosyncratic taste are fine– and certainly preferable to the unbearable blandness of something like the Globe and Mail‘s weekly survey of recent crime fiction, which basically tells you over and over that this book is (or, occasionally, is not) a lot like the author’s other books–provided those idiosyncracies do not simply stand as dogmatic and limiting assertions but provide the motivation for searching and self-conscious analysis (not, again, of the critic, but of the book).

As I concede the point about which books are reviewed, then, for me the success or failure of a book review section really hangs on the quality of the writing and thinking it offers. On average, I find the Globe reviews trivial and uninteresting. I wonder about the wisdom of their apparent editorial policy of inviting so many creative writers to review each other’s work. There is such a thing as expertise in criticism, and it does not necessarily coincide with the skills and experience (or interests) of novelists or poets. (On the other hand, as I’m well aware, those with the most expertise about literature, namely academics, can be woefully bad at the journalistic skills of brevity–ahem–and wit, not to mention clarity.) I wonder too if the editors sell their audience short, or if their fundamental mistake or futility is just trying to be all things to all people, trying to find that elusive ‘common reader’ with no distinctly defined tastes or preferences and no patience for the kind of (sometimes excessively) specialized coverage of the TLS.

In any case, I don’t find there is any shortage of good reviewing going on. It’s just that not much of it is going on in newspapers, from what I can tell. I read all of Adam Roberts’s reviews at The Valve, not just out of team spirit, but because even when he writes about books I’ll almost certainly never read, he’s interesting about them (see his recent comments on Wolf Hall, for instance, or on Byatt’s Booker contender The Children’s Book). I’m looking forward to Steve Donoghue’s forthcoming full-length review of Wolf Hall at Open Letters, too, not least because his brief but pithy posts on the excerpts which appeared in the New York Review of Books in the summer were what first put the book on my own radar. Both writers convey a strong sense of their own reading personalities (which are, I think, quite different) while giving me plenty of ideas about the book in question. There are all kinds of smart, interesting people writing about books informally in blogs and more formally in online publications: the downside here is the difficulty of finding the kind of informed, substantial commentary that rewards careful attention, the way the best print criticism also does. I don’t have a suggestion here, except perhaps that print editors should keep exploring online reviewing, as the rest of us do, looking for voices that are distinct and engaging and well-informed. At the very least, they could expand their blogrolls. Bookslut and Maud Newton are not the only games in town.

So, the rest of you? Any ideas about what book review sections could or should do differently? How do you feel about the review section of your local paper–if it even still has one?

Why Books?

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

This post from Sisyphus is timely for me, as I had a meeting recently with a representative from a university press to discuss what kind of monograph might lurk beyond the discrete research and writing projects I have been engaged in lately, and as a result I have been thinking a lot myself about the shape, purpose, and necessity (or not) of academic books. Sisyphus asks,

why is the “gold standard” in literary studies a book for tenure if we are not assigning them in our classes?

I hadn’t thought about monographs in our discipline from quite that angle before, but it’s true that, consistent with what Sisyphus says about other disciplines, I remember being assigned quite a lot of scholarly books to read in their entirety when I was a history student, and doing assignments that were essentially a kind of book report or review. But it would never occur to me to assign more than a fraction of a scholarly book in one of my own undergraduate classes, or, for that matter, in my graduate classes. If I assign anything besides a stand-alone article, it is most likely to be the framing chapter(s) from a book, where the main theoretical or interpretive argument will be laid out, sometimes along with a chapter directly addressing an assigned primary text.

I’m not sure, though, how to connect these observations (keeping in mind, of course, that my practices in this respect may be anomalous) with what we ought to value when it comes time to assess tenure files. Our classroom work typically bears little overt relation to our published work, doesn’t it? Also, as the students doing Sisyphus’s library assignment discovered, however dynamic and engaging we are when we teach, in our books and articles our “academic voice” becomes “difficult, contentious, and completely boring”! That may be one reason why, as has been pointed out in a couple of places recently, even academics hardly read other academics any more.

