READING:
- Lauren Berlant, “’68, or Something” (1994)
- Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (2009)
- Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!” (2011)
- Dorothy Hale, “Fiction as Restriction” (2007)
- Adam Phillips, “Against Self-Criticism” (2015)
- Eve Kosofksky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading” (2003)
- Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” (1966)
Pre-Class Notes
For examples of the format and style of pre- and post-class notes, see: https://americanfictionnow2019.art.blog/
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– I’m interested in discussing the relationship between Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” and Felski’s “Context Stinks.” Both of these essays argued, in different ways, for increased attention on a work of art’s actual, apparent qualities, rather than the conversations around the work (in Sontag’s case, conversations of interpretation, and in Felski’s case, conversations of context). Ultimately, though, I felt that these essays fundamentally contradict one another. While Felski’s essay at time seems to support Sontag’s notion of the eminence of our actual experiences with a text (“ …no longer a matter of looking through such experiences to the hidden laws that determine them, but of looking squarely at them, in order to investigate the mysteries of what is in plain sight,” p. 585), she in fact substitutes one type of interpretation (historical) for a different, theoretical one (actor-network theory).
I found Sontag’s argument to be sounder. I do agree with Felski’s claim that overly relying on periodization can be disadvantageous for literary criticism, and English departments in particular. She argues that we shouldn’t use historical periods as “coffinlike containers” for literary criticism, because literary works can in fact elicit a host of readings and responses that defy temporal demarcations. This is a valid point. But I did not buy her argument that using ANT and Latour’s theoretical models would solve the issue of a hierarchy of critical conversations. She wavers between arguing that any type of response to a text is valid, and that a certain type of reading—a historically specific one—is insufficient. She writes in one moment, for example, that “the performance of Macbeth in early seventeenth-century London boasts no special priority or privilege compared to the play’s many afterlives on the stages of New York or New Delhi, Sydney or Singapore” (p. 581). Wouldn’t the varying contexts of these geographically and temporally specific performances be precisely—or at least partially—what makes them interesting to examine together? Context is in fact critical to the type of literary analysis Felski seems to be advocating at many points in her essay, not in opposition to it.
I thought, at many moments, of a book I’m reading for my C Course, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Contemporary police brutality toward black Americans is the historical context of this poetry book. And this context, rather than a bucket that stifles our true reading of the text, in fact informs many of the formal qualities of Rankine’s poetry. How would Felski’s argument react to a text like this? It would be difficult to argue that, particularly for readers from racially marginalized groups in America, reading Rankine’s text when it was published in 2014 “boasts no special priority or privilege compared to the [text’s] many afterlives” (p. 581). I don’t think Felski would deny the importance of such a contextually specific reading of the text. But by so forcefully and frequently denouncing context (ex: “Context Stinks!”), Felski worked against what seemed to be her intention—a more egalitarian landscape of literary criticism. [Rebecca Dolan, RD]
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– I found Adam Phillips’s Freudian analysis of self-criticism to be interesting, in part because most of it rang true to me on a personal level, but mostly because, unlike the other articles that we read this week, it took a more individual look at the act of criticism and interpretation and extended it past that of the literary variety while simultaneously performing a literary analysis of Hamlet. This focus on the inner critic, I think, better helps us understand Sontag’s definition of interpretation that we can then apply to both our literary criticism and our own understanding of the human experience.
Phillips argues that we see self-criticism as “essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves,” that we define ourselves by “our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences” (2). And yet at the same time, we are not always aware of what frameworks or “moralities” we are using to criticize and determine ourselves and our actions, performing this self-censorship without conscious knowledge of “where these rather punishing standards come from” (4). The domineering presence of these hidden moralities (i.e., the suger-ego) can lead to us becoming characters, even masking our true self behind ideas of what we think we should be. Phillips argues that we should avoid this self-criticism of the super-ego and instead over-interpret everything. He says that individuals “can only understand anything that matters—dreams, neurotic symptoms, people, literature-—by over-interpreting it; by seeing it, from different aspects, as the product of multiple impulses” (3).
While at first Phillips seems to be arguing in direct opposition to Sontag by advocating for an over-interpretation of each hidden impulse rather than letting the manifest content speak for itself, a closer look shows that they are advocating for a similar thing: a recognition that interpretation should be something that allows us to define what something is and discover how something “is what it is” rather than to prescribe “what it means” (Sontag 9). For Philips and Sontag, interpretation becomes less about adding meaning to our experience but discovering the meaning(s) already within it.
