Twilight series: Feminism and the vampire novel

Much has been written about sexism in the Twilight books and film. Here, Caitlin Brown puts the series in context of other popular vampire fiction

Feminism and the vampire novel have not traditionally been particularly well-suited bedfellows. The prototype of the genre, the shadow which lurks behind each and every modern vampire novel, is of course Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a novel which combines a mastery of atmosphere and suspense with a decidedly misogynistic mythology.

In recent years, however, the vampire text has evolved to encompass a narrative structure and an attitude towards women which moves beyond the virginal victim/deadly whore dichotomy that characterised the genre’s precursors. All of which makes Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and its retrograde take on the role of women all the more infuriating. The success of the Twilight books has wrenched the vampire genre out of dark obscurity into blinding publicity; but the books have also dispensed with many of the features which make contemporary supernatural literature so interesting.

Meyer’s response to accusations of sexism in her books is to claim that, “When I hear or read theories about Bella being an anti-feminist character, those theories are usually predicated on her choices.” However, the real reason Bella is not a feminist heroine is because Meyer fails to develop the role of women in the supernatural novel much beyond what Stoker achieved more than a century previously.

At the crux of sexism within the vampire novel is the paradigm of male vamp/female human, a framework which an overwhelming majority of vampire novels are based around. The consequence of this is to represent the male as virtually unassailable in terms of power, and generally intellectually superior due to the centuries of wisdom he has accumulated. It is also a rare vamp novel which features a male (anti)hero not in possession of dazzlingly good looks and the ability to persuade a mouldy carrot into bed with one devastating glance. The female human is physically weaker and, at least traditionally, unable to resist the lure of the dashing corpse. These are tropes which vampire narratives such as Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer have delighted in overturning, yet in one form or another they remain pervasive in the supernatural novel.

In Dracula, the women are faced with two equally unappealing alternatives: forsake their initial quasi-independence and embrace the status of victimhood which the men in the text (both supernatural and otherwise) combine to foist upon them; or give in to the seduction of the vampire and so gain power - but a power which is represented in the text as sexualised and therefore, according to the morality of the novel, demonic. (Much as all female sexuality is deemed demonic in literature of a certain stance, both supernatural and otherwise.) The same ‘choices’ which Meyer parades as being Bella’s own in the Twilight series, and therefore above criticism, are in reality almost as narrow.

The male vamp/female human set up is a preconfigured metaphor for the dominance of men within society

For most of the series, she can choose only between relying on vampire Edward or werewolf Jacob for salvation from whatever big bad is gunning for her, or relying on Edward to allow her to become a vampire so that she too has access to the power which only he can bestow.

The imbalance of power between men and women in many vampire novels can also be attributed to the capability of the male vampire to completely subsume any independent desires or individuality on the part of the female heroine.

In Dracula, both Mina and Lucy are compelled by the Count to work against their allies. Their own opposing wishes and agency are completely overtaken by the control which he exerts over them. While Jonathan is subject to the same mind control, he manages to maintain a sense of his own identity, and eventually escape from Dracula. The women in the novel are represented as incapable of sustaining any individuality in the face of Dracula’s power.

Of course, this is a scenario which will be eminently familiar to ‘Twihards’, mirroring as it does Edward’s control of all Bella’s actions and restriction of her choices. Bella’s sense of self is so dependent on Edward that his absence in the second book of the series, New Moon, causes her to enter a state of near-catatonic depression. Some critics have termed Edward’s actions in the series emotional abuse and this is certainly apt, but it is also an extension of an attitude towards women that is hardly new in the vampire novel. Sherrilyn Kenyon’s series of vampire romances occupy a similar vein of literature, with their focus on submissive heroines who gladly relinquish their agency to the alpha vamps/shapeshifters/gods they encounter, despite initial protestations of independence and a bit of mandatory soul-searching.

Meanwhile, the representation of vampires has long been linked to fears of the foreign Other, since the Eastern European spectre of the Count. As other critics of Twilight have pointed out, Meyer substitutes this for what amounts to a fetishisation of whiteness. The translucent beauty of Bella and Edward’s pale skin is lingered on obsessively and contrasted unfavourably to Jacob’s “russet” appearance.

Her continued insistence that an extremity of whiteness is integral to beauty and superiority of character (which Edward represents) is nothing if not problematic.

Issues of race are on the whole not dealt with particularly well by the supernatural novel. The television series True Blood has been criticised for its insulting portrayal of black women, for example its use of the stereotype of the “sassy black sidekick”. Yet the depiction of black women - or indeed any women not in possession of snow white skin - in other vampire stories is most noticeable for its shocking absence. The paucity of such characters highlights the fact that the vamp novel may have worked out some of its issues with women but when it comes to race, Twilight is far from the only vampire novel which severely disappoints.

All of this is not to say that the vampire novel is inherently anti-feminist. The power dynamic of male vamp/female human is in fact uniquely set up for the possibilities of subversion and exploration of the nature of power in any male/female relationship. It is a preconfigured metaphor for the dominance of men within society and the varied responses to this power imbalance available open to women.

If Dracula set in place many of the more sexist features of the supernatural novel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, also designed to have real-world relevance, paved the way for more intimate relations between the vamp text and feminism. In the world of Buffy, the male vampire with his supernatural powers is countered by a woman with powers of her own, continually underestimated by her opponents.

The misadventures of these female heroines do not compromise their independence or their integrity

In Buffy’s battles with vampires she does not always succeed, but what it is important is that the outcome is not predetermined - she will not inevitably give in to her male opponent’s superior strength and power. By the end of the series, Buffy’s slaying aptitude and strength develop to the point where her once threatening foes are increasingly represented as irritants rather than equal opponents. The vampire novel with aspirations of equality will generally give the female heroine some sort of power of her own with which to counter the vampire. Karen Chance’s heroine Cassandra Palmer is a clairvoyant; Sookie Stackhouse, of Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries, made into the TV show True Blood, is a telepath; Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake can both kick ass and raise the dead.

The sparkly vamp aficionados will now point out that Twilight’s Bella too has powers; her mind acts as a natural shield against any kind of telepathic interference. Yes, but Bella’s power is one of negativity. She has the ability to not have her mind interfered with, although for most of the series not even the ability to choose to use this power. Bella’s power gives her no agency, no possibility to redress the power imbalance which exists between men and women in the novel. The dynamic of male vamp vs. human female which characterises many supernatural novels is not necessarily anti-feminist, as the examples above demonstrate, but Meyers chooses to disallow her heroine access to the power accorded to the male protagonists of the series.

The vampire novel is suffused with desire, defined further by this miasma of fantasy which imbues its language and its narrative. The act of biting a victim, of transforming a human to a vampire, is inevitably linked to sex. This transformation is generally either explicitly linked to sex, as in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, or is used as a thinly veiled metaphor for the sexual act, as in Dracula. Both Charlaine Harris and Karen Chance imagine the acts as mingled in their series of books. The ability to turn someone into a vampire is usually the prerogative of the male, and so sexual power in the vampire novel tends to reside with men.

The female heroine is often represented as yearning for the vampire to exercise his sexual power over her, yet in the best contemporary vampire novels the writer uses this desire to explore the nature of fantasy and equality within relationships. Anita Blake, Sookie Stackhouse and Cassandra Palmer each become increasingly assertive in achieving the fulfilment of their sexual desires, as at times several of the books in these series become less about the bloodlust, and more about the lust to bang anything without a pulse. But crucially, the misadventures of these female heroines do not compromise their independence or their integrity. The fantasy of submission to the vamp lover is fulfilled, but this is not the end of the story; the balance of power can change, and this desire in itself need not lead to a fundamentally unequal power dynamic between men and women in the novel.

I admit it; whatever scruples I may have, I was gripped

In Dracula, Lucy’s linked experience of sex/vampirism results in new supernatural, physical and sexual powers. However, once in possession of these powers, Lucy is represented as divested of the attributes of both humanity and femininity which characterised her previously. Power and femininity are not mutually compatible in the world Stoker created. In Twilight also, Bella gains power only through becoming a vampire, which is a result of her much-awaited sexual liaison with Edward. This vampiric power of Bella’s ultimately comes to her due only to Edward’s decision to grant her with it.

This reluctant bestowal of power is linked to the denial of the fulfilment of desire within the text. Twilight throbs with sexual longing, and this tension is part of what makes the books so compelling. (I admit it; whatever scruples I may have, I was gripped.) Yet, whatever intentions Meyer may have had with regards to the abstinence storyline, desire in the context of the vamp novel is a means by which the female heroine can explore power and fantasy, and so the abstinence within Twilight signifies a denial of the power that comes with the fulfilment of sexual fantasy. Authority over both the sexual experience and access to power remain with Edward.

The modern vampire novel is overwhelmingly a text written by women, and featuring female heroines. The narrative voice within in the vampire novel is usually female and this in itself lends a certain power to the heroine: the power to tell the story from her point of view, a power not accorded to the male vampire. Certainly, Bella is the narrator of her own story for most of the series, but she loses this agency just before her transformation into a vampire and consequent gain in power. Any advances the fourth book could be seen to make in terms of equality - the introduction of several strong, powerful female characters, Bella’s new abilities which in some ways exceed Edward’s - are negated by the images of the preceding chapters. Bella as helpless vassal, stripped of agency and voice, and devoured from within as a result of the clash between Edward’s power and her own feeble, female humanity cannot be easily rendered equal in the chapters that follow. Meyer’s insistence on perpetuating a power imbalance in her novels means that any claim she may eventually have to feminism in the texts is entirely shot to hell.

The feminist vampire novel is certainly possible, although when it comes to equal representations of a wide spectrum of different women the choices narrow significantly. With regards to Twilight, not only does the treatment of race leave much to be desired, but in many other ways it fails to measure up to its supernatural counterparts. While other contemporary vampire novels use the power dynamic of the vamp novel as a way of exploring the nature of power, desire and fantasy, Twilight’s denial of the importance of these means that in this eminently popular modern novel, little has changed in terms of the relative roles of men and women since the publication of Dracula in 1897.


