Modern North American Criticism and Theory

modern north american criticism and theory A CRITICAL GUIDE Edited by

JULIAN WOLFREYS

Modern North American Criticism and Theory

Also available:

Modern British and Irish Criticism and Theory Modern European Criticism and Theory

Modern North American Criticism and Theory A Critical Guide ÐÐÐÐÐ

Edited by Julian Wolfreys

Edinburgh University Press

#

The Contributors, 2006

The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Modern Criticism and Theory in 2002 First published as part of

Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in Ehrhardt by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-10 0 7486 2451 1 (paperback) ISBN-13 978 0 7486 2451 5

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents Preface

1.

Charles Sanders Peirce and Semiotics

vii

1

Kenneth Womack 2.

The New Criticism

4

Charles Altieri 3.

The Chicago School

12

William Baker 4.

Northrop Frye

19

Imre Salusinszky 5.

The Encounter with Structuralism and the Invention of Poststructuralism

26

Mark Currie 6.

Reception Theory and Reader-Response: Norman Holland, Stanley Fish and David Bleich

33

Jeremy Lane 7.

The Yale Critics? J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Paul de Man

40

Ortwin de Graef 8.

Deconstruction in America

49

William Flesch 9.

Fredric Jameson and Marxist Literary and Cultural Criticism

55

Carolyn Lesjak 10.

Edward W. Said

63

John Kucich 11.

American Feminisms: Images of Women and Gynocriticism

70

Ruth Robbins 12.

Feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s: The Encounter with Poststructuralism and Gender Studies

79

Megan Becker-Leckrone 13.

Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism

87

Megan Becker-Leckrone 14.

Feminists of Colour

Anne Donadey

96

contents

vi 15. Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicism

103

Virginia Mason Vaughan 16. Lesbian and Gay Studies/Queer Theory

110

David Van Leer 17. Postcolonial Studies

118

Malini Johar Schueller 18. Cultural Studies and Multiculturalism

126

Marcel Cornis-Pope 19. African-American Studies

135

Yun Hsing Wu 20. Chicano/a Literature

143

 de la Luz Montes Amelia Maria 21. Film Studies

150

Toby Miller 22. Feminist Film Studies and Film Theory

159

Julian Wolfreys 23. Ethical Criticism

167

Kenneth Womack 24. Postmodernism

176

Marcel Cornis-Pope 25. The Role of Journals in Theoretical Debate

186

Kate Flint 26. Whiteness Studies

193

Betsy Nies 27. Masculinity and Cultural Studies

199

David Alderson 28. Comics Studies

207

Christopher Eklund 29. Anglophone Canadian Literary Studies

214

Fiona Tolan 30. Francophone Canadian Literature

224

Elodie Rousselot Contributors

229

Index

230

Preface Modern North American Criticism and Theory

presents the reader with a comprehensive and

critical introduction to the development and institutionalization of literary and cultural studies throughout the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first in North American

universities.

Focusing

on

the

growth

and

expansion

of

critical

trends

and

methodologies, with particular essays addressing key figures in their historical and cultural contexts,

the

present

continuous quest

volume

offers

for and affirmation

a

narrative

of

change,

transformation

of multiple cultural voices

and

the

and identities. It is a

narrative on the one hand that traces the movements, schools of thought and institutional allegiances that have emerged, while, on the other hand, it considers the ways in which the close reading and formal analysis of works of literature have given way to more politicized and theorized accounts. From semiotics and the New Criticism to the identity politics of Whiteness

Studies,

the

cultural

study

of

masculinity

assumptions of cultural value by Comics Studies,

Theory

and

the

challenge

presented

to

Modern North American Criticism and

provides an overview of literary and cultural study in North America as a history of

questioning, debate and exploration. While emphasizing the practice and theory of literary and cultural criticism in many of its historically specific guises, the present volume also provides extensive critical coverage of related cultural issues in the articles, and the contextual discourses that inform those issues. Clearly the focus is on the institutional practice of criticism and, with that, an implicit narrative develops concerning acts of institutionalization. Another way to understand this is that there takes place repeatedly instances of accommodation, domestication and, in some cases, normalization of currents of thought imported or translated from other disciplines, other fields of thought, and, in the case of so-called high theory from the late 1960s to the 1980s, other cultures of critical thinking. This is inevitable in any process of institutionalization. It is a matter of what Jacques Derrida has referred to as auto-immunization. Any institution ± but it has to be said the university is particularly good at this, and thus exemplifies the means by which institutionalization maintains itself ± takes in and makes over just enough of some

other

in order to

keep it going. In that act of self-interested maintenance there is also an act of hospitality. Such reciprocity is an inescapable feature of any accommodation. One welcomes the other into one's home, across the threshold, boundary or border as a gesture of hospitality and welcome. But intrinsic to this welcome, inextricably tied up with any such act, is a desire to render the foreign, the other, that which is different, less other, less strange or threatening perhaps. Hospitality assumes both tolerance and neutralization, and it seeks to maintain a

preface

viii

degree of mastery through taking in just enough of the other into its system, immunizing itself if you will, in order to allow it to carry on with business as usual. Again, the university is wonderfully effective in such processes, and nowhere has this appeared to be more the case than in institutions of higher education in North America. Such incorporations are not without consequences, without the rise of contest

and

conflict; and also, not inconsequent to the encounters between a more or less idealized notion of community such as the `university' are the misreadings and misperceptions, the avoidances, the non-reception and even occasionally the hostilities that provide some of the more visible punctuations within the history of criticism and theory. (Hostility, after all, shares its roots, at least etymologically, with volume

chart

and

reflect

on

the

hospitality

accommodations

and

.) The articles in the present

resistances,

the

tolerances

and

intolerances. In this, each article concerns itself not only with the formalist contours and epistemological parameters of a particular discourse or movement, it also acknowledges the cultural, historical and ideological specificities of the emergence and transformation of criticism. Together and individually, the essays offer to the reader a view of the extent to which philosophy, poetics, politics, aesthetics, linguistics and psychoanalysis are part of the densely imbricated textures of critical practice. Furthermore, while remaining aware of the importance of the various contexts within and out of which criticism has grown, the essays herein

also

concern

themselves

with

the

equally

important

issue

of

cross-fertilization

between the various academic and intellectual cultures under consideration.

American Criticism and Theory

Modern North

thus provides the reader with a comprehension of the key

issues with the intention of demonstrating that those issues and the fields into which they are woven are marked by, even as they themselves re-mark, an unending and vital process of hybridization ± of methodologies, disciplines, discourses and interests. In this, taken together the essays comprising the present volume interrogate implicitly the very condition of the practice and theory of criticism itself. In presenting the various facets of critical activity across one century approximately, there have been omissions, doubtless. This is true of the shaping of any narrative. Even so, it

is

hoped

that

the

overall

contours

of

critical

practice

in

North

America

are

not

misrepresented, and that, concomitantly, the dominant hegemonies of thought in their particular historical and cultural moments are neither distorted nor in some other manner misrepresented. It has to be said that if there is no such thing as a pure discourse, selfsufficient and closed off from influences, confluences and even contaminations, there is also no such thing as a finite context or group of contexts. One obviously cannot speak of either purely national or universal determinations; equally one cannot ascribe to critical thinking a finite or unchanging condition. The very definition of literary criticism and its institutional manifestations is as an identity always in crisis, and always accommodated as such in its mutability. Intellectual cultures, like literary genres, have moments of historical ascendance, ideological transformation and hegemonic dominance. Appearing to lose that dominance, going `out of fashion' as is sometimes perceived in the more journalistic of interpretations, traces, influences, remain, continuing to be transformed, and so to effect the cultures of criticism in which the reader is presently situated. It is with such issues, such processes

and

cultures

Criticism and Theory

of

transformation

and

is purposely involved.

translation

that

Modern North American Julian Wolfreys

1. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839±1914) and Semiotics

Coined

by

American

philosopher

Charles

Sanders

Peirce,

the

concept

of

semiotics

involved, at least initially, the examination of various signs and signifiers in relation to one another. Peirce's linguistic theories underscored the significance of social and cultural interaction as fundamental aspects of language. Peirce's discoveries regarding the three classes of signs and the notion of pluralism, moreover, continue to impact the direction of contemporary linguistics and literary criticism. As a foundational philosopher and exponent of pragmatism, Peirce would seem, at least on the scholarly surface, to be an unlikely proponent of semiotics and its remarkable impact upon twentieth-century linguistics. Nevertheless, he shared in the establishment of several basic principles of modern linguistics. In 1906, Peirce identified the nature and study of signs as a kind of semiosis. Peirce recognized that the emergence of semiotics as a science in its own right required a more dynamic understanding of signification as a linguistic process. As John Deely observes, Peirce realized that `semiotics could not be merely a response to the question of the being proper to signs ontologically considered'. Rather, `response must also be made to the further question of the becoming this peculiar type of being enables and sustains itself by. Symbols do not just exist', Deely adds, `[t]hey also grow' (1990, 23). Understanding the social organicism inherent in signs and symbols, Peirce approached semiotics as a distinctive activity in itself and referred to the relationship between such linguistic components as the product of `brute force' and `dynamical interaction'. Peirce defined the actions and relationships of signs in terms of their objectivity, while intuitively comprehending

the

subjectivity

that

they

take

on

when

considered

in

regard

to

the

present, to the social and cultural forces that exist in the here and now. Simply put, given historical and cultural moments imbue signs and symbols with variant degrees of meaning dependent purely upon the function of time and place. Having established the interactional and temporal properties of signs, Peirce demonstrated the nature of their action via the concepts of mediation and triadicity. First, signs are invariably mediated by external forces ± history, culture, time ± and these mediating entities concept,

characterize the

process

the of

ways

in

triadicity,

which finds

we its

interpret

origins

in

signs the

and

dyadic

symbols.

The

relationship

second

between

the sign itself and the signified, which refers to the idea that constitutes the sign's meaning. Peirce furthered this notion in terms of a more complex, triadic relationship between the sign and the signified, as well as between the sign and the interpretant, which Peirce

modern north american criticism and theory

2

described as `all that is explicit in the sign itself apart from its context and circumstances of utterance' (cit. Deely 1990, 26). For Peirce, signs become actualized when they represent something other than themselves. Signs exist as mere objects when standing on their own. In other words, signs always depend upon something other than themselves to establish their uniqueness. In Peirce's philosophy, then, signs are inevitably subordinate to their qualities of representation. As Deely notes, `the key to understanding what is proper to the sign is the notion of relativity, relation, or relative being. Without this content, the sign ceases to be a sign, whatever else it may happen to be' (35). Essentially, signs can only be recognized in a relational context with something other than themselves; hence, signs take on their unique characteristics of being when interpreted in terms of their historical or cultural antecedents. The Peircean philosophy of triadicity provided the basis for his postulation of the three classes of signs, which Peirce identified in terms of the relationship between the sign and the signified. The first class of signs, the icon, operates by virtue of its shared features and similarities with that which it signifies. In his work, Peirce referred to the icon rather opaquely

as

a

`possibility

involving

a

possibility,

and

represented as a possibility' (cit. Merrell 1997, 53). In Floyd

Merrell

describes

icons

in

regard

to

their

thus

the

possibility

of

its

Peirce, Signs, and Meaning

inherent

self-referentiality

as

being

(1997),

`signs

of

themselves and themselves only' (54). The notion of the index, Peirce's second class of signs, denotes a kind of sign that enjoys a natural relationship with the cause and effect of what it signifies. As Merrell explains, `Indices, by nature binary in character, ordinarily relate to some

other'

(54). The third class of signs, the symbol or `sign proper', refers to the

unnatural relationship between the sign and its signifier. These symbols ultimately function as the words that constitute the nature of a given language. Peirce described the concept of the symbol as `a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant'

(cit.

Lidov

1999,

93).

David

Lidov

usefully

recognizes

the

dependent

relationship that exists between Peirce's three classes of signs. While the notion of the symbol has since come to refer to a broader range of textual and linguistic referents in literary studies, Peirce's classification schema continues to impact on the ways in which we understand the interrelationships ± indeed, the dependency that exists ± between language and the objective reality of a given historical or cultural moment (1999, 93±4). Peirce's contributions to semiotics also include his expansive philosophies of pragmatism and pluralism, schools of intellectual thought that continue to impact on the course and direction of scholarship in the humanities. Peirce introduced his ground-breaking philosophy

of

pragmatism

during

a

1903

lecture

at

Harvard

University.

His

concept

of

pragmatism finds its roots, moreover, in our collective understanding of the larger ethical and communal matrix of human behaviour. More than a simple practical approach to life and human discourse, Peirce's pragmatism involves a recognition of the highest form of good, which he describes as the ways in which communities search for forms of higher truth. Peirce ascribes a given person's capacity for accomplishing a higher sense of goodness to their ability to achieve what he refers to as self-control. `In its higher stages', Peirce writes, `evolution takes place more and more largely through self-control, and this gives the pragmatist

a

sort

of

justification

for

making

the

rational

purport

to

be

general'

(cit.

Corrington 1993, 53). By entering into the development and community of the world, then, the pragmatist in Peirce's formulation evolves toward ideal states of being that imbue life

with

more

rational

and

objective

senses

of

reality.

In

a

1905

essay

on

`Issues

of

Pragmaticism', Peirce attributes his philosophy of pragmatism to a kind of critical common-

charles sanders peirce and semiotics

3

sensism, which, in the words of Robert S. Corrington, `applies evolutionary thinking to the unconscious and foundational propositions of our moral and scientific life' (1993, 54). Honouring the strictures of critical common-sensism affords pragmatists with the capacity for enjoying greater possibilities for self-control and rationalism. The seemingly logical intellectual result of his notion of a pragmatic philosophy, Peirce's concept of pluralism finds its origins in the multifarious ways in which we perceive the worlds in which we live. In Peirce's philosophical purview, our sensory perceptions of the world

are

contingent

upon

the

interdependence

between

our

experiences

±

however

divergent they may be ± of reality and the facticity inherent in the perceived worlds of our human others. `The real world is the world of sensible experiences', Peirce writes, and `the sensory world is but a fragment of the ideal world' (cit. Rosenthal 1994, 3). The notion of possibility ± in fact, the very same concept of possibility inherent in the vague spaces of reality

that

exist

between

our

real

worlds

and

our

sensory

worlds

±

operates

as

the

foundation for Peirce's philosophy of pluralism. Sandra B. Rosenthal ascribes the philosopher's ultimate vision of plurality to a comprehension of the power inherent in our creative selves:

Human creativity can be understood as a uniquely specialized, highly intensified instance of the free creative activity characteristic of the universe within which it functions, and the conditions of possibility of human freedom in general, as self-directedness rooted in rationality, are to be found in the conditions that constitute the universe at large and within which rationality emerges. (Rosenthal 1994, 126)

Clearly, Peirce's ideas of possibility and pluralism ± rooted, as they are, in notions of freedom and rationality ± offer a fertile intellectual background for the analysis of signs, symbols

and

signifiers,

open-ended

concepts

that

are

invariably

contingent

upon

the

infinitely more powerful social forces of a given historical and cultural moment.

Kenneth Womack

Further reading and works cited Chomsky, N.

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA, 1965.

Colapietro, V.

Peirce's Approach to the Self. Albany, NY, 1989.

Corrington, R. S.

Deely, J. Eco, U.

An Introduction to C. S. Peirce. Lanham, MA, 1993.

The Pursuit of Signs. Ithaca, NY, 1981.

Culler, J.

Basics of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN, 1990.

A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN, 1976.

Hawkes, T. Holland, N. Jameson, F. Lidov, D.

Structuralism and Semiotics. London, 1977. The Critical I. New York, 1992. The Prison-House of Language. Princeton, NJ, 1972.

Elements of Semiotics. New York, 1999.

Malmberg, B. Merrell, F.

Structural Linguistics and Human Communication . Berlin, 1967.

Peirce, Signs, and Meaning. Toronto, 1997.

Rosenthal, S. B.

Charles Peirce's Pragmatic Pluralism. Albany, NY, 1994.

2. The New Criticism

Recent literary theory has had very little good to say about the New Criticism. As Gerald Graff puts it, `With remarkable speed, the fortunes of the New Criticism in the university had gone from rags to riches to routine' in two decades (Graff 1987, 227). Here I will argue that there is much to learn from both transitions. The New Criticism struck it rich in America because the founding efforts of a few critics ± especially John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks ± came to represent two important possibilities for literary education and hence drew many people into loose associations with most of their principles. These critics spoke for many who came to believe it was time to focus on what held individual texts together as distinctive experiences rather than on what bound them to contexts they shared with other aspects of their culture. And they

promised

that

such

experiences

would

foster

powers

encouraging

revolutionary

changes in educational practices. The prevailing emphasis on historical and philological scholarship

could

be

replaced

by

more

direct

efforts

to

address

the

`dissociation

of

sensibility' that T. S. Eliot had diagnosed as the fundamental torment for contemporary culture. But the emerging consensus was made routine because the stress on cultivating powers soon

gave

way

to

a

transmittable

method

in

which

close

readings

instruments for producing original interpretations explicating the `

were

organic unity

treated

as

' that gave

the texts their unique identities. Cognitive claims then typically got reduced to thematic analyses, with the statement of ideas replacing the initial ideal of treating the texts as unique experiences that modified sensibilities rather than addressed ideological frameworks. And, as critics like Frank Lentricchia, Terry Eagleton and John Fekete would later point out, it had also come to seem the case that the basic ideas generating this revolution were in fact very difficult to reconcile. The best way to preserve ideals stressing the organic unity of individual texts is to deal with them as discrete specific contexts whose internal densities continually ironize all efforts at generalization. But this route to individuation seemed to depend on bracketing concerns for intentionality and historical contexts that would in fact prove necessary for any adequate account of how texts confer or contribute to the development of cognitive powers. Many of the major New Critical essays were written in the 1930s as part of a ferment in critical culture that linked these critics loosely with others like Kenneth Burke and Yvor Winters and William Empson who were trying to develop general interpretive stances attuned

to

modernist

practices.

But

the

movement

movement with the publication in 1941 of Ransom's

only

took

on

public

The New Criticism

identity

as

a

, with chapters on

Eliot, Winters, Richards and `ontological criticism'. Concentrating on poetry, these early writings defined powers attributable to close reading individual texts by developing sharp

the new criticism

5

contrasts with what were then the two perspectives dominating literary study in America. Because American PhD programmes had been founded in the 1880s on German ideals, the prevailing model for literary study was a positivist historicism concerned with elaborating biographical contexts, tracing the `evolution' of forms, and establishing the sources and influences for major texts. For the New Critics such work seemed to treat those texts as excuses

for

studying

contexts

established

by

the

historian,

not

by

the

project

of

the

individual work. The New Critics found some sustenance in neohumanist critiques of that historicism along fundamentally Arnoldian lines. Thinkers like Norman Foerster and Paul Elmer More tried to replace historical frameworks by discourses insisting on the intellectual and moral significance of individual texts. But because these critics treated these texts as offering beliefs that could enter into dialogue with the great philosophers, they seemed no less eager than the historians to sacrifice text to context. The New Critics' primary task then was to develop a vocabulary and methodology that could foreground what seemed the distinctive concrete experience produced by the words of the text so as to reduce the need for either historical or philosophical contexts. In hindsight it is easy to say that they went too far ± clearly, reading is a dialogical relation among what Rene Wellek called `intrinsic and extrinsic' aspects of a text's presence in the world. But such rapprochement is difficult in practice when one's opponents are no more balanced than oneself and seem a lot more dangerous. More important, rapprochement requires a shared sense of practice. But the New Critics came to power largely because they would not accept the fundamentally academic nature of the discourses carried out by their opponents. Early New Criticism was suffused with the passions of modernist writing. It saw criticism not primarily as scholarship but as an instrument for taking on the cultural project of resisting the `

dissociation of sensibility

' diagnosed by T. S. Eliot as the basic disease facing

modernity. And it therefore concentrated on ways of reading that might actually make a difference in how audiences engaged the blend of market thinking, positivist empiricism and

enervated

romanticism

that

seemed

to

carry

public

authority

in

their

respective

domains. American New Critical responses to these cultural forces were mostly reactionary. Their roots were Southern agrarian and their sense of manners Mandarin. But resisting modernity was

a

task

that

bred

strange

alliances.

We

have

to

imagine

those

Southern

values

interacting with a new academic clientele undreamt of in historicist and neohumanist philosophies. Only a few years after Ransom's book, the GI Bill sent millions of Americans to universities and colleges, usually as the first members of their families to enter higher education. And that rush to education soon filtered down into the children of parents who had suffered in the name of freedom and wanted to begin reaping some of its benefits. These new populations had quite practical goals for their educations. But they were curious about the culture that had seemed worth fighting for, and a new age of opportunity made it appealing to imagine remaking psyches through the arts. These new students would not sit long for dry scholarship or pious moralizing, and they could not be expected to bring to their classes the historical education or the trainings in discrimination given to those from families with generations of university attendance. But they were a perfect audience for writers committed to plain prose and practical attention to texts. Guided by New Critical principles popularized in the anthology

Understanding Poetry

(1938), students did not have

to bring much learning to literature (and did not have to feel guilty or disqualified by their ignorance of historical contexts). They could work out concrete terms for what brought texts

alive

for

them,

and

they

could

imagine

themselves

participating

in

the

work

of

modern north american criticism and theory

6

cultural reformation largely by recognizing how their reading promised to make their lives quite different from those led by their parents. They could idealize culture as a release from the levelling forces fundamental to modernity without having to idealize the South and its institutions. After all, these American Southerners themselves learned a good deal from the English psychologist

I.

A.

Richards,

whose

presence

seems

to

me

fundamental

to

the

field

of

possibilities and struggles that was to constitute New Critical theorizing during the years when it was consolidating power. Richards's experiments

over

several

years

with

Practical Criticism

undergraduates

(1929) recorded a series of

reading

for

an

honours

degree

in

English at Cambridge. Given poems for which the author was not identified, these gifted and privileged students nonetheless proved themselves simply awful readers. They were trained to provide historical backgrounds for identified texts, but they had very weak abilities to interpret and to evaluate work not situated historically for them. Analysing this data led Richards to postulate ten aspects of reading for which teachers and critics had to provide

`educational

models

more

efficient

than

those

we

use

now

in

developing

discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read' (1929, 3). Criticism then was not recondite scholarship but the struggle to provide society improved means of making and communicating intricate judgements. Richards's

Principles of Literary Criticism

(1924) presented his most influential effort to

restructure the education enabling such judgements. All the ladders start with a fundamental

distinction

eliminating

between

psychology

and

science

and

developing

poetry.

methods

Science for

seeks

generating

true

propositions

unequivocal,

by

testable

statements. Poetry, on the other hand, is not concerned with picturing the world. Its utterances are `pseudo-statements' making possible specific

attitudes

affecting how we take up

stances towards the world. Where science seeks unequivocal clarity enabling firm decisions between

what

is

to

be

believed

and

what

rejected,

poetry

provides

textual

relations

modelling how psyches can compose their energies and form attitudes articulating complex balances for the psyche: `In describing the poet we laid stress upon. . . the width of the field of stimulation which he can accept, and the completeness of the response that he can make.

Compared

with

him

the

ordinary

man

suppresses

nine-tenths

of

his

impulses,

because he is incapable of managing them without confusion' (1924, 243). Art puts inner impulses into `equilibrium' and hence `brings into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences of more defined emotion' (1924, 251). Close reading is our means of attuning ourselves to such equilibrium, and hence it is fundamental to psychic health. And tragedy's blend of pity, fear and awe offers poetry's richest contribution

to composing

permanent modifications in readerly sensibilities preparing them to adapt more fully to the world. The

New

Critics

deeply

admired

three

basic

features

of Richards's

arguments

±

his

emphasis on criticism as oriented towards cultural literacy rather than towards scholarship, his finding cultural roles for modernist emphases on complexity, and his locating that complexity primarily in how texts are read as semantic structures rather than in how they are contextualised. But they were made uneasy by his secular liberal rationalism and his faith in psychological paradigms. So they developed theoretical alternatives for each of his key

principles,

and

in

the

process

they

set

intellectual

currents

running

that

would

transform a potentially radical psychology into routine academic exercises. First and most important, the New Critics could not accept Richards's treating science and poetry as just two distinctive practices, each with its own roles to play in society. The

the new criticism

7

New Critics had to demonize science because it was the source of dissociated sensibility and the basic instrument for industrial capitalism. Science gave public authority to an inflexible empiricism that could deal with bodies but not with souls, with pleasures but not with the intricate

purposiveness of meanings constructed by the imagination. More

drastic yet,

science gave currency to myths of progress in every domain, so that people were tempted to overlook all that is tragic and unexplainable and probably unchangeable in their lives. Where the populace had once managed to accept their fates, now they would feel entitled to resentment and society would be rife with conflict. Second, treating the textual density of poetry as if it were mere pseudo-statement simply did not provide a sufficient counterweight to science or to the romantic psychologizing that gave personal resonance to myths of progress and individuality. Poetry had to do more than establish possible attitudes toward the world that were valuable because of the complex states of mind produced. States of mind are useless or dangerous unless they are anchored in actual truths. Only the disciplines associated with pursuing truths beyond the self could free the western psyche from the self-absorption imposed upon it by the nineteenth century. So theory had to show how literature provided cognitive access to some kind of distinctive truth to which science did not have access (a task which required privileging poetry over the novel's embeddedness in social issues). The third dissatisfaction followed naturally. Richards' concern was primarily with how psyches processed different kinds of meanings. But an effective poetics would stress texts, not psyches, since only attention to the text itself

could

discursive

establish

knowledge

objective rivalling

evidence what

for

science

the

claims

could

that

provide.

poetry

provided

Stressing

texts

a

non-

required

minimizing context, and that could best be done by showing how most contextual work depended on what W. K. Wimsatt called the `intentional fallacy'. There seemed only two choices ± either one proposed contexts that limited what the words could be seen as performing or one trusted the complex patterning implicit in the verbal texture as the ultimate arbiter of what texts meant. Each major New Critic offered a distinctive slant on these topics. Here, I will try to indicate their major differences by concentrating on three different ways they went about approaching Richards

the

question

stressed

the

of

overall

poetry's

access

balancing

of

to

truths

affective

unavailable

investments,

to

science.

Ransom

Where

locates

the

balancing in real miraculous integrations of the physical and the metaphorical, Tate turns to what can be known by our experience of the text as itself a real event, and Brooks takes organicism to its logical extreme in a vision of poetry as complex dramatic irony. From there, only routinization can follow because all texts end up sustaining pretty much the same kind of experience. Ransom's model of poetry is based largely on what he came to call a miraculous fusion of local

texture

and

logical

structure.

At

one

pole

we

find

movements

like

imagism

demonstrating the power of a fundamentally physical poetry to make us recognize the sharp edges, the givenness and the density of the material world (1955, 873). But even physical poetry (especially physical poetry) requires rhythm, which is profoundly bodily yet also depends on systemic structures that cannot be made physically visible but appeal to the self-reflexive mind. So poetry is constantly tempted also by a second possibility responding to these transformative mental energies. Ransom calls this orientation that of `Platonic poetry'. We must feel the energy of an allegorical pull organizing the elements into some kind of overall meaningfulness. But at the same time Ransom constantly reminds us of the danger within this Platonic impulse because it is happiest when it can march images like

modern north american criticism and theory

8

`little lambs to the slaughter' (1955, 874). Because this Platonic impulse is so strong within us, we need poetry to provide concrete trials for its ideas (1955, 875), and even to establish a density of experience that does not so much disprove the idea as make it `look ineffective and therefore foolish' (1955, 876). Ultimately Ransom denigrates ideas in order to celebrate experiences that can build on reason's

energies

encounters

the

but

thwart

fundamental

its

self-confidence.

religious

awareness

Then of

even

how

spirit

in

secular

can

live

contexts

one

incarnationally

in cooperation with the sensuous world rather than as its master. Poetry is cognition in resistance to reason. So where `science gratifies a rational or practical impulse and exhibits the minimum of perception, Art gratifies a perceptual impulse and exhibits the minimum of reason' (1955, 877). `Miraculism' is our recognition of how this minimum of reason turns out

to

be

a

maximum

of

spirit,

as

we

see

most

fully

in

poetry

that

is

fundamentally

metaphysical (that is physical and Platonic). This poetry manifests metaphoric powers capable of making what had seemed mere analogy proceed `to an identification which is complete' (1955, 880). As a mundane example consider how fully true lovers can make real the figure of exchanging hearts. And as a sublime example think of how Milton's

Lost

comes

to

represent

for

us

the

entire

process

of

the

Fall

and

the

Paradise

possibilities

of

redemption that it created. For Ransom poetry takes on the burden of two centuries of seeking substitutes for religion through art, and it almost succeeds in at least keeping alive the possibility that notions like grace and miracle need not be dismissed because of the demise of organized religion. Allen

Tate

shared

Ransom's

sense

that

the

spirit

of

religion

had

somehow

to

be

preserved in the face of science. But he wanted to base the claims for poetry on something much more defensible in secular terms than talk of miraculism. So he took on the leading semioticians of his day in order to develop a notion of meaning which did not reduce poetry either to non-sense or to the rhetorical manipulation of feelings (1968, 91). Ransom made a

mistake

construct,

locating not

a

the

`reality'

perception

or

of

poetry

in

proposition.

the If

image

poetry

is

because

the

to

a

offer

image

remains

distinctive

kind

a of

knowledge, one must be able to characterize it as a distinctive kind of experience in the real world, and one must do that in terms that reach beyond Richards' purely psychological register. Poetry must be the experience of something for which truth claims can be made. Tate faces these challenges by shifting from what poetry says to what poetry does. Its claim for

truth

depends

on

the

fact

that

the

poem

is

not

merely

about

the

world

but

in

a

significant sense `an object that exists' in its own right (1968, 194). By attending to the work as real object we can show how it provides `complex wholes which are never in a rigid state of adjustment' so that the experience rendered invites `infinitely prolonged attention'. And it is this fascinated prolonging of attention which constitutes the major difference between science and poetry. Where `the half-statement of science arrests our attention at those features of the whole that may be put at the service of the will', poetry presents an object that may be `known' as a `qualitative whole' and hence grasped in terms of the intricacy of the internal relations emerging as aspects of the experience that we cannot control but nonetheless find compelling (1968, 194). Now Tate can provide a theoretical foundation for modernist critiques of views that art is fundamentally a mode of communication, and hence he can show clearly why notions of intention and context based on communication models are inappropriate. Were poetry to seek communication it would have to stress either the extensional or the intentional aspect of

its

assertions.

Either

it

relies

on

specific

claims

to

depict

actual

particulars

or

it

the new criticism

9

concentrates on mobilizing the range of connotations by which expressions indicate how someone feels. In the one case we have images without cogent purposiveness; in the other we have all too evident purposes without what Ransom called trial by experience (1941, 56±63). But if the poem exists in its own right, then rather than communicating it focuses our infinitely prolonged attention on the conditions by which communications are shaped and

modified.

Rather

than

The

audience

stressing

is

witness

intension

or

to

the

extension,

problematic `the

aspects

meaning

of

of

communication.

poetry'

consists

in

`its

``tension'', the full organized body of all the intension and extension that we can find in it' (1941, 64). Poetry offers cognition because it organizes experiences of the complex energies running through human actions and interactions. This mode of cognition in turn cannot be judged and tested in scientific terms but depends on the collective body of reflections on experience previous

that

constitutes

exposure

to

cultural

poetry's

traditions

truths

±

the

(1941,

63).

fundamental

Poetry's circular

truths

depend

argument

that

on the

humanities cannot escape. I think it was grappling with this circularity that led to the making routine of New Criticism, along with all those sociological factors set in motion by success within an institution. For critics had to address two contradictory demands: they had to show how works of literature stressed an internal density or organic unity that made them different from typical communicative acts, and they had to show that they could explain the value of this difference by providing some model of cognition that would display the use value of these texts in terms that science could not replicate but had to envy. The distinction of art as experience from art as statement provided a promising beginning. But how could one make distinctive truth claims about experience without reintroducing the very models from science that had to be resisted? One option was to say that the truths involved were manifest only in the audience's enhanced powers for experience. This path, however, led to undemocratic, Nietzschean visions of agency (or radical theological visions of authenticity) incompatible with New Critical Christian humanism, and it undermined struggles against the authority of science in the universities and in politics. If the arts produce little Nietzsches we need science to tell us how to regulate them. So criticism turned instead to simply finding wisdom within the experiences it was characterizing. `Infinitely prolonged attention' gave way to thematic `readings' explicating ideas and values which held the unity together (when in fact organic unity must be pervasive, with each element playing its irreducible part). Yet these readings still had to stress the specialness of art, even on the thematic level, so they tended to treat texts as `about' the power of art or the mystery of metaphor and of love. Thematics suspicious of science and of philosophy has very few ways to avoid becoming routine. Cleanth Brooks's criticism directly confronted the dilemma of reconciling organic unity claims with cognition claims, but in highly persuasive ways that intensified the pressures on routinization. Where Tate stressed the role of tension at the core of poetic experience Brooks idealized the presentation of paradox resulting from foregrounding that tension. Poetry's terms are `continually modifying each other and thus violating their dictionary meanings' (Brooks 1947, 9). Consequently, assertions in poetry are always confronted with their opposites, and metaphors continually tilt planes and overlap edges so as to bring contradictory possibilities into play. One could praise the paradox as an end in itself, and hence an analogue to Ransom's miraculism. But Brooks took an overtly more secular tack. Rather than stop with the paradoxical meanings, Brooks insisted that we situate these contradictions in dramatic terms. Then poetry has the immense power of making us aware

modern north american criticism and theory

10

at every step of the contradictions fundamental to our desires and our practices. Richards' inclusiveness has cognitive force as dramatic irony. Then, probably to dignify that irony and restore a kind of fideism, Brooks adds the unwarranted but powerful insistence that this sense

of

irony

summarizing affirmation.

is

his

inseparable

from

reading

Randall

of

`the

unity

of

Jarrell's

the

experience

`Eighth

Air

itself'.

Force':

`In

Here this

is

Brooks

poem

the

. . seems to me to supply every qualification that is required. The sense of

self-guilt, the yearning to believe in man's justness.

. . all render accurately and drama-

tically the total situation' (Brooks 1950, 1048). Irony is poetry's truth, and its organic unity is the privileged means by which this completeness of experience gets embodied. Brooks was the most influential of the New Critics on academic practice, probably because he offered very full readings of texts and managed to make theory seem practical rather than philosophical. But his success came with a substantial price. There were many possibilities of `intrinsic criticism' not pursued, especially those offered by Kenneth Burke that stressed authorial action and so were open to a variety of possible projects and ways of organizing materials. More important, the possibilities that were pursued ran the risk of making all readings demonstrate that they have captured the wholeness of the text by revealing how intricately self-cancelling it is. Wholeness could only have cognitive force if it was based on drama ± otherwise it was only an aesthetic abstraction. But all one can know

through

drama

is

the

imposing

of

positionality

on

referentiality.

Poetry

staged

personae whose situation dictated what they could assert or even experience. Burdened

by

such

constraints,

the

New

Criticism

had

lost

most

of

its

intellectual

authority by 1960, although vague idealizations of close reading as a cognitive instrument governed most literary practice for at least the next decade. However, this lost intellectual authority served almost as a contrastive springboard against which two new movements could promote themselves. The perspective that would become deconstruction saw itself the eager heir of `the process of negative totalisation that American criticism discovered when it penetrated more or less unwittingly into the temporal labyrinth of interpretation' (de Man 1971, 35). Where the New Critics tried to domesticate irony by treating it as a form of knowledge subordinate to supple aesthetic and ethical judgements, the spirit of deconstruction required making whatever was positive a direct complement of this absolute negativity.

One

could

not

talk

of

`cognition'

without

convicting

oneself

of

terminal

naivety. There were no miracles connecting the allegorical to the existential; there was only the tracing or remaking of unjustifiable desires exposed in all their hopeless neediness. Yet as de Man's arrogant prose makes visible, one could find deep pleasure and even full psychological release in the process of continually undermining truth claims in the name of fascination or `tragic gaiety'. The ethical correlate of art's dense internal patterning was an absolute writerliness committed to treating the real world by analogies with the process of fingering the folds of the text. There is in all this positioning one irony that de Man apparently did not grasp. At his most arrogant he seems only to repeat one of the most problematic aspects of New Critical theory: `Considerations of the actual and historical existence of writers are a waste of time from a critical viewpoint' (1971, 35). Perhaps only this insouciant dismissal of history could sustain a belief that there is only

a critical viewpoint. In any case de Man entirely failed to

see that what irony erases as a metaphysical negation, history promises to restore as a field of possible

cognitive

attachments.

For

history

needs

no

absolutes

and

promises

not

to

overcome irony but only to contextualize it in its limitations. So it should be no surprise that the most powerful heir to the New Criticism turned out to be a variety of historicisms,

the new criticism

11

each promising its own versions of Brooks's dramatic view of situations but without the uncomfortable baggage of having to find a place for `organic unity' or, indeed, for any terms stressing the existential significance of the internal relations writers establish. It is crucial that we understand how the New Criticism unwittingly set the stage for the success of these historicisms and prepared conditions where a new routinization would soon take hold. It was the New Critics who popularized the demand that literary study pursue cognitive ambitions enabling it to rival the sciences for social and institutional authority. Their particular versions of the cognitive proved impossible to sustain ± in part for their quasi-mystical talk about miraculism or just about `experience', and in part because they could not find a way of making generalizations that was sufficiently responsive to the strong individuality basic to claims about organic unity. But they made literary study very difficult to justify for audiences who had learned to idealize that practice unless the discipline promised some kind of cognitive reward. As the authority of New Criticism waned it became increasingly easy to weaken or bracket the concern for aesthetic unity. That in turn cleared the way to exploring cognitive claims much more closely linked to the kinds of claims made by other disciplines. One could take the particularity of texts as especially dense moments where conjunctions of historical forces become visible. One might even keep principles of close reading but turn them against the aesthetic in order to show how texts worked to conceal ideological interests or to invent ways of grappling with actual historical contradictions. Soon historicist arguments like Terry Eagleton's would analyse the New Critics' evasions of history as itself a historical symptom: these critics were trapped in an aesthetic ideology committed to bourgeois ideals of autonomy, self-sufficiency and independence from demands that might arise from collective interests. Now the first of these successors to the New Criticism is already in ruins, the second has become routine. Perhaps we have arrived at a time when critics will once again take on the social burden of resisting academicism and exploring the powers that can be developed by focusing on how works of art organize experience and create values. They may well find much in New Criticism that can help them, provided that they learn from its history the costs of ignoring history and of seeking too avidly to attach what geniuses make to what critics can know.

Charles Altieri

Further reading and works cited  , P. Bove

Intellectuals in Power.

Brooks, C. Ð.

New York, 1986.

Modern Poetry and the Tradition.

The Well Wrought Urn.

Chapel Hill, NC, 1939.

New York, 1947.

Ð. `Irony as a Principle of Structure', in

Literary Opinion in America,

ed. M. D. Zabel. New York,

1951. Ð with Warren, R. Penn.

Understanding Poetry.

New York, 1938.

Crane, R. S. `History vs Criticism in the University Study of Literature'. October 1935. de Man, P.

Blindness and Insight.

Eagleton, T.

Literary Theory.

Fekete, J.

The Critical Twilight.

Graff, G.

Professing Literature.

Jancovich, M.

New York, 1971.

Oxford, 1983. London, 1978.

Chicago, 1987.

The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism.

Cambridge, 1993.

The English Journal,

24,

modern north american criticism and theory

12

Janssen, M.

The Kenyon Review 1939±1970. Baton Rouge, LA, 1990.

Krieger, M.

The New Apologists for Poetry. Minneapolis, MN, 1956.

Lentricchia, F.

After the New Criticism. London, 1983.

Ransom, J. Crowe.

God Without Thunder.

Ð.

The World's Body. New York, 1938.

Ð.

The New Criticism. Norfolk, 1941.

Ð.

Poems and Essays. New York, 1955.

Richards, I. A. Ð.

Principles of Literary Criticism. London, 1924.

Practical Criticism. London, 1929.

Spurlin, W. J. and Fischer, M. (eds)

The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory . New York,

1995. Tate, A.

Essays of Four Decades. New York, 1968.

Twelve Southerners. Warren, R. Penn.

I'll Take my Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Baton Rouge, LA, 1980.

Selected Essays. New York, 1958.

Wellek, R. and Warren, A. Winchell, M. R.

Theory of Literature. New York, 1949.

Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism. Charlottesville, NC, 1996.

Wimsatt, W. K. and Brooks, C. Wimsatt, W. K.

Literary Criticism. New York, 1957.

The Verbal Icon. New York, 1958.

3. The Chicago School

The Chicago School flourished from the later 1930s into the 1950s. It centred on Ronald Salmon Crane (1886±1967), who taught at Chicago from 1924 to 1951. In 1925, he was made professor, and, ten years later, chair of the English department, holding this position until 1947. Although Crane's early output was largely devoted to the post-Restoration period, this work was not ostensibly concerned with the application of Aristotelian ideas to English literary thought, so important to the shaping of the Chicago School. He was also responsible for a bibliography of journalism from 1620 to 1800, published under the title

A

Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals 1620±1800 (1927), and the annual survey of current scholarship in eighteenth-century studies for the edited

from

1930

to

1952.

Crane's

work

was

infused

Philological Quarterly, which he with

neoclassical

ideas

and,

subsequently, with the awareness of the role that Aristotle had played in the formation of such ideas. Using Aristotle's

Rhetoric and Poetics as their theoretical base texts, the Chicago School

believed, along with T. S. Eliot, that criticism should study `poetry as poetry and not another thing'. They viewed with suspicion what they regarded as New Criticism's practice of

rejecting

historical

analysis,

its

penchant

for

presenting

subjective

judgements

as

objective analysis and its emphasis on poetry rather than other genres such as fiction. Crane and others examined other genres, drawing for their `techniques on a ``pluralistic and instrumentalist'' (Crane,

in

basis,

Preminger

from 1974,

whatever 22).

In

method

seemed

appropriate

to a

particular

case'

Critics and Criticism edited by Crane (1952), for

example, there are many illustrations of this critical phenomenon including Crane's own essay, `The Concept of Plot and the Plot of

Tom Jones', a reading of Fielding's novel.

the chicago school

13

Becoming chair of Chicago's English department, Crane was instrumental in hiring, over the next decade or so, critics such as Elder Olson, Norman MacLean and W. R. Keast, who were also sympathetic to the application of Aristotelian ideas to the study of literature, and whose work, in retrospect, has become recognized as the Chicago School. A student of Crane's, Wayne C. Booth (1921±), inherited his mantle at Chicago, teaching there from 1962 until well into the 1990s. Booth's

The Rhetoric of Fiction

(1961) was influential in the

formation of the study of narratology and its emphasis upon the analysis of how language is used. A major legacy of Booth's work has been narratological analysis of prose carried out by, among others, James Phelan, editor of the journal

Narrative

, whose work is in the same

general, neo-Aristotelian tradition as that of Wayne Booth and Sheldon Sacks. Many of the publications identified with what is regarded as the Chicago School were produced during the 1930s as part of a ferment created by the radical reorganization of undergraduate

education

at

the

University

of

Chicago.

Robert

Maynard

Hutchins

re-

structured the undergraduate programme. He emphasized the value of interdisciplinary studies and stressed the importance of reading and understanding primary texts. These activities were epitomized by Mortimer Adler's `Great Books of the Western Tradition' and by philosopher Richard P. McKeon in a course, `Organizations, Methods and Principles'. The influence of Hutchins, Adler and McKeon directed Crane's focus away from stressing the primary importance of historical criticism to concentrating on a humane liberal arts education for English Department graduates. In `History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature', Crane advocated an approach for the

teaching

origins,

but

of

undergraduate

with

a

literature,

preference

for

an

not

primarily

approach

aesthetics. Crane's style has been described by Gerald Graff in and

scholastic that it became a

target

of parody'

through

combining

literature's

textual

Professing Literature

(1927,

236±7).

historical

explication

and

as `so elephantine

However, central

Crane's ideas and crucial for the Chicago School was the notion of `

pluralism

to

', which

derives from the work of McKeon, particularly his adherence to the idea of philosophical pluralism. Writing the 1965 entry on the Chicago Critics for Alex Preminger's

Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics pluralism ``

Princeton

, Crane notes that `the most explicit statements of . . .

'' are contained in McKeon's ``The Philosophic Bases of Art and Criticism'',

Olson's ``An Outline of Poetic Theory'' ' and his own

Structure of Poetry

The Languages of Criticism and the

. Underlying `pluralism' is a relativist approach that advocates many

different forms of literary criticism, each of which has its own interpretive powers and limitations.

The

Chicago

School,

in

other

words,

did

not

advocate

one

method,

but

several, to be adopted pragmatically as dictated by the needs of the given text and situation. For Crane, `the only rational ground for adhering to one of them rather than to any of the others is its superior capacity to give us the special kind of understanding and evaluation of literature we want to get, at least for the time being' (Crane, in Preminger 1974, 117). Elder Olson observes in his memoir, `R. S. Crane' (1984), that `all of us were influenced by McKeon', who `provided the philosophical foundations for much of our work', although McKeon `never published anything that could be taken as a formulation of the poetics of the Chicago School' (Olson 1976, 236). McKeon also argues that philosophical systems in history `were generated by their prior choice of organizations, methods, principles and modes of thought'. In

The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry

, Crane argues

that criticism is unlike other areas of inquiry, such as biochemistry for instance, which has an agreed set of methodological and factual assumptions. Criticism is rather `a collection of

modern north american criticism and theory

14

distinct and more or less incommensurable ``frameworks'' or ``languages'' '. These critical vocabularies differ radically in `matters of assumed principle, definition and method'. For Crane, `we ought to have at our command, collectively at least, as many different critical methods as there are distinguishable major aspects in the construction, appreciation, and use of literary

works' (1953,

acceptance

different

of

192). Inasmuch as

critical

methods,

their

the Chicago Critics shared

approach

may

be

seen

to

the

be

broad

primarily

methodological in nature, rather than ideological, as Paul de Man has correctly asserted (1986, 54). In other words, they concentrated their efforts on the methods of reading literary texts, not on pre-existing political or aesthetic criteria for evaluating such texts. If McKeon provided a methodological basis for the work of the Chicago School, Crane's personality and vision of literary criticism can be seen to be of equal importance. Crane greatly influenced his students and gathered around him colleagues who developed similar ideas to his own. Olson (1909±1998), for example, gives an account of his initial encounter with Crane, `one afternoon in 1933', for the start of a new course, `a survey of English literature from 1660 to 1800'. Crane was, Olson writes, `a man of immense erudition'. He was `someone who strained [Olson's] capacities. More than that, he made me realize that I had capacities I had not guessed'. They shared the same concerns: `criticism should be made into and recognized as an academic discipline'; `literary history was not really history'; `the theory of both literary history and history in general must be more closely looked into'; `that the present condition of critical theory was deplorable'. They also shared a `distrust of . . .

Geistesgeschichte,

the ``spirit of the

age'' ' and `nonsensical classifications as ``Classical'' or ``Romantic'' ' (Olson 1976, 232, 234±5). As Gerald Graff has succinctly expressed it, underlying the scepticism towards the history of ideas and historicism was `the feeling that the power of literature was somehow compromised if it were felt to be rooted in history' (1987, 192). Writing in what may be taken as the manifesto of the Chicago school of criticism ±

Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern

(1952) ± Olson makes the now well-known

remark that `criticism in our time is a sort of Tower of Babel'. He adds:

Moreover, it is not merely a linguistic but also a methodological Babel; yet in the very pursuit of this analogy, it is well to remember that at Babel men did not begin to talk nonsense; they merely began to talk what

seemed

like nonsense to their fellows. A statement is not false merely

because it is unintelligible; though it will have to be made intelligible before we can say whether it is true. (Olson, in Crane 1952, 546)

To make something intelligible needs, according to Crane, `a general critique of literary criticism . . . such as might yield objective criteria for interpreting the diversities and opposition among critics and for judging the comparative methods of rival critical schools' (546)

David

pluralistic

Richter

position.

indicates

For

that

Richter,

there

`there

are

are

inconsistencies

always

going

to

in be

Crane's

and

reductive

Olson's

theoretical

positions we are going to wish to exclude (e.g. `poetry judged by its suitability for landfill'); secondly, `there was an ineluctable rhetorical conflict between Crane's position as the chief advocate for the Neo-Aristotelian mode of interpretation, and his meta-critical position as a pluralist' (Olson, in Crane 1952, 92). Crucial to the Chicago School, already stated, is the idea of `neo-Aristotelianism' and the Chicago group's `special interest in the

Poetics',

as Richter suggests. The reasons for this,

as Crane explains in his account of the Chicago School, are `pragmatic'. The critics were literature

teachers

concerned

with

the

practical

criticism

of

literary

texts

and

the

specifically artistic principles that characterize their construction. These aspects of literary

the chicago school

15

works are `distinct from their verbal meanings, their historical and biographical backgrounds, or their general qualities'. But why Aristotle? Crane writes that the

appeal of Aristotle to the Chicago group lay in the fact that he, more than any other critic they knew, had conceived of literary theory in this

a posteriori and differential way and had not only

formulated some of its necessary distinctions and principles in his brief discussions of ancient tragedy and epic but pointed the way to further inquiries of the same general sort concerning possibilities in these and other literary arts still unrealized at the time he wrote.

Crane adds that the Chicago group has `attempted to pursue some of these, and with increasing independence of the letter of the

Poetics,

in their writings on the lyric, the

drama, and the novel' (1971, 117). Particularly important to the Chicago critics are the Aristotelian concepts of ` form and

genre'.

Literary forms include `species of works, inductively known, and differentiated, more

or less sharply, in terms of their artistic elements and principles of construction' (Crane 1967, 2: 59). Important to the idea of `form' is the concept of `synolon', or the `concrete whole', that is `matter shaped by form, and shaped so as to be coherent, comprehensible, and meaningful in itself. Meaning comes from the inferred sense of the whole, not from the parts' (Richter 1982, 92). Genre is a heuristic concept, conceptual rather than prescriptive; that is, genre is not supposed to be understood as a series of categorical rules, but as a basis which is open to adaptation. Olson writes in

On Value Judgments:

`The words must be

explained in terms of something else, not the poem in terms of the words; and further, a principle must be a principle of something other than itself; hence the words cannot be a principle of their own arrangements' (1976, 13). This `focus on genre and method does not preclude an interest in historical analysis'. Genre studies by Olson on comedy and tragedy, Crane on the eighteenth century and MacLean writing on the lyric `are developed around hypotheses of historical change' (Gorman 1994, 145). The prominent members of the Chicago School include, apart from Crane and Olson, Dryden

scholar

William

R.

Keast,

Norman

MacLean,

Richard

McKeon

and

Bernard

Weinberg. On the whole, their focus was on poetics. The texts on which they concentrated often came from the eighteenth century, so it is hardly surprising that the University of Chicago produced during the period of Crane's ascendancy many distinguished eighteenthcentury scholars. Among these are the editors Donald F. Bond, Arthur Friedman and Shirley Strum Kenny. It also produced scholars such as Gwin J. Kolb, Louis A. Landa, Edward W. Rosenheim and Paul Alkon, as well as historians of ideas such as Philip Harth, James Malek and Howard Weinbrot. The general trend of the second generation, however, has tended to be on rhetoric rather than poetics (Gorman 1994, 145). The

formative

voice

of

the

second

generation

has

been

Wayne

C.

Booth.

Booth

obtained both his graduate degrees at the University of Chicago where he taught from 1947 to 1950. In 1962 he rejoined the English Faculty at Chicago. In a telephone interview with Mary

Frances

Hopkins

(3

December

1981),

Booth

defined

his

relationship

with

the

Chicago critics. Hopkins asked him: `Could you comment on what the Chicago critics are doing now?' Booth replied `that the school is not at this point a school, even if it ever was one, partly because of a series of tragic deaths'. Booth explains, `The second generation after Crane and Olson and McKeon, and others who originally met together, there was a kind of second generation school here consisting of Robert Marsh, Sheldon Sacks, [Arthur] Heiserman and me; all three died in their forties' (Hopkins 1982, 58).

modern north american criticism and theory

16

Booth also told Hopkins, `I'm the only one left' in Chicago `who is even thought of as closely connected with the Chicago critics, and of course I'm always whoring after false gods, like rhetoric, from the point of view of the originators. That's the first point, that there

is

no

Aristotelian

Chicago critics'.

School

Booth

at

also

Chicago suggests

in

that

that

there

narrow was

sense

neither

a

of

a

group

`common

of

Neo-

mold'

nor

a unification of focus on subject matters: `We're different people going different ways', he remarks

(Hopkins

1982,

59).

What

such

a

statement

omits

of

course

is

the

shared

methodological interests, the focus on form, on the eighteenth-century, on ` pluralism', on Aristotle's

Poetics,

which runs as a thread throughout the eclectic writings of the differing

generations of the Chicago School. Also, as the direct heir of Crane and the Chicago thinkers, Booth's own preoccupation in the

role

of

readers

has

in

its

turn

The Rhetoric of Fiction

been

subsumed

into

with communication and

other

reader-oriented

theories,

conducted for instance by Norman Holland and Bernard J. Paris among others. But, and this is perhaps more to the point, Booth adds that `there is a Chicago ethos that I think may be as powerful as ever; the place is permeated with a commitment to reflection about methods ± to going twice as deep as anybody else into the assumptions of a text' (Hopkins 1982, 58). This

methodological

rigour

is

exemplified

by

Booth's

complex and prolific. His most influential work remains

own

output,

which

The Rhetoric of Fiction

is

both

(1961),

revised in an augmented edition of 1983. His concern with the ways in which directly and indirectly authors address readers has its roots in Aristotle's

Poetics.

Booth's study is

divided into three parts: `Artistic Purity and the Rhetoric of Fiction', `The Author's Voice in Fiction' and an investigation of `Impersonal Narration'. In the Afterword to the second edition, Booth meditates on the changes that two decades have brought on his own thinking and on writing about narrative theory since the first publication of

The Rhetoric of Fiction .

The

second

edition

also

contains

an

additional

bibliography

compiled by James Phelan of 4,000 writings on narrative theory since the first edition of 1961. Booth is forced to clarify and modify the central arguments of his rhetorical analysis in  rard Genette, Mikhail Bakhtin and others, acknowledging their the light of the work of Ge influence. For Booth, the relationship between morality and rhetoric, and our implied moral

judgements

during

the

act

of

reading,

are

much

more

complex

than

he

first

envisioned. He also refines his ideas of the complex relationships between different kinds of authors, different kinds of readers and different kinds of narrators. Booth's subsequent major work,

A Rhetoric of Irony,

owes more to Longinus than it does to Aristotle. Already in

the 1983 revision of the classic

The Rhetoric of Fiction

may be seen the subsuming of the

ideas of the Chicago critics. Other than Booth, of the second generation of critics, Sheldon Sacks' 1964 study

and the Shape of Belief

Fiction

is a good illustration of the application of the ideas of the Chicago

School applied to fiction and specifically Henry Fielding. Sacks differentiates between the `comic', the tragic' and the `serious' in Fielding's writing (1964, 20±4). He argues that Fielding's intention was `to recommend goodness and innocence'. Fielding the novelist incorporated this into the structure of, for instance,

Tom Jones,

not as a distinct `theme' or

`vision' but `through its embodiment in the structure of beliefs by which we are led to evaluate

characters

and

actions'

(Richter

1982,

37).

Elsewhere,

the

influence

of

the

Chicago critics is still indirectly refracted through the discourse on narratology conducted by critics such as James Phelan. The Chicago-based journal

Critical Inquiry

also retains the

the chicago school Chicago

concern

with

17

the

examination

of

the

formal

organization

of

structure

and

language. Looked at from a historical perspective, the Chicago critics may be viewed on one level as reflecting a local situation at the University of Chicago. In formulating their theoretical ideas based upon classical principles, Crane and others were reacting to the internal demands of a university dean intent on creating a great school of liberal and humane

education.

Crane

and

his

colleagues

were

also

trying

to

place

the

study

of

English as a discipline on a sound footing. Indeed, John Crowe Ransom, an influential new critic, writing in 1938 in an essay appropriately entitled `Criticism, Inc.', refers to Crane as `the first of the great professors to have advocated [criticism] as a major policy for

Departments

of

English'

(1938,

330).