As I was reading these articles, I was reminded of an episode on Planet Earth that I saw very recently (courtesy of Delta and the 9-hour flight from the States to the UK so bear with me on this one) about albatrosses who cannot recognize their chicks unless the chick is in the nest. In the film, the chick had fallen out of the nest due to a storm and was lying right by it, but the mother albatross would not feed it or even acknowledge it until it had climbed back into the nest. In other words, she could not interpret the manifest truth that her chick was her own unless it was perceived within a certain, known context (the specific nest). In this manner, context without interpretation led to a potentially fatal misunderstanding. I think both Phillips and Sontag are advocating for the need of a certain type of interpretation, one that reveals what something is within and outside of certain contexts and moralities.
[Morgan Daniels, MD]
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– Marcus and Best’s “Surface Reading” concludes, among other thoughts, with a reference to Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” that illustrates the danger of looking exclusively “under the surface” to mine symbolic meaning. A reader should not forget to take into account the systems of exchange, power, and description surrounding the symbol, regardless of, in the case of Poe’s letter, what is “actually” inside the envelope. Though Marcus and Best express an interest in taking a “distance” from “the type of symptomatic reading we inherited from psychoanalysis” (19) the “Purloined Letter” reference for many probably calls to mind Lacan’s reading of the same story. Like Marcus and Best, Lacan is more interested in the “symbolic chain” of the letter’s transmission, use, and the discourse surrounding it, than what it holds. Meaning, for Lacan, is found in the detour of the letter’s path rather than its “destined” one, its transmission rather than its contents. Poe’s story, as well as Lacan’s reading of it, both caught my interest for their arguably theatrical tones. In a play, the audience can never see the actual text of the letters, wills, or verdicts read by the actors onstage. More often than not, a prop like this may hold no text at all.
Marcus and Best might take issue with Lacan’s treatment of the letter as a signifier of any kind, even an empty or unknowable signifier that generates meaning through the characters’ interactions with it, which lie very much on the surface of the text. But none of them would likely be concerned with mining what is “inside” the letter in either a literal or figurative sense. I’m interested in the idea that a more surface-focused reading is at least part of the very condition of theatre. As audience members, we have no choice but to look at the surface, either finding meaning, as Lacan does, by tracing the motion or exchange of props or signifiers or attempting to finding meaning in what these objects “are not”, or applying Marcus and Best’s suggestions, taking the performance at face value.
I’m probably very biased as a lover of theatre and performance, but I think in this way theatre has the capacity to help us understand Marcus and Best’s issues with a thinker like Frederic Jameson, who argues interpretation to be an “unmasking” (5) of meaning in a text. Where does this kind of interpretation leave us when reading a script, the textual embodiment of, or at least accompaniment to, the “mask” he wishes to remove? The cloudy relationship between text and performance, literature and theatre, may serve helpfully as a final nail in the coffin for ways of reading that center solely around the act of unmasking. This is not to say that theatre and text are always the same, or that the “decoding” tradition of reading has no place or use. This is instead to say that the tradition of props, actors, and, unreadable documents in the theatre demonstrates the vast array of conversations, as Marcus and Best suggest, foreclosed by treating text as mere code.
[Clara Abbott, CA]
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– (As a brief opening/aside that I need to think more about and hopefully will have done by Wednesday, I feel that Sedgwick’s ‘Paranoid Reading’ plays quite well with the idea of scale – paranoia demands that you are opening up the scale because you are suspicious of some larger framework in which you are reading. The answers come from somewhere bigger.) The chapter discusses how paranoia has become a dominant methodology in critical thinking, before defining the features of and driving forces behind reading in a paranoid manner. Sedgwick begins with the idea of knowledge, stating that ‘knowledge doesrather than simply is’. Paranoia then functions around knowledge.
Sedgwick quotes from Leo Bersani: ‘’To inspire interest is to be guaranteed a paranoid reading, just as we must inevitably be suspicious of the interpretations we inspire. Paranoia is an inescapable doubling of presence.’ It’s this quotation that really gave me the idea for this blog post. For A Course last term, the book I gave my presentation on (Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting(2012)) conceptualised ‘interest’ in a way that I really bought into. As Bersani suggests that interest gives way to paranoia, I’d like to do a quick (rambling, inconclusive) discussion on the relationship between Ngai’s interesting and Sedgwick’s paranoia. I think Ngai’s interesting actually ties together Bersani’s statement with Klein’s work, which Sedgwick draws on later.
