READING
- Wai Chee Dimock, “Scales of Aggregation” (2006)
- Jim English and Ted Underwood, “Shifting Scales” (2016)
- Günter Leypoldt, “The Fall into Instituionality” (2011)
- Heather Love, “Small Change” (2016)
- Franco Morretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” (2000)
Pre-Class Notes
— I was particularly interested in Leypoldt’s article this week, as I’ve read Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (if people remember, this was the text I presented on in A Course last term). But reading Leypoldt’s review, I actually had a different reaction to McGurl’s text; I was newly struck by how McGurl’s argument draws us a picture of literary history in the postwar period that is, in many ways, overwhelmingly male. The Program Era obscures this impression by invoking a number of notable female writers (Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Flannery O’Conner). But I felt that Leypoldt’s article was franker about the names that have really come to define the “Program Era” phenomenon (Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme) and inhabit “nearly identical economies of symbolic prestige and thus a similar socio-institutional space” (p. 847) as the iconic modernist writers. Particularly since Leypoldt references the GI Bill so frequently (which primarily benefited men after the war), I began to think more about the gender implications of using the “Program Era” as a way of defining postwar fiction. I searched online for statistics on the historical gender breakdown of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and found a graph on The Program Era Project. As expected, just after the end of WWII, men began surpassing women dramatically in enrollment numbers. This imbalance doesn’t even out until 1983. When I think of iconic postmodern writers in America, I most often think of men (Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, and later, Wallace). How might the link that McGurl suggests between postmodern American writing and the creative writing program also be responsible for gender imbalances of this literary period? Next to the gender breakdown graph, The Program Era Project site reads:
“… it is worth noting that before WWII, women predominated as students in what was a small and fledgling program. We also know from high school graduation dates that most of these women were older than standard college age. The program in its early years, in other words, was less about professional credentialing than continuing education.”
This last sentence is particularly interesting. The programs weren’t about professional credentialing until men began to dominate them? At many points in Leypoldt’s article, he references an idealized pre-Program Era time when writers relied on “the limited support networks of the modernist period (the rentier-financed gifts, stipends, little magazines, and publishing houses of the 1910s and 1920s),” when those writing at the upper regions of the literary field were seeking “low economic profits and high elite recognition” (p. 847).
I can think of many 19thcentury female writers (Alcott, for example), who were upfront about viewing their writing as a source of profit, particularly when other, traditionally male professions weren’t available to them. And Alcott is not a writer we consider low-brow, or “commercial.” Is McGurl’s (and thus, Leypoldt’s) assertion—that the Program Era demonstrated a groundbreaking blending of commercial and aesthetic priorities under the university—more relevant to a history of male writers than to one of both genders? [RD]
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One of my undergraduate professors once asked us if watching a gruesome war film or a close-up video of a papercut would traumatize us more, and almost all of us immediately answered the latter. Perhaps this sentiment helps explain why I keep returning to Heather Love’s “Small Change” piece in thinking about scale. In some ways, as Love helps to illuminate, a view of systemic issues too large can encourage us to disengage from them or quickly desensitize ourselves to the damage they cause. Literary criticism, Love argues, seems to live in these small grains and details that a reader can connect to. Furthermore, she notes a major difference between literary studies and other disciplines to be the presence or absence of large-scale data as methodology, quoting Harding’s definition method as “a matter of data collection rather than interpretation or theory. In literary studies method has often been understood only as interpretation of theory” (425). Perhaps I am misinterpreting Love’s actual definition of data, but this aspect argument seems to ignore many of the points we have discussed in this course, that there is methodological significance in what we read, how we place texts alongside one another, and what we actually consider a text (or part of a text) before we start the work of interpretation.
Dimock seems to be operating from a similar, or at least comparable, standpoint, questioning the societal impulse to average, compile, and aggregate rather than orienting towards more detail and nuance. Aggregating a large data set to make a generalization, Dimock argues, is in its logic “an abstracted and sanitized version of racism itself” (220). When placed alongside Love’s thoughts on large-scale data collection, this sentiment might imply the work of detail or small-scale literary criticism to be inherently anti-racist or anti-capitalist. Regarding “Scales of Aggregation,” a version of the same question also arises here for me, namely, what are we taking to be our “data” and what is our data set? Must the work of digital scholarship or more quantitative approaches to literature aggregate a large data set? I would be curious to hear ideas about whether Love’s “micro” scale could also be carried out in quantitative ways, or if these sensibilities must necessarily be mutually exclusive. With Dimock in mind, I wonder if there are more quantitative or scientific methods towards literature that resist nationalistic tendencies towards aggregation and account for transnational identities or other subjectivities that exist outside those frameworks.