Another likely cause of our own relative failure to ‘keep up’ with each others’ output, as well as our reluctance (assuming this is a general phenomenon) to assign entire books along with–or, as every syllabus is a zero-sum game–instead of primary texts, may be the massive proliferation, and overwhelming micro-specialization, of academic monographs. No matter how narrowly I define my own research interests, it is physically impossible for me to read all the relevant available material, and as my interests in fact range across periods and disciplines, the labour of choice rapidly becomes overwhelming in itself. Inevitably, it seems to me, the excessive supply degrades the value of any particular book; it becomes hard to justify singling out one (or two, or even three) monographs that really demand and deserve such special notice and extended engagement. This is not to assume that any given monograph is not in fact, on its own terms, valuable, but here’s a not entirely hypothetical case: I’m teaching a graduate seminar next winter on George Eliot. Which entire academic book would you assign in its entirety? My instinct is that the best candidate would be an older book–a critical ‘classic’–because you’d want its range and applicability to be as broad as possible: Barbary Hardy’s The Novels of George Eliot, for instance, or Dorothea Barrett’s Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines. Books published since about 1990 get increasingly specific in their interests–George Eliot and science, or historiography, or empire, or Italy, or music–and thus decreasingly useful in a more general context such as my seminar (though, of course, they would be invaluable to students pursuing presentations or papers on related narrower topics).

The overwhelming number of highly specialized academic monographs was one of the things I wanted to talk to this university press acquisitions editor about. It’s hard not to feel at times as if we should all just stop and ask ourselves what we are doing and why, and whether doing it in book-length manuscripts that may eventually be seen into print only to languish, expensive but unread, on library shelves should really be our goal. The MLA argues for decentering the monograph as “the gold standard” for tenure and promotion, but largely on practical grounds: publishing books is only going to get harder, for reasons that have little to do with the quality of their content. (It may have something to do with the nature of that content, of course, as the intense specialization typical of an academic book guarantees a small market.) If we could do that, though–if we could remove the expectation that junior scholars need to “have a book” to get tenured, not only could we release them from the vice but also liberate ourselves from the book glut. Because let’s face it: how many monographs published in the last two decades are book-length because their arguments “need to be thought through on this level of scope and depth across a lot of pages,” as Sisyphus sums up the usual pro-book argument, and how many for more careerist reasons? The standard model is a theoretical, contextual, or critical framing (the book’s selling point) and then a series of chapters “reading” particular texts from that angle or through that lens. (That’s exactly how my own monograph is structured.) That’s not a terrible way to build a book, but almost inevitably the “readings” chapters lack urgency: they are illustrative, rather than integral or developmental. They show the main idea in practice, and they demonstrate how or why it is an interesting or useful or important idea. But they’re arbitrary, rather than necessary, and they might do just as well as supplementary articles. They might even have more portability and usefulness in article form because they would need their own framing material, perhaps a refined version of the book’s larger argument, and so would work well as assigned readings, whereas in chapter form their specific claims may not be entirely cogent without the explanation offered in the book’s introductory chapters. (Now that I think of it, I do often assign articles that have eventually appeared as book chapters, but I use the stand-alone version, for more or less that reason.)

Lightening up on the book expectation would also remove the corrupting pressure to inflate, not only our prose and our manuscripts, but our claims. Book-length treatments of subjects do require justification, after all: the claim needs to be made that here is something really worthy of time, attention, space, and resources. So we make relatively grandiose claims about the innovation and importance of our work. It’s no use having insight into a particular author or text: you need to propose a revision of a major critical paradigm, or a reconfiguration of traditional literary histories, or a radical new understanding of the importance of some side-angle in a particular writer’s corpus (pickles, anyone?), or otherwise attach what may be a genuine but modest claim to something as big as you dare. You need to make it sound “interesting,” even if that means knowing your reach will exceed your grasp.

The editor I spoke with was firm about the commitment of his press to specialized academic monographs, and we should all be grateful that there are publishers who recognize that some subjects do need to be treated, some arguments made, in long form, and that their value is not defined by the size of the audience they will reach but by their contribution to knowledge and understanding. We’ve all probably been delighted, too, to discover on the shelves hitherto unknown books, maybe books we are the first to sign out, that illuminate a topic about which we have suddenly discovered we want or need to know more. But something’s wrong when “a book” as such is the goal. Shouldn’t we work on a smaller scale until we discover we really can’t explain ourselves without a larger canvas? Shouldn’t a book be a capstone achievement, as it once was, rather than an obligatory and thus often perfunctory professional performance? If enough people keep asking these questions, maybe we can “be the change.”

