Why Books?

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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.

This Week in My Classes (April 9, 2009)

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This was our last week of classes for the term. Though it is a relief to be done with the insistent pressure to be ready for the next class meeting (an anxiety that kicks in for me about as soon as I walk out of the classroom), in its own way the next phase is also pretty tiring. For instance, I have about 25 papers left in my half of the batch from Mystery and Detective Fiction, and I hope to return them at the exam on Tuesday, which didn’t seem unrealistic until it really sank in that this is a four-day weekend, meaning concentrated quiet time will be sparse until at least 9 p.m., by which time my mental functioning has, shall we say, diminished. Once that set of papers goes back, the exams come in, as do the 21 papers for the Faith and Doubt seminar–but the latter should be relatively interesting and enjoyable to work through, not least because the students already submitted (and received detailed comments on) proposals. It’s a lot to get done, and in addition I am accutely (!) aware that time is running out to get a draft of the Soueif paper together to present at ACCUTE in May. (What am I doing writing this post, then, you ask? Well, you see, it has been a long day already, and I have a cold. You can’t mark papers under those conditions: you need a shred of generosity remaining so you don’t snark too cruelly when someone writes about [real example] “hardnosed” instead of “hardboiled” detection.)

The last two weeks of both classes seemed to go well enough. I wish the energy had been higher all term in Faith and Doubt. It’s no surprise that Jude the Obscure did not bring us to a rousing conclusion, though as usual the novel proved provocative enough to stimulate some good discussion, especially about Sue. I’m not sure how much of this is my fault (as several class members have studied the novel with me before) but the consensus seemed to be that she is thoroughly annoying, which is certainly my own reaction to her. The problem, of course, is that Jude adores her–idealizes her, even. Is this just another of his follies (Jude “Fawley,” get it?), like his early worship of Phillotson and his dreams about Christminster? Is she to him as, say, Amelia is to Dobbin, unworthy of the beauty and endurance of his love? Or is she some kind of ideal form of intellectual femininity freed from the animality of sex (the “not-Arabella”) and yet unable to escape the mundane realities of earthly relationships? Are we too supposed to yearn for her, and thus for the happy fulfilment of their love? The novel is sad either way, but it’s only really tragic if what Sue and Jude struggle for would be worth having, and the novel as a whole does seem to put its weight behind them, especially towards the end when even Widow Edlin asserts the truth of their illegitimate marriage over Sue’s legal (but appalling) union with Phillotson. Jude is so depressing I’d never teach it again, except that (a) it’s always a hit, (b) its themes resonate really well with those of other novels I teach, and (c) I don’t really look forward to exploring other Hardy options. I’ve assigned Tess a couple of times in seminars but never lectured on it; it’s equally depressing. Still, maybe a change would be as good as a rest. As part of the final group presentation, we got to play “Survivor: Christminster Edition,” which was fun, and appropriately ruthless (no help allowed–because after all, “nobody did come, because nobody does”).

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we ended with City of Glass. I had hoped that working it up for teaching would temper my initial reaction. It did, somewhat. Given the context of the course, we mostly discussed it as an “anti-detective novel,” examining the ideas put forward via Quinn and his pseudonymous work as mystery novelist William Wilson about reading and writing detective fiction, and then the ways Quinn’s adventures as detective Paul Auster undermine the assumptions of certainty and meaning typically associated with the genre. For instance, with our other books we had talked quite a bit about the significance of objects as clues (sometimes comparing this fairly literal deployment with the “literary” use of objects as symbols): in City of Glass the expectation that one way or another objects or incidents (or characters) will be replete with meaning and cohere, over the course of the story, into a revealing pattern is pretty obviously frustrated. We touched (a bit lightly–as it’s not really that kind of course) on some underlying philosophical or theoretical ideas, such as poststructuralist critiques of the idea of a unified self, or slippages between signifieds and signifiers, or metaphysical problems about naming and identity (e.g. through Auster’s example of the malfunctioning umbrella). In some interviews I turned up, Auster has rejected the idea that he writes cerebrally, claiming that his books are about the music of language. Uh huh. I also invited us to look back across our earlier readings and see how far they correspond to the fairly reductive view Quinn gives of detective fiction. In their own ways, a number of them also unsettle supposed certainties–if not metaphysical, then certainly moral and epistemological. I don’t know how successful an addition the novel was to the course. I know already that a few students really liked it but others disliked it intensely, but then popularity is not always the best measure of pedagogical value. It certainly met my goal of introducing something very different from the other readings, and it challenged me intellectually, which is always a good thing for a teacher. I felt a bit uncertain working with it, but I’ll do better the second time (tune in next April for a full report…). Though I won’t know until I see the course evaluations later on whether the students felt the same way, I thought that overall the course went well this time, better than last year. Attendance was good, a lot of students were willing to put their hands up and pitch in with good ideas, they were very cooperative with group exercises–the energy in the room almost always seemed positive. I hope they felt that too.