I think often an association arises between more digital or quantitative methods of studying literature and a disrespect for traditional modes of interpretation, such as close reading or archival work. Digital scholarship, or even the blending of AI and literature, to many, seem to come from “the burden of justification” (425) as Love puts it, for the humanities. I too am troubled by a privileging of quantitative or scientific methodologies over traditional literary interpretation, but I am also interested in questioning what we actually mean by “data” in the humanities and perhaps imagining quantitative approaches that honor the small-scale or resist logics of capitalism. [CA]
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In James F. English and Ted Underwood’s essay, ‘Shifting Scales’, they introduce a connection between Heather Love’s essay on ‘incrementalism’, and Lauren Berlant’s ‘affective probing of minor archives’ (English and Underwood, p. 282). I was really interested in this implied connection between the minority stance, and the act of close-reading something small (such as microaggressions). The suggestion – from Love herself – seems to be that there is something inherently political in paying attention to the particular.
Love observes that ‘small-scale observations of everyday life tend to be understood as conservative, reinforcing the status quo.’ However, she ‘argues for the political utility of description at the micro scale’ (Love, p. 419). Here, Love invokes Sianne Ngai’s reading of Lauren Berlant’s 2011 book, Cruel Optimism. Ngai ‘argues for the political value of the incrementalist turn’, and ‘sees Berlant’s turn to minor and diffuse affects as informed by political commitments responsive to those conditions’. To Ngai, “Scaled-down affects are the ones that best register [the] only seemingly paradoxical becoming ordinary of social, political, and environmental crisis”’ (Love, p. 422).
As an example of these “scaled-down affects” that, according to Ngai, best register social crises, Love uses the ‘genre’ of microagressions. Specifically, she looks at the way in which these microagressions play out on Twitter (an innovative example of super-close reading): Love demonstrates how ‘[c]hroniclers of small-scale verbal and nonverbal assaults’ have used hashtags to ‘gather and correlate evidence of racist violence on such sites as Twitter and Tumblr’ (Love, p. 423). Thus, Love argues that reading microaggressions becomes not just a critical activity, but ‘a key activist tool in combating racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of bias, denigration, and exclusion’ (Love, p. 423).
This made me think of Berlant’s essay, “’68, or Something”, which we read in the first week of this course. She, too, is interested in tracing the particularities of racism, sexism, homophobia, and bias – however, she does so through a reading of the minority subject. To Berlant, being ‘intensively minor’ is ‘about producing and representing local, national, and transnational particularity,’ but also ‘about radically redressing bodies, affect, and authority, about writing criticism, about reinventing the forms of history in the intimate sensations and memories of childhood, envy, exile, and political trauma’ (Berlant, “’68, or Something”, p. 132). Thus, the minority subject becomes not just a site for reading (observation) but for action (radical redressing).
To Berlant, ‘a minor literature’ is, first and foremost, ‘a corpus that registers a minority culture’s linguistic displacement from a majority culture’s authority over the “real”’. Second, minor literature ‘registers and collapses historical or diachronic narrative time into a lyric, disruptive, present tense, a new temporality’ that exists in ‘dislocation from traditional referentiality’. Lastly, ‘a minor literature produces a new understanding of authorship’: since ‘[m]inor authors experience their authorship in the state of dissolved boundaries between themselves and the publics from within which they speak’, Berlant argues that ‘their texts may be understood to be collaborative, ongoing sites of cultural production’ (Berlant, p. 134).
Berlant seems to be arguing that a ‘minor literature’ could exceed both temporal and spacial borders. This lead me to think about Wai Chee Dimock’s essay, ‘Scales of Aggregation’, in which she problematizes the very idea of the ‘nation’ itself.
Dimock argues that ‘[h]umanistic fields are divided by nations’, and thus ‘the contours of our knowledge […] follow the borders of a territorial regime’ (Dimock, p. 223). As an alternative, Dimock proposes ‘an unbundling and rebundling of the humanities’, which would allow us to look at literary artefacts not as ‘national’ but rather as ‘prenational as well as subnational’. In dissolving these borders of knowledge, Dimock argues that we can access ‘a time when the nation-state was not yet on the planet, and a scale on which territorial sovereignty does not register.’ (Dimock, p. 225-226)
Dimock’s argument about accessing ‘a time when the nation-state was not yet on the planet’ feels oddly similar to conversations we’ve had previously on this course, about the impossibility of going back to a time ‘before critical reading’. However, Dimock’s essay also made me think about the way in which we (or rather, the academy) group authors into ‘nations’ (e.g. American Studies), an act of categorization which is perhaps not always natural. Berlant, in her essay, brings up the example of Kafka, ‘who, as a “Czech Jew [writing] in German,” exemplifies the process by which national state and official languages can be divested of their domination’ (Berlant p. 135). Perhaps this is what makes Kafka such a good subject to discuss when talking about literary borders.
