Author: Michael Kalisch

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]

—

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]

—

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]

–

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]

READING

• Alice Bennett, Contemporary Fictions of Attention (2018)
• Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception (1999)
• Amy Hungerford, “On Not Reading David Foster Wallace” in Making Literature Now (2016)
• William James, “Attention”, in The Principles of Psychology (1890)
• Jenny Oddell, How to Do Nothing (2019)
• Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking (2019)

Pre-Class Notes

— I was fascinated by the readings this week, particularly since I’m fairly unfamiliar with psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of attention. There were a number of interesting links in these texts to our class discussion last week. I noticed that a few authors, particularly James and Phillips, frequently used the figure of the child as an embodiment of underdeveloped or uncorrupted attention. James writes that “sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli characterizes the attention of childhood and youth. In mature age we have generally selected those stimuli which are connected with one or more so-called permanent interests, and our attention has grown irresponsive to the rest” (417). Phillips similarly spends a lengthy amount of his book analyzing the development (or more accurately, suppression) of the child’s initial, far-flung attentions. These arguments recalled moments from last week’s readings, in which authors described childhood as the period of our earliest, purest form of reading, free from interpretative strategies and paranoia. In some of the texts last week, the adult/child reading dichotomy seemed to in fact map onto established hierarchies of high/low culture. What was described as childlike reading practices frequently sounded much like notions of “low-brow” cultural consumption: passive absorption, pleasure-seeking, immediately gratifying, largely surface-level.

This week, then, I wondered if a similar dichotomy was present in some of the arguments about attention and attentive reading. When James writes that, “men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern…. Even in poetry and the arts, some one has to come and tell us what aspects we may single out, and what effects we may admire, before our aesthetic nature can ‘dilate’ to its full extent and never ‘with the wrong emotion’” (443), is he in fact exclusively talking about a certain type of “high-brow” reading, one motivated by an academic or intellectual impulse? Could the descriptions of “childlike” readings and attentions described by James and Phillips actually function as descriptions of perceived “low-brow” cultural consumption? I was reminded of Sontag’s mention of cinema as an art form that largely escapes over-interpretation, because of the necessarily fast pace of its consumption. The film genres that are often classified as low-brow, like thrillers or horror movies, also seem to be those to which we most readily cede our immediate, unfiltered attentions. [RD]

—

Phillips’s Attention Seeking and James’s chapter, “Attention” continually reminded me of a point Mehvish made in our first class. As we were discussing the critical tendency to look or analyze for an already expected interpretation before letting a text “speak for itself,” Mehvish (if I’m remembering correctly – my apologies for putting you on the spot!) described the feeling of being surprised or proven wrong by a text. We can arrive at a piece of art with our own predispositions about its significance or central moves, but at times the text pulls the rug out from under us, leaving us to abandon our original interpretation. This comment continues to resonate with me, and I think it may prove particularly helpful in our conversations about attention.

Phillips, in discussing the challenges of psychoanalysis, seems to apply this idea quite directly. In the final chapter of Attention Seeking, Philips describes a central problem in psychoanalysis: that “is always to do with the sense in which he already knows what he is looking for” (98). How is a psychoanalyst such as Freud to “cure” a patient without some element of surprise? If he already knows what to look for, he finds himself, according to Phillips, trapped in a closed circuit.

This problem of an interpretive essentialism is also important for James, although he may not acknowledge it so directly. James describes an effect of “paying attention” as a “shortness of reaction time” due to the fact that when one pays attention, they are waiting for something to happen. James makes a series of comparisons across genre (listening for certain notes in a chord, seeing red in warm colors, etc.), generalizing that “Confident expectation of a certain intensity or quality of impression will often make us sensibly see or hear it in an object which really falls far short of it. In the face of such facts it is rash to say that attention cannot make a sense-impression more intense” (426). James does not apply this practice to the act of reading, but his chain of artistic comparisons might lead one in this direction. When a reader confidently approaches a text looking for a specific reading, like listening for a note in a chord, they, according to James, may find it, but in a place that will inevitably “fall short” of what they seek. 

Both Phillips and James’s examples suggest that this experience of paying attention by looking for something (I’m also reminded of Sedgwick’s Paranoid Reading here), we are, in a sense, doomed to find exactly what we’re looking for. This feeling of surprise that Mehvish pointed out, according to Phillips and James, is enabled by a view wide enough to invite distraction from our preconceptions. As Phillips puts it, the shock or surprise is a necessary part of experiences “indescribable because new, and not previously formulated (not yet in language)” (103). I am inspired to curb my predispositions as I read and honor the shock of the new, but also eager to discuss as a group how one can most effectively do this. [CA]

—

While I thought this week’s readings were riveting for a number of reasons, in this post I’ll choose to elucidate some connections I made between attention and two of the main industrial complexes in the United States – the military and prison-industrial complexes. Both Suspensions of Perception (Crary) and Contemporary Fictions of Attention (Bennett) cite wartime as a causal factor in the uptick and increased necessity of research on attention. Crary notes that it has been “argued that problems related to the efficient human use of new technology during World War II were in part responsible for a new wave of research into attention” (34), arguments which cite issues of “vigilance” in the execution of tasks by human operators. Bennett, too, notes that “[i]mpulse-control and self-control… became the qualities that the American education system desired to foster” as a response to Cold War tensions and related pressure to improve American school curricula. In these examples of increased research into attention and a reconfiguration and amplified application of the ideal nature of attention, wartime directly impacted American education and youth – impacts which I can’t help but relate to the concept of total war. War became more comprehensive as potential national defence resources expanded through the shift into modernity, and I think it would be interesting to conceive attention studies in terms of the trope of the American “home front,” and generally as a manifestation of modern total war. Further, I think the notion of government intervention in the educational system to support and implement a reconfiguration of ideally efficient behavioural patterns, specifically for the purposes of creating a citizenry that could be more proficiently mobilized in wartime, ambivalently relates to the contemporary zeitgeist of late-capitalism. While understandings of top-down public manipulation are now mainstream, as Bennett points out, I’d like to know to what extent sedentariness and a certain degree of docility (necessary for the ideal attention style of the Cold War-era) now exist as a security issue. Further, I think it would be fascinating to trace government campaigns to examine and improve attention over the past few decades in terms of their effectiveness and potential counterproductivity.