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About the author

Caitlin Brown is a recent graduate currently trying to stave off the pain of real life with a never-ending stream of fantasy novels

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The Problem With Comic Book Critique

Comic book and graphic novel criticism is rarely found outside of niche publications such as Wizard, or the many fan-driven sites that litter the web. Occasionally a mainstream newspaper will publish an article on the medium as a whole, or offer a retrospective on an under appreciated author, usually Alan Moore; but for the most part it is rare to come across comic reviews in any shape or form. I used to believe that this was simply down to media prejudice - and largely it probably is - but when I decided to dedicate my precious spare time to the joys of graphic novel criticism, I soon learnt that the "funny books" were far from the easiest medium to offer an objective evaluation of.

In the era of Stan Lee, comic plots rarely extended beyond an issue. The Fantastic Four would thwart Doctor Doom's plans for world domination and still be home in time to laugh at the Thing's working class idiosyncrasies. While this limited the writers somewhat, it did allow for episodic adventures that were entirely self-contained. Casual readers could pick up the occasional issue and never be far behind the soap opera antics of their favourite characters. Of course, pre-80s comics were considered an enjoyable but disposable pastime. Most were binned after being read, and forgotten soon after.

Naturally, things have changed. Sequential art is now accepted as an art form, though whether such an acceptance entails any benefits is another matter altogether. The contemporary comic book has become a far slower affair, with the sort of storyline that would have filled a single issue back in the sixties now stretched across several. While this makes for far superior graphic novel narratives, it does alienate the casual reader, and leaves the regular collector dangling on tenterhooks before the serial has had time to resume. More importantly, this approach to serial storytelling has rendered the reviewing of individuals comic issues a little pointless - who reviews the first half of a film, or a television drama only up to the first commercial break?

Of course, we could leave the reviews until our favourite series are collected in trade paperback format, but this approach is equally problematic. Many series have reached double digit number of volumes. Should each volume of The Sandman, The Walking Dead, or Y: The Last Man be reviewed individually, or should the series be critiqued as a whole? If comic book critics were to wait until a series had concluded before laying down their position, then very few new books would get the endorsement that quality appraisal offers.

Of course, there are no answers here. The comic medium will continue to suffer the prejudice of literary circles, and isolate those with only a passing interest. But I love the fact that any individual can have his say on the internet, and would rather be guided by the opinions of another comic enthusiast than the tepid, uninspired drivel from a mainstream film or videogame magazine that has temporarily jumped aboard the superhero zeitgeist. With or without mainstream attention, the comic book appears to be stuck comfortably in its niche. Is that such a bad thing?

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Carl Doherty occasionally assumes the guise of a freelance writer specialising in cultural nonsense of the pop and junk varieties. For more of his pungent diatribes on the twisted world of comic books, including a daily graphic novels review, and his weekly webcomic The Scribe, visit Shelf Abuse Graphic Novel Reviews

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Literary Criticism of 'The Soldier' (Poem by Rupert Brooke)

Brooke observes the sonnet form (14 lines of iambic pentameter, divided into an octave and sestet), however the octave is rhymed after the Shakespearean/Elizabethan (ababcdcd) rhyme scheme, while the sestet follows the Petrarchan/Italian (efgefg). Brooke has also deviated somewhat from the traditional thematic divisions associated with the octave and sestet: question/predicament and resolution/solution, respectively. The octave and sestet both enjoin the reader to imagine the blissful state of the fallen soldier.

'The Soldier' is the culmination of Brooke's '1914' sonnet sequence. In 'The Soldier' Brooke invokes the ideas of spiritual cleansing (as found in 'Peace'), inviolable memories of the dead (as in 'Safety'), a hero's immortal legacy ('The Dead' III & IV), but now he combines all these specifically under the overarching framework of English heritage and personal loyalty to it. Although Dean Inge objected to the neo-paganism of Brooke's idea of resurrection,

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind[,]

'The Soldier' touched a nerve and inspired imitations. Some were close and complimentary as they sought a recognizable connection with Brooke's sonnet. For example 'To My Mother -- 1916' by Rifleman Donald S. Cox:

If I should fall, grieve not that one so weak
And poor as I
Should die.
Nay! Though thy heart should break
Think only this: that when at dusk they speak
Of sons and brothers of another one,
Then thou canst say--"I too had a son;
He died for England's sake!"

Edward Thomas (who was acquainted with Brooke) was probably musing on 'The Soldier' when he made up his little ditty to a bugle call -- 'No One Cares Less than I':

No one cares less than I,
Nobody knows but God,
Whether I am destined to lie
Under a foreign clod,

while Martin Stephen sees a "clear rebuttal" to 'The Soldier' in Charles Hamilton Sorley's sonnet 'When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead':

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Associated, as it came to be, with the discredited idealistic attitudes of 1914, Rupert Brooke's sonnet 'The Soldier' suffered a similar fate. However, Stephen finds that "the personal element" in Brooke's sonnets distinquishes them from propaganda verse: "[w]hatever else they may be, Brooke's sonnets sum up admirably a mood that was felt by many people when war broke out."

LitCrit by: Robert Means
English Literature Librarian
Harold B. Lee Library
Brigham Young University

Source: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk
Image © Hulton Getty

Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

You may interest to read more about Rupert Brooke:
Rupert Brooke Society
Work by Rupert Brooke on Project Gutenberg
Collected Poem by Rupert Brooke
Selected Poem by Rupert Brooke
Rupert Brooke, Biography, works and literary criticism

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“Post-feminism” or plain old sexism

By Sharon Smith

“POST-FEMINISM” is the phrase du jour among mainstream political pundits, often accompanied by derogatory comments toward anyone who continues to complain that women lack equality.

U.S. society has entered a “post-feminist” phase, a level playing field, according to this group of commentators. Women’s oppression belongs to a bygone era, and ideas of women’s liberation are merely outdated relics of that era. If anything, these pundits inform us, the women’s movement of the 1960s went too far and now must be reigned in. This is the typical rationale for curbing abortion rights.

But more insidious is the repeated accusation that feminists have created a “victim” consciousness among women by inflating statistics to exaggerate problems such as rape and sexual objectification. Without evidence, these claims have gained the status of conventional wisdom through sheer repetition.

Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, for example, regularly ridicules the problem of date rape, with comments such as: “The biggest myth that won’t die is that one of four college women is raped on campuses each year...If 25 percent of Daddy’s little girls were being sexually assaulted at college, there wouldn’t be any girls on campus.”

The figure Parker holds in such contempt is based on a study conducted in the 1980s by Ms. Magazine, surveying 6,000 students at 32 colleges which found that one in four college women had been a victim of rape or attempted rape--a figure now accepted even by the U.S. Department of Justice. Furthermore, less than one in every three rapes and sexual assaults were reported to law enforcement officials in 1996.

Date rape is not a figment of the imaginations of “hysterical” feminists, but an indisputable reality for women in the U.S. Nevertheless, in the age of “post-feminism,” demands for women’s rights are deemed a colossal act of self-indulgence.

Those who are offended by images of women in popular culture must be either pro-censorship prudes or outmoded feminists born without a sense of humor. After all, who but the most bitter feminist could fail to be amused by the plot line of Pamela Anderson’s new Fox television show, which finds the former Baywatch babe starring as a busty bimbo working in a bookstore? (And the show’s called Stacked!)

Those who are irritated by the show’s promotional ad (Anderson posing suggestively atop a pile of books, as her silicone-enhanced breasts defy the force of gravity) might be jarred by beauty standards and sexual ideals manufactured on Wall Street and in Hollywood yet absorbed by women throughout society.

“Manufactured” is no exaggeration, given that 9.2 million cosmetic surgery procedures, from breast augmentation to Botox injections, were performed in 2004--mainly on women--according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, up 24 percent from 2000. Ironically, this rise in cosmetic surgery coincides with a 10 percent decline in medically necessary reconstructive surgery procedures in 2004 alone, due to declining insurance coverage.

The beauty ideal, moreover, has changed drastically from the buxom Marilyn Monroe (size 12-14) to today’s undernourished supermodel (size 2-4). A woman between the ages of 18 and 34 today has just a 1 percent chance of being as thin as a supermodel.

As modeling executive Jennifer Venditti explained in a 2001 Cosmopolitan article, “The smaller the sample, the better [the clothing] drapes...It’s almost like the body is not present.” This can be a problem for human beings. Yet this image permeates popular culture with unrealistic images that negatively affect self-esteem among females from a very young age.

Thanks to these airbrushed beauty standards, 80 percent of American women are dissatisfied with their appearance, according to the National Eating Disorder Association, contributing to the incidence of anorexia and bulimia currently suffered by up to 10 million women in the U.S. By the age of 10, 80 percent of girls in the U.S. have already tried to diet to lose weight.

“Post-feminism” is a term brimming with hypocrisy--promoted primarily by those who oppose women’s rights--turning women’s bodies over to the control and judgment of others. The need for women’s liberation is far from antiquated--it is, in fact, thoroughly modern.

::link source; http://www.socialistworker.org/2005-1/539/539_07_PostFeminism.shtml

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Deconstructing Jacques Derrida

The Most Reviled Professor in The World Defends His Diabolically Difficult Theory

LENGTH: 4539 words
SUBJECTS: Profile of Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, literary theory, contemporary philosophy, postmodernism, poststructuralism
BYLINE: By Mitchell Stephens, Mitchell Stephens is a journalism professor at New York University and the author of A History of News (Penguin).

THE WORLD'S MOST CONTROVERSIAL LIVING philosopher, arguably its most controversial living thinker, is sitting at a concrete picnic table at an outdoor snack bar at UC Irvine. Few of the undergraduates who stroll by in jams or jeans seem to notice Jacques Derrida, with his carefully tailored gray suit and purple tie. Few would recognize his name if they were introduced. * But as Derrida sips his coffee from a plastic cup, a crowd of world-class graduate students and star professors from as far away as China is already hustling for the best seats in his classroom. In a few minutes, Derrida will present two immensely difficult hours on the latest applications of his renowned method -- deconstruction -- and that room full of scholars will barely allow itself a cough. * Echoes of Derrida's ideas can now be heard in the most unlikely places. The word deconstruction (albeit shorn of much of its meaning) now appears in newspaper reviews and at dinner parties: "Let's deconstruct this scene." It is becoming, like existentialism before it, a part of the language -- to the point where a State Department official can speak of a plan for the "deconstruction" of part of the American Embassy in Moscow, and Mick Jagger can ask, "Does anyone really know what deconstructivist means?"("Deconstructivist" has been the most controversial variety of architecture in recent years.) But the main impact of Derrida's method has been felt on college campuses. * Deconstruction -- which Derrida gave birth to in Paris in the 1960s -- swept through American universities in the '70s and '80s, presuming to remake nothing less than the way professors and students perform their most basic activity: reading.