These

reactions

to

perceived

internal

university pressures and threats to English as a legitimate area of study[/help] tended to ignore external events such as the Great Depression and Nazism. Waves of left-wing thought tended to pass Crane and his fellow critics by, although thinkers such as Isaac Rosenfeld and Saul Bellow were Chicago-based. Others, such as George Steiner, who did

his

insular

undergraduate ideas

Department.

than In

work

those

the

late

at

Chicago,

prevalent 1930s

at

and

left the

during

for

Europe

University the

1940s

and of

were

influenced

Chicago

Chicago

and

was

its

the

by

less

English

centre

for

the `Chicago School of Social Thought'. This suggested `that we go through recurring, even ceaseless cycles of social organization, disorganization, and then social reorganization, cycles when existing patterns of social interaction and relations, social institutions and

forms

(Carey

of

1997,

colleagues

in

life,

even

28). the

forms

This

English

of

individual

emphasis

on

department

identity

society who

was

focused

are not

broken

down

stressed

instead

on

by

form,

and

dispersed'

Crane on

and

the

his

means

by which form was expressed, and on reactions to `New Criticism'. With the advent of various formalisms in the 1970s, the Chicago School's influence waned further, its approach to analysis even more marginalized. New Criticism, with its emphasis on the word and thematic analysis, could more easily adapt in response to new forms of critical discourse, especially those interested in matters of ideology. Criticism has tended to move away from the focus on the expression of language towards an emphasis on social considerations represented, for instance, by the New Historicists who have been influenced by neo-Marxist thinkers such as Raymond Williams and others. Crane and others were concerned with theory but in a rather insular fashion. Graff indicates in

Professing Literature

that Crane's postwar

writings contain `a critique of the routinization of criticism' reflected in the dominance of the New Criticism (1987, 234). Further, as Graff suggests, Crane's concern in his introduction to the revised edition of

Critics and Criticism

with the `authority of criticism' and `the problem of

the interpretability of literature' was ahead of its time. The reasons were twofold: first, `most literary theorists were still preoccupied with the problem of its truth'; second, `Crane was raising problems few people wanted to hear about at a time when academic literary studies had finally won their institutional autonomy'. For Graff, `Crane's work looked forward to the later growth of ``theory'' ' (Graff 1987, 236±7, 240). It is perhaps ironic, then, given their concern for methodological rigour, that the shift of focus in critical study in English departments should be away from the work of the Chicago critics to that of continental thinkers, particularly those from Paris in the late 1950s and 1960s, and represented, for instance, by the import of the thought of Jacques Derrida. In the last decades of the twentieth century, literary criticism in English departments has been profoundly influenced by criticism and philosophy which has emerged from Europe, and

modern north american criticism and theory

18

the irony exists in the return to concerns with rhetoric, tone and poetics in the work of those who are grouped together under the name `poststructuralism', while it is forgotten that such were the interests of the Chicago School.

William Baker

Further reading and works cited Battersby, J. L. `Elder Olson', in

Modern American Critics since 1965 , ed. I. J. Gregory. Detroit, MI,

1988. Booth, W. C. Ð.

A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago, 1974.

The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago, 1983.

Carey, J.

James Carey A Critical Reader, eds E. Stryker Munson and C. A. Warren. Minneapolis, MN,

1997. Crane, R. S. `Imitation of Spenser and Milton in the early Eighteenth Century',

Studies in Philology,

15, April 1918. Ð.

`An

Early

Eighteenth-Century

Enthusiast

for

Primitive

Poetry',

Modern Language Notes, 37,

January 1922. Ð. `Gray's

Ð.

Elegy and Lycidas'. Modern Language Notes, 38, March 1923.

English Literature 1660±1800. Princeton, NJ, 1952.

Ð et al.

The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry. Toronto, 1953.

Ð (ed.)

Critics and Criticism. Chicago, 1952.

Ð.

The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical . Chicago, 1967.

Ð.

Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History . Chicago, 1971.

Ð. `The Chicago Critics', in

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger. Princeton,

NJ, 1974. Crane, R. S. and Kaye, F. B.

A Census of British Newspapers and periodicals, 1620±1800 , ed. M. E.

Prior. London, 1966. de Man, P.

The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis, MN, 1986.

Gorman, B. `Chicago Critics'.

The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, eds M. Groden

and M. Kreiswirth. Baltimore, MD, 1994. Graff, G.

Professing Literature. Chicago, 1987.

Gregory, I. J. (ed.)

Modern American Critics since 1965. Detroit, 1988.

Hopkins, M. F. `Interview with Wayne C. Booth'.

Literature in Performance, II, 2, April 1982.

Narrative, 1, January, 1993. Olson, E. (ed.) Olson, E.

Aristotle's Poetics and English Literature. Chicago, 1965.

On Value Judgments in the Arts and Other Essays. Chicago, 1976.

Ð. `R. S. Crane',

American Scholar, 53, Spring, 1984.

Phelan, J. `Wayne C. Booth', in

Modern American Critics since 1965 , ed. I. J. Gregory. Detroit, MI,

1988. Preminger, A. (ed.)

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ, 1974.

Ransom, J. C. `Criticism, Inc.'. in

The World's Body. New York, 1938.

Richter, D. H. `The Second Flight of the Phoenix'. Ð. `R. S. Crane', in

The Eighteenth Century, 23, 1, Winter 1982.

Modern American Critics since 1965 , ed. I. J. Gregory. Detroit, MI, 1988. April,

1918. Sachs, S.

Fiction and the Shape of Belief. Berkeley, CA, 1964.

Selden, R. et al. (eds)

A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory . Hemel Hempstead, 1997.

4. Northrop Frye (1912±1991)

No single literary critic influenced a period of twentieth-century academic criticism more than Northrop Frye who dominated the 1960s and early 1970s. In his first book,

Symmetry

Fearful

(1947), Frye had glimpsed, and demonstrated, an order and a symmetry in the

thought of William Blake that nobody had suspected before. Everything in Blake studies since has been affected by it. In his seminal

Anatomy of Criticism

(1957), Frye more or less

established the modern field of critical theory as an independent discipline (though it would eventually move in directions that disquieted him). In the 1960s and 1970s, Frye devoted himself to the practical application of his ideas and methods to the central writers of the western tradition: in particular, he made influential contributions to Shakespeare studies, and transformed our understanding of romanticism, providing a catalyst for the `Romantic revivalism' that marked the earlier careers of Yale critics like Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom. Finally, in the last decade of his life, Frye produced two monumental studies of the Bible and literature ±

The Great Code

(1982) and

Words with Power

(1990) ±

in which his special qualities of unfettered intellectual play, of bringing new shape and structure to previously chaotic subjects, and of being able to appeal to specialist and nonspecialist audiences at once, are all still evident. While Frye brought a great deal to the understanding of criticism and literature, there is almost nothing that he brought that cannot be found, implicit at least, in

Fearful Symmetry

,

and hence that cannot be traced back to Blake: indeed, the relationship between Blake and Frye provides as intense an example of identification between a poet and his foremost critic as the English-speaking tradition affords. In particular,

Fearful Symmetry

contains the seeds

of Frye's approach to four subjects ± the role of the archetype in literature, the function of imagination in art and society, the relation between the religious and artistic visions, and the existence of what he would eventually call the `literary universe' ± that would occupy him for the next four decades, in a `spiral curriculum' pattern that he described as `circling around the same issues, though trying to keep them open-ended' (1976b, 100). Several times he described the epiphany that got this movement started. Staying up all night to write an undergraduate paper on Blake's

Milton

, in the early 1930s, he began to ponder the

principle that Blake and Milton were connected by their use of the Bible. This seemed both an obvious and an unhelpful fact, since surely it was a likeness that only served to obscure what was `individual', or really interesting, about each of them:

Around about three in the morning a different kind of intuition hit me, though it took me twenty

years

to

articulate

it.

The

two

poets

were

connected

by

the

same

thing,

and

sameness leads to individual variety, just as likeness leads to monotony. I began dimly to see

that

the

principle

pulling

me

away

from

the

historical

period

was

the

principle

of

modern north american criticism and theory

20

mythological framework. The Bible had provided a frame of mythology for European poets: an immense number of critical problems began to solve themselves as soon as one realized this. (1976b, 17)

Through

the

attempt

to

explain

the

`private

mythology'

and

`private

symbolism'

that

critics had always claimed were in Blake, Frye discovered, as he later put it, `not merely that Blake's mythology was not private, but that the phrase itself made no sense' (1976b, 108). Far from being the eccentric that he was frequently portrayed as, in method at least Blake

was

an

connections

absolutely

between

traditional

his

figure

`prophecies',

who

the

epic

sought

to

tradition,

make

explicit

myth

and

the

folktale

structural ±

and

of

course the Bible, which, in a phrase that haunted Frye throughout his life, he called `the Great

Code

of

Art'.

And

Blake's

characters,

Frye

argued,

weren't

failed

attempts

at

realistic representations, but successful attempts to isolate the models, or archetypes, that provide the structure for

a

ll

representations of character (including realistic ones, which

are simply, to use Frye's term, `displaced' from the archetypal models). A fully imaginative vision, for Blake, is one that sees all the works of human genius as contributing to a vast story of loss and redemption; in social terms, this is also a revolutionary vision, one that children possess a natural correspondence with, and that is hence driven out of them so that they may become more docile social subjects. At the close of

Fearful Symmetry

, Frye

concludes that Blake's belief in an overarching human vision in which local differences of religion, myth, and doctrine are reconciled `implies that a study of comparative religion, a morphology of myths, rituals and theologies, will lead us to a single visionary conception which the mind of man is trying to express' (1947, 424). It was to this study that Frye devoted the rest of his life. Although the feeling in

Fearful Symmetry

is of a productive confrontation between two

visionary intellects ± Blake's and Frye's ± played out before the backdrop of the entire western

imaginative

tradition,

there

were

more

local

issues

bubbling

just

beneath

the

book's surface. It is, after all, a book written during war, and Frye clearly wants to rescue the idea of myth from its perverted use in the rhetoric of fascism. (He was terrified that Blake's mythic heroes could be misread as supermen.) More locally, a suspicion of Blake, and of romanticism generally, had been a spark-plug in T. S. Eliot's canonical arguments, which had in turn strongly influenced the New Critics, whose `close reading' method had, noncoincidentally perhaps, made little headway with Blake, Milton and other unpopular poets who

stressed

poetic

argument

over

texture.

All

of

this

worked

as

a

challenge

and

a

provocation for Frye, not least because, especially in the Eliot version, it was connected with a broader attack on middle-class Protestants and their values (Frye was a left-liberal, and an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada). Meanwhile the New Critical method, with its obsessive attention to language and its lack of interest in the conventions that create linkages between poems, was already coming under pressure from the Chicago School. While sharing with Crane, Olson and the other neo-Aristotelians an interest in myth, Frye felt that the rigorously inductive procedure with which they sought to oppose the

New

Critical

dissolving

of

poetry

into

a

kind

of

language

suffered

from

a

similar

weakness to the New Criticism itself: it stood so close to the individual poem, in an effort to see how the parts contributed to a successful whole, that there was little possibility of seeing larger connective patterns, of moving towards a genuinely generic criticism. All of these themes, concerns and undercurrents culminate in

Anatomy of Criticism

,

Frye's unquestionable masterpiece, in 1957. Although Frye had not heard of structuralism

northrop frye when he wrote the

21

Anatomy

, he did at one time consider `Structural Poetics' as a title for it,

and we can see now some remarkable anticipations of the structuralist project: the mythic turn; the architectonic and spatial metaphors; the love of categories and system-building; the dazzling contraries; and, of course, the brimming confidence about the `human sciences' which smacks of the late 1950s and early 1960s and which has since passed so notably from the whole field of the humanities.

Anatomy

The footing

within

may be seen as an attempt to place criticism on a sound intellectual the

university,

not

reliant

in

any

special

way

upon

the

disciplines

surrounding it, and capable of proceeding in an orderly, non-contentious and progressive manner on the model of the natural sciences. While it is obvious that in this larger aim the

book

did

not

succeed,

in

numerous

more

specific

ways

it

assuredly

did.

In

the

Polemical Introduction, for example, Frye declares famously that the demonstrable valuejudgement,

anchored

in

something

outside

the

critic's

own

preferences,

prejudices

or

social conditioning, is `the donkey's carrot of literary criticism' (1957, 20). Specific valuejudgements

he

relegates

to

the

`history

of

taste',

along

with

`all

the

literary

chit-chat

which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock-exchange' (1957, 18). If Eliot's attack on Blake, Milton and the romantics was conventional literary warfare, then Frye's attempt to wipe out evaluation altogether is the nuclear response ± and

the

literary

almost

criticism

instantaneous marks

it

as

disappearance

one

of

the

rare

from

the

examples

academic of

a

scene

definitive

of

evaluative

clincher

in

the

humanities. And

if

value-judgements

have

no

place

within

a

systematic

criticism,

Frye

argues,

neither can such a criticism be founded on some externally derived religious or ideological position ± here, once again, in his critique of the fallacy of determinism, we feel the barely sublimated animus towards Eliot's Anglo-Catholic polemics. Adapting some of the key terms in the battle between the New Criticism and the Chicago School, which he clearly wishes to transcend, Frye proposes an alternation between an inductive survey of literary experience and the deductive assumption that there is such a subject as criticism, and that it makes or could make complete sense. It is its weakness or hesitancy in the second, conceptual

domain

that

has

left

criticism

so

vulnerable

to

ideology

and

determinism:

`Criticism seems to be badly in need of a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole' (1957, 16). Of all the passages in the

Anatomy

, perhaps the most startling are those in which Frye

outlines this `central hypothesis' as the `assumption of total coherence', the belief that the actual works of literature are not haphazard but form a `literary universe' analogous to the natural universe studied by the sciences, and that, analogous to the order of nature that the natural sciences posit, there is an `order of words' waiting for critics to uncover its structures and codes: `We begin to wonder if we cannot see literature, not only as complicating itself in time, but as spread out in conceptual space from some kind of centre that criticism could locate' (1957, 16±17). The four long essays that make up the body of the

Anatomy

explore the contours of this

cardinal assumption about an order of words. The First Essay deals with the historical sequence of `modes', defined as the literary hero's changing power of action, from ancient myth to contemporary irony; the Second Essay proposes a theory of meaning based on five levels

of

symbolism;

the

Third

Essay,

the

central

one

in

the

book,

is

an

account

of

archetype and myth; and the Fourth Essay is an attempt to define the basic genres of

modern north american criticism and theory

22

literature ± drama, epic, fiction and poetry ± according to their `radical of presentation', or the way that they are intended to be consumed by the audience. The discussion that the book aroused was immediate and enormous, and it centered on the Third Essay, or Theory of Myths. Here Frye proposes four basic narrative myths ± comedy,

romance, tragedy

and irony

±

all seen

as parts

of one large

story

of fall

and

redemption. Although he draws analogies between these four basic storylines and the seasons of the year, it is not his intention to derive the stories from primitive rites such as fertility rituals. Like these, however, the basic stories told in literature are attempts by the imagination

to

discover

parallels

between

the

human

drama

and

the

natural

world,

attempts to turn a hostile environment into a home and thus part of the larger project of civilization. As he rings the changes upon the typical storylines and characters of each

mythos

, ranging across three thousand years of western literature with extraordinary brio

and confidence, Frye comes upon pieces of symmetry that even he concedes are `forbidding', such as the existence of six `phases' within each phases of each neighbouring

mythos

. The

Anatomy

mythos

, three being parallel to the

is richly loaded with examples, and one

of the things that prevents most readers from feeling that it is as an exercise in empty pigeonholing is the way that Frye's categories and connections can throw a new light on the thousands of texts that he mentions along the way. We are hardly likely to read

Wonderland

tradition of Burton's

Anatomy of Melancholy Anatomy .

What was always going to make the explicit

Alice in

in quite the same way after Frye has described it as a Menippean satire in the

and

implied,

to

the

New

Critical

controversial were its correctives, both

methodology

that

had

dominated

literary

criticism almost since its emergence as a university discipline between the wars. When the Third Essay tells us that we need to `stand back' from a poem in order to see its archetypal organization (1957, 140), every reader at the time would have sensed a critique of the relentlessly `close reading' method that defined the New Criticism. Naturally, some of the older New Critics attacked Frye's myths as having no constructive role whatever in practical criticism, since they could not be derived, whole, from any individual work of literature. To this he replied, in 1966:

The principle that a work of literature should not be related to anything outside itself is sound enough, but I cannot see how the rest of literature can be regarded as outside the work of literature, any more than the human race can be regarded as outside a human being. When I use the metaphor of standing back from a work of literature . . . I am trying to give some reality to the word `literature'. (see Krieger 1966, 3)

For

younger

critics,

the

way

that

Frye's

perspective

broke

out

of

the

New

Criticism's

claustrophobic attentiveness to the individual poem and suddenly provided lines of sight in new, unexpected directions was a liberation. No less so was the toppling of the antiromantic literary hierarchy, in particular the denigration of the romantic long poem, that younger critics, many of them inspired by After all, the

Anatomy

Fearful Symmetry

, were already bridling against.

not only had a place for all literary modes and movements: its view

of all of these as contributing to one, larger picture seemed to resonate with romanticism itself, specifically with Shelley's vision of `that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world' (Shelley 1930, VII: 124). While the New Criticism had run out of steam long before 1957, the

Anatomy

was the final blow. At Yale, which had been a centre of New Critical activity,

it was like a burst of oxygen for younger critics like Harold Bloom, who had begun to find

northrop frye

23

the Eliotic atmosphere thin and suffocating. During a personal interview in 1982, Angus Fletcher, a friend of Bloom's and a distinguished follower of Frye himself, told me about a visit to Yale in 1957: Harold Bloom came into the room waving this book, shouting at the top of his voice, `The King is dead!' And the book was the

The

Anatomy of Criticism.

Anatomy, then, made Frye famous, and brought him many followers; but he never

formed a school, and never sought disciples, which he once told me would only be to invite `the Judas reaction'. Notoriously introverted by temperament, he resisted numerous invitations to move to the United States after 1957 (though he did teach terms there) and remained for over half a century on the faculty of the University of Toronto, where he had gained his undergraduate degrees. The 1960s and 1970s were a fertile period for Frye, in which his work moved in two related directions: essays in practical criticism that applied the theories outlined in

Anatomy, and an increasing emphasis on social criticism, directed at the general public, in which he developed the connections between literature, myth and religion. What links these endeavours is that at their root they are meditations on the same theme, one of Frye's favourites: the survival of romance, particularly in the area of the popular arts, despite all of the apparent gains made against it by realism in the arts specifically and by the scientific worldview in western society generally. In

A Natural Perspective

(1965), his study of

Shakespearean romance, Frye takes up Coleridge's distinction between Iliad critics interested in tragedy, realism and irony, and Odyssey critics interested in comedy and romance: `I have always been temperamentally an Odyssean critic myself, attracted to comedy and romance. But I find myself, apparently, in a minority, in a somewhat furtive and anonymous group who have not much of a theory, implicit or explicit, to hold them together' (1965, 2). In books like

A Natural Perspective and The Secular Scripture (1976),

and in essays of practical interpretation like `Dickens and the Comedy of Humours' (see Frye 1970, 218±40), Frye does much to rectify this situation, suggesting that romance is in fact the core of all storytelling, since it is precisely what reality lacks and only imagination can provide. Even the realist tradition, which Frye sees as a conservative response to romance's anarchic, erotic spirit, can only displace, never avoid, romance patterns and motifs, such as the monster, the questing knight, the descent into an underworld and so on. A writer like Dickens, whose characters are clearly drawn as much from the theory of humours as from `life', is much better understood as a traditional romancer than as a failed realist. Comedy and romance move from frustration and the blockage of desire towards erotic fulfilment and identity, thus implying `that what is must never take final precedence over what ought to be' (Frye 1970, 240). It is the fact that, in the last several centuries, this feeling that the realistic world-picture cannot be the whole story has been expressed principally through the arts that causes Frye to call them a `secular scripture', doing much of the same work in modern societies that religion performed in traditional ones. This connection is more fully sketched in Frye's final two books on the imaginative legacy of the Bible. Because the vision of identity in comedy, particularly, is a vision of a renewed social identity, Frye's interest in `Odyssean' forms also allows him to connect his central interests with a social criticism. In books like

The Modern Century (1967) and The Critical Path

(1971), we see Frye developing a view of literature as related to a society's `myth of concern'. While the `myth of freedom' ± essentially, scientific reasoning ± has brought

modern north american criticism and theory

24

modern society many benefits, it is always in a tensely dialectical relationship with the fundamental concerns that unite all human beings in all societies: concerns for things like food, shelter, warmth and love. Literature, says Frye in with concern, but `represents the

language

The Critical Path

, is not identical

of human concern' and `displays the imaginative

possibilities of concern'. While concern can readily turn into mere tribal will, or ideology, literature contains a more liberal and liberating element, because unlike concern `it is not to be believed in: there is no ``religion of poetry'': the whole point about literature is that it has no direct connection with belief' (Frye 1971, 98, 128). In a sense all of Frye's books are following

up

Blake's

point

about

the

imagination's

freedom

from

the

constraints

of

whatever, simply, is, and the way that this freedom enables all visions of a more fully humane world (including, of course, by providing the mythic substratum for revolutionary political stories). Only criticism, however, can trace these connections, and Frye never departs from the view in

Anatomy

that `a public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows

what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory' (Frye 1957, 4). After

Anatomy

, Frye frequently uses the language of the sublime in connection with the destiny

of criticism, language that would embarrass most contemporary critics. Literature, he says in his popular 1963 Massey Lectures broadcast on Canadian radio, is `a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man', and criticism is `not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind' (Frye 1963a, 105). Of course, as critics in the 1980s and 1990s continued to express their preference for combat over cooperation, ideology over myth, Frye's hope that criticism would ever realize the destiny he had posited for it became weaker. Although the claim that Frye was an arid formalist, a dehistoricizing critic and thus a bourgeois idealist, followed him through most of his career, it is clearer now that only from one, no longer ascendant, perspective, that of historical materialism, is this even remotely plausible. Terry Eagleton, for example, claims that Frye's work `emphasizes . . . the utopian root of literature because it is marked by a deep fear of the actual social world, a distaste for history itself' (Eagleton 1983, 93); but we may wonder, in response, whether literature is more sequestered from `the actual social world' by a view that sees it as an ideology masking a deeper reality, or by a view that embraces literature's utopian dreamings and connects them with the mainsprings of social concern, action and vision. Frye subtitled his 1970 collection,

The Stubborn Structure

, `Essays on Criticism and Society', and he explained the

subtitle as follows: `as some of those who write about me are still asserting that I ignore the social reference of literary criticism, the sub-title calls the attention of those who read me to the fact that I have written about practically nothing else' (Frye 1970, x). Indeed,

Symmetry

is

as

good

an

introduction

to

the

principal

currents

of

Fearful

eighteenth-century

politics, religion, philosophy and aesthetics as one is likely to get, and the cultural context never fades out of Frye's thought; it is simply construed in the very broad terms that characterize other historicist thinkers valued by Frye, like Vico or Spengler. Frye is always aware of the way that specific social formations impose their particular, and necessarily partial, perspectives, their own story-outlines, on the world: that is precisely his subject. But he

is

also

aware

that

beneath

the

ideological

level

of

this

activity

there

is

a

deeper,

mythological level that unites rather than divides different societies and periods. Is there a better explanation of why the great artistic works of the past continue to speak to us? For criticism to limit itself to the ideological level is to hand the entire show over to the faculty that Blake called `corporeal understanding', and which he contrasted with imaginative

northrop frye

25

vision. Critical vision, in Frye, is the fully imaginative response to the creative act that, while it recognizes part of that act as mere historical datum, lifts another part of it clear into the permanent mythological dimension. As he puts it in his last book,

Words with Power:

I think of a poet, in relation to his society, as being at the centre of a cross like a plus sign. The horizontal bar forms the social and ideological conditioning that made him intelligible to his contemporaries, and in fact to himself. The vertical bar is the mythological line of descent from previous poets back to Homer. (1990, 47)

On

this

ideology,

question

Frye's

of whether

humanist

there is

optimism,

a

level

which

of shared

conceives

of

concern more the

possibility

primary of

than

productive

cultural exchange, and which makes imaginative structures like literature central to that exchange, is suddenly starting to look less time-bound than the insistence on irreducible difference that characterized much of the criticism that displaced him in the 1980s and 1990s. With a `Collected Edition' of Frye's works (which will include his fascinating diaries and notebooks) currently underway with University of Toronto Press, and international meetings on his ideas being held in places as far apart as China, Australia and Canada, there is good reason to subscribe to A. C. Hamilton's view that `Frye's hope that he may play a role in holding traditional culture together and passing it on to the next generation may well be fulfilled because the multiculturalism characteristic of his criticism will have its place in an increasingly globalized world' (see Boyd and Salvszinsky 1999, 119). Frye once said that Blake possessed an imagination so large that it was impossible to feel claustrophobic within it: countless readers and students have had a similar experience of Frye's own critical imagination. A scholar and humanist of immense erudition, a brilliantly witty writer and polemicist, and a teacher in the best sense of the word, Northrop Frye was one of the most gifted individuals to devote himself to the theory and practice of literary criticism in the twentieth century.

Imre Salusinszky

Further reading and works cited Boyd, D. and Salusinszky, I. (eds) Denham, R. D. Ð.

Northrop Frye.

Rereading Frye.

Northrop Frye and Critical Method.

Eagleton, T. Frye, N.

Literary Theory.

Toronto, 1999.

Toronto, 1987. University Park, PA, 1978.

Oxford, 1983.

Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake.

Ð.

Anatomy of Criticism.

Ð.

The Educated Imagination.

Ð.

Fables of Identity.

Ð.

T. S. Eliot.

Ð.

A Natural Perspective.

Ð.

The Modern Century.

Ð.

The Stubborn Structure.

Ð.

The Critical Path.

Bloomington, IN, 1963a.

New York, 1963b.

Edinburgh, 1963c.

Ð.

The Secular Scripture. Spiritus Mundi.

Ð.

The Great Code.

Ð.

Words with Power.

Hamilton, A. C.

New York, 1965. Toronto, 1967. Ithaca, NY, 1970.

Bloomington, IN, 1971.

Ð.

Princeton, NJ, 1947.

Princeton, NJ, 1957.

Cambridge, 1976a.

Bloomington, IN, 1976b New York, 1982. New York, 1990.

Northrop Frye.

Toronto, 1990.

modern north american criticism and theory

26

Krieger, M.

Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism The Legacy of Northrop Frye The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley

. New York, 1996.

Lee, A. and Denham, R. D. (eds) Shelley, P. B.

. Toronto, 1994.

, eds R. Ingpen and W. E. Peck. London,

1930.

5. The Encounter with Structuralism and the Invention of Poststructuralism

There is a common perception that poststructuralism arrived in the United States as an import in October 1966, when Derrida read his paper, `Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', at Johns Hopkins University. Bearing in mind that the term

poststructuralism

was not used in Europe until much later, it is important to stress that

poststructuralism was not a ready-made object which could be imported, but something that had to be fashioned in the United States, something which emerged, in the 1970s, from a complex set of circumstances in North American criticism, and which was, in particular, deeply bound up with the context of reception of Derrida's work. Poststructuralism

was

not

so

much

imported

as

invented

in

the

United

States,

by

a

process

of

decontextualizing and then recontextualizing Derrida. To understand this process it will be necessary to sketch the debates into which Derrida's work intervened, the kind of impact that

this

intervention

entailed,

and

the

reception

history

of

Derrida

and

other

post-

structuralist thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s. Commentators North

American

often

claim

criticism

that

there

before

was

1960.

a

Paul

kind de

of

methodological

Man

is

one

who,

consensus

describing

in

the

relationship between American and European criticism, represents the New Criticism as

a

formalism

completely

isolated

from

`a

European

sense

of

history'.

It

is

to

be

regretted, according to de Man, that the New Criticism `was never able to overcome the anti-historical within

its

bias

original

that

presided

boundaries

over

and

its

was

beginnings'

and

allowed

do

to

`that so

it

remained

without

confined

being

seriously

challenged' (de Man 1983, 20±1). This idea of the New Criticism as an unchallenged, anti-historical formalism is highly influential in accounts of the history of criticism and theory

in

the

United

States,

but

it

is

not

easy

to

support.

There

are

some

hopeful

manifestos, such as R. S. Crane's `History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature' (1935) and John Crowe Ransom's `Criticism Inc.' (1937), which seek to establish a new criticism explicitly in opposition to a traditional historical scholarship. Commentators have

also

pointed

to

the

focus

on

poetry

in

early

New

Criticism

as

a

form

of

anti-

historical bias. Eagleton argues that `poetry is of all the literary genres the one most apparently sealed off from history, the one where ``sensibility'' may play its purest, least socially

tainted

role'

(Eagleton

1983,

48).

Similarly,

Norris

remarks

that

`the

New

Critics were bent upon preserving [poetry's] uniqueness as an object' (Norris 1982, 8), Culler observes that `the projects of the New Criticism were linked to the preservation of aesthetic autonomy' (Culler 1983, 20) and Lentricchia describes the New Critical

encounter with structuralism and invention of poststructuralism

27

mentality as `a continuing urge to essentialise literary discourse by making it . . . a vast, enclosed textual and semantic preserve' (1980, xiii). These accounts may be expressing a tendency in some New Criticism, but they do not represent the extent to which historical consciousness continued to thrive within and around the New Critical project. A traditional, positivist model of historicism may have been displaced by the New Criticism, but there is no evidence to suggest that historicism at large ever accepted its demotion, and an impetus for historicist self-renewal became a recurring

feature

of

critical

debate

throughout

the

period

of

supposed

New

Critical

consensus. In the 1920s, Harry Elmer Barnes and James Harvey Robinson were at the forefront of a movement at Columbia University to develop a new historical method that freed itself from the positivist model. In 1940, Matthew Josephson can be found declaring in the

Virginia Quarterly

that `there seems to be a thirst for history in various forms. Is it

because the readers of our time have lived through so much history in the making since 1914 that they are more history-minded than ever before?' (Josephson 1940). Jumping forward to 1952, Cushing Strout argued that Barnes and Robinson's new historicism of the 1920s, marred by its adherence to a linear temporality, nevertheless points the way to new relativist historiography. Six years later the case was still being argued by Roy Harvey Pearce

in

the

Kenyon Review

(Pearce

1957),

this

time

claiming

strong

compatibility

between New Critical methods and the new historicisms. In 1960, Rene Wellek argued that there has always been a tension within the New Critical movement between criticism and history, and again evidence for this is easy to find. Soon after Ransom's anti-historical manifesto of 1937, Cleanth Brooks published an article in the

Kenyon Review

in which he

rejects the conflict between criticism and history as it is represented by his fellow `Southern Critic' Allen Tate, and Edwin Greenlaw, whose

The Province of Literary History

had sided

with historical scholarship in its rivalry with criticism. For Brooks, the question was not `whether we shall study the history of literature, but rather about what centre this history will be organised?' (Brooks 1940, 412). The importance of this background is that it is only a very selective, canonical history of theory and criticism that can represent New Criticism in the United States as a serene consensus or a hegemony. From Wimsatt's attempts to define and vindicate the role of history in criticism in

The Verbal Icon

(1954) to Wellek's persistent defence of historicism

in literary studies, it is clear that the American universities had no agreed position on history that could be incorporated into their programmes for the study of literature. It is also clear, from Wellek's spat with Gerald Graff in

Critical Inquiry

in 1979, how little agreement

there was in retrospective constructions of critical history on the role of history in the period of New Critical influence. Not only is there an apparent war between formalism and historicism

running

through

the

journals

before

1960,

there

is

also

an

apparent

war

between differing interpretations of that period in more recent critical histories. It is in the context of this irreconcilable battle between formalism and historicism that the impact of structuralism and poststructuralism in the United States is best understood. In fact it is hard to say which attitude to this polemic is more influential, those who, like Wellek, seek to stress the ferocity of the debate between criticism and history, or those who, like de Man, aim to reduce the critical past to a stable consensus. In either case, there is a strong sense of continuity between the era of New Critical dominance and the arrival of structuralism in the 1960s. De Man, for example claims that French criticism `especially in the case of Roland Barthes, appears to be moving in the direction of a formalism that, appearances notwithstanding, is not that different from New Criticism' (de Man 1983, 230±1). This

modern north american criticism and theory

28

continuity between New Criticism and structuralism is a theme in the work of many critics

The Romantic Image suggests, for example, that Frye's

and commentators. Frank Kermode's

Anatomy of Criticism extends the New Critical tradition of neo-Coleridgean symbolism into the 1960s despite Frye's explicit repudiation of New Critical aestheticism; Philip Thody's

Roland Barthes: a Conservative Estimate argues that Barthes's work operates with the same set of assumptions that mobilized New Criticism; Lentricchia finds `many traces (perhaps ``scars'' is the word) of New Criticism in the fixed and identifiable positions we have come to know as contemporary theory' (1980, ix); and Wellek's history of criticism describes Richards' view of Jakobson's work as the fulfilment of his own ambitions, and claims an obvious continuity from New Criticism in the structuralist poetics of Tzvetan Todorov. Nor does this sense of continuity stop at structuralism. This is Culler in

On Deconstruction:

One can certainly argue that American criticism has found in deconstruction reasons to deem interpretation

the

supreme

task

of

critical

inquiry,

and

thus

to

preserve

some

measure

of

continuity between the goals of New Criticism and those of the newer criticism. (1983, 220)

Because of the perceived continuity from New Criticism to structuralism and deconstruction, there was always a sense that the encounter with structuralism in the United States was being assimilated into an ongoing conflict between formal and historical approaches to literature. The exact moment of impact of literary structuralism in the United States is impossible to locate. While the New Criticism grew up in a distinctly Anglo-American context, criticism in the 1960s was moving into a phase of importation and translation of ideas from Continental European thought. The work of Roman Jakobson, for example, had been available from about 1960, but many were not aware of the highly scientific, linguisticsbased structuralist project in literary studies until the 1970s, with the publication of

The

Structuralist Controversy and Culler's Structuralist Poetics. The `structuralist controversy' was presented in the United States as a strange concoction of these highly systematic and scientific

approaches

to

literature

and

approaches that would later be named as to until well into the 1970s as a

the

critiques

of

these

systematized

linguistic

poststructuralist. Derrida was, for example, referred

structuralist. Whereas in France there was a slow unfolding

of structuralism as a literary critical science followed by a period of mounting critique of the scientism of these approaches (perhaps best represented in the work of Roland Barthes), in the United States, the encounter with scientific structuralism coincided largely with the reception of its critique. It may be that this contemporaneity of classical structuralism and the

beginnings

of

deconstruction

was

a

chronological

confusion

that

necessitated

the

invention of poststructuralism as a distinct critical tendency. The reception of Derrida's work in America was also conditioned by the delay between original publication dates in French and the publication of translations. The American academic expert in the reading of French and attentive to French academic journals could have had foreknowledge of the entirety of

  rence by the time of its L'Ecriture et la Diffe

publication in 1967, eleven years before its translation into English. The publication of

La

Á ne and De la grammatologie in the same year gave a start of six and nine Voix et le phenome years over translation-reliant colleagues. The reading of `Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', at Johns Hopkins in October 1966 may be seen as marking the first impact of Derrida in America, but even here there was a complicated time lag. The translation did not appear until its inclusion in

The Languages of Criticism and the

Sciences of Man: the Structuralist Controversy in 1970, and did not reach a wide readership

encounter with structuralism and invention of poststructuralism until

1972,

when

the

Structuralist Controversy

paperback

edition

was

released

under

the

snappier

29

title

The

. Perhaps the most significant fact about Derrida's reception in

the United States was just how little material was available in translation before the process of mediating his work to an English-speaking readership had begun. In 1971, for example,

De la grammatologie

Paul de Man's landmark discussion of Derrida's

in

Blindness and Insight

was for many a crucial point of entry, and preceded the translation by five years. The importance of the translation history and the prominence of mediation is exactly that

it provides the

opportunity

for Derrida's work

to

be

reinvented, refashioned

and

recontextualized according to the preoccupations, interests and values of the American critical tradition. In the late 1970s and 1980s many commentators held the mediation process responsible for a `domestication' of Derrida, on the grounds that the original force of his writing had been sacrificed to these distinctly American preoccupations. It could be said that the invention of poststructuralism was structured according to two phases in the reception of Derrida, the first being the initial mediation of his ideas, and the second a revision of his reputation in the early 1980s. I have argued that the principal legacy of the American

critical

tradition

was

an

ongoing

polemic

between

historicist

and

formalist

approaches, and if we turn for a moment to the critical journals in which the invention of poststructuralism was unfolding, this legacy is overwhelmingly present. Most significant, perhaps, were

New Literary History

and

diacritics

, founded in 1969 and 1970 respectively, in

which there was a kind of table tennis being played with the character of poststructuralism between 1970 and 1975. On one hand Derrida formalist to be aligned with de Man (see

diacritics

can be represented as a kind of arch

, Winter 1972), who in this period, was

perceived above all as the critic who extended the influence of the New Criticism into French studies. He is, for Funt in 1971, `the avant-garde of the structuralist movement itself', and yet, in early 1972, was contrasted with the structuralists on the grounds of a more historicist orientation:

One of the characteristics that makes Derrida's work particularly valuable for scholars is that, in contrast to many contemporary Structuralists, he views this formal organisation which in itself has no sense as susceptible to historical delineation. (Gelley 1972, 10)

It would be fair to say, cutting a longer story short, that this kind of uncertainty dominated the early reception of Derrida. It might also be reasonable to see this initial discussion as somewhat

more

faithful

to

the

character

of

Derrida's

work

than

the

phase

which

immediately followed, in which he was much more decisively aligned with formalism, and in which deconstruction was consolidated as a critical school in such a way that it was difficult to sustain any notion that Derrida might represent some long awaited return to historicist values. A milestone in this regard was the publication of Jonathan Culler's

Structuralist Poetics

, which stresses Derrida's relation to the language-based paradigms of

structuralism. Up to this point, Derrida had been referred to primarily as a structuralist except when being claimed by the historicist camp. The significance of Culler's book is that it emphasizes Derrida's difference form the linguistic analyses of the structuralists, but represents this difference as a deviance in attitude to the linguistic model of analysis in criticism, rather than as a deviation into historicism of any kind. Not for the last time, Culler settled a debate that had been troubling the critical academy, and in so doing, distanced the idea of poststructuralism from the kind of historicism to which it might easily have been linked from the start. If poststructuralism was invented in the United States, it was invented by these debates

modern north american criticism and theory

30

which, for contextual reasons, had to decide upon whether it belonged to the formalist or historicist orientation. In the second half of the 1970s, the invented object takes on a distinctly formalist character largely through its heavy association with another invention ± deconstructive criticism. One way of telling the story of how deconstruction acquired a formalist character is to look at a debate which arose in

Critical Inquiry

in 1976. Here

Wayne Booth argued that Hillis Miller's critique of M. H. Abrams's historicism represented an exhilarating possibility, namely a `deconstructed history', which would exist in a kind of parasitical relationship to the traditional historicism represented by Abrams. In the same edition of

Critical Inquiry

, Abrams himself develops the question through rumination on

the relation between a deconstructed and a traditional criticism. Abrams is clearly talking about

the

impossibility

indeterminate

(a

of

history

writing

of

a

literary

deconstructed

history

texts),

when

without

texts

in

that

considering

history

the

are

question

as

Booth had, that the historical analysis is itself a text which tells a story as indeterminate as the texts it analyses. For Booth, an awareness of the textuality of history would constitute a new historical method (a deconstructed history). These two approaches to the question of deconstruction in relation to history might seem identical, since a history of indeterminacy and

an

indeterminate

contemplating, Miller,

history

however.

Derrida,

de

Man

In or

might

Booth's

be

hard

sense

Nietzsche,

to

there

which

tell

is

can

a

apart.

theory

be

The of

applied

difference

history to

in

the

literary

is

worth

work

history

of

and

historicism. In Abrams's sense, there is a prior theory of the indeterminacy of language in general which then leads into historiographical difficulties. These are markedly different ways

of

assessing

the

impact

of

deconstruction

and

poststructuralism

on

traditional

historicism, since one comes from within historiography and the other from without. The aftermath of this encounter was of great significance for the invention and impact of poststructuralism in America. At the first meeting of the Modern Language Association's `Division

on

Philosophical

Approaches

to

Literature'

in

1976,

Abrams

emphatically

endorsed this second conception of the relevance of deconstruction to literary history. He did this by analysing the challenge to his own historicism, and indeed to the `entire body of traditional inquiries in the human sciences', as one that derives from a theory of language. He then goes on to present what he calls the linguistic premises, in the work of Miller and Derrida, on which the critique of historicism depends. `It is often said', wrote Abrams, `that Derrida and those who follow his lead subordinate all inquiries into a prior inquiry into language'. This is one of the clearest incidences of the misrepresentation or reinvention of Derrida in the American context. And Miller's response to Abrams at the symposium is equally revealing (Miller 1977). Miller's `little example of a deconstructive strategy' focuses on Booth's suggestion that a deconstructive history would be `plainly and simply parasitical' on traditional history from the point of view of etymology. The use of etymology conception

for

Miller

of

history,

is in

twofold.

On

which

earlier

the

one

hand,

meanings

are

it

resonates

considered

with

more

a

traditional

authentic

than

derived ones, against which he can assert an alternative in which the history of words can be presented as a complex of conflicting senses. Where traditional etymology refers current usage of a word back to the solidity of a prior usage, Miller's discussion of `parasite' does the opposite, disrupting the secure interpretation of current usage with a complex of prior synonymic and antonymic relations. On the other hand, Miller uses etymology to illustrate just how much indeterminacy a deconstructive reading can produce from a small fragment of text, and therefore affirms Abrams's view that deconstructive strategy entails a view of the

language

as essentially

polysemic

and

indeterminate.

But

whereas

for

Abrams

the

encounter with structuralism and invention of poststructuralism

31

deconstructive challenge to history was based on prior linguistic premises, Miller's example seems to assert the priority of a historical method upon which the polysemy of language is consequent. In either case, what began as a debate about historical method quickly shifted to a debate about language and interpretation. There is a discernible process here of polarizing deconstruction as an anti-historicist formalism with linguistic premises which certainly cannot be substantiated with reference to Derrida's writings. But there was a tendency in 1976 and 1977 to represent Derrida, deconstruction and sometimes poststructuralism as a whole in this way. Whereas in 1972, Gelley had argued in

diacritics

that Derrida and Foucault could be distinguished only by the

most subtle nuances, it was more common in 1977 to see this nuance presented

as

the

opposition between linguistic formalism and political historicism. Edward Said was one who, in

Beginnings

in 1975, had identified the relationship between Derrida and Foucault

as a choice, and by 1978 was formulating it as an insistent opposition:

Whereas Derrida's theory of textuality brings criticism to bear upon a signifier freed from any obligation to a transcendental signified, Foucault's theories move criticism from a consideration of the signifier to a description of the signifier's place, a place rarely innocent, dimensionless, or without the affirmative authority of discursive discipline.

The point here is not that Said is wrong to characterize Derrida in this way, but that this is increasingly common as a representation of Derrida at the end of the 1970s. In both Said's call for a political history and Abrams's defence of a literary history, Derrida's work is represented primarily as an investigation into the signifier, and secondarily as a challenge to historical discourse. Despite the fact that Derrida's engagement with linguistics relentlessly

opposes

criticism,

he

the is

possibility

repeatedly

of

linguistic

characterized

premises, in

this

or

indeed

phase

as

a

of

linguistic

linguistically

models

in

orientated

theoretician of indeterminacy. But if Miller's debate with Abrams was the place where the idea of deconstruction as a critical approach with linguistic premises was established, it may be that the debate between Derrida and John Searle in

Glyph

in 1977 and 1978 put it

to rest. Given the opportunity to represent himself, rather than to be mediated by an American disciple, Derrida used this exchange as a demonstration of the distance between his work and any systematic theory of language. Remembered mainly for what Culler described as Searle's `egregious misunderstanding of Derrida', the debate between Derrida and Searle illustrated the problems for the academy in the United States of relying too heavily

on

the

mediation

of

Derrida's

work

for

its

understanding

of

the

nature

of

poststructuralism. There are three important points to be made here about this history. First, there is a profound theoretical difficulty in any account such as this which seems to imply that Derrida has been misrepresented, misread, domesticated or disrespected by his mediators. Deconstructive contexts

over

reading

characteristically

translations,

rejects

misrepresentations,

the

authority

misreadings

and

of

origins

errors.

and

Miller,

original de

Man

and Bloom have claimed that all readings (including translations) are misreadings. Derrida argues in

Speech and Phenomena

that the relationship between an origin and its supplements

is one in which `a possibility produces that to which it is said to be added on', which is to say that the possibility that a message will go wrong somehow inheres in the original as a possibility. Second, I have been describing a phase of critical history in which the terms poststructuralism and deconstruction (or the name of Derrida) were virtually synonymous, so that the invention of poststructuralism and the reception of Derrida were inseparable

modern north american criticism and theory

32

processes. Third, the context of polemic opposition between formalism and historicism made it necessary to be able to place a critical approach at one pole or the other. Taken together, these factors began to exert a pressure on the polemical context of American criticism which can be seen to have impelled a revision of the notion of poststructuralism along different lines. The idea, for example, that American poststructuralism represented a domestication

of

more

politicized

counterparts

in

Europe

became

a

commonplace

of

critical commentary. The extent of this realization at the beginning of the 1980s is striking. At the `Colloque de Cerisy' in 1980, for example, interventions from American speakers attest to a widespread feeling that the domestication of deconstruction was a function of the institutionalization of Derrida's work in American literary departments. After Ro 's `Deconstruction as Criticism' in 1979, which sought to retrieve Derrida for dolphe Gasche a radical philosophy, commentators were lining up to point out the domesticating effects of the American literary critical encounter with poststructuralism. In 1980, Frank Lentricchia's

After the New Criticism

attacked American deconstruction for its fall into ahistori-

 recognized `traces of New Criticism' in the `repeated and often cality, and like Gasche extremely subtle denial of history by a variety of contemporary theorists'. In 1983 Wlad Godzich's article `The Domestication of Derrida' points to some of the marxist semes, and in particular the term

production

, which had held significance for Derrida's original context

in the marxist Tel Quel Group, and which had been simply dropped in the American appropriation

of

Derrida.

And

in

an

interview

before

his

death,

even

Paul

de

Man

recognizes the distortion:

It is often said ± and this is true to some extent ± that whatever is audacious, whatever is really

subversive

and

incisive

in

Derrida's

text

and

in

his

work

is

being

taken

out

by

academicizing him, by making him just one other method by means of which literature can be taught. (1986, 116)

Perhaps what is most interesting about this realization, recontextualization and revision of the relation of deconstruction and its relation to history and politics is that it allowed the notion

of

Criticism

poststructuralism

to

acquire

a

wider

reference.

Lentricchia's

After the New

, for example, is one of the places where the idea of poststructuralism is cleaved

away from American deconstruction to the point where it becomes possible to speak of poststructuralism

and

history

in

the

same

breath.

Like

Said,

Lentricchia

depends

on

Foucault as an uneasy bridge between Derrida and marxism, and blames de Man for all that is wrong with the American invention. But when Lentricchia describes his own project as a `poststructuralist history', he significantly distances himself from those, like Maria Ruegg and Terry Eagleton, who have condemned poststructuralism as a whole for its ahistoricality. The early 1980s in American criticism can be seen as a period in which it was ensured that, the next time there was a call for a return to history, it could be made in the name of, and not in opposition to, poststructuralism. It is now recognized that the new historicisms that dominated criticism in the 1980s and 1990s represented a more appropriate critical response to Derrida

and other poststructuralists than the deconstructive

readings in relation to which poststructuralism was initially defined.

Mark Currie

reception theory and reader-response

33

Further reading and works cited Natural Supernaturalism. London, 1971.

Abrams, M. H.

Ð. `The Deconstructive Angel', Arac, J. et al. (eds)

Critical Inquiry, Spring 1977.

The Yale Critics. Minneapolis, MN, 1983.

Booth, W. `M. H. Abrams: Historian, Critic, Pluralist', Brooks, C. `Literature and the Professors',

Critical Inquiry, Spring 1977.

Kenyon Review, 1940.

Crane, R. S. `History versus Criticism in the Study of Literature', Culler, J. Ð.

On Deconstruction. London, 1983.

de Man, P. Ð.

English Journal, 24, 1935.

Structuralist Poetics. London, 1975.

Blindness and Insight. London, 1983.

The Resistance to Theory. Manchester, 1986.

Derrida, J.

Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs . Evanston, 1973.

Ð.

Of Grammatology. Baltimore, 1976.

Ð.

Writing and Difference. London, 1978.

Eagleton, T.

Literary Theory. Oxford, 1983.

Funt, D. `Piaget and Structuralism',

diacritics, Winter 1971.

 , R. `Deconstruction as Criticism', Gasche Gelley, A. `Form as Force',

Glyph, 6, 1979.

diacritics, Spring 1972.

Godzich, W. `The Domestication of Derrida', in Arac, et al., ed. Greenlaw, E.

The Province of Literary History. Baltimore, MD, 1931.

Josephson, M. `Historians and Mythmakers', Kermode, F.

Lentricchia, F.

After the New Criticism. London, 1980.

Miller, J. H. `Tradition and Difference', Ð. `The Critic as Host', Norris, C.

diacritics, Winter 1972.

Critical Inquiry, Spring 1977.

Deconstruction. London, 1982.

Pearce, R. H. `Historicism Once More', Ransom, J. C. `Criticism Inc.', Said, E.

Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer, 1940.

Romantic Image. London, 1957.

Kenyon Review, 1958.

Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall, 1937.

Beginnings. Baltimore, MD, 1975.

Ð. `The Problem of Textuality', Thody, P.

Critical Inquiry, Summer 1978.

Roland Barthes. London, 1977.

Wellek, R. `Literary Theory, Criticism and History', Wimsatt, W. K.

Yale Review, Spring, 1960.

The Verbal Icon. London, 1970.

6. Reception Theory and Reader-Response: Norman Holland (1927±), Stanley Fish (1938±) and David Bleich (1940±)

While some commentators (for example, Holub 1984) wish to restrict reception theory to the European tradition embracing both phenomenology and hermeneutics ± in shorthand terms, the Geneva and Constance Schools ± it is possible and I think valid to extend it ± and to use the alternative term `reader-response', indifferently ± to cover a wider and more

modern north american criticism and theory

34

diverse

range

American

of

theories

versions

of

of

how

literary literary

effect texts

and

response,

achieve

their

including

effects

on

the

various

readers,

how

Angloreaders

respond to them, and what the implications of the interaction between reader and text may be. The American scene lacks the apparent homogeneity and orderliness of the European, where the authority of `schools' of theory has been paramount, at least within the Germanspeaking arena, and where a culture of collaborative accumulation of theoretical models has been encouraged, in the perhaps

delusive hope of establishing an ultimate `grand

theory' of reception. Elements of reader-response criticism are diffused more widely and variously within the American academic and intellectual arena, which has in the postwar period been both more eclectic and more assimilative of a range of theoretical positions, from a still tenacious New Critical stance, various psychoanalytically oriented approaches, through structuralism to poststructuralism (a movement in the history of semiotics given exemplary clarification in the work of Jonathan Culler), and into various broadly sociological approaches which stress race or gender or pay particular attention to pedagogy. This multifarious mix no doubt answers to the cultural profusion and the social and ethnic variety of the USA and it has occasioned vigorous critical debate, not to say fractiousness, in

some

quarters

within

the

academy

there

in

the

late

twentieth

century.

However,

important though this context is, it is impossible to survey the whole variegated scene in the confines of a brief article (though some indications are given at the end and the bibliography refers to some selected contributions to the wider debate) and I therefore restrict myself largely to discussion of the three critics indicated above. These

major

American

proponents

of

reader-response

criticism

occupy

significantly

different and individualistic positions within the broad parameters of reception theory, in its general sense ± that understanding of literature (and other arts) which stresses the active and formative role of the reader (or audience or spectator) in the constitution of the artwork (primarily the literary text) and which reflects a dissatisisfaction with formalist principles which privilege and prioritize the text over the reader. While Norman Holland and David Bleich share an emphasis on the psychological approach to the activity of reading, their descriptions of that approach are significantly different. Stanley Fish, on the other hand, starting from a more strictly literary-critical position, develops a theoretical model which might be termed, in a specialized and abstract sense, sociological, with a strong

rhetorical

implications

of

inflection.

All

reader-response

three

theory

critics and

lay

varying

practice.

All

stress

three

on

are

the

also

pedagogical

engaged

with

the overall dialectical pressure that informs reception theory with regard to literature ± that is, the tension between reader and text, or subjective and objective principles, the initial affirmation of the former against the latter, and the subsequent `return of the text', as it might

be

termed,

in

the

effort

to

avoid

or

qualify

the

subjectivism

or

impressionism

threatened by the stress on the reader's role. Bleich and Holland, true to their emphasis on psychology, each affirm a qualified subjectivism, while Fish, through an ingenious and powerful theoretical strategy, is most successful in overcoming the dualizing pressure of the dialectical model, though this appears to lead him ultimately to a theoretical position which is, to use one of his own celebrated terms, `self-consuming'. Norman Holland, engaged in `constructing a post-Freudian psychoaesthetics' (Freund 1987,

30),

gives

substantial

and

predominant

force

to

the

conscious

personality

and

unconscious psyche of the reader in the activity of reading, employing concepts taken from American

ego

psychology

to

construct

a model

of the

reader

as enjoying

the

psychic

pleasures and benefits of engagement with the imaginative work. His starting point is the

reception theory and reader-response

35

Freudian sanctioning of artistic creativity as the therapeutic licence to fantasy which, although grounded in the infantile ego and its unconscious drives, succeeds in transforming these

(expressed

imaginative

as

forms

either

and

desire

thereby

or

fear)

achieves

into

an

socially

adult

respectable

mediation

and

between

representable

fantasizing

ego

and obdurate reality. Acknowledgement of this creatively mediating activity is developed by Holland into a theory that articulates the secondary operation implicit in it, in his view ± that is, the specific mediation between reader as ego and text as object ± and involves seeing the process of reading as a dynamic and mutual transaction between the text as artistic form and meaning and the reader as adaptive and defensive ego ± what he terms `the dynamics of literary response' (Holland 1968). He claims that we as readers `work out through the text our own characteristic patterns of desire and adaptation. We interact with the work, making it part of our own psychic economy and making ourselves part of the literary work ± as we interpret it' (Holland 1980, 124). This approach, usually termed transactive (sometimes transactional) criticism, has the merit of recognizing that reading is itself a psychological process and that the reader ± any reader ± has a subjective reality, but it is perhaps simplifyingly optimistic in its conviction that the dynamic transaction with the

text

necessarily

processes.

And

produces

although

it

pleasure

presents

from

the

the

sublimation

interaction

of

of

reader

traumatic

and

text

unconscious

as

one

that

is

mutually transformative and explicitly rejects a dualistic Cartesian epistemology, his model retains an implicit dualism with its positing of the imaginative text on the one hand in transaction with the autonomous ego on the other. For Holland, then, meaning

is fundamentally

psychological,

realized

according

to a

psychoanalytic and indeed Freudian and anti-Jungian prescription, and so he claims a correlation between textual and psychic processes ± as the text strives for unity, an eventual thematic

harmony,

so

the

individual

reader

strives

for

identity,

an

eventual

psychic

equilibrium. Text and self are accordingly parallel terms, as are unity and identity, the latter pair seen as abstractions or idealizations of the former, and a sort of isomorphism operates so that textual work (interpretation and understanding leading to thematic unity) and psychic work (expression and control of egoistic drives leading to personal identity) are seen as interinvolved, a mutual process as text and self interactively develop toward the achievement of unity and identity ± `when I arrive at the unity in a literary text or the identity theme of a personality I am studying, I do so in a way that is characteristic for me ± for my identity theme' (Holland 1980, 122). Accordingly, `interpretation is a function of identity' (Holland 1980, 124), an assertion which defines reading as to some degree a common

subjective

constituted

by

response,

fundamental

in

so

psychic

far

as,

drives,

in

Holland's

passing

Freudian

through

the

model,

infantile

we

are

all

pre-oedipal

stages, oral, anal and phallic, into the oedipal crisis ± but also as an individual subjective response, in so far as we are all particular persons with our own specific life experiences. The literary text is thus the means for its reader to recreate him or herself through a unifying interpretation, a centripetal movement that brings text and self together in a movement of self-identification on the reader's part. Holland's theory has been criticized for its tendency to subordinate the text to the personality of the reader, making reading a quasi-confessional or autobiographical procedure ± the reader ultimately finds only his or her own subjectivity at the core of the text. It has also, predictably, come under attack from a deconstructionist perspective which questions the unitary nature of the identity presupposed in Holland's model. Holland has sought to answer some of this criticism, and to take

account

of

his

own

experimental

work

with

readers

(Holland

1973,

1975),

by

modern north american criticism and theory

36

proposing

a

`transferential'

model,

which

moderates

the

emphasis

on

the

reader

as

personality in favour of a stress on the activity of reading as dialectical, a negotiation between text and reader, although this returns him to the problem of dualism. But overall his

theory

remains

strongly

oriented

toward

a

subjectivizing

view

of

the

text±reader

relationship. David

Bleich,

who

was

associated

with

Holland

and

others

in

the

Centre

for

the

Psychological Study of the Arts in New York, also produced a psychological model of reader response, but one that developed away from the ego-based theory of his colleague toward

a

theory

of

intersubjectivity

based

on

an

epistemology

of

the

reader's

initial

perception and subsequent interpretation of the text. There is also a recognition of the importance of language as the articulation, both mediating and objectifying, of the self, since language ensures a distancing which enables reflection but also requires the reader as subject for

its

animation

and

in

consequence

cannot

claim

abstract

objectivity.