It seems right that Bersani would present interest and paranoia as sequential. Ngai’s interesting appears where we as readers or consumers acknowledge ‘that which seems to differ, in a yet-to-be conceptualized way’. Sedgwick’s paranoia – or the imperatives of paranoia – are anxious, centred around ‘pursuit’, ‘exposure’, and confirmation of knowledge.
Even though Sedgwick opens with the conversation with Patton which essentially suggests that knowledge gleaned by pursuing paranoia doesn’t necessarily change anything (including the piece of knowledge that prompted you to pursue further knowledge), it seems that there is always something to be found out. Sedgwick doesn’t frame this pursuit of knowledge as fruitless – there is a something, even if the something changes nothing. In this way, the practice of paranoid reading becomes the means by which we attempt to conceptualise – or organise, to employ Sedgwick’s terminology – Ngai’s ‘yet to be conceptualized’.
Reaching ‘calm’ is the biggest point of contention between Ngai’s interesting and Sedgwick’s paranoia. Ngai argues that to call something interesting is itself calm (specifically not passive) because it implies space for logic; for Sedgwick, the only way to reach Klein’s ‘something like a whole’ and produce a calm response like Patton originally delivers to Sedgwick is to pursue paranoia to some conclusion, to the site of knowledge. The associated temporality is therefore also different. Ngai’s calm can refer to a gap and therefore to a future satisfaction. Paranoia’s calmness must only work in the past tense – ‘there must be no bad surprises’; we must already know this.
I think the connection I’m drawing here actually proves the point of Sedgwick and the critics she draws on, and made me rethink the extent to which I buy into Ngai’s argument regarding interest as calm. Sedgwick states that ‘paranoia is nothing if not teachable’ – we have reached a point, maybe because of the academic purpose of so much of our reading, where calling something interesting and acknowledging the gap does not satisfy us, only hints at the potential and then seems to do nothing with it. Ngai elsewhere claims that in certain academic spheres (often scientific, but also literary) to call something interesting means it must pique the interest of peers and be provablyinteresting, however tenuous the hypothesis. It is the provability that we are truly focussed on, which allows interest to give way to paranoia as Bersani suggests, and that causes us to be paranoid before we can be calm, as Sedgwick suggests of Patton. We do not want to acknowledge that there is something we can know, we just want to already know it. [Rachel Farguson, RF]
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“We want to ask what it might mean to stay close to our objects of study, without citing as our reason for doing so a belief that those objects encapsulate freedom. We pose this question, in part, out of a sense of political realism about the revolutionary. capacities of both texts and critics, and doubts about whether we could ever attain the heightened perspicacity that would allow us to see fully beyond ideology. We also detect in current criticism a skepticism about the very project of freedom, or about any kind of transcendent value we might use to justify intellectual work.” (15f.)
This passage from the Marcus and Best text „Surface Reading: an Introduction“ resonated with me. This is because it touches upon the question(s) I hear when people ask me „So, why do you study literature?“, the questions being: what can literature/art (not) do? What can/should the critic (not) do?
Not having read Jameson myself, I have to rely on Marcus & Best for my impression of his contributions. I gathered that he proposes a rather powerful role for the critic, who discloses hidden meanings and truths in texts. Yet they also politically enrich texts; “the activist component of literature is a value added by the critic.” (7) What would be the implications of this statement? For one, only readers with thorough training could derive political messages from literature. For another, what would this activist component achieve? A critic would need to be heard on a large scale for their discovery to bring about any change and probably only few critics could be said to have an audience large enough to make a difference, rendering literature more or less politically inert after all. True, their voice could affect institutions which could then bring about change, e.g. by changing school syllabi, but that would mean only such political additions to literature as are in line with the institution’s ideology would be propagated. Hence, literature could not (through critics) effectively articulate non-dominant political positions, marginal voices.