(cross-posted)

An Unfamiliar Sensation; and, More on Post-Colonial Criticism

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I think it’s called a “lull.”

I’ve just crossed off the last teaching-related task that I can do for now. This afternoon my Mystery and Detective Fiction students are writing their final exam and my Victorian Faith and Doubt papers are due at 4:00. Until these milestones are passed, however, I am free. Free, that is, to work on other things, like my Soueif paper! But a change is as good as a rest, no?

So, about that paper. In between my other recent activities, I’ve been thinking more about post-colonial criticism and why I’ve been assuming that it is a necessary component of this project. Some time ago I asked “whether working on Egyptian novelist writing in a post-colonial context necessitates using post-colonial theory.” The always-helpful Aaron Bady responded that a more productive version of my question might be “how to determine to what extent the meaning of Eliot in Egypt is determined not merely by Eliot herself, but by the meaning of ‘English literature’ in Egypt.” Now that I’ve looked at least a bit more closely at what it means to “use” post-colonial theory (or, properly, to do “post-colonial readings”) I think I understand better the difference between these options. If (though I realize now that this is debatable) a “post-colonial reading” means reading with a specific focus on how the text under consideration is “implicated” in imperialism, then that is not the right angle from which to approach a text like In the Eye of the Sun, which is itself (perhaps) a post-colonial text. If a post-colonial reading is called for in this project, it would presumably be a reading of Middlemarch, in order to see how (or whether) Soueif’s engagement with that novel is an engagement with it on those terms. My own preliminary sense of In the Eye of the Sun is that this is not what it is doing with Middlemarch–but I can’t be sure unless I can grasp what a post-colonial interpretation of Middlemarch might entail, so there is a reason to continue my exploration of this theoretical approach. Priority reading, then: Nancy Henry’s George Eliot and the British Empire and Patrick Brantlinger’s new volume Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies. I’ve spent some time with Henry’s book before and recall it focusing primarily on Daniel Deronda. So far I’m not aware of any specifcially post-colonial reading of Middlemarch.

Returning to Aaron’s reformulated question, though, about the meaning of ‘English literature’ in Egypt, this turns out to be quite an interesting question to think about, and not an easy one to answer. A slight refinement of it might be, what does English literature in general, and Middlemarch in particular, mean to Soueif–or, what does English literature in general, and Middlemarch in particular, mean in In the Eye of the Sun? What does it mean for an Egyptian novelist to invoke this novel as a touchstone in a novel about an Egyptian woman studying English literature in Egypt and then in England? What interpretive freight does Middlemarch carry here? There is a textual dimension to these questions (what is actually said about literature, for instance, or about Middlemarch). But there’s a contextual dimension too, such as the conditions by which English becomes a subject of study in Egyptian universities in the first place, so that Soueif herself, as well as her character Asya, has anything to do with Middlemarch at all. Here too, colonialism is clearly a factor. So far, I haven’t found much scholarship addressing the history of English studies in Egypt; more attention has gone to English studies in India, such as Guari Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest, which emphasizes the role of literary studies in “strengthen[ing] Western hegemony” and imperial control. I was prompted by Amardeep Singh’s extremely clear and helpful comments here to order Priya Joshi’s In Another Country (on sale now at Columbia UP, in case you are interested), but I think there too the focus is on India. I’ve found one book on the history of Cairo University, Donald Reid’s Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt, which gives some useful insights into the competing imperial impulses and nationalisms that shaped the formation of that institution. English studies get fairly brief mention, though what is there is certainly interesting. For instance, did you know that Robert Graves taught at what was then the Egyptian University for a while, or that Jehan Sadat’s PhD thesis was on “the influence of nineteenth-century English romanticism on twentieth-century Egyptian writing” (219)? Reid’s explanations of the Egyptian educational system more generally, as well as his account of the “Islamist challenges” of the 1970s and 1980s, certainly help place Asya’s experiences in the novel for me, especially her uncomfortable encounters with veiled students on her return to the university after her years abroad (I learned, for instance, that in 1981 Sadat imposed a ban on students wearing the niqab, a ban which was overturned in 1988). More specific analysis of the curriculum of English studies, or the value attached to it, or its ideological implications in a specifically Egyptian context I haven’t yet found. In fact, at this point it seems to me that English-Egyptian relations have received far less scholarly attention than English-Indian relations, at least in the areas where such scholarship would overlap with literary scholarship. I may learn otherwise as my research continues, but if I’m right about this, that in itself is kind of interesting. In the meantime, I can consider what has been said about English literature in India to see what insights there might seem portable to my own context. Again, I have a preliminary sense that In the Eye of the Sun is not setting English literature up as an antagonist or ‘problematizing’ English studies on political or nationalistic grounds, but everything I learn about how and why someone in Egypt would be reading Middlemarch is helfpul to my thinking. Though in exploring these issues I will be thinking about relationships between a former colonial power and a former colony, I don’t believe that probing these questions qualifies as doing “post-colonial criticism.”