Deconstructive readings focus -- intently, obsessively -- on the metaphors writers use to make their points. Their purpose is to demonstrate, through comparisons of a work's arguments and its metaphors, that writers contradict themselves -- not just occasionally, but invariably -- and that these contradictions reflect deep fissures in the very foundations of Western culture. In other words, deconstruction claims to have uncovered serious problems in the way Plato and Hemingway and you and I think about matters ranging from truth and friendship to politics and masturbation. Such suggestions have, to say the least, proved controversial. University departments and scholarly associations have split in two over Derrida's complex, often misunderstood method. Friendships have been ruined. His followers tell tales of enlightenment: "It was a little like the moment when Helen Keller first understands the connection between the signing she is being taught and meaning," recalls Harvard English Department's Barbara Johnson of her first encounter with Derrida and deconstruction while a graduate student at Yale. "Keller wanted to go back and sign everything; I wanted to reread everything," Johnson says. But those academics who remain unconverted call Derrida's movement a "cult" or even a "fraud." * "Deconstruction has rather obvious and manifest intellectual weaknesses," writes Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle. "It should be fairly obvious to the careful reader that the emperor has no clothes." * When Irvine displaced Yale as Derrida's main American base four years ago (paying him more than $30,000 a year for an academic quarter compressed into five weeks), there were, along with the proud press releases, predictable outbursts of hard-headed cynicism and fiscal outrage. The shrieks might have been louder if the residents of Orange County understood just how profound a challenge to their thought this distinguished new visiting professor would bring.

DERRIDA'S DARK MEDITERRANEAN skin contrasts with a wide, still full frame of silver hair. "Striking," one of his female graduate students had commented, twice. The word most of his friends use to describe him is "gracious." "Jacques is the mildest of persons," adds Yale professor Harold Bloom. Nevertheless, Derrida is occasionally unwilling or unable to play the roles expected of him. I had been warned that he would not respond well in particular to personal questions of the sort the subject of a magazine profile must face. "Ah, you want me to tell you things like 'I-was-born-in-a-petit-bourgeois-Jewish-family-which-was-assimilated-but . . .' " is how Derrida parried one such query by a French magazine reporter. "Is this really necessary? I just can't do it," he protested to that reporter.

For a celebrity of sorts, Derrida is unusually private and reserved. "There is a certain distance," concedes the avant-garde architect Peter Eisenman, who collaborated with Derrida on the design for a garden in Paris. (Eisenman teasingly accuses Derrida of believing a garden ought to have some benches and trees, a charge Derrida vehemently denies. The design the two of them came up with -- as yet unbuilt -- includes no such reactionary elements.) "He's not the kind of guy," Eisenman notes, "to whom you say, 'Hey, come on, Jacques, let's go have a beer.' We sniff around each other."

And to Derrida's natural reserve -- his tendency to sniff around -- has been added a professional suspicion of easy answers and simple categories. Note, for example, the hesitations that accompany one brief attempt to define his method: "Deconstruction," Derrida says, "if there is such a thing as deconstruction -- and I wouldn't say there is just one deconstruction -- is something heterogeneous, complex. Deconstructions are ways of accounting for the main assumptions common to the culture, common to what we call Western culture.

"Again, I don't think there is one Western culture," he quickly adds. "It's plural."

It's not easy even to apply a designation as simple as "philosopher" to Derrida, though he was educated in philosophy and is, at the moment, fingering the traditional token of a philosopher: a pipe. "I never thought I had something to say philosophically," he tells me. The word philosopher sometimes gets relegated to quotation marks in his writings.

Derrida is also suspicious of the standard biographical accounts we append to the work of our writers. In fact, deconstruction (singular or plural) is known for the extent to which it turns attention to "texts" -- the actual words on paper -- and away from such distractions as the lives of the authors of those texts. One of Derrida's best known and most controversial pronouncements was, "There is nothing outside the text." And for a time it looked as though Derrida wanted nothing to appear in print about himself outside the actual texts he and his interpreters had written. For 17 years, from 1962 to 1979, he would not even allow himself to be photographed for publication.

Consequently, Derrida wears, along with his stylish suits, a certain air of mystery. While there are a couple dozen books in English that feature Jacques Derrida's name in their titles or subtitles, it is almost impossible to find such basic biographical information as the fact that he is married (Derrida's wife of 33 years, Margaret, is a psychoanalyst), or that he has two sons, now in their 20s (one of whom has embarked on a career in philosophy).

Derrida is aware of his elusiveness. His fascination with words extends to their sound, and in the name "Derrida" (pronounced Dare-ee-DA) he says he hears the sounds "derriere le rideau" -- behind the curtain. Rather than attempt to yank the curtain back, I was prepared to tiptoe around the personal questions, but that proved unnecessary. Derrida is surprisingly forthright.

"Why did you refuse to allow yourself to be photographed?"

"My surface motivation was political," Derrida says, softly. "I thought that the things I was writing were not compatible with this silly image of the writer in his office with his books. If there was a deep motivation, it had to do with my relationship with my face, my body."

"Why then this change in policy?"

"It's a kind of resignation. I gave up this image of the non-image."

JACQUES DERRIDA WAS BORN, in 1930, into-a-petit-bourgeois-Jewish-family-which-was-assimilated-into-French-life-in- Algeria-but. . . . (The word but appears often in his story.) But not entirely assimilated. "There were insults," he recalls, "and all the usual manifestations of anti-Semitism." Jacques was the middle child ("this explains everything in my life," he quips), always fighting with his older brother, never fighting with his younger sister. His father was a salesman; his brother became a pharmacist. Jacques, who would grow up to be the only intellectual in his immediate family, was a "very good pupil" until the age of 12. "Then things got complicated."

In 1942, a less common form of anti-Semitism reached Algeria. On the first day of school, the principal called Jacques into his office and said, "You're going to go back home. Your parents will explain."

While the young Derrida was feeling some small part of the horror of Nazism, Paul de Man, the late Yale literature professor who became Derrida's friend and most influential supporter, was writing literary articles, one of which seems clearly anti-Semitic for a collaborationist newspaper in Nazi-occupied Belgium.

Inspired in part by this terrible news, which was revealed four years after De Man's death, Derrida recently has been questioning (i.e., reading "texts" on) the concept of friendship -- among the larger stones in the foundation of our civilization. Derrida, characteristically, is investigating the concept's cracks, its contradictions: the extent to which friendship is necessary but impossible, loving but not too loving, caring but competitive, a form of union but, as are all our relations with others, also a form of separation.

For Derrida, many of these contradictions are embodied in the statement, "Oh my friends, there is no friend." For years, each of Derrida's lectures has begun with this enigmatic -- Derrida would say "undecidable" -- quotation attributed to Aristotle but not actually found anywhere in Aristotle's writings.

The problem of friendship was an important theme in Derrida's early life, too. His childhood friends at the lycee in Algeria were put to the test after their Jewish playmate was expelled. They failed. "It was a very, very painful situation," he admits, "something which probably left deep scars."

The Jewish community in Algeria reacted by organizing its own school. "But I didn't like it," Derrida says. In his work, Derrida has emphasized the importance of that which does not quite belong: the marginal. He finds many of the ambiguities, loose ends and contradictions for which he is searching buried in the margins of writings -- in the footnotes, parentheses and prefaces other readers overlook. And he sees himself as having lived on the margins -- not quite French, not quite Algerian and also not simply Jewish.

It took four months for the Free French government to repeal the "racial laws" in Algeria, but eventually Derrida was allowed back in the lycee. He returned, he says, as a "very irregular pupil -- very good in some disciplines, not so good in others." Good enough in philosophy and literature, however, to move to Paris at the age of 19 to prepare himself for the Ecole Normale Superieure, France's most prestigious college (where Jean-Paul Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir). And Derrida -- a boy not just from the provinces but from way beyond the provinces -- went on to secure a reputation among Parisian intellectuals that could begin to be compared to Sartre's. But. . . .

But Derrida continued to view himself as something of an outsider: "There is this distance, a distance because I was Jewish" -- a word he pronounces quietly -- "because I wasn't totally French." Although he published widely -- three books in 1967 alone -- and gained notoriety, as a philosopher can only in France, his fame was as a rebel, someone who challenged the dominant culture. (Politically, Derrida inhabits the left margin.) And, although he soon was teaching at the Ecole Normale, Derrida continued to see himself as removed from the academic establishment.

"In the academy there are two images of me," Derrida suggests. "One is of a professor with authority, given honorary degrees, legitimized in so many ways. But the other is of a man who doesn't belong to the university, who is just destroying the norms, who is not an authentic scholar. These images constantly conflict with each other, and I'm in the middle, just traveling between the two. Sometimes I naively ask myself, 'Where am I?' "

JACQUES DERRIDA'S IDEAS first established a beachhead in America in 1966 at a conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University. Structuralism is the belief, then all the rage among Parisian intellectuals, that "structures" -- like the rules and relationships that make words into a language -- underlie all forms of "communication," from tribal myths to French fashions. The American literary scholars gathered at that conference had been delighting themselves with their own perspicacity when Derrida, the youngest of the Frenchmen invited to perform for them, took the stage and announced, in effect, that the structuralism the au courant were so proud of having adopted was dead -- hopelessly entangled with the same unsupported beliefs in ultimate meanings and final answers that permeate all of Western thought. That caused some flutters beneath the cardigans.

And the impression that an original and important new thinker had been discovered was furthered when Derrida's writings started drifting across the Atlantic and being translated. They were, to say the least, unconventional: A sentence might begin on page 319 and not end until page 322; a single footnote might run the length of an article; two separate narrations might share the pages of a book.