In

a

quasi-

phenomenological spirit, Bleich claims that human attention distinguishes three kinds of entity ± people, objects and symbols ± and literary works fall into the third category. While the text in its mere physicality is an object, its realization as meaningful work depends on the capacity and desire for symbolization on the reader's part ± that is, the reader's initial response ± which is followed by a secondary symbolization, or `a motivated resymbolization' (Bleich 1980, 134), in which an understanding and coherent articulation of the initial response are developed as a process of interpretation. It is the reader as epistemological subject or agent who retains primacy in this process, however, which Bleich terms unapologetically `subjective criticism' (Bleich 1975, 1978) and it appears that it is the mode of attention, or response, directed by the reader at the object which constitutes the `perceptual symbolization' (Bleich 1980, 135) of it. This is not, however, a purely individual and arbitrary process because the decision to perceive the object as symbol ± as an aesthetic object ± both derives from a common immediate experience of seeing the words on the page and leads at once to a confirmation which is collective, that is the agreement of a community which determines the articulation of the resymbolization or interpretation which extends the initial reaction or perception into aesthetic understanding and enjoyment. However, the basis for discussion of any literary work, for an intersubjective activity related

to

the

resymbolization

text, of

remains

it'

which

not

the

produce

text the

per se

but

reader's

the

reader's

`subjective

`symbolization

syntheses'

(Bleich

and

1980,

145). For Bleich, then, the text has no efficacy or particular status so far as response is concerned: it is the reader who produces and invests the text-as-work through symbolizations that are grounded in the reader's psychology and therefore inalienably subjective (Bleich 1977). They are not therefore solipsistic and incommunicable, however, because of the intersubjective force of language and the capacity of an interpretive community to mediate

responses

communicative

through

agencies

in

an

implicit

`the

consensus.

common

social

Bleich

purpose

locates of

the

pedagogy'

origin

of

(Bleich

these 1980,

158) by which he appears to mean a communal inculcation of responsive knowledge, whether

formally

instituted

in

the

classroom

or

not.

In

the

context

of

the

modern

developed world, however, `schools become the regular agency of subjective initiative' (Bleich 1980, 159) and much of Bleich's attention has consequently been devoted to analysing the conditions of subjective response in the framework of pedagogy. As such, his work can be seen as an important contribution to a substantial current of reader-response theory which has been engaged in examining the acquisition and development of reading skills and powers of interpretation.

reception theory and reader-response

37

Bleich's formulations of the roles of both language and community in enabling and controlling

subjective

response

owe

a

good

deal

to

the

thinking

of

the

third

of

my

American representatives of reader-response theory, Stanley Fish. However, Fish's ideas regarding response develop over a period, and he starts out from a position which is in some respects that of the traditional literary critic, examining closely a canonical text. The text in question is Milton's

Paradise Lost,

which Fish subjects to a minutely scrupulous reading

that derives from the New Critical tradition, although his arguments from that reading take an importantly different direction. Briefly, he claims that the reader, through the process of reading, realizes an awareness of the parallels between his or her own epistemological situation and the imagined primal human situation articulated through the poem, a tension between reasoned inquiry and analysis on the one hand and faith on the other, and this realization renders the reader not merely an observer of but a participant in the poem (Fish 1967).

Although the approach is basically traditional in its

recognition

and

elaboration

of

the

reader's

difficulty

and

centring on the text,

uncertainty

of

the

response

is

a

significant first move, for Fish, toward a reader-oriented approach. The insight is developed and

extended

to

treat

a

wider

range

of

seventeenth-century

texts

(Fish

1972),

again

subjected to minute and often brilliant analysis, and a dualizing conception of reading, somewhat similar to the Barthesian division between `readerly' and `writerly' text (Barthes 1974),

is

proposed.

persuasive

in

expectations

The

text,

or

its

satisfaction

of

and

demanding

a

literary the

representation,

reader's

movement

of

is

seen

expectations,

or

self-reflection

on

as

either

`rhetorical',

`dialectical', the

disturbing

reader's

part

in

a

recognition of the difficulties of comprehension. The argument opens up but does not resolve, except in a negative way, the problematic of interaction between author, text and reader ± the question, that is, of where authority and responsibility for meaning are to lie. The

intriguing

concept

of

the

`self-consuming

artefact',

emphasized

in

the

subtitle,

epitomizes the problematic and its negativity, where `self-consumption' seems indifferently but somewhat obscurely the process to be undergone by author, text and reader in an unresolved play of interpretive and signifying forces. Fish is still holding here to some of the traditional principles of textual objectification and an ambiguity of focus results as he seeks to combine this with an increasingly radical recognition of the dynamic and constructive capacity of the reading process. However, a little earlier this recognition was generalized and given polemical force in Fish's essay of 1970, `Literature in the Reader', republished a decade later as the first chapter of

Is There a Text in This Class?

(1980). Here the emphasis shifts decisively toward the

reader as the text is reconceived not as object, however problematic in interpretation or dialectical in effect, but as

experience, and literature understood as event rather than content

or substance. It opens with a joust against the influential New Critical notion of the `Affective Fallacy' and claims the text, on the microlevel of the sentence, to be `no longer an

object,

a

thing-in-itself,

but

an

event,

something

that

participation of, the reader' (Fish 1980, 25). Accordingly,

happens process

to,

and

with

the

is given primacy: as

the sentence, and eventually the text, unfolds successively, word following word, it is this temporal flow, the experience of reading, which demands recognition and is not to be subsumed in a result or goal, the determination of a teleology. The text,

a fortiori

the

individual sentence (and Fish analyses a selection of sentences from various authors), is not to be viewed as `a repository of meaning' (Fish 1980, 29) but as a process of making meaning, every part of which remains significant and no part of which is to be relegated by an

end-oriented

or

totalizing

interpretative

claim.

Reading,

and

the

text

as

reading

modern north american criticism and theory

38

experience, are kinetic activities not static entities and their qualities of and as movement must be fully realized in any responsible interpretation. The tendency to `spatialize' and thereby `freeze' the text formalistically, in Fish's view the besetting sin of New Criticism, must be countered by an emphasis on temporality and flow. Further questions arise from this fundamental resituating of the relation between text and reader and simultaneous reconstitution of the nature of the text itself. One question concerns language ± is the faculty of `making meaning' in this experiential way peculiar to literary or poetic language a particular kind of semantic and formal strength? Fish answers this in the negative, with a progressively more radical inclusiveness ± this faculty belongs as much to the language of literary prose as of poetry, he claims initially, and then, making considerable use of the speech-act theory developed by Austin and Searle (Austin 1962; Searle 1969), widens this to reject any fundamental distinction between literary and nonliterary language. All language, he claims (adducing Austin), is performative, and carries illocutionary force (adducing Searle) ± that is, it bears with it the intentions and purposes of

its

speaker,

always

related

to

a

context,

and

accordingly

demands

a

corresponding

response. Language, in use, is never abstract or neutral, and the meaning of an utterance is never `pure', fully susceptible to abstract and categorical definition, but always in some sense

experientially

understood.

Another

question

concerns

the

nature

of

the

agency

responsible for rendering the text-as-experience: who or what is this? Fish introduces the concept of the `informed reader', which he acknowledges to be `a construct, an ideal or idealized reader' (1980, 48) but one that he claims is adequately although approximately identifiable with an empirically verifiable reader. The term raises difficulties, however, in its

uncertain

position

between

the

empirical

and

the

abstract,

in

its

individualizing

presumption, and in the degree to which it is understood to be a product or epiphenomenon of the text. Again, Fish revises the concept radically, later situating the reader in the context of what he terms `interpretive communities', the institutional frameworks which

govern

individual

readings,

which

he

emphasizes

in

the

subtitle

of

the

1980

collection of essays whose introduction provides an explanation of the term. Indeed,

Fish's

contribution

to

reader-response

theory

is

characterized

by

a

vigorous

capacity for self-revision, a willingness to reconsider and reshape his thinking, energized by a considerable capacity for forceful, perhaps occasionally truculent, polemic. First taking issue with New Critical precepts, he moves into an exploration of the complexities and perplexities of reading as process, which leads him to a radical reconsideration of meaning as experience, accompanied by attacks on what are viewed as attempts to re-objectify the text, notably the sophisticated strategies of stylistics (Fish's countering term is `affective stylistics'), but also by a critique of one-sidedly subjectivizing approaches, and finally to an effort to transcend the dualism of text and reader, object and subject, by means of the concept of `interpretive communities', understood as ineluctable, given institutions and systemic articulations of meaningfulness, enabling both texts and readers through their power of authorizing and controlling interpretation. Ultimately, as he acknowledges, his theory takes on a kind of implosive force ± fulfilled and voided at the same time in its `truth'. There is no `grand theory' to be applied to literature

in toto: there is only the

clarification of the conditions of our practice, what we do as readers constrained and enabled by our contexts and capabilities. Clarification of these conditions requires, in a Wittgensteinian

way,

the

removal

of

false

imperatives

and

directives

±

the

assumed

univocal authority of either text or reader, for example. But it also ensures escape from the falsely absolutized assumed consequences, a fall into subjectivism or solipsism on the

reception theory and reader-response

one

hand

(the

view

that

only

the

reader

39

produces

meaning)

or

into

objectivism

or

scientism on the other (the view that only the text does), as well as the, in Fish's view, unproductive

dualistic

oscillation

of

the

model

of

text±reader

interaction.

Nothing

is

changed by the recognition that Fish argues for: we are still (already) readers, as we were ± we have perhaps only the clarification and assurance of the recognition we no longer need. Holland, reception American

Bleich

theory

and

±

context

or ±

notably

reader

but

Fish

all

response,

they

are

by

offer

as

no

substantial

it is

more

means

its

and

interesting

commonly

only

termed

in

versions the

of

Anglo-

proponents. Recognition

and

investigation of the role of the reader extends back some way in twentieth-century AngloAmerican

critical

history,

as

the

important

examples

of

I.

A.

Richards

and

Louise

Rosenblatt illustrate, although its appearance is sporadic and it is overwhelmed by the success of the text-based New Criticism until the early 1960s. Thereafter it infiltrates into some of the structuralist models of literary theory, synthesized in Culler, and more broadly, though also contentiously, into linguistics and stylistics, in Chatman and Dillon. It is an aspect of the historical sociology of literature in the work of Ong, as well as more generally of the sociology of reading, notably that current which is concerned with pedagogy ± the ways

in

which

reading

ability

is

acquired

and

the

developmental

and

psychological

implications of reading in childhood and adolescence, at home and in school (Purves and Beach 1972; Many and Cox 1992). It also broadens to encompass other media, so that the reading of film in particular (a feature of Holland's work) and of other cultural products may be included ± in this it may be seen as true to its roots in reception theory and aesthetics. European reception theory has some influence but this is variable and models are

fairly

eclectically

adopted

or

engaged

with,

perhaps

because

of

the

vagaries

of

translation ± the major current of German reception theory is only very partially recognized (Holub

1987).

The

selection

of

essays

edited

by

Tompkins

(1980),

by

Suleiman

and

Crosman (1980) and by Bennett (1995) respectively are indicative of the range. Like the European, the American postwar development and efflorescence of reader-response theory and

criticism,

though

beginning

a

little

later,

is

similarly

swift,

impressive,

but

also

relatively short-lived ± with, again, a lifespan of little more than twenty years. Energized by its often polemical reaction against formalism, reader-response criticism is remarkably extensive in its theoretical exfoliation but also, it appears, determinate in its theoretical implications,

although

its

importance

in

encouraging

a

shift

of

concern

toward

the

pragmatic in literary criticism should not be underestimated.

Jeremy Lane

Further reading and works cited Austin, J. L. Barthes, R.

How to Do Things with Words.

S/Z.

New York, 1962.

New York, 1974.

Bennett, A. (ed.)

Readers and Reading.

Ð.

Readings and Feelings.

Ð.

Literature and Self-Awareness.

Ð.

Subjective Criticism.

London, 1995.

Urbana, IL, 1975. New York, 1977.

Baltimore, MD, 1978.

Ð. `Epistemological Assumptions in the Study of Response', in

Reader-Response Criticism,

Tompkins. Baltimore, MD, 1980. Chatman, S. Culler, J.

Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film.

Structuralist Poetics.

Ithaca, NY, 1975.

Ithaca, NY, 1978.

ed. J. P.

modern north american criticism and theory

40

Ð.

On Deconstruction.

Fish, S.

London, 1983.

Language Processing and the Reading of Literature.

Dillon, G.

Surprised by Sin.

Ð.

Self-Consuming Artefacts.

Ð.

Is There A Text in This Class?

Berkeley, CA, 1972.

Garvin, H. R. (ed.) Holland, N.

London, 1987.

Theories of Reading, Looking, Listening.

The Dynamics of Literary Response.

Ð.

Poems in Persons.

Ð.

5 Readers Reading.

Holub, R. C.

New Haven, CT, 1975.

Reception Theory.

Crossing Borders.

Reader-Response Criticism,

Madison, WI, 1992.

Many, J. and Cox, C. (eds)

Purves, A. C. and Beach, R.

Rosenblatt, L. Ð.

Royle, N.

Literature and the Reader.

Practical Criticism.

Slatoff, W.

Literature as Exploration.

Protocols of Reading. Speech Acts.

New York, 1968.

Oxford, 1991.

New Haven, CT, 1989.

Cambridge, 1969. Ithaca, NY, 1970.

Suleiman, S. R. and Crosman, I. (eds)

Weber, S.

Urbana, IL, 1972.

Carbondale, IL, 1978.

With Respect to Readers.

Tompkins, J. P. (ed.)

Norwood, MA, 1992.

New York, 1935.

Telepathy and Literature.

Searle, J. R.

10, 1977.

[1982]. London, 1988.

The Reader, the Text, the Poem.

Scholes, R.

Genre,

Reader Stance and Literary Understanding .

Orality and Literacy

Richards, I. A.

ed. J. P. Tompkins. Baltimore, MD, 1980.

London, 1984.

Mailloux, S. `Reader-Response Criticism?',

Ong, W. J.

Lewisburg, PA, 1981.

New York, 1968.

New York, 1973.

Ð. `Unity Identity Text Self', in

Ð.

Cambridge, MA, 1980.

The Return of the Reader.

Freund, E.

Bloomington, IN, 1978.

London, 1967.

The Reader in the Text.

Reader-Response Criticism.

Institution and Interpretation.

Princeton, NJ, 1980.

Baltimore, MD, 1980.

Minneapolis, MN, 1987.

7. The Yale Critics? J. Hillis Miller (1928±), Geoffrey Hartman (1929±), Harold Bloom (1930±), Paul de Man (1919±1983)

In 1975, the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida performed the first of his soon to become famous annual seminars at Yale University. Although Derrida's specialist background was in the critical tradition of Husserl's phenomenology and Heidegger's dismantling of metaphysics, the primary institutional niche he found himself in at Yale was the space of literary studies. Among his prominent colleagues in that location were Harold Bloom and Geoffrey H. Hartman, who both began their academic careers at Yale in 1955, and

Paul

de

respectively)

Man

and

moved

to

landmark conference on

J.

Hillis

Yale

Miller,

from

Johns

who

had

Hopkins

both

recently

University,

the

(in

1970

venue

The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man

of

and

1972

the

1966

where Derrida

delivered his first lecture in the United States. Derrida's arrival at Yale, then, accompany-

the yale critics?

ing

the

gradual

41

emergence,

or

at

least

the

naming,

of

the

`Yale

Critics',

marked

an

important institutional moment in the establishment of what has come to be known as `deconstruction in America'. A few years later, in 1979, this moment was half-heartedly monumentalized in the joint publication

Deconstruction and Criticism

, a volume of four

essays by Bloom, de Man, Hartman and Miller arranged (even if only by the random order of the alphabet) around an expanded version of one of Derrida's Yale seminars. It was to be the only collective publication of the `Yale School' ± and even that may already be saying too much. Two obvious but crucial points to be registered in this loose critical constellation are the apparent intent to welcome the `continental' challenge posed to the Anglo-American humanities,

and

the

determined

emphasis

on

the

specific

claims

of

literature

in

this

encounter. Throughout the 1970s, the most visible face of the `continental' challenge ± though by no means the only one ± was arguably that of Derridean deconstruction, and for better or worse the American reception and modulation of deconstruction initially took shape primarily in the context of literary scholarship. That this shape should have emerged at all is itself far from self-evident, and it could be argued that its very unlikelihood was an important factor in the impact of its appearance. The constitutive instability of the `Yale School' simultaneously allowed its members to become members at all (however briefly) and

contributed

to

the

Yale

Critics'

almost

implausibly

powerful

influence

on

the

development of literary studies well into the 1980s. Paul de Man's immediate response to the 1966 Johns Hopkins symposium mentioned above

offers

a

suggestive

illustration

of

the

relative

unlikelihood

of

the

Yale

Critics'

subsequent alliance with Derrida. Addressing what he calls `the structuralist aberration' as a `methodologically motivated attack on the notion that a literary or poetic consciousness is in any way a privileged consciousness' (1967, 56), de Man argues that this attack misfires because it mistakenly conceives of the disputed privilege of literary consciousness as a naive belief in the unity of sign and meaning erroneously associated with romanticism. To the contrary, de Man asserts, articulating a position arrived at in the course of reading primarily canonical European romantic and post-romantic authors and their critics since the early 1950s, literary consciousness

is

privileged precisely to the extent that it is `demystified from

the start' (1967, 55): it has always already abandoned this naive myth by presenting itself in the form of radical fiction, as `pure nothingness,

our

nothingness stated and restated by a

subject that is the agent of its own instability' (1967, 56). For this reason, the literary `self as a constitutive subject' (1967, 47), which structuralism seeks to dismiss, successfully survives  vi-Strauss and, surprisingly, `Deridda' ( the attack of the likes of Le

sic

).

The surprise here is not just that de Man misspells Derrida's name, but that he should conceive of him as a structuralist. For Derrida's lecture at the Johns Hopkins symposium de Man

alludes

to

here

is

pre-eminently

a

powerful,

be

it

sympathetic,

critique

of

the

structuralist project itself. Still, to the extent that Derrida's text does question the `myth' of `a subject which would be the absolute origin of its own discourse' (1967, 418), de Man's early misplacement of deconstruction as just another structuralism is perhaps less important than

his

fundamental

reservations

concerning

what

he

took

Derrida's

thought

to

be,

though it is important to underscore de Man's insistence on the critical merits of `the structuralist aberration' for a `philosophical criticism . . . that takes the critical process itself as its field of inquiry' (1967, 56). For in structuralism at least, and for de Man at the time this includes Derrida's work, `the problem of the subject', which involves `the central intent of literature', is mishandled `on such a vast scale that genuine criticism ensues', while in

modern north american criticism and theory

42

`the formalist and narrowly historical methods of literary study' still prevalent at the time, this problem is merely `bypassed . . . in a petty way' (1967, 56). When de Man revised his

Blindness and Insight (1971), which also features a

text for inclusion in his first book,

sustained response to Derrida's work as `one of the places where the future possibility of literary criticism is being decided' (1983, 111), the somewhat anomalous reference to Derrida was erased, but the defence of the literary self as a constitutive subject against all manner

of

mistaken

demystification

survived,

as

did

the

insistence

on

the

status

of

literature as `a primary source of knowledge' (1983, 19). Given the subsequent alliance between de Man and Derrida, it is not entirely surprising that readers of this revised text looking

for

deconstructive

demystification

of

literary

dogma

often

consciousness

blatantly

as

an

misread

outline

of

his

de

Man's

own

sketch

critical

of

the

project

(see

Berman 1988, 241 and further instances listed in de Graef 1995, 235). The mistake signals precisely the potential incommensurability between a privileging of literature and what `true' deconstruction is supposed to be all about, and it is this incongruity which can be read as the signature fissure in the Yale Critical edifice. A cursory investigation of the other Yale Critics' publications prior to their establishment as a `school' reveals a bedrock agreement on the status of literature ± and specifically what is received as `canonical', predominantly romantic and post-romantic literature ± as somehow

a

privileged

mode

of

discourse.

More

particularly,

this

privilege

involves

a

recognition of literature as the maximally lucid articulation of what is variously called consciousness,

the

self,

or

the

subject.

In

this

respect,

the

Yale

Critics'

early

work

participates in a broad resistance to the relative dismissal of consciousness, self or subject that had become codified in the critique of the so-called `intentional fallacy' at the heart of New

Critical

orthodoxy,

while

the

historical

focus

in

their

readings

amounts

to

a

reconsideration of the contemporary as more significantly marked by romanticism than the ideologues of modernism had been willing to admit. In its actual detail, this double emphasis takes on markedly different forms in their writing, yet the general pattern amply succeeds in creating at least the impression of a family resemblance. Thus, Harold Bloom's first major works are powerfully idiosyncratic readings of great or, to

use

Bloom's

romantic

own

tradition.

favourite

With

their

formidable figures, works like

term,

`strong'

unashamed

poets

in

emphasis

the on

English

the

romantic

creative

and

struggle

of

postthese

Shelley's Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961),

Blake's Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970) and The Ringers in the Tower (1971) are so many stages in the antagonistic recovery of a company of extreme and powerful dissident selves from the neglect or even contempt they had suffered at the hands of, especially, the New Critics. Bloom's strong romantic poets are committed to the Stevensian notion that `the theory of poetry is the theory of life', and just as `they would not yield the first to historical convention, so they could not surrender the second to religion or philosophy or the tired resignations of society' (1971a, 3). Their `immense hope' was that `poetry, by expressing the whole man, could either liberate him from his fallen condition or, more compellingly, make him see that condition as unnecessary, as an unimaginative fiction that an awakened spirit could slough off' (1971a, xxiv). And while Bloom acutely registers the failure of this romantic ambition, he continues to call on the strong selves of true poetry `to help us in an increasingly bad time' by making `the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful' (1971b, 11). It is not surprising, therefore, that in the second half of the 1960s, when the New Critical orthodoxy was increasingly becoming a thing of the past, Bloom should have felt the need to measure his distance from the new anti-romantic challenges of the self associated with

the yale critics?

43

structuralism much in the same way as did de Man (as witness Bloom's epilogue to the 1971 revised edition of his plain

dreariness

demonstrate (1973,

of

that

12±13).

The Visionary Company all

those

they

can

While

it

is

, 1971a, 463±4) and from `the anti-humanistic

developments

aid

in

reading

not

quite

in

European

any

clear

one

who

criticism

poem

exactly

by

any

stands

that

have

poet

accused

yet

to

whatsoever'

in

this

latter

blanket judgement (one of Bloom's idiosyncrasies being his cavalier contempt for footnotes and bibliographical references), its implicit indictment of anti-humanism does not seem to augur well for a future alliance with a thinker like Derrida who, in the same seminal essay referred to above, outlined the prospect of a step `beyond man and humanism' (1967, 427). It is characteristic of Geoffrey Hartman, whose reluctant articulacy is at least as arresting as Bloom's rhetoric of strength, that he should frame his recognition of the privileged status of literature as an insight brought home to the `unwilling' company of literary scholars, himself included, who are now, at the time of writing just

`advanced

beyond

Â' Èvete naõ

intellectual

and

The Unmediated Vision

find

themselves

(1954), only

`forced

to

consider

literature as more than an organic creation, a social pastime, a religious trope, an emotional outlet, a flower of civilization, more even than an exemplary stage for ideal probabilities' (1954, x). More than all of this, literature stands revealed as `a moral force in its own right, an institution with its own laws, and, incipiently, a distinctive form of knowledge' (1954, x). In the `hard labor' of pursuing this recognition of `literature as a distinctive mode of knowledge in which the processes, or, better, the desires of the human mind find their clearest expression' (1954, xi), Hartman envisages the possibility of a universal `method of interpretation which could reaffirm the radical unity of human knowledge' (1954, x) ± a method, in short, which would transcend the parochial status of the mere `approach' ± , though

his

engagement

actual with

readings the

here

workings

and

of

elsewhere,

the

especially

`consciousness

of

his

long

and

consciousness'

complicated

in

the

poetry

of Wordsworth (1971, xii), remain marked by the hesitations and qualifications of the arch( - )interpreter ultimately unwilling to abandon literature to the unity he nonetheless invokes,

and

of

the

literary

scholar

who

constantly

seeks

to

retune

his

reading

by

confronting it with alternative `approaches' current at the time. Like Bloom, Hartman registers his reservations concerning the limitations of structuralism, both in its European and in its Anglo-American forms (notably Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism), but, like de Man, he is more usefully ready to recognize the critical potential of these limitations (see,

for

example,

Hartman

1970,

3±23).

Similarly,

in

his

strategic

play-off

between

`formalism' and `critical intuition', he proposes to rescue formalism from its commodification as `puerile' `explication-centred criticism' under the `dominion of Exegesis' rather than dismiss it altogether (1970, 56±7). Like

his

later

Yale

colleagues,

J.

Hillis

Miller

also

begins

his

critical

career

with

predominantly monographical arguments intent on disclosing the characteristic workings of individual literary minds. He differs from them, however, in devoting more attention to narrative fiction and to Victorian authors, pursuing the `spiritual history' (1965, vii) of a development beyond romanticism through nihilism. His theoretical alliances at that time are

primarily

Starobinski intimate the

with

being

the the

identification

Preface

to

his

Geneva

pivotal with

1963

School,

figures)

their

study

whose

practice

literary

a

object.

members

(Georges

criticism

of

Poulet

and

consciousness

As Miller programmatically

The Disappearance of God

,

`If

literature

is

Jean

based

a

on

states

in

form

of

consciousness the task of the critic is to identify himself with the subjectivity expressed in the words, to relive that life from the inside, and to constitute it anew in his criticism'

modern north american criticism and theory

44

(1965, ix). At a 1965 Yale symposium on literary criticism where de Man and Hartman also delivered papers, Miller found himself called upon to confront this critical principle, which presupposes a maximum access to the presence of consciousness at the heart of literature, with recent alternatives in European criticism challenging this metaphysics of presence (Miller 1966), and by 1970 a clear choice between Poulet and Derrida's interrogation of `consciousness as the will to language within its presence to itself' seemed inevitable: `A critic must choose either the tradition of ``presence'' or the tradition of ``difference'', for their assumptions about language, about literature, about history, and about the mind cannot be made compatible' (Miller 1970, 223). Except, it seems, in a recognition of the `failure' of Poulet's criticism (and, by implication, Miller's own earlier work) as itself a partly unwitting exercise in what Derrida calls the `rigorous reading of metaphysics' (223). The failure of criticism would then be its rigorous recovery of the `experience of failure' as `the central movement of literature' itself (224): its naming and renaming of `the failure of the mind ever to coincide with its point of origin' (225). The often desperate privilege accorded to literature in the first stages of these four critical careers

never

considerable

disappears

from

modifications

in

the the

work late

of

the

1960s

Yale

and

Critics,

early

though

1970s,

a

it

period

does in

undergo

which

the

future Yale Critics also begin to emerge as an alliance. This emergence can partly be derived from the fact that they publish alongside each other in new journals like Johns Hopkins's review of contemporary criticism

diacritics

, which features de Man and Miller in

its advisory board, but the more decisive formative factors are arguably Miller's repeated attempts throughout the 1970s to articulate the incipient connections between his own work and that of Derrida and de Man in the context of contemporary American criticism. The connections to Bloom and Hartman are less forcefully established, but their work too develops new emphases approaching those highlighted by Miller and de Man. De Man's retrospective recognition of a movement away from `the thematic vocabulary of consciousness and of temporality' towards a `rhetorical terminology' in his seminal 1969 essay

`The

Rhetoric

of

Temporality'

(1983,

xii)

offers

a

convenient

(and

therefore

admittedly also somewhat insensitive) frame for these emphases. Notwithstanding their lasting differences, Bloom, de Man, Hartman and Miller all articulate more explicitly the problematic linguistic constitution of the literature they continue to uphold as a distinctive discursive

mode.

One

way

to

investigate

that

linguistic

constitution

is

by

recognizing

literature as text, forbiddingly codified by de Man, in a 1975 essay on Nietzsche later republished in his most sustained collection

Allegories of Reading

, as an undecidable construct

that `allows for two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view, and therefore puts an insurmountable obstacle in the way of any reading or understanding' (1979, 131). From this perspective, the privilege of literature is bracketed by dint of its unreadability, yet, importantly, the privilege survives, with literature now `condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man

names

and

transforms

himself'

(1979,

19).

This

notion

of

a

critically

unreliable

linguistic naming and transforming effectively brings about a crisis in the earlier emphasis on literary consciousness and (its) history, while at the same time preserving that emphasis in an alternative hermeneutics open to the challenge of Derridean deconstruction, itself fuelled by the recovery of differential unreliability within logocentrism. The practice of reading then becomes the critical tracing of the experience of the undecidable which both informs and unforms

interpretation,

and

the

pursuit

of

language's

`rhetorical,

figural

(`literature itself') (de Man 1979, 10) is one strategy to perform this tracing.

potentiality'

the yale critics?

45

If that, as they say, is the theory,

Deconstruction and Criticism

is a record of the resistance

of the practice of reading to the theoretical programme with which it is associated. In his preface to the volume, Hartman seeks to identify the alliance between `the critics amicably if not quite convincingly held together by the covers of this book' (Bloom et al. 1979, ix) in terms of `a shared set of problems': the question as to `what kind of maturer function' criticism `may claim . . . beyond the obviously academic or pedagogical', and the question as to `the importance ± or

force

± of literature' (Bloom et al. 1979, vii). Both questions are

clearly related: if the force of literature involves `the priority of language to meaning', the `excess' of `figurative language' over `any assigned meaning' (Bloom et al. 1979, vii), then the function of the criticism reading this literature will depend on its response to this excess. For Hartman, this appears to generate a distinction between Derrida, de Man and Miller on the one hand, and Bloom and Hartman himself on the other: the former are gently caricatured as `boa-deconstructors' mercilessly revelling in the repeated disclosure of the `pathos' of literary language as only ever a thin membrane covering `the ``abysm'' of words'; while the latter ± `barely deconstructionists' ± retain a special commitment to the `persistence' and the `psychological provenance' of this pathos (Bloom et al. 1979, ix). In Bloom's contribution, this pathos is celebrated as `the will to utter permanent truths of desire, and to utter these

within

a tradition of utterance' as manifested by `strong poems'

which refuse to be treated `merely as a formal and linguistic structure', as is the case, according to Bloom, in all rhetorical criticism `even of the advanced deconstructive kind' (Bloom et al. 1979, 20). The function of criticism is to oppose `the abysses of Deconstruction's ironies' by championing the strong poetry `that will not abandon the self to language' (Bloom et al. 1979, 37). Bloom acknowledges an affinity between his conception of texts as the `interplay of differences' and that of his `legitimate rival[s]' Derrida and de Man (Bloom et al. 1979, 13±14), but insists on the foundation of that interplay in the `narcissistic self-regard' (16) of the aggressive and historically situated self articulated in the achieved anxiety of literature which the alert reader must engage in combat. Where Bloom measures

his

appreciative

distance of

the

from

deconstruction

`significant

difference

as

a

veritable

between

lord

of

language

Anglo-American

poetic

properly tradition,

and the much weaker French and German poetic tradition' (Bloom et al. 1979, 13) ± a difference he reads as somehow explaining deconstruction's damaging blindness to the strong

historical

self

of

literature

±

Hartman

maintains

his

reserved

pose

and

`simply'

proposes an extremely complex reading of a Wordsworth poem as if nothing much had happened.

Yet

his

subtle

unfoldings

of

the

latent

undecidability

in

that

genuinely

Wordsworthian word `fit' (Bloom et al. 1979, 209) suggest the workings of his acknowledged awareness of deconstruction's untimely utterances. In Miller's contribution, `The Critic as Host', that awareness is voiced with an almost apostolic assertiveness matching Bloom's agonistic pathos. An earlier version of the piece had appeared in 1977

as

one

of

Miller's

fairly

regular

attempts

deconstructive company in America, and in

to

explicitly

claim

Deconstruction and Criticism

Critical Inquiry ground

for

in

the

Miller's expanded

essay is easily the most programmatic contribution, identifying the `extreme interpretation' of `deconstruction' as interpretation itself finally come into its own ± `interpretation as such' ± and culminating in the triumphant `ultimate justification for this mode of criticism' which is `that it works' (Bloom et al. 1979, 231±2, 252). As Miller also concedes, this is the ultimate

justification

for

any

conceivable

instructive to juxtapose his readings in

of Reality

mode

of

criticism,

and

in

this

respect

The Disappearance of God The Linguistic Moment

with the readings collected in his 1985 volume

and its 1965 sequel

it

is

Poets

: early and

modern north american criticism and theory

46

late,

Miller's

reading

genuinely

works,

even

to

the

point

that

it

survives

the

nagging

suspicion that this lasting success must involve a measure of theoretical failure. Miller's slightly shrill and self-consciously serpentine but strategically enabling corporate rhetoric in

Deconstruction and Criticism

stands in sharp contrast to de Man's saturnine reading of

The Triumph of Life

Shelley's unfinished long poem

: de Man's is the only piece in the

collection that does not explicitly address the shape of deconstruction at all, focusing instead on the `Shape all light' in Shelley's text whose radical unreadability simultaneously feeds and starves the hermeneutico-archaeological desire to establish meaningful relationships allowing us `to inhabit the world' (Bloom et al. 1979, 40). As Hartman points out in the preface, an `earlier scheme' for the collection had been `to acknowledge the importance of Romantic poetry directly, by focusing all contributions on [Shelley]', but as it happens only de Man has rigorously observed that scheme. Bloom ± the only one of the Yale Critics who frequently engages with contemporary literature ± devotes a large part of his piece to John Ashberry; Hartman pursues his admirably interminable interpretation of Wordsworth; Derrida memorably avoids Shelley, primarily by reading him into Blanchot; Miller, as he had promised in the original version of his piece, programmatically uses the `example' of Shelley's

Triumph of Life

to demonstrate the merits of

deconstruction in revealing `hitherto unidentified meanings and ways of having meaning in major literary texts' (Bloom et al. 1979, 252); de Man stubbornly and single-mindedly

reads

Shelley's

`historically frustratingly, the

rigor

`disfiguration'

more is

reliable

not

exhibited

to by

be

as

a

than

resistance

the

products

reproduced

Shelley

into

which

is

`a

to

`historicism'

of

historical

method

exemplary

of

which,

paradoxically,

archaeology',

reading',

precisely

lest

because

we it

but

`regress refuses

is

which, from to

be

generalized into a system' (Bloom et al. 1979, 69). In a somewhat trivial sense, the `Yale Critics' as a collective may be said to have observed this refusal of systematic methodization inscribed in their non-manifesto, for the Yale School

largely

remained

a

phantom

formation,

randomly

held

together

only

by

its

members' sheer commitment to the task of reading literature as a singularly other mode of discourse. Nonetheless, this commitment proved to be remarkably productive as a point of reference in the institutional developments of literary scholarship, primarily perhaps in the sense that Yale's phantom formation became a privileged target for widely divergent critical objections. Three large groups may be distinguished in this resistance. Proponents of a more traditional conception of the literary humanities grudgingly acknowledged the Yale Critics' commitment to canonical literature but deplored the putative nihilism of this commitment, as well as what

was perceived as a perverse blurring of the hierarchical

distinction between literature and `mere' criticism attendant on the self-reflexive scrutiny of the act of reading itself. Politically contestatory representatives of what can loosely be called the left opposed precisely the commitment to the (dead, white, male) canon itself and castigated the Yale School as an essentially conservative or even reactionary body diverting critical challenges to the status quo. In the course of the late 1970s and 1980s, this critique of the Yale School was a rallying issue in the development of feminist and more and

generally

new

gender-centred

historicist

research,

reading,

all

of

postcolonial

which

studies,

established

(post-)marxist

various

footholds

in

scholarship the

newly

emerging disciplinary formation of cultural studies. At the same time, however, numerous participants in these alternative critical formations have found considerable support in the Yale Critics' writings and in work produced by scholars associated with or influenced by them such as Gayatri Spivak, Shoshana Felman, Fredric Jameson and Barbara Johnson ±

the yale critics?

47

traces of this Yale dissemination are acknowledged in the work of, for instance, Stephen Greenblatt, Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha. A third and sometimes related strand of opposition to the Yale School specifically targeted its alleged abuse of Derridean deconstruction: here, the very preoccupation with literature as such was diagnosed as generating a disabling deflection of the radically political institutional charge of Derrida's thought (Ryan 1982) or as screening an intellectual incompetence or unwillingness to properly  1979; but see also Attridge appreciate deconstruction's philosophical credentials (Gasche 1992 for an excellent reflection on the `haunting' of literature in Derrida's own work). The death of de Man in 1983, followed by Miller's move to the University of California at Irvine in 1986, brought the decade or so of Yale Criticism to an appropriately arbitrary end. The heated debate occasioned by the 1987 publicization of de Man's contributions to the German-controlled press during the early years of the occupation of his native Belgium consolidated rather than decisively altered existing critical attitudes, both dismissive and appreciative, towards his later work, though it did lead to a more focused concern for the ethical charges of that work (which had already been foregrounded in Miller's 1986 book

The Ethics of Reading

) and for the historico-ideological thrust of de Manian deconstruction,

which he had been articulating more closely in his final years. The essays now published as

Aesthetic Ideology The Resistance to Theory (1996)

by

his

disciple

collected in

Andrzej

(1992) and

Warminski,

together

with

The Rhetoric of Romanticism

the

essays

(1994) remain

impressive testimony to his stubborn but erratic recognition of the literary imperative: literature's demand to be read as a language irreducible to yet of crucial import for the discourses of politics, ethics and philosophy. The critical careers of Bloom, Miller and Hartman have also observed this imperative in their widely different ways. Bloom's 1994 best-selling the

The Western Canon

Greatness

of

Strength

in

monumentalizes its author as a strong prophet proclaiming the

wilderness

wrought

by

`the

Balkanization

of

literary

studies' (483) at the hands of the members of the `School of Resentment', including the `Deconstructionists' (492). Bloom remains a formidable figure in contemporary literary scholarship,

partly

as

a

result

of

his

massive

self-performances

in

the

rhetoric

of

the

formidable, but also on account of the sheer volume of his output, including his valuable work as editor for Chelsea House's under-achieved

anxiety

Modern Critical Interpretations

of his writing threatens

to forfeit

series. Yet the increasingly

the patient reading

he does

deserve. Doubtlessly, such a reading would have to involve the influence of the figure of patient reading himself, Geoffrey Hartman, whose own reading has gradually become more explicitly preoccupied with the question of culture in the aftermath of the Holocaust (he is a founder and, since 1981, the project director of Yale's Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies) and in the contemporary context of increasingly aggressive politics of cultural identity, leading him to call for a restoration of `literature's specificity as a focus for thinking about culture and as a force that challenges a monolithic or complacent culturalism' (1997, 2). An important aspect of that restoration is his at times exorbitant defence of literature as a medium for the representation of trauma, as witness for instance his suggestion that Wordsworth's specific poetic modulation of the traumatic transition from a rural to an industrial society around the turn of the eighteenth century `saved English politics from the virulence of a nostalgic political ideal centring on rural virtues, which led to serious ravages on the continent' (1997, 7) ± a proposal that seems ultimately more productively erratic than Bloom's eccentric tome-thumping thunders. Like Bloom, Hartman has continued to measure his distance from deconstruction, though he remains characteristically unsure about the extent and nature of that distance. Miller, on the other hand, and unsurprisingly,

modern north american criticism and theory

48

has lived up to his profile as deconstruction's closest advocate, defending its legacy both in his

literary-critical

writing

institutional

policy.

In

book-length

combination

and

`The of

in

his

Excess

of

numerous

contributions

Reading',

institutional

the

reflection

coda

and

to

of

debates

concerning

Black Holes, his 1999

literary

criticism

which

joins

covers with Manuel Asensi's monographic study of Miller's entire work, that defence is still the defence of literature as a discourse rather than anything else, except the reading of literature is `exemplary' of the encounter with otherness as such: reading `is exemplary of the aporias of the ethico-political situation in which we all live' (Asensi and Miller 1999, 491).

The

mechanical

memorializing their

extension

exemplary

of

this

trope

commitment

into

to the

an

epitaph

for

the

privileged exemplarity

Yale

Critics

of literature

remains to be read.

Ortwin de Graef

Further reading and works cited Arac, J. et al. (eds) Ð.

The Yale Critics. Minneapolis, MN, 1983.

Critical Genealogies. New York, 1987.

Asensi, M. and Miller, J. Hillis.

J. Hillis Miller or, Boustrophedonic Reading/Black Holes . Stanford, CA,

1999. Attridge, D. `Introduction: Derrida and the Question of Literature', in J. Derrida,

Acts of Literature, ed.

D. Attridge. New York, 1992. Berman, A. Ð et al.

From the New Criticism to Deconstruction . Urbana, IL, 1988.

Deconstruction and Criticism. New York, 1979.

Ð Bloom, H.

The Visionary Company. Ithaca, NY, 1971a.

Ð.

The Ringers in the Tower. Chicago, 1971b.

Ð.

The Anxiety of Influence. New York, 1973.

Caruth, C. and Esch, D. (eds)

Critical Encounters. New Brunswick, NJ, 1995.

Davis, R. C. and Schleifer, R.

Rhetoric and Form. Norman, OK, 1985.

de Bolla, P.

Harold Bloom. London, 1988.

de Graef, O.

Titanic Light. Lincoln, NE, 1995.

de Man, P. `The Crisis of Contemporary Criticism',

Arion, 6, 11, 1967.

Ð.

Allegories of Reading. New Haven, CT, 1979.

Ð.

Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis, MN, 1983.

Ð.

The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis, MN, 1992.

Ð.

The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York, 1994.

Ð.

Aesthetic Ideology, ed. and intro. A. Warminski. Minneapolis, MN, 1996.

Derrida, J.

 criture et la difference. Paris, 1967. L'e

Elam, H. R. (ed.) Felperin, H.

Essays in Honour of Geoffrey H. Hartman. Studies in Romanticism , 35, 4, 1996.

Beyond Deconstruction. Oxford, 1985.

 , R. `Deconstruction as Criticism', Gasche Hartman, G. H. Ð.

Glyph, 6, 1979.

The Unmediated Vision. New Haven, CT, 1954.

Beyond Formalism. New Haven, CT, 1970.

Ð.

Wordsworth's Poetry 1787±1814. New Haven, CT, 1971.

Ð.

The Fateful Question of Culture. New York, 1997.

Miller, J. Hillis.

The Disappearance of God. New York, 1965.

Ð. `The Antitheses of Criticism',

MLN, 81, 5, 1966.

Ð. `Geneva or Paris? The Recent Work of Georges Poulet', 1970.

University of Toronto Quarterly, 39, 3,

deconstruction in america Ð.

49

The Ethics of Reading Marxism and Deconstruction Reading de Man Reading . New York, 1986.

Ryan, M.

. Baltimore, MD, 1982.

Waters, L. and Godzich, W. (eds)

. Minneapolis, MN, 1989.

8. Deconstruction in America

In 1987 Ortwin de Graef announced the discovery of scores of articles written by the young Paul de Man for collaborationist journals in occupied Belgium between 1940 and 1942. This discovery considerably complicated the fortunes of deconstruction in the United States, but also had the virtue of clarifying an intellectual atmosphere that had become somewhat hazy in the previous years, certainly since the death of de Man in 1983. De Man was the principle expositor of deconstruction in the United States, and if Derrida was better known throughout the country, de Man's local presence (at Yale and therefore at schools whose faculty included a substantial number of Yale-trained teachers) guaranteed that his thought and methods would be highly influential to the thinking of a small but elite class of theoretical expositors. De Man was responsible for bringing Derrida to Yale as a

yearly visitor, and

in large

part

contributed

to

the

American

reception

of

Derrida's

thinking, and in particular to the widespread interest in deconstruction in a literary rather than a philosophical context. Not

that

this

interest

was

anti-philosophical.

Rather

deconstruction

in

the

United

States is a strange and interesting hybrid, a kind of imaginary enterprise that made possible an

intellectual

adventure

which

could

never

take

place

elsewhere.

Deconstruction

as

practised at Yale by de Man and Derrida introduced a philosophical vocabulary to students of literature ± especially a vocabulary derived from continental philosophy ± that tended to be foreign to the study of literature in the United States. W. K. Wimsatt, it is true, wrote powerfully and penetratingly about Hegel, and Wimsatt's and Monroe Beardsley's seminal article on `The Intentional Fallacy' set the philosophical tone for one version of the New Criticism, but the European philosophy important to most American students of literature tended in the 1960s to be restricted to somewhat potted versions of Sartre, himself taken to task by Heidegger (one of the centrally proclaimed forerunners of deconstruction) in his polemical `Letter on Humanism' against Sartre's `Existentialism is a Humanism'. Deconstruction has tended to be much more interested in Heidegger than in Sartre, but this interest has been largely critical. Heidegger (following Nietzsche, and in a way analogous to Freud who also followed Nietzsche) is regarded as having set the right agenda, as having asked the right questions and probed them deeply but as having become waylaid by an ontology that intensifies and symptomatizes the `metaphysics of presence' it attempts to dismantle.

Heidegger's

highly

idealizing

or

metaphysical

view

of

language

becomes

changed in deconstruction by an emphasis on Saussurean linguistics, and that emphasis, combined with the French critiques of Heidegger by Emmanuel Levinas and by Maurice Blanchot are the major ancestors of deconstruction proper. Deconstruction increased

came

attention

to

there

the

to

United

States

continental,

in

mainly

the

mid-1960s

French,

at

interest

the

in

beginning

the

relation

of of

modern north american criticism and theory

50

language to psychological and cultural life. That attention has its sources in American interest in Sartre and also Merleau-Ponty (Lacan's teacher), and in New Wave French film-making

as

well,

in

particular

in

Jean-Luc

Godard,

himself

much

influenced

by

contemporary French philosophy: Brice Parain, important to Gilles Deleuze, appears in one of Godard's movies, as himself; it also has sources in New Critical interest in linguistic theory, in particular in Roman Jakobson and the figures who line up with him: in France Ferdinand de Saussure and Emile Benveniste. Saussure's linguistic theory and its expansion and

inversion

by

 vi-Strauss's Le

structuralist

project,

and

Jacques

Lacan's

Saussurean

reconceptualization of Freudian psychoanalysis, made for an incipient intellectual climate in

the

United

States

that

was

friendly

to

structuralism

and

poststructuralism,

and

deconstruction was received as a similarly vigorous and daring exposition of non-humanistic structures of human thought, agency and subjectivity. Derrida's version of deconstruction was itself profoundly influenced by psychoanalytic ways of thinking, in particular by the idea that repression is constitutive of mental phenomena and mental life, which is to say is constitutive of signifying phenomena and signifying life. The things that the mind thought about, and in particular the things that it regarded as central ± subjectivity, being, presence, spirit ± were all differentially erected through the repression of the fact and structure of their internal tensions; and this differential constitution was analogous to Saussure's account of the elements of language ± difference without positive terms. De Man was far less interested in psychoanalytic modes of thinking. For him literature provided the unnerving alterity that Derrida and Lacan ascribed to language and to the instabilities of language. De Man here was following in the footsteps of Blanchot, the great French philosopher, critic and novelist (a strong influence on Derrida as well, somewhat less strong on Lacan), who wrote of literary space as the space other to all worlds, strange and proximate but in a proximity without presence: for Blanchot this characterizes love as well, and his fictional work treats love much as his critical work treats literature: as the place of an otherness that haunts all settled nativity in the world. (Geoffrey Hartman had helped introduce Blanchot to an American readership in 1961.) De Man does not write about love, but he does write about the severe power of literature to unsettle system and certitude, and to expose its readers to an experience of power and alienation different from the ordinary business of the world, and not a commentary upon it. De Man won a fit and fairly large audience through a combination of sheer intellectual power and great personal charisma. In many ways he might be compared to Leo Strauss (although their political views were largely anathema to each other): an extraordinarily charismatic

teacher

whose

pedagogy

took

the

form

of

discerning

hidden

meanings

in

literary and philosophical texts, meanings that were hidden because of the radical danger they presented to dominant ideology. De Man's first book was

Blindness and Insight

(1971),

and in that book he offers lucid and powerful critiques not of literary but of critical texts, texts that in various ways are blind to the fact that their own best insights were anticipated and forestalled by the works in relation to which they offer them. De Man is often accused, with his Yale colleagues, of asserting the equality of criticism and the literature that it takes as its object, but where Hartman actually does come close to saying these sorts of things, and Harold Bloom does assert a continuity and partial identity between strong reading or misreading and strong writing, de Man in fact asserts very nearly the opposite doctrine. His canon,

though

Wordsworth,

small,

Keats,

is

very

close

 Mallarme

overwhelming as to force

all

to

sacred:

challenge

Shelley,

their

Pascal,

readers

them into evasive strategies

Rousseau,

with

a

Kleist,

cognitive

of aestheticization

Kant,

power

(as de

so

Man,

deconstruction in america

51

following Walter Benjamin, calls it). De Man might seem close to Hartman and Bloom in his sense of the difficulty and rarity of adequate `reading': the term already sacralized by Bloom becomes in de Man almost apotheosized as the province of an extremely select elite who could confront what was actually going on in a work. And de Man's extreme elitism applies as well to literary works, so that it's not hard to find him condescending to a wide range of literature, from Pope to Schiller, that doesn't meet his cognitive demands. This is the reason he has been mistaken as a relativist as to literary `standards', whereas in fact he is an

absolutist

so

uncompromising

that

most

canonical

literature

fails

to

meet

those

standards. But those that do are for him beyond praise as they are also beyond argument or subversion. Derridean deconstruction seeks the hidden fault lines and repressions by which a writer or text founds its illusory presence or meaning; de Man is interested not in textual or writerly evasions, but in those practised by readers confronted with literary works. He is concerned not with deconstructing works of literature but with showing how such works deconstruct themselves, or the assumptions readers bring to them, or the wishfulfilment that characterizes all our relationships with others. The similarity between Derrida and de Man is in the very high premium that they put on what they variously call `writing'. But for Derrida writing means a practice of

diffeÂrance,

something that any particular text struggles to repress in order to come into being and to establish itself as meaning and presence. Texts for Derrida tend to be examples of writing despite themselves, despite their wish and will to function as presence. In de Man the archiwriting that Derrida reads his authors as all evading is what

readers evade in confrontation with

the rare but rigorous works which instantiate it. For this reason de Man is profoundly suspicious of and studiously uninterested in psychoanalytic language or methods of reading which seek to discover anxiety within a work. Derrida is an analyst of constitutive repressions, whereas de Man focuses on the things that works say, not the things they evade or flee. Both Derrida and de Man derive many of their ideas from Blanchot, so that it is not surprising to see strong affiliations as well as strong differences. The strongest difference would be in the privilege that de Man accords to literature and literary texts (which also embrace

a

certain

symptomatic,

order

of

philosophical

de Man his own as

apodictic.

work).

Derrida

reads

his

central

texts

as

The results of this difference in the adventures

of literary theory in the United States are complex, often unexpected and not particularly deterministic, but certain general remarks can be made. Many of de Man's students and some of his colleagues sought to combine his emphasis on rhetorical criticism with the psychoanalytic proclivities of Derridean deconstruction. The tension between Derrida and de Man is a fruitful one (and their friendship was a deep one), and attempts to resolve that tension remain fruitful. Cynthia Chase, steeped in de Manian ideas, nevertheless is a profound reader of Freud, and exemplifies one virtue of the respect that de Man taught with regard to major textual events (as he called them): unlike Derrida she is less interested in demystifying Freud than in getting the most hidden and unnerving aspects of his writing right, instead of assimilating them to received wisdom. Many of de Man's students and followers remain deeply committed to a psychoanalytic methodology, variously Freudian, Lacanian or Kleinian (as in recent work by Barbara Johnson). Others have stressed his interest in a conceptualization of disruption embodied and represented with and in the other, and have extended these ideas (under the strong influence

of

Blanchot

and

his

friend

Levinas,

the

French

philosopher

and

Derrida's

teacher) to work on trauma and on the witnessing of trauma, for example Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Thomas Keenan.

modern north american criticism and theory

52

The general result of the kinds of psychoanalytic thinking that seems most consistent with de Man was an orientation of this thinking away from the text under analysis to its audience, and the more recent ascendancy of the new historicism, with its talk of cultural anxieties

and

aesthetic

hegemony

also

finds

in

de

Manian

deconstruction

an

often

unacknowledged ancestor, unacknowledged because de Man's philosophical and frankly anti-historical bent is something that the new historicism seeks to counter. But its methods are often de Manian as well as Foucauldian, at least in their origin, particularly to the extent that they overemphasize the political influence and efficacy of literary texts and of ways of reading literary texts. Here the influence might be traced through the arrival of some Yale-educated critics at Berkeley, where they encountered Foucault (also an acolyte of Blanchot's) and combined de Manian sensitivities to literature with a Foucauldian idea of culture. In particular Stephen Greenblatt, D. A. Miller and Walter Benn Michaels, were at the centre of this development, and Greenblatt and Michaels had also been involved with and published in the Johns Hopkins journal

diacritics

Glyph

which had been (with Cornell's

) the central American organs of deconstruction. De Man himself had been a

highly influential presence first at Cornell and then at Hopkins before arriving at Yale in 1971, and his influence continued to tell at those institutions. Other figures in whom to trace the movement and cohabitation of a broadly deconstructive orientation to a cultural studies, new historicist, cultural materialist, feminist, queer theoretical or more broadly hegemonic and counter-hegemonic analysis include Alan Liu, in particular his work on Wordsworth, Gayatri Spivak, de Man's student and Derrida's translator, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jonathan Goldberg and J. Hillis Miller (de Man's Yale colleague). At Cornell, Neil Hertz ought to be singled out as the most important colleague of de Man's

in

this

context.