One final thought about all of this: I really do think one of the reasons I have been worrying about post-colonial criticism even though it’s not clear to me that its concerns are my concerns, is anxiety about the expectation that Soueif’s novel is best understood as a post-colonial critique of Middlemarch–that I will get questions from the floor along those lines, for instance, and not know how to answer them. Even if those questions might represent a kind of unwarranted knee-jerk assumption about how Victorian novels always already function in a post-colonial context, there I’d be fumbling the question about Said or Homi Bhaba or whatever and my protestations that the question is a sort of category mistake would just make me look either ignorant or evasive. The work I’m doing right now may turn out to be largely irrelevant to the arguments I ultimately make about In the Eye of the Sun, but at least I will be better prepared to explain why I have done the project I have done, and not something else.

And now, off to invigilate my exam and (circumstances permitting) read Viswanathan.

Exploring Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies

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One of the things I need to do (or at least think I need to do) for my work on Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun is enhance my understanding of post-colonial theory. My own interests in the novel are rather different than those I take to be the usual concerns of post-colonial criticism, but given the Anglo-Egyptian contexts of the novel and its author, I know I need to give some thought to ways they might be engaging with Egypt’s colonial history, through the novel’s portrayal of Egyptian history and politics, and also through the role played in the novel by Asya’s literary studies and by Soueif’s own intertextual allusions, particularly to George Eliot. Surprisingly, perhaps, I have muddled along this far in my professional life without paying a lot of attention to post-colonial theory: I have always had plenty to read in the areas of my own research and writing, though I have made occasional forays, mostly for teaching purposes, into specific debates, such as those over post-colonial readings of Jane Eyre. But I have never tried in any systematic way to map out this field–and I don’t intend to do so now, either, as I do know enough to be aware just how complex, varied, and wide-ranging it is. Still, I feel I need to orient myself (so to speak!) well enough that I can consider how or if to draw on the insights of post-colonial theorists to explain what I think Soueif is up to in her novel. More particularly, I have a tentative working hypothesis that Soueif is actually offering a kind of counter-argument to some of the assumptions of post-colonial theory, particularly about the ways the Victorian novel is typically treated as “a vehicle for imperial authority”: to test or develop this hypothesis, I need to improve my fluency in this discourse.

As a first step, I have been working my way through the handy volume Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, by Helen Tiffen, Gareth Griffiths and Bill Ashcroft (the source of the quotation near the end of the previous paragraph). I feel a little anxious about how far to rely on this book, because I don’t bring to it enough independent ideas about what I am rapidly learning are vexed concepts to know if its explanations are neutral or tendentious. It is definitely helping me get started, though, just by identifying and defining terms I have heard (and even used) without always knowing exactly their significance or ramifications. Thanks to my Sony Reader, I now have a handy personalized index to terms that seem especially likely to prove relevant to my thinking about In the Eye of the Sun. One of the first ones I explored, for instance, was “hybridity,” a term which has been used quite a bit by critics to describe Soueif’s Anglo-Egyptian identity. It does seem to mean pretty much what I thought it did (their starting definition is “the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization,” and they go on to outline its place in the work of Bakhtin and Bhabha particularly). What I hadn’t known was that it was a controversial notion if used to “stress mutuality,” which has been seen to minimize “oppositionality.” The authors touch on other complications of the term as well, such as Robert Young’s concern that “hybridity” was commonly used “in imperial and colonial discourse in negative accounts of the union of disparate races.” I did want to use the term to summon up a positive, creative relationship between the English and the Egyptian elements of the novel; now I’m aware that if I do so, I may have to defend that usage, and I have some ideas about where to look as I think that problem through. That’s useful.