Still, it was Derrida's reading, not his writing, that won most of the converts. He gave literature professors a special gift: a chance to confront -- not as mere second-rate philosophers, not as mere interpreters of novelists, but as full-fledged explorers in their own right -- the most profound paradoxes of Western thought (which helps explain why he has been accepted in American literature, not philosophy, departments). If they really read, if they stared intently enough at the metaphors, literature professors, from the comfort of their own easy chairs, could reveal the hollowness of the basic assumptions that lie behind all our writings.

Language is an endlessly complex and unwieldy medium, Derrida argued, and writers are never entirely in control of their words. When Plato, the father of Western thought, is trying to explain, for example, why speech is a dramatically more effective way to communicate than writing, he ends up with this justification: Speech "is written in the soul of the listener." The metaphor and the argument conflict. Ernest Hemingway, arguing that bullfighting is "a tragedy, not a sport," continually explains bullfighting with analogies drawn from American sports. Again, the metaphors -- like Freudian slips -- seemingly unconsciously subvert the argument.

Derrida was trying to show that most of the distinctions we attempt to draw can in some ultimate sense be thrown into question: Speech is not closer to our souls than writing; Hemingway's bullfighting is not of a different order than mere sports; sex (to choose another of his examples) is not purer than masturbation. Male/female, human/animal, good/evil -- if we read carefully enough, suspiciously enough, the value-laden comparisons upon which we base our ethical, aesthetic and political behavior can be, to use the lingo, "disturbed."

Derrida's acolytes were convinced that he had presented them with new eyes, new ways of seeing the tangles and dissonances of what was rapidly becoming the postmodern world. His opponents, whose number was becoming legion, saw fog banks, intentional obscurity and a cynicism that threatened to undercut all accepted notions of what is good, beautiful and politically important.

"OH MY FRIENDS, THERE IS NO friend. . . ." Derrida, a short man with a square face, strong nose and thick eyebrows, sits in front of an overcrowded class at UC Irvine.

While they still attract a throng of intellectual heavyweights, Derrida's lectures are no longer so clearly the place to be for academe's trailblazers. Deconstruction has lost a little of its newness and glamour. In fact, some trendsetters in the universities already have a new theory with which to perplex their students: the "new historicism," which reasserts (in an unexpected, provocative kind of way, of course) the importance of historical circumstances -- circumstances outside the "text" -- on works of literature.

The fact that the cognoscenti are losing some of their excitement, however, is often a sign that a fashion is establishing itself with a larger public, and in a sense this is happening with deconstruction. Derrida himself -- with his increasing willingness to step out from behind his texts -- has appeared in a movie, "Ghost Dance," and even inspired a rock song by the English group Scritti Politti: "I'm in love with Jacques Derrida/Read a page and I know what I need ta/Take apart/My baby's heart. . . ." (Derrida had lunch with band leader Green and described him as "a very intelligent young man, really knows his Wittgenstein.")

Deconstructivist architects acknowledge Derrida as an inspiration for their work: uncentered, marginal, committed to mocking expectations -- gardens without benches and trees. And Derrida's name has begun showing up in non-academic publications and broadcasts -- as the scourge of the author, as the epitome of the incomprehensible intellectual, as the postmodern era's "post man" and, most recently, as a patron saint of that controversial "multiculturalism" (though those Derrida favors with his deconstructions are almost exclusively white, male, European authors: Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, Freud, Mallarme, Genet).

In France, where deconstruction fell in and out of fashion about half a decade earlier than it did here, Derrida remains an important force, a public figure who has involved himself in such political causes as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and in favor of freedom of expression in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia. (Derrida was jailed in Czechoslovakia in 1982 after meeting with some dissident writers.) He breaks the stereotype of the French leftist intellectual by living not in Paris but in a suburb, Ris-Orangis -- on the margins of Paris. He does not spend his evenings in Left Bank cafes.

In the United States, Derrida first began giving his dense, iconoclastic lectures and seminars as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins, then at Yale, where in the late '70s and early '80s he played the role of guru to some members of the influential "Yale School" of literary criticism, which included De Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller.

DERRIDA'S SQUARE HANDS are folded in front of him. A pair of clear-framed half-glasses rests on his nose. He is reading, or rather translating, from his French notes, notes that themselves are spotted with citations in German and Greek. Derrida began lecturing in English for the first time at Irvine, but English words still escape from his mouth slowly.

After 30 minutes, we reach what the professor says will be his starting point. After 43 minutes he announces, "That's where we are beginning today." Not that he could be accused of wasting time. Like most of those rare individuals endowed with gravity, Derrida seems to circle but not drift. Fifty minutes into the lecture, Derrida's investigation of some sentence from a great philosopher becomes particularly obtuse, and his audience allows itself a collective fidget -- its first and last.

"One often, if not always, speaks too fast, too early," Derrida is explaining. "One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says." One often speaks without . . . meaning what one says? You can see why Derrida drives those accustomed to more cautious statements batty. Not only is he arguing that we contradict ourselves, occasionally switching positions in mid-thought -- "Oh my friends, there is no friend" -- but also that it is impossible for us to communicate with friends, or even with ourselves, with perfect clarity, that it is impossible to achieve some sort of ultimate, unambiguous understanding.

The problem, Derrida contends, is that meaning is always dependent on context. " 'There is nothing outside the text,' " he explains in a recent book, "means there is nothing outside context." And since the context in which words might be read or heard can always shift, meanings are impossible to completely pin down -- and the distinctions we base on them ultimately rest on sand.

Remember that one magic moment -- perhaps you were in a garden, on a bench, under a tree -- when the meaning of existence suddenly came into focus? Well, Derrida has bad news, especially for those who have devoted their lives to the truth of such magnificent, all-encompassing visions: The world, he maintains, can be viewed from a limitless number of different perspectives. There is no one true answer. Aha! But doesn't deconstruction itself pretend to be such an answer? No, says Derrida, who presents deconstruction not as a conclusive theory but as a method for uncovering the contradictions at the heart of attempts to formulate such conclusive theories.

For those political or intellectual conservatives who insist on the validity of simple truths, straightforward values and a single cultural tradition, Derrida is indeed the enemy. He sees instead a world that is complex, contradictory and plural. Derrida is no friend to doctrinaire leftists either. His views allow too much room for doubt. Even those of us who are simply trying to hang our beliefs on one or two solid principles will find Derrida's work troubling.

Nevertheless, as he and his friends emphasize and re-emphasize, Derrida is not a nihilist. The fact that, in Derrida's view, there is no one meaning does not mean that there is no meaning at all. We can, of course, determine whether statements are true or false within the specified contexts of, say, science or magazine profiles. And this does not mean, as Derrida notes in this lecture, that we are freed of responsibility to try as hard as we can to say what we think we mean. It does mean that we can never know all there is to know about a sentence attributed to Aristotle, about our existence, about what is good, even about the words we are saying -- all of which will always remain open to interpretation and reinterpretation.

It is no coincidence that deconstruction has arrived as this self-conscious century totters, coughing and wheezing, into its last years. One of the last great attempts to impose a single perspective upon human societies has crumbled before our eyes in Eastern Europe. Our "great war," the Cold War, was fought with interpretations of weapons, not weapons. Our businesses sell by placing their products in finely worked contexts. Our politicians triumph by manipulating the interpretation of the events in which they participate. Our governments are run as much by "spin doctors" as by policy makers. Derrida might be dubbed a "spin scholar."

"What marks Derrida's work," Tom Keenan of Princeton explains, "is this incredibly serious thinking of the idea that communication is not something transparent" -- that meaning does not simply shine through, that messages arrive bearing a variety of spins, that there is no one correct interpretation. This is an idea that has marked the work of other 20th-Century thinkers -- from Marshall McLuhan to Roland Barthes to Republican media-strategist Roger Ailes. It is perhaps the idea of the century, and Derrida -- with his attempts to think the limits of our ability to communicate, even with ourselves, his attempts to think the limits of thought -- may be following it to its most extreme, most disturbing, conclusions.

One often speaks without . . . meaning what one says.

WE ARE DINING AT A RESTAURANT called Hemingway's (his choice) -- a warm and dimly lighted place, since closed, near Newport Beach -- when Derrida says, with unexpected wistfulness, that he dreams of writing something naive, something straightforward, something -- of all things -- simple.

"Derrida is able to surprise you even when you think you know his thoughts," notes Jonathan Culler, whose book "On Deconstruction" provides one of the clearest introductions to Derrida's work.

Derrida write simply? It is pretty to think it possible, but this is the thinker who seems always ready to strike off in a disconcerting new direction. (Derrida's ongoing seminar on friendship, for example, has been metamorphosing of late into an investigation of "the rhetoric of cannibalism" -- the ultimate attempt to become one with a friend.) This is the thinker who seems always eager to substitute a new ramification for a mere restatement, who refuses to settle for the more straightforward forms of prose, who has earned a reputation for being perhaps the most complex writer of our time.

And the density, the complexity of Derrida's writing is no mere accident. It seems central to his thought -- to his circling, suspicious way of responding. (Indeed, Derrida has been attacked recently for his inability to offer a simple condemnation of De Man's wartime writings.) Derrida is the prophet of complexity -- the person who continually takes responsibility for noting the difficulties, the inescapable contradictions; the person who has finally accepted the impossibility of simplicity. "The world is complex," he tells me, "and I'm afraid -- or I hope -- it will remain so."

Nevertheless, this dream -- the simple book (not text) that rests unborn within him -- will come up again and again in our conversations. It would be a novel, perhaps. And in place of the great philosophers whose work he has so often deconstructed, the book's subject would be: a 12-year-old boy in Algeria, French but not French, Jewish but not Jewish, with friends but no friends; a 19-year-old boy in Paris struggling to cross the "psychological/sociological borders" into and out of the world of Parisian intellectuals.

"I have the deep feeling of not having written what I would like to write and what I should have written," Derrida says, adding that in a sense he views all that he has written -- and Derrida has been remarkably prolific -- as a "preliminary exercise" for "the one-and-only project," which he suspects he will never write. "I know it's not possible to write in an absolutely naive fashion, but that's my dream."

Which may be where we stand after deconstruction: Derrida has been demonstrating the extent to which our dreams -- of naivete and simplicity, of perfect friendship, of indisputable meaning, of God, for that matter -- are impossible. But he also knows that we remain incapable of not dreaming.

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Some Post-Structural Assumptions

The following are intended to be some suggestions which you should expect to modify, add to, contest, and otherwise work with.

