Literary Materialisms

M. Nilges, E. Sauri, M. Nilges, E. Sauri

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137339959
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Literary Materialisms addresses what has become a fundamental concern in the last decade: how do we today define literary studies as an academic discipline and literature as a relevant object of study? Avoiding unproductive proclamations, this volume unites new materialist critical thinking with a commitment to fundamental principles.

Part I

Reading and Interpretation

Chapter 1

Reading Dialectically

Carolyn Lesjak

This, then, is the limit of common sense. What lies beyond involves a Leap of Faith, faith in lost Causes, Causes that, from within the space of skeptical wisdom, cannot but appear as crazy. And the present book speaks from within this Leap of Faith—but why? The problem, of course, is that, in a time of crisis and ruptures, skeptical empirical wisdom itself, constrained to the horizon of the dominant form of common sense, cannot provide the answers, so one must risk a Leap of Faith.

—Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes

Fredric Jameson ends his recent book on the dialectic, Valences of the Dialectic, with a careful reading of Paul Ricoeur’s Narrative and Time. On the face of it, a book about the dialectic in 2009 might seem destined for the remainder shelves. Especially one that concludes with a long, final section closely reading a work of narrative theory with which few scholars today would be familiar, in order to argue that the task of criticism is to “make time and history appear”—at a moment when, as Jameson himself diagnosed in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, our ability to think historically has all but disappeared. Against the specter of the dialectic’s obsolescence, I want to suggest however that Valences of the Dialectic in fact constitutes a timely polemic against the new disciplinary conservatism, and a spirited defense of theory, which is also a defense of reading.

Theory and reading: in the contemporary climate, these two endeavors, more often than not, tend to be pitted against one another. Simply put, theory is on its way out; reading is (back) in. Beleaguered by post-structuralism and Foucault, social constructionism, interdisciplinarity, cultural studies, and the like—all of which get collapsed under the umbrella bogeyman “theory”—a group of literary critics are once again arguing for an emphasis on the literary in literary criticism, and claiming, in essence, that reading literature is what we literary scholars do best and hence what we ought to return to doing, after having lost our way in the heady theory days of the 1960s–1990s.¹ As the former president of the MLA, Marjorie Perloff, wrote in her 2006 presidential address, “a specter is haunting the academy, the specter of literature.”² And the means of exorcism: “It is time to trust the literary instinct that brought us to this field in the first place and to recognize that, instead of lusting after those other disciplines that seem so exotic primarily because we don’t really practice them, what we need is more theoretical, historical and critical training in our own discipline. Rhapsodes [discussed in the context of her preceding argument regarding the absence of poetics in interdisciplinary literary studies, which she renames “other-disciplinary” to capture its total disregard for the literary], it turns out, can and should serve a real function in our oral, print and digital culture” (655, 662).

This claim echoes those made by New Formalists of various stripes, as well as a slew of other new “isms” committed to “returns” of one sort or another, which are also presented as reclamations—the need to reclaim the aesthetic, or reading, human nature or pleasure, and so on. In her review essay on New Formalism, Marjorie Levinson identifies two strains within the movement, normative and activist new formalism. She characterizes the former as a “backlash new formalism,” for its rejection of new historicist claims and because it “assigns to the aesthetic norm-setting work that is cognitive and affective and therefore also cultural-political”; activist formalism, on the other hand, aims to restore the importance of form within historical reading, thereby positioning itself along the continuum of new historicism rather than as a break with it.³ For our purposes here, normative new formalism most directly dramatizes the conservatism of these movements in its advocacy of a return to the pleasures of a kind of reading theory has supposedly made impossible. (I will return to the status of new historicism and its relationship to theory.) As Levinson notes, “normative new formalism makes a strong claim for bringing back pleasure as what hooks us on and rewards us for reading.” Following a list of such claims by critics such as Susan Wolfson, Denis Donoghue, Charles Altieri, and George Levine, Levinson concludes: “Normative new formalism holds that to contextualize aesthetic experience is to expose its hedonic dimension as an illusion, distraction, or trap. It is hard not to hear in this worry a variant of the classic freshman complaint that analyzing literature destroys the experience of it” (562).