I’ve brushed up on some other terms too, including liminality, contrapuntal reading, (af)filiation, and rhizome, and reviewed their explanations of the really big concepts, such as Orientalism, imperialism, and post-colonialism (learning in the process that there is a whole debate about whether or not to hyphenate). Though the extent and intricacy of the ‘jargon’ involved is still somewhat alienating to me, it’s clear that for some of the questions I’m going to want (or need) to address, this specialized vocabulary will help me do so with greater precision, whether in my own analysis or in response to questions others might have for me–when I present my first version of the paper at a conference in May, for instance.

One negative effect of reading this glossary, though, has been to confirm my prejudice against post-colonial readings because built into their very methodology is an assumption about the outcome of the reading: built into the definition of both contrapuntal and post-colonial readings here is a pre-determined conclusion about what any particular text will reveal:

contrapuntal reading: A term coined by Edward Said to describe a way of reading the texts of English literature so as to reveal their deep implication in imperialism and the colonial process.

post-colonial reading: A way of reading and rereading texts . . . to draw deliberate attention to the profound and inescapable effects of colonization on literary production. . . . It is a form of deconstructive reading . . . which demonstrates the extent to which the text contradicts its underlying assumptions . . . and reveals its (often unwitting) colonialist ideologies and processes.

By these definitions, post-colonial readings are highly tendentious, even question-begging: here we have a critical method that says we don’t really need to read the book to know what it says or does, and that preemptively rules out the possibility that a given text might be in a different–perhaps an oppositional–relationship to “colonialist ideologies and processes.” The world “implication” is also the kind of weasel word that drives me crazy: it seems to imply some kind of complicity, but without actually attributing agency or blame. I’m reminded of Derek Attridge’s complaint, in the exchange with Henry Staten that I wrote about a little while ago that sometimes in the rush to interpretation we fail to “respond accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work.” These definitions of post-colonial reading seem to me models for sausage-grinder criticism: put in any Victorian novel, for instance, turn the handle, and it comes out in the same shape (and casing) as any other one.

I’d be interested to know (as I’m sure many of you are wiser in the ways of this critical field than I) first, if the definitions I’ve quoted from this particular reference work seem reasonably reliable, at least as introductions to what these terms mean and how they are used (or would you recommend another source?), and second, if you have any response to my objection about criticism that assumes its conclusions even before it begins, and/or could steer me towards any good exchanges about this (perceived) problem among people working in post-colonial studies. (I am aware of–and will soon be re-reading–Erin O’Connor’s provocative essay “Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism” (and the responses to it) in Victorian Studies.)

Weak Reading; or, That’s Not What It’s About

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A while back Dan Green posted a link to this interesting exchange between Derek Attridge and Henry Staten. I’m attracted by the idea of “weak” or “minimal” reading they discuss, because it seems related to my own reservations about some tendencies of academic literary criticism. Here’s an excerpt from Attridge’s introduction:

I’ve been trying for a while to articulate an understanding of the literary critic’s task which rests on a notion of responsibility, derived in large part from Derrida and Levinas, or, more accurately, Derrida’s recasting of Levinas’s thought, one aspect of which is an emphasis on the importance of what I’ve called variously a “literal” or “weak” reading. That is to say, I’ve become increasingly troubled by the effects of the enormous power inherent in the techniques of literary criticism at our disposal today, including techniques of formal analysis, ideology critique, allusion hunting, genetic tracing, historical contextualization, and biographical research. . . .

The notion that it is smarter to read “against the grain” rather than to do what one can to respond accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work can compound this disregard of what is truly important. This is not to say that the use of literary works as illustrations of historical conditions or ideological formations (including abhorrent ones) is invalid or reprehensible; just that to do so is not to treat the works in question as literature. . . .