Post-structuralism is not a school, but a group of approaches motivated by some common understandings, not all of which will necessarily be shared by every practitioner. Post-structuralism is not a theory but a set of theoretical positions, which have at their core a self-reflexive discourse which is aware of the tentativeness, the slipperiness, the ambiguity and the complex interrelations of texts and meanings. There may be some sharp differences about what 'post-structuralism' includes; I see a substantial ideological component which others may not, for instance.

Post-structuralism is, as the name suggests, consequent upon Structuralism, with which movement one should have some familiarity in order to understand post-structuralism.

There follow some of assumptions of post-structural thought.

*I* Post-structuralism is marked by a rejection of totalizing, essentialist, foundationalist concepts.

* a totalizing concept puts all phenomena under one explanatory concept (e.g. it's the will of God)
* an essentialist concept suggests that there is a reality which exists independent of, beneath or beyond, language and ideology -- that there is such a thing as 'the feminine', for instance, or 'truth' or 'beauty'
* a foundationalist concept suggests that signifying systems are stable and unproblematic representations of a world of fact which is isomorphic with human thought.

*II* Post-structuralism contests the concept of 'man' as developed by enlightenment thought and idealist philosophy. Rather than holding as in the enlightenment view that 'individuals', are sacred, separate and intact, their minds the only true realm of meaning and value, their rights individual and inalienable, their value and nature rooted in a universal and transhistorical essence -- a metaphysical being, in short -- the post-structural view holds that persons are culturally and discursively structured, created in interaction as situated, symbolic beings. The common term for a person so conceived is a 'subject'.

* Subjects are created, then, through their cultural meanings and practices, and occupy various culturally-based sites of meaning (as family members, as occupationally and economically and regionally defined, as gendered and of sexual orientation, as members of clubs or clients of psychotherapy or presidents of their school parents' organization, and on and on -- every site evoking a different configuration of the self, different language uses, different foci of value and energy, different social practices, and so forth).

* Subjects are material beings, embodied and present in the physical world, entrenched in the material practices and structures of their society -- working, playing, procreating, living as parts of the material systems of society.

* Subjects are social in their very origin: they take their meaning and value and self-image from their identity groups, from their activities in society, from their intimate relations, from the multiple pools of common meanings and symbols and practices which they share variously with their sub-cultural groups and with their society as a larger unit.

Post-structural understandings of persons are sometimes referred to as 'anti-humanist', because they are opposed to the Humanist idea that persons are isolate, unified, largely immaterial beings, and that humanity is transcendent, universal and unchangeable in its essence. To be anti-humanist is not to be anti-humane, however, but to have a different philosophical and ideological understanding of the nature of the person.

*III* Poststructuralism sees 'reality' as being much more fragmented, diverse, tenuous and culture-specific than does structuralism. Some consequences have been,

1. poststructuralism's greater attention to specific histories, to the details and local contextualizations of concrete instances;
2. a greater emphasis on the body, the actual insertion of the human into the texture of time and history;
3. a greater attention to the specifics of cultural working, to the arenas of discourse and cultural practice;
4. a greater attention to the role of language and textuality in our construction of reality and identity.

*IV* Post-structuralism derives in part from a sense that we live in a linguistic universe. This means, in the first instance, rejecting the traditional aesthetic, phenomenalist assumption that language is a 'transparent' medium which hands over experience whole and unproblematically; in a 'linguistic' universe 'reality' is only mediated reality, and what it is mediated by is governed by such things as:

* the way language works, by difference for instance;
* the world of discourse which governs our knowledge and way of speaking about the subject under discussion: we can imagine only what we can symbolize, speak of only what we have language for, speak only in the ways our rules of discourse allow us to;
* the workings of the 'master tropes' (a trope is a way of saying something by saying something else) of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony;
* the structure of ideology, which attempts to 'naturalize' power relations and our sense of how the world is configured;
* the various cultural codes which govern our understandings of our selves, our place, our procedures;
* the idea that any cultural construction of meaning will privilege some meanings or experiences and deprivilege others, but that there will be traces of the deprivileging or suppression of some experiences, and by looking at the cracks, the silences, the discontinuities which ideology attempts to smooth over, we can deconstruct or demystify the cultural meanings;
* the idea that we think in terms of certain tropes, and construct meaning in terms of genres, so that meaning is pre-channeled in certain typified, identifiable ways, which ways reveal more about their construction of meaning than about any 'reality' beyond the rhetorical constructs.

To put this briefly, we live in a world of language, discourse and ideology, none of which are transparent, all of which structure our sense of being and meaning.

*V* All meaning is textual and intertextual: there is no "outside of the text," as Derrida remarked. Everything we can know is constructed through signs, governed by the rules of discourse for that area of knowledge, and related to other texts through filiation, allusion and repetition. Every text exists only in relation to other texts; meaning circulates in economies of discourse. This understanding does not mean that all reality is textual, only that what we can know of it, and how we can know, is textual, constructed through discourse, with all its rules; through symbols, linguistic and otherwise; through grammar(s).

*VI* Discourse is a material practice; the human is rooted in historicity and lives through the body. (Why 'historicity' instead of 'history'? Because the term 'history' suggests an objectively existing, cognitively available reality; 'historicity' implies that what we conceive of as history is tentative, situated, contingent.)

*VII* In Foucault's terms, the production of discourse, the (historical, material) way we know our world, is controlled, selected, organized and distributed by a certain number of procedures. Discourse is regulated by rules of exclusion, by internal systems of control and delineation, by conditions under which discourses can be employed, and by philosophical themes which elide the reality of discourse -- the themes of the founding subject, originating experience, and universal mediation. Discourses are multiple, discontinuous, originating and disappearing through chance; they do not hide the truth but constitute its temporary face. Foucault is post-structuralist in his insistence that there is no great causal flow or plan or evolution of history, that what happens is mainly by chance.

*VIII* The Derridean concept of différance links up with Freudian suppositions and marxist ideas to highlight concepts of repression, displacement, condensation, substitution and so forth, which, often by following metaphoric or metynomic links carefully, can be deconstructed or revealed; what is 'meant' is different from what appears to be meant. Meaning disguises itself. This is essentially structuralist, one of the reasons why 'post-structuralism' cannot be understood without structuralism.

*IX* Texts are marked by a surplus of meaning; the result of this is that differing readings are inevitable, indeed a condition of meaning at all. This surplus is located in the polysemous nature of both language and of rhetoric. It must be kept in mind that language is what is (for us as cognizant beings), that our sense of reality is linguistically constructed. Consequently the 'meaning of it all' is continually differing, overflowing, in flux.

*X* A 'text' exists as read. This 'reading' is formed, conducted, through certain mediating factors:

* the present structures of discourse, hence understanding, including the present conceptions of the discourse structures of the time of the 'writing' of the text.
* the traditions of reading, and the oppositions which those traditions have made possible, of that particular text,
* the expectations dictated by the genre of the text and the tradition of genre of the reading,
* the relations of meaning which are 'in' the text by virtue of its having been written at all, modified by the fact that these relations have a certain historical existence, a local, situated, and corporeal existence whose reality may or may not be imaginatively recoverable;
* the understanding that these 'historical' relations of meaning will to some extent be mystifying and ideologizing relations,
* the understanding that insofar as texts have a surplus of meaning they tend to reveal the flaws which the reigning discourse is attempting to mystify,
* the conceptual distances between the historical discourse / ideology / cultural codes / genre-traditions of the past and the historical discourse / ideology / cultural codes / genre-traditions of the present, which distance opens up 'new' meanings which the work could not have, in a sense, had before. Post-structuralism is deeply aware of such hermeneutic reading and also suspicious of it, certain that meaning is historical, uncertain that it is recoverable as what it may have meant.

*XI* At the expense of repetition, let's go again over the sorts of conflict Culler notes deconstructionist criticism (which is a mode of or modes of post-structuralist criticism) may look for [On Deconstruction pp. 213-215]:

1. the asymetrical opposition or value-laden hierarchy
2. points of condensation, where a single term brings together different lines of argument or sets of values
3. the text's ecarte de soi or difference from itself -- anything in the text that counters an authoritative interpretation, including interpretations that the work appears to encourage (this was touched on earlier re: the cracks, silences, discontinuities, etc.)
4. self-reference, when the text applies to something else a description, image or figure that can be read as self-description, as a representation of its own operations; one can by applying these to the operations of the text read 'against the grain'
5. an interest in the way conflicts or dramas within the text are reproduced as conflicts in and between readings of the text -- Texts thematize, with varying degrees of explicitness, interpretive operations and their consequences and thus represent in advance the dramas that will give life to the tradition of their interpretation
6. attention to the marginal -- hierarchies depend on exclusions; the marginalized is what the text resists, and therefore can be identified by.

*XII* Post-structuralism is consequent on and a reaction to structuralism; it would not exist without structuralism. Macherey's points in his critique of structuralism (1965) lay out some of the groundwork for post-structural thought:

1. structuralism is a-historical; life and thought are historical -- they change, different relations with different elements at different times, and so forth
2. the transfer of knowledge from one area of knowledge (e.g. linguistics) to other areas of knowledge is questionable enterprise
3. structuralism assumes that a work has intrinsic meaning -- that is, it is 'already there' and always there, that the 'meaning' pre-exists its realization (it is already there -- we just identify it).
4. structural analysis is therefore the discovery of the rationality or 'secret coherence' of a text. But this coherence is a coherence that precedes the text, or it could not form the text. For there to be 'intrinsic meaning' there has to be a pattern or order or structure which governs and orders and regulates the production of meaning. The text is therefore in a sense a 'copy' of that order or structure which grounds the coherence of the text; analysis of a text is a copy of a copy, the text is just an intermediary between the reader and the structure of rationality, and so it 'disappears'.
5. structuralism presupposes the traditional and metaphysical notion of harmony and unity; a work is only a work, i.e. only has meaning as an entity, only insofar as it is is a whole. This notion negates the reality of the material conditions of production or reception, it makes the meaning itself unitary, is makes criticism commentary, a pointing out of the essential truth which is embodied not in but through the work.