I’d be interested in talking more about Kafka and the way various nations have tried to ‘claim’ him as their own, especially in relation Judith Butler’s essay, “Who Owns Kafka”, which addresses many of the issues above. (I highly recommend it – it’s a great read. Those of us from Michael Kalisch’s C-Course will recognize it from last term.) [CRK]
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Franco Moretti’s “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” stood out to me for a few reasons. The first being, I think this is one of only a few articles in the field of literary criticism that I’ve read that made use of any sort of math, used categories like “first experiment” and “second experiment,” and peppered the article with charts. It seemed like a conglomeration of the history of the book articles that I’ve been reading as well as the articles I read as a research assistant for a computer scientist (loads of charts and predictable headings like “methodology,” “data collected,” and “analysis”). In many ways, Moretti’s article seems to embody the trend identified by English and Underwood that there is currently “a host of novel methodological exchanges between the humanities and the social sciences” (284) and their position that those in the literary fields need to “build quantitative sociological models on a ‘middling scale,’ large enough to capture statistically meaningful tendencies of the field as a whole but small enough to be constructed without heavy reliance on computation” (291). Moretti seems to have done just that, making a valiant attempt to merge disciplines and widen the methodologies used in literary criticism, but I found the computations to be predictably clumsy. For example, in the first experiment, he states that he brought to his graduate seminar “about twenty detective stories of Conan Doyle’s times” and that his class “combed them for clues,” which resulted in Figure 1. In the social sciences, this description of the methodology would be inadequate. He would need to state that each story was randomly assigned to three students individually, categorized individually, and that all discrepancies between these evaluations would be addressed through reference to a rubric created before. He would have also needed to take a different approach to choosing the stories used in the study. Essentially he jumped to the analysis without explaining his data collection or methodology thoroughly enough; and in addition, he calls it an experiment but doesn’t follow scientific procedure. While this initially bothered me, perhaps we could discuss the merits of this system. Can we learn anything by experiments that essentially break the rules? How much credit can we give to Moretti’s experiments? For our field, we rarely focus on things that can be proven. Does Moretti just extend that philosophy to a methodology that is designed to oppose it? What are the ramifications of this?
What I did find compelling about Moretti’s argument was his focus on form as the element of literature that determined “what makes readers ‘like’ this or that book” (211) and how it is the form that can determine whether a book is one of the .5% that survives time. While he focused on the implementation and development of clues in Arthur Conan Doyle’s works, his argument reminded me of Sir Walter Scott’s rise and fall in the literary canon as taught in most American universities (I can’t attest to this in the English school system). While Sir Walter Scott was a quintessential figure in the rise of the novel (practically inventing the genre of historical fiction) during the Romantic period and the sales of his Waverly novels dominated the works of his contemporaries both in the UK and America, his novels (besides the occasional excerpt) have become largely forgotten on American university reading lists. In fact, many of his contemporaries that admired Scott’s works are better known and more widely read than Scott today in American universities, including Jane Austen. Why this shift? What aspect of the form of Austen is more palatable to current American readers than that of Scott? Is it simply the fact that Austen’s novels are much shorter than Scott’s and are, therefore, easier for professors to assign? Or perhaps, American readers find Austen more accessible. Scott was trying to elevate the novel, even beginning each chapter with a quote from an acceptably high-brow source, like Shakespeare or one of the Greeks. Is it possible that this stylistic choice that helped him gain readers in the Romantic period is the same reason he lost them in the 21st? I find Moretti’s attempt to find the underlying cause of a novel’s success within the novel itself to be interesting, but I have my doubts that it could be quantifiably proven, but perhaps that isn’t the point of the discourse. [MD]
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The readings this week covered a broad range of topics from literary overproduction and canonization (Moretti, The Slaughterhouse of Literature), and different divisions/aggregations (are they the same thing or the opposite?) of humanity, particularly that of citizenship and national borders, and how they apply to the humanities. While I was less interested in Moretti’s argument surrounding clues and the detective genre, I appreciated the lens he applied to the literary tree: “If we want to explain the laws of literary history, we must move to a formal plane that lies beyond them: below or above: the device, or the genre.” He focuses on clues as the device, and the criminal/detective fiction as the genre in the late 19th century, but I find looking at devices and genre useful to looking at Rankine’s Citizen. (Love, Small Change)
Moretti concludes that what survives in the slaughterhouse of literature may well be simply arbitrary. Last week’s brief discussion on the process of canonization, partly owing itself to academia and partly to the economy and industry, seemed to be aligned with Moretti’s argument that 99.5% of literature meets a dead end I the larger tree of literary history.