Hertz

(who

has

since

gone

to

Hopkins)

has

done

the

most

important readings of Freud and of the literature of the sublime central to de Man's later work, as well as of de Man himself. Hertz reads Freud as de Man might have, as operating with an idea about the uncanniness of literary power that he both approaches and avoids but that when applied to Freud himself becomes particularly vivid and powerful and that brings Freud into promising and powerful juxtaposition to Kant's analysis of the sublime. That

reading

of

Freud

and

of

Kant

is

one

in

which

what

has

seemed

too

central

a

Freudian insight ± the fundamental developmental status of the Oedipus complex ± turns out in Hertz's reading to be an evasion of a more uncanny, less appropriable agency, which might be inadequately designated as `the agency of the letter' (Lacan), `repetition' (Deleuze), `the sheer arbitrary power of language' (de Man), `alterity' (Levinas), `literary space' (Blanchot) or the `impossible' or `transgressive' (Georges Bataille). All of these are partial, all of them evasive ± just because in one way or another melodramatic, for Hertz, but what he is persistently and indefatigable alert to are echoes of this spookiness in literary works, a spookiness partly spooky because it has no designs on us and yet is not to be put by. Even the most telling critiques of de Man, by Hertz (who admires him) and by John Guillory, concede the force and power of his writing. Guillory is more interested in the ways that de Man's students and followers have tended to find a doctrine within a set of brilliant

readings

doctrinalism.

and

Guillory

aperc Ë us, is

and

strongly

he

has

influenced

analysed

the

by

Weber

Max

academic and

by

sociology Pierre

of

this

Bourdieu,

but that influence itself comes out of interests that de Man was the most imposing teacher of. Guillory's central opposition of Bourdieu to de Man plays out as a critique of the kind of canonicity that de Man (like Strauss) turns out to defend, as we shall remark below.

deconstruction in america

53

By an irony that de Man would have relished both his centrality and the evasion of that centrality to American literary theory in the last fifteen years or so has been catalysed by the scandal of his wartime writing. Hertz, Keenan and Werner Hamacher collected that writing in a volume whose companion was a volume of responses to the discovery of that journalism. Those responses range from invective to strong defences of de Man, and as with the notorious Sokal hoax the strongest defences, including Derrida's, had the unfortunate effect of helping to discredit deconstruction in the United States, despite the fact that its ways of thinking continue to be highly influential. (Indeed it also had something of an antithetical effect as well: fair-minded critics like Denis Donoghue who read through de Man's later work in the wake of the scandal were much more impressed by it than they expected to be, and increased attention to that work could only be salutary.) Perhaps the most pronounced effect overall was the not entirely strange reversal which reduced the small but absolute canon that American deconstruction established to no canon at all in the practice of much of the new historicism. There are two reasons for this: deconstructive scepticism about the value and politics of humanistic culture (a scepticism derivable from Nietzsche through Heidegger) finds an echo in new historicist accounts of how

cultural

artefacts

function

in

the

discursive

matrix established

by

power

and

the

organization of knowledge, but without the deconstructive sense that literature escapes reduction to this matrix; and the discovery that de Man himself had feet of clay (and less invidiously that some of his analyses don't withstand the test of time) means that the canonical figure of de Man himself became an example of the reasons that one ought to be sceptical of canon-formation. Nevertheless

deconstruction,

like

Foucauldian

(and

even

Bloomian)

criticism,

con-

tinues to have an enormous influence on critical thinking. These modes of criticism have such an effect because

the unlikely and somewhat unrigorous ideas they deploy mesh

extremely well with the literary vocation that attracts people to the study of literature to begin with. (This may change through its own dialectic: at least in a sardonic introduction to an issue of

Studies in Romanticism

that he edited and which contained essays mainly by

his own students, de Man himself suggested, in a tone of elaborate and deadpan praise, that their attraction to literary theory was far less literary than his own had been. On the other hand, critics like Sedgwick, Guillory and Lee Edelman have sought to return the centrality of

pleasure

to the analysis of literature.) As with Strauss, literature turns out in decon-

structive (and Foucauldian) analyses to be about things as fantastic and wonderful and strange as we originally believed in our archaic, childhood response to it. Kant, Shelley, Keats

were

involved

with

utterly

foundational

struggles

within

a

Manichean

world.

Literary and philosophical figures really were heroes of a fundamental and cosmic or at least

ontological

struggle

for

the

very

Shelley's actual body is inscribed in

existence

of

meaning.

The Triumph of Life

When

de

Man

says

that

, or that texts masquerade as wars,

 vi-Strauss's anthropology as being itself an actual creation story and when Derrida reads Le not just an account of one, it feels as if we have entered a mythic realm, the place where philosophy mythic

and

stature.

literature, Our

souls

or

philosophical

take

a

proud

literature

flight

in

and

literary

participating

in

philosophy, this

story.

take

The

on

new

historicism similarly and taking its cue from deconstruction provides a kind of magic realist Âa Ma  rquez and not of, say, account of history, so that we're in the realm of Gabriel Garcõ Christopher Hill. As in Strauss, intellectual figures turn out to be engaged in giant struggles that engage us still, that we participate in by reading their work properly. The most explicit and most canny version of this paradigm is in Bloom, who in his accounts of the life and

modern north american criticism and theory

54

death struggles of strong poets with their precursors makes all poetry into an exciting and mythical agon. But here Bloom is representative of the spirit of his times, and the very resentment he provokes (and encourages) in his fellow-theorists derives from the openness with which he mythologizes a struggle that they wish to believe is real. I

say

this

not

out

of

the

desire

to

demystify

or

deflate

the

pretensions

of

(broadly

speaking) deconstructive literary theory. Its salubrious effects have been far greater than its drawbacks:

literary

critics

are

on

the

whole

far

more

alert,

serious,

philosophical

and

intellectually engaged than they have been. That this should come with drawbacks ± newer pieties, sloppy thinking, risks of intolerance and resentment, and complacency ± is not surprising, and these deficits are no worse than they ever were among critics. And it should be said of deconstruction what is also true of Freud, that it invented a new adventure story, a new and exciting literary experience, which may be judged somewhat harshly as sober analysis, but must be praised highly as a literary enterprise that continues to grip people's imaginations.

William Flesch

Further reading and works cited Bloom, H. et al.

Deconstruction and Criticism.

Ð and Esch, D.

Critical Encounters.

Decomposing Figures.

Chase, C.

On Deconstruction.

Culler, J.

Ð (ed. and pref.)

Blindness and Insight.

Ð.

Rhetoric of Romanticism.

Ð.

Resistance to Theory.

Ð.

Wartime Journalism.

Ð.

Aesthetic Ideology.

Ð and Laub, D.

Guillory, J.

Lincoln, NE, 1989.

Minneapolis, MN, 1996.

Testimony.

Cultural Capital.

New York, 1985.

Lincoln, NE, 1989

The Critical Difference.

Quinney, L. Shaviro, S.

New York, 1990.

New York, 1993.

Fables of Responsibility.

Keenan, T.

trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. New York, 1986.

Ithaca, NY, 1983.

New York, 1992.

The End of the Line.

Johnson, B.

Wall, T.

New York, 1984.

Minneapolis, MN, 1986.

Learning to Curse.

Responses.

18, Winter 1979b.

Minneapolis, MN, 1983.

The Literary Speech Act.

Greenblatt, S.

Ð et al.

New Haven, CT, 1979a.

Memoires: For Paul de Man,

Felman, S.

Hertz, N.

Baltimore, MD, 1986.

Studies in Romanticism,

Ð.

Baltimore, MD, 1991.

New Brunswick, NJ, 1995.

New York, 1983.

Allegories of Reading.

de Man, P.

Derrida, J.

New York, 1979.

Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions.

Caruth, C.

Baltimore, MD, 1980. Stanford, CA, 1997.

Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth.

Passion and Excess.

Radical Passivity.

Gainesville, FL, 1995.

Gainesville, FL, 1990.

Albany, NY, 1999.

Waters, L. and Godzich, W. (ed.)

Reading de Man Reading.

Minneapolis, MN, 1989.

9. Fredric Jameson (1934±) and Marxist Literary and Cultural Criticism

More than anything, misreadings of Fredric Jameson's work testify to the remarkable range and

variety

of

elements

forming

his

intellectual

background

and

theoretical

method.

 csian, an Althusserian, a structuralist and a Variously characterized as a Hegelian, a Luka postmodernist, Jameson in fact draws on all of these thinkers and intellectual traditions without being reducible to any single one of them. Indeed, his work is best represented as an amalgam of marxist and non-marxist thought that exceeds any individual label at the Á -vis its object of study. same time that it resists recourse to a moralizing position vis-a Perhaps this latter fact more than any other accounts for the numerous misreadings of his work (the debate, for instance, over whether Jameson celebrates or criticizes postmodernism) and simultaneously highlights its singularity. As Jameson himself notes, the tendency to identify him with and/or to position him as either spokesperson or critic of his object of study excludes the possibility of being neither of those things, but obviously `neither' in a way hard for people to understand (Kellner 1989, 369±70). The possibility of this unusual and complicated `neither' forms the heart of Jameson's oeuvre; rather than appearing as a fault

or defect, Jameson's

important

and

necessary

eclectic and totalizing system intervention

into

both

of thought can

marxian

theory

be seen

generally

and

as an

literary

theory specifically. Two of Jameson's earliest books,

Language

Marxism and Form

(1971) and

(1972) established him as a leading marxist literary critic.

The Prison-House of

Marxism and Form,

in

particular, is often cited as the Ur-text of marxist literary criticism in the US academy (Homer 1998, 38). These two works, along with

The Political Unconscious

(1981), not only

firmly solidified Jameson's reputation and status but also contain the core components and vocabulary

of

his

intellectual

project:

the

dialectic,

utopia,

a

non-essentialist

subject,

totality, mediation, the analysis of movements of literary and cultural history (periodization) and the primacy of narrative. As his work has developed and expanded, Jameson has applied and amended these terms in an increasingly diverse set of analyses of texts and cultural objects, from single-author studies of Sartre, Wyndham Lewis, Adorno and Brecht to works on cinema (Signatures

Space in the World System Late Capitalism Time

(1994),

of the Visible

(1990),

The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and

(1992)), postmodernism (Postmodernism,

(1991)), and theory (The

The Cultural Turn

Ideologies of Theory,

or, The Cultural Logic of

2 vols (1988),

The Seeds of

(1998)). Tracing the lineaments of Jameson's thought

throughout this body of work reveals in fitting dialectical form how the sum of Jameson's contributions to contemporary marxism is greater than its parts. The central concept underlying all of Jameson's intellectual forays ± be they into marxist

modern north american criticism and theory

56

theory, mass culture, third world movements and literature, architecture, film theory or postmodernism ± is found in the injunction that opens

The Political Unconscious: `Always

historicize!' (1981, 9). While on the face of it a fairly straightforward gesture, Jameson's imperative yields surprisingly complex results. First and foremost, it shifts the focus of critical attention away from evaluative judgements (for example, is postmodernism good or bad) towards historical and dialectical analysis (why postmodernism now). The product of such a shift is perhaps most dramatically seen in Jameson's essay `Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture' (1979). Like

The Political Unconscious, the essay begins with the need for a

`genuinely historical and dialectical approach', in this case to the opposition between high

Jaws and The Godfather I and II specifically, Jameson shows how the high culture/mass culture divide

culture and mass culture. In a reading of theories of mass culture generally and

simply represents two sides of the same phenomenon, namely the `fission of aesthetic production under capitalism' (1979, 14). If high modernist art attempts to resist the commodification of culture in its development of a new language and a new aesthetic, it does so in reaction to the very same processes ± capitalist commodification and reification ± that produce mass culture. As such, high culture and mass culture are seen to exist in a relationship of structural dependency rather than oppositional independence. This dialectical overturning significantly challenges the classic Frankfurt School reading of the `culture industry' in which traditional high art is valorized over and against the manipulative designs of a denigrated mass culture. Instead, both modernism and mass culture are shown to be equally dissociated from group praxis: the former through its very resistance to commodification and its subsequent creation of aesthetic enclaves, and the latter through its absorption into the commodity form. The exposure of this surprising parallel between modernism and mass culture is but one

Jaws and The Godfather I and II, Jameson argues (and this is signature Jameson) that the new model move, however, in the final dialectical turn of the argument. In his readings of

of manipulation he is putting forward contains nothing less than the utopian: `the hypothesis is that the words of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated' (Jameson 1979, 29). In other words, these films `work' only in so far as they tap into deep fantasies about how we wish to live and what sort of social life we want. The Á la the Frankfurt School misses this important move in its simple rejection of mass culture a emphasis on an evaluative critical stance and therefore too easily dismisses mass culture as mere manipulation. Significantly, the `content' that is lost is a vision of collectivity, of a desire for a collective form of social life not possible structurally under capitalism (imaged in

The Godfather,

for instance, in the form of the family). This dual move captures

Jameson's hermeneutic, or rather `double hermeneutic' (Kellner 1989, 13): ideological critique coupled with utopian hope, itself a coupling of traditional marxian ideological analysis (Marx et al.) with the utopian marxism of theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Bloch. The need to historicize and the dialectical form through which Jameson's historicism operates marks the nature of his contributions to classical as well as more contemporary

The Political Unconscious (as well as in `Marxism and Historicism' and the introduction to The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2) marxism is the theory of history and thus subsumes all other forms of

marxist and non-marxist thought. On the one hand, as he claims in

interpretation (1981, 10, 47; 1979, 149±50, 172±7; Kellner 1989, 14). It is the `un-

fredric jameson and marxist literary and cultural criticism

57

transcendable horizon', the master narrative that doesn't simply add to other interpretive frameworks

but

rather

(much

like

the

Aufhebung

of

Hegelian

dialectics)

cancels

and

preserves them, contains and transcends them. The act of subsumption defines Jameson's method of theoretical incorporation.

The Political Unconscious

, in particular, represents a

meeting of marxism and the new continental theoretical work of the 1970s, especially poststructuralism, psychoanalytic criticism and semiotics as well as Althusserian marxism. Much of the work of continental theorists ± Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari,

Lyotard,

Nietzschean totalizing,

and

Kristeva

and

Althusser

anti-interpretive

reductionist

Political Unconscious

and

current:

authoritarian.

± a

share

in

critique

Against

what

of

these

the

Jameson

refers

hermeneutic

readings,

the

to

act

premise

as

itself of

a as

The

± and one that incorporates these criticisms ± is that such a critique is

misplaced. The problem isn't interpretation in and of itself but the adequacy of previous

The Political Unconscious

hermeneutical models. What is needed and what

as a project

offers, then, is a new `immanent or anti-transcendent hermeneutical model' (1981, 23). Althusser's model of structural causality provides the framework for a new method of interpretation in which the relationship among different levels within the social system is conceived not in terms of expressive causality (as in Althusser's reading of Hegel) but of semi-autonomy. That is, rather than resting on a notion of expressive identity, in which each

part

of

the

system

expresses

the

essence

of

the

whole

and

thereby

exists

in

a

transparent relation to the whole, the notion of various social levels as semi-autonomous allows for the possibility of differentiation among individual parts of the whole ± and thus for a more complex and heterogeneous understanding of how the social system functions. Unlike Althusser, however, Jameson conceives of this model of structural causality not as a break with hermeneutics or the dialectical tradition of marxism but as a modification of them. Jameson thus finally situates Althusser (along with the other poststructuralists and theorists he considers) through a `radical historicizing of their mental operations, such that not only the content of the analysis, but the very method itself, along with the analyst, then comes to be reckoned into the ``text'' or phenomenon to be explained' (1981, 47). In short, Jameson places them within a dialectical framework, thereby aiming to retain their insights and simultaneously overcome their limits. In the case of Althusser, the result is the development of a hermeneutic derived from the very concept of structural causality, a hermeneutic

that

accounts

both

for

the

totality

and

for

its

`absence'.

In

the

process,

Althusser's conception of history as an absent cause is transcoded into a notion of totality: `Totality is not available for representation, any more than it is accessible in the form of some ultimate truth (or moment of Absolute Spirit)' (1981, 55). But what is available is narrative itself, which becomes the mode through which a political unconscious works and, in turn, defines the task of the critic: to unmask narratives as socially symbolic acts. Hence the primacy of narrative for Jameson: not only is it the means through which we live history but the means through which history lives. In other words, for Jameson, there is no narrative that is not political. The proper and only critical stance, then, is to apprehend history through its effects, namely in the form of texts or cultural artefacts. The body of various

generic

forms

The Political Unconscious

(magical

narratives,

realism

and

takes up this task by looking at romance)

and

authors

(Balzac,

Gissing, Conrad) that progressively mark the increasing commodification of everyday life and of the subject under capitalism. A

certain

Jameson

urgency

comes

to

drives

terms

this

with

project

given

contemporary

our

current

theory,

older

historical classical

moment.

models

of

Just

as

marxist

modern north american criticism and theory

58

criticism

(primarily

from

the

1930s)

demand

revitalizing

because

they

are

unable

to

account for the complex mediations between cultural artefacts and the socio-economic system. In place of the older base/superstructure formulation (a `vulgar Marxism'), Jameson turns to a Hegelian marxism for a theory of mediation adequate to the new conditions of monopoly capitalism and its subsequent mutation into late capitalism. As he states in

Marxism and Form,

it is in the context of this historical moment `that the great themes of

Hegel's philosophy ± the relationship of part to whole, the opposition between concrete and

abstract,

the

concept

of

totality,

the

dialectic

of

appearance

and

essence,

the

interaction between subject and object ± are once again the order of the day' (1971, xviii±xix). In

Marxism and Form,

 cs and the Frankfurt School as well as elsewhere, Georg Luka

Marxism and Form

provide the prime material for this rethinking. hensive

treatment

of

some

of

the

major

figures

of

western

comprises a compre-

marxism

with

chapters

on

 cs and Sartre, respectively, and a final chapter entitled Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Luka `Towards

Dialectical

Criticism'.

Above

all,

 cs's Luka

theory

of

reification

underwrites

Jameson's approach both to the problems of contemporary capitalist society and to the means

toward

brought

new

problem

of

a

solution.

attention

to

Published an

 cs Luka

reification.

in

aspect

1923,

of

develops

History and Class Consciousness

 cs's Luka

Marx's

analysis

Marx's

in

ideas

Capital

about

long

neglected,

commodity

fetishism

the or

reification, arguing that commodity fetishism is a problem specific to the age of modern capitalism (Bottomore 1983, 412). Moreover, he is concerned to show how the `essence of commodity structure' ± so pointedly summed up by Marx as the transformation of the relations between people into the mere relations between things ± transforms the `subject' of the commodity world as much as its objects. So that not only does a qualitative change occur in the world of commodities as a market economy comes to dominate our `outer life', but this same process penetrates our `inner life': `Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness  cs 1971, 93). For Jameson this translates into an analysis of contemporary of man' (Luka capitalism where the reifying logic of capital is precisely that which blocks our ability to see it as a total, now fully global, system. The task of criticism is thus to draw out the very kinds of connections that capital logic denies; to overcome what Max Weber characterized as the process of rationalization (the division of both mental and manual labour, the specialization of skills and the reduction of all social processes to a rational system of calculation) and  cs argues `leads to the destruction of every image of the whole' (1971, 103). Luka For Jameson the concept of `cognitive mapping' defines this necessary critical function. It is an attempt to map the new space of the postmodern, to conceive the coordinates of the social

structure

and

the

totality

of

class

relations

on

a

global

scale

(1988a,

353).

Its

spatializing metaphor of the map is meant to capture the new organization of space under late capitalism: the disorientation of saturated space in which any sort of distance itself is suppressed. Central to this characterization of our present social structure is its differentiation from previous modes of production. Each of the three historical stages of capitalism, that is, has generated a space unique to it. Under classical or market capitalism, that space was a grid (and coincided aesthetically with realism); under monopoly capitalism it is best defined as a growing gap between lived experience and structure, a distance defined in terms

of

problems

irony, of

and

a

figuration

contradiction or

which

representation

produces,

which

the

according

various

to

Jameson,

modernisms

have

specific at

their

fredric jameson and marxist literary and cultural criticism

59

centre. Within the new complexities of postmodern space and its disorienting effects this problem of figuration becomes especially acute. How to even grasp the system as a whole when the organization of its parts functions to deny anything larger than the fragment and its

cognitive

effects

±

of

disorientation

and

fragmentation

±

prevent

any

sense

of

perspectival distance or `point of view'? And yet, to cede to this dilemma, to celebrate the fragmentary and the multiplicitous at the expense of the whole, is essentially to abandon a socialist politics altogether. The aesthetic

becomes

postmodern) gains

the a

political

certain

and

vice

primacy

versa

over

as

culture

economics or

(the

saturated

politics.

The

space

mapping

of

the

of the

cultural logic of late capitalism therefore takes on a political immediacy: `the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience. It follows that an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in this sense is an integral part of any socialist political project' (1988a, 353) ± and a project, moreover, that is still yet to be conceived. Cognitive mapping thus attempts, finally, to `produce the concept of something we cannot imagine' (1988a, 347). In

essence,

realism

then,

adequate

to

cognitive the

mapping

demands

and

functions logic

of

as

Jameson's

consumer

version

culture

of

would

what

look

a

like,

new but

importantly one that is not `exactly mimetic in that older sense' given its simultaneously  cs' theory local, national and international coordinates (1991, 51). As such, it is from Luka of reification rather than his theories of realism that Jameson draws his own analysis of  cs' negative realism. (It is important to note that Jameson distances himself from Luka  cs pronouncements on modernism, identifying himself much more with Brecht than Luka when it comes to the question of innovative modernist forms or the creation of new forms of (critical) realism other than classical nineteenth-century realism.) Indeed, as Jameson himself clarifies, ` ``cognitive mapping'' was in reality nothing but a code word for ``class consciousness'' . . .: only it proposed the need for class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed

of

kind,

while

it

also

inflected

the

account

in

the

direction

of

that

new

spatiality implicit in the postmodern' (Kellner 1989, 387). The exploration of the new spatiality of postmodernism and its reorganization of politics finds its fullest articulation in Jameson's full-length study

Logic of Late Capitalism

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural

(1991), a collection of essays taking its title from the seminal 1984

essay on postmodernism. The same dictum that drives Jameson's earlier work forms the basis of this much later work where the postmodern as a concept is meant to capture the very

historicity

of

historical

thinking

itself:

`It

is

safest

to

grasp

the

concept

of

the

postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place' (xi). Here Jameson extends his earlier analyses across a wide spectrum of the arts: the visual arts, architecture, video and film. Certainly, the most cited and exemplary of his readings is his analysis of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. In his description of its spatial disorientation, of the ways in which it seems designed to cause confusion and an utter inability on the individual's part to map its space, Jameson highlights how both the objects and the subjects of multinational capital are radically altered and transformed from their high modernist counterparts. In contrast to the space

of

degraded

high city

modernism, fabric

the

around

it

Bonaventure but

rather

to

seeks

not

replace

it

to

differentiate

altogether.

The

itself lack

from of

the

visible

entranceways, the mirroring effects of its glass exterior, and the interior elevators and escalators all conspire to produce a complete hyperspace as a substitute for the city and a totally new built environment that requires the production of new subjects to inhabit it:

modern north american criticism and theory

60

`The new architecture . . . stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible,

dimensions'

(39).

As

Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,

Jameson

argues

throughout

Postmodernism, or, The

these radical changes are not merely stylistic or formal

(as many earlier accounts of postmodernism would have it) but structural, linked directly to the social and to the changes in economic production identified by Ernest Mandel in his analysis of contemporary capitalism,

Late Capitalism.

The difficulty and the consequent

need to map on a spatial scale figures the need to map on a social scale. The most controversial of Jameson's work involves his extension of these concerns to socalled third-world literature and culture. Situated as a `pendant' to the postmodernism essay in its attention to the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature, his essay `Thirdworld Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism' provocatively claims that all thirdworld texts are to be read as national allegories. In the most well-known critique, Aijaz Ahmad (1987) attacks the all-encompassing `all' in this claim and Jameson's attempt to establish a situation of radical difference between the first and third world. However, the definitiveness of this statement at once draws attention to the standpoint of the dominated in its radically different relationship to multinational capital as well as emphasizes the relative impoverishment of first-world culture. The perspective of the dominated (culled  cs' epistemology in from a combination of Hegel's master±slave dialectic and Luka

and Class Consciousness)

History

reveals certain forms of experience and collectivity no longer

available to the first world. Specifically, Jameson finds in representative readings of the Chinese writer Lu Xun and the Senegalese novelist and film-maker Ousmane Sembene wholly different relations between the subjective and the public or political: `Third-world texts,

even

those

which

are

seemingly

private

and

invested

with

a

properly

libidinal

dynamic ± necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory:

the

story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society'

(1991, 69). In a reversal of first-world/third-world relations,

Jameson concludes that the first world has much to learn from the third world and its texts ± about the reified nature of first-world public and private life, about the libidinal and the political, and about the role of the intellectual and the role of the humanities more broadly in American education. In short, they offer access to a notion of `cultural revolution' and a vision of community interdependence that has all but disappeared in the first world. In contrast to critiques such as that of Ahmad, then, Jameson's position on third-world culture serves not to subsume everything within a first world perspective (Ahmad accuses Jameson of

a

form

of

Orientalism)

but

to

highlight

the

very

processes

of

first-world

cultural

imperialism and its `crippling' effects for the `masters' or `we Americans' (1991, 85). Ahmad's response has its parallel in criticisms of Jameson that equate his emphasis on totality with totalitarianism. In this line of reasoning, the desire to create a totalizing system is described as violent or oppressive in its attempt to incorporate everything. Such a view, when not simply a false equation of two obviously different terms (totality and totalitarianism), mistakes a symptom for a cause: the dissatisfaction with the concept of totality is itself a marker for the increasing difficulties of cognitively mapping contemporary society, a project

that,

as

Jameson

underscores,

`stands

or

falls

with

the

conception

of

some

(unrepresentable, imaginary) social global totality' (Jameson 1988b, 356). More substantive responses to Fredric Jameson's work often tend paradoxically to centre on his style. Admittedly, Jameson's prose is difficult. It assumes a wide and diverse body of knowledge,

from

philosophy,

to

critical

theory,

semiotics,

psychoanalysis,

European

fredric jameson and marxist literary and cultural criticism

61

modernism and popular culture. For anyone who has thought about teaching Jameson to undergraduates, the problem is clear enough. Each text presupposes knowledge of so many other texts that it seems virtually impossible to find a point from which to begin. The breadth of Jameson's references is matched by the sheer bravado (at times) of his dialectical style of writing. In the tradition of the Frankfurt School, his prose is meant to be as difficult as the thought it represents, and because the very processes of dialectical thought are inimical to our reified way of thinking under capitalism, Jameson's style is too. In his own defence, Jameson asks: `Why should there be any reason to feel that these problems [of culture and aesthetics] are less complex than those of bio-chemistry?' (Jameson 1982, 88). Responses to Jameson's style range from unqualified admiration of its `splendour' to serious scepticism about its utility for a properly political or revolutionary criticism. On the positive extreme, Perry Anderson sees in it the perfect embodiment of the multiple texts and multiplicitous signs which it engages, of the melding of form and content (Anderson 1998, 71±2). Style meets content as Anderson glowingly assesses Jameson's contribution to the

postmodernism

debate

and

claims

that

he

does

what

no

other

theorist

of

the

postmodern does ± anchors the aesthetic forms or style of postmodernism in the economic and

political

alterations

of

late

capitalism.

In

stark

contrast,

Terry

Eagleton

identifies

Jameson's style as finally detrimental to an engaged socialist or marxist politics. As he sees it, the very generosity and appropriative nature of Jameson's thought marks the limits of its

bricoleur

political bite. Jameson becomes for Eagleton an `unrepentant

' who too easily

absorbs others' ideas and `leaves everything as it was' (Eagleton 1986, 71). Instead of formulating a sharp relationship between the mystifications of late capitalism or ideology more generally and a practical politics, Jameson, in Eagleton's view, prioritises theory (or  cs' ideological critique) over practice. In this sense, his distance from Luka

Consciousness

indispensable

is

marked:

`the

concomitant

dispelling

and

effect

of

of

reification

class

which

struggle

has

for

History and Class

that

become,

work

in

was

an

Jameson,

its

theoretical prolegomenon' (Eagleton 1986, 75). At issue finally is the larger question of institutional marxism and its relationship to the driving force of marxism: class struggle and the overthrow of capitalism. Does Jameson's work suffer from the same limits, for instance, as those of western marxism? If western marxism

represents

a

move

away

from

class

struggle

and

praxis

towards

theory

and

philosophy, reflective of the political realities post-1968, can the same be said for Jameson's project? According to Perry Anderson, whose

Considerations of Western Marxism

makes this

very case about western marxism, the answer is, interestingly, no. He argues that Jameson exceeds the limits of this tradition and provides its `most complete consummation' by grounding his account of postmodernism in the economic development of late capitalism. Whereas

the

aesthetic

in

the

western

marxist

tradition

functioned

as

`involuntary

consolation for impasses of the political and economic' in Jameson no such consolatory function is at work (Anderson 1998, 72). Rather the penetration of culture by capital and capital by culture bespeaks a different political reality and hence the necessity of a different political strategy. The very pervasiveness of `the cultural' that Jameson analyses in terms of the logic of late capitalism directly confronts the conditions of contemporary life rather than evading them. As a result, Anderson locates Jameson's contribution as central to a properly political intervention into the space of postmodernism: `So Jameson's resumption of

[the]

heritage

description

of

[of

the

western

marxism]

conditions

(Anderson 1992, 73).

of

could

yield

contemporary

a

life

much than

more

the

central

precedents

and it

political drew

on'

modern north american criticism and theory

62

Perhaps, given the conditional nature of Anderson's response, it is simply too soon for any final reckoning of Jameson's theoretical and political contributions. Or, rather, the very

provisional

nature

of

such

an

assessment

underscores

the

necessarily

mediated

relationship between the theoretical and the political that defines the marxist tradition and Jameson's work within it. In the best tradition harbours

no

illusions

that

academic

literary

of institutional marxism, Jameson

marxist

criticism

is

going

to

topple

the

capitalist system on its own. At the same time, his work derives its political immediacy from the recognition that in order to even begin to challenge the system we have to first understand how it functions. As with the classical marxist formulation, such theory will only be fully realized when it is put into practice. In the meantime, as Jameson's collection of texts cautions and simultaneously inspires, there is much groundwork yet to be done.

Carolyn Lesjak

Further reading and works cited Ahmad, A. `Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ``National Allegory'' ',

Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays.

Althusser, L. Anderson, P.

The Origins of Postmodernity.

Bottomore, T. (ed.) Burnham, C. Eagleton, T.

Against the Grain.

Hardt, M. and Weeks, K. (eds) Homer, S.

Fredric Jameson.

Ð.

Cambridge, MA, 1983.

Durham, NC, 1995.

London, 1986.

The Jameson Reader.

Oxford, 2000.

New York, 1998.

Marxism and Form.

Jameson, F.

17, 1987.

London, 1998.

A Dictionary of Marxist Thought.

The Jamesonian Unconscious.

Social Text,

London, 1971.

The Political Unconscious.

Princeton, NJ, 1971.

Ithaca, NY, 1981.

Ð. `Interview' with L. Green, J. Culler and R. Klein.

diacritics,

12, 3, 1982.

Ð. `Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism', Ð. `Cognitive Mapping', in

Social Text,

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,

15, Fall 1986.

ed. D. Kellner. Urbana, IL,

1988a. Ð.

The Ideologies of Theory.

Minneapolis, MN, 1988b.

Ð. `Afterword: Marxism and Postmodernism', in

Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique,

ed. D. Kellner.

Washington, 1989. Ð.

Signatures of the Visible.

Ð.

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Ð.

The Geopolitical Aesthetic.

New York, 1990. Durham, NC, 1991.

Bloomington, IN, 1992.

Ð. `Actually Existing Marxism', in

Marxism Beyond Marxism,

eds S. Makdisi, C. Casarino and R. E.

Karl. New York, 1996. Ð.

Brecht and Method.

Jay, M.

London, 1998.

Marxism and Totality.

Kellner, D. (ed.) LaCapra, D. Â cs, G. Luka

Berkeley, CA, 1984.

Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique.

Washington, DC, 1989.

Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language .

History and Class Consciousness.

Cambridge, 1971.

Ithaca, NY, 1983.

10. Edward W. Said (1935±2003)

Edward W. Said has not formulated a single, coherent theoretical model of his own ± nor has he founded a theoretical school or movement. But he has sketched out a number of important directions for cross-cultural analysis, as well as a unique set of positions within postcolonialist criticism. Said is best known for his work of the 1980s and 1990s, which has established him as a major cultural/political analyst of imperialism ± and, more particularly, as a spokesperson for Palestinian rights. Theorizing the cultural implications of power differentials between East and West and commenting on the Middle East situation have brought Said a public stature that is virtually unique among humanistic intellectuals in the US. While his work on imperialism has not had a measurable impact on public policy or discourse, it has had an enormous influence on a number of academic disciplines, including literary theory, Middle East studies, political science, history and anthropology. Though

he

has

achieved

his

high

public

and

academic

profile

primarily

colonialist critic, Said's career, launched in 1966 with the publication of

the Fiction of Autobiography preoccupations.

He

has

as

a

post-

Joseph Conrad and

, has evolved over four decades through a number of theoretical

moved

away

from

an

early

grounding

in

phenomenology

and

existentialism, through an extremely productive exploration of poststructuralism, and into the profound theoretical scepticism ± accompanied by proposals for alternative models of cultural

interpretation

±

that

has

characterized

his

more

recent

postcolonialist

work.

Appreciating Said's postcolonialist positions, as well as the range of theoretical contributions he has made over the course of his long career, requires an understanding of the persistent problems that have shaped the various stages of his critical development. Throughout his career, Said has been concerned with the agency of the intellectual, and with his ability to direct and control intellectual progress. At the same time, though, Said has been scrupulously attentive to the power of culture as a limit on intellectual invention. These dual concerns ± which, to be sure, characterize much twentieth-century thought ± have compelled Said to search for interpretive paradigms adequate to what he sees as the dialectical

relationship

between

such

opposing

pressures.

Said's

attempt

to

develop

a

dialectical theory of cultural production draws together a number of subsidiary themes in his work: the role of development or transformation within individual texts, over the course of careers or within large cultural movements; the viability of rational forms of knowledge that respect epistemological discontinuities and ruptures; and the complicity of culture with political power. The opposing pressures that have long preoccupied Said ± at the most general level: intellectual agency and cultural constraint ± also inhabit the very form of his writing. That is to say, Said's writing is often idiosyncratic in its choice of subject and method; but it remains systematically, respectfully focused on canonical writers and dominant intellectual movements. It is both encyclopaedic and oppositional, both

modern north american criticism and theory

64

learned and iconoclastic. Energized by this unstable dynamism, his writing can appear to be more

unclassifiable

than

that

of

many

other

contemporary

theorists.

It

can

also

seem

inherently resistant to discipleship or filiation. Said's first book extracts a dialectical model for intellectuals and culture from the work of Joseph

Conrad,

which

Said

explores

as

a

pre-figuration

of

phenomenological

and

ex-

istential philosophies. Said claims that Conrad was unable to resolve the tension between intellectual self-consciousness and the agonistic conditions of social existence by positing some authentic identity for the writer; instead, Conrad expresses this tension through dramatic conflicts that perform, without resolving, his own dilemma as an intellectual. Anticipating the emphasis on cross-cultural understanding that marks his later work, Said argues

that

±

unlike

many

other

writers

of

his

time

±

Conrad

welcomed

political

developments after the First World War, seeing them as a sign that nations had risen to a self-conscious individuality that could, at the same time, still accommodate panEuropean cooperation. Conrad's imagined resolution of tensions on an international scale parallel, according to Said, the tensions he perceived between the individual thinker and culture

as

a

whole.

At

this

stage

of

his

career,

Said

celebrates

Conrad's

dualistic

formulations and, significantly, does not emphasize the link between Conrad's political optimism and his enthusiasm for colonialism ± a conjunction that lies at the heart of Said's later work on Conrad, and on other western novelists as well. In

Beginnings

(1975), Said ambitiously expands his critical horizons to include Western

literature over the last two centuries, while he continues to meditate on the possibility of a theoretical `middle path' between subject-oriented humanism and modernist nightmares of cultural hegemony. 1970s,

in

which

Beginnings

he

marks a key phase of Said's development in the mid to late±

employs

while

contesting

poststructuralist

Michel Foucault's theories of power ± in order

theory

to think through

±

in

problems

particular, of cultural

production. Said elides the concept of beginning with intentionality, and although he understands intentionality in impersonal terms ± as the rules of inclusiveness or pertinence which

make

the

act

of

beginning

a

somewhat

arbitrary

and

retrospective

one

±

he

understands beginning intentions as a means of reconciling individual agency with the pressures of cultural systems.

Beginnings

risks positing an ahistorical and anti-materialist

model of interpretation, by containing the history of beginnings within an opposition of classic to modernist conceptions of intentionality in western writing. Yet by recognizing the persistent emphasis that conflicting philosophies of cultural production have placed on the

act

of

beginning,

Said

contests

the

poststructuralist

notion

that

such

acts

merely

disguise `the perpetual trap of forced continuity' (1975, 43), arguing that they are, in fact, newly generative. Despite late-twentieth-century preoccupations with the hegemony of paradigms and epistemes, then, Said argues that the notion of beginning intention cannot be eradicated from theoretical models, and needs to be theorized comprehensively. Said finds

fictions

of

beginning

in

poststructuralism,

for

example,

particularly

in

Foucault's

postnarrative methods of knowledge. Bravely celebrating the humanism he finds latent in Foucault's references to effective, if undeniable, pressures for epistemic disruption, Said attempts to undermine from within poststructuralism's goal of separating the construction of knowledge from the individual subject. Nevertheless, Said is very critical ± in

Beginnings

and in his other writings from this period ± of poststructuralism's collapsing of agency into signification. He is particularly harsh on the `linguacentricity' (1975, 336) of Derrida, both for failing to account for change and for denying that the discontinuous evolution of knowledge can ever be understood as progressive. Ultimately, Said takes his own preferred

edward

w. said

65

model of beginning from Giambattista Vico, the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher who remains a seminal force in much of Said's later work. In Said's view, Vico conceives knowledge as deeply embedded in textual systems, at the same time that he affirms the potency and the unpredictability of intellectual disruption. Significantly, though, Said's dialectical model of beginning largely ignores the role of state power, and its presence within both culture and self-consciousness ± an issue that becomes the central concern of his work from the late 1970s on.

Orientalism

culture,

and

(1978) is Said's first direct analysis of the relationship between politics and this

book

marks

a

stage

in

Said's

career

in

which

his

earlier

belief

in

intellectual agency is sometimes swamped by a monolithic, quasi-Foucauldian conception of power. For the first time in his career, Said formulates a deterministic theory of cultural hegemony,

one

that

continues

to

appear

±

though

often

throughout his later work on imperialism. Starting with

in

more

Orientalism

nuanced

forms

±

, the tensions between

Said's theories of cultural hegemony and his commitments to intellectual oppositionality break free of his earlier, synthetic models and generate dramatic oscillations ± contradictions, some critics would say ± within or across Said's own texts. In

Orientalism

, Said

argues that the western discourse of Orientalism ± as well as discourses of colonialism more generally

±

determine

the

thinking

of

scholars

who

set

out,

whatever

their

conscious

intentions, to acquire `objective' knowledge about Eastern cultures. Implicitly sceptical of intentionality,

Orientalism

describes an academic system of knowledge that is static, and

that ensnares its adherents

in grand misapprehensions. Said's central thesis about Or-

ientalist discourse is that its incapacity for development stems from its founding myth: that Eastern culture is itself a culture of arrested development. He claims that the concept of `the

Orient'

is

purely

a

western

invention,

and

that

Orientalist

discourse

conflates

knowledge with power in the absence of any real object of such knowledge. Said does historicize strategies

developing did

not

strategies

shift

within

relationships

of

Orientalist power

or

discourse,

challenge

but

he

them;

argues

rather,

that

they

these

merely

enabled the conversion of Orientalism from a contemplative discourse into an administrative and political one. Nevertheless, as James Clifford has pointed out, Said also departs from Foucauldian models of power and contradicts himself by suggesting rather persistently that there

is

a real Orient which has been distorted and denied the ability to speak (Clifford

1988, 260). Most importantly, though, in

Orientalism

Said argues for the first time that the

fact of political domination is dependent on a legitimating cultural discourse ± a cultural reductionism that he will develop much more extensively fifteen years later in

Imperialism Orientalism

Culture and

(1993).

Predictably,

virtually created the academic subdiscipline of colonial discourse analysis.

it

has

been

vigorously

and

sometimes

abusively

attacked

by

Islamic

and

Arabist specialists, but it has been well-received by specialists in related fields. It has been ambivalently critiqued by postcolonialist theorists, particularly by those who, like Benita Parry, admire Said's anti-Orientalist stance generally, but find that its totalizing approach suppresses native political voices and makes Said `indifferent to textual gaps, indeterminacies and contradictions' (Parry 1992, 26) in the dominant discourse as well. Some have argued that Said overestimates the degree to which western scholars have eroticized the Orient

(see

Spanos

1996).

Feminists

have

attacked

him

for

overlooking

questions

of

gender. He has also been faulted for ignoring the interrelated histories of victimization, particularly in regard to anti-Semitism. In a number of later essays, but particularly in

Orientalism

`

, an Afterword' (1995), Said strenuously debates these charges ± in particular,

modern north american criticism and theory

66

denying his alleged anti-westernism, his alleged totalizing of the West, and his alleged belief in the Orient as a stable referent ± though these criticisms continue to dog his work. Even those who praise Said for his political position and for his scholarship continue to complain that he has presented a history of Orientalism solely from the perspective of the West (though this critique must be seriously qualified in light of Said's work in the 1990s on Arab intellectuals).

Orientalism

may be bitingly clear about the insidious aspects of Orientalism, but it largely

ignores the very questions about intellectual subversion and oppositionality that dominated Said's first two books and that return to become central aspects of his later work. The dramatic imbalance of Said's thought during this phase of his career is reflected in two

Orientalism

books written at roughly the same time which form a kind of trilogy with

Question of Palestine

Covering Islam

(1979) and

Orientalism,

books seems a refutation of Said's fatalism, in ship of knowledge and power. In

The Question of Palestine,

oppositional

anti-Orientalist.

intellectual,

as

an

±

The

(1981). The very existence of these two

Said's

about the monolithic relation-

Said himself takes up the role of

twin

goals

are,

first,

to

provide

media-misinformed Americans with a general history of the Palestinians, and, second, to defend Palestinian political aspirations in the teeth of Orientalist distortions. In

Islam,

Covering

Said shows how Orientalist discourse has contaminated American media depictions

 s that of the Arab world. Besides documenting the gross generalizations and cultural cliche characterize

western

representations

of

the

Arab

world,

Said

demonstrates

how

these

distortions are embedded in assumptions about American political entitlement ± the selfserving belief that world events can and should be reduced to a calculus of American interests. Both these books indict cultural hegemony, while also enacting its subversion by means

of

historical

and

political

realities

±

as

Said

views

them

±

that

contradict

the

dominant discourse. In the last two books of the Orientalist trilogy, then ± both of which eschew the rhetoric of

theory

and

target

a

mainstream,

theoretical foundations of

Islam,

non-academic

Orientalism

readership

±

Said

contradicts

by vigorously calling for what, at the end of

the

Covering

he terms `antithetical knowledge' (1921, 167). Translating his complex thought on

the relationship of power and knowledge into ordinary language, he claims that `any good reader' can go `a reasonable distance toward overcoming the limitations of orthodox views' (167), and that `most knowledge about human society is, I think, finally accessible to common sense' (170). This position represents a bold, if unintegrated, return to traditional humanistic values that Said's later work continues to affirm ± but in highly qualified ways.

The World, the Text, and the Critic

(1983) is an important collection of Said's essays,

written between 1968 and 1983, all of which in some way attempt to refine his ideas about the

possibilities

interconnected

for ideas

antithetical that

could

knowledge. be

said

to

These

essays

characterize

revolve

all

of

around

Said's

a

major

series

work

of

after

his Orientalist trilogy: a strong condemnation of contemporary criticism's obsession with textuality; an even stronger condemnation of what he sees as the over-specialized and professionalized

discipline

of

literary

studies;

a

call

for

the

integration

of

cultural

and

political analysis; a systematic analysis of the cultural foundations of imperialism; and an affirmation

of

alienation,

as

the

necessary

starting

point

for

intellectual

labour.

The

importance of the last point cannot be overstated. In his later work, whenever Said affirms the power of the individual intellectual, he discards the humanistic rhetoric that marks early stages of his career by insisting that the awareness of culture as a system of exclusions must ground a

genuinely

critical consciousness. Yet

in Said's later

work, that kind of

edward

w. said

67

consciousness is never viewed as self-authorizing. Rather, it always negotiates a complex set of relationships between inherited and invented cultural traditions. Said thus reformulates

Beginnings,

the dialectical models of his early work on Conrad, and in

by conceiving the

intellectual as a kind of cultural bricoleur. Recombining the ideas of selected writers and cultural traditions into an idiosyncratic bulwark against determinative order, the intellectual appropriates and transforms rather than initiating ideas outside of the cultural context ± a methodological description that applies to many of Said's own essays on writers he admires, from Vico to Ghassan Kanafani. In `Secular Criticism', Said distinguishes between inherited order, or what he calls `filiation', and invented order, or `affiliation'. In Said's complicated

view

though

latter

the

Imagining

the

of

these

process

field

of

concepts, can

culture

filiation

either as

a

is

said

reproduce

plural

and

inevitably

filiation

or

to

produce

depart

discontinuous

affiliations,

radically

repertoire

of

from

it.

models

for

writing and thinking allows Said, in this phase of his career, to rework his earlier, quasiexistential

attitudes

toward

intellectual

work

within

a

more

complex

panorama

of

strategies for cultural production.

The World, the Text, and the Critic

is also a celebration of the essay form. Said is, perhaps

quintessentially, a writer of essays. In `Secular Criticism', he claims that the essay is the privileged form for antithetical thought. Reflecting on his own fundamental dilemma as a critic, Said claims that the book's demands for coherence and totality restrict the writer, while the essay has more affinities with the speculative and the sceptical. The bulk of Said's recent work has come in the form of essays, which have been collected in numerous anthologies, and which have ranged across a great many cultural and political topics ± from opera to Arabic fiction to the Balkans. The style of multi-layered thought that his essays, taken

as

a

whole,

seem

to

develop

has

recently

enabled

Said

to

take

a

more

fluid

methodological approach in his major projects as well. The single most important example of this fluid style is

Culture and Imperialism

(1993).

On one level, Said's critique of imperialism, and the cultural work that sustains it, seems to

Orientalism.

return to the totalizing approach of

Moving beyond his earlier analyses of

Orientalist discourse, Said seeks in this book to explore the general relationship between culture and empire. He rectifies one flaw cited by critics of

Orientalism

by tracing the

movements of resistance among colonized peoples, rather than describing them simply as the passive recipients of the imperial gaze. Nevertheless, in

Culture and Imperialism,

Said

tends to see the formation of both dominant and resistant cultures in a single source: metropolitan

self-legitimation.

More

disturbing,

for

some

of

Said's

critics,

he

seems

completely to conflate western culture and imperialism, as he argues that culture sustained, legitimated and normalized the imperial project. The British novel comes in for particularly harsh

criticism,

since

Said

regards

it

as

the

cultural

form

most

responsible

for

the

justification of imperial conquest ± one of the realistic novel's `principle purposes' was to `almost unnoticeably [sustain] the society's consent in overseas expansion' (12). While he is `not trying to say that the novel ``caused'' imperialism', Said does assert that the novel and

imperialism

`are

unthinkable

without

each

other'

(70±1).

Said

is

`struck

by

how

inexorably integrative' (6) imperial culture was ± and, to some extent, still is, since he argues that the western vision of the world is still haunted by imperialism. This

unforgiving,

all-encompassing

critique

has

many

productive

consequences.

It

allows Said to expose the complicity of contemporary culture with empire in representations of the New World Order and the End of History. It allows him to show how latenineteenth-century novels of empire were structurally congruent with novels written a

modern north american criticism and theory

68

century earlier, and to demonstrate how the linkage of domestic and imperial space in the novel grounds British morality in concepts of expansionism. Not just a simple indictment of

imperialism,

ideology,

Culture and Imperialism

including

codification

of

its

belief

ethnological

in

provides

ontological

differences,

its

a

thorough

differences

great

diagnosis

between

creative

power

East and

of

imperialist

and

its

West,

its

tendency

to

construct European subjective autonomy through the subjugation of native peoples. Oddly incongruent with this central project of

Culture and Imperialism

, however, is Said's

celebration of what he terms `contrapuntal reading' (1993, 66) ± a form of analysis he has championed increasingly in the 1990s. Derived in part from his recent studies of music, `contrapuntal reading', in the context of an analysis of imperialism, means fully taking into account

the

discovering canonical

relationships how

between

complex,

British

novels.

hybrid

dominant and

Significantly,

and

impure

any

resistant single

discourses.

text

Culture and Imperialism

might

It be

includes

a

also ±

means

including

long,

useful

account of previously neglected colonial responses to the West, and an analysis of the structures of such resistance ± an attentiveness to the non-European intellectual that has become central to Said's work since the late-1980s. Said does not reconcile his practice of `contrapuntal reading' with his uncompromising condemnation of western culture; rather, he weaves these two themes of his work ± the totalizing critique of western culture, and his own discovery and appropriation of cultural hybridity ± in an elaborate textual score that is finally, in some respects, resistant to theoretical resolution. `Contrapuntal reading' allows Said to entertain seemingly conflictual approaches to particular issues ± for example, he alternates between recognizing the necessity of a homogeneous native identity, including a nationalist one, and the inevitable hybridity of postcolonial identity ± a double-voiced reading

of

postcolonial

subjectivity

that

has

brought

him

into

conflict

with

many

postcolonialist critics, notably Homi Bhabha (Bhabha 1983, 200±2). Much of Said's most recent writing has explored, in effect, the dialogics of cross-cultural reading. His lifelong preoccupation with the dialectic of agency and culture has thus taken a productive new form in the shape of a mobile practice of writing and interpretation. Through `contrapuntal reading', he has been able to discuss disparate texts within multiple social and circumstantial contexts, and, therefore, to navigate between deterministic and agential perspectives. This method drives Said's recent essays on Arabic intellectuals, but it also fuels his essays

on

Middle

Discontents

East

(1996) and

politics,

many

of

which

have

The Politics of Dispossession

been

collected

in

Peace and Its

(1994b).

In the later stages of his career, then, Said recognizes that the tensions between agency and

culture

that

underlie

his

thought

are

best

handled

methodologically,

not

as

a

 developmental logic but as an `exfoliating structure of variations' (Buttigieg and Bove 1993, 3). Embracing this style has given Said a unique method, which proceeds by layering analytical

projects

and

positions,

building

cumulative

informational

resources

and

pa-

tiently exploring a variety of contextual fields. Said has not attempted to reconcile his method of `contrapuntal reading' with normative theorizing; instead, he has recently come to identify theoretical enterprises entirely with the privileged conjunction of knowledge and power. Predictably, perhaps, `contrapuntal reading' has been influential on a wide range of oppositional critics, not all of whom would recognize each other as allies: those who support particular nationalisms as well as those who oppose nationalism in general; those

engaged

defending

in

nativist

a

critique

traditions;

of

various

those

`universalizing'

interested

in

the

political

discourses,

overdetermination

and of

those

imperial

hegemony as well as those interested in the variable complexity of imperialism. What

edward

w. said

69

appeals to all these critics about Said's refusal of orthodox theorizing, more than anything else, is that it prevents him from succumbing to theoretical discourses popular in the wake of

poststructuralism

celebration

that

leave

no

room

for

the

assertion

of intellectual affiliation, or worldliness,

of

as a way

intellectual

will.

Said's

for the critic to express

oppositional power through alliances with particular cultural systems has generated a great deal of new work by cultural critics from many disciplines who are interested in the political efficacy of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies.

John Kucich

Further reading and works cited In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.

Aijaz, A.

Bhabha, H.

Theory,

K. `Difference, Discrimination and

London, 1992. the

Discourse of Colonialism',

 , P. A. `An Interview with Edward W. Said', Buttigieg, J. A. and Bove Clifford, J.

The Predicament of Culture.

Gandhi, L.

Postcolonial Theory.

Loomba, A. Lowe, L.

in

The Politics of

eds F. Barker et al. Colchester, 1983. 2, 20, 1993.

New York, 1998.

Colonialism/Postcolonialism.

Critical Terrains.

Boundary,

Cambridge, 1988.

London, 1998.

Ithaca, NY, 1991.

Parry, B. `Overlapping Territories and Intertwined Histories',

Edward Said,

ed. M. Sprinker. Oxford,

1992. Said, E. W. Ð.

Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography.

Beginnings.

Ð.

Orientalism.

Ð.

The Question of Palestine.

Ð ed. Ð.

Cambridge, MA, 1966.

New York, 1975. New York, 1978.

Literature and Society.

Covering Islam.

New York, 1979. Baltimore, MD, 1980.

New York, 1981.

Ð. `In the Shadow of the West',

The Arabs,

Channel 4 (London), 1982a.

Ð. `Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community'. Ð.

The World, the Text, and the Critic.

Ð. `An Ideology of Difference'. Ð. `Orientalism Reconsidered',

Critical Inquiry,

Cultural Critique,

Ð.

After the Last Sky.

Ð.

Musical Elaborations.

Ð.

Culture and Imperialism.

Ð.

Representations of the Intellectual.

Ð.

The Politics of Dispossession.

New York, 1994a.

New York, 1994b.

Raritan,

14, 1995.

New York, 1996.

Ð.

Out of Place: A Memoir.

New York, 1999.

Boundary,

1, 1985b.

New York, 1993.

Peace and Its Discontents.

V.

12, 1 (Autumn 1985a).

New York, 1991.

Ð.

W.

9, 1982b.

New York, 1986.

Ð. `Orientalism, an Afterword',

Spanos,

Critical Inquiry,

Cambridge, MA, 1983.

`Culture

2, 23, 1996.

and

Colonization:

The

Imperial

Imperatives

of

the

Centred

Circle',

11. American Feminisms: Images of Women and Gynocriticism

In her 1981 essay `Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', Elaine Showalter identified three common modes of feminist literary theory which she saw as exemplifying different national tendencies:

English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses

expression.

All,

however,

have

become

gynocentric.

All

are

struggling

to

find

a

terminology that can rescue the feminine from its stereotypical associations with inferiority. (1986, 249)

Showalter's accurate,

separation

though

her

of

the

categories

insistence

on

the

of

feminism

gynocentrism

was

strategic

rather

than

(woman-centredness)

of

strictly literary

feminism is the right and necessary first step towards any feminism worth its name. In the years since the essay was published, however, it has become increasingly clear that feminist literary theories evade national and conceptual boundaries, and that it is perfectly possible to be a marxist-feminist who also takes account of the insights of psychoanalysis in order to make some sense of literary expression. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it might have been truer to say in 1981 that American

feminist

literary

theory

tended

to

be

concerned

primarily

with

issues

of

representation rather than those of textuality. Representation is used here in its widest sense: the representation of women as characters and images by literary texts whether female- or male-authored; the representation of women writers by literary critics; their representation in the institutional canons of literature departments in universities; their existence on or absence from the lists of publishers, both academic and popular. Some of the effort that went into recuperating and rediscovering women writers from past ages was indeed `textual' in the sense that it required textual scholarship and original research. But the research itself was motivated by the will of liberal feminism to equalize the representation of the sexes ± both in texts and in the world ± in the institutions that tend to guard cultural value. The most significant 1960s text for American feminism was by Betty Friedan, entitled

The Feminine Mystique

(1963). It was not a book about literature, drawing rather on the

methodologies of sociology and the language of popular journalism (Friedan herself was a magazine writer while she gathered the material for the book). On the other hand, it did both suggest and exemplify one of the routes that literary feminism would take through its investigation into

the

discrepancies

that existed

between

the

idealized

representations

american feminisms

71

women found of themselves in popular magazines aimed directly at them and their own lived experience as American housewives. Friedan examined the lives of women whose material lives could scarcely have been more comfortable ± they had enough money, nice houses, husbands and children, and all the labour-saving devices their husband's money could

buy.

She

uncovered,

however,

an

undercurrent

of

dissatisfaction,

neurosis

and

depression within those lives, in which the women themselves felt empty and insignificant. The women of the 1950s and 1960s appeared to her to be less liberated, less ambitious and far less satisfied than their mothers and grandmothers, the generations of women who had achieved suffrage, higher education and a degree of financial independence for themselves. They were less secure and less contented than the women who had lived through those struggles, and appeared to be objects of a backlash against the liberated women of the immediately

preceding

generations.