:: source: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/poststruct.html

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Jacques Derrida: Structuralism/Poststructuralism

Structuralism is appealing to some critics because it adds a certain objectivity, a SCIENTIFIC objectivity, to the realm of literary studies (which have often been criticized as purely subjective/impressionistic). This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating "parole" to "langue;" actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a system in the abstract. Thus structuralist readings ignore the specificity of actual texts and treat them as if they were like the patterns produced by iron filings moved by magnetic force--the result of some impersonal force or power, not the result of human effort.

In structuralism, the individuality of the text disappears in favor of looking at patterns, systems, and structures. Some structuralists (and a related school of critics, called the Russian Formalists) propose that ALL narratives can be charted as variations on certain basic universal narrative patterns.

In this way of looking at narratives, the author is canceled out, since the text is a function of a system, not of an individual. The Romantic humanist model holds that the author is the origin of the text, its creator, and hence is the starting point or progenitor of the text. Structuralism argues that any piece of writing, or any signifying system, has no origin, and that authors merely inhabit pre-existing structures (langue) that enable them to make any particular sentence (or story)--any parole. Hence the idea that "language speaks us," rather than that we speak language. We don't originate language; we inhabit a structure that enables us to speak; what we (mis)perceive as our originality is simply our recombination of some of the elements in the pre-existing system. Hence every text, and every sentence we speak or write, is made up of the "already written."

By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralists cancel out history. Most insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless. Structuralists can't account for change or development; they are uninterested, for example, in how literary forms may have changed over time. They are not interested in a text's production or reception/consumption, but only in the structures that shape it.

In erasing the author, the individual text, the reader, and history, structuralism represented a major challenge to what we now call the "liberal humanist" tradition in literary criticism.

The HUMANIST model presupposed:

1.) That there is a real world out there that we can understand with our rational minds.

2.) That language is capable of (more or less) accurately depicting that real world..

3.) That language is a product of the individual writer's mind or free will, meaning that we determine what we say, and what we mean when we say it; that language thus expresses the essence of our individual beings (and that there is such a thing as an essential unique individual "self").

4.) the SELF--also known as the "subject," since that's how we represent the idea of a self in language, by saying I, which is the subject of a sentence--or the individual (or the mind or the free will) is the center of all meaning and truth; words mean what I say they mean, and truth is what I perceive as truth. I create my own sentences out of my own individual experiences and need for individual expression.

The STRUCTURALIST model argues

1.) that the structure of language itself produces "reality"--that we can think only through language, and therefore our perceptions of reality are all framed by and determined by the structure of language.

2.) That language speaks us; that the source of meaning is not an individual's experience or being, but the sets of oppositions and operations, the signs and grammars that govern language. Meaning doesn't come from individuals, but from the system that governs what any individual can do within it.

3.) Rather than seeing the individual as the center of meaning, structuralism places THE STRUCTURE at the center--it's the structure that originates or produces meaning, not the individual self. Language in particular is the center of self and meaning; I can only say "I" because I inhabit a system of language in which the position of subject is marked by the first personal pronoun, hence my identity is the product of the linguistic system I occupy.

This is also where deconstruction starts to come in. The leading figure in deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, looks at philosophy (Western metaphysics) to see that any system necessarily posits a CENTER, a point from which everything comes, and to which everything refers or returns. Sometimes it's God, sometimes it's the human self, the mind, sometimes it's the unconscious, depending on what philosophical system (or set of beliefs) one is talking about.

There are two key points to the idea of deconstruction. First is that we're still going to look at systems or structures, rather than at individual concrete practices, and that all systems or structures have a CENTER, the point of origin, the thing that created the system in the first place. Second is that all systems or structures are created of binary pairs or oppositions, of two terms placed in some sort of relation to each.

Derrida says that such systems are always built of the basic units structuralism analyzes--the binary opposition or pair--and that within these systems one part of that binary pair is always more important than the other, that one term is "marked" as positive and the other as negative. Hence in the binary pair good/evil, good is what Western philosophy values, and evil is subordinated to good. Derrida argues that all binary pairs work this way--light/dark, masculine/feminine, right/left; in Western culture, the first term is always valued over the second.

In his most famous work, Of Grammatology, Derrida looks particularly at the opposition speech/writing, saying that speech is always seen as more important than writing. This may not be as self-evident as the example of good/evil, but it's true in terms of linguistic theories, where speech is posited as the first or primary form of language, and writing is just the transcription of speech. Derrida says speech gets privileged because speech is associated with presence--for there to be spoken language, somebody has to be there to be speaking.

No, he doesn't take into account tape recordings and things like that. Remember, a lot of what these guys are talking about has roots in philosophic and linguistic traditions that predate modern technology--so that Derrida is responding to an opposition (speech/writing) that Plato set up, long before there were tape recorders. Just like poor old Levi-Strauss talks about how, in order to map all the dimensions of a myth, he'd have to have "punch cards and an IBM machine," when all he'd need now is a home computer.

Anyway, the idea is that the spoken word guarantees the existence of somebody doing the speaking--thus it reinforces all those great humanist ideas, like that there's a real self that is the origin of what's being said. Derrida calls this idea of the self that has to be there to speak part of the metaphysics of PRESENCE; the idea of being, or presence, is central to all systems of Western philosophy, from Plato through Descartes (up to Derrida himself). Presence is part of a binary opposition presence/absence, in which presence is always favored over absence. Speech gets associated with presence, and both are favored over writing and absence; this privileging of speech and presence is what Derrida calls LOGOCENTRISM.

You might think here about the Biblical phrase "Let there be light" as an example. The statement insures that there is a God (the thing doing the speaking), and that God is present (because speech=presence); the present God is the origin of all things (because God creates the world by speaking), and what God creates is binary oppositions (starting with light/dark). You might also think about other binary oppositions or pairs, including being/nothingness, reason/madness, word/silence, culture/nature, mind/body. Each term has meaning only in reference to the other (light is what is not dark, and vice-versa), just as, in Saussure's view, signifiers only have meaning--or negative value--in relation to other signifiers. These binary pairs are the "structures," or fundamental opposing ideas, that Derrida is concerned with in Western philosophy.

Because of the favoring of presence over absence, speech is favored over writing (and, as we'll see with Freud, masculine is favored over feminine because the penis is defined as a presence, whereas the female genitals are defined as absence).

It's because of this favoring of presence over absence that every system (I'm referring here mostly to philosophical systems, but the idea works for signifying systems as well) posits a CENTER, a place from which the whole system comes, and which guarantees its meaning--this center guarantees being as presence. Think of your entire self as a kind of system--everything you do, think, feel, etc. is part of that system. At the core or center of your mental and physical life is a notion of SELF, of an "I", of an identity that is stable and unified and coherent, the part of you that knows who you mean when you say "I". This core self or "I" is thus the CENTER of the "system", the "langue" of your being, and every other part of you (each individual act) is part of the "parole". The "I" is the origin of all you say and do, and it guarantees the idea of your presence, your being.

Western thought has a whole bunch of terms that serve as centers to systems --being, essence, substance, truth, form, consciousness, man, god, etc. What Derrida tells us is that each of these terms designating the center of a system serves two purposes: it's the thing that created the system, that originated it and guarantees that all the parts of the system interrelate, and it's also something beyond the system, not governed by the rules of the system. This is what he talks about as a "scandal" discovered by Levi-Strauss in Levi-Strauss's thoughts about kinship systems. (This will be covered in detail in the next lecture).

What Derrida does is to look at how a binary opposition--the fundamental unit of the structures or systems we've been looking at, and of the philosophical systems he refers to--functions within a system. He points out that a binary opposition is algebraic (a=~b, a equals not-b), and that two terms can't exist without reference to the other--light (as presence) is defined as the absence of darkness, goodness the absence of evil, etc. He doesn't seek to reverse the hierarchies implied in binary pairs--to make evil favored over good, unconscious over consciousness, feminine over masculine. Rather, deconstruction wants to erase the boundaries (the slash) between oppositions, hence to show that the values and order implied by the opposition are also not rigid.

Here's the basic method of deconstruction: find a binary opposition. Show how each term, rather than being polar opposite of its paired term, is actually part of it. Then the structure or opposition which kept them apart collapses, as we see with the terms nature and culture in Derrida's essay. Ultimately, you can't tell which is which, and the idea of binary opposites loses meaning, or is put into "play" (more on this in the next lecture). This method is called "Deconstruction" because it is a combination of construction/destruction--the idea is that you don't simply construct new system of binaries, with the previously subordinated term on top, nor do you destroy the old system--rather, you deconstruct the old system by showing how its basic units of structuration (binary pairs and the rules for their combination) contradict their own logic. [source: http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/1derrida.html]

---

Suggestions for Further Information:

• Derrida for Beginners, Jim Powell

• Poststructuralism

• Poststructuralism as Theory and Practice in the English Classroom

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Social Construction of Reality

Something very peculiar occured to some members of Europe's educated classes around the beginning of the Renaissance: they read the ancients and realized the past was different from the present. Not just in the obvious, trivial sense that that was then and this is now, but that in antiquity they had talked differently, acted differently, lived differently, even thought differently. This was rather a shock; one can see it reflected in, say, Machiavelli, as he explains why the ancient polities simply cannot be revived. This realization, that "they do things differently there," did not go away; it only acquired more force and a broader scope as the "discovery of the historical world" (Cassirer) progressed along-side contact with other cultures. (Islam had of course been next door to Europe, even in Europe, for centuries, but it shared an Abrahamic religion and Hellenistic philosophy, and each side could condemn the other as deviants from the True Faith. This resource was unavailable to the Jesuits when they got to Kerala and China.) So far this was just an uneasy awareness that we can be led into error by the customs of our country (to try to keep to the language of the time), and that, if we want to avoid such errors, we need to carefully scrutinize those customs and received notions. (Thus Descartes at the start of the Discourse on Method.)