My dissertation being on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, though, I was most interested in Heather Love’s “Small Change,” particularly as it is situated in the modern paradigm of digital humanities and interdisciplinary exchange in literary criticism. (English, Underwood, Shifting Scales) The strain of anxiety surrounding the role and weight of literary criticism in last week’s readings were present in Love’s article; quoting Seltzer, Love cites “new incrementalism” as an approach to affect, politics, and perspective in literature: we look at the minor characters, minor feelings, small moments of adjustments and resistance, with longer attention span, perhaps zooming in on a smaller scale. This is an observation, Ngai says, that is true of the political, the social, and the environmental: they are becoming ordinary, more everyday. I would argue that in the past year, the three have become closely interconnected, and that the daily has started to impinge on the macro-scale; coupled with youth activism, digital culture makes it possible for microsociology and details on the micro-scale to serve as strong evidence for or against the politics—whether cultural, social, or environmental—on a national or transnational (apologies to Wai Chee Dimock) level.
Rankine’s Citizen is an exemplary text that uses micro-observations as a reflection of a larger social issue. Underwood and English discuss the “fluid configuration of disciplines” and conversation between the humanities and social sciences; and this is what Rankine precisely achieves. Although Love argues that Rankine draws on lyric, essay, and documentary, she in fact bends and fuses existing genres to reveal what micro aggressions ultimately point to a nationwide political/social/historical issue: the invisibility of whiteness as opposed to the indifference to continued violence against black bodies. Her section on micro aggressions provides the “interaction-rich” texts, small, uncomfortable scenes that the black ‘you’ is utterly familiar with, and which either implicates or refuses access to other readers placing themselves in the second-person ‘you.’
Lauren Berlant, the author of Cruel Optimism—which Love cites, and who has also written extensively on Rankine—argues that “non-sovereign politics is not a refusal of politics.” This is true. But in the context of US race relations, sovereign/national politics affect the smallest areas of day-to-day life; then the seemingly small micro observations build the foundation for larger issues; Rankine’s lyrical essay on Serena Williams, or her “Situation” video series with John Lucas on black victims of police brutality, rise to illustrate the larger affects (in both senses of the word) of race, and “[invoke] the literal connection between minor events and major events.” Love discusses Rankine’s insistence to title her book an “American lyric,” what, then, the lyric means in Citizen; her use of the lyric speaker ‘you,’ the use of the present tense, her use of brevity and extension, the discomfort triggered by the text’s request for unexpected types of attention.
In an interview with Lauren Berlant, Rankine stated that “video manipulation by John Lucas allowed [her] to slow down . . . as if. . . in real time rather than as a spectator.” This is what Citizen largely achieves; it engages the audience in each moment of microaggression, police brutality, and racial tension, in daily life, in the tennis court, and in the performative screening of black bodies. It is meant to draw in the reader to the ‘lyric now’ (Love, Small Change) by hooking on to the seemingly invisible, and seemingly brief, micro-scale interactions–which are, in fact, ultimately an outrageous constant—then forcing the reader’s attention to zoom into larger pictures, whether it be a shocking full-page image of Wozniacki, or a video series with an unending list of names. [JK]
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The painful heart that weighs down many of these readings, that upsets the balance of their scales, is the inherent kinds of violence that they recognise in extant modes of scalar thinking and abstract evaluations that underpin both literary criticism, and wider realms of thought. Recalibration, whether hitting the zero button, or radically resetting our manners of appraisal and redistributing its weights, is revealed as necessity.
Dimock, in ‘Scales of Aggregation’, concludes that the hidden aspects of literary lives and non-standard critical modes—from the possibility of interdisciplinary study to endangered languages—are part of what she rescales as ‘these prenational, subnational, and transnational words [which] belong to baseline humanity’ and that it ‘is only by an act of violence that we can elevate them to a national paradigm.’ In other words, she exposes here how the conventional parameters of critical and literary thought, ones that, as she draws from Harpham and Mingolo’s work, tip their own balance in the favour of the hegemonic structures of the capitalistic nation, and in doing so they destroy and erase realities that are not within their interests to preserve. The ‘humanities’, both as a value system and a fenced-off ‘field’ of study, often perform the same violent and homogenising work as the ‘voracity’ of the nation, which destructively assimilates into itself both the transnational beyond it and the citizen within it, in their re-inscription of ‘national’ veins of thought where they ‘follow the borders of a territorial regime.’ This might be seen, for example, in the regional fetishism of rigidly prescribed notions of Americanliterature as much as in Gove’s attempts to ‘de-Americanise’ the English GCSE curriculum during his time as Minister for Education, and maybe even in Oxford’s predilection for rigid ‘period papers.’ For Dimock the stakes are much higher than intellectual integrity. Where the ‘left-leaning discipline’ (Harpham) of the humanities can perform something like “homeland defence”, as she puts it, the ‘random and non-random casualties’ of its aggregative processes become dangerously similar to those that erase and persecute citizens and ideas alike. It is hard not to heed her rallying-cry for new scales of multi-dimensional reading and thinking.