I believe it can. At the same time, I appreciate Marcus’/Best’s bid for a realistic position regarding „the revolutionary. capacities of both texts and critics“ and the diversity of positions on reading they introduced. Nealon’s claim that critics need not add theory to the text, only to “register what the text itself is saying” (8) made me question my understanding of theory as a tool that helps just this process of registering. Is theory a registering or an addition of meaning? (Happy to brainstorm). Marcus’/Best’s sixth form of surface reading that “sees ghosts as presences, not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying what they are ghosts of.” (12) Placed a finger on a critical point: can we, as critics, go too far in interpretation? Is there a point where we are imbuing texts more with our own ideology and identity politics rather than discovering something external in the text? And, even if so, would that necessarily be a condemnable practice? If we lay no claim to unearthing any absolute truths, is it not legitimate to autopsy a text and say „look, using this reasoning and theoretical structure, this is what the text says to me, this is what it can say. It is part of its potential.“ Like Latour’s nonhuman actors, critics would thus configure and refigure meanings rather than transmit them in a predetermined state.
It would also allot more space to the aspect of resonance (Dimock) Felski introduces. As the ”text’s capacity to signify across time, to trigger unexpected echoes in new places,” (580) resonance goes beyond a political activism that needs to be set in motion by a critic. It encompasses affective qualities of texts that academia often dismisses, as Felski criticises: “The significance of a text is not exhausted by what it reveals or conceals about the social conditions that surround it. Rather, it is also a matter of what it makes possible in the viewer or reader – what kind of emotions it elicits, what perceptual changes it triggers, what affective bonds it calls into being.” ”What if academia didn’t dismiss these emotional attachments as naïve and learned to ’forge a language of attachment as intellectually robust and refined as our rhetoric of detachment?’” I find this suggestion powerful, as the practice of bracketing emotional appeal of literature, of immersion, as unworthy of academic study seems to ignore not only part of the human experience but also a key as to why texts can have political agency.
Overall, my thoughts are still jumbled (as this rather random account attests). The readings have made me consider the pleasure not just of reading but also of interpretation and whether we ought not accept that there is a strong creative element to the latter, too.
Two sidenotes
1. Felski introduces Tony Bennett’s ‚reading formation‘ and his idea that “How we respond to works of art is governed neither by the internal structures of the text nor by the raw social demographics of race/gender/class, but by the cultural frameworks and interpretative vocabularies we have unconsciously absorbed” (585) I wondered whether the cultural frameworks wouldn’t include race/gender/class? I don’t quite how he distinguishes them, maybe someone can enlighten me?
2. Marcus/Best suggest in the beginning that the 21st century might have richer surfaces and required less deconstruction, because information was more immediate – like war photography immediately transmitting the truth and horror of current events. My impression is actually contrary in that I’d argue we have to decode more than ever, because we consume information on a broader variety of media channels now and have more connections from which we are confronted with information that we need to assess re/truth value, emotional affect, relevance etc. I’d be interested to hear what people think (though I realise this may not be too relevant for the seminar) [Frida Heitland, FH]
— What unites many of these essays, and what interests me nearly the most about them (if I haven’t completely misread them!), is what they portray as at stake in the interests, practices, and ‘distractions’ of ‘critique’, and the ideas they construct around these odds. These are shifting goalposts, and the elusive ball, more often than not, is some idea of reality or integrity. For Sontag, this is a ‘real’ art threatened by the work of ‘interpretation’ as the ‘revenge of the intellect on art’ and ‘the world’; for Berlant it is an embrace, as she puts it in the apparently infamous CCP memo, of ‘a space of concrete utopian imagining’ that for her can harness the ‘sublime productivities of political failure’ against the banal rising-tides of professionalism and hegemony; for Sedgwick it is the underlying ‘misrecognition of other ways of knowing’ that the ‘limitations of present theoretical vocabularies’ and their “hermeneutics of suspicion” which she recognises in ‘paranoid theory’ and its ‘ugly prescriptions.’ The violence to reality and progress that they often see in that which they write against is often matched by a like relentlessness of critique that, often, leaves their arguments susceptible to the charges of ‘distraction’ they level against other modes of thinking and perception.