Thinking a bit about attention studies in terms of the military-industrial complex led me to consider how attention plays a role in the prison-industrial complex. Crary claims that attention “has remained more or less within the center of institutional empirical research and at the heart of the functioning of a capitalist consumer economy” since the 1800s, and I can imagine how it has been an integral supporter of the prison-industrial complex. While corporations producing common goods have been proven to utilize prison labour, and institutions including public universities can often be found to hold shares in PIC-related enterprises, the sheer lack of attention that these operations tend to garner likely allowed the PIC to flourish. Perhaps this lack of attention is related to general dehumanization of incarcerated populations, or to the rapidly evolving digital marketing industry which can effectively convey brands like Victoria’s Secret as “fun” and “sexy” while intentionally leaving product manufacture unacknowledged. I think the intersection between digital marketing, attention, and the PIC, both in empirical and affective terms, would be fertile ground for further study. [TB]

—

I was struck by the idea that there exists two seemingly opposing types of attention: authentic, innate attention and culturally or institutionally programmed attention. While none of the authors use these terms per se, most of them seem to be trying to grapple with this dichotomy between genuine and inauthentic forms of attention. For example, in the very first paragraph of Attention Seeking, Adam Phillips states, “Everything depends on what, if anything, we find interesting – on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested despite of ourselves” (3). As he continues his introduction, Phillips gives greater validity to those interests that people find themselves naturally attracted to rather than the things they were taught to find interesting and pay attention to. Crary poses a similar duality to attention when he states that “attention is the means by which an individual observer” can “make perceptions its own” while attention is also how a person can be vulnerable  “to control and annexation by external agencies” (5). Again, we see natural proclivities opposed to external control and influence. 

While these distinctions in theory made sense to me, I found them difficult to apply. Many of the interests that I have, I found within and because of an institution. (I’m thinking specifically of university but there are other institutions at play.) Does that mean that it was something that I was taught to like? That these interests that I’ve been attending are not where I should be directing my attention because they aren’t authentic enough for my natural proclivities? Have I been programmed to like certain theories and disdain others, to direct my attention to some over others, not through internal discernment but through the teachers that taught me the theories and through what theories are currently in vogue? How do we distinguish between these things that we were taught to value and those that we value innately? Can something that we were educated to like ever be something worthy of our attention or is it always, as Phillips and Crary seem to imply, less than the authentic? How can we tell where external influence ends and our own interests begin? 

Something that helped me navigate these questions (although I’d love to discuss them more in class) was Jenny Odell’s story of her growing interest and knowledge of birdwatching. When she first started birdwatching, she started to notice the unique songs of each type of bird more than she did before. She states that these songs “had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time.” As her knowledge continued to grow, she “started learning each song and associating it with a bird” and can now recognize the birds around her by their sounds even when she cannot see them. While Odell does not give you a history of how this interest began and what or any influences may have led to this new hobby, it did help me understand the role of education in interests better. Essentially, people pay more attention to the things that they have studied. If you are someone who has studied and internalized queer theory, then you are going to see homosexual undertones more readily than someone else who may be more familiar with postcolonial theories. If I had been in the Rose Garden with Odell, the bird songs would have faded into the background rather than became the focus of my attention because our knowledge of those songs are different (mine is literally nil). We notice and pay attention to what interests us, in part, because we have more knowledge about the things that interest us. [MD]

—

In this week’s reading, Jonathan Crary’s ‘Suspension of Perception’ and William James’ ‘Principles of Psychology’ seem to offer quite different models for attention. Where Crary illuminates the historical specificity of both how we pay attention, and the social significance of that engagement, James makes a more universalist claim when he says that ‘[e]very one knows what attention is.’ Attention, he continues, ‘is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.’

For Crary, attention presents a double bind. Modernity and industrial capitalism produce certain possibilities for attention, but thereby also inaugurate systems for managing distraction or inattention. Put differently, modern subjectivity is fundamentally paradoxical, in that attention is a condition of creativity and freedom, but also bound up with disciplinary systems and the imperative for productivity in modern institutions. It’s this idea of the mandate for attention which strikes me as interesting. Crary’s reading reminds me that attention is very much imbricated in systems of control, that modern distraction ought not be read as a disruption of our natural and sustained powers of perception, but an effect of ongoing attempts to produce attentiveness. Contrary to this, James’ analysis understands attention as our capacity to ‘tak[e] possession’ of external objects. In this reading, we attend to objects in making sense of the world, and attention connotes our control of these objects rather than our own subjection to external powers.

In this, I’m curious about James’ explication of ‘anticipatory imagination.’ Calling on an example from Helmholtz, James writes of our anticipation of certain sounds when listening to music; he notes, ‘so completely does the expectant attention consist in premonitory imagination that, as we have seen, it may mimic the intensity of reality, or at any rate produce reality’s motor effects.’ Further, ‘an imagined visual object may, if attention be concentrated upon it long enough, acquire before the mind’s eye almost the brilliancy of reality, and (in the case of certain exceptionally gifted observers) leave a negative after-image of itself when it passes away.’ Faculties of observation are equated with the creative powers of the mind: for James, the power of imagination is able to transform our perception of that which we attend to. I like this postulation that through our attentions we can somehow imagine something into being.  