I’m not (yet) familiar with the other work in which Attridge develops this notion of critical responsibility or the value (or even obligation) of responding “accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work.” But so far it sounds as if his work would help me articulate my own dissatisfaction with the often sizable gap between what literary texts themselves are primarily concerned with–the conversation they are consciously having with their readers–and what we talk about when we talk about them in our criticism. (I discuss this concern briefly, and a bit flippantly, here in the context of a classic deconstructive reading of Middlemarch, and here in a discussion of Denis Donoghue’s The Practice of Reading, to give a couple of examples, and I’ve pointed to James Wood and Edward Dowden as critics who can [though, in Wood’s case, may not always] exemplify what it means to focus on what is “truly important” by the standards of the text itself.) At stake, I think, is the issue a friend with a library science background has told me is called in his world, perhaps unofficially, “aboutness.” In determining the appropriate way to catalogue a book, a decision must be made (note the bureaucratic passive voice) regarding its central identity or “aboutness”: where it belongs depends on what is it ultimately about. Another useful concept might be what Henry James called the author’s “donnee,” or Donoghue simply calls the text’s “theme”–though Donoghue emphasizes that at issue is the text’s theme, not the critic’s (he protests, regarding recent criticism of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” that “Yeats is not allowed to have his theme: he must be writing about something else”). Often, when hearing or reading examples of recent critical analysis, I find myself thinking, “very clever, but that’s not what the book is about!”* So at least initially, I like the idea of rigorously minimal reading.

But a ‘weak reading’ movement would run into trouble pretty quickly, because a text’s own “theme” is rarely obvious–which is the challenge Attridge and Staten confront in the bulk of their discussion. They attempt a ‘minimal’ reading of Blake’s “The Sick Rose”; Attridge proposes “talking about what [they] take to be obvious (as well as what a concern with the obvious makes possible and perhaps what it excludes),” to which Staten adds the clarification (or qualification) that “if something is obvious, then it must be so not just to me but to others as well, if not initially, then with a bit of pointing out.” But, as every English professor knows, the devil is in the details: what’s obvious is very much a result of one’s experience and preparation. Attridge and Staten seem to have put themselves at a disadvantage in this experiment by starting with a poem that is, as Staten says, “a very un-obvious poem.” Really, the only obvious thing about it to me is precisely its overt reaching at symbolic resonance. The moves in their attempt to fix some stably obvious points certainly demonstrate that weak reading requires considerable effort:

DA: Now you may say that to read the rose as a symbol of beauty, perfection, etc. is to leave the surface, and the garden plant, and therefore the realm of the obvious, to enter the depths about which there cannot be general agreement.

HS: Yes.

DA: But don’t these connotations constitute an aspect of the generally agreed meaning of the word rose? Or perhaps we need to distinguish between the obvious and the more recherché aspects of the word’s symbolic force. Of the associations I mentioned, beauty, perfection and love are surely not much less general than the literal botanical meaning.HS: There are many associations that a word like “rose” can potentially arouse; but which of these associations are in fact activated within a specific poem, in a way that we actually need to bring out in order to get the bold, sharp outlines of the poem’s action? Perfection doesn’t seem to me to play a significant role in the major dynamic of “The Sick Rose”—a dynamic you’ve described so well—and therefore I would say this meaning is not saliently activated here (certainly not at the level of what is or can become obvious). The rose is sick, and sickness doesn’t attack perfection as such, it attacks health. Beauty is no doubt there in some way, since flowers in general have this connotation; but even beauty plays no direct role in the drama of the poem; “bed of crimson joy” suggests a kind of exuberant organic vitality in the rose more than it does its beauty. The drama foregrounds the joyous vitality of the rose, on the one hand, and its vulnerability to the worm, on the other hand; and in this connection the associative resonance would be, rather, with the softness of rose petals, so easily crushed, don’t you think? I don’t claim that this association is obvious; it’s a bit in the background. But it’s more directly linked to the manifest action of the poem than are beauty or perfection.

I wonder if their work would have been easier or harder if they had chosen a more literal example for their case study.