What immediately strikes me about Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ is not only the urgency with which it deconstructs the ‘extraordinary hegemony’ in criticism of an understanding of art where ‘content comes first’, but its advocation of an ‘erotics of art.’ Content-centric modes of interpretation have always seemed, for me, what lets a lot of art and academia down in terms of what it they might achieve in terms of pertinence and complexity of critique. The ‘encrustation’ of such an approach cannot be overstated, and it is one that often begins even as early as primary-school comprehension-tests, where the highest prizes are for squeezing out elusive emotional ‘meanings’ and equivalences. Her parody of Kazan’s default approach to Streetcar sounds like what I wrote in year 11, and what the examiners wanted to hear. Sontag here reveals something that these pernicious modes of interpretation threaten beyond a world of bland critiques. The ‘deplet[ion] of the world’ which she figures as pollution, where ‘the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities’ serves to make her injunction to ‘recover our senses’ all the more urgent. The fact that such interpretations as she criticises seem to threaten the concrete and the bodily in art point to stakes that I had not quite put my finger on before. Yet, just as Berlant’s injunctions for a ‘utopian’ mode of thought that can embrace the useful aesthetics of political failure might be said to have a touch of the ivory-tower to them (those who really suffer at the ‘bottom’ of hegemony can’t afford such posturing) despite how attractive and persuasive they are, I find Sontag’s supposition that a better ‘vocabulary’ for ‘forms’ in literary study as an antidote to interpretation flawed. Much of this exists, and is often as guilty as content-fetishism for violating the ‘reality’ of works of art. Just watch the students desperately searching for that enjambment to shoehorn into their next close-reading.
Sontag’s portrayal of bad interpretations as ‘like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere’ put me in mind of a thinker whose ‘reparative practices’, as Sedgwick might put it, manage to operate, although within the frame of ecological critique, as deconstructive in a manner that only gives birth to new realisations. Timothy Morton’s notions of the mesh of all lifeand the dark ecology of falling into an embrace of it seem to be able to sometimes simultaneously perform something like Sedgwick’s brilliant diagnosis of paranoid critique’s role, particularly in feminist and queer theory, of calcifying the oppressive stylizations of heterosexism and ‘the violence of sexual differentiation’ as ones that can ‘never quite be ruled out’, and the ‘reparative practices’ she cites as something that might work against them. Destroying notions of ‘Nature’, his work, like Sedgwick’s, is often maximum critique, minimum distraction. [Sammy Moriarty, SM]
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As I’ve recently been working on a project about the political utility of conspiracy theories in African American communities, I was struck this week by Best and Marcus’ ‘Surface Reading,’ and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ‘Paranoid Reading.’ For me, paranoid thinking, like symptomatic reading, does important cultural work, of which I think Marcus and Best may be too dismissive. I am sympathetic, however, to Sedgwick’s contention that suspicious reading is one of several politically agitating epistemologies.
Brief synopses:
- Best and Marcus elaborate on symptomatic reading and expound the potential of the surface in material methodologies, cognitive reading, new critical close readings, thematic criticism, and literal reading. For these critics, surface reading is not ideological complicity, but rather a means of approaching the text on its own terms without a political goal.
- For Sedgwick, queer theory’s paranoid readings need to be supplemented by other methodologies, namely reparative reading. In this, queer theorists can gain something substantive even from those texts which have sought to erase their existence. Unlike paranoid reading, reparative methodologies deal in pleasure and amelioration, calling on positive rather than negative affect.
Points of contention:
- Do these approaches do justice to the serious political potential of symptomatic readings?
Each text notes that any Jamesonian conviction that ideology can only operate covertly is undone by contemporary awareness of government misconduct. Sedgwick recalls Patton’s response to HIV conspiracy theories: if we could be sure that the government abhors those most vulnerable to HIV, and overlooks military initiatives which seek to annihilate even nonviolent others, ‘what would we know then that we don’t already know?’
I think we should recall Best and Marcus: in defining the terms of ‘the way we read now,’ they ask, who are we? In response to Kosofsky’s opening anecdote, I would suggest that the potential for new knowledge in paranoid readings depends on the position of the reader. I think that the rhetoric of conspiracy can assign moral culpability and emphasise the urgency of addressing institutional imbalances, just as suspicious reading can make serious political comments.
- How should we read about reading?
We might understand Sedgwick’s paper as redressing the paranoid style employed in her earlier ‘Epistemology of the Closet’. Might we, then, employ a reparative reading in engaging with Sedgwick’s essay itself? Equally, Sedgwick’s subheading addresses us as a paranoid reader. Importantly, Sedgwick notes that both readings have their own merit, and suggests that the two aren’t entirely mutually exclusive.