At this point we might return to that paradox illuminated by Crary. Thinking about attention as both a disciplinary tool and constitutive aspect of free subjectivity, we can consider how our imaginative capacities might allow us to break with the status quo. If, in the case of overtones and clock chimes and incomplete pictures, we can think something into existence, might we conceive of this as an alternative kind of productivity? In doing so, we ask what determines the acceptable objects of our concentration. What kinds of attention are counterproductive, and thus anti-capitalist, and can a such a departure represent a genuine break with the injunctions of modernity? [TG]

––

I am particularly interested in the tension between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ (or ‘learned’) reading, something which a lot of this week’s texts addressed, and which many people have already commented on. Bennett’s text introduces us to ‘an ideal form of reading’, in which you ‘might allow the world around you to fade as you relax and concentrate’. I found it interesting that she begins with this scene of ‘natural’ reading (almost like the one we discussed last week: lying in the sofa, feet up, enjoying a book) – because she uses it to show how the practice of reading itself is an unnatural one. 

Bennett argues that our contemporary culture is characterised by a ‘growing anxiety’ about the fact that our ‘absorbed attention’ in books is now ‘only possible through a labour of disciplined focus’ (Bennett, p. 2; emphasis mine). However, she observes that, from an evolutionary perspective, ‘the linear attention [deep attention] we privilege today is, in many ways, an aberration: “to read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object”’ (Bennett quoting Nicholas Carr, p. 8). 

However, in critical reading, we encounter a paradox, in that it ‘assigns all value to the act of reading and none to the objects read’ (Bennett quoting Rita Felski, p. 11). I was interested in the way Bennett placed emphasis on ‘the objects read’ and the material aspect of books. In fact, to make her argument that the book is ‘a constantly interrupted object’, she cleverly invokes ‘traditional book paraphernalia’ as proof of the commonality of interrupted reading: ‘footnotes, cross-references, indexes, margins, chapter breaks, subheadings, page numbers, bookmarks’ – according to Bennett, all these material objects can be read as ‘mechanisms for managing books’ requirements for attention’. And what they show us is that ‘reading is never undividedly attentive and always somewhat shifting, disrupted and unfocused.’ (Bennett, p. 18; emphasis mine)

Like Bennett, Crary also seems to focus on the effort of paying attention, and the unnatural process of doing so: ‘The roots of the wordattentionin fact resonate with a sense of “tension,” of being “stretched,” and also of “waiting”’ he writes (Crary, p. 10). 

In Attention Seeking, Phillips, too, argues that some reading is easier than others. As Michael noted in his pre-class note, the first paragraph is a good example: ‘Everything depends on what, if anything we find interesting – on what we are encouraged and educated to find interesting, and what we find ourselves being interested in despite ourselves’ (Philips, p. 3). Interestingly, Philips goes on to distinguish between our ‘official curiosity’ and ‘our unofficial curiosity’: ‘our official curiosity is a form of obedience, an indebtedness to the authorities’ (Phillips, p. 3). 

In mentioning this ‘indebtedness to the authorities’ which is present in certain kinds of reading, it seems that Phillips agrees with Crary that there is a link between attentionand institutional power. Crary’s book explores ‘the paradoxical intersection […] between an imperative of a concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption’ (Crary, p. 1-2). In his view, ‘[t]he realization that attention had limits beyond and below which productivity and social cohesion were threatened created a volatile indistinction between newly designated “pathologies” of attention and creative, intensive states of deep absorption and daydreaming’ (Crary, p. 4). In other words, because ‘deep absorption and daydreaming’, or ‘our unofficial curiosity’ are not productive within a system of labour and consumption, they are not seen as useful. As Tallulah just remarked in her pre-class note: ‘modern subjectivity is fundamentally paradoxical, in that attention is a condition of creativity and freedom, but also bound up with disciplinary systems and the imperative for productivity in modern institutions.’

In Bennett, we see how this dichotomy between ‘natural’ reading (the type that comes easy) and ‘useful’ reading (the type that requires critical effort) plays out within the academy: by institutionalizing close reading, the academy ‘takes a student’s capacity for concentration and instrumentalizes it by turning it into a transferable skill that justifies the discipline of literary studies’ existence’ (Bennett, p. 11). It seems that, while last week, the authors suggested that ‘symptomatic’ or ‘paranoid’ reading was problematic, Bennett suggests that reading itself is unnatural – and critical reading comes out, yet again, as the villain. 

However, drawing again from Rita Felski, Bennett does attempt to offer a different model of reading: one that ‘acknowledges both the critical and affective – the vigilant and the absorbed – expanding the discourse of literary interpretation to develop “a lexicon more attuned to the affective and absorbing aspects of reading” ([Felski], Uses of Literature 62)’ (Bennett, p. 12). Like Sontag, Bennett seems to privilege the affective response; however, much like Sedgwick’s mellifluous model of ‘reparative reading’, this isn’t much is the way of explanation. 