*One phenomenon with which anyone in literary studies is certainly familiar, for instance, is the interpretive strategy by which something seemingly incidental in the text is seized upon and ‘discovered’ to have great interpretive significance–usually because it can be read symptomatically, helping turn the text, as Attridge says, into an “illustration[] of historical conditions or ideological formations.”Here’s a mildly parodic (but fairly accurate) example of how it works. Suppose the text is a 19th-century realist novel–say, Barchester Towers, which I happen to be reading now. Imagine there’s a scene with a dinner party at which pickles are served. Now, the immediate action of Barchester Towers has everything to do with the internecine rivalries of English clergyman and the moral and social crises flowing from them, and nothing to do with pickles, but now that we have noticed the pickles, it becomes irresistible to follow up on them. Lo and behold, nobody has done pickles yet (though I could give you quite a list of what has been done). So we produce a pickled reading. What are the cultural implications of pickles? Who could afford them, and who could not? Were pickling techniques perhaps learned abroad, maybe in the chutney-producing regions of the eastern empire? Or maybe pickling was once a cottage industry and has now been industrialized. We learn all about these issues and make that jar on the table resonate with all the socio-economic and cultural meanings we have uncovered. Though the pickles seemed so incidental, now we realize how much work they are doing, sitting there on the table. (Who among us has not heard or read or written umpteen versions of this paper?) And perhaps we are right to bring this out–after all, for whatever known or felt reason, Trollope saw fit to put pickles there and not, say, oysters or potatoes. But do we really understand more about Barchester Towers, or just more about pickles–not in themselves, but as symptoms of industrialism, colonialism, or bourgeois taste in condiments? It’s not that our pickle paper might not be interesting or, indeed, accurate in all the conclusions it draws about the symptomatic or semiotic or other significance of the pickles. But it’s hard not to feel somehow that such an analysis misses the point of the book and thus has a certain intrinsic irrelevance.

Posner on the “Decline of Literary Criticism”

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In the most recent issue of Philosophy and Literature, Richard Posner reviews Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (discussed previously here):

The problem with “criticism conceived as magistrate”—the problem that McDonald not only does not solve, but does not acknowledge—is that there are no objective criteria of aesthetic distinction. The reason is that there is nothing that all great works of literature have in common but lesser works of literature do not. When critics propose criteria that they think will distinguish the great from the non-great, they end up narrowing the canon of great literature in arbitrary ways, as T. S. Eliot attempted to do with Milton and Shelley. There is no need to develop a litmus test for great literature. Critics can point to the features of literary works that they like or dislike without assuming the authority to tell people what they should read. And Croce was right: you don’t need evaluative critics in order to have a “canon” of great literature. The canon evolves in Darwinian fashion; writers compete, and the works that are best adapted to the cultural environment flourish.

I fear that McDonald has succumbed to the cliché that the enemy of my enemy is my friend: the cultural studies crowd is against evaluative criticism, so McDonald is for it, provided it is objective—but he does not show how literary criticism can be objective. But the problem is not that modern-day literary criticism is not evaluative; it is that literary criticism aimed at increasing the readership of great literature has been displaced by literary theory, on the one hand, and by literary scholarship for literary scholars only . . . on the other hand.

Though I might take issue with some of Posner’s specific points, I agree with him that “the dearth of evaluative criticism” is not what accounts for the diminished significance of literary criticism. He concludes that “If there were less pretentious literary theory and no evaluative criticism, but more readable literary criticism in the style of Cleanth Brooks or F. R. Leavis, the literary culture would be in a lot better shape than it is.” I’ve been reading a fair number of books that attempt to offer “readable literary criticism“; it’s not that such books aren’t out there, but perhaps that often they aren’t often as intellectually challenging or rhetorically exhilirating as the examples Posner gives–often they seem to me to underestimate their intendend audience. The two books I’m reviewing on the 19th-century novel (Case & Shaw and Levine) are actually pretty good options of this kind, but they are overtly aimed at a student audience and so unlikely, I’m guessing, to reach very far out into the world. I admit, “readable literary criticism” with the effects Posner describes (work that “quickens” the reader’s interest in reading literary works) is pretty much the kind I would like to write one day… “literary criticism that helps people understand and enjoy serious literature,” which is why the kinds of debates he and McDonald are engaged in are of such interest to me.