Professor
Catherine Nicholson
Uses Old Theory:
George Puttenham's
Art of English Poesy
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
12:30 p.m.--LC 208
Reading packets in LC 108
Ginger ale and saltines provided
The packet is a modernized critical edition of Puttenham's text. Scans of the original 1589 edition are available on EEBO through this link [must be on Yale network]. We are reading Book 1, chapters 1-6, 9-10, 30-31; Book 2, chapters 1-3, 6, 12; Book 3, chapters 1-4, 7, 9-10, 17, 21, 23.
Our tentative schedule for the rest of the semester:
March 30: Special Distinguished Guest Lecture
April 8: Emily Setina
April 21: Catherine Flynn
TBA: Metaprofessional Milk and Cookies II
After the jump: some spurs to discussion. Comments always welcome.
AG's response
I'm very grateful to Cathy Nicholson for giving us a chance to discuss Puttenham. Within a theoretical context, reading The Art of English Poesy reminds us of the long history of literary theory (i.e., theory goes back before 1960's France). It also forces us to historicize the theory we use, and then to ask what use is to be made of historicized theory, whether for the study of the literature of the same period or of another.
Our excerpt is also largely, though not solely, occupied with rhetoric and figurative speech. Thus reading Puttenham raises questions about the place of rhetoric in our, or any, literary-theoretical enterprise. This is the issue I'm now going to say a little bit more about, as a provocation to discussion. I don't know whether Cathy or the group will want to take it up on Wednesday; obviously, in abstracting Puttenham in this way, I'll be scanting his Early Modern particularity and all the interest that holds for thinking about that period, about the consolidation of English vernacular literature and its relations to other contemporary and ancient literatures, etc. But I think the strange relation of rhetoric to contemporary theory is a key issue that everyone has to think about.
The philosophers Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have been saying for two decades that rhetoric is not a genuine subject matter. Arguing from their view of linguistic pragmatics (called Relevance Theory, which is shaped by analytic philosophy and research in cognitive science), they suggest that the the concepts of "trope" and "figure" are not natural kinds. From a cognitive perspective, some of the devices traditionally grouped together as figures of speech do not belong together at all; and, furthermore, most or all of the classical figures should be regarded as differing only in degree from other loose ways of speaking found in all kinds of ordinary language. (There's more to it than that, but the basic point is that the figures shouldn't be studied in isolation from many other kinds of language use.)
One powerful statement of their view is their 1990 essay "Rhetoric and Relevance," which begins with the claim that in the 2500-year history of rhetoric, "the same substance was inculcated by eighty generations of teachers to eighty generations of pupils": the field combined "institutional success with intellectual barrenness." This same substance is, according to Sperber and Wilson, the view that rhetorical figures serve to ornament an essentially unchanged literal meaning. Puttenham belongs in this line, gladly transmitting the classical view that rhetorical figures add to the persuasiveness and attractiveness of language without really changing its meaning. Against the classical understanding of figurative language Sperber and Wilson pose "the Romantics" (they mean everyone from Coleridge to Empson and beyond), who argued that the connotative richness of figures meant they were unparaphrasable--and also untheorizable.
For SW, rhetoric is still where the Romantics left it, in a shambles. Rhetorical terms are now used as loosely as everything else: "This academization of Romanticism allowed--more paradox--the resurgence of classical rhetoric...And so we find, in modern literary studies, a Romantic use of rhetorical terms: they are not endowed with a 'proper meaning' anymore, but they suggest subtle distinctions and evoke scholarly sophistication and historical depth." Thinking about the appeal of Puttenham's list of figures, from antonomasia to synecdoche, this hit home. I've definitely thrown around rhetorical terms in a pretty impressionistic way, even as I congratulated myself on the rigor of my "close reading."
As a cure, SW advise jettisoning the illusory "field" of rhetoric and instead setting out on an empirical program of research in cognitive psychology and linguistic pragmatics. They have continued to defend this view, for example in their recent summary of Relevance Theory for an Oxford handbook of the philosophy of language. One of their targets, more obvious in 1990 than today, is the would-be rhetoricism of structuralism and deconstruction. They hit on the same phenomenon that John Guillory so scathingly exposes in Cultural Capital: the way Yale School deconstruction deployed rhetorical terms to signify methodological "rigor" while in fact using those terms to designate thematic associations rather than the consistent linguistic or "structural" patterns they claimed to be identifying. Though there is certainly an element of caricature in SW's history of rhetoric, I am quite persuaded by what they have to say, and I think that the slow, still-incomplete eclipse of deconstruction has not ended literary studies' infatuation with the ad hoc, impressionistic use of rhetorical terms.
I read Puttenham and think: We really haven't made any progress in this field since his work. Why not? The only thing holding us back now, I suggest, is a disciplinary siege mentality, which refuses to forfeit the creaky proprietary terminology of tropes to a confrontation with the best contemporary work coming from philosophy and the social sciences on how people use language.
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