The Critical Pulse

Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary Critics

Jeffrey Williams, Heather Steffen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231530736
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This unprecedented anthology asks thirty-six leading literary and cultural critics to elaborate on the nature of their profession. With the humanities feeling the pinch of financial and political pressures, and its disciplines resting on increasingly uncertain conceptual ground, there couldn't be a better time for critics to reassert their widespread relevance and purpose. These credos boldly defend the function of criticism in contemporary society and showcase its vitality in the era after theory.

Essays address literature and politics, with some focusing on the sorry state of higher education and others concentrating on teaching and the fate of the humanities. All reflect the critics' personal, particular experiences. Deeply personal and engaging, these stories move, amuse, and inspire, ultimately encouraging the reader to develop his or her own critical credo with which to approach the world. Reflecting on the past, looking forward to the future, and committed to the power of productive critical thought, this volume proves the value of criticism for today's skeptical audiences.

Contributors: Andrew Ross, Amitava Kumar, Lisa Lowe, Vincent B. Leitch, Craig Womack, Jeffrey J. Williams, Marc Bousquet, Katie Hogan, Michelle A. Massé, John Conley, Heather Steffen, Paul Lauter, Cary Nelson, David B. Downing, Barbara Foley, Michael Bérubé, Victor Cohen, Gerald Graff, William Germano, Ann Pellegrini, Bruce Robbins, Kenneth Warren, Diana Fuss, Lauren Berlant, Toril Moi, Morris Dickstein, Rita Felski, David R. Shumway, Mark Bauerlein, Devoney Looser, Stephen Burt, Mark Greif, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Mark McGurl, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Judith Jack Halberstam

THE DEFENSE OF LITERATURE

25

ACCESS TO THE UNIVERSAL

LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND THE HUMANITIES

TORIL MOI

I have been asked to write a credo, a declaration of what I believe in as a literary critic. The answer is: I believe in the value of language, of literature, and of the humanities. Yet I can’t just write about language, literature, and the humanities as if these words were unproblematic. Throughout history, women have been denied access to the very fields I care passionately about. Even today, women’s contributions to language, literature, and the humanities are often overlooked, undervalued and neglected. In many parts of the world, women are still denied equal access to learning and education.

Simone de Beauvoir defined sexism as the systematic attempt to deny women access to the universal. As long as man remains the norm and woman the other, the deviation from the norm, males will be taken to represent humanity, and human culture will remain unjust to women. In such a world “language,” “literature,” and the “humanities” will be represented by the words and experiences of men. As long as we continue to live in a sexist world, feminists have to continue to uncover the traces of women, revalue women’s contributions to human culture, and insist that women’s point of view be taken into account in every scholarly project.

LANGUAGE: THE IMPORTANCE OF TRANSLATION

Language is the repository of human culture. Language is expression and action, behavior and performance. Our words shape our world. As scholars and critics of literature, we specialize in the arts of language: we should respect the work of words. We should value good writing, strive to write well ourselves, and be passionate about training our students to write with pleasure, flair, and elegance.

Among the different arts of language, translation remains the most underestimated. Yet we live in a world in which people, ideas, and goods are constantly on the move. Transnationalism—the commitment to open communication across borders and cultures—has become a buzz word in academia. American universities set up campuses on the other side of the world, and students are encouraged to spend a summer, a semester, or a year abroad.

In a globalized world, translation is more important than ever. Translators shape a culture’s perception of key works from other cultures. In spite of their commitment to transnationalism, American universities still do not value translation and translators sufficiently. Although many universities offer specialist training in translation studies, literary and philosophical translation is far too often considered a technical skill rather than an art and an intellectual challenge. Young faculty members in departments of languages and literature quickly learn that they can’t get tenure for doing translations. Yet translation of literary, philosophical, and intellectual works is a highly demanding activity. The best translator is at once a linguist, a cultural historian, and a writer. Outstanding translators ought to find as much support in universities as creative writers.

Departments of languages and literature, including English departments, should train their students to understand and value the crucial work of translation. Publishers also need to value the work of translation. American publishers still publish fewer translations than publishers in other Western nations. Many publishers still don’t realize that translation is a profession: they are still far too likely to think that anyone who can speak a foreign language well can also translate well. This is false, as the distressing example of the new translation of The Second Sex shows all too clearly.¹

READING LITERATURE: BEYOND CRITIQUE

We have been far too uncritical in our embrace of critique. The hermeneutics of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud) has dominated literary studies for the last fifty years. It taught us to read closely and well and remains useful as one tool for ideology critique of various kinds. But the hermeneutics of suspicion had a downside. It fostered a myth of critical superiority that turned teaching and writing about literature into an exercise in faultfinding. The hermeneutics of suspicion made us suspicious of the simple, the unaffected, the artless, the candid, the open, and the plain. It made us want to appear knowing and sophisticated. It made it easier for us to criticize than to praise. In fact, the very word “praise” is still likely to conjure up the idea of thoughtless gushing rather than serious analysis. This is a problem. We need to move beyond the language of critique and unmasking and relearn how properly to praise a work.

