We announce with great pleasure our very first Using Theory Special Guest Lecture, to take place next Monday afternoon:
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
Author of The Practice of Diaspora
Co-Editor of Social Text
Monday, March 30
4 p.m. in LC 317
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.
On Tuesday, December 2, we met to discuss excerpts from Georg Lukács' Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel. Many thanks to Professor Ala Alryyes for leading our discussion, and to Glyn Salton-Cox for taking minutes! Participants should e-mail AG or CG if something has been lost in the passage from live voice to HTML. And all are welcome to comment. Follow the link to the full post for the minutes.
Our spring schedule will be forthcoming shortly--check back for updates.
Leader: Ala Alryyes
Present: Misha Avrekh, Katerina Clark, Sam Cross, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Heather Klemann, Sebastian Lecourt, Jessica Pressman, Glyn Salton-Cox, Rania El Shabassy, Johsua Sorley.
Ala Alryyes, introduction: Interested in seeing how Scott's Waverley bares the devices of literary theory, rather than the other way around. In Theory, Lukács judges Scott's novels as inwardly empty and lacking in ideas. In Historical Novel Lukács celebrates Scott for inventing a novel form in which history can be represented.
Major points of comparison, Theory vs. Historical Novel: Time vs. History; Epic hero vs. Peripheral characters; Romanticism favored vs. Romanticism denigrated.
In Theory, GL follows late-19th century German Hellenism on Greek culture: "The Greeks knew no riddles"; their world integrated art and civilization. Our richer, more complex world, by contrast, lacks this capacity for totalization. GL has an essentially formalist concept of totality: nothing points outside it. In epic, GL sees no separation between adventure and accomplishment; all experience is meaningful. In the novel, the quest is for a lost totality, given the divorce between interiority and the adventure in the external world. "The novel is the epic of a world abandoned by God." GL's typology of the novel: two kinds, those of abstract idealism and Romantic disillusionment. In the former, the hero's soul is narrower than the world from which it is isolated; in the latter, the hero's soul is too large for the world. Don Quixote is the only satisfactory abstract-idealist novel in GL's view, by virtue of its parody; his examples of the Romantically disillusioned novel include Oblomov and Sentimental Education.
In Historical Novel, the figure of the hero is now a middling sort, anxious, passive; he recedes in favor of the historical forces which, in the view of the later Lukács, drive history.
Heather Klemann: Can you elaborate on the time/history distinction?
Josh Sorley: Time is internal, history external.
AA: Time is associated with hope and memory, with the hope for the integration of inner life and outer events.
Andrew Goldstone: in Theory's novel of disillusionment, in fact everything is integrated by the flux of time---even though GL characterizes it as fragmented by the break between the hero's consciousness and the world.
AA: As in Proust.
AA: In Theory GL reduces all novels to Bildungsromane. That is why Scott's historical romance is condemned: not enough interiority.
HK: I'm struck by the idea of Waverley baring theory's devices rather than vice versa. Can we do the same thing with Don Quixote? Is it really a novel of abstract idealism? Isn't Sancho Panza already commenting on this idea?
AA: GL has the habit of making typologies into which only one novel fits; everything else resembles a vulgarization. Is there anything about peripheral characters in Theory?
AG: In these sessions we always try to raise the So-What question. Can we seriously contemplate using or applying Lukács' ideas, given the huge distortions that support his generalizations and the dubious status of his orthodox-Marxist theory of history?
AA: GL is useful because he offers ways of linking different scales of reading. In literary criticism we face the problem of losing ourselves in the particular. Other fields have an easier time linking up their specialized studies with large questions of general interest. GL gives a way into such larger questions. And, in fact, the reading of Waverley is still good.
I would also see History and Class Consciousness as a link between Theory and Historical Novel: there, he says: "The fragmentation of the object of production is a fragmentation of time." Thus the historical-materialist view leads back to the ideas about time and fragmentation in Theory (!).
HK: GL is important for the study of the eighteenth-century novel.
Glyn Salton-Cox: Even the so-called "Stalinist" GL of the 30s is important today. Despite, or indeed because of, the dogmatic nature of GL's defense of realism, these readings are important as a corrective to the hegemony of modernism in the study of twentieth-century literature which is prevalent in the academy today.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
12:30 p.m. in LC 209
Ginger ale and saltines provided
Reading packets in LC 108
or e-mail CG or AG for an electronic copy of the readings. Or, if you own Lukács' The Theory of the Novel and The Historical Novel, we are reading the following: Theory (Bostock, trans.) pp. 29, 97-101, 112-31; Historical Novel (Mitchell and Mitchell, trans.) pp. 19-24, 30-63.