I’d like to end by briefly introducing Bennett’s theory of ‘inward attention’, which I had a really hard time wrapping my head around. I’ll leave you with a final paragraph that we can discuss further in class, if you’re drawn to it: ‘If attention is a bubble or balloon, piercing its surface with critical focus will destroy it. Inward attention also, for me, invokes a glancing, light and fleeting recognition that cannot be held or fixed in place. Attention’s etymological root in the Latin attendere means a stretching towards or holding in tension, which fixes objects under its gaze and is therefore somewhat at odds with inward attention’s glancing, shifting form of unconcentrated noticing.’ (Bennett, p. 12-13) [Caroline Koktvedgaard, CK]

–

My thoughts are jumbled and distracted with this week’s readings, so please forgive the chaotic response! 

On attention and different modes of reading, I found Alice Bennett’s Contemporary Fictions of Attention provided a useful summary. We’ve discussed different modes we assume when we read, from symptomatic reading to surface reading, paranoid and hyper vigilant reading, reparative reading, and critical reading. I’m unsure what the verdict was on whether one type of reading should have more authority than others in relation to different texts, but I found the conventional and modern understanding of attention interesting. William James, in the Principles of Psychology, maintains that “the natural tendency of attention . . . is to waver to ever new things.” Hence,’voluntary attention’ cannot be retained for longer than a few seconds at a time, and what he ascribes to genius lies in ‘sustained attention’, that is, the ability to bring one’s focus back to the original subject repeatedly despite the wavering nature of attention. Such sustained attention may be the form of engagement used for close reading or deep reading, which then, in turn, would hone the reader’s ability to ‘perceive, conceive, distinguish, remember,”; and shorten the reaction-time to intellectual engagement. 

On the other hand, Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, discusses the attention economy and how the value of attention is attached to productivity, with a culture that equates time with money. We are constantly asked to direct our time and attention to different things, both online and material, that are socially considered to be (in a capitalist sense), productive. She contextualizes with the modern distraction of social media and a need for online presence and constant self-expression, which in turn requires both constant attention and distraction. Her corrective is to resist the attention economy and the demands of technology, and to attempt to do nothing—redirect our attention to physical and natural surroundings instead (she cites birdwatching as an example). These texts approach attention differently, but both agree that fundamentally, out attention spans are short, constantly distracted, and not naturally engineered to constantly focus on ‘productive’ materials.  

Bennett further purports  the ‘book as a constantly interrupted object’— in material books, all the book paraphernalia & paratext provide constant distraction, and in electronic reading, with the plethora of options and digital distractions. It is then notable that the discussion on shifting modes of attention/reading affects contemporary writers as much as readers. When there are so many distractions, a social call for digital detox or an advocacy for ‘niksen’ (doing nothing), a criticism of didactic literature, and literary overproduction, how should writers then provide texts that retain, and remain worthy of, attention? 

Bennett argues that the culture of self-diagnosis bleeds into literary production, citing Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Tao Lin’s Taipei. Contemporary literature seems to demonstrate an anxious self-awareness of surrounding distraction as well as different modes of attending to texts; contemporary writers face the struggle of producing texts that do not provide a prescriptive or pedagogical way of reading/approaching the text. If Tao Lin attempts to allow the reader an array of options of ‘paying attention to’ the book by providing a “mass of overlapping attentions,” Zadie Smith’s NW as a text wavers in its indecision in pace, techniques, and perspectives, perhaps in an attempt at variation, but to the effect of rather frustrating uncertainty. Katherine Fitzpatrick provides further context, writing that “The form is suffering from the ‘anxiety of obsolescence.’’ The long-held discussion of the death of the novel asks writers to rise to the challenge of writing texts that capture the reader’s attention, but avoiding the traps of obsolescence int he era of mass digitization. This self-awareness of modern literature is then understandable, in that it reflects societal phenomena of self-criticism and anxiety surrounding distraction; personally, though, I often found these unnaturally self-aware texts, (Tao Lin, Tan Lin, Zadie Smith) difficult to parse through, and less than effective as narrative fiction; they seemed more representations of the phenomena of modern anxiety, than ‘meaningful presentations of attention’ leading to subsequent refracted. ‘Inward attention.’ 

On Amy Hungerford’s “On Not reading DFW,” I have a lot of personal response, stemming from personal experience, on coming to terms with my choices as a reader engaging (or not engaging) with texts produced by problematic writers, especially when they are contemporary. I entirely agree: in the age of literary overproduction, the choice not to read writers such as DFW, is not radical, but “normal, and pragmatic.” 

Hungerford posits the question of “how literature function in our social life,” asking “What do people want novels to do for them?” Perhaps the time for novels to act as moral arbiters has passed; but we cannot argue the cultural value and influence of literature without then questioning the cultural impact of, or values upheld by, the choices we make by paying attention to certain texts.  I find this especially true for contemporary writers and artists: how do we feel about, for instance, the films produced by Harvey Weinstein? In circulating, discussing, and purchasing his works, do we not continue to socially, financially, and political endorse him and his actions to an extent? 

What does it mean for institutions/academia/critics/or even the general audience to direct their attention to works produced by problematic artists, in an attention economy— when being discussed and listened to holds cultural and financial capital?

Considering the question of abandoning contextualizing, (Rita Felski, Context Stinks!) perhaps it seems impertinent to draw too much of a relationship between an artist and his/her work; but often our literary practice relies on following not only the literary, but personal/biographical trajectory of the writer, when we attempt to understand their works. And the practice does often yield insight into how a work is produced. 