Often

college-educated

and

with

the

vote

long

achieved, these women had somehow been coerced back into the home, into the joint roles of homemaker and mother. The coercion was linked (though exactly how and why is not clear) to the conservative images fed to women by their own consumer culture. In the final chapter of

The Feminine Mystique

, Friedan suggested that the solution to the

problems encountered by such women was to be found in a serious response to educational opportunity. Women must make themselves a life-plan, and educate themselves to be more than `just' housewives. This would require a change of heart among women themselves, since too frequently they used their years of education and their early experiences of paid employment merely as time waiting for the right man to come along and `rescue' them from the ignominy of being a spinster-career-woman. It would also require a change in the educational system, away from training women to be mere homemakers, and towards a more intellectually stimulating curriculum. Finally, for the women already caught up in the feminine

mystique, it must be made

combine

their

undergraduate

learning and

with

graduate

possible

their

other

courses

be

for them

duties

±

so

to return Friedan

administratively

to education, and to

suggests

tailored

to

that

the

part-time

needs

of

the

housewife student. Friedan has been criticized for the narrow social focus of her book (with its insistent interest only in middle-class white American women), and it is certainly true to say that

Feminine Mystique

The

did not address the needs of those women who suffered acute material

deprivation, nor those who were further disadvantaged by a racist society because they were not white. Nonetheless, her example did offer important lessons for feminist literary theory and criticism in the years that followed. The housewives who took Friedan's advice and went back to college to gain an arts education in subjects such as literature or history might well have been disappointed by the curriculum they found there and the methodologies that they were to be taught. History had tended to be the study of the lives of `great men', and English literature had a rigidly exclusive canon, a great tradition containing, as Terry Eagleton has È as a marginal case' (1996a, 28). put it, `two and a half women, counting Emily Bronte Nonetheless, armed in part with Friedan's insight that the representations of women in literary

and

cultural forms can

have

real

effects on

the

lives

of

women

beyond

those

representations, female critics (they did not usually call themselves feminists because of the hostility such a label often produced) began a process of interrogating the canon, seeking not eternal truths and beauties, but rather investigating the truth status (or otherwise) of the images of women that they found therein. The force of what was essentially a content-based criticism was the presupposition of a woman reader in the pursuit of the woman's image, rather than the previous assumption of a male reader as the norm.

modern north american criticism and theory

72

Two of the earliest and most important discussions of the image of woman in literature (mostly

in

male-authored

(1968) and Kate Millett's

prose

fiction)

Sexual Politics

were

Mary

Ellmann's

Thinking About Women

(1969), each of which offers a very different

response to the material examined. Ellmann's book takes issue with what she calls the sexual analogy, in which the facts of the superior strength of the male and the prolonged nurturance of offspring by the female are turned into metaphors that govern the representation of every human action, even when these `facts' have no bearing on the matter in hand. Unlike Friedan, her focus is on the literary text, and on the representation of women within it. She argues that sexual analogy fatally infects literary representation with distortions of the truth. The images that (usually male) writers derive from their belief in the soft feminine woman and the hard warlike man must therefore be stereotypes. Stereotypes undermine both the literary value and

the

transcendent

truth-status

of

the

literary

text

because

of

their

fundamental

untruthfulness and self-evident absurdity. In readings of a wide range of contemporary fiction

(largely

from

the

1940s

through

to

the

1960s)

Ellmann

gently

and

wittily

demonstrates that the stereotypes are everywhere, and that they are always absurd. In particular, she suggests that female characters are almost always associated with formlessness, instability, confinement, piety, materiality, spirituality, irrationality and compliancy ± a list that in itself contains structural oppositions that necessarily render femininity as irrational: how can a woman be at once material and spiritual? And she concludes her discussion with a series of readings of two particularly long-standing types of fictional woman ± the witch and the shrew. Ellmann provides image criticism of a very sophisticated kind. Her arguments proceed through ironic understatements and juxtapositions rather than through strong statement.

Thinking About Women

is a creative performance as well as a critical one, and its poise and

irony unsettle the reader's certainties rather than setting out a polemical argument against what

she

perceives

as

the

wild

irrelevance

women in fiction. In contrast, Kate Millett's

and

inaccuracy

Sexual Politics

of

most

representations

of

, a much longer book, is also

much more forthright in foregrounding its own attitudes and assumptions. It was also a much more immediately successful book, becoming a bestseller in the English-speaking world soon after its publication (

Thinking About Women

has never enjoyed such success).

The reasons for the contrasts in fortune are not hard to fathom. Millett wrote a more or less sensationalist book of criticism, focusing as she did on the quasi-pornographic sex scenes in the works of a handful of male authors. And her response to these scenes is unmitigated fury ± the message against misogyny is far easier to follow in Millett's text than in Ellmann's. Millett's first chapter exemplifies her method. She extracts three sexually explicit sex passages from novels by the notoriously misogynistic Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, and from the work of French novelist and playwright Jean Genet. Her comments on each of these scenes demonstrate that there is a relationship in each of the writers between sexual potency and social and/or political power. She argues that the apparently private sexual relationships between men and women reflect the power structures in the world at large, hence her title,

Sexual Politics

, in which the private sphere of the bedroom becomes inescapably entwined

with the public sphere of politics. In addition, the representation of sexual relationships at once reflects, and is itself reflected by, the real. The falsity of such images of women matters, argues Millett, because it is to the cultural image that cultured beings turn in order to make their own self-images. What was once the reflection of the real becomes the real, and is then re-reflected in a never-ending interplay between image and reality.

american feminisms

73

As Toril Moi has noted, images of women criticism became for a while the dominant mode of feminist thought in American institutions. The publication of Susan Coppelman Kornillon's

edited

collection

of

essays

aimed

specifically

at

college

Images of

students,

Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives (1972) was influential on a whole generation of American college graduates, for whom it defined what feminist theory might mean. The essays

collected

in

Images of Women focused largely on male-authored texts, and dis-

covered, as Ellmann and Millett had done before them, that when men write about women they

often

write

inaccurately.

The

collection

had

certain

key

assumptions

that

have

subsequently been partially dismantled by feminist theory. It took for granted the idea that literature is supposed to be a more or less unmediated reflection of life; that life-experience and fictional representation of experience ought, therefore, to map onto each other; and that for the woman reader, the purpose of fiction is to find her own experience so that she can `identify' with her fictional counterparts. But, as Moi comments, a naive image critique is a theoretical dead-end. The `reality test' approach to literature leads to merely repeated critical gestures in which critics seek and find the same inaccuracies over and over again; the reader is led to assume that her own reality is a touchstone for the reality of all readers; and, in certain cases, image criticism fails to account for the persistence of the stereotype, fails to analyse the social context in which the type arises, fails to offer an alternative future ± a solution to the problem of representation (see Moi 1985, 42±9). In a 1979 essay entitled `Towards a Feminist Poetics', Elaine Showalter, again surveying the field of feminist criticism, identified what she saw as the two most usual modes of feminist practice. The first, which I have called `images of women' criticism, is named `feminist critique' by Showalter. She argued that this was a necessary first step in liberating the woman reader from masculine standards of judgement, but she went on to say that there were two fundamental problems with it as it had been practised to date. Firstly, it was `male-oriented', paying far too much attention to the texts of the male-authored canon; secondly, it had a tendency to `naturalize women's victimization by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of discussion' ± a tendency, Showalter suggests, that could lead dangerously close to celebrating women's victim-status instead of challenging it (1986, 130±1). To prevent this danger, she suggested that academic feminism might choose as an alternative focus the figure of

`the

woman as writer', and she coined the term gynocritics to describe this focus.

Gynocritics was to be the study of literary writing by women, its key advantage that it would liberate feminist thought from a dependency on masculine models; in doing so, it would explode the canon by uncovering ± or inventing ± a separate, but equal, literary tradition in which women had participated. Gynocritics would interest itself in

woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, genres and structures of literature by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works. (1986, 128)

Gynocritics had, in fact, begun to take place, even before there was a word for it. For example,

Patricia

Meyer

Spacks's

The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological

Investigation of Women's Writing had been published in 1972. Spacks's argument was that a female tradition did, indeed, exist in literature. There were elements in women's writing that were transhistorical ± that remained constant despite the vagaries of time, history, geography and social class ± and that could be understood as `a woman's point of view' (Spacks 1976, 4). Moreover, she discovers not only a female tradition, but also the effects

modern north american criticism and theory

74

of women's specific problems in literature on female readers of those texts. Using the personal

(rather

than

academically

rigorous)

responses

of

her

own

classes

of

college

students, juxtaposed with her own more measured academic responses, Spacks dramatized the relationships between women as readers and women as writers. Covering quite a range of

texts,

genres

and

historical

periods,

the

book

argues

that

femininity

(the

cultural

construction of femaleness) is a double bind, both for writers and for their readers. Passivity, for example, is both attractive and dangerous ± attractive because it traditionally affords a technique for getting a man in marriage, dangerous because marriage itself can often be a deceptive state that is not nearly so ideal as romantic fictions portray it. Or, again, she argues that adolescence is felt very differently by women than by men. There is no book she says, that `celebrates female adolescence' (158), because adolescence is a time for secrecy and anxiety in women, not for a triumphant entry into the public world, as fiction often portrays it for men. Across history, therefore, women have chosen different solutions from men for the problems they face because the problems themselves are different, given the social set-up that proscribes such different lives for adult females than those it offers to adult males. In 1976, Ellen Moers also produced a text that performed a gynocritical method.

Women: The Great Writers

Literary

consists of chapters made up of essays that Moers had been

writing for at least ten years. Moers's focus is also very wide-ranging. She establishes the idea of a female tradition by appealing to writers' biographies, historical contexts and networks of literary influence (which often appear in surprising places); she also considers the significance of finance on women's writing; and she elaborates a theory of the Gothic as a female mode in fiction, a theory that develops very directly out of women's bodies and their material lives. Moers's introduction opens with the bold statement: `The subject of this book is the major women writers, writers we shall always read, whether interested or not in the fact that they happened to be women' (Moers 1985, ix). The bold assumption is that `great' women writers do, in fact, exist, and although Moers is careful not to call herself a feminist (the writers she is interested in just `happened to be women'), she is nonetheless anxious

to

emphasize

that

female

experience

±

especially

the

physical

and

psychical

consequences of femaleness ± are a legitimate subject for academic study. And, like Spacks, she is also sure that there are links between women

writers

because they are

women

writers.

For Moers, the female tradition, however, is often indirectly inherited, and is often elusive. Only in her description of the genesis and development of the female Gothic is she convinced of distinct networks of influence and of easily understood patterns of meaning that arise from the woman writer's female body. The Gothic, she says, is a literature of the body: it gets `to the body itself, its glands, muscles, epidermis, and circulatory system, quickly arousing and quickly allaying the physiological reactions to fear' (1985, 70). It arises because of the suppression in culture of the secrets of the female body (especially the taboos of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth). And it finds a covert way to speak of the forbidden female. The definition of the female Gothic is important within

Women

as

a

whole

because

it

points

out

the

ways

in

which

a

female

Literary

tradition

will

necessarily be the result of both biology and culture ± of physiology and the repression of that physiology by different societies at different times. The book argues by implication that there is a commonality in all women's experiences, despite historical, geographical and social variations: and like Spacks, Moers assumes some congruence between the woman writer, the female character and the woman reader. There are problems with this view, to which I will return.

american feminisms

75

In 1977, Showalter produced her own explicitly gynocritical study,

È to Lessing, Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte

in

she

A Literature of their

which

set

out

to

place

individual women writers and their social, psychological and economic situations into a

larger

historical

picture

of

literary

influence

and

literary

value.

Thus,

rather

than

a

transhistorical appeal to a female imagination or tradition, Showalter provides a more nearly historicized approach to feminist theory and scholarship. She argues that there are distinctive phases of development in women's writing, phases that are reactions to specific historical and cultural conditions. She declares herself `uncomfortable with the notion of a ``female imagination'' ' because such a concept risks `reiterating the familiar stereotypes', and

renders

the

differences

between

men

and

women

in

writing

permanent

and

sex-

determined. Instead, her emphasis is on `not an innate sexual attitude, but [on] the ways in which the self-awareness of the woman writer has translated itself into a literary form in a specific place and time-span'; this enables her to argue that change and development in women's writing are possible (1978, 12). In her description of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury women's writing, she proposes that there have been three distinct phases: the feminine

phase,

roughly

from

1840

to

1880,

characterized

by

the

choice

of

male

pseudonyms as a strategy for evading a critical double standard, and by the disguise of subversive (feminist) content through displacement and irony; the feminist phase, 1880± 1920, the period of women's struggles for suffrage and education, in which women's writing became more overtly politicized and their texts spoke openly of female oppression; and finally, the female phase, from 1920 to the present, in which women's writing eschews the `dependency' on male models implied by imitation and protest, and turns unapologetically instead to female experience for its raw material (Showalter 1978, 13). The idea of the differences between women across time is important. For Showalter, women represent a sub-culture within the mainstream, coexisting in an uneasy symbiosis with the dominant, male-authored canon of the time. For women writing in the specific circumstances of Victorian England and its long aftermath, female sub-culture, she argues (as Moers had done before her), was characterized by secrecy, in particular the secrets of women's

bodies.

Because

women

could

not

write

directly

about

their

experiences

of

childbirth or menstruation, they tended to encode them into their texts as displaced images that only other women would notice and understand as shared markers of secret femininity. But perhaps more important than her commitment to some attempt at historicism is Showalter's commitment to the women writers who have never been classed among the `great'.

Spacks

and

Moers

focused

accepted as writers of literary quality.

almost

entirely

on

writers

A Literature of their Own,

who

have

usually

been

on the other hand, though it

È , George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Dorothy Richardson and does concentrate on Charlotte Bronte Virginia Woolf, also opens its pages to far less well known women writers, women whose names had more or less vanished from the literary canon (at least in 1977). Showalter notes that there has been a tendency for women writers to disappear, and for her, making a female tradition involves historical excavation of the texts that have not survived. It is only by considering even those whose works are `irreparably minor . . . Millicent Grogan as well as Virginia Woolf ± that we can begin to record new choices in a new literary history, and to understand why, despite prejudice, despite guilt, despite inhibition, women began to write' (Showalter 1978, 36). And, indeed, attention is accorded to the minor women, as well as the `great' ± though the attention is definitely skewed towards the `great', and Showalter clearly has some blindspots in relation to issues of literary value when she considers the minor writers.

modern north american criticism and theory

76

Two years later, in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar published

The Madwoman

in the Attic: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination .

It

is clear from their preface that in a relatively short period of time, the idea of a female tradition

in literature was pretty well secure.

They

cite

the works of both Moers

and

Showalter as having established without doubt that `nineteenth-century literary women

did

have both a literature and a culture of their own ± that . . . by the nineteenth century there was a rich and clearly defined female literary sub-culture, a community in which women consciously

read

methodological

and related to each impetus

derives

other's

not

only

works' (1979,

from

the

xii). Their theoretical

then

newly

developing

and

feminist

tradition of Moers and Showalter, but also from the aggressively masculinist writings of

The Anxiety of Influence.

Harold Bloom, in particular his 1973 book

Bloom's argument had

been that writers situate themselves in a tradition through violent reaction against their literary

forebears.

A

poet

is

validated

by

his

(all

Bloom's

examples

are

male)

hostile

rewritings of the texts of the past. The male writer is always engaged in a quasi-Oedipal struggle with his literary father for supremacy. The terms of this argument quite clearly, Gilbert

and

Gubar

suggest,

leave

no

space

for

the

woman

writer:

poets

have

no

metaphorical mothers, no significant relationships with women as women, or with women as readers and writers to whom their works might be addressed. Instead of the anxiety of influence, they propose as their model for the woman writer the

anxiety

of

authorship.

Women

fear

to

write

since

in

nineteenth-century

culture,

writing is a masculine activity, and value is only accorded to masculine production. The woman who chooses to write arrogates male power, and will necessarily fail to accrue literary

value

insignificant

since or

she

silly,

lacks

and

the

her

male

person

gift. will

Her be

literary

attacked

products as

will

be

monstrous

attacked

and

as

aberrantly

unfeminine. Gilbert and Gubar then set out to chart how nineteenth-century women writers

attempted

sustained

and

to

evade

impressive

or

confront

readings

of

the

the

hostile

works

of

literary

Jane

world.

Austen,

They

Mary

undertake

Shelley,

Emily

È , Charlotte Bronte È , George Eliot, Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson ± an Bronte alternative `great tradition' of women writers. They refer to a massive range of material ± from

Native

American

Wuthering Heights,

mythology

to

the

poetry

of

Sylvia

Plath

in

their

reading

of

for example ± and make connections between female experience and

female authorship across vast swathes of time and space. Their approach mixes traditional close readings of the texts with wide citation from critical material and with other more

tour de force;

eclectic detail. The book is a

it appears very persuasive and the readings of

individual texts remain important and fascinating. But the conclusions Gilbert and Gubar draw

about

Armstrong

the has

nature

argued,

of

a

they

female

are

often

tradition

are

dangerously

open

to

ahistorical

question, because

and of

as

their

Nancy will

to

connect the woman writer to her forebears (see Armstrong 1987, 7±8).

A Literature of their Own

and

The Madwoman in the Attic

are very important signpost

books that offered both a theory and a method for reading women's writing in its own terms. But like Friedan, Ellmann, Spacks and Moers before them, and for all the apparent inclusivity of their frames of reference, in the end Showalter and Gilbert and Gubar still offered

quite

a

partial

view

of

the

woman

writer.

One

criticism

has

been

that

their

concentration on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature left earlier periods underrepresented, as if there was no such thing as a woman writer in earlier periods. But by far the most serious criticism of all these earlier manifestations of feminist criticism has come from black feminists. Where, in the elaboration of a female tradition, of female representation so

american feminisms

77

far, have been those `other women'? That is, where are the women who are not white, middle or upper class, straight and relatively privileged? Where are the non-housewives, those for whom work is not a choice or a privilege, but a necessity? In 1979, novelist, poet and critic Alice Walker spoke at Sarah Lawrence College in honour of Muriel Rukeyser. Her talk, subsequently published in

In Search of Our Mothers'

Gardens: Womanist Prose (1984), was entitled `One Child of One's Own: A Meaningful Digression Within the Work(s)'. It is a partially autobiographical piece, partly about the experience of maternity, partly about Walker's professional career as a writer and university teacher, and its theme is race and the race-blindness of white people that Walker has encountered. In one passage, she describes how she was, in the early 1970s, working at an upper-class college, teaching a course on black women writers: `There she shared an office with

a

white

woman

feminist

scholar

who

taught

poetry

and

literature.

This

woman

thought literature consisted predominantly of Nikki Giovanni, whom she had, apparently, once seen inadvertently on TV' (1984, 371). Walker, appalled by this ignorance tried to repair it by leaving books on her desks by black women writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, Nella Larsen, Paula Marshall and Zora Neale Hurston, believing that this subtle approach would help. Some time passed, and then the white feminist scholar published her most famous book:

Dozens of imaginative women paraded across its pages. They were all white. Papers of the status quo, like the

Times, and liberal inquirers like The New York Review of Books and the

Village Voice, and even feminist magazines such as Ms . . . actually reviewed this work with varying degrees of seriousness. Yet to our young mother, the index alone was sufficient proof that the work could not be really serious scholarship, only serious white female chauvinism. (1984, 371±2)

The scholar was Patricia Meyer Spacks, and the book was

The Female Imagination. Walker

was not unnaturally infuriated to discover that for Spacks, and for many white feminists, the black woman scarcely counted as a woman at all. In

1977,

Barbara

Smith

had

also

noticed

the

yawning

gap

in

feminist

scholarship

represented by black female experience. In her essay `Towards a Black Feminist Criticism', she wrote that she did not know where to begin because writing about black women's experiences,

and

writing

specifically

about

black

lesbian

experiences,

had

never

been

tackled, even by `white women critics who think of themselves as feminists' (Smith, in Showalter 1986, 168). In many ways, Smith's essay restages some of the battles that white feminist scholars had already fought on their own behalf. First of all she has to establish that a

black

feminist

discourse

is

necessary.

After

all,

where

conditions

of

severe

material

deprivation exist, talking about books may not seem very important. But Smith suggests that political and aesthetic theories are one possible vehicle for raising the consciousness of oppressed groups, and knowing the terms of one's oppression is the prerequisite for tackling it. Moreover, because literature itself is a privileged category, claiming some of the value that goes with that privilege for black women writers is a highly charged political act that implies a claim of value for the lives of black women more generally. Black feminist theory necessarily entails a re-evaluation of the status of literary value and works back towards the lives of the women it represents. Smith suggested that black women's writing had to be read in the context of other black women's writing, rather than measured against some preexisting (white) standard. She advocated a criticism that focused in part on content, on its mediated reflections of lived experience, but she also argued that attention had to be paid

modern north american criticism and theory

78

to the forms, images, metaphors and plots that this writing expressed. In the examination of the

black

women's

forgotten),

black

tradition

feminist

(a

critics

tradition would

that

be

exists,

able

to

see

even that

if

it

had

been

`thematically,

buried

or

stylistically,

aesthetically and conceptually, black women writers manifest common approaches to the act of creating literature as a direct result of the political, social, and economic experience they have been obliged to share' (Smith, in Showalter 1986, 174). One would also discover a

`specifically

emphasis

on

black the

female

oral

language'

tradition.

expressing

These

forms

black

could

be

women's celebrated

experiences, when

seen

and in

an

their

proper context, not criticized for being improper, and such language might even then find their way into the discourses of criticism. Literary feminism, feminism in the academy in the United States, then, has largely been a matter of representation. In whatever guise it appears, it begins by looking at images of women, focusing on content. It then moves to consider the issue of the woman writer, and her representation in the canon, the academic institution and the publishers' lists. But where white feminist criticism was often content to describe what it perceived as the (white) woman problem, black feminist criticism, and the writings of other women of colour, is often much more radical in diagnosing its own problems and seeking change. As well as looking at issues of representation within the text, it also seeks a wider representation in the world beyond the text.

Ruth Robbins

Further reading and works cited Armstrong, N.

Desire and Domestic Fiction. Oxford, 1987.

Cornillon, S. Koppelman. Eagleton, T. Ð (ed.)

Images of Women in Fiction. Bowling Green, KY, 1972.

Literary Theory. Oxford, 1996a.

Feminist Literary Theory. Oxford, 1996b.

Ellmann, M.

Thinking About Women. New York, 1968.

The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth, 1992.

Friedan, B.

Gilbert, S. M. and Gubar, S. hooks, b.

Millett, K. Moers, E. Moi, T.

Sexual Politics. London, 1977.

Literary Women. Oxford, 1985.

Sexual/Textual Politics. London, 1985.

Poovey, M.

The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago, 1984.

Showalter, E. Ð (ed.)

The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven, CT, 1979.

Ain't I a Woman? London, 1982.

A Literature of their Own. London, 1978.

The New Feminist Criticism. London, 1986.

Ð. `Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness' and `Towards a Feminist Poetics', in

The New Feminist

Critic, ed. E. Showalter. London, 1986. Smith, B. `Towards a Black Feminist Criticism', In

The New Feminist Critic, ed. E. Showalter. London,

1986. Spacks, P. Meyer.

The Female Imagination. London, 1976.

Walker, A. `One Child of One's Own', in

In Search of our Mothers' Gardens. London, 1984.

12. Feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s: The Encounter with Poststructuralism and Gender Studies

It is commonplace in historical surveys of American feminism to identify a seismic shift ± in both subject matter and modes of inquiry ± near the end of the 1970s or beginning of the 1980s. Perhaps the most profound marker of this shift may be situated around the question of `difference'. As the previous article outlines, the academic feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s urged women to be resistant readers of the male literary canon and to reconsider women writers as part of a distinctly rich, differently established female canon. `Images of women' criticism (such as Kate Millett's or Judith Fetterley's) and `gynocriticism' (such as Elaine Showalter's, Sandra Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's) innovatively direct attention to issues

of

sexual

difference

within

the

western

literary

tradition,

laying

the

important

groundwork that has made feminism an undeniable force in academic discourse. Pointing to the ways women are excluded from or subsumed by prevailing concepts of reading, writing,

thinking

demonstrate

and

that

living,

humanism's

such

feminisms

supposedly

follow

universal

Simone

subject

de

was

Beauvoir's

actually

lead

only

and

male

all

along. For this mode of feminism, the difference between a male subject (or a purportedly ungendered one, which amounts to the same thing) and a female one makes a critical difference. And generally speaking, articulating this

difference it makes

difference between

and analysing what

was the central preoccupation of American feminist criticism prior to

1980. In the next two decades, by contrast, the contribution of feminists of colour, lesbian critiques, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and gender studies all serve to move the question of difference from a Much

of

the

difference between

energy

directing

this

to a

difference within.

shift

involves

feminism's

new

engagement

with

poststructuralism's powerful critiques of binary logic, particularly the logic that sanctions the

opposition

suspicious

of

within

the

sexual

extent

difference.

to which

its

As

own

such,

feminism

discourse

was

comes

to

dependent

be

upon

increasingly a

difference

between `men' and `women'. Because of this very suspicion towards oppositions, however, easy

divisions

determined especially

by

hard

between dates to

feminism

and

provide

`then'

descriptors in

and

calling

discussing

`now' for

also

prove

aetiologies

feminism's

unstable.

and

`encounter

And

definitions

with

surveys become

poststructuralism

and gender studies' since 1980. In the first place, a number of critics would dispute the notion that earlier feminist work was not concerned with or only naively aware of the theoretical challenges poststructuralism posed for those seeking to define a female literary tradition, or describing the experience of `reading like a woman', or expressing a unified

modern north american criticism and theory

80

feminist project. In her own survey, in fact, Naomi Schor emphasizes that feminism of the 1970s itself `was in fact part of a larger and very powerful critical trend of the early 1970s, the structuralist-poststructuralist critiques of mimetic representation' (1992, 265). In this regard, it might be useful to notice the continuities as well as the break between the two understandings of `difference' proposed above. For, as Schor implies, both feminist epochs intersect historically and intellectually with poststructuralist theories of representation, and both are concerned with `laying bare the sexual politics at work in seemingly innocent and authoritative imitations of social reality' (1992, 265). A further difficulty is that the very gesture of defining poststructuralism as a position, movement or method would be antithetical to those who stress that such an effort is misguided

from

the

start,

missing

precisely

what

poststructuralism

most

has

to

offer

±

namely, the critique of foundational `essence' as such. `Poststructuralism', asserts Judith Butler,

`is

not

exclusionary

strictly

speaking,

operations

by

position

a

which

,

but

``positions''

rather

a

[including

critical feminist

interrogation positions]

of

are

the

estab-

lished.' Linda Kauffman calls for a similarly rigorous self-consciousness and resistance to objective definition, stressing as well that poststructuralist critique involves a commitment to

a

continual

knowledge

work

in

progress:

`I

want

continually

to

cast

doubt

even as we are in the process of constructing it ±

±

a

on

the

status

perpetual

of

project.'

Poststructuralism is not grounded in a specific set of methods, except for a commitment to the `erosion of the very ground on which to take a stand', asserts Peggy Kamuf (all in Friedman 1995, 22). Diane Elam, writing about feminism and deconstruction, highlights the

problem

of

supposing

that

feminist

projects

that

`use'

deconstruction

or

other

poststructuralist theories simply bring together two discrete methods or movements (`they cannot

best

be

understood

as

movements')

to

make

a

new

one.

For,

more

than

just

historically, `there is a sense in which feminism already ``is'' deconstruction, and deconstruction ``is'' already feminism. And yet, with this said, they also do not collapse into one another and eliminate their differences' (Elam 1994, 9, 21). Such refusals have a strategic efficacy, indeed necessity, as well, for as Barbara Johnson warns, `[a]s soon as any radically innovative thought becomes an its

disciples

tend

conservative, (Johnson

at

1987,

to

become

which 11).

time

ism

, its specific ground-breaking force diminishes, . . . and

more its

Johnson

is

simplistic,

power

more

becomes

speaking

of

dogmatic,

institutional

and

ultimately

rather

`deconstructionism'

in

than

this

more

analytical'

instance,

but

her admonition is also in keeping with all of the above statements about feminism and poststructuralism (11). A similarly self-conscious impulse has brought a key feminist insight to new avenues of inquiry

we

regarding

could

the

place

`and'

in

under

the

`feminism

larger

and

heading

of

deconstruction'

`gender applies

studies'. equally

Elam's to

the

caution relation

between poststructuralism and gender studies as well, for in many ways gender studies `is' poststructuralist. (The other `and', however, requires circumspection. Schor cautions that `feminist and gender studies are not coextensive' and `cannot simply be collapsed onto each other' (1992, 275, 262).) If there is no category of identity that exists outside of culture, then understanding the construction of femininity must entail studying constructions of masculinity too, as well as the interaction and complicity of those constructs. For instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's important work on male `homosociality',

Men

in Between

(1985), examines the influence of patriarchal culture upon men's social interactions

with other men by means of methods feminists had previously used to study women. While Sedgwick's work is arguably `feminist' at its core, its focus on male rather than female

feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s

81

Episte-

gender construction also claims new intellectual territory. Her subsequent books,

mology of the Closet

Tendencies

(1990) and

(1993), have been particularly instrumental in

fostering the vitality of gay studies and `queer theory' of the late twentieth century. Other work one might place under the rubric of `gender studies' explores the implications of mainstream feminism's `compulsory heterosexuality', and works with a suspicion towards binary oppositions to promote a specifically lesbian critique of feminism's discourse on `women'. Naomi Schor points out, however, that it is misleading to assume that gay male gender studies and lesbian studies `fits neatly into the template of gay-gender studies' (1992, 280). As Sedgwick points out in the specific context of her literary study, it is important not

to

conflate

the

two

for

doing

so

overlooks

`an

asymmetry

in

our

present

society

between, on the one hand, the relatively continuous relation of female homosocial and homosexual bonds, and, on the other hand, the radically discontinuous relation of male homosocial and homosexual bonds' (1985, 4±5). Schor extends Sedgwick's point to a more general proviso for understanding the projects of contemporary gender studies. `[B]ecause male homosexuality threatens patriarchal society in a way that female homosexuality does not',

we

must

be

vigilant

about

recognizing

difference

here

as

well;

`there

is

no

gay

continuum' (1992, 281). Such a conflation would obscure as well the challenging role lesbian critique serves within a discourse she would still call `feminist'. Robyn Wiegman asserts such a role suggestively in a response to Susan Gubar in the pages of

Critical Inquiry.

For Wiegman, an avowedly poststructuralist lesbian critique came about and helped to bring about the epochal shift from a `difference between' to a `difference within' feminism, playing the important role of `the lesbian, [who] threatens to undermine from within the Edenic . . . unity' of a heterosexually grounded feminism (1999, 363). If they disavow definable method or unity of purpose, these assertions do nevertheless suggest a certain critical spirit or disposition we could characterize as specifically `poststructuralist'.

Structural

linguistics

stressed

the

arbitrary

and

differential

nature

of

sig-

nification, and poststructural theories brought that insight to bear on issues of psychic formation,

gender

identity

and

cultural

instantiations

of

sexual

difference

in

ground-

breaking ways. Correspondingly, all of these critics express an intellectual commitment to analytical rigour, scepticism and self-consciousness with regard to their object of study ± and in all of these cases, that object is

discourse

and that `object' includes their own. We

could also generalize that most academic feminism of the last two decades regards gender as a construction rather than a natural fact or an essence, produced by a complex set of social, political, psychic, racial, economic, historical, but most emphatically discursive or linguistic forces. The particular methodological orientation of a critic tends to be dictated by the privilege she gives to one or a combination of those forces. And in the high-stakes, often divisive

intellectual

climate

that

emerges

from

such

a

matrix

of

possibilities,

these

theoretical choices make all the difference. Though they do so in a vast heterogeneity of

ways,

arguably

all

academic

feminisms

of

the

last

two

decades

engage

in

this

self-

conscious approach and work from these basic premises ± or fail to do so at their peril. In a story many commentators tell, a number of concrete institutional changes also mark the transition between these two periods. Jane Gallop locates this foundational shift rather precisely `around 1981', a moment in which key incidents of continental drift take place: two major academic journals (Critical to

feminism;

poststructuralist

Inquiry

theory,

and

much

of

Yale French Studies) it

imported

from

devoted entire issues France,

gained

new

currency among many American feminists; and feminist inquiries that had largely been the domain of literary critics and members of English departments moved beyond their

modern north american criticism and theory

82

traditional disciplinary boundaries (Gallop 1992, 1±10). Many note that, more broadly, an institutional rite of passage seems to occur for feminism around this time. Citing Gallop, Naomi Schor adds that `such leading indicators as the exponentially growing list of feminist publications . . ., the proliferation of feminist sessions at the annual MLA convention, and . . . the tenuring of scholars primarily identified as feminist critics' ± including Gallop herself ± all point to the fact that `by the early 1980s feminist criticism and theory were without question no longer marginal activities, practiced by an embattled corps of largely untenured and powerless women' (275). Gubar notes that the last two decades have seen `some six hundred programs in Women's Studies . . . [develop] since the seventies' and `prominent feminist scholars serve as the presidents of major professional organizations', along with numerous other gains (2000, 157, 113). It would be misleading, however, to imply that this is simply a narrative of collective progress and exuberant solidarity. In fact, one of feminism's most suggestive theses is that such

narratives

are

necessarily

reductive,

that

they

necessarily

efface

the

incalculable

differences within the various categories feminism establishes for study. Though critics like Gubar and Wiegman warn against the seductiveness of casting early feminism as a lost Eden of either singular purpose or harmonious pluralism (whether to celebrate or castigate it), it is fairly safe to say that, in comparison with the body of feminist scholarship produced in the 1960s and 1970s, the subsequent proliferation of theoretical arguments and positions around the question of `women' and `gender' have rendered it effectively impossible to speak a `feminist project' in the singular. This theoretical heterogeneity has also led to new doubts

regarding

its

`collective'

goals

and

gains.

Somewhere

`around

1981',

it

seems,

feminism's very success story becomes the subject of scrutiny for critics who wonder whom this narrative leaves out and at what cost such `success' might come. Newly challenging assumptions about the insiders and outsiders of feminism, voices emerge with provocative questions. Who has been telling feminism's story? And who gets left out of that telling? Articulated

through

such

questions,

crucial

concerns

are

expressed

by

those

who

see

exclusionary powers at work within the feminist project as well as without. The discursive self-consciousness of the poststructuralist climate has encouraged scholars to consider the blind spots within the rhetoric and ideology of mainstream feminism itself. Under this lens, the largely white, middle-class, heterosexual bias at work in earlier feminist discourse comes into focus, ushering a new `generation' of critical work that regards gender as but one variable in the infinitely complex matrix of categories (such as race, class, nationality, religion, sexuality) that establish identity and structure power. bell hooks's pivotal 1981 publication, example,

posits

Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism , to give just one

`difference

feminism's method

within'

through

of locating exclusion or

the

question

occlusion to

of

race,

critique

applying

feminism

an

earlier

itself.

In

a

similar critical spirit, Gayatri Spivak also examines the difference at work in feminism and critical theory more generally. Her especially heterogeneous theoretical approach works from `within', both drawing from and critiquing poststructuralist theory to produce her influential

1988

psychoanalytic

book,

theory,

In

Other

Gayatri

Worlds.

Spivak

Working

expands

the

with black

marxist, feminist

deconstructive critique

of

and

`white'

feminism and grafts it to a critique of `French' feminism by placing both `in an international frame' (1988, 134). While offering translations of Indian short stories and literary analyses of texts as varied as Dante, Wordsworth and Woolf, this text also provides extremely influential essays on `subaltern studies'. Such studies consider the subject formation of the `subaltern', shaped in complex ways by the intersection of India's `culture of imperialism',

feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s

83

class hierarchies, gender, and recent historical shifts in global politics' (1988, 245). Related to the feminist effort to account for women in a history that has largely left them out, Spivak's project `attempt[s] to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis and ``situate'' the effect of the subaltern' by providing a detailed analysis of the existing `work of Subaltern Studies from within but against the grain' (205). Adumbrating questions of `difference within' and across race, class, nationality, history and political structures, Spivak's has proved foundational to the burgeoning field of `postcolonial studies', which has charted significant theoretical territory beyond the bounds of both feminism and gender studies. Her work provides just one illustration of how interdisciplinary and wide-ranging feminisms of the last decades have become, and the extent to which they engage with issues across a broad field of cultural and ethnic studies. As Gallop and so many others demonstrate, feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s show a similar preoccupation with the political effects of its own historiography. In her essay, `Making History: Reflections on Feminism, Narrative, and Desire', Susan Stanford Friedman

focuses

on

just

such

projects,

arguing

that

the

strategies

at

work

in

feminist

historiography have everything to do with the hotly contested question of not only what feminism has been and is, but also what it should be and will become. History, as she defines it, is more something we engage

in

a

`heuristic

activity'

do

than something that

and

to

stage

an

is.

To `make history' is both to

`intervention'.

As

Spivak

stresses

the

`interventionist value' and `strategy' of retelling a history with `the subaltern as the subject', Friedman considers interventionist strategies in various feminist historiographies (Spivak 1987, 207). She stresses that `writing the history of feminism functions as an act in the present that can (depending on its influence) contribute to the shape of feminism's future' (13). The purpose of citing Friedman here is, instead, largely heuristic. On the one hand, her project provides a fairly useful ± if somewhat arbitrary ± example of what premises broadly characterize feminism's `encounter' with

both

`poststructuralism and gender studies'.

On the other, it also occasions a duly self-conscious acknowledgement of the impossibility of justly synthesizing the voluminously heterogeneous body of work under its heading. In Elam's succinct words, `her-story

is not one story'

(1994, 37).

Primarily, and in the most general sense, Friedman approaches her subject from the premise that history `is' what we `make' it. It is a

construction.

Her argument is also informed

by the notion that `the politics of representation' is not simply a look at from an intellectual remove, but a profoundly

static structure

dynamic process

feminists

in which feminists

too ± including Friedman herself ± necessarily participate (1995, 18±19). That underlying distinction ± between a criticism that purports to study a static, external representational structure and a criticism that grapples with representation as a dynamic, co-implicating process of construction or `production' ± marks a key shift not only between `Feminism I' and `Feminism II', but from structuralism to poststructuralism writ large. In its attention to the

way

representational

dynamics

specifically

shape

feminist

narratives,

Friedman's

approach also indirectly echoes a guiding principle of scholars informed by intersections between deconstruction and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. She directly references Peter Brooks' theory of `narrative desire', a richly suggestive concept that insists upon a dynamic rather than static understanding of narrative, which Brooks formulates by juxtaposing Freud's drive theory with formalist and structuralist narratology. One could also read in her essay an indirect echo of projects like Johnson's, which bring deconstructive theoretical premises to bear on issues of `gender, race, literary genre, [and] institutional context' in consistently challenging ways. Johnson's pointed assertion that `the question of gender is a

modern north american criticism and theory

84

question of language' issues from the broader aims of a project she describes as `a critique of the fallacious naturalness and blinkered focus' of institutions and `articulations of power' that authoritatively claim reference to the `real world' (Johnson 1987, 37). For Johnson, the `real world' cannot be referenced except in quotation marks, a theoretical observation many poststructuralist feminists apply to the terms `woman' or `women' as well. Related to such projects are those that examine just how gender comes to be constituted by language, and Friedman's concerns point to another important avenue in feminist and gender studies: the issue of

performativity

. As Friedman's study asserts, accounts that say

where we are going and where we have been, to paraphrase the subtitle of the star-studded retrospective on feminist criticism at the December 1994 MLA convention, are, as that panel theatrically demonstrated to a capacity crowd,

performances

. They do not refer to pre-

existing categories of knowledge; they are produced and reproduced by being acted out. More simply put, as performances (or `speech acts'), they do something or make something happen. This emphasis on the performative construction of categories of knowledge we might assume are fixed or `natural' has especially informed Judith Butler's influential work in gender studies. Butler has taken into provocative new arenas Foucault's insistence on the historically-specific and ideologically-determined discursive construction `sex' in his landmark

History of Sexuality

(1976).

Butler

specifically

examines

both

gender

and

the

presumably `natural' and more primary category of `sex', arguing that the two function in a complex interrelationship, and that `gender is a performance that

produces

both

are indeed constructed rather than essential:

the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic

gender core' (1991, 28). Gender, for Butler, is a radically unstable category that exists only through repeated performances (iterations) by all of us who live within a sex-gender system (and that is everyone). Like much of the most innovative and challenging feminist theory to emerge in the last two decades, Butler's project both engages with and helps transform poststructuralism's radical critiques of representation, subjectivity and ideology. As Schor and Wiegman both suggest, the poststructuralist critique of essence and the expanding interdisciplinarity of gender studies has led a number of influential scholars to question the tenability and efficacy of that very adjective (`feminist') for critical theories aimed

at

examining,

even

dismantling,

the

humanist

subject

they

deem

irretrievably

phallogocentric. The most radical implication of such a critique is one that vexes some feminist orientations and invigorates others, namely that feminism's heuristic privileging of gender, on the word `women', as a guiding principle might be, in Biddy Martin's bold words, `plagued from the outset' and even `may have outlived its usefulness' (Martin 1997, 104, 106). A number of debates over the state of feminist theory at the turn of the century laments such propositions as grievously self-defeating. With a problematic deployment of terms

too

complex

to

delineate

here,

a

number

of

critics

lay

blame

at

the

feet

of

`poststructuralism' itself (arguably by means of poststructuralist premises), charging it with an extreme constructivism that denies any validity to the collective identity categories feminism claims in the service of its `cause' (see Gubar 2000, 113±34). Gubar complains that feminist discursive self-consciousness too often devolves into

ad feminam

accusations

of political bad faith. Similarly, Friedman worries that an unselfconscious commitment to self-consciousness could foster inertia: `first danger is the problem of paralysis, the kind of infinite regress and fetishization of indeterminacy that can develop out of constant navelgazing.

Perpetual

self-reflexivity

±

particularly

with

its

continual

focus

on

linguistic

construction ± contains within it the potential of dangerous inaction' (Friedman 1995, 25). The radical and relentless `differencing' feminist theory demands, however, need not

feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s

85

signal defeat, nor imply the job is not still worth doing. And, as Daphne Patai suggests, discursive self-consciousness is not theory's only concern: `It is a mistake to let ourselves be overwhelmed by these problems. The fact that doing research across race, class, and culture is a messy business is no reason to contemplate only our difficulties and ourselves struggling with them' (in Friedman 1995, 25). Patai's comment also implicitly points to the possibility that such criticisms misidentify their culprit. Wiegman vehemently responds to Gubar's diagnosis of `What Ails Feminism?' (a version of an essay originally called `Who Killed Feminism?') with a Socratic apology,

reminding

her

of

a

distinction

between

poststructuralism

done

badly

and

poststructuralism as such: `While it is always the case that critical modes of analysis spawn reductive and predictable scholarship . . ., it does not follow that the existence of such scholarship renders illegitimate the intellectual value of the trajectories of analysis being pursued' (1999, 369). Gubar refines her criticism in a response to Wiegman, protesting that what she laments, more precisely, are `boring, . . . routinized default positions [that] inhibit what one would ordinarily call thinking, making it hard for people to risk ideas that do not toe what is assumed to be a morally superior or epistemologically more sophisticated line' (1999,

381).

Wiegman's

and

Gubar's

debate

broader contentions within feminist theory,

is

illuminating

not

just

because

but also for the unified demand

it

(though each might object to the notion of such a unity). Sparring on the pages of

Inquiry,

stages

it makes

Critical

both invoke the importance of critical inquiry that proceeds in the face of risk ± the

risk of bad manners or bad grammar, perhaps, but more profoundly, the risk of genuine

thinking.

Implicitly defending herself against Gubar's charge that her bad grammar is one of

the symptoms of what ails feminism, Butler rebuts that it is a `mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself' (Butler 1999, xviii±xix). Barbara Johnson,

who

might

remind

both

Gubar

and

Wiegman

of

the

theoretical

value

of

`depersonalization' or `self-resistance' in their disagreements with one another, acknowledges the pitfalls of a poststructuralism on autodrive: `It can lead to a kind of infinite regress of demystification, in which ever more sophisticated subtleties are elaborated within an unchanging field of questions' (Johnson 1987, 42±6, 15). More to the point, she demands a rigorous

self-consciousness

that

does

not

equate

with

mere

`navel-gazing',

but

rather

remains vigilant against it. Like Butler's commitment to think the unthinkable, Johnson insists that the feminist interrogation of difference demands a commitment to `what can never be taken for granted' (16). `The impossible but necessary task of the reader is to set herself up to be surprised' (15). As such debates and avowals variously demonstrate, no matter how scholarship narrates the development of feminist study throughout the final decades of the twentieth century, a general

(if

not

generalizable)

discursive

tenor

does

emerge.

Although

with

widely

divergent, variously ominous tones, feminism in the 1980s and 1990s is anything but complacent with ± or convinced of ± its purported success. Attributed to a great diversity of causes

±

generational,

institutional,

political,

social,

practical

and

philosophical

±

the

critical mass of critical discourse on feminism of late explicitly locates itself at a particularly pivotal historical moment, at an uneasy crossroads where the work of the past calls for crucial new work to be done in the future. A cursory survey of titles from the period with which this article is concerned provides a telling snapshot of this richly overdetermined moment:

Conflicts in Feminism, Gender Trouble, Feminism Beside Itself, Feminist Contentions,

Generations, Critical Condition.

Joan Wallach Scott explains that she named the special

modern north american criticism and theory

86

issue of

differences she edited `Women's Studies on the Edge' ± an issue that included essays

with such provocative titles as `The Impossibility of Women's Studies' and `Success and Its Failures' ± to highlight the `sense of precariousness and uncertain anticipation' that marks this `time of transition' (Scott 1997, iii, iv). Scott sees troubling irony in the fact that this academic journal comes out just as

Time magazine asks on its cover, `Is Feminism Dead?'

(accompanied by Ally McBeal's pouty visage silently saying `yes'), but also recognizes a continued need and promise for feminist discourse in the future. Writes Scott:

An

edge

is

not

only

a

point

of

transition,

but

also

a

site

of

contestation,

a

place

where

differences become apparent and are erased, where lines divide and converge, and where new configurations emerge ± a place of anxiety and irritability, to be sure, but also one of great energy and vitality ± a cutting edge, in other words, in the worst and best senses of the term. (Scott 1997, iv)

In this special issue and beyond, the many rich proposals and daring rehearsals of what this

project

should

entail

similarly

suggest

that

the

`feminism'

of

the

future

will

be

contentious, multivocal, difficult, even impossible ± yet still vital and necessary, a perpetual project.

Megan Becker-Leckrone

Further reading and works cited Benhabib, S. et al.

Feminist Contentions. New York, 1995.

Brown, W. `The Impossibility of Women's Studies',

differences: A Journal of Feminist and Cultural

Studies, 9, 3, 1997. Butler, J. `Imitation and Gender Insubordination', in Ð.

Inside/Out, ed. D. Fuss. New York, 1991.

Gender Trouble. New York, 1999. Feminism and Deconstruction. New York, 1994.

Elam, D.

Ð and Wiegman, R. (eds) Foucault, M.

Feminism Beside Itself. New York, 1995.

The History of Sexuality. New York, 1976.

Friedman, S. Stanford. `Making History' in

Feminism Beside Itself, eds D. Elam and R. Wiegman. New

York, 1995. Fuss, D.

Essentially Speaking. New York, 1989.

Gallop, J.

Around 1981. New York, 1992.

Gubar, S. `Notations Ð.

in Medias Res', Critical Inquiry, 25, 1999.

Critical Condition. New York, 2000.

Hirsch, M. and Keller, E. Fox (eds) hooks, b.

Johnson, B. Ð.

Conflicts in Feminism. New York, 1990.

Ain't I a Woman. Boston, 1981. A World of Difference. Baltimore, MD, 1987.

The Feminist Difference. Cambridge, 1998.

Looser, D. and Kaplan, E. Ann

Generations. Minneapolis, MN, 1997.

Martin, B. `Success and Its Failures', Moi, T. Scott, J.

differences: A Journal of Feminist and Cultural Studies , 9, 3, 1997.

Sexual/Textual Politics. New York, 1985. Gender and the Politics of History. New York, 1988.

Scott, J. Wallach. `Women's Studies on the Edge. Introduction',

differences: A Journal of Feminist and

Cultural Studies, 9, 3, 1997. Schor, N. `Feminist and Gender Studies', in

Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and

Literatures, ed. J. Gibaldi. New York, 1992. Seagwick, E. Kosofsky.

Between Men. New York, 1985.

psychoanalysis and literary criticism Ð. Ð.

87

Epistemology of the Closet Tendencies The New Feminist Criticism In Other Worlds Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory . Berkeley, CA, 1990.

. Durham, NC, 1993.

Showalter, E. (ed.)

. New York, 1985.

Spivak, G. Chakravorty.

. New York, 1988.

Weedon, C.

. Oxford, 1997.

Wiegman, R. `What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion',

Critical Inquiry

, 25, 1999.

13. Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism

Surveying

the

work

of

Peter

Brooks,

Barbara

Johnson,

Shoshana

Felman,

Neil

Hertz,

Cynthia Chase or any of the innumerable others who could be added to this list provides ample evidence that some of the most significant contributions to recent psychoanalytic criticism and theory have come from scholars working in the United States. Today, critics at the forefront of this theoretical discourse almost invariably draw from poststructuralist understandings

of

reading,

language,

representation

and

subject

formation

that

were

initially `imported' from Europe in the 1970s. More often with the aid of than to the exclusion

of

prominent

similar

discourses

American

efforts

in

to

England,

juxtapose

France,

Germany

psychoanalysis

and

and

elsewhere,

literature

the

most

emphasize

the

complexity involved in the pairing. Some important common aims emerge among these projects:

an

interest

in

psychoanalysis

as

a

rich

site

for

exploring

the

vicissitudes

of

interpretation and theory as such, including one's own; an emphasis on the fruitful analogy between the workings of language or signification and the workings of the unconscious (often prompted by Jacques Lacan's linguistic `return to Freud'); an effort to explore not just what psychoanalytic theory can tell us about literature, but also, importantly, what literature or literary study can tell us about psychoanalysis or interpretation as such. Despite the possibility of such a generalization, however, it is also important to point out that recent critics approach these concerns by way of a fairly heterogeneous set of theoretical models, from Freudian to Lacanian vocabularies, from structuralist narratology to deconstructive rhetorical analysis, from feminism to marxism, from psychoanalytic readings of literature to literary readings of psychoanalysis. For these reasons, in fact, it seems specious to speak of

an

American psychoanalytic criticism as such, or an

criticism, or ± for that matter ± an American projects we

could practically place

psychoanalytic

American

psychoanalytic

criticism. The most suggestive

under such a heading have diverse aims and cross

national as well as discursive boundaries. It seems worth pointing out, in this regard, that all of the critics cited above are ± in both training and teaching ± comparatists. We might say that this state of the field is as it should be, since the first psychoanalytic literary critic was Sigmund Freud himself, an Austrian whose most famous theoretical formula borrowed from the plot of a Greek drama, and whose `scientific' study of the unconscious so often took him to the speculative reaches of religion, philosophy and art. Yet despite ± or perhaps because of ± Freud's formidable precedent, in

Dreams

The Interpretation of

and elsewhere, the critical juxtaposition of psychoanalysis and literature has always

been a rather anxious exercise. As Brooks himself admits at the outset of a recent essay:

modern north american criticism and theory

88

The enterprise hasn't on the whole made a good name for itself. It's in fact most often been something of an embarrassment . . . I find myself resisting the label `psychoanalytic critic' ± though no doubt I am one, in some sense still to be defined ± and worrying about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. (Brooks 1994, 20)

He speaks here, presumably, of an embarrassment that comes from within, generated by his ambivalent membership in a group whose `legitimacy and force' he finds questionable. That

critical

positioning

performs

a

self-consciousness

that,

because

it

is

a

prominent

feature of much recent psychoanalytic literary criticism, warrants further consideration. But first, it is instructive to consider the more obvious state of affairs Brooks implicitly glosses. For when he worries that the `notion of a psychoanalysis applied to literature continues to evoke

reductive

categories',

he

maneuvers

seems

to

that

assign

flatten

blame

the

to

richness

both

of

creative

`reductive'

critics

texts

and

into

an

well-worn

audience

that

maintains stereotypical expectations about what psychoanalysis does in the first place. The ambiguous origin Brooks assigns to this mistaken `notion' in one sense acknowledges the deep, long-standing and overdetermined popular resistance to psychoanalysis generally and psychoanalytic applications to literature in particular. As Maud Ellmann puts it, `Freudian literary criticism causes a peculiar form of irritation' uniquely able, it seems, `to elicit sniggers of embarrassment or snorts of disbelief' (Ellmann 1994, 1). In her lucid introduction to a collection of such essays by prominent continental and Anglo-American critics, Ellmann attributes that reaction in part to the audacious strangeness of Freud's intellectual

project

and,

ultimately,

to

the

profoundly

troubling

implications

of

his

proposals. Thus, like Brooks' `embarrassment', this `visceral' reaction, she suggests, should not

necessarily

be

discounted

or

lamented.

For

in

a

certain

sense

`a

gut

resistance

to

psychoanalysis often signifie[s] a deeper recognition of its danger than [does] a prompt assimilation of its principles' (1). We could say that much recent criticism privileges the forces of `resistance' over impulses towards `assimilation' that occur when psychoanalysis and literature encounter one another, often by finding an inherent, analogous, kind of resistance in Freud's efforts to interpret the unconscious and critics' efforts to interpret literature. Ellmann argues that the latter reaction ± assimilation rather than resistance ± more aptly characterizes Freud's initial reception within American intellectual culture, from a medical community that developed from Freud the positivistic `ego-psychology' Lacan would so virulently attack, to a critical community prone to unsubtle applications of psychoanalysis to study the authors, characters and thematics of literary texts. What proves problematic, however, is that it may still be harder to confront an eager appropriation of psychoanalytic principles for the vocabulary of literary criticism than it is to confront a popular dismissal or resistance to such an approach. The history of Freud's reception in this country bears out this paradoxical truth: the alacrity with which some critics sought to `apply' psychoanalysis to literature

has

proven

a

more

onerous

legacy

than

the

suspicion

with

which

others

greeted it. In this sense, there is no real irony in the fact that the pioneering American psychoanalytic

critic

Frederick

Crews,

for

instance,

would

famously

come

to

reject

psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic tool, for, as Ellmann wryly observes, he `seems to have talked himself out of psychoanalysis precisely by applying it too heavyhandedly' (Ellmann 1994, 2). Crews'

Out of My System

, a collection written between 1967 and 1975, gives one

notable record of this ambivalence. In it, he offers a reading of Conrad's

Heart of Darkness

±

the images of castration and primal horror bespeak Marlow's and perhaps even Conrad's

psychoanalysis and literary criticism

89

own Oedipal anxieties, he suggests ± in the midst of a pervasively anxious meditation on the efficacies and pitfalls of his own critical method. Before and after cataloguing a series of thematic `[d]erivatives of the primal scene' that `await the hero everywhere' and `belabor[ing] the obvious point' that

Heart of Darkness

is deeply autobiographical, Crews concedes

that

Freudian criticism too easily degenerates into a grotesque Easter-egg hunt: find the devouring mother, detect the inevitable castration anxiety, listen . . . for the bedsprings of the primal scene.

A

critic

who

may

have

been

drawn

toward

Freud

by

the

promise

of

a

heightened

sensitivity to conflict in literature may, without ever knowing what has happened to him, become the purveyor of a peculiarly silly kind of allegory. (Crews 1975, 57±8)

But while Crews self-effacingly includes himself among such potentially wayward critics, he also expresses a certain pride in managing to knock literature off the liberal humanist pedestal that he claims, in a questionable hybridization, was kept erect in the twentieth century

by

`New-Critical

formalism

and

...

Northrop

Frye'

(167).

Arguing

that

his

methods expose the intentional fallacy of a purportedly less self-conscious criticism that supposes its object fully realized by the express motivations of its creator, Crews takes a `satisfaction in brushing past formal or generic or ironic or (above all) morally uplifting aspects of literature and showing instead that even the sublimist masterpiece traffics in unconscious wishes' (1975, 167). Throughout his meditation, which includes the imagined protests of `detractors' and `nonpsychoanalytic colleagues' (resistance of the common variety), Crews nevertheless sidesteps the more unsparing discursive self-consciousness (`self-resistance', to use Barbara Johnson's term) that a subsequent generation of psychoanalytic literary criticism would insist upon (Johnson 1987, 42±6). The latter generation, indeed, would make it a central aim

to

account

for

the

motivations

of

criticism

itself,

to

avoid

the

condition

of

an

unreflective critic (`without ever knowing what has happened to him . . .'). For despite the appearance of conscientious reflection, Crews never wavers from nor seeks to ground the operating literature

premise might

that

be

in

literary any

way

content

deserves

resistant

to

his

privilege

brand

of

over

literary

hermeneutic

form

or

detective

that

work.

`Using psychoanalytic assumptions', he writes, `a critic can show how a writer's public intention

was

evidently

deflected

by

a

private

obsession

...