The task of the critic is to show others why a specific work merits our sustained and undivided attention. Understanding must precede critique. To understand a work is to get clear on its conditions of possibility, its historical, social, and political situation and concerns, its aesthetic and existential projects and achievements. Clearly, there is no intrinsic conflict between critique and understanding. After all, the most effective criticism emerges from critics capable of understanding a text or an argument from within, capable of fully seeing what it is the writer wants to accomplish and why he or she goes about it in the way she does.

I am against the sense of superiority that the cult of critique breeds in literary critics. I am not against critical thinking, understood as the capacity to demolish a bad argument or find the flaws in a theory. Logical thought and analytical skills are indispensible for anyone who wants to do significant work. Of course, students and teachers must engage with the worldview and the arguments of a text, whether philosophical or literary.

Writers and philosophers often engage with the same problems, sometimes independently of one another and sometimes as part of a complex dialogue. Why, then, do literary critics so often fall for the temptation to reduce the work to an illustration of preexisting theories or philosophies? Or worse: to consider the work a failed illustration of a theory? (This book almost achieves the insights of Derrida or Foucault.) To treat the work as if it were intended to be an illustration of a theory or a philosophical doctrine is to suggest that we value the literary work only insofar as it exemplifies or illuminates that theory. But if it is the theory we want, there is no need to read the work of literature. I remain convinced that works are illuminated by being placed in relation to relevant theoretical and philosophical insights, yet we need to learn to treat theory and literature as equal participants in the discussion, learn to let the work challenge the terms of the theory we use to illuminate it.

Literature and philosophy overlap in significant ways. Both raise the normative questions of human existence: What ought we to believe about the world and ourselves? And given our beliefs (what we think is the case), what ought we to do? We can’t get through a day without acting on our own answers to these questions. (Do I think there will be a bus at five p.m.? Should I take it? Do I think he loves me? Should I marry him?) There isn’t a literary work that doesn’t convey its own response to the question of what to believe and what to do. As literary critics we need to show how profoundly thoughtful the best literary works are. By “best” I mean the works that the individual critic is willing to call the best. Her judgment will depend on the questions she has raised and the projects and purposes she has in mind.

By objecting to the hermeneutics of suspicion, with its excessive focus on critique, I am not trying to restrict the field of literary study. Literary study should be concerned with whatever literature is concerned with: that is to say, pretty much the whole of human experience in recorded time. There is space in literary study for the investigation of every aspect of human existence, from everyday life to revolutions and war. Feminism, postcolonialism, Marxism, and other political perspectives are not external to the work: most literary works already contain their own reflections on power and politics.

I don’t mean to reduce literary works to thematics. I take for granted that literary critics should pay close and full attention on the work’s struggle to find its form, to its relation to its own artistic traditions, and in general explore the way it gives shape to the conditions of possibility of aesthetic utterances. Yet literature is not just about literature, form, and the struggle with language. Literature is also expression and representation. We don’t have to choose between formal self-consciousness and representation: the struggle with form coexists with the struggle to express and represent.

DEFENDING THE HUMANITIES

In today’s technocratic and business-oriented world, the humanities are under threat. Bureaucrats all over the Western world wonder why they should continue to fund disciplines that appear so unworldly, so incapable of bringing in money. Faced with such arguments, we should remind ourselves of the value of research in the humanities. Such reminders may not sway the bureaucrats, but they can galvanize our resistance to a certain kind of technocratic reason.

The humanities are concerned with history, meaning, and values. The humanities study the historical records of human experience and the myriad ways human beings have found to express that experience. Humanists interpret signs and decipher the traces of lost cultures. In different ways, the study of art, literature, music, film, philosophy, history, ethnology, and religion helps us to understand what values individuals and cultures have been willing to struggle and die for, what values they have wanted to transmit to future generations, and what myths and ideologies human beings continue to live (and die) by. The humanities keep the history of a culture or society alive. The humanities give a society its memory and its identity. The humanities help us understand who we are. (“We” here does not refer to a given community: I mean “we” as in “any one of us,” and “we” as in whatever community we claim allegiance to.) To imagine a society that no longer cares about such things is to imagine a society reduced to alienated technocrats.