What lies ahead? I’m not teaching this summer, which I regret a bit, as I always enjoy summer classes–but I think it was the right decision, as I need to sort out the various strands of my research. I’m also taking a real holiday, a trip to England, for the first time since 1986. I’m very excited about this! We are going just to Oxford (where my little hotel is directly across from Balliol) and London, so we will be able to concentrate our energy rather than rushing all over the place. Then here’s my teaching line-up for 2009-10:

Fall:

The Nineteenth-Century British Novel from Dickens to Hardy

Victorian Sensations

Winter:

British Literature From 1800

Mystery and Detective Fiction

George Eliot

I am thinking that I will ‘blog my teaching’ more selectively or in a different way next year, especially as some of these courses are ones I have covered before, if in slightly different versions. I still feel about this exercise, though, much as I did last year: it is at once a useful supplement to and a valuable record of the activity that takes up most of my professional time and energy.

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns: “A Man’s Accusing Finger Always Finds a Woman”

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It seems almost trivial to comment on A Thousand Splendid Suns as a novel with this story in the headlines. (Not incidentally, I am infuriated at the tepid journalistic standards underwriting the description of the new law as one that “critics say would severely undermine women’s rights”–it does undermine women’s rights–I’m pretty sure that the main difference between the law’s “critics” and its proponents is simply whether they are fine with that or not–is this dodgy phrasing in the interests of some flawed idea of objectivity in reporting?)

A Thousand Splendid Suns is not an outstanding novel qua novel; there’s nothing stylistically breathtaking or formally innovative about it. The inevitable comparison for me is to The Swallows of Kabul, which is more artful, if less far-reaching in its scope. But Swallows also partakes somewhat of the genre of the fable or parable, which changes our readerly relationship to it: it used its historical and political contexts more delicately. Hosseini’s novel, in contrast, seems extraordinarily grounded, from its detailed descriptions of the landscapes and cityscapes of Afghanistan to its careful chronicling of the shifting of power among nations, factions, and individuals. Though at times I felt the mechanisms of the novel turning too clearly (as I also felt when reading The Kite Runner), it is nonetheless is an absolutely harrowing read. I finished it feeling equal parts enraged and heartbroken. There is perhaps something manipulative in the relentless movement of the novel from bad to worse and worse again, but the suffering of the individual characters is convincingly shown to be part of broader contexts. Unlike, for example, Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue, which is also harrowing in its account of spousal abuse but limited in its historical analysis and contextualization, A Thousand Splendid Suns shows the social and cultural–and, ultimately, political–structures that support the devaluation, degradation, and violence endured by Mariam and Laila. The novel performs superbly one of the things fiction has done so well and vitally since at least the nineteenth century, with novels like Oliver Twist or Mary Barton: it puts a human face on systematic failures and abuses, ensuring that abstractions such as “severely undermining women’s human rights” get, as it were, fleshed out. Here’s the slightly laboured expository summary Hosseini gives, for instance, of the changes after the takeover of Kabul by the Mujahideen:

The freedoms and opportunities that women had enjoyed between 1978 and 1992 were a thing of the past now–Laila could still remember Babi saying of those years of communist rule, It’s a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan, Laila. Since the Mujahideen takeover in April 1992, Afghanistan’s name had been changed to the Islamic State of Afghanistan. The Supreme Court under Rabbani was filled now with hardliner mullahs who did away with the communist-era decrees that empowered women and instead passed rulings based on Shari’a, strict Islamic laws that ordered women to cover, forbade their travel without a male relative, punished adultery with stoning.