Moretti’s exploration of the ‘slaughterhouse of literature’ and the anxieties surrounding ‘canon’ that attend it is similarly concerned with recovering what is buried in the ‘field’ of literary studies. His argument that the loss of the ‘99.5 percent’ of texts in the process canonisation, created by the ‘butcher’ readers and literary marketplaces and perpetuated by the ‘the very close reading of very few texts’, might be remediated in setting up a framework for ‘a larger literary history [which] requires other skills: sampling; statistics; work with series, titles, concordances, incipits’ is persuasive, and his dauntingly statistical “trees” provide a possible exemplar for such recovery-work. But it is hard not to sometimes see the possibilities of a knife lurking in his own hand. He might admit his errors in focusing narrowly on the formal quirk of the ‘clue’ in Conan-Doyle and his contemporaries, but the silent assumption of his argument’s Darwinian turn (which I might have totally mistraced!) is that many of the texts which lie beyond the ‘0.5 percent’ do so only on lack of merit or failure to adapt, something which is slightly troubling when the often-deliberate systems of smothering certain voices and languages—what Dimock might call ‘nation’—are taken into account. Yet his call for an ‘anarchy’ of methodology to recover the canon’s corpses remains irresistible.
Recognition of these branching ‘trees’ and ‘fields’ of literary studies, then, might perhaps bring about a kind of generous ‘ecology’ of texts and readings, one whose multi-scale ‘anarchy’ can attend to and grasp both the subterranean intricacies of their hidden mycelia and overreaching epochs of their atmospheric changes. (sorry about this weirdness!) [SM]
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This week’s reading was so diverse–I like it! We can see the discussion of scale as an extension to what we already picked out in our previous discussions on attention and paranoid reading, which is to say that certain interpretations we make, what we deem interesting or worth a look, often gets entangled around structures of time, space, and identity, whether it be the idea of a national literature or sentiment, how certain literary devices or stories move across times–remaining relevant to current readership (and in relation to mass consumption rather than necessarily an elite critical body, one would say)–, and even the literal process of critique (the graphing and measuring of a persistent style–the “clue”–as a kind of scale), text’s formulation (aggregating authorship to a general MFA), or how texts over others become considered “literary.”
What was most full circle to me, in regards to our own A-course discussion in the previous term’s week 1, was the Wai Chee Dimock reading, as it problematized the initial history of the founding of the American Literature discipline, and further, periodization (as we brought up earlier), and the states of literature that exist before and after/ in and around, aggregative, critical projects…
Setting the scene:
“Aggregation–the making of entities, its costs as well as its limits–turns out to be the thread…” (221)
“Nowhere is the adjective American more secure than when it is offered as American literature” (223)
I think its premise is simple, but opens up the floodgate to nuance: namely, thinking beyond the idea of nation, which has encapsulated so much discussion around what texts like Leaves of Grass or The Scarlet Letter mean as a story of a particular American texture, readings that often overlook or over simplify, think Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition; the idea of taking particularities, striping and reforming it into a larger entity: the melting pot of literature. But what about these nuances? What about Native American traditions, immigrant narratives, private diaries, queer romances….that become shut out by aggregation. And this type of reading has really opened what a text can say, such as Edward Sugden’s reading of moby dick as pre-national or an interstitial text–stories of ocean travel as an “inbetweenness,” and more potentialities of experience. The nuances of polynesian life for instance, or the ways these characters inhabit identities before the true patriotization of “Americanness.” All not to say necessarily that national thinking is bad, but to undo the stranglehold it has on categorizing style and content.
“Is the dividing line central to its constitution? And is the transnational always symmetrical to the national, a replay of its exclusionary form on a spatially extended register?” (221)
And here the argument is extended to the global age, subjects that pose problems to the idea of national character–the fluidity of a transnational subject…reminding me very much of modern takes on cosmopolitanism, Teju’s Cole’s Open City for instance. Whether or not a narrator who takes on many voices, many literatures: is there a kind of world citizen, is there critique to be had about this, and it makes me wonder what our pals in the World Lit Mst are doing? Or rather something else is at play, at least from the quote, the idea that the transnational isn’t just a larger aggregation of nation, but beckoning to an intersititual, beyondness that categorizes our current zeitgeist as well as our literary methodologies.– (B.J.S)
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Both Franco Moretti’s broad literary analyses and Heather Love’s micro-reading engage the nuances of Best and Marcus’ surface reading, revealing what methodological subsets are available within this approach, and rebuking the contention that surface reading equates to quietism. For Moretti, close reading is to be disavowed because it tends to a re-inscription of a finite, nationalistic canon, obfuscating our truer object of study—all literature. This ties closely with Wai Chee Dimmock’s assertion that literary studies must be progressed by an increased attention beyond the nation, at the transnational, pre-national, and subnational level. Contrastingly, Heather Love makes use of new incrementalism, maintaining analysis at the scale of the object of study to engage the issue of microaggression.