Also arguing against the abuses theory has propagated against contemporary readers, New Darwinism advocates for a return to the concept of human nature, a concept out of favor in a climate dominated by theories of social constructionism with their championing of the virtually infinite malleability of human individuals, and the power, therefore, of social contexts, institutions, and cultural factors to change and mold individuals. One of New Darwinism’s main proponents, Steven Pinker, for example, argues against what he sees as an historical triad of ideas that have been used, sometimes erroneously, to discount the role of human nature in modern life: the “blank slate” (Locke), the “Noble Savage” (Rousseau), and the “Ghost in the Machine” (Descartes).⁴ Given new developments in evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, Pinker argues, there is ample evidence to prove that, within contemporary theory, social factors are unduly privileged over the biological imperatives of human nature. His motive for writing The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, he states, stemmed from his utter frustration with social constructivist models of human development:

I first had the idea of writing this book when I started a collection of astonishing claims from pundits and social critics about the malleability of the human psyche: that little boys quarrel and fight because they are encouraged to do so; that children enjoy sweets because their parents use them as a reward for eating vegetables; that teenagers get the idea to compete in looks and fashion from spelling bees and academic prizes; that men think the goal of sex is an orgasm because of the way they were socialized.⁵

In the realm of the arts, specifically, Pinker suggests that an attentiveness to human nature would illuminate the false claims of both modernism and postmodernism and their shared allegiance to the constructedness of perception, formal innovation (the desire to “make it new”; the embracing of nonnarrative form), and relativism, all of which go against human nature’s privileging of beauty, pleasure, middlebrow realistic fiction, narrative, and representational art. But Pinker also perceives progressive seeds of change in the humanities:

A revolt has begun. Museum-goers have become bored with the umpteenth exhibit on the female body featuring dismembered torsos or hundreds of pounds of lard chewed up and spat out by the artist. Graduate students in the humanities are grumbling in emails and conference hallways about being locked out of the job market unless they write in gibberish while randomly dropping the names of authorities like Foucault and Butler. Maverick scholars are doffing the blinders that prevented them from looking at exciting developments in the sciences of human nature. And younger artists are wondering how the art world got itself into the bizarre place in which beauty is a dirty word.(416)

Pinker provides a long list of other movements sympathetic to “these currents of discontent” that are “coming together in a new philosophy of the arts, one that is consilient with the sciences and respectful of the minds and senses of human being,” and which include New Formalism, along with the artistic movement Derrière Guard (“which celebrates beauty, technique, and narrative”), the New Narrativism, Stuckism, and the Return of Beauty, as well as literary critics such as Joseph Carroll, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner, and Frederick Turner, characterized as a “growing number of mavericks . . . looking to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to reestablish human nature at the center of any understanding of the arts.”⁶

While these movements sound somewhat like the Tea Party contingent of a new literary criticism—”Give us back our literature and our socially unencumbered aesthetic!” the rallying call in this case—less bombastic, more solidly centrist voices, to continue the analogy, also call for the renewal of formalist analyses, as well as other kinds of scientistic approaches to literature, more moderate and nuanced than Pinker’s and from within the humanities. In her call for a “strategic formalism,” for example, the Victorian scholar Caroline Levine proposes a model of “social close reading” (Herbert Tucker’s term) that would allow critics to move more deftly and flexibly between the micro- and macro-levels of a text.⁷ “Formalism,” Levine writes,

emerges as an ideal set of methods for thinking about competing modes of order, and it is particularly well suited to the apprehension of subtle interactions among different ordering tactics. The point is not that societies are just like poems, but that literary critics, long practiced at articulating the subtle shaping patterns that both reinforce and destabilize one another in a given textual object, are ideally suited to extend those reading practices to the analysis of cultural life more broadly, understanding cultural entities as sites where many conflicting ways of imposing order jostle one another, overlap, and collide.⁸