Likewise, I’m interested in how we apply the question of surface and depth to Marcus and Best’s own writing. How should we use their methodology to approach their/wider criticism? Should we trust that there isn’t a deeper meaning? Or, in the work of a critic like Jameson, who says that meaning is encoded, are we to assume that only scholarly publications say what they mean?
- Can we properly define surface?
In thinking about conspiracy theory, I have often wondered how my own analyses differ from that which is broadly considered overinterpretation. If the most salient reading is available at the surface of a text, how do we define the surface? What level of engagement is too deep? And if surface reading, like reparative reading, centres on an openness to interpretation, shouldn’t Marcus and Best follow Sedgwick’s lead in naming surface reading one of many valid approaches? [Tallulah Griffith, TG]
— I’d like to highlight two parallels, which are conceptually related, located in the Felski and Philips pieces. The first parallel between the two pieces involves their conceptualizations of history (Felski) and the conscience (Philips) as necessarily multifaceted and endlessly interpretable in and of themselves; the second, related parallel draws on both pieces’ characterizations of a set context as not only limiting, but inherently diminishing, of the essence of the “text” itself.
As Felski writes of the weaknesses of Historicism, she does acknowledge the attempts of New Historicism to address and amend some of these weaknesses. She particularly notes how through the lens of New Historicism, “history itself is revealed as a buzzing multiplicity of texts—explorers’ diaries, court records, childrearing manuals, government documents, newspaper editorials—whose circulation underwrites the transmission of social energies” (Felski, 577). I was piqued by this quote specifically because, as a holder of a BA in History, I have been exposed to this notion of history as directly comprised of and existing as text for several years. I benefitted acutely from this conceptualization when approaching historical archives and archivable material: treating an archive as living history itself – fragmented, never complete, and yet manifesting value through infinite iterations of interpretation –helped me to recognize the limitations and incompletion of my own research, its contingencies for further development, and the utter necessity of said further development. When conducting historical research, with archival materials or otherwise, one’s work can almost never be complete because there are infinite interpretive angles we have yet to gain access or exposure to.
My analysis of Felski’s point and my relating it to the treatment of historical archives obviously draws on Philips’ notion of the conscience as interpretable in multiple iterations. To me, Felski and Philips’ perspectives are parallel at this point. At a base level, Philips argues that “[o]ver-interpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; to believe in a single interpretation is radically to misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and interpretation itself.” I immediately related this idea to my experience with historical archival work, including the implicit inconclusiveness one must understand the archive as bearing, while accepting this inability to reach a definitive and perfectly nuanced interpretation as the nature of interpretation itself. On the subject of conscience, Philips further argues that “[b]eing able to reflect on one’s conscience – being able to look at the voice of conscience from varying points of view – is itself a radical act” – an act, in my mind, that bears semblance to an understanding and mobilization of what Felski describes as the [historical] text’s ability to underwrite the “transmission of social energies” simply via its existence and circulation. In an abstraction of this parallel, I can’t help but conflate history-as-text and conscience – both not only mutually informing each other through their construction, reiteration, protection and circulation, but existing themselves as each other. If the material which upholds and represents (Western, perhaps recent) human history is both developed, interpreted and disseminated by those bearing (and perhaps grappling with) semblances of a “conscience” themselves, then aren’t the interpretive existences of each interwoven?
The second parallel I’ll draw between the pieces is the limiting and diminishing nature of set context on the “text”s which Felski and Philips discuss. Felski and Philips both describe a set interpretive context as punitive in nature. Felski writes that context “is often wielded in punitive fashion to deprive the artwork of agency, to evacuate it of influence or impact, rendering it a puny, enfeebled, impoverished thing. We inflate context, in short, in order to deflate text” (Felski, 581). Here, if the artwork is the “text” (I’m thinking of a Barthes-esque notion of the text, here in terms of ANT), then an approach towards this text featuring set context essentially punishes the text into a deflated, adulterated form; we cannot reach the text in its fulness because of the aggression implicit in our movement towards it. Similarly, Philips finds evidence of Freud’s “ongoing suspicion, i.e. ambivalence, about psychoanalysis” in his implication that “the more persuasive, the more authoritative the interpretation[,] the less credible it is.” He characterizes the super-ego (a dominant means of interpretation of the conscience) specifically as a bully, connoting punitiveness, diminishing and flattening our perception of ourselves and our world. Rendering ourselves and our worldviews through this set context of the super-ego, as Freud might argue, essentially enfeebles and impoverishes them; and, as the power lies in what interpretive means one can recognize, adhering to only one vis-à-vis the conscience is not only reductive but “boring” (Philips). If we are to retain the vitality of the “text” itself, a set context cannot be employed in an interpretive approach – a conclusion forwarded by Felski and Philips alike. [Talise Beveridge, TB]
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Best and Marcus’ article “Surface Reading”, I found, provided a useful introduction into the broad field of how literary critics and academia approach the scope and hermeneutics of texts. If contextualizers depend on drawing from political, social, philosophical, and historical paradigms to interpret works, since the 1970s the New Critics have pushed for close readings of texts that, James English and Ted Underwood in “Shifting Scales” understand as a formalistic and textual methodology; a practice which, interestingly enough, was the focus of many of my literature education in undergrad.