I want to say something like this: The study of aesthetic expressions is a key area of the humanities because literature and the other arts provide an unparalleled archive of expressions of what it means to be alive, to be human, and to create, in a specific place and time. Yet there is something wrong with this formulation. “What it means to be human” is not quite right. I do mean to speak about human beings, members of the species homo sapiens. But in real life no human being is just “human,” just as literature is never just about “human beings.” To talk about “humans” is to run the risk of stripping away the particular characteristics we actually notice, pay attention to, and care about in interactions with others. We always exist in the world as some specific incarnation of the human: I am a man, a woman, an intersexed person; I am black, white, Chinese, Norwegian; I am a seamstress, an empress, a coal miner, a soldier, a peasant. I don’t think of the people I know as examples of the species but as particular people to whom I have quite specific ties of obligations and responsibilities, people who present me with quite specific problems and opportunities and who inspire in me quite specific feelings. The word “human” is indispensable to anyone who cares about the humanities, yet it easily leads us astray, for, as Simone de Beauvoir points out, it carries a long tradition of exclusion. We still need feminists to remind us that one meaning of the “records of human existence” is the “records of women’s existence.”

NOTE

1. For details, see Toril Moi, “The Adulteress Wife,” review of The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, London Review of Books 32, no. 3 (2010): 3–6. My essay and the translators’ and French publisher’s letters to the editors are available on www.torilmoi.com.

26

WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL

A MODEST CRITICAL CREDO

MORRIS DICKSTEIN

The role of critics varies greatly according to the roles they imagine for themselves, the course they pursue, and the audience they seek to address. Academic critics writing for their peers will take a different tack from public critics speaking to a general audience, large or small, or from writers themselves using criticism to carve out a space for their own work. Surprisingly, novelists and especially poets have proved to be among our best critics. Poet-critics form the main line of the English critical tradition while the critical foundations for the novel were laid by Henry James. Yet American writers are better known for their prickly aversion to critics rather than their appreciation, even when critics created the following for their work. My favorite example, one that set my blood boiling, was Saul Bellow’s likening of the critic to a deaf man tuning a piano. (Had he merely said “tone deaf” I wouldn’t have been so offended.) Then there are the old saws that continue to surface: “Those who can’t, criticize.” “No one ever grew up with the dream of becoming a critic.” All this implies that critics are little more than clumsy mechanics or failed writers, stewing in their inadequacy and taking out this resentment on their betters, the really creative spirits. As one wag put it, a critic is someone who arrives late on the battlefield to kill off the survivors.

In fact, really good critics are writers, with their own style and literary personality, though their work feeds off other writing, as novelists and poets feed off the text of our common life. Both kinds of writers must somehow be faithful to their originals yet develop their own angle of vision. They have to tell the truth, a truth we’ll recognize, but, like Emily Dickinson, “tell it slant.” They distill art into meaning, punish failure, and lionize success, but like all writers they work by way of selection, even distortion. We remember critics for their temperament as much as their critical judgment: the pugilistic vigor of Hazlitt, the digressive idiosyncrasies of Ruskin, the clerical acerbity of Eliot, the transparent windowpane of Orwell, the poetic conjunctions of Benjamin, the Hegelian dynamics of Adorno. We can forgive a great deal in a critic who works out of a striking sensibility or a startling point of view, as we are seduced by writers who give us a fresh take on the familiar world. Some critics survive on the strength of their prose alone; some, by introducing or promoting new artists and movements; others, by introducing seminal concepts (the objective correlative, the dissociation of sensibility), by sheer intelligence or depth of learning, or by helping reorient the history of an art form. As it happens, T. S. Eliot could qualify under any of these categories.

So let me lay down a few principles that are simply features of the kind of criticism I love to read and have tried to write.

• It was only in the mid-twentieth century, thanks to the New Criticism, that criticism itself began to play a major role in the academic study of literature, which previously was focused on textual scholarship and factual research. Because of the new emphasis on close reading, most academic criticism grew too long, too pedantic and detailed. The critic felt obliged to lay out every step of the reading, not simply the interpretive outcome, the take-away or upshot of careful reading. Such monographs too often became little more than stepping stones in the job market, rungs in the accreditation process. Earlier critics read just as closely but luxuriated in aphorism, intuition, and apodictic summation, writerly vices. They kicked away the analytic ladder that brought them to their goal. Most journalistic criticism, on the other hand, is too brief and superficial, too uninformed, almost weightlessly opinionated. Trapped by space limitations and deadlines, such pieces habitually default on context, ignoring much that undergirds the work and gives it meaning. With the exception of longer, more intricate reviews in little magazines and a few intellectual journals, they reduce criticism to consumer guidance. They strike attitudes and ventilate feelings, unsupported by argument or evidence. If criticism must make its case as illuminating commentary on works of art, then the best vehicle for criticism is not the extended monograph or the hastily written review but the literary essay, personal, reflective, attuned to an ongoing conversation. This is why critical journals (like the avant-garde magazines of the 1920s and 1930s) and critical schools (the New York Intellectuals, the New Critics) were so important to twentieth-century criticism: they kept a conversation going, they responded to new m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Criticism in a Difficult Time
• A Critic’s Progress
• Academic Labor
• Declaration of Politics
• Pedagogical Moments
• The Defense of Literature
• New Turns
• List of Contributors