Hungerford further justifies her choice to avoid DFW by drawing parallels between his misogynistic relationship with women, and his text’s relationship with the reader. I don’t think modern readers need to provide such analytical justification with the choices they make regarding where they focus their attention. We have an abundance of rich texts to engage with, written by writers worth listening to; the standard to which we hold contemporary artists and writers reflects the standard we, as a society, tolerate/live by. If we have limited attention, we might as well resist endorsing problematic artists, as well as the stressful demands of an attention economy. [JK]

  Jonathan Crary concludes in his introduction that he is concerned with how attention “can be both an absorption and an absence or deferral,” as well as how those elements of attention are not perceptive a priori attributes, but a production based on a “historical emergence.” This, I think, runs counter to William James’s approach as defining attention as such: “my experience is what I agree to attend to […] only those items which I notice shape my mind.” Crary’s move, as many critics work within during the age following post-structural critique, is to distance the role of subjectivity as a defining part of how experience is structured. Maybe I’m simplifying the Jamesian approach, but Crary is at least further problematizing how attentive gaze is shaped, and more so, moving beyond the mind itself as the only part of the puzzle, as Crary mentions “attention is at the same time a means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies”–Lending I think to our discussion last week between the problem of preconceived methodologies of suspicion vs. the possibility of an affective reading.
        With the increasing overprescription of ADHD medications, one might ask the question about how we have come to see attention in the modern era, and how it has been intercepted as a device of capital production, but for our purposes, also within the ways we read literature. Crary is right to bring up this issue, especially since the modernist approach (Faulkner, Beckett, Joyce) has been to establish a climate of fragmentation, where as Crary sees the movement into the 20th century as an intensification and creation of a language in and around creating a particular type of attention. Which is not to run counter to Bennet’s critique that an “age with a deficit of attention […] must imagine an age of surplus attention elsewhere.” Instead, and I repeat the word, “intensification,” it’s a question of how in this particular and present moment, the power dynamics in structuring attention becomes front and center, a kind of “paradoxical intersection” with the more splintered modernist takes.
         On a side note, in some ways, I think the founding of the discipline of English in the 20th century is (as we discussed last week), established very particular ways in which attention is oriented in regards to how one reads. I thought a lot while reading this material about how I read prose as opposed to poetry. Poetry, with a request of an acute attention to every particle of text; prose–especially long prose like Moby Dick or War and Peace–have fading degrees of attention, and I think the critical apparatus we have been educated in sequester large parts of texts: only the moments that beg attention appear, and I simplify, Gatsby’s green light across the bay, the A in the Scarlet Letter, or the gordian knot in Benito Cereno. But I don’t just mean symbols only, but I use these as examples to show how there is a methodology of attention at play that could defer other ways of seeing a text: ways in which certain writers have even mocked and played with as they have analyzed modern attention (according to Bennett). The most out-there examples for me, B.S. Johnson and Mark Z. Danielewski–and I’m particularly excited to see how what we discuss this week will engage with week 4 on digitization and the problems that provides literature moving further in the 21st Century. –[B.J.S]

Post-Class Notes

‘The picture makes you look at both – the close-up happenings and the bigger picture’

                                                                                    ALI SMITH, How to be Both, 2014

This moment in Smith’s novel, from the passage with which the class began and ended, could be thought of as the thread that ran through the wide-ranging discussions and debates in today’s seminar. It wants attention to hold two things at once—intricate detail and the ‘bigger picture’—and its own performance of this process, in George’s engagement with the fresco’s ‘separate details’ of duck and giant lobster as they are strung along amongst layered ‘continued happenings’ that stretch as if ‘for miles’ behind them, seems to allow it to crumble as it performs them. The frustrated possibilities of this simultaneous attention and its performance play up to the wider issues of the difficulty of sustaining nuance (and interest) in these debates around ‘attention’, from the canon and de-platforming to technology and control. Is there a possibility for both the wider picture and the minute detail? James’ funny figures would have us believe there is not.

Rachel’s brilliant presentation on Odell’s How to do Nothing laid bare the problems of attention’s slipperiness as it revealed the contradictions that deflate Odell’s jeremiad and her fears for the manipulations of our attentions. Her premise seems quite attractive and frames itself as such—who doesn’t want to do nothing and feel morally superior at the same time?—and it is more than the stuffiness of privilege that prove some of her fears as misdirected. Rachel’s observation, where Facebook is a symptom rather than a cause, that anxieties of attention have always existed to some degree in different societies, was not only a swift dispatch of Odell’s impossible self-removal from the technological economy of attention using the unique combination of her misappropriation of Seneca, a hypocritical twitter account, and a recent Dolly Parton meme, but also a testament to how different modes of attention—here, something like Hayle’s notions of ‘hyper-reading’ with its many open tabs—can totally frustrate other concept other rigid conceptions of it.

That doesn’t mean that many of Odell’s worries aren’t valid. Questions of the capitalist architectures that, in Crary’s words, constitute an ‘imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption’ which clashes paradoxically with the free-form slipperiness of the attention impart notes of unease to the entire discussion. From the problems of controlling the amount of video-games children guzzle and the hierarchies of attention to different art forms that result, to the difficulties of disengagement and investment of attention in literary figures with hurtful and problematic personal lives like DFW, attention never allows for simple discussions of itself. The ‘regimes of attention’ that Mehvish drew attention to in Phillips’ work are matched by his conceptions of individual ‘attention-seeking’ that these very regimes frustrate and necessitate. His idea of the ‘fear of our own minds’ captures this constant battle of the irreducible problems such ideas of attention provoke.