It took another peculiar event to change the fear of inherited errors into a positive doctrine; that was the Great French Revolution of 1789, or more precisely the conservative response to it. The basic point made by, for instance, Edmund Burke, was that it was neither possible nor desirable to start from scratch, from tabulæ rasæ, as (according to the conservatives) the philosophes and the revolutionaries had tried to do. We are, after all, not blank slates, we do not evolve our thought out of pure abstraction, but inherit our modes of thought and categories from our ancestors; our intellect as much as our institutions and our feelings are part of a vast social fabric, stretching back into a literally immemorial past. So we can't start from stratch; but we can modify our inheritance. Yet (the conservative argument continues) that inheritance is the product of millennia of sifting and winnowing; however imperfect it may be, it has in fact endured and worked for a very long time, and as such is not to be lightly tampered with, much less completely rejected in favor of very recent and very speculative, hence very uncertain, substitutes, especially not when serious matters of human life and happiness are at stake. (The contrast between this sort of conservativism, and the doctrinaire radicalism of Thatcher, the Reagan administration and Gingrich, is most instructive.)

I have a lot of sympathy for this line of argument, certainly as it applies to politics, though I think conservatives generally unfair to the Enlightenment, but that's a side-issue for the moment. The important point, for our present purposes, is the notion of that thought is social, is traditional, most especially that the categories we employ in thinking are social, inherited, traditional. Add to this the idea that our concepts form a closed, coherent system, from which there is no (rational) escape. Result: The terms in which we thinks are fixed by society; the very effort to condemn or escape our society and its conventions, even in thought, is sabotaged from the start. Add one more belief, that we never have an unmediated contact with reality, that all we know are (socially-approved) representations, and the circle is complete. "Reality" as such, independent of all ideas, concepts, modes of representation, etc. inherited from our past, is nothing to us. What we have is (allowing for the barbarization of learned prose since Burke's day) a social construct; reality, as we know it, is socially constructed. Radical challenges to the status quo are thus, quite literally, unthinkable and unrealistic.

The phrase, "social construction of reality," was in fact brought into general use, if not invented, by a book of the same title by a pair of conservative sociologists, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. (They do not give the argument in quite this form, but I think mine is a neater derivation.) It's very curious that the idea has been taken up so enthusiastically by academics who pride themselves on being leftists and radicals. (Though not without precedent; much of Marx's work is an attempt to expropriate the original conservative arguments.) Their reasoning seems to run roughly as follows. Many (if not all) oppressed people are thought of in an invidious, demeaning, repressive way; if we teach people to think in different categories, we'll get rid of those kinds of oppression. But this presumes that we can change the system of concepts, and in a deliberately chosen way at that, which blocks the premises we started from. In any case, Marx and Engels knew all about this kind of optimism a hundred and fifty years ago:

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence. This honest fellow was the type of the new revolutionary philosophers in Germany. [The German Ideology, preface.]

Of course, today it's not just "in Germany"...

This is a reductio, so let's see where the reasoning went wrong.

In the first place, let's start with this idea of "society." It's a pretty harmless one, and an invaluable short-hand, but here it leads us into mistakes. We do not, pace Durkheim, ever actually deal with society; we deal with other people --- our parents, our playmates, our bosses, our enemies, our spawn, etc., etc. It's certainly true that we acquire many concepts, ideas and ways of thinking from these people, through formal instruction, through shared experience, through conversation and conviviality, and through direct imitation, but it by no means follows that we acquire a coherent system of thought from them, much less that we all share the same system by virtue of getting in each other's hair. This doesn't make it impossible to talk about (e.g.) which conceptions are common in a certain population, but it does or should warn us against laying out elaborate conceptual systems and saying "This is what the English aristocracy thought in 1900" or the like.

More: I spoke above as though the social origin of ideas meant that they form a closed, self-consistent and self-supporting system, a vicious (or, if you like it, virtuous) circle. But there's no a priori reason to suppose this is so, and certainly not much evidence. Variation from established concepts is common; useful variants, alas, are rare. (As one of my biology professors put it: "Most errors don't work.") This modification of ideas from within can even be a perfectly rational process, as, for instance, Toulmin shows. Nor does the fact (if it is true) that we can't grab hold of reality unmediated by some form of representation show that we can't use experience to weed out ideas and methods which work poorly; even that we can't use experience to change our forms of representation.

That said, I'm far from wanting to dismiss the idea totally. We do acquire many ideas from others, and it's a damn good thing too: it's what makes intellectual progress possible ("shoulders of giants" and all that). For people to share a certain concept, they must at the very least agree on when to apply it, at least roughly. But some of our concepts seem to have nothing more to recommend them than such consensus. Probably the most important such categories, at least in modern America, are those of race. (Personal anecdote: In most of the US, despite the fact that we have the same biological parents, I'm classified as white but my brother is not. Here in New Mexico, since we're neither Spanish nor Native American, we're both Anglos.) At the beginning of this century, many, perhaps most WASPs regarded the Irish, let alone the Italians, the Poles and the Jews as belonging to a different race; by the middle of the next century, I expect that "white" will have come to include people of East Asian descent, and probably changed its name. Moreover, whether a new idea, or a new variation of an old one, becomes entrenched in a population is a social process; but that's not the social construction of reality, that's the social selection of beliefs and practices, a far weaker and more reasonable notion, which can still do the good works which attract people to its impossibly strong cousin.

I also expect that the doctrine of social construction will go from strength to strength. True, at the moment it's tied up with some pretty fru-fru sorts of leftism, which limits its reach, but that's an unstable, unnatural combination. We leftists want to say that oppression is wrong, unjustified and rest on false premises. But if social construction holds, what counts as right, justified and even true is set by society, and ultimately by the powers that be within it, i.e., the very people we're struggling against. Turned around, of course, this makes a splendid argument for the status quo: dissent is, automatically, inescapably nonsensical. Wait a few decades for the people being educated in social constructivism to grow up and get with the strength, and watch this argument fill up the journals.

Recommended:
• Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge
• Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past
• Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? [Deserves a full review, which will take me a little while at least]
• Richard F. Hamilton, The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community
• Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants
• Bruce Sterling, Zeitgeist: A Novel of Metamorphosis [This is science fiction: an alternate world where reality really is socially constructed, all the way down, with hilarious side-effects.]
• Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. I: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts.
• Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions

To read:
• Kenneth Gergen, An Invitation to Social Construction
• Eric Heubeck, The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement ["The truth of an idea is not the primary reason for its acceptance"]
• John Shotter, Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric and Knowing of the Third Kind

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Literary Criticism and Theory of Criticism

There are a great many books to read; there are many place to travel to. Travellers are often much better for advice --- where to go, where to avoid, what to know and what to do to get the most out of their trip. It is my humble opinion that works of literary criticism are the travel books of the written world --- sometimes guides (and it is, for instance, a rash traveller who visits Wallace Stevens without one), sometimes reportage, travelogues, impressions. This is, or can be, a worthwhile enterprise, but it does not sound like one which needs or would benefit from a vast and obscure body of theory, nor one whose successful practioners are likely to be able theorists.

What, then, accounts for the current deluge of theory of criticism, as opposed to criticism proper (and as opposed to critical theory, a different beast altogether)? I have no idea, but I feel licensed by the subject matter to speculate as to the causes.

1. Disaffection. Mencken observed seventy or eighty years ago: "Every now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily endeavors falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Christendom turn to a somewhat sour and depressing consideration of the nature and objects of their own craft." This however merely backs things up one stage: why should critics feel that criticism is not enough, and practice it? Failing to practise criticism, why don't they give up and become actual novelists, poets, etc.? (Frank Lentricchia has finally taken this honorable course.)
2. Vicious cycle. Suppose that, for whatever reason, theory of criticism came to be prized more highly than criticism itself. Then it would be to the benefit of fledgling literary scholars to turn to theory, and to continue to place a high value upon it. (This last is important, since the study of literature, at least in the West, is close to self-governing.) Selection can take it from there, though that is not a guarantee that the result will be sustainable. Obvious query: why should theory be more valued than criticism? Second obvious query: what are the coefficients of selection?
3. Professional deformation. During this century, and especially since the Second World War, criticism, and literary culture generally, have migrated into academia in the most striking way. The qualities needed by a good critic --- "intelligence, toleration, wide information, genuine hospitality to ideas," to keep with Mencken --- are hard to inculcate in a lecture or seminar, and make very poor dissertation material. But theory of criticism, however appalling (perhaps especially if appalling) can be lectured on and debated endlessly and published. (And cited. Criticism of, say, Milton, is unlikely to be cited by anyone but other Milton scholars; but theory of criticism can be cited by other theorists and by critics.) Because they no longer need appeal to any public other than themselves, the usual concentration of mutants and anomalies found in small, in-bred populations may be expected.
4. Physics Envy. Modesty forbids me to elaborate on this.
5. Spirit of the Age. It has sometimes been claimed that "we" are now much more self-conscious and reflexive than our predecessors. This would seem to fit with critics preferring to theorize about criticism to criticizing, but the exact relationship is obscure. Would the general increase in self-consciousness explain the shift to theory, or would the shift be part of what is meant by the general increase in self-consciousness?

But at this point a doubt arises. Has higher-order writing grown faster than direct, first-order literature or its immediate, second-order criticism? I know of no statistics on this, so I made some very crude ones of my own, by counting the number of titles in the UW-Madison on-line catalog assigned to various Library of Congress call numbers. Books in the category PN, which are about literature in general, grew at 4.1 +- 0.2 percent between January 1950 and April 1998; the PS, PR and PZ categories, which roughly comprise literature in English (with some translations in PZ, and criticism in PS and PR) at only 2.9 +- 0.1 percent. By way of comparison, the QC category, which is (almost all of) physics grew at 4.8 +- 0.4, and the combination of PG, PQ and PT (literature in modern European languages other than English) at 3.9 +- 0.2. (The numbers are from a least-squares fit to a simple exponential curve, so the error bars should be taken with grains of salt.) The growth of non-English literature is probably mostly a change in our acquisition policy, but the difference between English literature and writing about literature is clearly statistically significant. Going from the number of books to the number of writers and so to something like relative fitnesses for different sorts of literary writers would, however, be pretty difficult. (Thanks to Jason Hsu for pointing out an unfortunate ambiguity of wording.)

At some point I should use this space to record some thoughts about what a natural history of literature would look like, and how it would differ from hitherto-existing literary criticism; but really I should be working now, and you can probably figure out what I'd say from my contribution to the Valve's symposium on Moretti. At the same time, because I seem to have been unclear about this, I should emphasize that I don't think that sort of natural history is the only sort of literary scholarship, much less the only sort of literary criticism, worth pursuing.