Given that surface reading is often understood as ideologically complicit, the political engagement visible in these texts is interesting to me. Both Moretti and Dimmock seek to expand the canon: Moretti is perhaps most interested in what this means for the literary field, but this shift of attention holds political consequences nonetheless, and Dimmock explicates the possibilities for studies of Native cultures in a more inclusive corpus. Likewise, Love’s exploration of the intersection between literary and political realism champions micro-reading as a means of engaging with social inequalities as they occur in everyday life, rather than as simply institutional phenomena. By focusing on microaggression, we can deal with power struggles on the level at which we experience them. What’s more, this seems to me a particularly ‘woke’ reading, precisely because it is so conscious of its own limits: the political power of this kind of reading resides in its aversion to grandiose claims which risk ignoring the felt effects of racism, homophobia, etc, by appealing to something far more intangible. Crucially, just as Sedgwick championed reparative reading as one mode among many, and Dimmock posits transnational approaches as an addition to rather than usurpation of national discourses, Moretti writes that ‘since no one knows what knowledge will mean in literary studies ten years from now, our best chance lies in the radical diversity of intellectual positions.’ Close reading and distant reading may each work to the same end, and, contrary to popular criticism, this end may be political.
Following on from this, I have two musings that I haven’t quite reached the conclusion of.
Firstly, and more obviously, I wonder whether literature is not too imperfect a science to hold up in Moretti’s Literary Lab, or to Dimmock’s desire for ‘a database comprising the languages of the world’. Love writes that ‘it is not clear if literary studies should even be properly understood as debates about method, since literary studies does not concern data in a sense that would be recognisable in empirical fields.’ There may be a methodological problem even in our definition of method. Equally though, isn’t there also a sense in which scientific scrutiny drains the joy from literary study?
Secondly, I was wondering if there’s something of a paranoid approach even in Moretti’s surface reading. As far as I understand, surface reading champions an approach which starts with the text, without preconceived notions of its content; in this vein, Moretti seeks not to apply patterns to his canon but to examine patterns as they emerge. However, as Jessica Brent contended, ‘if we search the archive for one device only, no matter how significant it may be, all we will find are inferior versions of the device, because that’s all we are really looking for.’ Moretti writes, ‘if you are looking for clues, each sentence becomes “significant,” each character “interesting”; descriptions lose their inertia; all words become stranger and sharper.’ In using Moretti’s approach to ‘look for clues,’ all we will find in these texts is absence and inferiority, because that is all that the terms of his enquiry permit. Rather than freeing us from the constrictions of symptomatic reading, does this mode of reading simply offer another foregone conclusion? [TG]
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I was quite piqued by the repetitive use of the word “database” in this week’s readings, namely in the Dimock and English / Underwood articles. I think this is a meaningful word to hinge on in the context of these topics because it alludes to notions of knowledge creation, control, retention, and reference. Reflecting on the Dimock article particularly, while I agree with the argument that the transnational (noun) largely deploys the logics of the national and capitalism, thus failing as an effective and sustainable aggregate operative for the humanities discipline, I think Dimock’s suggestions for the future of literary studies (which she sees as demanding further interrogation herself) are worth discussing – especially in terms of data production and pooling and human agency.
After summarizing Harpham’s argument that the humanities discipline has served the state most acutely (as forwarded in “Between Humanity and the Homeland: The Evolution of an Institutional Concept”), Dimock infers that Harpham is suggesting “an unbundling and rebundling of the humanities – symmetrical to the work of the nation-state in its making of citizens, but reversing its direction, multiplying where it would subtract, and integrating where it would divide” (Dimock 224). Dimock utilizes this logic in her discussion of scalar modifications – namely, expansions – which at this point seem to be productive choices for a sustainable future of the humanities discipline. One such modification of scale Dimock suggests to free “history and literary studies[…] from the nation” is to level these disciplines with anthropology to create a platform inclusive of the entire species, thus mitigating the stagnating issues arising from the thresholds conventionally defining history and literary studies. Dimock predicts this levelling will create a range of study both spatially and temporally broad, producing a database which “would be prenational as well as subnational, emerging on either side of the nation” (Dimock 225).