Dry, perhaps, despite the punitive implications of what he’s describing, and I realize too that there are risks (both artistic and factual) in presenting as well as receiving a novel in too documentary a spirit. But those implications are rapidly given meaning by, for instance, the scenes following the abortive attempt of Mariam and Laila to leave the country (and their abusive husband) (apologies for the spoiler):

“What does it matter to you to let a mere two women go? What’s the harm in releasing us? We are not criminals.”

“I can’t.” [says the officer who sends them back]

“I beg you, please.”

“It’s a matter of qanoon, hamshira, a matter of law. . . . It is my responsibility, you see, to maintain order.”

In spite of her distraught state, Laila almost laughed. She was stunned that he’d used that word in the face of all that the Mujahideen factions had done–the murders, the lootings, the rapes, the tortures, the executions, the bombings. . . .

“If you send us back,” she said instead, “there is no saying what he will do to us.”

She could see the effort it took him to keep his eyes from shifting. “What a man does in his own home is his business.”

“What about the law then, Officer Rahman?” Tears of rage stung her eyes. “Will you be there to maintain order?”

“As a matter of policy, we do not interfere with private family matters, hamshira.”

“Of course you don’t. When it benefits the man. And isn’t this a ‘private family matter,’ as you say? Isn’t it?”

The women are cruelly beaten and confined on their return “home,” and when their husband releases them, starving and broken, they and he know the truth of his words: “You try this again and I will find you. I swear on the Prophet’s name that I will find you. And, when I do, there isn’t a court in this godforsaken country that will hold me accountable for what I will do.”

When the Taliban move in just a page later, the control they assert over women’s conduct and liberties is “only” an extreme form of what we have already seen, transferring completely to the public sphere what has been considered acceptable already in the household–namely, the horrors inflicted on women by men who cannot, or will not, be held accountable:

Attention women:

You will stay inside your home at all times. . . If you go outside, you must be accompanied by a mahram, a male relative. If you are caught alone on the street, you will be beaten and sent home.

You will not, under any circumstances, show your face. You will cover with burqa when outside. If you do not, you will be severely beaten. . . .

You will not laugh in public. If you do, you will be beaten. . . .

Girls are forbidden from attending school. All schools for girls will be closed immediately.

The novel ends not long after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. That the return of power and influence to the warlords, among other things, makes this intervention a mixed blessing to the people of the country is certainly one of Hosseini’s points, but so is the relief it brings to Afghanistan’s women from the insupportable injustices and cruelties perpetrated against them for far too long. What a shame, we might think, that the form of domestic terrorism many of them endured on a daily basis was not in itself reason to invade. (For a related argument along these lines, see Pamela Bone’s essay “They Don’t Know One Little Thing” in this volume.)

I note that the new Afghan law referred to above is described as a”family” law; among its provisions is one that forbids Shia women to leave home without their husbands’ permission. This is a concession to just that kind of genuinely “domestic” terrorism. Of course, one of the cornerstones of the last two centuries of feminist activism in the west has been the insistence that the family space is a political space, that essential to women’s full and equal participation in the human community is dismantling both implicit and explicit assumptions about power and control within the domestic sphere. In her powerful essay “Wife Torture in England” (found here, for instance), Victorian feminist Frances Power Cobbe notes that one of the chief obstacles to protecting women from domestic violence was the conviction of the British husband (supported, of course, by many branches of both law and society in the nineteenth century) that his wife was his property (“and may I not do what I like with my own?” she paraphrases the defense against the horrific crimes against women she reports). That was in 1868. Though nobody could say spousal abuse is a solved problem in the west, or that specific as well as systemic injustices don’t remain, at least (and this is no small accomplishment) we no longer treat women’s fundamental human rights as negotiable. In law, in principle, and to a large extent in practice, we have won that battle. I hope our national leaders (male, most of them) have the balls to fight it on behalf of all of the women in Afghanistan. The CBC report says the new law “only” affects 15% of the population. Hosseini’s novel reminds us (as if we could forget) that every woman in that 15% has a name, a story, and the right to leave her house or say no to her husband–no matter what passes for a “family” law or private matter.

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.)

Miscellaneous Reading Updates

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I haven’t been doing well blogging my reading lately. Here are some brief comments on recent selections.