Or

again,

he

can

draw

biographical inferences on the basis of certain recurrent themes that the author hadn't consciously meant to display' (168). Peter Brooks, working in large part from the formalism Crews considers retrograde, locates much of the embarrassment associated with `the label ``psychoanalytic critic'' ' in this very assumption; namely, in the notion of psychoanalysis as a stable master discourse that may treat a text as an unmediated record of a particular psyche. Brooks situates that idea in a larger tradition of criticism that has `over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts' (1994, 21). A telling demonstration of the shift in analytical object Brooks effects occurs in his own penetrating reading of describe

a

series

of

Heart of Darkness

psychic

, which stresses that the novel does not simply

experiences,

but

presents

them

within

complex

frames

of

narration, so that it proves important to consider how and why Marlow tells the story he tells,

and

why

Conrad

might

have

had

him

do

so

(1984,

238±63).

Calling

for

and

producing a criticism that avoids the traditional analysis of author, reader or character, Brooks instead emphasizes, so to speak, a psychoanalysis of textuality, acknowledging at the

modern north american criticism and theory

90

same time the overdetermined textuality of psychoanalysis itself. Whereas Crews considers

hermeneutics

psychoanalytic criticism a

(which aims at unveiling the latent meaning of

poetics

manifest textual content), Brooks considers it a

(which aims at describing how

particular textual elements work to achieve meaning). One central preoccupation for him, in

this

regard,

has

been

to

develop

an

emphatically

dynamic

poetics

of

plot

he

calls

`narrative desire', formulated by putting the relatively static models of formalist narratology together with Freudian drive theory, in order to describe not only how plots tend to be structured but what moves them forward. Rather than unveil `the meaning' of Marlow's journey into the heart of darkness, Brooks looks at the way Conrad's text, with its ironically framed narration, is itself

about

revelation. The force that moves the narration forward is

driven by Marlow's need to retell the story of his search for Kurtz, so that he may construct a meaning ± a `readable report' ± out of an initial experience (an `unreadable report') that disturbingly thwarts his epistemological desire, his desire to know, his need for the end of that journey to be indeed a `summing-up' (Brooks 1984, 247±8). Throughout, Brooks is careful to align such a `motor force' with the conventional tendencies of narrative and interpretations as such. His

often-anthologized

essay,

`Freud's

Masterplot',

provides

useful

illustration

of

the

current interest in reading psychoanalytic texts through the lens of literary study, as well as the reverse. Aristotle's study of reversal and recognition, Tzvetan Todorov's description of `narrative transformation' and Frank Kermode's `sense of an ending' are just some of the careful analyses of literary form Brooks incorporates into his reading of Freud's plotting and

Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

narrative strategies in

Brooks argues, in turn, that Freud's own

discursive style offers a suggestively dynamic `model' for thinking about `movement of plot and

its

motor

force

in

human

desire,

its

peculiar

relation

to

beginnings

and

ends,

its

apparent claim to rescue meaning from temporal flux' (Brooks 1984, 90). Exploring the dynamics of beginning and ending at stake not just in Freud's theory of the death drive but also in the very `plot' Freud's discourse produces, Brooks identifies a complex set of parallels between literary and psychoanalytic textuality ± and offers at the same time a provocative statement

of

purpose

that

claims

to

break

from

the

tradition

of

which

Crews

was

an

instrumental part. He writes:

[W]e can read

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

as a text concerning textuality and conceive that

there can be a psychoanalytic criticism of the text that does not become . . . a study of the psychogenesis of the text (the author's unconscious), the dynamics of literary response (the reader's unconscious), or the occult motivations of characters (postulating an unconscious for them). It is rather the superimposition of the model of the functioning of the psychic apparatus on the functioning of the text that offers the possibility of a psychoanalytic criticism. (Brooks 1984, 112)

Brooks stresses that his theory does not claim to account for the workings of a particular mind ± that of the author, reader or character ± but rather, as he states it here, of the `psychic

apparatus'

`[p]sychoanalysis recent

as

and

psychoanalytic

such.

This

focus

literature

are

critics.

Two

belongs

mutually

to

an

explicitly

illuminating',

influential

collections

a of

stated

premise essays

premise

shared devoted

by to

that

many that

mutuality emphasize both the potential force of such a pairing and the radical uncertainty it can elicit. Shoshana Felman, in the preface to

of Reading: Otherwise, and

Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question

enumerates a new set of questions critics need to ask: `What does the

really mean? What is its conventional sense, its traditional function, in the usual

psychoanalysis and literary criticism

91

approach to the subject? In what way would we like to displace this function (to reinvent the ``and'') ± what would we like it to mean, how would we like it to work, in this issue?' (Felman 1977, 5). Her response is that the `traditional function' of this `and' has been far from

neutral,

subordination

typically

`implying

not

so

much

a

relation

of

coordination

as

one

of

. . . in which literature is submitted to the authority, the prestige of psycho-

analysis' (5). Felman argues that too often literature is presumed to be a static, passive `body of

language'

or signs to be interpreted by psychoanalysis' masterful `body of

knowledge'

± a

presupposition, as we have seen, on which Crews' hermeneutical approach depends (5, emphasis Felman's). Underlining the suggestive etymology of her proposed term, she calls instead

for

a

shift

from

application

to

implication

(`being

folded

within'),

where

the

`interpreter's role would be . . . to act as a go-between, to generate implications between literature and psychoanalysis', for instance the fact that literature is `not simply psychoanalysis, since it motivates and

inhabits

outside

the very names of its concepts' (9). While

`they are really traversed by each other', literature and psychoanalysis as Felman sees them also

contain

differences;

they

are

`other'

to

one

another,

each

other's

`blind

spot'

or

`unthought' (10). Thus, Felman's volume raises the stakes. The psychoanalytic project is complicated and fixed on new aims, with the question of reading at the centre.

[The

essays]

all

reflect

upon

the

textual

and

theoretical

encounter

between

literature

and

psychoanalysis not as an answer but as a question, questioning at once its possibilities and limits. They thus suggest . . . how the question of the relationship . . . might be articulated ±

otherwise:

how psychoanalysis and literature might indeed begin to be rethought, both in their otherness and in their common wisdom. (10)

Felman's own critical work ± such as the essay on Henry James and Freud, `Turning the Screw of Interpretation', included in this volume, and

Insight

Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of

(1980), which includes important essays on the place of literary examples in the

work of Freud and Lacan ± demonstrates a commitment to a rigorously self-conscious psychoanalytic criticism and a complicated understanding of literature's `implication' in it. The preface and selection of essays in another important collection ,

the Question of the Text, those

expressed

by

Psychoanalysis and

edited by Geoffrey Hartman, states a theoretical purpose similar to

Brooks

and

Felman.

Hartman

begins

by

somewhat

distinguishing the psychoanalytic criticism of an earlier period from

disdainfully

the efforts

of the

critics for whom he speaks, echoing the discursive mutuality Felman espouses:

This volume does not contain something for everyone. It reflects the considerable and, one hopes, fruitful complication of psychoanalytic studies as they accept their mutual rather than masterful relation to language and literature. Those who expect literary case studies will be disappointed

...

Every

essay

included

here

is,

if

anything,

too

conscious

of

the

changing

vocabularies and modified models of applied analysis, and particularly of the inadequacy of the applied science model of analysis itself. The emphasis has shifted from producing yet another interpretation, yet another exercise in casuistry, to understanding from within the institutional developments of psychoanalysis, and from the inner development of Freud's writings, what kind of event in the history of interpretation is proving to be. (Hartman 1978, vii)

From that initial provocation, however, Hartman takes a longer view to the past than Felman does, reflecting on Freud's place in a literary critical history that includes romantic and New Critical meditations on character and identity. While he too sees a determined shift in focus and method in the psychoanalytic criticism his collection showcases, he is also careful to acknowledge that the earliest literary critical efforts to engage with Freud did

modern north american criticism and theory

92

not

produce

a

mere

wasteland

of

naive

application,

as

Brooks,

Felman

and

others

sometimes imply. Along with a nod to Kenneth Burke, he favourably cites Lionel Trilling for probing the limits of the ego's unity in literary works, and for `raising this issue within a perspective that remains literary but assimilates in a highly critical way both Freudian and sociological currents of thought' (Hartman 1978, x). And indeed, Trilling's

Imagination the

The Liberal

contains a thoughtful meditation on `Freud and Literature' first published in

Kenyon Review

in 1940, where he presciently observes that `it was left to Freud to

discover how, in a scientific age, we still feel and think in figurative formations, and to create, what psychoanalysis is, a science of tropes, of metaphor and its variants, synecdoche and metonymy' (Trilling 1947, 51). Trilling's observation is closer to Brooks' own methodologies than the latter's diagnosis of the criticism's mistaken objects seems to allow, and it suggests, as Ellmann also does, that we would do well to look beyond `such howlers' as Crews' reading of Conrad in evaluating a diverse, complex critical history (Ellmann 1994, 2). Trilling's description of psychoanalysis as a `science of tropes' suggests particular continuity with Brooks' explanation for why interest in psychoanalysis and literature persists:

We continue to dream of a convergence of psychoanalysis and literary criticism because we sense that there ought to be, that there must be, some correspondence between literary and psychic process, that aesthetic structure and form, including literary tropes, must somehow coincide with the psychic structures and operations they both evoke and appeal to. (Brooks 1994, 25)

Even Trilling's otherwise traditional reading of Wordsworth's `Immortality Ode', in the same

book,

includes

a

deeply

suggestive

moment

where

he

speculates

on

the

striking

parallels between Wordsworth's and Freud's intellectual preoccupations ± namely, between the poet's idea that the infant's originary state of non-differentiation may be a possible source of our `intimations of immortality' and Freud's speculation that the `oceanic feeling', the feeling of `limitless extension and oneness with the universe', is a vestige of the `primary ego-feeling'

that

exists

prior

to

the

separation

by

which

the

child

comes

to

establish

identity (Trilling 1947, 137±8). Trilling leaves this speculation on Wordsworth and Freud largely undeveloped. But a remarkable number of recent critics who are psychoanalytically predisposed have also given attention to the poetry of Wordsworth in particular and romanticism in general. That common interest seems to reflect a broader theoretical investment: the crucial forbear of these scholars is Paul de Man, a sphere of influence that is somewhat ironic, given de Man's emphatic insistence that language, rhetoric, is radically empty of psychological content and his rare, but rather dismissive, references to psychoanalytic interpretation. (Brooks, it is worth mentioning, dedicates assessment

of

such

Reading for the Plot

relevance,

critics

such

as

to de Man.) Regardless of de Man's own

Neil

Hertz,

Cynthia

Chase

and

Barbara

Johnson have offered powerful testimony to the fruitfulness of generating psychoanalytic readings of literature that proceed from the methods de Man's rigorous rhetorical theory ± rooted in a radical reading of romanticism ± produced. They have, more importantly, demonstrated

the

compelling

resonances

between

psychoanalytic

speculation

on

the

earliest dynamics of significatory identification and de Man's rhetorical or deconstructive account of the materiality of language. Certainly Lacan also provides rich precedent for reading psychic structuration in linguistic terms, and some critics invested in a rhetorically oriented

psychoanalytic

criticism

attest

to

that

influence

explicitly.

But

it

is

striking,

psychoanalysis and literary criticism among

American

critics

in

particular,

that

93

a

de

Manian

model

of

language

so

often

supersedes a Lacanian one, in spite of these figures' relative theoretical interests. What de Man offers Cynthia Chase, in her dense but illuminating essay `The Witty Butcher's

Wife:

opportunity the

to

Freud,

read

disturbingly

in

Lacan,

and

Freud's

and

non-referential

the

Conversion

Lacan's

aspects

of

of

theoretical language

Resistance discourse

and

to

Theory',

instances

examples

of

of

the

is

an

resisting necessary

disavowal involved in every act of interpretation. Laying out the complex structure of meaning at work in the dream of the `witty butcher's wife' both Freud and Lacan interpret, Chase argues that the dynamics of mirroring or `specular rivalry' at work in the woman's story are themselves mirrored in the various analytic treatments of that story ± the woman's own, Freud's, Lacan's and Chase's own. She explains the helpfulness of de Man as follows:

What de Man's essay [`The Resistance to Theory'] describes is a resistance to language, or to the rhetorical nature of language or to the necessity of reading, precisely in theories of language, in `theory' understood as a reflection on how language is in the first instance about language rather than about the world. (Chase 1987, 991)

Chase demonstrates that each successive, contentious, theory of the dream depends on such a resistance. In a virtuoso demonstration of the self-consciousness and recursiveness recent psychoanalytic theory demands, Chase explores the shadowy ways in which the possibility of meaning (`interpretable and significative') ± in a dream, an interpretation, in referential language as such ± is predicated on a `resistance' to the possibility that they are `essentially non-significative' (999). As one step in this argument, she teases out Freud's contradictory claims about wish-fulfilment, which Lacan also notices: on the one hand, that we sleep in order to dream (and fulfil unconscious wishes), and on the other, that we dream in order to sleep (that is, fulfil a brute need not reducible to `wish'). Here, Chase is interested in highlighting the `indeterminably significative status' Freud assigns to the dream, but also of Lacan's own account and of language as such: `This is the moment in which the mirror

wavers,

in

which

the

specular

symmetry

of

the

structuralist

conception

about

language-about-language breaks down, as language . . . seems to mean also that which

not certainly

does

signify' (999).

Chase pursues a similar thesis in `Primary Narcissism and the Giving of Figure: Kristeva with Hertz and de Man' (Fletcher and Benjamin 1990, 124±36). She argues that Julia Kristeva's

rhetorically

inflected

theory

of

`primary

narcissism',

a

theory

that

posits

a

primordial structure of signification prior to Lacan's mirror stage, has offered Hertz and herself a provocative model for `mediating between psychoanalysis and non-psychoanalytic discourse, between the discourse to which the concept of primary narcissism would seem to belong, and a practice of rhetorical theory that denies that discourse explanatory authority' (124). Chase sees potent analogies between de Man's rhetorical theory and Kristeva's description

of

the

simultaneously

primordial

and

`recurrent

condition

of

the

speaking

subject' Kristeva calls `abjection' (129). She points out that such a theory `draws near de Man's considerations' in that Kristeva's specific brand of psychoanalytic theory, like de Man's, `becomes the analysis of an act of

reading'

(126, emphasis Chase's). The one literary

example in this discussion, one which strikingly echoes Kristeva's account and which de Man himself memorably uses, is the `blessed babe' passage from Book Two of Wordsworth's

Prelude,

which

between

a

props

describes

mother

and

the

infant

initially

intimate,

abruptly thrown

`indeterminably

into crisis by

of my affection were removed') (129, 134).

the

significative' mother's

relation

death

(`the

modern north american criticism and theory

94

As her title suggests, Chase recognizes that Hertz too is interested in such moments, both in an essay

on de

Man that explores the `drama of uncertain agency'

at work

in the

The

figurative logic of his rhetorical theory and, more elaborately, in his excellent book,

End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime.

In the latter, the subtle rhetorical

moves of the first extant theory of sublimity (Longinus' `On Sublimity'), the notion of blockage in Kant's

Critique of Judgment,

the dynamics of influence in Wordsworth and

Milton, as well as readings of George Eliot, Flaubert and Freud, are united by an ambitious, provocative effort to align aesthetic with psychoanalytic discourse. It is in his `Afterword' that he explains and explores his title. Like Chase, he notably enlists Kristeva's pre-Oedipal theory of abjection to describe a crisis ± of signification, but also of subjectivity itself ± that is precipitated by differential undecidability, such as the sublimely, unsettlingly `minimal difference between black and black' in Courbet's painting,

La source de la Loue

or `the

minimal difference between the ``Label'' on [the] chest and the ``fixed face and sightless eyes'' ' of Wordsworth's famous description of the blind beggar in

The Prelude

(Hertz 1985a,

217). Borrowing from Kenneth Burke, Hertz calls such representations instances of an `end of

the

line'

moments

structure

in

reflection,

(218±19).

Wordsworth's

In

all

poetry),

a mise en abyme

of the

such

`what

examples

one

is

(he

drawn

explores

to

is

not

a

number

a

clearly

artist's representational project, but

an

of

such

oriented

engagement

with the act and with the medium of painting or writing condensed almost to the point of nonreflective opacity' (219). Hertz's innovation is to integrate such literary examples and the seemingly felicitous psychoanalytic theory that would account for them with a broader history of discourses on the sublime. He is conscientious, however, to acknowledge Thomas Weiskel's

earlier,

ground-breaking

engagement

with

just

such

a

juxtaposition

Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence .

The

in

Hertz writes: `It

was Weiskel's distinction to have seen that the poetic and philosophical language of the primary sublime texts [Longinus, Kant and especially Edmund Burke] could be made to resonate with two quite different twentieth-century idioms, that of psychoanalysis and that of the semiological writings of Saussure, Jakobson, and Barthes' (Hertz 1985a, 49). Hertz respectfully

distinguishes

his

own

efforts

to

theorize

sublimity

psychoanalytically

from

Weiskel's by emphasizing his own debt to recent theories that challenge Freudian, Oedipal model on which Weiskel relies:

I . . . give Weiskel credit for dwelling as long as he did on the puzzles and the anxieties of the preOedipal,

while

also

calling

attention

to

the

relief

he

seemed

to

interpreter in bringing it all home to the Father. Since 1976 ± when

have

experienced

as

The Romantic Sublime

an was

published ± developments within psychoanalytic practice have converged with the work of feminist and post-structuralist theorists in providing counterirritants to [pre-Oedipal] anxieties and

encouraging

particular,

the

more,

concept

and of

more

varied,

narcissism

has

exploration been

of

expanded

the and

earliest

stages

generally

of

infancy.

reworked,

both

In by

American psychologists of the `self' and ± more interestingly to my mind ± by French writers drawing on Lacan's and Derrida's rereadings of Freud. (Hertz 1985a, 231)

The pressure Hertz puts on Weiskel's recourse to a relatively `reassuring' Oedipal model and, more remarkably, on the interpretive `relief' he finds in it recalls the potent critical ma of Barbara Johnson's well-known and widely published essay, `The Frame of Reference: Poe,

Lacan,

Derrida'

(Hartman

1978,

149±72).

Specifically

critiquing

an

exchange

between Lacan and Derrida on Poe's `Purloined Letter' ± a detective story about finding a stolen letter hiding in plain sight ± Johnson demonstrates that interpretation is inherently

psychoanalysis and literary criticism

95

prone to `framing' its object of analysis within an invested theoretical model. Effectively beginning where Crews' reflections on method seemed to stop, Johnson interrogates the very grounds on which meaning is, or may be, asserted in an interpretive act. Looking at Lacan's reading (which claims the story is `a kind of

allegory

of the signifier')

and Derrida's

rebuttal to it (which questions Lacan's gesture of fixing meaning on the very thing, the letter, he also claims has no inherent meaning), Johnson argues that Derrida repeats the very

`crime'

Derrida

of

which

`frames'

he

Lacan,

accuses

accusing

Lacan him

(Hartman

of

an

1978,

overbearing

152±3, faith

emphasis

in

the

Johnson's).

possibility

of

a

psychoanalytic metalanguage, in the same way that Lacan `frames' Poe's story, to make it readable as an allegory of the signifier. Yet, Johnson argues, `although the critique of what Derrida calls psychoanalysis is entirely justified, it does not quite apply to what Lacan's text is actually saying' (158). She finds this misreading `too interesting not to be deliberate' (158).

She

reads

the

exchange

between

these

two

radically

self-conscious

writers

as

performative display of interpretation's tendency ± indeed necessity ± to read past the

literary

aspect of the text in question, past the

letter

of the text. Johnson subtly demonstrates

that, rather than simply blind to this blindness, both Lacan and Derrida self-consciously act it out. The double sense in which she means `frame' mobilizes the key claim she makes about

interpretation

and

its

object,

especially

with

regard

to

that

elusive

object

of

psychoanalysis, the unconscious. Ultimately, what Johnson reads as the simultaneously inevitable and impossible conditions of psychoanalysis are the conditions of all acts of interpretation, including literary criticism, where `the theoretical frame of reference that governs recognition is a constitutive element in the blindness of any interpretive insight' (164). In closing, Johnson articulates the multiple connotations of the refrain with which both Lacan and Derrida play: `a letter always reaches its destination'. Among the things that phrase may indicate is the observation that the resistance of the letter ± of literature ± to an absolute, decisive reading:

It is not any one of these readings, but all of them and others in their very incompatibility, that repeat the letter in its way of reading the act of reading. Far from giving us [Lacan's] seminar's final truth, these last words, and Derrida's reading of them, can only enact the impossibility of any ultimate analytical metalanguage, the eternal oscillation between unequivocal undecidability and ambiguous certainty. (170)

What Johnson here describes much of her excellent work performs, exploring encounters between psychoanalytic and literary texts within the force field of this very oscillation. Her most

recent

Gender,

publication,

includes

psychoanalytic

several

criticism.

The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and essays Here

similarly

and

interested

elsewhere,

in

Johnson

the

pitfalls

approaches

and the

promise act

of

of

a

reading

by means of a `self-resistant', rhetorically sensitive rigour that characterizes much of the current

American

psychoanalytic

work

literary

in

psychoanalysis.

criticism

±

like

the

As

all

of

these

`interminable'

dynamic

enterprise

studies

Freud

indicate,

understood

his analysis to be ± is vitally `still to be determined' (Brooks 1994, 20).

Megan Becker-Leckrone

modern north american criticism and theory

96

Further reading and works cited The Anxiety of Influence. New York, 1973.

Bloom, H. Ð.

Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. New York, 1982. Reading for the Plot. New York, 1984.

Brooks, P. Ð.

Psychoanalysis and Storytelling. London, 1994. Decomposing Figures. Baltimore, MD, 1986.

Chase, C.

Ð. `The Witty Butcher's Wife', Crews, F.

Davis, R. Con (ed.) Ð.

MLN, 102 (1987).

Out of My System. New York, 1975. The Fictional Father. Amherst, MA, 1981.

Lacan and Narration. Baltimore, MD, 1983.

Ellmann, M. (ed.)

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. London, 1994.

Feldstine, R. and Roof, J. (eds) Felman, S. (ed.)

Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca, NY, 1989.

Literature and Psychoanalysis. Baltimore, MD, 1982.

Fletcher, J. and Benjamin, A. (eds)

Hartman, G. (ed.) Hertz, N. Ð.

Abjection, Melancholia, and Love. London, 1990.

The Daughter's Seduction. Ithaca, NY, 1982.

Gallop, J.

Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text. Baltimore, MD, 1978.

The End of the Line. New York, 1985a.

The End of the Line. New York, 1985b.

Johnson, B.

The Feminist Difference. Cambridge, MA, 1998.

Lupton, J. Reinhard and Reinhard, K. MacCannell, J. Flower.

After Oedipus. Ithaca, NY, 1993.

Figuring Lacan. London, 1986.

Muller, J. P. and W. J. Richardson.

The Purloined Poe. Baltimore, MD, 1988.

Ragland-Sullivan, E. and Bracher, M. (eds) Schwartz, M. M. and Kahn, C. Sedgwick, E. Kosofsky. Skura, M. A.

Between Men. New York, 1985.

The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process. New Haven, CT, 1981.

The Liberal Imagination. New York, 1978.

Trilling, L. Weber, S.

Lacan and the Subject of Language. London, 1991.

Representing Shakespeare. Baltimore, MD, 1980.

The Legend of Freud. Minneapolis, MN, 1982.

Weiskel, T.

The Romantic Sublime. Baltimore, MD, 1976.

14. Feminists of Colour

Feminists

of

colour

in

the

US

have

made

ground-breaking

contributions

to

feminist

thought (scholarship and activism) in general and feminist theory in particular. They have engaged, challenged and reformulated feminist insights from the inception of feminism in the nineteenth century to the present. They have been active participants in the social justice movements (Civil Rights, Latino, Native American, gay and lesbian, and women's liberation) of the past forty years. In the US, African-American women were the first to engage with feminist literary criticism in the early 1970s. Other women of colour followed suit in the late 1970s and early 1980s, calling for coalitions among women of colour as well as for the development of criticism accounting for specific group experiences (Chicana, Asian-American, etc.). These different groups of critics have influenced each other as well as white feminists, male writers of colour and entire academic disciplines. Always at the

feminists of colour cutting

edge,

they

97

have

redefined

feminism

at

the

levels

of

nomenclature,

theory,

methodology and genres or styles of writing.

Nomenclature Feminists

of

colour

have

renamed

feminism

in

order

to

make

it

better

reflect

their

concerns. Some have chosen to literally invent a new word, whereas others have opted for retaining the old word (sometimes modifying it) and redefining it to suit their own worldviews. The most famous renaming is African-American writer Alice Walker's definition of a `womanist' (1983, xi±xii). Anglicizing the word (from the French etymology of feminist, based on in

femme

[woman], to womanist), Walker's definition is grounded first and foremost

African-American

cultural

and

linguistic

specificity.

Her

first

definition

is

`a

black

feminist or a feminist of colour', thus placing women of colour at the centre of a concentric definition that expands to include `a woman who loves other women, sexually or nonsexually' (a direct reference to Jewish-American feminist Adrienne Rich's concept of the `lesbian continuum', in which all positive woman-to-woman relationships, sexual and nonsexual, are included as a way to bridge the tensions between lesbian and heterosexual feminists). Walker's definition then broadens to a holistic, radical feminist embrace of love of the world and of the self. The fourth and last part of the definition rests on the analogy, `womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender'. Reminiscent of Walker's classic novel,

The Colour Purple

, this final definition deconstructs the perception that feminism is a broad

category of which feminists of colour are a part, to represent womanist as the standard, deeper colour (purple) and feminist as a variation on purple, a combination of purple and white. Walker's colour symbolism includes the struggle of the gay and lesbian movement, which has chosen the colour lavender (a mixture of pink and blue, the pastel colours typically

associated

with

little

girls

and

little

boys

in

western

cultures)

as

one

of

its

part

of

attributes. Womanist

is

presented

as

the

more

inclusive

standard,

and

feminist

as

a

womanist, for two reasons: first, because womanists come out of a historical and social context in which all people of colour, male and female, were and still are subjected to racist domination by a white supremacist order, their worldview includes men as part of the struggle for liberation. Therefore, womanists cannot agree with the gender separatism of some

feminist theories. The

second reason

for womanist being presented

as the

more

inclusive standard is a response to the exclusionary nature of a feminism that focuses solely or mostly on gender issues and refuses to give equal attention to the effects of race, class and other forms of domination. White feminists who are `committed to the survival of the entire people' can be womanists, white racist feminists cannot. Frances M. Beal was even more direct, as early as 1970: `Any white woman's group that does not have an antiimperialist

and

antiracist

ideology

has

absolutely

nothing

in

common

with

the

black

woman's struggle' (1970, 393). Finally, Walker never uses the form `womanism', only `womanist', to indicate that while there are womanists, people of all colours committed to a broad vision of social justice, there is no one way of being a womanist, no one doctrine to follow that would be called womanism. Walker's position is in keeping with that of many other black feminists who insist that there is no such thing as a monolithic black feminist standpoint (Collins), black feminist

theory

(Christian)

or

feminist

movement

(bell

hooks).

Inspired

by

Walker's

modern north american criticism and theory

98

Âa Isasi-Dõ Âaz coined the term `mujerista' (from the renaming, Latina theologian Ada Marõ Spanish word for woman,

mujer

) to refer to Latina feminists who struggle against the

oppressive strictures of racism, sexism and economic domination. Similarly, Chicana Ana Castillo has created the word `Xicanisma' to designate Chicana feminists. The second way of handling the problem of nomenclature is to continue using the term feminism, qualifying it to redefine its meaning. This is the way that Barbara Smith, among others, has chosen. Smith's redefinition is probably the most famous: `Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free class

women,

economically

poor

women,

privileged,

disabled

women,

heterosexual

all

women: women of colour, working-

lesbians,

women.

old

Anything

women

less

than

±

as

this

well

as

vision

white,

of

total

freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement' (Smith 1990, 25). Several feminists of colour have modified the term, retaining a connection to it but specifically naming themselves to overcome a history of silencing. For example, Chela Sandoval

makes

a

distinction

between

`hegemonic

feminism'

(a

term

also

used

by

postcolonial feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to refer to mainstream, white middle-class feminism) and `US Third World Feminism' (1991, 1). Sandoval's definition makes the link between women of colour in the US and third world women, reminding us

that

worldwide,

women

of

colour

are

a

majority

and

that

international

alliances

between women of colour will serve them best. This new formulation bases itself on an analysis of racial domination in the US as a feature of internal colonialism, thus drawing parallels between colonial and neocolonial practices in the Third and the First Worlds. It also points to the class discrimination suffered by many US women of colour, who are disproportionately part of the poorest segments of US society (its `Third World'). Finally, it is a way to bring together US and foreign-born women of colour in North America in general, and Latinas of diverse nationalities in particular, a group whose interests are of special concern to Sandoval, a Chicana critic. The theorists calling for such alliances are generally part of a migrant or colonial experience (such as Chicanas or Puerto-Rican women) who may have relatives dispersed throughout different countries across North/ South borders. More recently, legal scholars using the methods of close textual analysis and concerned with the intersections of race, class and gender in the law have named themselves critical race feminists. In doing so, they claim their connection to a triple legal tradition: critical legal studies (whose primary focus tends to be class), critical race theory and feminist  thought. African-American scholars such as Lani Guinier, Adrien Wing and Kimberle Crenshaw and Asian-American scholars such as Mari Matsuda have participated in this new and exciting scholarly development.

Theory From Sojourner Truth in the nineteenth century onwards, women of colour involved in diverse

social

justice

movements

have

argued

that

other

people's

theories

about

their

situation were inadequate: these theories asked them to `choose' between a focus on race, on class or on gender. Women of colour have been told by white feminists that their insistence on fighting racism was `divisive' to a movement committed mostly to working against gender oppression. Marxist and labour movements have claimed that a focus on race and gender detracted from the `real' struggle. Finally, the civil rights leadership tended to replicate patterns of male dominance. Deborah K. King notes that this fundamental

feminists of colour difference

in

99

conceptualizing

oppression

(from

a

monist

to

a

multiplicative

analysis)

resulted in `the theoretical invisibility of black women' (1990, 76). She documents how African-American women have historically contributed to developing a multiaxial theory of race, class and gender (and other forms of oppression). For example, the work of Angela Davis

has

contributed

to

shaping

such

a

perspective.

Similarly,

the

Combahee

River

Collective espoused an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, socialist, black lesbian feminist position that theorized all forms of oppression as `interlocking' in its manifesto (1983, 210). Lesbian feminists of colour have argued that sexuality, like race, class and gender, is an Âe Moraga important part of the system of domination. Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Cherrõ Â a were some of the first theorists to analyse the connections between and Gloria Anzaldu heterosexism and homophobia and other forms of oppression. Perhaps because they often felt rejected by their own communities, lesbian feminists of colour have tirelessly agitated for inclusive spaces and against homophobia within the diverse movements in which they have participated. Mohawk poet and essayist Beth Brant and Laguna Pueblo writer Paula Gunn Allen have called for principled coalitions among people in different liberation struggles. Furthermore, Lorde and Brant have broadened and deepened the definition of sexuality by highlighting the healing and creative power of the erotic and the connections between sexuality and spirituality (Lorde 1984, 53±9; Brant 1994, 55±66). A fifth element of the system of domination, colonialism, was highlighted in the analyses of two groups of theorists: Native American and postcolonial scholars. Native American women have traditionally had a very vexed relationship with feminism for the following reasons:

feminism's

peoples,

and

the

general

discursive

failure

to

understand

colonialism

the

(Mohanty

et

colonial al.

domination

1991,

51)

of

of

much

Native feminist

thought. This discursive colonialism is expressed in an unwillingness on the part of most white

feminists

to

acknowledge

the

impact

of

US

colonialism

on

the

lives

of

Native

Americans, a refusal to support Native claims for sovereignty and self-determination, and a desire to place the blame for Native American women's oppression on the shoulders of Native American men. In terms reminiscent of Frances M. Beal, M. Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey state that until feminists start to join the Native American anti-colonial struggle, feminism will bring nothing to Native American women (Jaimes with Halsey 1992,

332).

Indeed,

few

Native

women

have

self-identified

as

feminists

(Paula

Gunn

Allen, Beth Brant, Janice Gould (Maidu), Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee) and Kate Shanley (Assiniboine) are important exceptions). Critics such as Brant and Gould have highlighted some

common

themes

of

Native

women's

literature:

the

question

of

multiple

and

fragmented identities in a colonial context; the deep sense of connection to the land, the people and other living beings; the question of how to express the centrality of the oral tradition

and

storytelling

through

writing;

and

finally,

conveying

the

pivotal

role

of

humour in the process of healing and survival (Gould 1995; Brant 1994, 5±24). Native writers and theorists have criticized the interlocking forces of colonialism and capitalist destruction of the land (Winona LaDuke), racism, sexism and homophobia (Allen, Brant), as well as the cultural appropriation of their spirituality by New Age religions (Brant, Wendy Rose, Laura Donaldson). Feminist theorists who migrated to the US from third world countries such as India and Vietnam have also argued for the necessity of including colonialism in a multiaxial analysis of domination and having a more global vision of the struggle to end domination. In particular, Talpade

US-based

Mohanty

South

have

Asians

argued

such

that

as

Gayatri

western

Chakravorty

feminists

replicated

Spivak

and

colonialist

Chandra

paradigms

modern north american criticism and theory

100

when they sought to `sav[e] brown women from brown men' (Spivak 1994, 93). A monist focus on gender (or gender and sexuality) as the primary source of women's oppression conveniently serves to blind hegemonic feminists to their own participation in third world women's oppression through the neocolonialist and imperialist practices of the US and Europe. The publication of Mohanty's essay `Under Western Eyes' in 1984 and of Trinh

Woman, Native, Other

Minh-ha's book,

in 1989 were landmark events of what came to be

known as `US Third World Feminism'. They sought to promote `a common context of struggle' between women of colour in the US and women in the third world in order to create broad-based alliances (Mohanty et al. 1991, 7). However, their occasional equation of racism and colonialism is sometimes problematic in so far as it can tend to subsume the concerns of women in the third world to those of US-based women of colour (problems due to colonial or neocolonial practices in the third world are sometimes viewed as being caused by racism by US third world feminists living in the US). In spite of this problem, the call

to

enlarge

feminist

issues

to

transnational

ones,

which

has

also

been

made

by

ecofeminists, has become a very important aspect of feminist theory. For example, Patricia Hill Collins's revised edition of her classic

Black Feminist Thought

now includes a chapter

on `US black feminism in transnational context' that draws from the work of African women writers and theorists. Most feminists of colour have built their theoretical frameworks around a recognition of the

centrality

of

self-definition

and

self-determination.

It

was

crucial

to

argue

for

the

centrality of women of colour in the theorizing process, especially at a time when their voices were few and silenced. Therefore a majority of criticism written by feminists of colour has focused on the importance of theorizing from experience and placing one's analysis in the appropriate cultural context, in order to avoid common misreadings and oppressive interpretations of the lives and writings of women of colour. Writers such as Patricia Hill Collins and Paula Gunn Allen, Asian-American authors Mitsuye Yamada and Deborah

Woo,

and

Chicana

critic

Norma

Ân Alarco

have

forcefully

countered

and

deconstructed stereotypical `controlling images' (Collins 2000, 69) of women of colour that stand in the way of self-definition. Since the 1970s, literary critics seeking to retrieve the voices of artists have established the existence of literary traditions by women of colour. They

have

attention include

brought

to

the

Barbara

Washington,

back

work

of

Smith,

Toni

to

light

Alice

Cade

forgotten

contemporary Walker,

Bambara

and

writers

women Amy

Ling,

Yvonne

of

writers

the

past,

of

colour

Âa Marõ

and

provided

(such

literary

Herrera-Sobek,

Yarbro-Bejarano).

Mary

Barbara

critical critics Helen

Christian

(1990) has pointed out that she reads and writes about the work of black women writers not as a luxury, but as a life-line, as a way to confirm her own worldview and experiences, in order to survive the theoretical invisibility of black women. Collins has clearly articulated the concept of a black feminist standpoint. She highlights the fact that black feminist thought not only provides new paradigms, but new epistemological frameworks as well (Collins 2000, 252±74). She sees black female intellectuals as affirming and rearticulating the experiential knowledge of everyday black women into a more specialized form of knowledge (Collins 2000, 32±4). In her view, black feminist thought is produced primarily, but not solely, by black women, who engage in principled coalitions with other groups fighting for and theorizing about social change (Collins 2000, 38). In contrast, theorists of colour who began writing at a time when ethnic literary criticism was blooming are sometimes more critical of the essentialist and overgeneralizing  n, Hazel Carby, pitfalls that can accompany such positions. Thinkers such as Norma Alarco

feminists of colour

101

Wahneema Lubiano, Valerie Smith, Hortense J. Spillers, Gayatri Spivak and Trinh T. Minh-ha

have

countered

identity-based

or

standpoint

theories

developed

by

other

theorists of colour and argued for a recognition of more postmodern or discursively-based positions. Finally, in the 1990s, feminist theorists of colour such as Rey Chow, bell hooks, Lisa Lowe, Valerie Smith and Michele Wallace have also been important contributors to the growing fields of cultural and film studies.

Methodology and genres of writing Since what usually counts as theory (including literary theory) originates mostly out of European

and

Euro-american

contexts,

feminists

of

colour

have

had

an

ambivalent

relationship to the concept of theory itself. Some have argued that theory is inherently oppressive because of its elitist language and disconnection from the actual lives of women. One of the best articulations of this position remains Barbara Christian's essay, `The Race for Theory', in which she makes a distinction between theory (an obfuscating pursuit that contributes to the theoretical invisibility of black women) and theorizing (a practice that seeks to illuminate the works of black women writers) (Christian 1990, 335±7). Many other

thinkers such

as

Gayatri

Spivak,

Hortense

J.

Spillers

Ân Alarco

and Norma

have

refused to disengage from mainstream theory and have thus countered the stereotype of women of colour as untheoretical. Generally speaking, the uncomfortable relationship that feminists of colour have had to theory has contributed to two original developments in the field: methodological innovations and a new use of genres in writing theory. Since feminists of colour

insist on the

primary

importance

of self-definition

in any

liberatory struggle, many have turned away from western-based theories and sought to establish a theory based on an analysis of the experiences of women of colour. This has contributed to redefining what counts as appropriate disciplinary methods. For example, Patricia Hill Collins explains that the sociological imperative to separate the researcher from her subjects of research is an impediment to black feminist sociological research, which seeks to understand black women's subjugated knowledge, their own interpretations of their experiences (Collins 2000, 254±6). Similarly, because black feminist thought aims to legitimize the voices of black women, Collins, rather than seeking academic credentials through

citing

authoritative

white

male

sociologists,

quotes

from

the

works

of

black

scholars and fiction writers, as well as the testimonies of everyday black women (domestic workers, working women). Theorizing from experience has also challenged boundaries of genre, as feminists of colour have made ample use of personal narrative as a form suitable to the theoretical Âe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldu  a, in particular, has been enterprise. The work of Cherrõ central to such reformulations of the genre of theory writing. The form of their books and

mestizaje

edited collections, which include theoretical and personal essays, poetry and fiction, as well as texts written in both English and Spanish, reflects the hybridity ( they

argue

is

at

the

heart

of

their

process

of

identity

formation

as

Chicana

) that

lesbians.

Similarly, Audre Lorde has argued that `poetry is not a luxury' but a first step toward articulating one's inchoate thoughts and feelings, a distillation of experience necessary for the process of theorizing (1984, 36±7). Japanese-American poets Mitsuye Yamada and Janice Mirikitani have also theorized and rewritten the silences of history through their magnificent people

of

poems.

colour

`is

Finally, often

Barbara

in

Christian

narrative

forms,

points in

the

out

that

stories

the

we

theorizing

create,

in

done

riddles

by

and

modern north american criticism and theory

102

proverbs,

in

the

play

with

language'

rather

than

in

the

obfuscating

language

of

high

theory (1990, 336). The use of literary sources in sociological scholarship and the use of personal narrative in much theory by feminists of colour are a testimony to the centrality of literature by women of

colour

to

the

process

of

theorizing.

In

many

ways,

theorists

of

colour

are

deeply

influenced by the work of creative writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston and Leslie Marmon Silko (on whose work Trinh draws heavily to develop her theory of third world women's writing in

Woman, Native, Other).

Conversely, many of

these writers (such as Morrison, Silko, Walker, Lorde, Michelle Cliff, Mitsuye Yamada, Paula Gunn Allen, Beth Brant, Wendy Rose and Janice Gould) have also been important theorists and critics.

Conclusion Because feminists of colour in the US have called for a `paradigm shift' (Sandoval 1991, 9), not only from feminists, but from other liberation struggles based on monist models of race or class as well as from a variety of academic disciplines, their impact has paradoxically been both immense and modest. Tensions remain between those still subscribing to monist parameters

of

analysis

and

those

embracing

multiaxial

paradigms.

In

other

words,

the

paradigm shift required by US feminists of colour has not yet been achieved in feminist theory and practice today. The work of US feminists of colour has unfortunately often been co-opted through tokenism rather than full integration. The body of literary criticism on women writers of colour has become a field ripe with appropriations and misreadings. Furthermore, the US tendency to think through race issues in Black and White terms still remains strong in women's studies as in other fields. This means that issues of importance to Latinos, Native Americans and Asian-Americans, in particular, are even more vulnerable  a, Lorde, to tokenism. Finally, while the work of lesbians of colour such as Allen, Anzaldu Moraga and Barbara Smith has been central to the development of multiaxial theory, homophobia further contributes to their theoretical invisibility as lesbians. In spite of these continuing problems, however, it is very hard to imagine today the situation in which Barbara Smith found herself in 1977, trying to write one of the first articles ever about a black female literary tradition and black lesbian existence. Similarly, the concerns Barbara Christian expressed over the lack of critical academic attention to the works of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker are no longer an issue (Christian 1990, 344). Today, the study of ethnic and postcolonial literature has become an important part of the women's studies curriculum. Similarly, the study of women writers of colour has become very significant in ethnic studies, and is being incorporated more and more into the study of American literature in English departments. A market for the fiction of women of colour has developed, and academic recruitment in

literary

and

women's studies increasingly

demands specialization in, or familiarity with, ethnic literature and theory. Last but not least, the early efforts of scholars such as Smith and Christian have generated a vital, sophisticated tradition of theory and literary criticism analysing the works of women writers of colour through the lens of the interlocking effects of race, class, gender and other forms of domination.

Anne Donadey

stephen greenblatt and the new historicism

103

Further reading and works cited  n, Alarco

N.

`The

Feminism', in

Subject(s)

of

This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American

The Sacred Hoop. Boston, 1986.

Allen, P. Gunn.

 a, G. (ed.) Anzaldu Ð.

Theoretical

 a. San Francisco, 1990. Making Face, Making Soul. Hacienda Caras, ed. G. Anzaldu

Making Face, Making Soul. Haciendo Caras. San Francisco, 1990.

Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco, 1999.

Bambara, T. Cade (ed.)

The Black Woman. New York, 1970.

Beal, F. M. `Double Jeopardy', in Brant, B.

Sisterhood is Powerful, ed. R. Morgan. New York, 1970.

Writing as Witness. Toronto, 1994. Reconstructing Womanhood. New York, 1987.

Carby, H. V.

Massacre of the Dreamers. Albuquerque, NM, 1994.

Castillo, A.

Collins, P. Hill.

Black Feminist Thought. New York, 2000.

Combahee River Collective. `A Black Feminist Statement', in

This Bridge Called My Back, eds C.

 a. New York, 1983. Moraga and G. Anzaldu Christian, B. `The Race for Theory', in

 a. Making Face, Making Soul. Hacienda Caras, ed. G. Anzaldu

San Francisco, 1990. Davis, A. Y.

Women, Race and Class. New York, 1981.

Gould, J. `American Indian Women's Poetry', hooks, b.

Signs, 20, 4, Summer 1995.

Ain't I a Woman. Boston, 1981.

Âaz, A. M. Isasi-Dõ

En la Lucha/In the Struggle. Minneapolis, MN, 1993.

Jaimes, M. A. with Halsey, T. `American Indian Women', in

The State of Native America, ed. M. A.

Jaimes. Boston, 1992.

Feminist Theory in Practice and Process,

King, D. W. `Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness', in eds M. R. Malson et al. Chicago, 1990. Lorde, A.

Sister Outsider. Freedom, 1984.

Minh-ha, T. T.

Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington, IN, 1989.

Mohanty, C. Talpade et al. (eds) Moraga, C.

Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington, IN, 1991.

Loving in the War Years. Boston, 1983.

 a, G. (eds) Рand Anzaldu

This Bridge Called My Back. New York, 1983.

Sandoval, C. `U.S. Third World Feminism',

Genders, 10, 1991.

Smith, B. `Racism and Women's Studies', in

Making Face, Making Soul. Hacienda Caras, ed. G.

 a. San Francisco, 1990. Anzaldu Ð.

The Truth That Never Hurts. New Brunswick, NJ, 1998.

Spivak, G. Chakravorty. `Can the Subaltern Speak?', in

Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory,

eds P. Williams and L. Chrisman. New York, 1994. Walker, A.

In Search of our Mothers' Gardens. San Diego, CA, 1983.

15. Stephen Greenblatt (1943±) and the New Historicism

`I

began

with

the

desire

introductory essay to the

political

and

to

speak

with

the

dead',

wrote

Stephen

Greenblatt

in

the

Shakespearean Negotiations (1988, 1), speaking of a desire rooted in

social

upheavals

of

the

1960s

and

1970s.

New

Criticism

dominated

modern north american criticism and theory

104

Greenblatt's undergraduate education at Yale University, but during a Fullbright scholarship to Cambridge University he encountered the teachings of Raymond Williams: `In Williams's lectures all that had been carefully excluded from the literary criticism in which I had been trained ± who controlled access to the printing press, who owned the land and the factories, whose

voices

were

being

repressed

as

well

as

represented

in

literary

texts,

what

social

strategies were being served by the aesthetic values we constructed ± came pressing back in upon the act of interpretation' (1990, 2). Greenblatt returned to Yale to finish his PhD with a dissertation

on

Sir

Walter

Raleigh's

self-presentation

(see

Greenblatt

1973);

then,

in his early years at the University of California at Berkeley, he confronted the theories of visiting lecturer Michel Foucault. Such experiences taught Greenblatt that speaking with the

dead

required

better

knowledge

of

the

social

and

political

conditions

of

their

lives. Greenblatt implemented that desire in

speare

Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shake-

(1980), a prize-winning analysis of identity formation in early modern England. To

describe the situation of individuals caught in a transitional period between the collective economy

of

medieval

feudalism

under

which

a

fixed

identity

was

inherited,

and

the

modern world of capitalist individualism, Greenblatt coined the term `self-fashioning', a logical extension of his earlier examination of Ralegh. Individuals caught between these two models necessarily had to improvise, `to capitalize on the unforeseen and to transform given materials into one's own scenario' (1980, 227). Sir Thomas More's writings reveal, for example, `the invention of a disturbingly unfamiliar form of consciousness, tense, ironic, witty, poised between engagement and detachment, and above all, fully aware of its own status as an invention' (1980, 31). Spenser's Red Cross Knight begins

The Faerie Queene

as

a `clown', a rustic who must learn how to play the role of gentleman and knight. Identity is not inherited or stable; it is constructed in the context of political ideologies circulated by and through the state, the church and the family. Thus for Greenblatt, the literary text is not an aesthetic object whose formal qualities set it apart from other texts. Literary works must be situated within the framework of practices, institutions and beliefs that constituted Renaissance culture at large. Greenblatt rejects the strict marxist notion that material conditions control the individual and accepts instead the possibility of agency, however limited; nevertheless, he shows the writer imbricated in social and political currents of which he may not be aware that necessarily shape his or her textual productions. Greenblatt's critical practice was clearly established before he coined the term `new historicism' in the introduction to a special issue of

Genre

on `The Forms of Power and the

Power of Forms'; the essays gathered in this volume, he claimed, demonstrate a kind of criticism `set apart from both the dominant historical scholarship of the past and the formalist criticism that partially displaced this scholarship in the decades after World War Two' (1982, 5). Old historicism, Greenblatt opined, had been monological, finding only one meaning in a text ± usually the official ideology of the dominant power structure. In the work of critics such as J. Dover Wilson and E. M. W. Tillyard old historicism described Shakespeare's history plays as literary refractions of the Tudor political ideology articulated in the

Homily Against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion

Ecclesiastical Polity

(1571) or Richard Hooker's

Laws of

(1594). In contrast, new historicism situates literary texts, no less than

other documents that circulated in the same period, as loci of competing interests and dissenting

voices.

Shakespeare's

histories

ideology (Richmond, John of Gaunt,

do,

indeed,

Henry V's

present

spokespersons

for

Tudor

Archbishop of Canterbury, for example),

but usually the plays' most attractive and appealing characters counter that ideology with

stephen greenblatt and the new historicism subversive

energies,

deeds

and

actions

(Richard

III

105

and

Falstaff

are

cases

in

point).

Subversive figures are normally contained by the dominant power structure, but the bulk of the plays' energies are devoted to divisiveness, contestation and debate. Greenblatt explained his methodology more fully in a 1986 lecture at the University of Western Australia that was later reprinted as `Towards a Poetics of Culture' (Veeser 1989, 1±14, and Greenblatt 1990, 146±60). Rejecting any totalizing theory, Greenblatt called the `new historicism' a practice as opposed to a theory or a doctrine. He went on to differentiate new historicism (or cultural poetics, as he prefers to call it) from Fredric Jameson's aesthetic

marxist from

the

approach public

which

and

blames

political;

capitalism

he

also

for

differed

separating

with

the

private

Jean-Franc Ë ois

and

Lyotard's

poststructuralist model of capitalism as a monological system. Instead Greenblatt views capitalism as a complex historical movement that has generated `regimes in which the drive

towards

differentiation

and

the

drive

towards

monological

organization

operate

simultaneously, or at least oscillate so rapidly as to create the impression of simultaneity' (1990, 151). American capitalism in the late twentieth century is characterized, Greenblatt argues, by its effortless `invocation of two apparently contradictory accounts of art' ± `in the same moment a working distinction between the aesthetic and the real is established and abrogated' (1990, 153). The resulting circulation is generated not just by politics but by `the whole structure of production and consumption ± the systematic organization of ordinary life and consciousness (1990, 154). Greenblatt's characteristic method is to apply the skilful close reading he learned at Yale to a non-literary text, event or experience and then, in a brilliant intertextual dance, juxtapose that text with a reading of a recognized literary work. The resulting analysis shows how the social energies which circulate between the two texts are, presumably, characteristic of the culture at large. `Invisible Bullets' works from Thomas Harriot's

Briefe and True Report of the new found Land of Virginia

A

(1588) and its account of the

Indians' explanation of their susceptibility to European diseases to Shakespeare's second Henriad;

both

texts

demonstrate

the

powerful, if illusory, voice (1988,

ways

21±65).

in

which

power

allows

subversive

`Learning to Curse' moves

forces

explorers' accounts of Indian languages as defective or uncultured to Caliban's curses in

Tempest Declaration of Egregious Popish Imposters (1990,

16±39);

`Shakespeare

and

the

Exorcists'

uses

(1603) to interrogate

a

from new world

Samuel

King Lear

The A

Harsnett's

's representation

of Edgar as a demonically possessed `Poor Tom' (1988, 94±128). The

relationship

between

texts

in

these

analyses

is

always

dynamic;

the

model

is

negotiation or exchange. Every text is necessarily embedded in a complex network of social, economic and political practices (similar to Foucault's episteme); literary and nonliterary texts circulate inseparably within this network. And because the theatre's intended audience was a community of spectators rather than the individual consciousness, the stage became a fruitful site for such inquiries:

For the circulation of social energy by and through the stage was not part of a single, coherent, totalizing system. Rather it was partial, fragmentary, conflictual; elements were crossed, torn apart, recombined, set against each other; particular social practices were magnified by the stage, others diminished, exalted, evacuated. (Greenblatt 1988, 19)

Although Greenblatt has often been criticized for opening his essays with an anecdote or petite histoire (sometimes related to Clifford Geertz's concept of thick description), he defends the practice:

modern north american criticism and theory

106

The historical anecdote functions

less as explanatory illustration than as disturbance, that

which requires explanation, contextualization, interpretation. Anecdotes are the equivalents in the register of the real of what drew me to the study of literature: the encounter with something that I could not stand not understanding, that I could not quite finish with or finish off, that I had to get out of my inner life where it had taken hold, that I could retell and contemplate and struggle with. (1990, 5)

Greenblatt's

early

work,

along

with

Stephen

Orgel's

treatments

of

the

Stuart

court

masque as an instrument of state power (Orgel 1975) and Jonathan Goldberg's analysis of Stuart literature's relationship to James I's court (Goldberg 1983), focuses on the state's power both to license and prohibit acting companies and the subversive energies they represented. In his subsequent work, however, Greenblatt moves away from an emphasis on Foucauldian analyses of power relations to the more aesthetic concepts of wonder and resonance. Wonder occurs during the observer's first encounter with an artefact, natural event

or

alien

other;

the

viewer

stops

in

his

tracks

and

feels

the

uniqueness

of

the

experience. Resonance comes as the encounter is repeated; the object, natural event or alien other evokes `in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which as metaphor or more simply as metonymy it may be taken by a viewer to stand' (1990, 170). Greenblatt finds the concept of wonder particularly useful in his account of European travel narratives,

World,

Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New

because wonder was invariably a `component of the discourse of discovery, for by

definition wonder is an instinctive recognition of difference, the sign of a heightened attention' (1991, 20). At the moment of first contact:

The seamless and naturalised world of Renaissance Europe is torn apart and dislocated . . . The alterity of the indigenous American form of life presents both a fascination and a challenge to the representational economy of the European invaders. The attempts to contain, delimit, order and incorporate the other are figured in the colonialist representation of the native Americans within European imagery. (Colebrook 1997, 216)

As he considers a variety of colonialist representations of the new world and its peoples, Greenblatt

shows

how

Renaissance

culture

incorporated

images

of

the

other

into

its

discourse and how those images evolved in ensuing negotiations. In the acknowledgements to

Marvelous Possessions

Greenblatt briefly relates his discus-

sion of European dispossession of new world natives to his own Zionist roots, but as he admits in his essay on `Wonder and Resonance' (1990, 167), because his own interests and values are pervasive, he seldom feels the need to articulate them. Other prominent new historicists are more insistent that the critic reflect on his or her own historical situation. Louis Adrian Montrose, for example, stresses the importance of recognizing `the agency of

criticism

in

constructing

and

delimiting

the

subject

of

study'

(1986,

7).