Click here for the full blog entry.On November 21, an intimate pre-Thanksgiving group met to discuss excerpts from Martin Hägglund's new book Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Professor Justin Neuman led our discussion. Also present: Anne DeWitt, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Sebastian Lecourt, and Jordan Zweck. In our festive mood we decided not to take detailed minutes, but I invite contributors to contact me (AG) if they would like to add notes or remarks. Briefly: JN introduced the idea of Continental philosophy's turn to ethics, dating from Derrida's Specters of Marx (1994). This turn is more or less synonymous with a turn to religion, especially a growing association between negative theology and deconstruction. Levinas, with his emphasis on ethics and on absolute otherness, has been important to this turn and to Derrida in particular. Hägglund argues that this turn is based on a misreading of Derrida; for Hägglund, Derrida is the exponent of a "radical atheism" which involves not just the denial of God but the denial that the absolutes of theology are even desirable. JN is interested by this argument; in his book project, JN places the turn to ethics in relation to what fiction writers are doing. Our general discussion spent some time puzzling over Hägglund's hard-to-pin-down uses of the terms "absolute peace" and (AD) "violence." We also discussed what the interest of this work might be outside of Continental philosophy, say for literary studies or for other kinds of philosophical ethics. We wondered about the stakes of an argument like Hägglund's--whether the totalizing desires (for immortality, for peace, for justice) that he attempts to deconstruct are actually felt by people, or whether (SL) he was deconstructing a straw man. AG and CG had a back-and-forth about otherness and ethics. SL is interested in Hägglund's ideas of "survival" in relation to the Victorian ideas of anthropological survivals that he has encountered in his research.
Click here for the full blog entry.Our next Using Theory session will be next Friday, November 21, at 12:30 p.m. in LC 319. Professor Justin Neuman will lead our discussion of excerpts from Martin Hägglund's new book, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life. Reading packets are now available on the windowsill of the department lounge. In the meantime, launch discussion with comments here!
Click here for the full blog entry.On October 15, Gabriele Hayden led our discussion of Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation and Monika Kaup's "'The Future is Entirely Fabulous': The Baroque Genealogy of Latin America's Modernity," MLQ 68, no. 2 (2007) (abstract). Many thanks to Emily Setina for taking minutes. Please e-mail Andrew Goldstone if he has mistranscribed your comments; and please use the comments function below at will.
Follow the link to the full post for the minutes of our world-spanning discussion!
Present: Anne DeWitt, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Gabriele Hayden, Susannah Hollister, Ben LaBreche, John Muse, Justin Neuman, Emily Setina, Jordan Zweck.
GH, introduction. Poetics of Relation was throwing you in at the deep end. Glissant's earlier work is more specific about the kind of critiques he's making. You can see the elements out of which this book develops. In particular:
Andrew Goldstone: How will this play into the work you're doing now?
GH: My first two dissertation chapters show how Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams are indebted to the Spanish baroque, the aesthetic of which they coopt for modernism. It's close to home for Williams, in his mother's mixed background; and the techniques of the baroque let him get around an Anglo model. My strategic question: should these ideas of the baroque belong just in these chapters or could I use it as a framework for the whole dissertation? For example, my original idea was to use it for thinking about Hughes as someone interested in connecting peripheries to each other.
Colin Gillis: I like the neo-baroque as an alternative to talking about "modernism," but it seems kind of like a relabelling of a standard modern vs. premodern dichotomy.
GH: Well, the historical baroque is already more complicated--is it just in Spain, or is it formed in the Americas as well?
Justin Neuman: Let's go back to a more basic question: what is the baroque denominating here? How does it relate to the Renaissance baroque? It's a troubled issue; it has a clear meaning in art-history--the monumental, the ornate--as a counterpart to the early modern era. Can we get at this question of relabelling by getting at what the baroque is engaged in?
AG: It's important to recall that there was a time when "Classicism" was important for talking about modernism, but that time has receded. So the opposition of baroque and classical doesn't seem so important for us--but in a French context, Classicism is the dominant art-historical period. The turn against it is far more revolutionary than it seems to us, in a literary history where TS Eliot lays simultaneous claim to Donne and classicism.
GH: As for defining the Baroque, it has a very concrete meaning in Spanish contexts: in literature, it's associated with the conceit (conceptismo), with wit, with outrageous erudition or cultismo. The archetypical Baroque writer is Góngora, whose language is crazy, altered in every possible way. These literary techniques are thus associated with the historical Baroque.
CG: When I say the Neobaroque looks like a relabelling, it's because it still seems to talk in terms of the same paradigm of modernism in terms of formal criteria drawn from European ideas of art and literature.
AG: Well, what else is it going to be? I don't want to defend a Eurocentric model, but you can't get around the kinds of formal changes Glissant names--the poetics of depth, language-in-itself, structure. They have to figure in any history. But when you relabel, that can get you somewhere by letting you tell other histories.