I had high expectations for Graham Swift’s Waterland. Before I read it, in fact, it was a leading contender for my upcoming survey course on “British Literature Since 1800,” for which I figure I can asssign a maximum of two novels, one Victorian (of course!) and one modern or contemporary. As I’m leaning towards Dickens (of course!) for the Victorian novel, I thought, from what I’d heard about it, that Waterland might make a great pairing with Great Expectations. But I was quite disappointed in the novel. Conceptually, it seemed very dated, for one thing: all that historiographical metafiction stuff felt really innovative in the 1980s but now seems to belabour the obvious (and I should know from obvious in this area, as I wrote both my undergraduate honours thesis and my Ph.D. thesis on relationships between history and fiction as narratives). I found the whole “wow he has a really big penis” plot extremely tedious, the family saga stuff uncompelling, and though I can see lots of ways the watery elements lend themselves to metaphorical play, I just wasn’t drawn in enough to want to think it through. This novel has been so widely and highly praised that I’m prepared to assume the fault lies in my reading, not the book, but there we are, or at least there I am.

I was also disappointed in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, though there at least I did not have such great expectations. The narration is all very smoothly handled, and I thought the ambiguities of the set-up were clever–it does become suspenseful as you try to gage who the listener might actually be and just what purpose underlies the speaker’s story-telling. But the absolutely crucial part, the moment in which the narrator turns towards not just fundamentalism but (or so we are led to believe) active hostility towards the U.S., or “the west,” seemed to be wholly unearned by what came before: the smile on September 11 does shock the narrator himself, but much of the rest of the novel seemed like retroactive justification for it. The edition I read made comparisons to The Remains of the Day, but the developing self-awareness there is far more convincingly supported by the accidental revelations we receive along the way.

I’ve been trying to read Midnight’s Children. I’m bored by it! It’s too digressive, too full of extraneous descriptions (yes, I know, I love Dickens). It lacks momentum. Again, my problem, no doubt, not the novel’s. I’ll keep trying. But I needed to be reading something for myself that I enjoyed, so I’ve started Ann Patchett’s Run. I’m liking it so far, though it is certainly not capturing my reader’s imagination the way Bel Canto did.

I’ve also been reading more on my Sony Reader. Though I am still a bit disappointed that you have to choose your reading location a bit carefully, I do find that in the right conditions, it is very easy to read on, and I really like the bookmarking and annotating functions. I’ve just gone through a glossary of terms in post-colonial criticism (sounds like fun, doesn’t it?) and I’ve marked it up so I can quite easily find the bits that I think will be helpful in my analysis of Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun. I am reading a book on Islam and feminism now. I definitely like being able to carry a range of books with me, as I shuttle between home and office all the time and am always debating what to carry along in case I get the chance to squeeze in a little research-related reading. I can certainly imagine reaching a point where it seems annoying that a book is “only” on my shelf somewhere and not on my handy machine.

This Week (and Last) in My Classes (March 24, 2009)

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In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we have been working on examples of the police procedural, including short stories by Ed McBain, Peter Robinson, and Ian Rankin. Now we are nearly done with our discussion of Rankin’s Knots and Crosses. I initially chose this novel for this course because I admire the quality of Rankin’s writing and have generally gone with the first in a series, to avoid the sense that I need to fill in a lot of back story on the detective’s development. I have kept it on the list because I enjoy its self-conscious literary and gothic elements and the way it doesn’t really fit the conventions of the procedural. It also deals with themes about masculinity, brotherhood (especially as nurtured–or forced–through the army and the police force), and uneasy relationships between male sexuality and violence. In these ways I feel it provides a good complement to, say, Grafton’s ‘A’ is for Alibi (though in a very different register)–which also explores sex and violence but as linked through conventional romantic fantasies, and considered from the perspective of a female protagonist struggling to reconcile her own sexual desires with her autonomy. Knots and Crosses is also short (Rankin’s books get both better and much, much longer) and neatly structured (almost too neatly, I now think). In other words, it’s a pretty good teaching text. This year, though, I find I’m a bit tired of it. It’s creepy, for one thing (students have remarked this in past years as well), and there are signs in it of Rankin’s relative inexperience as a novelist (for instance, what I consider problems in his handling of point of view, such as shifting occasionally to the perspective of the serial killer or of one of his victims–this kind of thing can be done well, but here seems primarily aimed at increasing suspense, which I find manipulative if it doesn’t also serve some larger idea or balance). Especially since I think I’m going to concede the argument against An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (routinely an unpopular text, though one of the few books on the reading list that I like just as a book to read), I may consider either a longer P. D. James or a longer Rankin to represent the procedural. I’m tempted by Fleshmarket Close, but then a 400+ pager near the end of term might sink my evaluations altogether….

In Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt last week it was a small sampling of Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne, and Christina Rossetti. CR is the author of a couple of my favourite poems, including this one:

Echo

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope and love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brim-full of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death;
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

It’s the sound and feeling of the words here that I respond to here, as much as, or more than, anything the poem is specifically saying. For the class, we read a selection of her religious poetry (I know, one way or another it can all be read as religious)–“Up-Hill,” “A Better Resurrection,” “The Three Enemies,” and a couple of others, and then “Goblin Market,” always fun to read and provoking to interpret. For today and Wednesday it’s Hopkins (faith today, with “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” and “Pied Beauty,” and doubt next time, with some of the ‘terrible’ sonnets). So a lot of our discussions over the past few classes have turned on relationships between aesthetic and sensual responses to the world and spiritual ideas and feelings.

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.

This Week in My Classes (March 10, 2009)

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In Mystery and Detective Fiction, it’s time for ‘A’ is for Alibi. I have fun with this one, putting as much interpretive pressure on it as I can to test our Reverse Thurber principle (in our very first reading for the course, “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” he shows it can be comical to read ‘real’ literature as detective fiction, while we turn the tables and read genre fiction as seriously as we would read MacBeth) . Will any of these novels collapse under the pressure? I’m helped a lot in this case by the fun Grafton is having playing with hard-boiled detective conventions as well as gothic and romance. That kind of self-consciousness is a critic’s good friend. I’ve been emphasizing the novel’s chronology, which places the story in the context of changes in gender politics and roles, particularly within marriage: the victim’s first wife marries him in 1957; they are divorced in 1970 (leaving her with bitter memories of her life as a Barbie doll); he is found dead in 1974 and his second wife is accused of the murder. Though she hires Kinsey Millhone to prove her innocence, she too recalls the deceased as controlling. I proposed last class that the poor fellow is doubly victimized, not only as the actual murder victim, but as the scapegoat for patriarchy. How much sympathy, if any, this earns him is another question: Grafton has said she devised the novel as a way to profit from her own revenge fantasies during a painful divorce. Tomorrow we’ll be focusing on the other murder plot, though, which involves the gender-bending “homme fatale” and culminates in Kinsey’s fairly unheroic last stand pant-less in a garbage can.

In Victorian Literature of Faith and Doubt, ‘A’ is for Arnold, angst, and alienation. Our progression (as I was trying to explain in a rambling opening comment for the class yesterday) has been from writers wrestling with specific challenges to their faith (or, with Darwin, presenting findings with challenging implications) to writers reimagining society and morality in the absence of that faith (the secular fable of Silas Marner, in which the major value of church-going is that it fosters community and sympathy) or now, with Arnold, seeking in poetry and culture alternative sources of inspiration and spirituality. But while Eliot eases her readers through the transition, in his poetry at least Arnold captures the sense of dislocation and grief that could also be part of the weaning from religion. “Dover Beach,” of course, is the best known of his elegies for lost faith, but “The Buried Life” is also beautifully evocative:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us–to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

I like the simplicity with which this poem resolves, as the speaker considers the soothing touch of “a beloved hand” and the “tones of a loved voice” carressing “our world-deafened ear” and the uneasy and irregular lines of pentameter and tetrameter that make up most of the poem soften, restfully, into easy (and rhyming) trimeter (actually, I guess the final line is anapestic):

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

“To Marguerite–Continued,” all built around the conceit of us “mortal millions” as islands isolated by “the sea of life,” but longing to be reunited as “parts of a single continent,” also ends well, with one of my favourite lines of 19th-century poetry, actually:

Who ordered, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?–
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

If there isn’t already a novel called The Estranging Sea, maybe I should write one.

For show and tell, I can bring in my old New Yorker cartoon (sadly, I can’t find an image of it to post here) that shows a bemused couple watching Old Sideburns on their TV; the caption is, “Here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night, Matthew Arnold, Fox News, Channel Five.”