Rita Felski makes a point in “Context Stinks!” that conventional historicizing/contextualizing approach to interpretation is deficient; I appreciated the Latourian idea she champions, arguing against the the “modern urge to purify”; I wholly agree that the “significance of a text is not exhausted” by the social conditions it reveals/hides, but Felski concedes in her conclusion that the “social make-up, buying power, and beliefs of audiences” affect our interpretation of texts. It’s useful, perhaps, to consider texts as nonhuman actors, to question how we define context, but if we take into account the “transtemporal movement” it is necessary to consider the context of how postcolonial, political, and identity discourses have dismantled and reshaped the temporal and spatial dimensions of literary history.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as a major queer/feminist theorist, unsurprisingly focused on paranoia as an anticipatory, reflexive, and nevertheless strong theory representing the repression of same-sex desire and, by extension, the systemic workings of oppression. Although her article is specific to antihomophobic texts and the depressive/reparative positions of paranoiac reading, I found her argument on the hermeneutics of suspicion fruitful: she argues that the harm of gender binaries and heterosexism can never not be anticipated, and can never be anticipated early enough; the same can be said of other dominant mass cultures that derive from touristic and imperial drives (“68, or Something”, Lauren Berlant).
I also found many of the readings self-aware of the role academia and institutions play in creating and solidifying dominant mass cultures and often hierarchical units of literary studies (this harkens back to the discussion we had in American Fiction Now on the problematics of “highbrow” literature, and of the arbitrary/sociopolitical/modernist psychology and elitism that highlight certain types of texts and readings over others.) English and Underwood frame literary history as one that, even today, remains partly “narrow and exclusionary”; and while the readings had different focuses, I found that many of them shared the same view that increasingly, authorship, and specifically the social and political identities of authors, emerged as an important part of the discourse surrounding contemporary literary hermeneutics. Lauren Berlant discusses minority literature at length, and takes the approach of close-reading to analyze Song of Solomon and No Telephone to Heaven as texts that, rather than adopting postmodern or modernist psychology, take up “anomalous languages”, to reveal the “alienation from cultural value that defines the experience of dominant populations,” and to “refuse the discursive logic of minor cultures.” Like Rebecca pointed out above, Rankine’s Citizen is a successful example of a work in which both “an attention to the microscope” as well as anomalous linguistic/paratextual techniques succeeds in pointing out both the larger scale social/political issues, as well as firmly entrenching itself in the dimensions of literary criticism. [Jane Kim, JK]
Post-Class Notes
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“Theory doesn’t always save you.”
– Frida Heitland
For me, this was the defining statement of Wednesday’s class. It appears that these classes are going to be an opportunity for quiet reflection as they make us confront the demons of our respective critical practices. Frida is on point: there’s a God-shaped hole in my heart, which theory fills from time to time, but theory does not save me.
The discussion on Wednesday (which left me with a lot to think about and very little to say at the time) broadly skirted around the ideas of ‘surface’ and ‘symptomatic’ reading. When I think about the ‘surface’ of ‘surface reading’ I automatically question whether this ‘surface’ is universally visible and visibly universal. Are all literary ‘surfaces’ commonly (and uniformly) perceived? Who determines where the surface ends and the depths begin? I’m not entirely keen on the idea of ‘symptomatic reading’ either. I think ‘symptomatic reading’ is something we do in academia to justify to the rest of the world that reading books and talking about them is an occupation which deserves monetary compensation. What kind of reading should we be doing? I really don’t know.