Indeed, modifying the scales of the humanities by integrating those of scientific disciplines seems like an intuitive approach to making our discipline more ethical and sustainable. As English and Underwood note, the “reading wars” are (or should be) over, and scales of inquiry ranging across the species rather than within nationalized conventions of the human would seem to be a turn towards inclusivity. However, I hesitate at the idea of a comprehensive species database – namely, in the implications revolving around its creation, handling, and referentiality. While, ideally, equal access would promote equal academic representation and contribution in this moment of necessary aggregation, we have not yet reached these levels of access, especially at elite institutions. Although I agree that modifying the scales of the humanities to form an apparatus which is sufficiently “unbundled and rebundled” is a positive possible trajectory, I feel that in practical terms, the efficacy of such a move would only be visible in at least several decades, when means to promote representation are implemented in communities on a micro scale. Until then, while the data pool would undoubtedly expand and create more fertile points of inquiry, the handling and referencing of this data would remain in the hands of those permitted into the institutional setting in the first place.
Furthermore, I’d like to hear thoughts on the possibility that perhaps those people written out of literary studies conventionally – those whose stories have not been included in the historical and literary “thresholds” of legitimacy – would even want to be included in a comprehensive “database” anyways. For instance, if minority representation in institutions remained as it is, how could one reconcile the relatively narrow control of this database with the diversity of information included within? Is the establishment of this database of homo sapiens a desirable notion for individuals, say, of Canadian Indigenous descent, who traditionally conceive the notion of meaningful knowledge quite differently than that reflected in European and North American institutions? I was reminded, in this vein, of a debate I heard about the inclusion of faces of African descent in facial recognition databases (an interesting article for context: https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-faces-equally/). As contemporary algorithms have issues recognizing Black faces with equal efficacy – especially those of Black women – a debate arises between the desire for more inclusivity and revulsion against state recognition in the first place. While many Black academics desire and have forwarded suggestions to improving Black facial recognition, i.e. by increasing the representation of Black programmers, doctors, and lawyers on these development teams, others have questioned the desirability of integration into this domain of data – in the U.S., for example, a domain which is accessed and referenced by traditionally anti-Black bodies such as the FBI – altogether. [TB]
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I have felt today a simmering anger at the academy which, in this blog post, I hope to let boil over, turn to steam, and evaporate. My anger spouts from the gnawing feeling that no one can tell me, in concrete and straightforward terms, why English Departments exist. I’m not advocating for our abolition, but I’m not being wholly facetious either. I’ll narrow my argument here some. The majority of articles I read, classes I take, lectures I attend, seem to have no sense of the stakes of their work. Rarely will I read a piece which says, in plain terms, “Here is why this matters,” “Here is why, beyond just academic novelty, this piece of analysis needs to exist in the world.” Real-world stakes seem to have been relegated to the space between lines, the implicit assumptions that scholars make about their work. And in this dark, interstitial space, the stakes are not only rarely seen, but rarely interrogated, and so rarely robust.
Let’s take Scales of Aggregation as an example — a particularly ethically inclined piece. Wai Chee Dimock argues for a re-organization of English departments, away from national boundaries and towards something that more closely resembles the ways “science and technology … address the question of the human.” I’ll set aside for now the fact that Dimock never really gives us a sense of what this re-organization would look like, beyond some throw-away quotes on concentric circles. Instead I want to focus on why such a re-organization seems necessary. The logic of her argument begins with the premise nations are “an abstracted and sanitized form of racism” insofar as they necessarily exclude individuals through the process of immigration. Humanities that adopt the nation as their starting point then reify the boundaries of this intrinsically racist institution — “Nowhere is the adjective American more secure than when it is offered as American literature” and so humanistic “knowledge is part of our national defense.” So long as we organize our lectures around national borders, we support the functioning of institutional racism.
I’ll continue reconstructing her argument in a moment, but want to step back for now to consider how ridiculous this logic chain is already. First, nations are not sanitized forms of racism, they are necessarily arbitrary constructions needed in order to provide basic social services. The absence of open borders does not constitute ‘sanitized racism’; to say this is to cheapen the term, and blind us from actual racism. Second, humanities that adopt the nation are not reifying it so much as actually grappling with it. Nowhere is the adjective ‘American’ more actively challenged and problematized than in studies of American literature. And finally, the claim that English Departments play some significant role in the ‘national defense’ of America is truly laughable. The quote comes from a man whose job in the humanities relies on political funding. It is not a claim to be taken seriously. This is clear when we step out of Dimock’s New Haven and try to imagine any meeting of American Generals that includes the topic of postdoctoral funding in Hawthorne studies.
Let’s resume.
Behind Dimock’s claims seems to be a belief that English Departments have some role to play in inculcating a specific form of citizenship. But there also seems to be a sense that English Departments have a duty to protect endangered languages. And to re-absorb linguistic studies. And to study rock and roll. And native American culture. And African music. She shoots off purposes for the department left and right, with no more organization and no less blatant crowd pleasing than if she were holding a t-shirt gun at a football game.