I think that these discussions lead nicely onto next week’s concepts of scale—what ought we investour attention in, what are the implications of the inevitable hierarchies of attention that arise from its focalising nature?—but there is one aspect that keeps returning to me. The first springs from the ‘cruelty’ and its banal omnipresence, to return to the Smith, that George finds in her meditation on the fresco. It puts me in mind of what the word ‘attention’ brings instantly to my own mind—the concept in the work of Simone Weil. For her ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’, and although the theological and ethical contexts of her conceptions of attention are very different from those we discussed today, it is like what Bennett recognises in Steigler’s work as ‘his emphasis on attention as a form of caring is provocative and powerful.’ It is like what I find most powerful in reading, its generous almost-simultaneous (in)attention, that allows us, in oscillating moments of self-awareness and self-suspension, see us, as Bennett puts it at the beginning of her book, ‘ceding control of your own thoughts in order to replace them—just for a while—with mine.’ This reframing of attention as generosity, however facile and sappy, is what makes it, particularly in a literary context, able to almost grasp both detail and bigger picture in its sacrifice of parts of our subjectivity for another’s. This might be ‘reparative’ reading, attention. [SM]

—

There was so much left to say at the end of the class. I wanted, for example, to extend our conversation about disciplinary forms of attention to include reference to Talulah’s s pre-class note about the military industrial complex, and about the kinds of vigilance demanded by the state. What am I supposed to do when I’m told to ‘remain vigilant’ after a terrorist attack (I live near London Bridge, so this question is quite fresh for me)? More often, I find that a terrorist ‘incident’ reminds me of how I generally distract myself from thinking about the reality of living in a city where the terror threat level no longer drop below ‘high’. What kinds of politics are produced by different kinds of attention (I’m thinking partly of Phillips’ lovely quip about the fascist and the anti-fascist alike both being overly attentive to fascism)? This question seems related to the many articles written in the last few months about political ‘fatigue’, especially in relation to Brexit (and Trump). Too much attention for too long and we exhaust our attention, we use it up, (James talks about this tipping point in attention). Our attention frustrates us. So attention has something to do with intensity,  which may be finite, or have a time limit. Since the class, I’ve been connecting this vague set of ideas  to something else that bothers me in Oddel’s book (which Rachel did such a good job critiquing), which is her example of birdwatching, especially in relation to Morgan’s pre-class note: ‘If I had been in the Rose Garden with Odell, the bird songs would have faded into the background rather than became the focus of my attention because our knowledge of those songs are different (mine is literally nil).’ So what’s the unacknowledged link here between paying attention and knowledge/ learning? For Oddell, understanding (and therefore appreciation) emerges over time, through acquiring a specialist knowledge from interactions with other more experienced bird watchers, but also, presumably, through repetition: I learn to recognise birds and birdcalls by seeing and hearing them again and again. So attention requires a kind of patience (again, it has a particular temporality). When children (and as Rebecca notes in her pre-class comment, these vaguely psychoanalytic accounts keep coming back to the figure of the child, in one way or another) get frustrated at not getting the hang of something first time round, we tell them to stick at it, to have a little patience (growing up as learning to pay attention, or learning to bear our frustration). The idea here is that practice makes perfect, or, to put it another way, something will change if we wait long enough. I think what the Crary illuminates is that this is a cultural rather than natural logic, that there’s a whole history – economic, technological, psychological – behind this ‘time of attention’. 

Anyway. The other thing we talked about was not paying attention to DFW. This led to some really important contributions regarding Hungerford’s argument. But I’m equally interested (actually, for the purpose of the class, I’m more interested) in her methodology: what style of critique does she practice in the essay? We’ve been coming back to the question of what this work on attention and scale and critique really means, in practical terms, for when we sit down with a literary object. I think Hungerford gives a sense of some of the possibilities. [MK] 

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 19^thcentury 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]

—

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]

–

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]

—

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]

—

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]

—

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]   

—

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)

—

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]

—

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]

–

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]

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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]

DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECTS:

• Chicago Text Lab
• Jim English et al, Mining Goodreads: Literary Reception Studies at Scale

READING:

• Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So, “Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature” (2016)
• Mark McGurl, “Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon” (2016)
• Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons (2019)

Pre-Class Notes

– Hi all! I’ve fleshed out my B-Course essay proposal below. Looking forward to our group disscussions in class!

In December 2017, The New Yorker published “Cat Person”, a short story written by a young, fairly unknown American writer named Kristen Roupenian. The story revolves around Margot, a 20-year-old woman, who goes on a mediocre date with Robert, a 34-year-old man. Their awkward date leads to bad sex, and Margot breaks off the relationship. When she runs into Robert a month later, he angrily calls her a “whore”. 

On the surface, not much seems to happen. However, The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, told Roupenian’s editor that she found the story ‘intriguing’, and chose to publish it. At that point, Roupenian had only had a single story accepted in a print literary magazine; the rest of her published work was available only in small-press online magazines. “Cat Person” had already been rejected by every other publication she’d sent it to. 

Almost immediately after its publication, “Cat Person” became the most-read piece on The New Yorker’s website that year. The story was shared on Twitter more than a thousand times in its first week of publication. Within a week, Roupenian had sold her debut short story collection to Scout Press (Simon & Schuster US) for $1.3 million. In short, it became the world’s first “viral” short story.

Or did it? In June 1948, The New Yorker ran “The Lottery”, a now-infamous short story which revolves around an annual ritual practiced in a small, unnamed village, in which the inhabitants must draw lots to select one person who will be stoned to death. The story was written by Shirley Jackson – another young, fairly unknown female writer – more than half a decade before Roupenian penned her provocative short story. After “The Lottery” ran, hundreds of readers wrote letters expressing their anger and confusion over the short story, enquiring what it meant, some even cancelling their subscriptions to the magazine. Jackson became a literary sensation almost overnight – and more than half a century later, “The Lottery” is still hailed as “perhaps the most controversial short story The New Yorker has ever published”. 