Thus

to

Montrose, new historicism's

collective project is to resituate canonical literary texts among the multiple forms of writing, and in relation to the non-discursive practices and institutions of the social formation in which those texts have been produced ± while, at the same time, recognizing that this project of historical

resituation

is

necessarily

the

textual

construction

of

critics

who

are

themselves

historical subjects. (1986, 6)

Like Greenblatt, Montrose locates the objects of his studies within a dynamic and unstable relationship to material conditions of production and circulation.

stephen greenblatt and the new historicism

107

Montrose's most quoted phrase acknowledges `the historicity of texts and the textuality of history' (1986, 8 and 1996, 5). The former refers to the `social and material embedding of

writing [and] . . . reading' (1996, 6); the latter suggests that

all modes of

we

can

have

no

access to a full

and

authentic past, to

a lived material

existence, that

is

unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question, and furthermore, that the survival of those traces, rather than others, cannot be assumed to be merely fortuitous but must rather be presumed to be at least partially consequent upon complex and subtle social processes of selective preservation and effacement. (1996, 6)

In a move akin to cultural materialism's emphasis on the ways texts become imbricated in the dominant power structure,

Montrose cautions the reader to see the text within

a

continuous process of mediation. Montrose eschews strict marxist interpretations, seeing the subject as both determined and capable of agency. The process of subjectification, he contends, `on the one hand, shapes individuals as loci of consciousness and initiators of action'; on the other hand, it also `positions, motivates, and constrains them within ± subjects them to ± social networks and cultural codes that exceed their comprehension or control' (1986, 9). Thus Montrose finds a limited space for the individual to shape his world and allows texts a limited ability to shape social and cultural codes. Montrose's 1996 monograph,

The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics

of the Elizabethan Theatre, brings together several of his earlier essays in carefully revised form. The first half examines the place of the professional theatre within Elizabethan culture, showing how the emergence of acting companies and the commodification of dramatic impersonation in an entertainment industry `were consonant with other material and

ideological

developments

±

capital

accumulation,

market

calculation,

contractual

relations, and ``possessive individualism'' ± that manifested the emergence of what we now characterize as merchant capitalism and bourgeois subjectivity' (1996, 92). The stage thus played a major role in the shift from the communal ceremonies of the medieval Catholic church to the nationalization of English culture under the Tudor Protestant state at the same time as it called into question the state's absolutist assumptions. The book's second half examines the relationship between the theatre and the state in

A Midsummer Night's

Dream through its refiguration of popular mythology surrounding Elizabeth, the virgin Queen. Montrose's concern with `figurations of gender' is shared by another prominent new historicist, Jean E. Howard. In an early essay outlining new historicism's major tenets, Howard broadened the scope of its inquiries from the power structure of the Elizabethan and

Stuart

courts

to

include

people

of

the

`middling

sort',

among

them

merchants,

apprentices and women. Even

more

than

Montrose,

Howard

contends

that

`the

historical

investigator'

is

a

product of her own time and therefore she can never `recognize otherness in its pure form' but must always see it `in part through the framework of the present' (1986, 23). The uncertainties

of

the

present

moment

(late

twentieth-century

America)

explain

the

selection of the past moment (early modern England): the Renaissance was `a boundary or liminal space between two or more monolithic periods where one can see acted out a clash of paradigms and ideologies, a playfulness with signifying systems, a self-reflexivity, and a self-consciousness about the tenuous solidity of human identity which resonate with some of the dominant elements of postmodern culture' (1986, 16±17). In the English

modern north american criticism and theory

108

Renaissance

contemporary

critics

find

fragmentation

and

dissonance

similar

to

the

cacophony of their own world. Howard stresses that any critical interpretation of the past is an intervention, an attempt

The Stage and Social Struggle

to recuperate meaning from the past for the present. Thus her

in Early Modern England

(1994) looks at the ways in which a broad range of Renaissance

texts ± canonical works by Shakespeare and Jonson, anti-theatrical pamphlets and obscure dramas

such

as

The Whore of Babylon

The Wise Woman of Hogsden

and

±

represent

theatrical practices through language. She finds that theatrical discourse in the period was contradictory but reflective of social change. True to her self-description as a `Marxist feminist',

Howard

focuses

on

the

ways

in

which

servants,

rogues,

vagabonds,

London

citizens and women were represented in ways that sometimes supported, but also sometimes challenged, the dominant male, aristocratic power structure. Howard rejects the by-now outmoded model of subversion vs. containment for a more fluid paradigm of social struggle and contestation. New historicism has had its share of detractors. In the critical ferment of the 1980s, feminists found the movement's founding `fathers' ± Greenblatt, Orgel and Goldberg ± negligent for their indifference to the `woman's part'. Carol Thomas Neely charged that new

historicists

resorted

to

the

same

old

`male,

upper

class'

texts,

and

continued

to

marginalize women (1988, 8±10). In a review of studies of the family in Shakespeare, Lynda E. Boose ruefully wondered, `Since feminism is, by definition, a subversive site of resistance

to

the

(Foucauldian) co-opted

by

dominant

premise

the

that

dominant

discourse, any

site

what

of

is

to

subversive

institution?'

(1987,

be

made

resistance

741).

Peter

out is

of

new

inevitably

Erickson

historicism's defeated

surmised

that

or

the

schism between feminists and new historicists was a result of `their conflicting attitudes toward the present . . . [W]here new historicism regards the present as an influence to be neutralized or escaped, feminist criticism views the present ± including the lives we are living or able to imagine now ± as a vital resource and a source of strength' (1987, 335). During the late

1980s

and throughout the 1990s, however, the

work of

materialist

feminists such as Jean E. Howard, Karen Newman, Phyllis Rackin, Dympna Callaghan, Valerie Wayne and Catherine Belsey have undermined this binary opposition. Gender in their work, as Steven Mullaney notes, is

historically situated, not subordinated to an amorphous concept of power (as early versions of new historicism tended to do), but no longer the exclusive or central category of analysis (as early feminist critiques of new historicism insisted it should be); rather, in such work, gender

is

increasingly

inscribed

within

a

complex

nexus

of

class,

gender,

and

race

hierarchies. (1996, 34)

The opposition between new historicism and feminism, which was probably exaggerated to begin with, has faded as a new synthesis of approaches develops. As Lynda E. Boose's critique suggests, new historicism has been particularly vulnerable to criticism for upholding the Foucauldian notion that power ineluctably works to contain and

delimit

subversion.

Greenblatt's

conclusion

to

his

most

frequently

cited

essay,

`Invisible Bullets' ± `There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us' (1988, 65) ± has become a mantra for criticism from both left and right. Academic conservatives see in this doctrine a dangerous shift towards determinism that erases human agency and makes the author a mere conduit of social and political forces. Edward Pechter thus lumped new

historicism

with

marxist

criticism

because

it

views

`all

history

and

contemporary

stephen greenblatt and the new historicism

109

political life as determined, wholly or in essence, by struggle, contestation, power relations,

libido dominandi Critics

' (1987, 292).

from

containment

is

the

left

also

inevitable,

attack

that

`Invisible

efforts

to

Bullets'

effect

social

because change

of

are

its

insistence

inevitably

that

doomed.

Walter Cohen, for example, charged that `new historicism describes historical difference, but it does not explain historical change'; he suggested that new historicism was, in effect, a form of `leftist disillusionment' (1986, 33, 36). Defending new historicism from Pechter's charges of `Marxism', Carolyn Porter called on its practitioners to examine more carefully their theoretical assumptions: `new historicists must begin to ask themselves whether and when

this

ostensibly

kind

of

wants

to

analysis

becomes

analyse

and

complicit

resist'

(1988,

in

the

781;

cultural

see

also

operations

Porter

of

power

1989±90).

it

Frank

Lentricchia blamed new historicism in general, and Greenblatt in particular, for espousing orthodoxy disguised as radicalism and for suggesting that `all struggle against a dominant ideology is in vain' (Lentricchia 1989, 239). Despite this array of critiques ± or perhaps because of it ± new historicism seems to have blended into the mainstream as the twenty-first century begins. The work of Stephen Greenblatt and other new historicists has opened up new topics for research and new ways of thinking.

More

important,

the

multidisciplinary

thrust

of

their

work

has

been

widely

adopted in literary and cultural studies in the United States. Literary scholars now avidly embrace texts and methodologies that would not have been considered appropriate to the study of literature twenty-five years ago, and they have broadened the canon to include works from a wide array of nationalities and ethnic groups that were previously marginalized. The new historicist drive to broaden the canon, too, has been subject to criticism. Pechter, for example, decried new historicism's tendency to flatten out all texts, removing great works of literature from a primary place (1987). Paul Cantor echoed this theme: `New Historicism works to assimilate [masterpieces of literature] to the average and everyday of their era, to diminish their aura, ultimately to strip them of their claims to genius' (1993, 25). But such fears about a total revamp of the canon are clearly unfounded. New historicists continue to proffer Shakespeare pride of place in the literary pantheon: along with Jean E. Howard, Walter Cohen and Katherine Eisaman Maus, Greenblatt edited

The Norton Shakespeare

(1997) for the

textbook market, while Bedford editions of Shakespeare's plays provide an abundance of `Texts and Contexts' that ± in accord with new historicist teachings ± situate the dramas within the larger framework of early modern political, social and cultural economies. As early as 1986 Montrose predicted that new historicism was on its way to becoming the newest orthodoxy (1986, 5), a prescient statement that in many ways now seems a reality. No longer a young Turk resisting Yale's formalist father figures, Stephen Greenblatt now holds an endowed chair at Harvard University and, more significantly, he is the new Associate General Editor of the current

Norton Anthology of English Literature

(2000), the

two-volume textbook that for decades has set the canon studied by millions of students in the United States. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the critical practices grouped together under the rubric `new historicism' are exercised throughout the United States, not only in university and college English departments, but in the study

of foreign literatures, art

history, geography, film and culture. One might even say that what in the 1980s seemed to be a strikingly `new' practice is now simply common practice.

Virginia Mason Vaughan

modern north american criticism and theory

110

Further reading and works cited Boose, L. E. `The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or ± Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or ± The Politics of Politics',

Renaissance Quarterly,

40, 1987.

Cantor, P. A. `Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicist Vision', Cohen, W. `Political Criticism of Shakespeare', in

Academic Questions,

Shakespeare Reproduced,

6, 1993.

eds J. E. Howard and M. F.

O'Connor. New York, 1986. Colebrook, C.

New Literary Histories.

Manchester, 1997.

Erickson, P. `Rewriting the Renaissance, Rewriting Ourselves', Foucault, M. Goldberg, J.

The Order of Things.

James I and the Politics of Literature.

Greenblatt, S. J.

Sir Walter Ralegh.

Shakespeare Quarterly,

38, 1987.

New York, 1970. Baltimore, MD, 1983.

New Haven, CT, 1973.

Ð.

Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare.

Ð.

Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England ,

Chicago, 1980. Berkeley, CA,

1988. Ð. `Introduction to the Forms of Power and the Power of Forms', Ð.

Learning to Curse.

Ð.

Marvellous Possessions.

15, 1982.

Chicago, 1991.

Howard, J. E. `The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies', Ð.

Genre,

New York, 1990.

The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England.

Lentricchia, F. `Foucault's Legacy', in

English Literary Renaissance,

16, 1986.

London, 1994.

The New Historicism,

ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York, 1989.

Montrose, L. `Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History',

English Literary Renaissance,

16, 1986. Ð.

The Purpose of Playing.

Chicago, 1996.

Mullaney, S. `After the New Historicism', in Neely, C. T. `Constructing the Subject', Orgel, S.

The Illusion of Power.

Alternative Shakespeares,

ed. T. Hawkes. London, 1996.

English Literary Renaissance,

18, 1988.

Berkeley, CA, 1975.

Pechter, E. `The New Historicism and its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama',

PMLA,

102,

1987. Porter, C. `Are We Being Historical Yet?', Ð. `History and Literature', Veeser, H. Aram (ed.)

South Atlantic Quarterly,

New Literary History,

The New Historicism.

87, 1988.

21, 1989±90.

New York, 1989.

16. Lesbian and Gay Studies/Queer Theory

Queer theory in the United States is opposed to the kind of encyclopaedic categorization of knowledge represented by this volume. At the same time, it is committed to the global dissemination of information also represented by this volume. It is only by acknowledging the difficulty (and perhaps the disingenuousness) of offering a summary overview that any scholar can hope to describe the disruptive critical endeavour undertaken by queer scholars in the United States. US queer studies is an amalgam of various theoretical methodologies ± feminist, marxist, Foucauldian,

deconstructive and new

historicist (among others). Coming

to academic

prominence during the last two decades, queer studies offers insight into issues of gender in

lesbian and gay studies/queer theory

general

and

the

heterosexual/homosexual

111

nexus

in

particular.

Moreover,

like

cultural

studies, postcolonialism and other nascent disciplines during this period of the so-called `cultural wars', queer studies stands as a testing ground for a whole range of postmodern attempts

to

understand

`difference'

±

both

in

terms

of

culturally

specific

conditions

concerning race/ethnicity, class and gender, and as a general category of knowledge. It is important not to overstate the role of academic critics in the study of gay culture. Homosexuality has, of course, been an object of interest since at least the medico-scientific research of the late nineteenth-century sexologists, most famously Richard von KrafftEbing, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld, John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis and of course Sigmund Freud. The origins of recent gay scholarship reach beyond academic theory back to the grassroots politics of sexual liberation. As long as there have been homosexuals, there has been interest in defining what constitutes the sub-culture, if only as a means of identifying possible sexual partners without fear of legal prosecution. Quite simply, one has always had to know a fair amount about patterns of homosexual behaviour to know whom to cruise. The early history of gay academic scholarship is generally comparable to that of other minority

disciplines. The

haphazard

study

of

homosexuality

in America

became

more

systematic after the Second World War, especially as part of Gay Liberation's pursuit of visibility following New York's Stonewall Rebellion in the summer of 1969. In the earliest stage of recent gay studies (the period roughly from the late 1960s to the late 1970s), journalists and scholars offered popular accounts of previously invisible homosexuals. The forerunner of such work was Jeannette H. Foster's pioneering study in 1956 of `sex variant [lesbian]' women in literature. More than a decade later book-length histories started to appear, often in conjunction with community organizations like San Francisco's Lesbian and Gay History Project or New York's Lesbian Herstory Archives. Jonathan Ned Katz and Martin Greif undertook broad surveys of gay men and women in history. For the popular press, Vito Russo explored the `closeted' presence of homosexuals in film, while Kenneth Anger tattled on the sexual misdeeds of a Hollywood `Babylon'. And in the late 1970s, to counteract the soft-core porn of Alex Comfort's heterosexual best-seller

The Joy of Sex,

Edmund White, Charles Silverstein, Emily Sisley and Bertha Harris all proclaimed the more complex sociological `joy' of gay and lesbian sex. These early commercial efforts were primarily

intended

homophobic isolated

to

educate

misconceptions,

lesbians

and

gay

straight

they

men

society

offered

unaware

and

historical

that

their

embolden profiles sexual

gay

in

readers.

gay

Correcting

courage

preference

was

to

those

shared

by

approximately one-tenth of America. Such efforts at consciousness-raising were followed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by more academic social and literary histories. The relocation of the centre of gay studies from the

grassroots

movements

(primarily

in

urban

communities)

to

the

academy

entailed

certain predictable shifts in form and emphasis. Many of the historical studies addressed specific issues, not all explicitly gay. Making space for sexuality in history was work by (among others): Estelle Freedman on American prison reform; John D'Emilio on pre rube  on Stonewall community groups; Guido Ruggiero on Renaissance Venice; Allan Be the Second World War; Judith C. Brown on a seventeenth-century Italian nun; B. R. Burg on

seventeenth-century

between

1890

encyclopaedic reference

for

and

account early

Caribbean

1940. of

Some

pirates;

histories

Christian

Church

opinion.

and took

tolerance In

a

George a

Chauncey

broader

toward

on

homosexuality

wide-ranging

New

perspective.

series

of

York

John

became

articles,

City

Boswell's the

key

subsequently

modern north american criticism and theory

112

collected, Martin Bauml Duberman and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg studied same-sex male and

female

relations

respectively

in

nineteenth-century

America.

And

more

recently

Freedman and D'Emilio turned from their specialized studies to co-author an overview of the history of American sexuality both gay and straight. The difference between these histories and their popular predecessors was as much one of

method

as

of

meaning,

and

scholarly

work

was

fully

compatible

with

the

popular

campaigns for `gay pride'. In chronicling the social oppression of homosexuals, historians implicitly defended gay civil rights. And in analysing earlier periods to demonstrate the existence of a positive attitude toward homosexuality, they used the precedent of the past to

counter

historians

contemporary

was

attacks

supplemented

on

sexual

somewhat

`unnaturalness'.

later

by

The

comparable

work

studies

of

of

professional

gay

aspects

of

literature. Some of these studies ± like those of Lillian Faderman on the development of lesbian

culture,

Enlightenment

Martha

Vicinus

Englishmen

or

on

Shari

Victorian Benstock

working on

the

women,

Left

Bank

G.

S.

female

Rousseau

on

modernists

±

approached literature with a eye to social history. Others ± like Robert K. Martin's survey of a gay

male

continuum in American

poetry

± were

more

traditionally

literary

in their

analysis. Biographers, too, began to pay more attention to the role of sexuality in identity formation, discussing the homosexuality of such writers as Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Willa Cather and even such fellow academics as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alan Turing. Although already a substantial body of work, gay and lesbian scholarship did not have much influence on mainstream theory until the 1980s, when an alliance between feminism and gay male studies placed it at the centre of gender debates. The established feminist scholar Elaine Showalter called for a broadening (and renaming) of `women's studies' as `gender studies' to signal the greater variety of ways in which one could `speak of' gender. Readings by D. A. Miller, Craig Owens, Joseph Allen Boone and Lee Edelman responded to (or anticipated) this call, adapting the paradigms of feminist theory to the study of male homosexuality. The central figure in the rapprochement between feminism and gay studies was the trail-blazing theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Her 1985 book

Literature and Male Homosocial Discourse

used

Gayle

Rubin's

Between Men: English

notion

of

the

`traffic

in

women' to explore the misogyny and homophobia behind the representation of male±male `homosocial'

relations

in

canonical

English

literature.

And

Epistemology of the Closet,

Sedgwick's magisterial 1990 work, placed gay males at the centre of gender theory with its ringing opening statement that `an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition' (Sedgwick 1990, 1). In this first stage of academic commodification, gay studies read feminist theory through the

postmodern

lens

of

Derridean

Central was Foucault's claim in

deconstruction

and

Foucauldian

History of Sexuality: Volume I

discourse

analysis.

that the history of sexuality is

a history not of bodily activities but of `discursive practices', a history less of `sex' than of things said about sex. According to Foucault, `homosexuality' as a concept did not appear until the invention of the medico-scientific discourse of sexuality in 1869. Before that shift in discursive paradigms, homosexuality was understood as a series of related physical acts, but not associated with any sense of a unified sensibility or even of a distinct character type, `the homosexual'. In Foucault's powerful formulation, `homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of

lesbian and gay studies/queer theory

113

interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species' (Foucault 1978, 43). Academic gay intellectuals had always recognized the dangers of identity politics and of the

very

concept

of

`identity'

itself.

To

avoid

what

Foucault

considered

the

sin

of

`transhistoricism', American gay scholarship for the most part insisted that `homosexuality', along with other categories of minority difference like gender, race and ethnicity, was `socially constructed'. A debate between this constructionist position and the complementary

`essentialist'

reading

occupied

centre

stage

throughout

the

scholarship

of

the

1980s. Predictably, both positions made valid points, and both were capable of being overstated. Essentialist interpretations began in the attempt to identify the historical and cultural conditions characteristic of a specific sexual subgroup. At their most extreme, however, essentialists treated same-sex love as a timeless entity, leaving themselves open to charges

of

ahistoricism

and

even

biological

determinism.

Aiming

for

greater

historio-

graphic and linguistic precision, constructionists demonstrated that the definition of sexual preference as a timeless entity called `homosexuality' was itself the product of a particular historical moment in nineteenth-century Victorian culture. Coupling Foucault's sense of historical discontinuity with Derrida's theories of linguistic undecidability, constructionists insisted that identity categories should be treated as cultural fictions, implicitly within quotation marks. At best the constructionists ably battled presentism and parochialism. The apparent similarity of same-sex object-choice throughout the ages should not obscure how

different

cultures

experience

that

choice

differently:

clone

lovers

in

Greenwich

Village share little social reality with Sambian adolescents in New Guinea, or with Socrates and Sappho in ancient Greece. When pressed too far, however, this corrective flirted with cultural determinism. It at times represented sexual preference as so wholly imposed from without that same-sex love appeared as merely a social epiphenomenon, with no grounding in desire. The limitations of the debate were clearest in its treatment of one of the central political issues of the decade ± the spread of HIV virus throughout the gay male population of Europe and North America. More than any other single factor, the health crisis made visible

the

diversity

(and

disagreements)

within

western

homosexuality.

The

uneven

spread of the virus through gay communities tragically illustrated that differences in gender, race/ethnicity

and

class

(to

say

nothing

of

specific

sexual

practices)

could

be

more

important than similarities in sexual object-choice. Just as AIDS problematized definitions of

what

constitutes

`being

gay',

it

also

challenged

understanding

of

the

relationship

between academic analysis and political activism. The problem was not, as traditionalists occasionally argued,

that AIDS was not a proper object for scholarly study. The gaps

between biological evidence and scientific interpretation demonstrated that representations of the disease were as fully fictionalized as any literary narrative. Yet there remained questions about what kind of fiction AIDS was and what knowledge could come from analysing it. In the public arena, fiery protests from activist groups like ACTUP combined with acts of civil disobedience profoundly to change governmental policies concerning education and drug distribution. In more purely academic settings, however, comparable deconstructions of `the AIDS text' seemed less consequential, even smug. It was hard for `readings' of AIDS not to recycle platitudes about sexism, racism and homophobia, while flirting with the very objectification they deplored. By representing the health crisis in terms of fashionable theoretical paradigms, scholars did not so much use social construction to deconstruct the misconceptions of scientific discourse as use the (easily agreed upon)

modern north american criticism and theory

114

limitations of AIDS representations to validate Foucauldian and Derridean paradigms as methods of cultural critique. The problematic relation between deconstructive linguistic theories and practical politics was one played out in many disciplines ± race theory, postcolonialism and minority discourse, as well as gay studies. Although continuing to use constructionist language to caution against ahistoricism in sexuality studies, by the 1990s most scholars found the essentialist/social constructionist controversy less interesting than they had five years earlier. The impersonality of some postmodern paradigms simply did not seem to afford a means to discuss subcultural specificity. In the words of the black gay cultural historian Kobena Mercer, `although romanticist notions of authorial creativity cannot be returned to the central role they once played in criticism and interpretation, the question of agency in

cultural practices that

does

contest the canon and its cultural dominance suggests that it really

matter who is

speaking' (Mercer 1994, 194). And after the banishment of `the author' and `the subject' in the

1980s, many

minority

scholars in

the

1990s

began

to

call

for

a

reconsideration

of

essentialism, whether as `strategic essentialism' or the `risk of essentialism'. Some of the new tone in gay studies undoubtedly resulted from the rise of a parallel but distinct

strain

of

lesbian

theory.

Both

lesbian

and

gay

studies

derived

considerable

intellectual force and professional visibility from their readings in feminist theory. Yet the route by which gay male theory developed out of (and after) feminism was not identical to that by which lesbian theory developed alongside (and contemporaneous with) it. No single model can describe the relation between feminism and lesbian theory. Lesbians played important roles in the rebirth of feminism in the 1960s, and in fact two of modern feminism's anthology

founding

texts

±

Kate

Sisterhood is Powerful

Millett's

(1970)

±

Sexual Politics are

also

early

(1970)

and

statements

Robin

in

Morgan's

lesbian

theory.

Straight feminist accounts of homosexuality run the full range of responses, from homophobic to homophilic. The early work of feminist Betty Friedan was explicitly anti-gay and implicitly anti-lesbian. Ellen Moers' early literary history was anti-lesbian, though not antigay. Luce Irigaray's theory could be interpreted as anti-gay, though not as anti-lesbian. And most post-Foucauldian theorists ± male and female, gay and straight ± reproduced their mentor's silence about the role of lesbian desire in the construction of the homosexual.

The

very

ease

with

which

straight

feminists

assimilated

gay

Á cle fin-de-sie

male

theory

seemed to mask a lingering discomfort with lesbianism. It was at least worrisome, as more than one theorist remarked, that despite numerous accounts of `gay men in feminism' a parallel history of `gay women in feminism' remained unwritten, as though the topic were simultaneously redundant and de trop. Less wedded than gay male theory to Foucauldian or deconstructive paradigms, lesbian theory was more interested in defining what constituted non-traditional sexualities than in

attacking

attempts offering

by an

regularly historical

those

definitions

Bonnie

alternative

rejected periods

complementary

as

socially

Zimmerman,

as

of

`essentialist'.

and

ways

`history'

among of

Julie

constructed.

Abrahams

lesbian

The

texts,

wish

homosexual

conceptualizing

to

and

This

and an

trace

difference

others

enterprise lesbian

heterosexual

homosocial

to

was

modify that

gay

relations

canon

male

continuities, subjects,

apparent

the

among

theory

both

resulted

in by

across in

women.

two The

historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, in her ground-breaking article `The Female World of

Love

and

Ritual'

(first

published

in

1975),

argued

that

the

nineteenth

century

permitted a ritualized style of romantic, even sentimentalized affection which to modern ears

sounds

sexualized.

She

concluded

that

`the

twentieth-century

tendency

to

view

lesbian and gay studies/queer theory

115

human love and sexuality within a dichotomized universe of deviance and normality, genitality and platonic love, is alien

to the emotions and attitudes

of the nineteenth

century and fundamentally distorts the nature of these women's emotional interaction' (Smith-Rosenberg

1985,

58±9).

The

poet/critic

Adrienne

Rich

argued

for

a

more

`transhistorical' position five years later in her `Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence'. Through `compulsory heterosexuality', the false claim that people are `naturally' attracted to people of the opposite sex, society institutionalizes behavioural norms like heterosexuality (and by extension domesticity or capitalism) that threaten all forms of feminism gay or straight. To resist covert social attempts to homogenize desire, Rich not

only

along

a

asserted `lesbian

`lesbian

existence';

continuum',

a

she

single

imagined

line

that

female

included

sexual the

identities

full

`range

positioned of

woman-

identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman' (Abelove et al. 1993, 239). Much lesbian theory

focused on rethinking, even recuperating,

cultural

stereotypes.

Anthropologist Esther Newton praised the usually pejorative notions of camp male `drag' and of lesbian `mannishness'. Drama theorist Sue-Ellen Case celebrated the transgressive character

of

what

others

had

considered

the

restrictive

Âs cliche

of

the

butch±femme

relationship and of lesbian vampirism. Especially influential in these recuperations were Á re's notion of insights drawn from performance and film theory. Building on Joan Rivie femaleness

as

a

`masquerade'

and

Laura

Mulvey's

claim

that

the

cinematic

gaze

was

inherently male, theorists like Case, Teresa de Lauretis and Kaja Silverman explored the implications of masquerade and the male gaze for sexuality. One particularly celebrated use of performance theory was that of philosopher Judith Butler. In

Gender Trouble: Feminism

and the Subversion of Identity, Butler argued that `the identity categories often presumed to be foundational

to feminist politics

. . . simultaneously

work to limit

and constrain in

advance the very cultural possibilities that feminism is supposed to open up'; that `gender' as

a

category

(Butler

1990,

unwittingly

supported

147,

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of `Sex' , Butler

x).

In

gender

hierarchy

and

compulsory

heterosexuality

explored the interconnections between the `performativity' of gender and the materiality of the body. Butler conceived performativity both as an authoritarian form of speech, in which power acted

as discourse, and as a linguistic relation that automatically implicated

speakers in the very thing they opposed (Butler 1993, 225, 241). She understood bodily materiality as the effect of a dynamic of power, and construed `sex' not as a biological fact but as a cultural norm (ibid., 2±3). Her sense that performativity constituted the sex/gender matrix was subsequently taken up by such theorists of male sexuality as Sedgwick, Miller and Edelman, and remains one of the reigning paradigms of contemporary sexuality theory. The models of performance popularized by Butler and Sedgwick employed an aggressively postmodern notion of `self', coupling a Derridean focus on iterability with a psychoanalytic (often Lacanian) interest in repetition compulsion, abjection and interpellation to critique as static the more traditional Austinian sense of the linguistic performative. In the early 1990s these high theory paradigms found their notions of transgressive theatricality embodied in a grassroots movement seeking to expose some political limitations of Gay Liberation. At the start of the new decade, a group called `Queer Nation' extended the political project of ACTUP beyond the specific focus on AIDS reform to decry more generally the conservative, middle-class ethos of 1970s gay activism. Distancing itself from the misogyny and racism of earlier sexual movements, Queer Nation discarded as tainted the adjective `gay' and adopted instead the self-appellation `queer'.

116 modern north american criticism and theory Such confrontiveness was not universally admired by older generations, and as a coherent political movement Queer Nation lasted only a few years. Yet scholars saw in its disruptive tactics a model for the transformative potential of language. Judith Butler argued that such a use of `queer' did not simply redefine a term of derision into one of celebration. Calling into question the very nature of power, queering was `a linguistic practice whose purpose has been the shaming of the subject it names' (Butler 1993, 226). Others read the movement even more broadly, and influential `special issues' of differences and Social Text, edited respectively by Teresa de Lauretis and Michael Warner, used the term `queer' to call for a coalition among various minority positions ± gay and lesbian of course, but also other less clearly defined outcasts. As Warner explained in the introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet, `queer politics brings [together] very differently sexualized and differently politicized people' into a movement that `rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favour of a more thorough resistance to the regime of the normal' (Warner 1993, xvi, xxvi). Or, as he stated in a piece co-authored with Lauren Berlant, `without assimilating queerness to a familiar minority identity like gay', queer theory `wants to address the full range of power-ridden normativities of sex': `the name queer [is not] an umbrella for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered. Queer politics makes available different understandings of membership at different times, and membership in them is more a matter of aspiration than it is the expression of an identity or a history' (Berlant and Warner 1991, 346, 345, 344). Everyone understood that there were limitations to conceiving of sexuality as oppositional. Leo Bersani long ago remarked that anyone who has ever been to a gay bathhouse understands that homosexuality does not necessary entail open-mindedness. While supporting the principles of `queeritude', Lauren Berlant cautioned that in its allegiance to the rhetorics of camp and citizenship, Queer Nation might unintentionally have reinforced an American national fantasy of consensus. Moreover, in declaring that `queer' sexuality does not depend purely on sexual identity, theorists extended minority status to those not systematically discriminated against: people apparently empowered by the mainstream could declare themselves individually `queered' by their personal deviations from heteronormativity. Doubting the value of any form of institutionalization, queer theory opposed all attempts to map out a `gay and lesbian' literary canon. The unfortunate result of such an admirable scepticism was that queer theory all too often focused on the already canonical work of Oscar Wilde or Henry James, while ignoring the importance of contemporary work by James Baldwin, John Rechy, Jane Rule, Audre Lorde, Samuel R. Delaney, Thomas Disch, Michael Nava, Dorothy Allison and Jewelle Gomez. Most distressing, however, was the way in which the oppositional strategy was so quickly domesticated by the mainstream. Not offering itself as a new category of knowledge, queer theory meant to challenge the very notion of labelling. When `queer' became simply the new name for Barnes & Noble shelves formerly labelled `Gay and Lesbian', the term, evacuated of its political content, lost much of its transformation status. Queer performativity is still an active, and arguably the dominant, paradigm of contemporary US theory of sexuality, especially as applied to cultural studies and theatre and film theory. Alive to the problems of commodification and co-optation, however, queer theorists have in recent years taken performance paradigms in a range of new directions. While it is too early to generalize comfortably about the shape of these new explorations, two tendencies have emerged. One develops out of ideological criticism in general (and Althusserian accounts of the invisibility of state apparatus in particular) to

lesbian and gay studies/queer theory

117

explore not the minority position but the character of dominant culture. Long ago Richard Dyer deplored the way in which `whiteness' was `unmarked', pretending to characterlessness at the same time that it constructed the putative differentiating traits with which to identify racial and ethnic minorities. Dyer and Ruth Frankenberg (among others) have continued to critique this misrepresentation both through delineating the processes by which whiteness manufactures its own invisibility, and by `marking' whiteness with the traits it represses. Similar critiques of the process by which hegemony renders itself invisible have considered the issues of masculinity and citizenship. Men's studies have for a long time applied feminist paradigms of the sex/gender system to understand maleness. More recently,

Judith

Halberstam

has

worked

to

separate

the

concept

of

`masculinity'

from

biology to claim that the processes by which masculinity has been constructed are most easily recognized in female masculinity. Similarly Warner, Berlant and a number of other scholars

have

problematized

the

notion

of

American

citizenship

with

quasi-Lacanian

critiques of the `National Symbolic' and `Queer Symbolic', the linguistic process by which those not actually enfranchised are made to feel as if they have been afforded a voice within national discourse. Another new direction studies the `intersectionality' among sexuality and other minority identities, customarily those of gender, race/ethnicity and class. Cultural studies scholars like Stuart Hall had always considered issues of `double' minoritization, and film-makers ± most notably the Sankofa Collective and Isaac Julien in Great Britain and Marlon Riggs and Cheryl Dunye in the US ± frequently explored the complexities of black gay identity. Since

its

institutionalization,

lesbian

and

gay

theory

has

tried

to

modify

its

own

pre-

dominantly white middle-class sensibility, especially along the lines suggested in famous  s Almaguer, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldu Âa critiques by Kobena Mercer, Toma and

Cherrie

Norma

Moraga.

 rcon Ala

identities,

which

Theorists

have are

of

colour

increasingly

treated

as

like

focused

relatively

 Kimberle

not

on

stable,

but

Crenshaw,

the on

Valerie Smith

indeterminacy the

of

interpretative

and

individual ambiguities

that arise from the intersections (and at times indistinguishability) among those categories. Theorists

of

sexuality

like

David

Van

Leer

and

Robyn

Wiegman

applied

notions

of

`intersectionality' to include the sex/gender nexus. They argue that minority identities are traditionally treated as indistinguishable by the dominant culture and cannot really be studied as discrete entities. Such interest in a multi-valent `minority discourse' rejects the binaries of traditional minority scholarship, emphasizing the conversations among minority identities over the ways in which each is victimized and disciplined by dominant culture. It is pointless to predict paths for queer theory. Many recent developments in the field cannot be separated from similar impulses to globalization and multiculturalism in related disciplines like women's studies, race/ethnic studies, film studies, postcolonial studies and cultural studies. As a result of these shared impulses, sexuality theory may see less the further

development

of

its

own

methodologies

than

an

amalgamation

with

other

dis-

ciplines. But whether the future of sexuality lies in performativity, multi-ethnicity, or some as-yet undefined interdisciplinary coalition, at the beginning of the new millennium queer theory remains one of the most lively and active of academic enterprises.

David Van Leer

modern north american criticism and theory

118

Further reading and works cited Abelove, H. et al. (eds) Berlant, L.

The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York, 1993.

The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship . Durham, NC,

1997. Ð and Warner, M. `What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?',

Periodical of Modern Languages

Association, 110, 1991. Bersani, L. `Is the Rectum a Grave?', in

AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism , ed. D. Crimp.

Cambridge, MA, 1988. Boone, J. A. and Cadden, M. (eds) Boswell, J.

Engendering Men. New York, 1990.

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the

Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago, 1980. Butler, J. Ð.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, 1990.

Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of `Sex' . New York, 1993.

Case, S.-E. (ed.)

Performing Feminisms. Baltimore, MD, 1990. Out in Culture. Durham, NC, 1995.

Creekmur, C. K. and Doty, A. (eds) de Lauretis, T.

The Practice of Love. Bloomington, IN, 1994.

Duberman, M. Bauml et al. (eds)

Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past . New York,

1989.

Surpassing the Love of Men. New York, 1981.

Faderman, L. Foucault, M.

History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction. New York, 1978.

Frankenberg, R.

White Women, Race Matters. Minneapolis, MN, 1993.

Fuss, D.

Essentially Speaking. New York, 1989.

Ð (ed.)

Inside/Out. New York, 1991.

Halberstram, J. Katz, J. N.

Martin, R. K. Mercer, K.

Female Masculinity. Durham, NC, 1998.

Gay American History. New York, 1976. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry . Austin, TX, 1979.

Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies . New York, 1994.

Miller, D. A.

The Novel and the Police. Berkeley, CA, 1988.

Sedgwick, E. Kosofsky. Ð.

Between Men. New York, 1985.

Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA, 1990.

Smith-Rosenberg, C. Van Leer, D.

Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America . New York, 1985.

The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society . New York, 1995.

Warner, M. (ed.) `Fear of a Queer Planet', Wiegman, R.

Cultural Politics, 6, 1993.

American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender . Durham, NC, 1995.

Zimmerman, B. `What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism', in

The New

Feminist Criticism, ed. E. Showalter. New York, 1985.

17. Postcolonial Studies

The publication of Edward Said's

Orientalism in 1978 inaugurated the field of postcolonial

studies in the US. Said's demonstration that an enormous number of literary, political, religious and philosophical texts about the Islamic Orient from the eighteenth century to the

present

functioned

as

a

Foucauldian

disciplinary

practice

linked

with

British

and

French colonization, influenced a generation of scholars. Although many, such as Homi

postcolonial studies Bhabha,

parted

119

company

with

Said

and

emphasized

the

ambivalence

rather

than

the

hegemony of colonial discourse, and feminists such as Gayatri Spivak forced a dialogue between western feminism and colonialism, the major areas of inquiry opened up by Said's work ± the analysis of western texts as colonial discourse, the investigation of representations of the colonized, the study of forms of resistance

to colonization in third world

literature ± all became important areas of inquiry in literary and cultural studies, and to a lesser

extent

in

decolonization,

history

and

anthropology.

neocolonialism

and

So,

imperialism

too, began

concerns to

be

such

seen

as

as

nationalism,

the

problems

of

language itself. More recently, postcolonial studies has concerned itself with the `internal colonization' of racial minorities in the US and with globalization. What explains the spectacular growth of postcolonial studies in the US academy in the 1980s? For marxist critics such as Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik, US postcolonial theory has flourished because of its complicity with global capitalism (Dirlik 1997, 503): its emergence at the beginning of global capitalism; its privileging of the position of the elite migrant intellectual; its attractiveness as a narrative eliding specific

inequities

of class; and its

inbuilt incapacity for praxis because of its critique of grand narratives (Ahmad 1992, 68, 69). To an extent, these critiques are true. There is reason to be vigilant about the politics of postcoloniality because of its production at the metropolitan centre. On the other hand, not all migrant intellectuals are similarly located at the centre. Edward Said's position as a Palestinian

activist,

which

has

subjected

him

to

numerous

death

threats

and

daily

harassment, is not the same as Homi Bhabha's purely western academic positioning, or Spivak's intimacy with historians in India and her precarious status as a feminist in the West, or Partha Chatterjee's split US ± India appointments which challenge `location' itself. Metropolitan location, thus, cannot be homogenized. US postcolonial studies, in fact, includes a diverse variety of interests, having in common an analysis of colonization and its aftermath. That postcolonial studies are not marxist enough does not go far enough to explain the popularity

of

this

complex

field.

The

reasons

for

its

ascendancy

are

institutional

and

cultural and occasion both hope and vigilance. On the positive side, clearly, postcolonial studies has opened up college curricula to third world texts in unprecedented ways. Chinua

Things Fall Apart of Darkness

Achebe's

is probably as well known by undergraduates as Conrad's

Heart

. Concerns of colonization and empire have become important in all humanities

fields. Postcolonial studies have realized these gains because of the momentum built up by the

Civil

Rights

era,

and

the

formation

of

African-American

and

ethnic

studies

pro-

grammes in which prominent intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates and Ronald Takaki have argued for canon and paradigm expansion. On the more sobering side, one can see two

related

and

troubling

issues:

(a)

the

turn

toward

`ambivalence'

and

`hybridity'

as

analytic models for colonization and the attractiveness of this turn to both practitioners and observers of postcolonial studies; and (b), the scarcely acknowledged role of postcolonial studies to defuse concerns of race. When

postcolonial

studies

began,

the

radical

race-based

demands

for

Civil

Rights

articulated in the 1960s were experiencing a strong backlash, fuelled by the anti-affirmative action policies of the Reagan era. In the social sciences, the paradigm of race (associated with rights and inequalities) was replaced with the safer paradigm of ethnicity (Omi and Winant 1986, 12). African-American studies continued to grow, most significantly in the discovery of nineteenth-century texts and the stature of theorists such as Henry Louis Gates,

Houston

Baker,

bell

hooks

and

Hortense

Spillers,

but

nobody

seemed

very

modern north american criticism and theory

120

interested in the Black Panthers. Internationally, most anti-colonial movements had been won

and

most

revolutionary

writing

had

been

published

at

least

a

decade

previously.

Postcolonial studies thus entered the academy after the period of active radical politics and has, in some ways, chosen not to be activist. Unlike scholars in fields such as AfricanAmerican

studies,

feminist

studies

and

ethnic

studies,

fields

inaugurated

to

address

concerns of domination and exploitation, no postcolonialist has demanded the creation of postcolonial studies programmes. Thus, despite the prestige of a handful of scholars, most postcolonialists

could

diversity.

importantly,

More

be

easily

tucked

the

away

general

in

departments

movement

in

which

postcolonial

could

then

studies

away

claim from

Said's model of discourse analysis which, for all its flaws, foregrounded domination and exploitation (seen as too binaristic by some critics) to negotiatory analyses of colonization popularized by Homi Bhabha, has ensured the non-threatening nature of much of the field. Postcolonial studies could thus be seen as a field that, while satisfying marginality, could be used to offset the challenges posed by African-American studies and to neutralize concerns of race. As postcolonial studies grows to cover `internal colonization', it cannot afford its separatist stance from African-American studies or real concerns of race and domination, concerns currently being addressed by theorists like Lisa Lowe. Yet, despite its tendency to get co-opted into a liberal pluralism, postcolonial studies have posed significant challenges to our understanding of western modernity, to relations between First and Third Worlds or what is now the North and South, to western feminist theory, to issues of immigration and globalization, and even to the field of American studies. The immediate historical antecedent to the development of postcolonial studies was the decolonization of most of Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. At the Bandung Conference of 1955, representatives from twenty-nine Asian and African states collectively condemned colonialism and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru used the term third world as a form of identity. The 1950s saw the beginning of the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya, the FLN's struggle for liberation in Algeria and the independence of Ghana. By the 1960s and 1970s most of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean was decolonized. The 1950s and 1960s

also

produced

the

revolutionary,

anti-colonial

Discourse on Colonialism The Tempest The Pleasures of Exile Black Skin White Masks

Cesaire's

(1955),

Shakespeare's

George

in

of racial marginalization in

treatises

Lamming's

born

of

struggle:

Calibanistic

 Aime

reading

of

(1960), Frantz Fanon's experiences (1952), his treatise on the Algerian

The Wretched The Colonizer and the

revolution in `Algeria Unveiled' (1959) and on the importance of nation in

of the Earth Colonized ,

(1961),

the

Tunisian

numerous

works

revolutionary of

C.

L.

R.

Albert James,

Memmi's

and

Roberto

Fernandez

Retamar's

`Caliban' (1971). The idea of a pan-African identity was begun by revolutionaries in exile  Cesaire (Martinique) and Leopold Senghor (Senegal) who turned in France such as Aime Á gre' into a term of pride signified by the term `negritude', a movement the despised term `ne that in turn inspired a generation of African-American activists. In its most basic sense, the term `postcolonial' is a temporal marker for the condition after colonialism. Postcolonial theory attempts to understand and interrogate the colonial past, see its effects on the present and, at its best, articulates strategies for cultural survival. The term (first used by Hamza Alavi) has been debated by critics on several grounds. Some claim that the hyphenated term marks a decisive break with the colonial past, while others claim that the non-hyphenated, `postcolonial' captures more accurately the continuing effects of colonialism. Anthony Appiah describes the `post' as a `space-clearing gesture' for producing work which, though marked by colonialism, transcends its modes of knowledge

postcolonial studies

121

(Appiah 1997, 432, 440). The term postcolonial is now freely applied to literature being written by the formerly colonized countries and has replaced older terms such as third world literature and imperial terms such as Commonwealth literature. It is also being used as an analytical category in relation to internally colonized cultures such as Native American, Chicana/o, African-American and Asian-American. The prefix `post' has also generated discussions about postcolonial's connections with other postist terms such as `poststructuralism' and `postmodernism'. While hardly identical with these latter terms which do not carry its economic or military weight, postcolonial theory does share with poststructuralism its critique of western master narratives which masked the process of Othering, and with postmodernism its suspicion of historiography as truth. Postcolonial theory also broadly relies on poststructuralism's critique of any sign system as simple representation. In the US, the major paradigms for postcolonial studies have been offered by Edward Said (colonial discourse analysis), Homi K. Bhabha (psychoanalysis and hybridity) and Gayatri C. Spivak (critiques of western feminism, the sovereign Subject, and attention to the foreclosed subaltern). In

Orientalism

(1978), Said applied Foucault's notion of discourse

as that which produces its objects of knowledge and procedures of truth to address an area that Foucault had left out: colonialism. Beginning with the late eighteenth century and up to contemporary anti-Arab sentiment in the US media, Said powerfully demonstrated how Orientalism (including research on the Orient, theories about the Orient, novels, epics, etc. about the Orient, as well as Oriental institutes in the West) was a colonial discourse through which European culture managed and produced the Orient `politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period' (Said 1978, 3). Despite various writers and genres, Orientalism produced a picture of the Oriental as passive, deviant, feminized and unable to represent itself. In

Culture and Imperialism

, (1993), Said extended his readings to include texts by Conrad,

Austen and Camus, as well as resistance literature, and shifted the terms of his analysis to emphasize what he called a contrapuntal reading of the cultural archive with both the metropole

and

the

colony

writing

with

awareness

of

each

other.

Nevertheless,

Said

continued to insist that the division between the `West and the rest' (Said 1993, 51) ran like a fissure through imperial history. Although Said pays scant attention to issues of gender and class, his work has provided a powerful model for analysing colonial discourse. If

Said

stressed

the

inexorable

constructions

of

the

West

and

the

rest

in

colonial

discourse, Homi K. Bhabha has introduced what are probably the most popular terms in postcolonial

theory

today:

hybridity,

ambivalence

and

contradiction.

Influenced

by

Lacanian psychoanalysis, Bhabha emphasized the contradictory motivations of anxiety and

defence,

mastery

and

pleasure

behind

the

construction

of

the

stereotype.

The

stereotype, according to Bhabha, functions as a fetish, at once affirming and disavowing difference (Bhabha 1994, 74±5). Because colonial texts acquire meaning only after being circulated in the colony, difference becomes part of such texts. Consequently, Bhabha writes, `the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference', producing a mode of authority agonistic rather than antagonistic (1994 107±8). Such split forms of authority, Bhabha argues, are implicit in Said and central to Fanon who evokes the colonial situation through image and fantasy and privileges the psychic dimension of the colonial experience (1994, 42±3). Does feminism participate as colonial discourse? Gayatri Spivak took up this question in two path-breaking essays: `French Feminism in an International Frame' (1981) and `Three

modern north american criticism and theory

122

Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism' (1985). Spivak employed the techniques of deconstructive reading, marxism and feminism to question the ethnocentrism of French and British feminisms. Spivak demonstrated how French feminists routinely ignored their own emphasis on recognizing the heterogeneity of the concept `woman' in dealing with third world women; Kristeva spoke for the Chinese women she saw, and analysed them definitively

as

participants

of

an

unchanging

patriarchal

culture

(Spivak

1988,

137).

Spivak also suggested ways in which marxist analysis could help uncover the complicity between

domestic

repression

of

the

womanhood clitoral

and

and

the

patriarchal

specific

capitalism

oppression

of

on

third

the

one

world

hand

women

and as

the

cheap

labour on the other. Throughout her critiques, Spivak has remained strongly Derridean, always suspicious of narratives of origin or totalization. Thus, while Said focused attention on the power of Orientalist representation, and Bhabha on the inevitable ambivalence of this power, Spivak has insistently focused on the situatedness of the speaking position, the problem of representation itself and the inevitable voicelessness of the subaltern. In her most

misunderstood

and

most

well

known

work,

`Can

the

Subaltern

Speak',

Spivak

critiques Foucault and Deleuze for not recognizing their positions as western intellectuals at the moment at which they suggest the possibility of the oppressed being speaking subjects. For Spivak, the idea of the oppressed being able to speak can too often become a simplified denial of the complex conditions of language and power under which particularly the female subaltern operates. While colonial history homogenizes the subaltern, the attempts of

the

subaltern

studies

historians

(from

India)

to

retrieve

subaltern

consciousness

is

problematic and impossible. `For the ``true'' subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself' (Spivak 1994, 80). The subaltern, Spivak suggests, can never be adequately represented by intellectuals nor

can

the

dominant

subaltern

culture.

And

ever she

have will

access

be

to

what

constitutes

misrepresented.

Thus,

speech

according

Spivak moves

to

to

her

the

much

criticized statements: `The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read' and `The subaltern cannot speak' (Spivak 1994, 104). In

Outside in the Teaching Machine

(1993), Spivak interrogates what is taken to be third

world or marginal writing in the context of the explosion of marginality studies in the US Arguing that the marginal is shaped by the kind of institution (teaching machine) it enters, Spivak critiques the homogenizing imperatives of the US academy as it constructs third world writing as always revolutionary, conscious of marginality and poised against western feminism. Spivak shifts the focus to differences among third world women, and through Bengali writer, Mahasweta Devi, points to a writing outside that of metropolitan postcoloniality. Seemingly reversing her earlier position about the unrepresentability of the subaltern, Spivak suggests that Devi can indeed speak about and write to the subaltern (Spivak

1993,

78).

Analyses

of

the

power

of

western

institutions

in

shaping

what

is

circulated as third world or marginal promise to be an important area in postcolonial studies. Attention to positionality and to the Derridean deferment of the trace in the figure of the subaltern woman continue to be Spivak's major concerns. In

Reason

A Critique of Postcolonial

(1999), Spivak combines these concerns with an increasing attention to native

complicity in imperialism and an insistence of the urgency of postcolonial theory to learn from the insights of third world activism.

A Critique

is monumental in its sheer range: four

major sections cover Philosophy, Literature, History and Culture; her analysis moves from Kant, Hegel, Marx and the Gita in philosophy to Kipling, Rhys, Mahasweta and Coetzee in

postcolonial studies literature,

to

the

British

123

management

of

widow

burning

in

history,

to

the

politics

of

postmodern fashion in culture. Although derided precisely because of its range by marxist

A Critique

critic Terry Eagleton,

emphasizes the responsibility of the postcolonial critic to

address precisely those areas deemed separate and unrelated through the epistemic violence of colonialism. Spivak constantly tracks the figure of the native informant, thus emphasizing, for instance, the continuity between the needed and foreclosed figure of the `raw man' in

Kant's

construction

of

the

sublime

and

the

contemporary

female

subaltern

who

is

silenced within a universalist feminist solidarity in which ` ``woman'' is important, not race, class, and empire' (Spivak 1999, 409). Spivak demonstrates how the native informant is not simply a slight figure within western philosophical and literary narratives, but rather the key on which major concepts rest. Spivak also focuses on uncovering native complicity with

imperialism.

In

a

bold

move

from

the

politics

of

resistance

broadly

accepted

by

postcolonialists, Spivak writes, `We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban. One task of deconstruction might be a persistent attempt to displace the reversal, to show the complicity between native hegemony and the axiomatics of imperialism' (Spivak 1999, 37). Thus Spivak demonstrates, for instance, the complicity between Hegel's reading of the Gita as belonging to the unconscious symbolic and the structure of the Gita itself which functions to confirm the social order of the castes, marking the movement away from a

Critique

tribal social order. In more

activist

phase

deconstructible (instead

of

of

terms.

, Spivak also suggests a new project intimated by Derrida's

affirmative Spivak

representation

deconstruction

argues

of)

for

a

in

which

postcolonial

`counterglobalist

or

justice

learning

and

of

ethics

are

vocabularies

alternative-development

un-

from

activism'

(1999, 429). Many

postcolonial

feminists

have

focused

on

questions

of

alterity

and

identity,

on

`authenticity', the status of the diasporic native, and the importance of concrete specificity in feminist analyses of third world women. The issue of authenticity, i.e. what the native woman is `actually' like or should be represented as, has brought feminists of different races and from different fields together. Thus the highly experimental, postmodern VietnameseAmerican

film-maker

and

anthropologist

Trinh

T.

Minh-ha

writes,

`Today,

planned

authenticity is rife . . . it constitutes an efficacious means of silencing the cry of racial oppression. We no longer wish to erase your difference. We demand on the contrary, that you remember and assert it. At least to a certain extent' (Minh-ha 1989, 89). Similarly, Chandra

Mohanty,

the

Indian-American

feminist,

critiques

the

homogenization

of

diversely classed, sexed and raced women under the singular category, `third world women' (Mohanty).

Rey

Chow

interrogates

the

Orientalist

lens

within

China

studies

that

associates the `authentic' China only with the past, as well as the politics of US academia in which the criticism of Chinese communism by a diasporic Hong Konger can only be seen as retrograde (Chow 1991, 1993). While Minh-ha, Mohanty and Chow focus on sites that can easily be identified as postcolonial (Vietnam, India, Hong Kong), the status of black feminists within postcoloniality has been more vexed. Postcolonial anthologies now include

works

(McClintock

by

et

black

al.

feminists

1997).

This

such

as

Hazel

convergence

of

Carby,

Audre

different

Lorde

feminists

and

under

bell

hooks

postcolonial

studies is, of course, not surprising if we recollect that the third-world movement of the late 1960s

was

Chicano/a

a

coalition

students

of

who

African-American, modelled

Native

themselves

after

American, third

Asian-American

world

liberation

and

struggles,

declaring ghettos to be `internal colonies'. Conversely, anti-colonial writers such as George Lamming recalled for inspiration the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Yet the `inclusion'

modern north american criticism and theory

124

of black women has not been unproblematic. The postmodern epistemological basis of a lot of postcolonial theory and the historical neglect of black women within the former has been a cause for concern among black feminists. As bell hooks puts it, radical postmodern practice will be politically inept if it fails to incorporate the voices of oppressed blacks. hooks writes, `third world nationals, elites, and white critics' who `never notice or look at black people on the streets . . . are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge racist domination . . .' (hooks 1990, 25). In order for black feminism and postcolonial theory to engage in productive dialogue, postcolonial theorists will have to privilege race more as a category, and to acknowledge the radical insights of early black feminists such as Sojourner Truth. Spivak's dismissal of race as simple chromatism in her most recent work will continue to be problematic (Spivak 1999, 166). It is precisely Lisa Lowe's focus on race as a regulatory mechanism that energizes her study of Asian-Americans as citizens, cultural producers and sweatshop labour (Lowe 1996). Postcolonial studies has also provided an arena of fierce debate about ideas of nation. While Benedict Anderson claimed `nation-ness [as] the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time' (Anderson 1991, 3), demonstrating the inherent democracy of

the

concept,

Partha

Chatterjee

critiqued

Anderson's

claims

by

demonstrating

the

inherent elitism of third world nationalisms that rested upon western modernity (1993, 11). Globalization and the fast flow of information in the electronic age have added new questions A key argument has been that of Arjun Appadurai who suggests that that the new

cultural

scene

is

one

of

`global

flows'

and

disjunctures,

a

`global

culture

of

the

hyperreal' in which many people live in `imagined worlds' (rather than imagined communities/nations) (1996, 31, 33). Such a world cannot be explained through older centre± periphery models. However, one should note that Appadurai's analysis of globalization through metaphors of movement and disorganization overlooks both the gross economic inequities unleashed by multinational corporations, as well as the one-way movement of American culture to third world countries. While paradigms such as rooted cosmopolitanism have also been posited to address the `postnational' world, critics of globalization have offered more sobering analyses (Appiah 1998, 91). Aihwa Ong, for instance, suggests that the

`flexible

citizenship'

of

diasporic

Chinese

from

Hong

Kong

amounts

to

flexible

accumulation of capital (Ong 1998, 138±41). Many contemporary critics are seeing globalization as an Americanized continuation of colonialism. Within the United States, the idea of examining racially different groups through postcoloniality is increasingly becoming important. The diasporic `reterritorialization of postcoloniality into ethnicity' has the potential to represent the third world within the First by fundamentally questioning the way dominant regimes dictate questions of identity (Radhakrishnan 1996, xxiv). For Chicano/a and Native American populations within

the

United

States,

however,

postcoloniality

needs

ethnicity. The colonized, in these cases, is the ethnic. In influential

Chicana

treatise

about

the

colonization

of

no

reterritorialization

Borderlands

into

, arguably the most

Mexican-Americans,

Âa Anzaldu

celebrates the hybrid border cultures formed in the Southwest as a result of US coloniza Saldivar have used the border as a  a, Chicano critics such as Jose tion. Following Anzaldu powerful metaphorical challenge to the idea of a dominant, hegemonic nationalism. A similar impetus to Native American studies is being given through the idea of Native Americans as a colonized people (Krupat 1994). Studies of early treaty negotiations, oral narratives and legal battles over forced movement have all energized the study of both contemporary and early US literature.

postcolonial studies

125

The examination of early US literary and cultural texts through postcoloniality has the potential to significantly alter the field. Ever since the authors of

The Empire Writes Back

stated that the United States was the first country to produce a postcolonial literature, questions about who can constitute legitimate postcolonial subjects have surfaced. The essays in

The Cultures of United States Imperialism focus on imperialism as a significant

ideology

in

the

culture

after

US

expansion

in

the

1890s;

Malini

Schueller's

U.S.

Orientalisms (1998) traces a genealogy of different Orientalist discourses in the US from Writing and Postcoloniality in the Early Republic (1998) argues

1790 to 1890. Edward Watts'

for a `Second World' model (appropriate for cultures both colonizing and colonized). As postcolonial studies continue to enjoy academic prestige, its challenge will be to forge a constituency from which minority voices can be articulated without being homogenized and

to

continue

to

critique

its

own

emergence

from

the

metropolitan

centre

of

the

contemporary world.