See also Analogy and Metaphor; Books and Their History; Cognitive Science; Cultural Criticism; Epics and Oral Poetry; Fantasy; Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis; Intellectual Standards and Competence; Intellectuals; Linguistics; Modernity and All That; Mysteries; Myths; Narratives; Novels; Poetry, Poets; Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, etc.; the Romanticists; Rhetoric; Science Fiction; Semiotics; Structuralism; Universal signs, images and symbols

Recommended:
• Aristotle, Poetics
• Marissa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response [Experimental cognitive psychology applied to analyzing questions of narrative theory and response to literature. This is brilliant; why doesn't everyone know about it?]
• Brophy, Levey and Osborne, Fifty Works of English (and American) Literature We Could Do Without [Amusing, even if you don't agree with all their choices.]
• Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form
• A. S. Byatt, Passions of the Mind
• Steven Cassedy, Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory [Online. --- It's not relevant to his argument, but, contrary to what he says on p. 137, the integers are not a group under multiplication (merely a monoid). Otherwise I can't detect any errors of fact.]
• Frederick Crews
  • The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy ["The New Americanists" and "Whose American Renaissance?" are on-line]
  • The Pooh Perplex
  • Postmodern Pooh
  • Skeptical Engagements
  • Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method
• John M. Ellis, The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis [An extremely appealing account by somebody who actually knows something about logic, methodology, etc., and cares about literature. In particular, he's convinced me that literature consists of those texts which people use in a certain way, and while some properties of those texts make them more or less well-suited to that role, it's the usage that's defining, not the properties. I'm less completely convinced he's correctly characterized that usage, and much of the rest of his argument rests on that. But he actually argues rigorously from his definitions!]
• E. D. Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation [An essay collection from 1976, picked up because I like his books on education and it was on sale for $2. There's a lot of sensible and valuable stuff in here, which is shockingly still relevant. (His sociological predictions about what it would take to displace New Criticism, for instance, were dead on.) But his neo-neo-Kantian arguments about how, if objects of cognition are to be "shared", we must be able to assume the same mental set, seem to me to be vulnerable on two grounds. (I am thinking about Chapters 3 and 6 particularly here.) First, as every Perl hacker knows, when it comes to information processing There's More Than One Way To Do It, with different antecedents, consequences and side-effects. Second, why should we think that any mental objects are shared, in that very strong and frankly rather mysterious sense? Wouldn't it be enough, to account for our empirical social life, if we just have highly similar mental objects, which would in any event accord better with what we know about learning? (See, e.g., Turner's Social Theory of Practices and Sperber's Explaining Culture.) That said, I think his arguments could be reformulated in less Kantian ways, to much the same effect. --- I don't know how his focus on reconstructing the author's meaning accomodates multi-author documents.]
• John Holbo, "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Theory for Life" [PDF]
• Frank Lentriccha, "Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic", Lingua Franca, Sept.--Oct. 1996 [Now reprinted in the Lingua Franca anthology, Quick Studies]
• John Leonard [Literary editor for The Nation. Reading his essays makes me sick with envy and despair, but I can't help myself, because they're so ridiculously well-done.]
  • This Pen for Hire [Reviews from when he worked for the New York Times, which either cramped his style a bit or before he really found it]
  • The Last Innocent White Man in America and Other Writings [The mature style begins here, it seems]
  • Smoke and Mirrors: Violence, Television and Other American Cultures
  • When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip-Hop
  • Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures
• John Livingston Lewes, The Road to Xanadu
• Carol Lloyd, I Was Michel Foucault's Love Slave
• H. L. Mencken, "Criticism of Criticism of Criticism"
• Franco Moretti [Struggling towards a naturalistic, evolutionary theory of literature --- a "materialist sociology of literary forms," as he says. I think his efforts in this direction are entirely laudable, but, at least in the books below, he's still too much given to type-thinking (as opposed to population thinking), to psychoanalysis, and to teleology. --- Graphs, Maps, Trees, published 2005, collects three recent articles from New Left Review, and largely corrects these deviations from proper materialist thinking, though he is, in places, excessively tactful towards those who still are in the thrall of error.]
  • Atlas of the European Novel, 1800--1900 [Review: One Effort More, Litterateurs, if You Would Be Empiricists!]
  • Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History [Discussed at great length in my weblog.]
  • Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez
  • Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays on the Sociology of Literary Forms
  • "The Slaughterhouse of Literature", Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 207--227
• Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading [Pound is frustrating, because he has some interesting and insightful things to say, mixed from page to page --- even from sentence to sentence --- with rubbish. Fortunately, here the rubbish (about, e.g., the nature of Chinese characters) is entertaining, and his fascism is not on display in this book.]
• I. A. Richards
  • Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment
  • Principles of Literary Criticism
  • Science and Poetry
• Alan Richardson, Literature, Cognition and the Brain --- includes a very useful annotated bibliography
• Levin L. Schücking, The Sociology of Literary Taste [The specific examples are both German and dated; but with a little search-and-replace it becomes universal.]
• Herbert Simon, "Literary Criticism: A Cognitive Approach," Stanford Humanities Review, 1994 [My discussion, with links]
• René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism [Paper collection. The attempts at periodization are especially interesting, though ultimately they leave me unpersuaded that one can identify dominant clusters of ideas in the way Wellek proposes. Similarly, the attack on "evolutionism" only convinces me of the awful lack of understanding of evolution among Wellek's literary-theoretical predecessors.]
• René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature [Sensible and acute, but they give a hopelessly circular definition of the function and value of literature.]

To read:
• M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition.
• Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
• Bakhtin
• Mark Bauerlein, Literary Criticism: An Autopsy [Recommended, without comment, by John Holbo. I've only read the introduction so far, and it inspires very mixed feelings --- I alternate, sometimes within a single sentence, between "right on!", "this needs saying?" and "that's just wrong". Also, I cannot determine if Bauerlein gets his underlying epistemology from Althusser, or a certain strand of American pragmatism...]
• Michael Bérubé [Has a nice blog, and some very agreeable essays, so I feel like reading his actual work.]
  • The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies
  • Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics
  • What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?
• Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction
• A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories
• David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Antisemitism, and the Ideology of Culture [I had a copy of this very interesting book, but it was destroyed by the post office.]
• John Carey, What Good are the Arts? [Sounds interesting, to judge by this Review by David Lodge]
• Antoine Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense [Blurb]
• John Constable
• Peter Dear (ed.), The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies
• Mark Edmundson, Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defense of Poetry
• John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities
• Raplh Ellison, Shadow and Act
• Empson
  • Seven Types of Ambiguity
  • Some Versions of Pastoral
• Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode
• Donald Freeman, Cognitive Metaphor and Literary Theory: Towards the New Philology
• Girard, Fiction and Diction
• John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation
• Giles Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture
• Stephen Halliwell, Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems
• Geoffrey G. Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society
• E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation
• Jerry R. Hobbs, Literature and Cognition [Fulltext as a free PDF. Large, because it's scanned images, rather than electronically-set text. But very cool!]
• Patrick Colm Hogan, Empire and Poetic Voice: Cognitive and Cultural Studies of Literary Tradition and Colonialism
• Norman N. Holland, The Brain of Robert Frost: A Cognitive Approach to Literature
• Irving Howe
  • A Critic's Notebook
  • Politics and the Novel
  • Selected Writings, 1950--1990
• Stanley Edgar Hyman
  • The Armed Vision
  • The Tangled Bank
• Charles Kaplan, The Overwrought Urn: A Potpourri of Parodies of Critics Who Triumphantly Present the Real Meaning of Authors from Jane Austen to J. D. Salinger
• Klaus Krippendorff, "Measuring the Reliability of Qualitative Text Analysis Data", Quality and Quantity 38 (2004): 787--800 [Abstract: "This paper reports a new tool for assessing the reliability of text interpretations.... It responds to a combination of two challenges, the problem of assessing the reliability of multiple interpretations ... and the problem of identifying units of analysis within a continuum of text and similar representations... A computational example is included in the Appendix." Obviously, this is working at a much lower level of interpretation than is common in literary criticism, but getting reliable results here is both non-trivial, as readers of Richards's Practical Criticism should know, and crucial to getting sensible higher-level interpretations.]
• Paisley Livingston, Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science
• Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning
• Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction [Blurb]
• Franco Moretti [NLR = New Left Review]
  • "Conjectures on World Literature", NLR 1 (2000): 54--68 [online]
  • "More Conjectures", NLR 20 (2003): 73--81 [online]
  • "Markets of the Mind", NLR 5 (2003): 111--115
  • "MoMA 2000: The Capitulation", NLR 4 (2000): 98--102
  • "New York Times Obituaries", NLR 2 (2000): 104--108
  • "Planet Hollywood", NLR 9 (2001): 90--101
  • The Way of the World
• Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel [Multi-volume survey: five volumes in the Italian original, but we're only getting a two-volume selection in English translation. Blurb and samples for volume 1; for volume 2]
• William Paulson, Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities
• John Press, The Chequer'd Shade: Reflections on Obscurity in Poetry
• Kenneth Quinn, How Literature Works [modest, ain't he?]
• Phil Roberts, How Poetry Works [ditto]
• William Elford Rogers, Interpreting Interpretation: Textual Hermeneutics as an Ascetic Discipline
• Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination
• Horst Ruthorf, Pandora and Occam: On the Limits of Language and Literature
• Edward Said, Orientalism
• Gordon E. Slethaug, Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction
• George Steiner [James Wood's marvellous polemic against Steiner, "Toppling the Monument" (Prospect, no. 14, December 1996) is sadly no longer available on-line. But it's dead on.]
  • No Passion Spent
  • Errata: An Examined Life
• Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics
• Peter Stockwell
  • Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction
  • The Poetics of Science Fiction
• Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation
• Peter Swirski, Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations of Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge
• Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists
• Mark Turner
  • The Literary Mind
  • Reading Minds
• René Wellek, Discriminations
• Edmund Wilson
  • Classics and Commercials
  • A Piece of My Mind
  • The American Earthquake: A Chronicle of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Dawn of the New Deal
• Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics
• Virginia Woolf
  • The Common Reader
  • The Second Common Reader

[this article is taken from http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/lit-crit.html]

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