In this essay, I will explore the making, marketing, and reception of “the viral short story”. I am particularly interested in how these two short stories, written in very different periods, exemplify the mass reading culture we know as “going viral”. What did this mean in the 1940s versus now? What makes a story “go viral”? 

Over the Christmas break, I visited The New Yorker archive at the New York Public Library, as well as the Shirley Jackson Papers, which are held at the Library of Congress. There, I was able to gain access to hundreds of letters from readers to Shirley Jackson, private correspondence between Jackson and her agents, internal correspondence from The New Yorker’s fiction department around the publication of “The Lottery”, as well as Jackson’s original manuscript and scrapbook for “The Lottery”.  

Although “The Lottery” didn’t “go viral” in a traditional sense, the enormous outpouring the short story received is reminiscent of the way readers used Twitter to respond to Roupenian’s “Cat Person”. I want to explore the role of Twitter as a digital archive, and hope to see how the practice of mass-sharing and public reading shaped the reception of Roupenian’s “Cat Person”. By drawing a comparison between the two, I hope to explore what makes a story “go viral”.

In this week’s workshop, I am looking for some help to decide what methodologies I should draw upon in order to support my argument. I am particularly interested in exploring different ideas about reader reception, “virality”, shared reading, and mass reading cultures (our discussions of “scale” will be quite useful here, I think). However, I’m also interested in exploring the cultural prestige of The New Yorker, and the role of Twitter in our reading experience. Any recommendations or ideas on these topics would be greatly appreciated! [CRK]

—

What I wish to do (you know, apart from have some tea + cake, and curl up with a book of my choosing)

Is to look at the 2009 edition of The Wind in the Willows, edited by Annie Gauger. In appearance, it resembles a coffee table book more than a scholarly edition and declares itself a tribute to Kenneth Grahame. At the same time, it contains archival material, and exhaustive footnotes that provide information on Grahame’s personal life, political allegory, intertextual references, and evaluation of various illustrators and their “faithfulness” to the text.

This begs the question of who the intended audience is and what kinds of reading this work can (not) facilitate. It appears to cater to more than one reading. The political analyses contextualise TWitW, as do the excursions into Grahame’s life, inviting/providing a symptomatic reading. Yet the stress on personal meaning of the editor and the introduction’s author clearly invoke affective responses. Furthermore, the volume is part of a series of annotated classics such as Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, and Huckleberry Finn, obviously devoted to canonised pieces, classics.

How do editions like these actively produce and continue the status of a “classic”? And what is it about the WitW that audiences love? Also, did the criticism of reading we’ve perused so far account for possible effects of childhood reading? From this jumble of loose ideas – reception history, purpose of the edition, possible readings, continuous creation of a classic – I aim to weave an argument that may very easily contain only one or two of the above.

Sources for reception history:

• Sales numbers by publishers
• Amazon reviews (if Michael approves)

Potentially relevant secondary readings:

• Günter Leypoldt – Degrees of Public Relevance: Walter Scott and Toni Morrison
• Franco Moretti – The Slaughterhouse of Literature
• Rita Felski – Context Stinks!
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick – Paranoid Reading

[FH]

I think I gave a bit too much background info. If you’re strapped for time, just skip to the fourth paragraph:) 

Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American author who has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the hyphen in her identity. She views herself as both a Dominican and an American, not one or the other but a hybrid of both. This combination identity is reinforced by members of both parties. Dominicans do not generally accept her as a Dominican, but neither do the Americans view her as strictly American. She represents “life as a hybrid. Life as a hyphen.” 

Alvarez is known primarily for her first two novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). What I find most interesting about these books is that they, like their author, seem to bridge two national cultures: the Dominican Republic and the United States. Garcia Girls focuses on four young Dominican girls who immigrate to the United States after their father’s political involvement forces them to flee the Dominican Republic. It talks about their struggle to learn English, to assimilate, to learn the nuances of a new culture, and to find and craft their own identity. Essentially, the customs of the DR and the customs in the US find themselves at odds with the four girls grappling with which ones to adopt and how to maneuver the in-between. 

Time of the Butterflies is a story, based on fact but fictionalized by Alvarez, of the Mirabal sisters who participated in the Dominican revolution against the dictatorship of Trujillo. This story, such a pivotal moment in the history of Dominicans, was fictionalized and popularized by Alvarez, who herself comes into the story as the gringa dominicana researching the story and writing it down, for American audiences. It is the history of the DR but became internationally known through the English works of someone with strong ties (even citizenship) to the United States. 

This close, sometimes conflicting association between the DR and the US in the life and works of Julia Alvarez is something that I’d like to explore more by looking at the public reception of these two works both within the United States and within the Dominican Republic. Specifically, I’m interested in how the book was marketed in both countries, how the public responded, why the books gained popularity in both countries (seems to be for very different reasons), how different reading cultures respond and why, and how these stories may have changed national opinion or stereotypes of both countries. I’m also interested in the transition: how both books were written in English and published in the United States but were destined from the beginning to be translated into Spanish and circulated within the Dominican Republic. Essentially, the history of the book itself (especially How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) takes a reverse journey to the one in its contents. What can be learned by these new migration patterns and how does it change perception of the relationship between the US and the DR? 

I’m basing most of my paper on articles, opinion pieces, and reviews in newspapers, itineraries of book tours, correspondence between Julia Alvarez and various parties (including her editor, literary agent, and publicist), and records of book sales from the original publishers (I’ve emailed and they said they should be able to get me the numbers, so hopefully that happens!). I’ve also been researching the cultural and political relationship between the US and the DR. 