CG: Why does Europe have to be the center? Surely there must be other structures in world literature than Europe at the center and everywhere else at the periphery.
GH: You can see this dynamic at work in the historical baroque in Marvell and the Reformation. Is he authoritarian? Revolutionary? Is his baroque a liberatory cultural mixture? Or just another version of domination? If you don't go for mixture, you fall back on ideas of indigeneity--but that implies problematic ideas of purity. So is the baroque colonizing or decolonizing?
Ben Labreche: Does the fact that the historical label seem so strained mean you should keep the general idea but lose the label? Because in the historical baroque, it's definitely an aesthetic that's embraced by people in power.
GH: Well, in Latin American baroque you can see people building the baroque cathedrals but slipping in their local gods in the details. The baroque allows room for proliferation.
AG: And in any case it's hard to translate the authoritarian baroque into Anglo-American history.
BL: Consider the Counter-reformation: yes, it's using emotionalism to bring in the common people, but on the other hand it's definitely authoritarian.
GH: Well, in Latin America the Neobaroque is a strong tradition: it largely overlaps, for example, with the "marvelous real." It might be problematic for Anglo-American scholarship.
BL: How much credence do we give to the idea that Donne belongs to this baroque? The representative of the English baroque might be Dryden--but who, again, celebrates authority.
JN: Why is it important to Latin American writers to be labelling their work baroque, given its characteristics in Europe? What is at stake in this appropriation of form? Is this a relabelling of high modernism from below?
GH: It's part of the Latin American desire to declare independence from the US too, by valorizing the Spanish literary tradition. At the same time, it reminds us that, as Wallerstein says, the European baroque was set off by the influx of wealth from the colonies. So the baroque invokes colonization from the beginning.
GH: What I wonder is: at specific moments modern writers translate the Spanish baroque. But does the Baroque usefully indicate something larger?
CG: You might not need the theory at all. You have found these wonderful connections in the archive; Glissant's argument is for the Baroque as a world system. Does it really apply?
AG: It does matter to GH's account of the genealogy of Pound and Williams's poetics. Is it that their modernism was already in the air, and they fastened on the Spanish baroque texts because it resembled that modernism---or do you make the stronger claim that their modernism came out of their engagement with the Baroque?
GH: Pound read the Spanish writers eight years before he ever took an interest in Chinese. So the question becomes: did he ditch the Spanish influence for something new? Or did he hold on to something even though he stopped referring to the Spanish baroque overtly?
John Muse: The two alternatives could exist together as parallel genealogies.
GH: Somehow it's more powerful to say that there's a separate tradition in Latin America that rhymes with modernism, but differs from it.
CG: Are other scholars talking about the Baroque?
GH: It's in the pipeline, with the work of Kaup et al. coming out. There's a push toward alternate genealogies. For example, the baroque (Calderón especially) was important to German Romanticism. And that's Walter Benjamin's genealogy, why he comes to the baroque. So it's a trans-European phenomenon.
AG: And a good way to link modernist studies to Caribbean studies.
JN: Why preserve the moniker "modern" at all? I wonder this about all the alternate-modernity theorists--why keep the pre-modern/modern divide? Why do we care about expanding "modernity"? What do we mean when we talk about the modern in this way?
CG: We expand the term to explode it from within. The term "modernism" doesn't really work; there are significant and important differences between the literary movements it's applied to. Gradually, European "modernism" will become a smaller part of early twentieth century studies.
JM: How do Latin American scholars deal with the different assumptions between Anglo-American "modernism" and "modernismo"?
GH: "Modernismo" means something more like our fin de siècle: it's influenced by Mallarmé. Rubén Darío and a Symbolist poetics. So a lot of people in the Latin American context have taken on post-modernism while leaving their relationship to modernism unclear.
AG: As for JN's question: people care about begin modern because at a basic level they care about the basics of modernity--industrialization, social mobility, etc. Our own question as shcolars of culture is whether this basic idea of historical modernity really matches up with particular "modernist" cultural movements.
JN: Exactly. I was also shocked by Glissant's use of the term "errantry"--with its appalling connotations.
BL: And couldn't you also associate the Baroque with the feminine?
GH: There's the idea of the Black Legend--which feminizes people in Catholic countries by conceiving of them as subordinated to an authoritarian regime. What I took from Glissant's "errantry" was the recognition that pieces of culture can travel anyway. The history of the Caribbean is a history of violence, as Glissant knows, but he also knows that that violent history led to the foundation of the something he's celebrating. He is trying to theorize center and periphery in ways that will ultimately abolish them. That's his utopian gesture at the end: turning to the periphery will abolish the dichotomy.