What emerges is anything but a coherent vision of why English Departments should exist, beyond some effuse ethical mandate that, panicked, reaches out in a hundred directions and grasps hold of nothing. I was reminded of Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, where he describes the process by which American Universities decayed from concentrated centers for holistic and humanistic education into sprawling centers pulled in every direction, attempting to provide, all at once, “professional schools, vocational schools, research and development institutes, area programs, semiprofessional athletic programs, hospitals, large-scale real estate operations, and innumerable other enterprises.” “Instead of offering a rounded program of humane learning, the university now frankly served as a cafeteria from which students had to select so many ‘credits.’” Dimock’s article reveals this same process occurring at a smaller scale in our departments. Her thousand justifications reveal a cavernous hole at the center of our study: a lack of any coherent, rounded reason for being.
What is it that English departments alone can do? Surely it is not what indigenous studies and linguistic departments already do. Surely the fate of American Citizenship does not rest on jargon-laden academic articles and 300-page dissertations. But just as surely, there is something we alone can provide. The work is to find that purpose, and to re-organize our scholarship from a stable core. [MP]
Post-Class Notes
— This week’s class began with taking a moment to consider the role that scale has played in our academic environments up to this point. The scales we encountered at undergrad seemed to be mostly temporal and spatial, grouping texts into period papers or grouping texts by the place they “relate” to (where this “relation” to place may refer either to the content of the text or their respective authors). Our initial conversations sparked two follow-ups on practicalities and perception, where practicalities in organising university courses necessarily limit the different scales available for study in a given department and perceptions of canon then impact the level of attention paid to different texts and authors.
One point raised by Mehvish’s discussion of her experience with scale in education was how attention is distributed across the course of a degree, which prompted discussions on ‘Introduction’ courses and subsequent specialisation. This seems to ring true – a compulsory Shakespeare course I took in my first year had us studying a play a week for 24 weeks, which even with 2 hours of lectures and a seminar never seemed to let us get anywhere productive. It was just too fast. For me this pace does also seem to point to the gaps that we are expected to already be able to fill in. Shakespeare is obviouslysuch a staple that there’s a sense in which these courses (which, when some universities don’t count first years in final grades or count them for a small percentage only) seem actually designed to “ease us in” as much as they are designed to “introduce”. There is an expectation of pre-existing knowledge that points to a broader implication of attention, that an implicit attention has alwaysbeen paid to some things, that we have already beenintroduced. This isn’t true of all introductory courses, but in my experience the courses that really felt like introductions were my American courses. As my cohort was the first at my university to do an English and American Literature course, it seems apt that we would be expected to start at some kind of beginning and not with a presupposition of knowledge.
Later in the class, Frida’s presentation on Moretti’s ‘Slaughterhouse’ called into question the validity of using purely quantitative data to track market trends in literature, and indeed in popular culture more widely. Frida drew attention in particular to ironic engagement with various media. In Moretti’s terms, then – which he borrows from economists – a ‘positive information cascade’ masks a negative reception, both complicating the relationship between the quantitative data of sales figures and the overall inference, and, as Frida identified, leading to the arbitrary equation of social canon with academic canon. The use of quantitative data without this line of questioning appears to allow the inference to read as somehow more objective, somehow closer to fact, somehow more credible, masking the shortcomings of the methodology. Perhaps this reflects further on the use of interdisciplinary methodologies – there is not necessarily a fracture between literature and sociological or economic methodologies, but where there is potential for some kind of gap, this certainly needs addressing, or the correlations readily observed as causality may read either as inconclusive or, more worryingly, dishonestly conclusive.
One thing I notice – and hugely enjoy – about this course is the strength and level of reaction it seems to prompt in us as a group. In no other class am I so ready to be disbelieving and so ready to voice it when I don’t agree with something. So, what’s the scale of a class about scale? If our undergrads had us looking at units of text from extracts to full texts to full genres, what unit are we looking at here? In a literature class more widely, we look at a text, and we assume that it has X amount of things in it, that we can only focus on a few in our two hours, that we will focus in depth, and that we do not have to be too concerned because the X amount of things the book can be about means that somewherethere is something to say even if we didn’t get around to saying it yet. You don’t have to like a book to be able to talk about it in an academic environment, to comment on its prose, its meaning. But these texts that talk about scale seem to bring out a different mode of analysis where we are essentially responding to an argument. Of course, classes on novel theory, for example, also ask this of us, but even the most contemporary novel theory is writing into a much larger discourse that doesn’t always feel as urgent. A discussion on scale that easily finds its way between a room on a campus, the academy, social media, popular culture, and all the disciplines we’ve encountered feels, even when keenly focused, somehow bigger, more pressing. [RF]
SCALES OF ATTENTION 