Despite the complexity of a formalism that is reservedly “strategic,” and thereby mirrors the knowingness of Gayatri Spivak’s notion of a “strategic essentialism” rather than the knee-jerk return of normative new formalism, Levine’s less extreme, and on the face of it utterly reasonable, model of reading best captures, I want to suggest paradoxically, the increasingly conservative mood within literary criticism and its key theoretical gestures. The overarching message seems to be: scale back, pare down, small aims met are better than grand ones unrealized. Reclaim our disciplinary territory and hold on to it. Perloff even makes an instrumental case for such an approach: as she notes, the demand outside the academy, as witnessed by the enthusiasm surrounding Beckett’s centennial, is for reading literature, not theory, so by returning to our roots, we will not only satisfy ourselves but the market as well. And in the process, this line of reasoning implies, perhaps save our jobs as humanities’ professors by (cynically) complying with the instrumentalization of knowledge and thought driving the very educational and university policies that see the humanities as obsolete. (Again, this is an extreme version of what I will argue defines the status quo.) And all in the name of getting back to basics, while seemingly forgetting that we have been there before and it is no longer the same place it used to be, if it ever was that place.⁹

It goes without saying that the sometimes catholic, at other times simple and purportedly neutral imperatives (accounting for the multiplicity of discourses in any text, or “the many conflicting ways of imposing order,” getting back to basics, respecting human nature) driving the spectrum of readings from normative new formalism to strategic formalism, to narratology, and to cognitive science studies are premised on a rejection of Marxist literary criticism, a point Levine makes explicit when she notes that her vision of “contests and encounters among different forms of order” only holds true if there is no single determining force among the colliding, overlapping forms: “When we are faced with the competing imperatives not only of race, class, and gender, but of imperial expansion, nationality, sexuality, and disability, the result—unless one is seen as the root cause of all the others—is not an orderly political culture but a highly contestatory one.”¹⁰ Except in isolated instances, I think it’s fair to say that Marxism is not even part of the conversation, despite the continued popularity of Slavoj Žižek (many of whose fans and readers seem perfectly capable of enjoying his work without adhering in any way to its Marxism).¹¹

By opening with a reference to the timeliness of Jameson’s Valences of the Dialectic, I mean to frame the argument to follow in the context of the ongoing necessity of a Marxist literary criticism and of a dialectical Marxist criticism, in particular. Indeed, I hope to show why a Marxist critique is more necessary than ever, given the current crisis in the humanities and the turn against theory—two events that Vincent Leitch argues are deeply interconnected. Leitch identifies the close connection between theory and the university when he suggests that claims of theory’s demise are also signs of anxiety about what is to come: the so-called passing of theory equally reflects wider fears about the role or place of critical thinking within an increasingly corporatized university. In short, for Leitch, the status of theory in such debates is inseparable from the status or future of the university. But whereas Leitch ends up embracing the proliferation of theories and new fields—from affect and animal studies to whiteness, fashion, and disability studies—as a sign of the continuing vitality of critical thinking, I want to make a case for narrowing the field: I want to suggest that the task the humanities need to set themselves now is akin to what Max Horkheimer claimed for critical theory in 1937: “the task of the critical theoretician is to reduce the tension between his [sic] own insight and oppressed humanity in whose service he [sic] thinks.”¹² What is counterintuitive here, obviously, is that an anti-humanist, revitalized Marxism—itself supposedly dead, along with theory—offers the way forward for humanist study, given how irreducibly bound to the economy the humanities are today.

Equally against the grain of mainstream dismissals of theory, Jameson in Valences of the Dialectic (as well as elsewhere) distinguishes between philosophy and theory and aligns reading with the latter, drawing on Ricoeur to characterize reading as “the momentary and ephemeral act of unification in which we hold multiple dimensions of time together for a glimpse that cannot prolong itself into the philosophical concept.”¹³ If philosophy tries to solve aporias, literature, in contrast, produces them. While Jameson will enlarge his frame of reading to historiographic texts such as Fernand Braudel’s, he nonetheless maintains an emphasis on the value of narrative (via Ricoeu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Literature and Materialism Revisited
• Part I   Reading and Interpretation
• Part II   The Ontology and Function of Literature
• Part III   Form and Genre
• Index