For this week’s workshop, I’m interested in hearing ideas/methodologies about reader reception (especially when that reception occurs in different countries or cultures), works in translation and how that influences perceptions of power, and history of the book (from the publisher, to marketing, to circulation, to reception, to cultural influence). [MD]

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In my B-Course essay, I’m interested in exploring the genetic history of Stephen Spender’s often overlooked novel, The Temple. Based on his own experiences in Hamburg the summer after attending Oxford, the novel follows the experiences of a young English man, Paul, traveling through Europe with his friends, Ernst, Joachim, and others. The novel centers around Paul’s evolving friendships with characters based on many of Spender’s actual friends, such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Herbert List, whose photograph Spender used for The Temple’s cover art.

The both the Harry Ransom Center and the Weston Library house several of Spender’s drafts and notes, which span from the early 1940s to the novel’s final publication by Faber in 1988. Spender makes drastic changes across these drafts, from the main character’s name to his travel destinations to even the format of the story, which features fewer and fewer diary entries as the drafts unfold. Considering the changes Spender makes to the friendships featured in the story, it is surprising that there has been no scholarship on the changes Spender made to the dedication pages of his many drafts. Given that the Weston and HRC house more than seven different drafts of the dedication to The Temple, I would like my genetic criticism of The Temple to use Spender’s dedications as a framework for interpreting the revisions made. Almost all of the dedicatees are featured in the story as characters, and I am interested in whether the drafts reflect their dedications, what the effect is in drawing a reader’s attention to a given character at the outset, and what outside factors may have played a role in these changing dedications.

Using the tools and templates provided by Emma Huber’s Digital Editions course at the Taylor Institution, I plan to format this analysis as a digital archive or “research guide” that features high-resolution images of six different drafts of the dedication. An annotation will accompany each image that places it alongside its respective draft and the other drafts in the collection. An introduction to the research guide will aim to synthesize the collection of dedication pages and annotations, analyzing the relevance of the dedication page to The Temple’s genetic history. It is important that this work be studied because it, unlike much of Spender’s other work, traces his entire literary career while also placing his work in relationship to his mentors and contemporaries, such as W.H. Auden. Even though a wealth of information and material exists surrounding The Temple, very little scholarship has focused on it, let alone read the work against itself rather than as a tool for understanding Spender’s poetry. I hope that this project will bring to light an overlooked part of Spender’s career, evaluate the dedication page as a framework for genetic criticism, and place the work into the context of Spender’s literary and personal friendships. Looking forward to hearing everyone’s input on this! [CA]

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A genetic criticism of B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo, his second novel, would trace the various stages of his production of both of this text, and the unique and violent “anti-reader” outlook that would come to shape his thoughts on literature and his writing process as a whole. The drafts, notebooks and letters in the archive of the novel’s production, in British Library Add. MS 89001, might reveal it as a as a suffering, mutilated work, not only in its literal laceration in Johnson’s late decision to have the novel printed with holes cut in some of its pages and his agonising over character name-changes, but also in the purposed ways it vexes its own relationship with reality and textuality. Its attempts to “reproduce the moment-to-moment fragmentariness of life” result in its highly self-conscious and material “aposiopesis”, which becomes, to its intrusive author, the deeper tragedy than that of the eponymous murdered supply teacher. 

Johnson’s archival material is made up of notes, plans, and unusual source-materials on scraps of torn graph paper and on the backs of receipts. These offer not only an interesting avenue to exploring the temporal genesis of AA, by tracking changing developments of the narrative as they match up to the dates on car-rental tickets and newspaper clippings, but perhaps also a conceptual frame for his literary style as a whole, as one focused on and frustrated by its pulpy mundanity and mediocre grasp of reality and masculinity. [SM]

In my B-Course essay, I plan to question the purpose, inherent message, and commercial and cultural value of a book. I will look into two different book artists, Ben Denzer and Russell Maret, both of whom are Manhattan-Based, living book artists interested in the form of the book rather than the content, and both of whom have gone through the New York Center for the Book Arts.

For Ben Denzer, I will be looking at the cheese book of American craft cheese slices that we saw at the Weston, and the 192 dollar book, a binding of 192 US one-dollar bills. Ben Denzer’s decision to publish such (arguably) conceptual art objects under the “Catalog Press,” the bind them into traditional book format, and the decision to print limited text (title, press, and price) calls into mind how we consume the book as an object. With the cheese book, I also want to question the mortality or conservation of a book, and what happens when a book is not meant to survive; the purpose of books and preservation in libraries. Another question that would be pertinent to both objects would be the commercial value of a book. American craft cheese is known to be ubiquitous, questionably long-lasting, and extremely cheap. Yet when it is bound and sold in limited copies, the value of the cheese ‘book’ multiplies by a hundredfold. The 192 dollar book is exactly twice the price of the number of one-dollar bills included: $384. Then again, what happens in the conceptualization, production, promotion, and supply chain that hitches up the price of a book? I wish to question the essential value of a book both culturally and commercially, and how their value might be decided by the public eye as well as the maker.

With both Denzer and Maret, I further want to investigate what happens when a book is stripped of text. With the increasing use of electronic sources–admittedly more accessible and sustainable–I posit that book artists have now the freedom to focus on the aesthetic value of the book as an object. Maret is particularly interested in the aesthetic aspects of font types, which harkens back to handmade illuminated manuscripts from the medieval to early modern period.

I am struggling most with finding secondary sources on both artists, but plan to look at certain art historical writing on books; I am currently using the Rare Books Collections in the Weston as a major source, and hope to get in contact with Ben Denzer for a brief interview.

Post-Class Notes