What is theory anyway? It is a form of mediation. It translates aesthetic experience into the linguistic medium. Therefore, the pitfalls of language by association become those of theory. See what I do? At my best, I can write sentences and essays about the ontology of this and that, until it gets old and someone comes up with something else. Then what? Theory is a self-propagating behemoth and we theorise for the simple reason that we are a talkative species. We articulate our experiences because to experience something, move on and not talk about it is not an option: there’s too much time on us. When we’re being talkative in writing, we call it ‘discourse.’ We extract meaning out of the depths to write an essay. When we discover that essay has already been written, we go deeper in an almost ritualistic resort to thinking. (This is why nobody calls up the Humanities people to solve problems: praxis isn’t really our forte. I think this is a potential reason why the Right is in government everywhere while the Left pats its back on Reddit). We complicate in order to simplify. We simplify in order to complicate. That keeps us busy. There is some saving involved, but not in the biblical way that we have come to expect. There’s really a God-shaped hole in all of our hearts.
A view is that ‘theorisation’ is academic jargon for ‘overthinking’ and that doing either is problematic. My theory (haha) is that it’s not the theorising, but the institutional setup within which we do the theorising that is at the heart of the problem. The problem isn’t that we overthink: we got into the business of overthinking because it comes naturally to most of us, I assume. The problem is that we’ve established overthinking as a stand-alone business in the form of the academy (I’m sorry, Michael). The academy rewards overthinking, because of which our overthinking has now become geared towards some academic goal or sense of purpose (I feel your pain, Brandon). However, we can’t really get out of overthinking because it is our nature, so we overthink overthinking and theorise theorising. It’s all very meta from there. A dear friend once called academia a ponzi scheme, I see why. The real question here is, what else could we be doing and why aren’t we doing that? [Mehvish Siddiqui, MS]
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This was a really interesting first class. I think part of what we revealed is how, surprisingly, some basic disciplinary questions are left unexamined until quite far into our training (I’m including myself in this). Questions like, what sorts of attention do I pay to literary texts? What kind of a practice is critique? What history – institutional, political, personal – is there behind the way I read? And more broadly, to draw on some of the Kleinian terms invoked by Sedgwick, what is the nature of my attachment to particular ‘objects’ in the scene of reading? I’m thinking in particular of one’s attachment to particular kinds of text – ‘I’m a novels person, I don’t work on poetry’ – or particular periods – ‘I don’t go beyond the late middle ages’ – or particular theoretical orientations – ‘I’m a close reader’, ‘I’m a Marxist’. What do these attachments enable and inhibit? What do they allow and preclude for our styles of thinking and writing? One thing Mehvish via Frida intimates is that symptomatic reading can resemble a faith-based practice, and like faith (I’m including atheism as a kind of faith) it can, at its worst, be self-confirmatory. The worst kinds of syptopatic reading are predictable; they know what they’ll find because they set out looking for it. So one thing we might get out of these (bad) attachments is a sense of euphoric affirmation that might seem, as Mehvish suggests, like a kind of salvation. Or, more routinely, what we might get out of these attachments is a sense of knowing what we’re doing – the allure of expertise – or what Sedgwick calls never being surprised. And in this sense, our attachments, particularly to theory, might (as Felski et al suggest) be a way of not reading. The problem here is not so much overthinking, but overthinking as a form of under-interpretation. I’m struck by Phillips on this: ‘Over-interpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; to believe in a single interpretation is radically to misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and interpretation itself’.
What we moved onto discuss was, OK, even if I find Felski, Sedgwick, Best and Marcus convincing, what does ‘un-symptomatic reading’ look like in practice? One thing I stressed in class is that all these critics are invested in the pedagogical implications of their work. One reason behind the success and pervasiveness of symptomatic reading is that it is easy to teach (or at least easy to teach badly). And what they’re variously advocating seems harder to teach, partly because it does away with policing its disciplinary borders; it’s open to thinking about ‘uncritical’ modes of response – like emotion – and critique – like anecdotes – that are harder to categorise. A place to start might be to do what we’re hopefully doing in this class; to think more about our attachments, and to allow ourselves to put down our overly familiar objects for a while, and pick up new ones instead. [Michael Kalisch, MK]
SCALES OF ATTENTION 