Malini Johar Schueller

Further reading and works cited Ahmad, A.

In Theory. London, 1992.

Anderson, B.

Imagined Communities. London, 1991.

 a, G. Anzaldu

Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco, 1987. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis, MN, 1996.

Appadurai, A.

Appiah, A. `Is the ``Post'' in ``Postcolonial'' the ``Post-'' in ``Postmodern''?, in

Dangerous Liaisons, eds

A. McClintock et al. Minneapolis, MN, 1997. Ð. `Cosmopolitan Patriots', in Ashcroft, B. et al.

Bhabha, H. K. (ed.) Ð.

Cosmopolitics, eds P. Cheah and B. Robbins. Minneapolis, MN, 1998.

The Empire Writes Back. New York, 1989. Nation and Narration. New York, 1990.

The Location of Culture. New York, 1994.

Chatterjee, P. Chow, R.

Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Minneapolis, MN, 1993.

Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between East and West . Minneapolis,

MN, 1991. Ð.

Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies . Bloomington, IN, 1993.

Dirlik, A. `The Postcolonial Aura', in

Dangerous Liasons, eds A. McClintock et al. Minneapolis, MN,

1997. Fanon, F. Ð.

The Wretched of the Earth. New York, 1963.

Black Skin White Masks. New York, 1967. `Race', Writing and Difference. Chicago, 1985.

Gates Jr, H. L. hooks, b.

Yearning. Boston, 1990.

JanMohamed, A.

Manichean Aesthetics. Amherst, 1983.

Ð and Lloyd, D. (eds)

The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. New York, 1990.

Kaplan, A. and Pease, D. (eds)

The Cultures of United States Imperialism . Durham, 1993.

Krupat, A. `Postcoloniality and Native American Literature', Lowe, L.

Yale Journal of Criticism. 7, i, 1994.

Immigrant Acts. Durham, NC, 1996.

McClintock, A. Ð et al. (eds)

Imperial Leather. New York, 1995.

Dangerous Liaisons. Minneapolis, MN, 1997.

Minh-ha, T. T.

Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington, IN, 1989.

Mohanty, C. `Under Western Eyes', in

Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism , eds Mohanty

et al. Bloomington, IN, 1991. Omi, M. and Winant, H.

Racial Formation in The United States. New York, 1986.

modern north american criticism and theory

126

Ong, A. `Flexible Citizenship among Chinese Cosmopolitans', in

Cosmopolitics,

eds P. Cheah and B.

Robbins. Minneapolis, MN, 1998.

Imperial Eyes.

Pratt, M. L.

Orientalism.

Said, E. W. Ð.

New York, 1992.

Diasporic Mediations.

Radhakrishnan, R.

Culture and Imperialism.

Saldivar, J. D.

New York, 1993.

Border Matters.

Berkeley, CA, 1997.

Beyond Postcolonial Theory.

San Jr, J. E.

Shohat, E. `Notes on the Postcolonial', Spivak, G. Chakravorty. Ð.

Minneapolis, MN, 1996.

New York, 1978.

New York, 1998.

Social Text,

31/32, 1992.

In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics.

Outside in the Teaching Machine.

Ð. `Can the Subaltern Speak', in

New York, 1988.

New York, 1993.

Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory,

eds P. Williams and L.

Chrisman. New York, 1994. Ð.

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.

Viswanathan, G.

Masks of Conquest.

Williams, P. and Chrisman, L. (eds) Young, R.

Colonial Desire.

Cambridge, MA, 1999. New York, 1989.

Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory.

New York, 1994.

New York, 1995.

18. Cultural Studies and Multiculturalism

Cultural studies are concerned with the exploration of culture in its multiple forms and of the

socio-political

transdisciplinary

contexts

and

within

sometimes

which

it

manifests

counter-disciplinary

itself.

field'

As

an

`interdisciplinary,

(Grossberg

et

al.

1992,

4),

cultural studies are a relatively new phenomenon in British and American universities. In its

current

sense,

the

term

was

first

used

by

Birmingham's

Centre

for

Contemporary

Cultural Studies (CCCS) launched in 1963. As envisioned by Richard Hoggart in his inaugural lecture, cultural studies consist of three domains: `one is roughly historical and philosophical; another is, again roughly, sociological; the third ± which will be the most important ± is the literary critical' (1970, 255). The study of English was broadened to include

a

sociology

of

literature

and

the

study

of

non-literary

forms

(film,

television,

popular music) previously regarded as `substandard'. The approach of the CCCS resonated with the incipient American interest in cultural studies that had been prepared by a similar debate about the role of popular culture in the mid-1950s. This debate opposed those who argued the dehumanizing effects of mass culture (a point of view which dominated the anthology

Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America,

1957), to emerging postmodern

critics like Leslie Fiedler (author of `The Middle Against both Ends', included in the same anthology, and `The New Mutants', 1965) and Susan Sontag ( Against

Interpretation,

1960).

The origins of American cultural studies are various and not limited to developments inside academia. The questions of high and mass culture were first articulated and fought outside

the

academy,

media

studies

emerged

from

commercial

needs

as

well

as

from

academic concerns, and `cultural critique was as much the province of the Beat poets and liberal journalists as university intellectuals' (Munns and Rajan 1995, 209). In terms of its academic roots, cultural studies emerged out of structuralist and poststructuralist critical

cultural studies and multiculturalism theory,

the

intellectual Clifford).

`cultural history

materialism' of (Foucault,

According

to

the

Birmingham Centre,

Bourdieu)

Antony

127

and

Easthope

cultural

(1991,

(1957).

Williams's

book

140),

the

two

introduced

a

social-

and

race

studies,

(Geertz,

books

Culture and Society

modern cultural studies were Raymond Williams's

Mythologies

gender

anthropology

Turner,

that

initiated

(1958) and Barthes's

anthropological

approach

to

culture, understood not only as a conveyor of meanings and values but also as a `particular way

of

life'

(Storey

1993,

53);

Barthes's

proposed

an

approach

that

unravelled

the

`secondary signification' (ideological connotations) of cultural discourses. An important early boost to American cultural studies came from Hannah Arendt and the members of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse) who moved to New York after Hitler's rise to power to set up a new Institute for Social

Research

at

Columbia

University.

In

1955

Adorno

published

Prisms,

subtitled

`Cultural Criticism and Society', and in 1959 a three-day colloquium organized by the Tamiment Institute in New York brought together philosopher Hannah Arendt, sociologist Edward Shils, historian Arthur Schlessinger and representatives of mass media to debate

the

effects

of

the

new

electronic

technologies

on

culture.

Both

events

helped

promote the American interest in cultural studies, articulating some of its later concerns. Retrieving

the

best

traditions

of

cultural

analysis

as

articulated

by

Adorno

in

the

programmatic essay of his 1955 book, American cultural studies have participated in what Henry Giroux, David Shumway, Paul Smith and James Sosnoski have called `counterdisciplinary' practices: `fostering forms of resistance' to cultural institutions and modes of production (including those of the academe) and articulating a `critical pedagogy . . . which promote[s] the identification and analysis of the underlying ideological interests at stake in the text and its readings' (1985, 654±5). The inter-/counter-disciplinarity of the field has forced a massive revision of traditional methods of textual and cultural analysis. During the heyday of New Criticism alternative post-formalist approaches to the national literary culture

were

established

pioneered

at

increasingly

George

by

the

nascent

Washington

interdisciplinary

in

the

American

University 1960s,

in

studies 1936).

exploring

programmes These

(the

first

programmes

movements,

patterns

one

became

of

thought

or the effects of mass communication on culture. Gender became an issue in American studies through the work of feminists like Annette Kolodny who in

The Lay of the Land

(1975) interrogated the recurrent representation of the American land as a female passively awaiting

male

impregnation.

The

Vietnam

War

and

the

Civil

Rights

movement

also

challenged the `melting pot' paradigm, bringing to the fore issues of race and cultural diversity, as in Angela Davis's

Women, Sex, Race and Class

(1982), which reread American

cultural history from a feminist, marxist and ethnic perspective. The growing interest in film

and

mass

communication

±

or

more

recently

in

gay

and

lesbian

studies

±

upset

disciplinary boundaries even further, breaking through some of the last defences of the traditional literary establishment. As

the

body

of

knowledge

assembled

through

empirical,

`ethnographic'

methods

increased considerably, cultural scholars engaged in a major rethinking of their fields, drawing rhetoric,

on

a

variety

semiotics,

of

analytic

sociology

and

models

from

anthropology.

linguistics, It

is

also

philosophy, true

that

literary

the

theory,

availability

of

powerful interpretive tools did not lead to theoretical sophistication across the board. Some scholars continued to resist the methodologies of linguistics, semiotics or literary theory, preferring more empirical approaches. Sociologists, for example, found the `pan-textualist' approach of cultural studies debilitating, reducing sociality to a matter of discourse. Early

modern north american criticism and theory

128

mass communication research was similarly divided between a culturalist approach, which applied methods derived from the humanities to the analysis of cultural messages, and an empirical approach that combined quantitative research with a `behaviouristic' understanding

of

the

process

of

communication.

The

integration

of

the

empirical

and

the

theoretical approaches to culture was delayed for at least two decades. The 1980s brought a more profound theoretical restructuring, reflected in the new centres and programmes opened between traditional departments (Duke University's Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

in

Science

and

Cultural

Studies,

Harvard's

Center

for

Literary

and

Cultural

Studies, Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Communication and Culture, the University of Rochester's programme in Visual and Cultural Studies, etc.). The 1990s were witness to the beginning of a new cross-disciplinary collaboration between social and cultural studies. In 1997, for example, Elizabeth Long published under the aegis of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association a collection entitled

Cultural Studies this

collection

From Sociology to

. Bringing together cultural scholars with sociologists and anthropologists, stressed

not

only

the

opportunities

for

new

cross-fertilizations

but

also

cultural studies' need for a firmer sociological grounding. These ongoing rapprochements make cultural studies difficult to define. Every time a seemingly incompatible theory or practice is brought to bear upon the `postdiscipline' of cultural studies, a new `crisis' of adjustment is triggered. The defining collections published since

the

Culture

,

end

1989;

of

the

1980s

Grossberg,

(Nelson

Nelson

and

and

A Cultural Studies Reader in Cultural Studies Cultural Studies Rajan's

Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultural Studies Disciplinarity and Dissent

Grossberg's

Treichler's

,

1992;

Munns

and

, 1995; Nelson and Goankar's

, 1996) reflect the ambitious polydimensionality but also the dispersal of

the field. As the editors of

put it, `[I]t is probably impossible to agree on any

essential definition or unique narrative of cultural studies . . . . Its methodology, ambiguous from the beginning, could best be seen as bricolage' (Grossberg et al. 1992, 2, 3). For Angela McRobbie, who wrote the `Postscript', cultural studies' `greater degree of openness' represents a welcome departure from the `rigidity' imposed by the field's original theoretical models (1992, 724). For Jameson and others, this fragmentation is a matter of serious concern. Responding to the

Cultural Studies

collection, Fredric Jameson chastised the field

for failing to clarify its definition and replacing the search for methodology with a fetishistic invocation of precursors such as Raymond Williams whose name `is taken in vain by virtually everyone and appealed to for moral support in any number of sins (and virtues)' (1993, 615, 618). Cultural studies can best be defined as a series of interrelated explorations rather than as a

single

body

of

theory

or

methods.

Therefore,

efforts

to

synthesize

them

under

one

description remain problematic, foregrounding the areas of tension inside cultural studies. Cultural studies have profited from models developed in literary theory, often taking a `text-based' approach to the exploration of culture. But cultural studies are not reduced to a study

of

literary

texts.

Beginning

with

Barthes's

Mythologies

that

effectively

applied

methods of literary analysis to a potentially limitless range of non-literary products, films, videos, comics, music disks, fashion, computer art and even oral culture have become legitimate objects of study. The work of cultural scholars like Judith Williamson, Richard Ohman,

Mas'ud

Zavarzadeh,

Teresa

de

Lauretis,

John

Fiske

and

Janice

Radway

has

managed to dispel the notion that media texts are transparent bearers of meaning, treating advertisements, film, TV series, or romance novels as `complex transactions involving not only

messages

and

meanings,

but

multivalenced

media

formats

and

a

wide

range

of

cultural studies and multiculturalism audience

variables

which

inflect

the

ways

in

129

which

the

media

text

is

received

and

interpreted' (Munns and Rajan 1995, 300). On the other hand these products are difficult to subsume under the traditional category of `text' because they are not always amenable to an analysis that can identify an author, a stable text or a distinctive genre. Even when a text-oriented approach is taken, the goal in cultural studies is to

decentre `the text' as an object of study. `The text' is no longer studied for its own sake, not even for the social effects it may be thought to produce, but rather for the subjective or cultural forms which it realizes and makes available. The text is only a

means

in cultural studies; [. . .] it is the

raw material from which certain forms (e.g. of narrative, ideological problematic, mode of address, subject position, etc.) may be abstracted. (Johnson 1983, 597)

In spite of this broadening/rethinking of the category of cultural studies, media studies and

English

continue

to

have

an

uncomfortable

relationship.

Only

film

has

been

satisfactorily integrated into English studies, the cinematic work producing a density of interpretation compatible with the kind of critical exegesis expected in literary studies. Other forms of popular culture are still perceived by many literary scholars as unworthy of their attention. Noting this continued crisis of adjustment, John Guillory has contended in

Cultural Capital

that the emergence of cultural studies in American literature departments

gives `more than sufficient evidence of the urgent need to reconceptualize the object of literary

study'

(1993,

265).

According

to

Guillory,

not

only

literary

studies

but

also

literature itself as a `cultural capital' has entered a terminal phase (x). And yet, while it is true

that

recent

developments

in

cultural

studies

have

thrown

the

object

of

literary

scholarship in crisis, English can contribute to cultural studies its sophisticated techniques of

analysis

and

its

insights

into

the

processes

of

cultural

creativity.

The

case

for

the

continued significance of the literary must be made, however, not by returning to some `neo-New-Critical, antitheoretical, apolitical, exclusive regime of literary study', but rather by valorizing the political and theoretical agendas of cultural studies (DeKoven 1996, 127). As

Marianne

discourse

DeKoven

because

it

has

can

argued,

act

literary

simultaneously

writing as

a

remains

medium

an

`of

important

self-assertion

model and

of

self-

construction; an acknowledgment of the division, alienation, and reification of the subject and at the same time an assertion of subjective agency' (128). For cultural critics like Guillory the category of `literature' simply `names the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie' (1993,

x).

Ironically,

this

definition

ignores

the

significant

contribution

made

to

the

literary by the constituencies that cultural studies have been trying to enfranchise. Writers like

Toni

Marmon

Morrison,

Silko,

Shirley

Audre

Lorde,

Anne

Williams,

Maxine

Hong

Alice

Walker,

Kingston,

Gloria

Clarence

Major,

 a, Anzaldu

Leslie

Bharati

Mu-

kherjee, Sandra Cisneros, Jonathan Strong and Jamaica Kincaid have retrieved previously marginalized experiences and genres (autobiography, oral storytelling), `disaggregat[ing] the

literary

from

its

conservative

uses

as

a

high-cultural

gatekeeper

and

preserve

of

hegemonic cultural capital' (DeKoven 1996, 137). Following their example, Marianne DeKoven and others have proposed a version of cultural studies that will mix the literary with the non-literary and the canonical with the anti-canonical. This version can be said to already exist in new historicism, regarded by Jameson as the `basic competition' to cultural studies. While cultural studies often concern themselves with the contemporary represented

by

mass

and

popular

culture,

new

historicism

(Stephen

Greenblatt,

Louis

Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, Jean Howard and others) is solidly anchored in history and in literature, pursuing the `the world's new textuality' (Jameson 1993, 616) from a broad

modern north american criticism and theory

130

interdisciplinary perpective. Greenblatt originally called his work a `poetics of culture' (1980, 5), conceiving the work of the critic as an archaeological search for the contextual traces of institutions, values and practices embedded in a text. Cultural poetics relocates literary texts within a web of competing forces, discourses and practices that range from literary to non-literary, aesthetic to political, microstructural to macrostructural. If the literary component has had a contradictory career in American cultural studies, the

political

component

seems

to

have

fared

better.

Cultural

studies

in

the

US

have

provided useful frameworks for addressing issues of historical change, cultural diversity and difference. And yet, by comparison to the Birmingham Centre, American cultural studies have tended to be `less overtly engaged in political critique'.

While the Marxist heritage has made British cultural studies alert to issues of class, popular culture and sub-cultures, at the expense of issues of race and gender, American forms of cultural studies focused upon the ethnographic approaches, making them more open to questions of gender and race but obscuring issues of class. (Munns and Rajan 1995, 4)

More recently, as cultural studies have begun to be integrated into traditional literature or communication departments, they have raised new questions about their political efficacy. For Jameson, the politics that informs cultural studies is a predictable ` ``academic'' politics' that operates like `a kind of United Nations plenary session', giving a `respectful (and ``politically

correct'')

hearing'

to

each

microgroup

or

social

movement

but

failing

to

articulate a politics beyond the `isolationist conception of group identity' (1993, 623). Such criticisms are overly harsh, ignoring the analytic sophistication and significance of much cultural studies work in the area of `otherness'. This work is concentrated in several new branches of cultural studies: ethnocriticism, multiculturalism and postcolonial studies. For Arnold Krupat, `ethnocriticism' or `multiculturalism' is `that particular organization of cultural studies which engages and in such a way as to provoke an interrogation of and a challenge to what we ordinarily take as familiar and our own' (1992, 3). This interrogation extends over one's own disenfranchised group ideology, allowing for tensions between group identities, and also to the more general question of why the `other' has been such a persistent

figure

in

North

American

society,

submitted

periodically

to

discriminatory

discourses and policies. The multicultural movement has developed in response to the charge that traditional American education was focused too narrowly on the dominant Euro-american literary culture and history, ignoring other alternatives. The emphasis on cultural diversity can be traced back to anthropology's interest in non-European cultures, to the civil rights and women's movements, and to postmodernism's attempts to reconceptualize culture from the margins, valorizing the experience of subaltern groups and excluded others. The type of polysystemic and multicultural fiction that has gradually emerged since the mid-1970s (Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jamaica Kinkaid, Ishmail Reed, Bharati Mukherjee, Sandra Cisneros, etc.) has provided multiculturalists with a model of reclamation, retelling and refashioning of an experience of previously distorted or marginalized by the dominant culture. Acknowledging the impact of postmodern theory and practice on multicultural studies, some consider multiculturalism a branch of the postmodern project (Lundquist 1996, 259). But

postmodernism's

approach

to

otherness

is

inevitably

limited.

Postmodernism

has

taught us that difference and heterogeneity matter, but did not always tell us how to create that space wherein differences can be negotiated in non-conflictive ways. Stronger models

cultural studies and multiculturalism

131

of otherness can be found in new historicism, whose explorations of the richly layered culture of a period are conceived as encounters with the radical `otherness' of history, its places of dissention and change. Feminism has also explored issues of gendered otherness not only in literary texts, but also in the products of popular culture such as TV and film (Laura Mulvey's influential work on woman as image and man as bearer of the look), formulaic fiction (Tania Modleski, Janice Radway), pop music and fashion (Ros Coward). The very definition of gendered otherness has undergone a radical rethinking: the versions  a's `mestiza consciousness' or Donna Haraway's of female identity offered by Gloria Anzaldu cyborg emphasize strange multiplicities and the `intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction' (Haraway 1991, 181). Race studies and, since the 1980s, postcolonial exposing the

criticism violence

have

also

played

done to the

an

important

body, mind

and

role

in

redefining

language

otherness

of the other

and

by western

colonial and postcolonial thought. The works that set the stage for this type of exploration were Frantz Fanon's

Black Skin, White Masks

(1963) and Albert Memmi's insights, Edward Said's

(1952; trans. 1968),

The Colonizer and the Colonized

Orientalism

The Wretched of the Earth

(1965). Building on their

(1978) described the process through which the West

constructed the East as a `colonizable' image. According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Said's

monumental

reading

of

`orientalism'

as

an

instrument

of

imperial

power

made

possible the `study of colonial discourse' and the new discipline of marginality `where the marginal can speak and be spoken, even spoken for' (1993, 56). Spivak's own work has focused on the double process of `othering' that produces both the dominant imperial Other that gives the ideological framework for understanding the world, and the small `others', the colonial subjects (1987, 249). It has also exposed the process of othering that the postcolonial critic inadvertently engages in.

Outside in the Teaching Machine

(1993)

describes the institutionalization of marginality studies within the First World metropolitan academy as a `new Orientalism', a neocolonialist gesture that consolidates the non-West in a position of `authentic marginality' (1993, 57). Much of the work in postcolonial studies has been anticipated/supplemented by the analysis of black American culture. African American studies have provided one of the earliest models of cross-cultural analysis for peoples affected by colonization and slavery. As the authors of a recent glossary of postcolonial concepts state, the `history of the struggle for self-determination by African Americans is historically intertwined with wider movements of diasporic struggles for independence', such as the `Back to Africa' movement initiated by the Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Triffin, 1998, 7). More recently, efforts have been made to define an interdisciplinary field of `black cultural studies' that would integrate black literary criticism, black popular culture, critical race theory and film theory. Among its possible contributors are Elizabeth Alexander, Derrick Bell, Barbara Christian,

Ann

DuCille,

Henry

Louis

Gates,

Jr,

Paul

Gilroy,

Stuart

Hall,

bell

hooks,

Lawrence W. Hogue, Mae G. Henderson, Valerie Smith, Claudia Tate and Cornell West, whose work has been instrumental in dismantling the `white supremacist, homophobic, capitalist patriarchy' and offering alternative ways of conceiving race, gender and class that emphasize `the extraordinary diversity of subject positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose [such categories]' (Sarup 1996, 61). The critique of the lingering of

assumptions

these

categories

is

strongest

in

bell

hooks'

books

that

challenge

the

universal category of `woman' and redirect the goal of feminism from achieving equal opportunity with men to eliminating sexism and sexist oppression. bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates,

Jr,

and

Barbara

Smith

have

also

urged

anti-discrimination

activists

to

ally

modern north american criticism and theory

132

themselves

against

all

forms

of

`othering'

and

oppression.

Challenging

the

persistent

homophobia not only in the dominant culture but also in the post-civil rights ethnocentrisms these writers have made clear that all forms of oppression are interconnected and that as long as one discrimination is allowed to stand through ignorance or prejudice, oppression in general is justified. This new awareness has been helped also by the work of queer theorists like Leo Bersani, Teresa de Lauretis, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayle Rubin and Jeffrey

Weeks,

who

have

argued

that

sexuality

is

just

as

important

a

category

in

the

configuration of social identities as class and race. Drawing on these diverse theoretical perspectives, ethnocriticism has focused on the contradictory meanings and political uses of ethnicity, rejecting `natural' definitions of it. Ethnocriticism offers not only an ethnography but also a critique of `identities', being concerned with the actual processes of identity formation. Identity, as Charles Taylor reminds us, is `dialogic', built upon how others see or recognize `us' (1994, 33). Cultural identity has been experienced very differently on the American continent by the dominant white, heterosexual,

Western

European

immigrants,

and by the various non-European

minorities or by the Native Americans whose being has been periodically threatened with oversimplification and cancellation. Therefore the work of multiculturalists is needed to redress

the

positive

balance,

reclaiming/reconstructing

representations

of

minority

cultures.

marginalized But

telling

experiences positive

and

stories

promoting

about

one's

cultural difference or sensitizing the dominant group to the value of the Other is not enough: multicultural writers and theorists are also interested in channelling this differential potential between the dominant and alternative cultures, centres and peripheries, towards `the mutual revisions of our expressions of reality' (Lundquist 1996, 272±3). Both ethnocritics and multicultural writers believe that listening to the marginalized voice of the Other is essential, but they also seek to activate those forms of cross-cultural communication that submit cultural systems to a process of mutual revision. Multiculturalism has been defined as `the reality of the post-melting pot, post-assimilationist era' (Lundquist 1996, 263), but it is by no means an unproblematic perspective. Believers in a unitary conception of society lament the fact that multiculturalism conduces to hermetically sealed ethnic enclaves, anarchy and the lack of an integrating national narrative. Supporters of multiculturalism argue that monocultures need to be converted into polysystemic `mosaics' in which no group can claim the status of ruling majority and each group enjoys equal rights and respect for its ethnic or gender identity. But they remain aware of the danger of co-option that confronts multiculturalism in the current hyperconsumerist culture, interested in promoting the ethnic flavours of the month, and also of the more subtle reappropriation

of

otherness

by

the

`benevolent'

discourse

of

western

multiculturalism

`masquerad[ing] as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves' (Spivak 1988, 292). Marjorie Perloff finds peculiar the fact that, `despite the lip service currently paid to multiculturalism, one has the sense that the only thing that matters in U.S. culture.

. . is U.S. culture. True, that culture is divided up into a dozen of marginalized,

disempowered, and minority subsets . . . . But the requisite for all these groups turns out to be U.S. citizenship: the Other, it seems, does not include the literature of other nations or in other languages' (Perloff 1998, 21). Jameson likewise identifies cultural studies with `an American NATO view of the world' from which whole political geographies (the Pacific rim, China, Japan and sometimes Latin America) are absent (1993, 640). The fall of the Berlin Wall and the new globalizing impetus of consumer capitalism have posed difficult new questions to multiculturalism. Judging from Stuart Hall's essay `Culture,

cultural studies and multiculturalism

133

Community, Nation' (1993), multiculturalism and cultural studies in general have not done

well

on

this

test.

As

Saba

Mahmood

comments,

this

essay

written

by

a

major

representative of the Birmingham Centre has difficulty dealing with the social movements (politico-religious and ethnic) that have emerged in Eastern Europe, the Middle East or Central Asia (Mahmood 1996, 2). While noting the parallel development of nationalist movements in post-Cold War Western Europe and the non-western world, Hall carefully divides nationalisms into big and small (or `good' and `bad'). He regards the emerging nationalisms of small countries (as a result of the National Liberation Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, or more recently of the collapse of the Soviet Empire) as failed imitations of the big nation-building strategies. Replicating older stereotypical divisions between a Protestant or Catholic Western Europe and an Orthodox or Muslim Central Asia and Eastern Europe, Hall considers the latter cultures by definition ethnically and religiously absolutist, ignoring the fact that the `othering' violence perpetrated by the secular western states in the last two centuries remains as yet unmatched by the violence committed in the name of non-western religious and ethnic communities. Cultural studies need to examine the analytical assumptions and stereotypes they have inherited from traditional cultural history, otherwise it is condemned to `reify boundaries of cultural otherness, political persuasions and objectives' (Mahmood 1996, 10). The concept of multiculturalism itself must be revisited in the postcolonial, post-Cold War world, in order to interrogate its blind spots. One of these blind spots is the unequal treatment of various others (western vs. non-western, diasporic vs. native, etc.). Refusing such polarizations, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam advocate in their recent study of multiculturalism and

the

media

a

`radical

polycentric multiculturalism

'

that

`reconceptualizes

the

power

relations between cultural communities', challenging the hierarchical division of communities into `major' and `minor' (1994, 47). Polycentric multiculturalism is not about sensitivity

towards

other

groups

but

about

`dispersing

power,

about

empowering

the

disempowered, about transforming subordinating institutions and discourses', about deconstructing the `dominant or narrowly national discourses' and negotiating `many margins and many centers' (48±9). Taking issue with mainstream multiculturalism that does not offer

`a

participatory

Eurocentrism

knowledge

of

non-European

cultures',

the

authors

Unthinking

of

address the global reach of the contemporary media, offering critiques of

imperialist discourses, theorizings of `Third World' and `Third Cinema', as well as analyses of African, Asian, Latin American and First World `minority' and `diasporic' media. A similar effort to create a more responsive space for intercultural negotiation can be found in the revamped version of `culturology' proposed by Ellen E. Berry and Mikhail N. Epstein.

Against

both

deconstruction's

cavalier

dismissal

of

firm

contours

of

cultural

identity and essentialist multiculturalism's assumption that `each cultural formation can and should be explained in relation to its racial, sexual or ethnic origin that gives rise to the particular system of social signification' (1999, 80), Berry and Epstein propose a `transculturalist' approach that acknowledges the `enduring ``physicality'' and ``essentiality'' of existing

cultures'

but

also

`the

possibility

of

their

further

transcendence,

in

particular

though with other cultures' (84).

[To be transcultural] means to rise above one's inborn identity, such as `white, adult male', through

a

variety

of

self-deconstructions,

self-transformations,

and

interference

with

other

identities, such as woman, black, child, disabled. For this purpose books, films, and sign systems are created to dissolve the solidity of one's nature, one's identity and to share the experience of `the other'. (84)

modern north american criticism and theory

134

Transculturalism moves us from a `passive' multicultural perspective that recognizes the `unqualified

multiplicity

of

cultures

without

positing

any

ways

for

them

to

interact

meaningfully', to a perspective that encourages the interplay of cultures on the surmise that `each culture has some basic incompleteness that opens it for encounters with other cultures' (97). While a final assessment of this and other recent projects is not yet possible, it is evident by

now

that

cultural

studies

have

found

new

resources

to

respond

to

the

`disjunctive

intersections of global, national, and local cultures' (Berry and Epstein 1999, 129) in the post-Cold War world. Together with women's studies, gay/lesbian studies and postcolonial criticism, cultural studies have contributed substantially to the constitution of the `new humanities', challenging the accepted practices of knowledge-gathering within the academy, foregrounding the exclusions `which confirm the privileges and authority of canonic knowledge systems' and recovering those `marginalized' or `subjugated knowledges' which have been `occluded and silenced by the entrenched humanist curriculum' (Gandhi 1998, 42).

While

position

many

not

only

problems in

remain

many

(cultural

English

studies

departments,

but

continue also

in

to

the

occupy

a

culture

at

peripheral large;

the

refiguration of what is studied as `culture' is far from finished; the battle for the `soul' of postCold War America has not been won by the new culturalist left), the voracious appetite of cultural studies for new intellectual experiences guarantees its future open-endedness and `need to go on theorizing'.

Marcel Cornis-Pope

Further reading and works cited Ashcroft, B. et al.

Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies.

Berry, E. E. and Epstein, M. N.

DeKoven, M. `Cultural Dreaming and Cultural Studies',

Literary into Cultural Studies.

Easthope, A.

Franklin, S. et al. (eds) Gandhi, L.

Off Center.

Postcolonial Theory.

New York, 1998.

Transcultural Experiments.

New York, 1999.

New Literary History,

27, 1, 1996.

London, 1991.

New York, 1991.

New York, 1998.

Giroux, H. et al. `The Need for Cultural Studies: Resisting Intellectuals and Oppositional Public Spheres',

Dalhousie Review,

Greenblatt, S.

Grossberg, L. et al. (eds) Guillory, J.

64 (1985).

Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Cultural Studies.

Cultural Capital.

Chicago, 1980. New York, 1992.

Chicago, 1993.

Hall, S. `Culture, Community, Nation'. Haraway, D. `A Cyborg Manifesto',

Cultural Studies,

7, 3, October 1993.

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.

Hoggart, R. `Schools of English and Contemporary Society', in

London, 1991.

Speaking to Each Other.

Harmonds-

worth, 1970. Jameson, F. `On Cultural Studies', Johnson,

R.

`What

Is

Cultural

Social Text,

Studies

34, 1993.

Anyway?'

Stenciled

Occasional

Paper

No.

74

(1983)

circulated by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Krupat, A.

Ethnocriticism.

Lundquist,

S.

Berkeley, CA, 1992.

`Ethnocriticism

and

Multiculturalism',

in

The Critical Experience,

ed.

D.

Cowles.

Dubuque, IA, 1996. McRobbie, A. `Post-Marxism and Cultural Studies', in

Cultural Studies,

eds L. Grossberg et al New

York, 1992. Mahmood, S. `Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism',

Cultural Studies,

10, 1, 1996.

african-american studies

135

A Cultural Studies Reader Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies Poetry On & Off the Page Orientalism Introducing Cultural Studies Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World Unthinking Eurocentrism History and Theory Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture Outside in the Teaching Machine An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture Multiculturalism The Terms of Cultural Criticism

Munns, J. and Rajan, G. (eds)

. London, 1995.

Nelson, C. and Goankar, D. (eds) Perloff, M.

. New York, 1996.

. Evanston, IL, 1998.

Said, E. W.

. New York, 1978.

Sardar, Z. and Van Woon, B.

. New York, 1998.

Sarup, M.

. Athens, OH, 1996.

Shohat, E. and Stam, R.

. London, 1994.

Spivak, G. Chakravorty. `The Rani of Simur'.

, 24, 3, 1987.

Ð. `Can the Subaltern Speak?', in

, eds C. Nelson and L.

Grossberg. Urbana, IL, 1988. Ð.

. London, 1993.

Storey, J.

. Athens, GA, 1993.

Taylor, C. `The Politics of Recognition', in Wolin, R.

, ed. A. Gutmann. Princeton, NJ, 1994.

. New York, 1992.

19. African-American Studies

In a 1985 issue of legitimacy

was

Cultural Critique

`existentially

and

, Cornel West asserted that the pursuit of academic

intellectually

stultifying

for

black

intellectuals'.

In

typically provocative fashion, he claimed further that such a quest

not only generates anxieties of defensiveness on the part of intellectuals; it also thrives on them. The

need

humanistic

for

hierarchical

scholarship

ranking

cannot

and

provide

the

black

deep-seated intellectuals

racism with

shot

either

through

the

bourgeois

proper

ethos

or

conceptual framework to overcome a defensive posture. And charges of intellectual inferiority can never be met upon the opponent's terrain ± to try to do so only intensifies one's anxieties. Rather the terrain itself must be viewed as part and parcel of an antiquated form of life unworthy of setting the terms of contemporary discourse. (1985, 116)

Echoing the sentiments of many Black Arts proponents whose criticism of the academy in the 1960s and 1970s had singled out the `aristocratic' nature of the academy as cause for the black critic's outsider status, West's words describe the bind that the academy creates for black intellectuals. On the one hand, as West implies, the academy beckons as a site of promise: black intellectuals thus turn to the university, seeking in it a place to forge a sense of identity and even community. On the other hand, this existential pursuit for a sense of being in the world ± because it is also fraught with a narrative of legitimacy ± can for West ultimately

have

no

satisfying

end,

since

the

very

terms

of

the

intellectual

quest

are

underwritten by the racist assumption that blackness and intellect are incompatible, if not inimical. His critique turns then to counsel: because the academy `cannot provide either the proper ethos or conceptual framework' that would secure or welcome what it means to be a black intellectual, it can be no institutional home, and therefore must be refused altogether. The

opposition

that

West

sets

out

between

the

place

and

possibility

of

the

black

intellectual and the academy marks one way to characterize the problematic history of African-American studies as a discipline. Indeed, if West's account of the difficulties faced

modern north american criticism and theory

136

by black intellectuals in entering the academy is a useful analogy for the difficulty that African-American studies has encountered in its development as a legitimate discipline, this essay looks to suggest that the inverse holds true as well. That is, just as the presence of black intellectuals in the academy enables for West a critique of the hierarchy and racism that lie at the heart of the institution, so does the emergence of African-American studies pose for the academy the necessity of understanding the mechanisms that drive disciplinarity in the contemporary university. In its own contentious history and debates over theory, practice and teaching, African-American studies, to put it another way, enables a sustained inquiry into the divided nature of disciplinarity. The significance of such division to African-American studies does not simply begin, however, with the full-blown appearance of the discipline on the academic stage. That is, the complications of making African-American culture an object of study has earlier ± or deeper ± roots than the disciplinary questions it raises in the late 1960s. Even the quickest of historical glances reveals that investment in such study and the contradictions that accompany century.

it

For

occupied

these

African-American

thinkers,

the

question

thinkers of

in

the

first

half

of

`African-American-ness'

the

was

twentietha

necessary

inquiry, one driven by the imperative to define and articulate the double-edge of the African-American experience: what W. E. B. Du Bois (1868±1963) famously named the `veil' of `double-consciousness'. Thus at the turn of the twentieth century author, magazine editor and journalist Pauline Hopkins (1859±1930) sought to forefront, and thereby create, the beginnings of a written history of African-American individual heroism in `Famous Men of the Negro Race' (1901) and `Famous Women of the Negro Race' (1902). W. E. B Du Bois, Arthur Schomburg (1874±1938) and Zora Neale Hurston (1891±1960) complicated this historical perspective by claiming that African-American folklore, religion and material culture, alongside economic and sociological analyses, warranted as much attention as the narratives of history. Du Bois in particular ± perhaps the most insistent voice addressing the ways in which the doubleness of the African-American experience constituted its uniqueness ± went so far as to argue throughout

The Souls of Black Folk

(1903) that at stake in such close inquiry was nothing less than future progress in race relations. In the meantime writers working during and shortly after the Harlem Renaissance

extended

this

line

anthologies, including 1922),

The New Negro

of

thinking

through

the

publication

The Book of American Negro Poetry (ed. Alain Locke, 1925),

(ed. V. F. Calverton, 1929),

a

number

of

literary

An Anthology of American Negro Literature

The Negro Caravan

Poetry of the Negro, 1746±1949

of

(ed. James Weldon Johnson,

(ed. Sterling A. Brown, 1941) and

The

(eds Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, 1949). The

discussions in the introductory pages of these anthologies anticipated the long-standing debate

over

the

canon

of

African-American

literature,

whether,

for

instance,

`Negro

literature' should represent literature by and/or about African-Americans, or even whether the use of the term, in its impulse to compartmentalize, might only further marginalize the work. For all that, however, these efforts sought in common to capture, all the while keeping in play, both the distinctiveness

and

American character of the African-American

experience. To do so was, as James Weldon Johnson put it, to `change that mental attitude and raise [the African-American's] status' by demonstrating the `intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art' (Johnson 1922, vii). When the young discipline of black studies (as it was then named) surfaced in the late 1960s, it faced this doubleness in the form of questions concerning its viability, definition and purpose. Student protests and radical activism of the time had produced an atmosphere

african-american studies

of

academic

reform,

137

contributing

not

simply

to

the

establishment

of

black

studies

programmes, but also to the sense that such programmes had a stake in the larger reform of the university (Frye 1976, 1). For many, this meant on the one hand revealing and doing away

with

assumptions

about the

homogeneity of

culture,

the

objectivity

of

scholarly

inquiry, including especially the notion that history and historiography embodied realms of pure fact, and the sanctity of any number of traditional liberal arts disciplinary canons (Thelwell 1979, 706±10). Black studies sought, in the words of one activist, `to correct falsehoods perpetrated by western academia about black people' (Frye 1976, 5). As a result, many black studies proponents insisted that the strength of the discipline would lie in its ability

to

enact

an

unprecedented

convergence

of

traditional

disciplines

±

including

history, political science, sociology, economics and literature. On the other hand, the development of black studies for scholars also meant the opportunity to make a social and Á -vis the articulation and expression of, as several put it at the institutional difference vis-a time, a black `sensibility' that, in embodying an Afrocentric vision, would challenge and revise the assumptions of western intellectual inquiry (one of the missions of the

American Literature Forum

Negro

, founded in 1967). This two-handed approach informed the

rush of success that black studies experienced in the early 1970s: in 1970, approximately 350 colleges and/or

universities had established such programmes, while by 1973, the

number had increased to 600 nationwide (Frye 1976, 4). In the meantime, these early years constituted conferences

a

period

and

of

disciplinary

`self-studies'

self-reflection,

involving

a

time

administrators,

when

faculty

workshops,

members

institutes,

and

students

addressed directly the development of black studies (Ford 1973, 88). Yet in the midst of success, discussions regarding the status, place and future of black studies

suggested

constituted

a

that,

dilemma

taken for

the

together,

even

discipline.

these

While

early

scholars

stages

of

institutionalization

continued

to

agree

that

the

discipline needed a vision of purpose, methodology, pedagogy and canon, the uniformity of such a vision had no consistent assurance. Around the debate over what `black studies' entailed, for instance, several questions split scholars into opposing camps. By the late 1970s, when the number of established programmes had declined to 200, proponents found themselves turning to diagnose institutional arrival

itself

as a cause of disciplinary ill health.

Responding to increasingly vocal complaints that black studies programmes, paralleling perhaps the radical ideology and aesthetics of the Black Arts movement, sought a separatist ± rather than pluralist ± agenda, some within the discipline voiced the concern that black studies' political origins, while initially the catalyst for administrative and curricular action, now haunted the discipline precisely by diminishing its institutional legitimacy (Ford 1973, 42). These accusations, however, exposed for other black studies scholars an anxiety on the part of more traditional disciplines that had seen students, courses and funding channelled towards the new and immensely popular field of study. To claim that the discipline was merely the result of political faddishness ± and therefore not intellectually serious ± was to serve

a

larger

agenda

to

reclaim

territory

presumably

`lost'

in

the

fray

of

institutional

competition. That many of these traditional disciplines had begun to add `black content' to their courses suggested that the old guard was seeking to `parallel and duplicate Black Studies' (Frye 1976, 37). To say that more recent developments in African-American studies also indicate this institutional tension is not, however, to argue that the discipline has somehow lost its way. If the discipline has experienced a bumpy ride in its history, this is not because AfricanAmerican studies possesses at base some inherent flaw. Rather, the impact that African-

modern north american criticism and theory

138

American studies has had (and continues to have) on the academy occurs as much through the challenges it has produced and negotiated as through the material it has brought into the academic fold. On the contemporary front, this is perhaps most evident in several areas: in the emergence of the exemplary African-American genre, the slave narrative; in the debates

over

the

place

and

role

of feminism

in

the

discipline;

and

in

the

continuing

discussion of what constitutes theory in the context of African-American studies.

In his introduction to

The Classic Slave Narratives

, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes that . . . one of

the most curious aspects of the African person's enslavement in the New World is that he and she

wrote

about

the

severe

conditions

of their

bondage . . .

In the

long

history

bondage, it was only the black slaves in the United States who . . . created a

genre

of human

of literature

that at once testified against their captors and bore witness to the urge of every black slave to be free and literate. (1987, ix, original emphasis)

Writing in 1987, Gates on the one hand extends his earlier claim that slave narratives function as a `countergenre' (1978, 47) ± a genre that, because it does not reside in any one generic

category

literature,

but

including

plantation

novel

deploys

and

conversion

tradition

and

mediates

between

narratives, sermons,

the

strategies

autobiography,

demands

a

of

other

sentimental

rethinking

of

kinds

romances,

literary

of

the

genres.

At

the same time, he identifies with assurance the fact that slave narratives now constitute a literary genre ± that is, a genre so marked and recognizable through certain conventions, thematics and structures that a canon exists by which one can judge and identify specific texts as `classic'. In so doing, Gates echoes a statement that Houston A. Baker, Jr had made five years earlier in his introduction to Penguin's edition of the

Douglass

:

`the

appearance

of

[the

Narrative

]

in

the

Narrative of the Life of Frederick

Penguin

American

Library

series

indicates that a new scholarly paradigm has emerged in our day' (1982, 15). Baker remarks that this recent popularity of slave narratives marks a resurgence of interest, since `prior to the 1960s, an accepted position in American literary and historical studies was that no distinct,

authentic,

surrounding

written

American

Afro-American

abolitionism'

(1982,

voice

existed

7±8).

While

in he

the does

canons not

of

say

discourse

so

directly,

implicit in Baker's statement is the sense that the arrival of the slave narrative as the `distinct,

authentic written

African-American paradigm':

with

studies.

Afro-American The

voice'

certification

such recommendation both

of

entails

the

generic

Gates

reinvigoration

status

and

and Baker herald

`a

as

new

well

of

scholarly

the debut

of the

slave narrative ± and therefore the discipline ± onto the institutional stage. The terms of this debut, as Gates' and Baker's comments reveal, mark an interest in the difference

of

African-American

literary

expression

±

and

therefore

the

difference

in

scholarship that it requires. As a number of commentators have observed, because slave narratives

provided

commentary,

they

source

material

mandated

and

on

the

institution

compelled

within

of

the

slavery

through

discipline

a

individual

major

shift

in

methodology. Such methodology sought to account for the enormous popularity of slave narratives ± within the first four months of its publication in 1845 Douglass'

Narrative

sold

five thousand copies; by 1860 the number had topped 30,000 (Gates 1987, xi). To do so meant, for one, to concede and consider the narratives' affective power alongside their rhetorical

suasiveness: to

read

them not simply

as

political

tracts

or

jeremiads,

but

as

expressions that captured the imagination of the public because, as Margaret Fuller put it in her review of Douglass's

Narrative

, they presented the immediacy of a `living voice' whose

african-american studies

139

speech could not be ignored (Andrews 1991, 24). At the same time, accounting for the genre's

popularity

also

meant

an

analysis

of

the

resistance

these

narratives

enacted

±

whether through their retrospective accounts of escape, their address to abolitionists or even their discussions and advocacy of literacy. Indeed, for many African-American critics the impact of the slave narrative resided most forcefully in their literariness; here, in the wielding

of

written,

published

and

disseminated

language,

lay

the

resistance

Gates

describes in naming the narratives a `countergenre'. Not surprisingly, this sense of the narratives' literary resistance involved reworking the view of literature and literary history that had in the past precisely dismissed slaves' voices as

unremarkable

or

irrelevant.

The

reintroduction

of

slave

narratives,

in

other

words,

enabled African-American critics to take on the notion of canonicity itself. From slave narratives, as Arna Bontemps argued, derived the African-American literary tradition, since they embodied `the spirit and vitality and the angle of vision responsible for the most effective prose writing by black American writers from William Wells Brown . . . [to] James Baldwin' (Gates 1987, x). The generic legitimacy of the slave narrative confirmed, because it produced, the legitimacy of the African-American literary tradition. What's more, with the

emergence

of

the

slave

narrative

African-American

critics

turned

the

American

literary canon on its head. Citing nineteenth-century commentary that slave narratives constituted

the

Americans',

`one

critics

series

of

claimed

literary

in

effect

productions that,

far

that

from

could

being

a

be

written

marginal

by

none

subset,

but

African-

American literature formed the very basis of American literature (Parker 1976, 245). Slave narratives, then, turned out to be a weapon on the disciplinary front, a weapon enabling African-American studies both to secure further its academic legitimacy and to trouble long-held assumptions about the history and character of American literary studies. At the same time, slave narratives also proved to be an ongoing occasion for AfricanAmerican studies to take stock of its own assumptions regarding the work done in its name. When, as part of her ground-breaking

Invented Lives

(an anthology and work of literary

criticism), Mary Helen Washington turns to an analysis of the slave woman's narrative, she does so with a larger view of countering a variety of notions about African-American women and their place in the discipline (Washington 1987, 3±12). The difficulties Harriet Jacobs faced in writing sexuality

that

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

nineteenth-century

conventions

of

± her personal struggle to express a

`true

womanhood'

would

not

allow

except to demonize it, the struggle to convince readers that her account possessed validity ± have, according to Washington, continued well into the late twentieth century in the form of a literary tradition that refuses to admit, much less acknowledge, the presence of AfricanAmerican women. Tradition, writes Washington, is `a word that nags the feminist critic'; for the black feminist critic, it provokes all sorts of angry questions, including those that wonder about the presumption that blackness is male (Washington 1987, xvii). If in 1987

Invented Lives

in fact marked an interruption of an African-American literary

tradition dominated by male authors and critics, it also was taking part in an ongoing project to found and maintain a literary tradition of writing by African-American women. Washington's earlier books ±

Midnight Birds

(1980) and

Black-Eyed Susans

(1975) ± both

sought to present literature `by and about black women', and in so doing, had set the stage for

critical

inquiry

addressed

to

questions

of

the

embodied in and by African-American women institution

that

had

been

unable

to

imagine

and

how

specific

concatenation

of

difference

the critique of the tradition and the women

might

have

any

role

but

a

marginal one in the development of both. The 1970s and 1980s saw, then, the increased

modern north american criticism and theory

140

institutionalization including

of

such

Washington's,

work

Toni

through

Cade

the

publication

Bambara's

of

important

anthologies

±

The Black Woman (1970) and All the

Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave (1982), edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith ± as well as the launching of several reprint series ± the Beacon Black Women Writers Series, Rutgers' American Women Writers series, and the Oxford-Schomburg Library of nineteenth-century Black Women's Writings. Moreover, this entry into the academy mattered, since, as the editors of

But Some of Us are

Brave put it:

Merely to use the term `Black Women's Studies' is an act charged with political significance. At the very least, the combining of these words to name a discipline means taking the stance that Black women exist ± and exist positively ± a stance that is in direct opposition to most of what passes for culture and thought on the North American continent. To use the term and to act on it in a white-male world is an act of political courage. (1982, 5)

At stake in this statement is the notion that visibility ± here in the form of the name `Black Women's Studies' ± means everything: far from simply referring to a group or movement, it wins attention and solidifies support. In that sense, it poses in a nutshell the challenge to and revision of the discipline that black feminist critics were seeking to articulate. Black feminist scholarship in the meantime experienced a parallel explosion of interest and productivity such that by 1990 the essays in the anthology of criticism

Reading Black,

Reading Feminist could reflect the evenness of pace at which works of criticism and black women's writing were being produced. This, several of the contributors observed, one could say from the perspective of a mere ten years: in the wake of Barbara Smith's `Toward a

Black

Feminist

Criticism'

(1977)

followed

Christian's

Black Women Novelists: The

Development of a Tradition (1980) and the edited collection Black Feminist Criticism (1985), Alice Walker's Hortense Spiller's Carby's

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983), Marjorie Pryse and

Conjuring: Black Women Writers and Literary Tradition (1985) and Hazel

Reconstructing Womanhood (1987). Much as the literary anthologies had aspired to

demonstrate that the preoccupations of black women writers converge on their double experience of oppression, this decade of black feminist criticism turned to theorize the formations that contributed to the literary complex of `black womanhood', `black female identity' or `black feminine sexuality'. Indeed, in so far as Barbara Smith urged fellow critics not to `try to graft the ideas or methodology of white/male literary thought upon the precious materials of black women's art', black feminist critics privileged experience as the site and source from which the literature emerged (Hull, Scott and Smith 1982, 164). Still, as the title of Hazel Carby's

Reconstructing Womanhood implies, the notion that

womanhood ± black or white, racially `marked' or `unmarked' ± stood as some uniform, constant and unchanging essence did not go uncontested. By the late 1980s, responding in part to the influx of poststructuralist theory in American literary studies, black feminist criticism sought to reinvigorate the terms of its work, eschewing any naturalness associated either with race or femininity, and positing that the constructed nature of both meant that their

entanglements

demanded

scrutiny

of the

ways

in which literature

produced

and

subverted such ideologies. Not to rely on the `indigenous' criticism, as Deborah McDowell observes, and to take on `foreign' theories and methodologies is not so much to capitulate or submit to some interpretative outside (McDowell 1989, 54), nor is it to betray the community of black feminism, the African-American literary tradition or the disciplinary home in which both at times take up residence; rather, to assume the authority of wielding

african-american studies

a

variety

of

discourses

141

means

±

as

McDowell,

Hortense

Spillers,

Hazel

Carby,

Mae

Henderson and a number of other black feminists have argued ± the possibility of changing `the contours of Afro-American literary history and of Afro-American critical discourse' (McDowell 1989, 54). Perhaps the greatest impact that this encounter between black feminist criticism and the thing known as theory has had, however, is on theory itself. Isolating African-American literature or criticism from other discourses is impossible, not only because the encounter already has taken place, but because those encounters have proved meaningful. This fact is nowhere more evident in recent work on the relationships that obtain between feminism, African-American

Studies

and

psychoanalysis.

In

this

context,

the

work

by

African-

Americanists on the filial configurations imposed by slavery makes the strong argument that the psychoanalytic model of development, underwritten as it is by the figure of the nuclear family, can have no purchase; it is the theory that proves inadequate here, not the families

themselves.

Such

work

enables

further

interrogations

of psychoanalysis

for

its

normative presumptions. The knowledge that Freud, for instance, on one occasion figures femininity in terms of Africa ± the mysterious `Dark Continent' that western imperialism would conquer ± immediately raises questions about the gendered and radicalized presumptions of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the meantime, as recent work has demonstrated, because these assumptions are not solely the realm of a Victorian past, but continue to occupy contemporary `white' feminist psychoanalysis, the need for ongoing conversation between African-American studies, feminism and psychoanalysis remains urgent indeed. The affiliation of change with theory, the contention that theory alone wreaks change, describes

only

a

one-way

street

of

influence.

What

the

`second

generation'

of

black

feminists experienced in their efforts to negotiate the political and ethical implications of taking

on

`western'

theory

±

rather

than

hold

strictly

onto

an

Afrocentric

vision

±

amounted to a mediation of the theoretical impulse, a revision, or edition, of what it means to theorize. While this stance is a long way from the statements of Black Arts advocates that the academy bars its doors to African-American critics, it does extend the claims of such writers as Addison Gayle that African-American literature offers a view of the theories that seek to explain it. In this sense, both black feminism and the Black Arts movement

converge

on

a

notion

that

continues

to

fascinate

and

vex

contemporary

African-Americanists: the idea that the relationship between African-American literature and theory, far from being a simple matter of rejection, application or appropriation, is instead a matter of intimate tensions. That this intimacy takes several forms should be no surprise. One of the earliest occurs in the justification that the criticism of African-American literature needs theory. In

Literature and Literary Theory

Black

, one of the first texts to address directly the stakes of theory in

African-American literary criticism, Gates offers perhaps the most cited of defences when he asserts that the study of African-American literature

demands

the turn to formalism,

structuralism or poststructuralism. `Who would seek to deny us our complexity?' he asks, implying that one discourse of complexity ± literature ± requires another (Gates 1984, 4). This

justification

gains

added

force

when

his

rhetoric

shifts

to

one

of

duty:

African-

American critics, Gates contends, `owe it to those traditions to bring to bear upon their readings any ``tool'' which helps us to elucidate [them]' (1984, 10). To perform this duty is to begin to bring these traditions, at this point still on the periphery of the academy, to the centre of the profession. What critics owe to literature underlies as well the claim that whatever theoretical

modern north american criticism and theory

142

work

African-American

literature

needs,

it

(1984)

and

American `extrinsic'

The Signifying Monkey

culture theory,

that, is

while

(1988),

sensitive

fundamentally

expressive

tradition,

voice

Baker

of

and

reminds

a

that

on

in

its

effect

responsive from

the

own.

its

model

own

for

argument

call

to

When

Houston

A.

a

a

view

Madelyn its

of

African-

Jablon

vernacular

calls

(Jablon

which casts the blues as both

the

is

for

what

terms:

A Vernacular Theory,

theoretical

readers

they

and

derived

1997, 3). Indeed, through his subtitle, an

generates

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature

Baker and Gates advance this argument in

African-American

`reorientation',

a

literary

return.

For

him, this return to the native sign is motivated by a sense of ethics; it marks `a minute beginning in the labor of writing/ righting American history and literary history' (Baker 1984, 200, emphasis mine). For his part, Gates announces in the preface to

Monkey

that

Baker

`accomplishes

with

the

blues

what

I

try

to

The Signifying

accomplish

here

with

Signifyin(g)' (1988, x). Gates, like Baker, enacts a return to the vernacular ± here to the African

and

African-American

trickster

monkey

traditions

for

which

language,

inter-

pretation and meta-discourse are fundamental currency ± in order to account for the ways in which the African-American literary tradition is based on a dynamic of revising and revisiting. The claim Gates makes in naming this theory `signifyin(g)' marks a desire to have the tradition `speak for itself' rather than, as he admits of his earlier work, to have it only spoken by `the white hermeneutical circle' (1988, 17, 232). These returns mark an effort to strike a balance between tradition and theory ± or better, as the essays from

Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s

suggest, to strike a balance such

that the usual opposition between `tradition' and `theory', whatever weight it carries, does not do so invisibly or without scrutiny. In the interstices, African-American literature could be said to do nothing less than read theory, even as theory reads for its nature. Baker in

his

essay

claims

for

a

poetics

of

African-American

women's

writing

a

`conjure'

of

phenomenology, feminism and African-American spirituality (Baker and Redmond 1989, 144±50); McDowell urges dialogism not simply as a method of reading texts, but as a figure for

the

encounters

between

black

feminist

criticism

and

other

discourses

(Baker

and

Redmond 1989, 70); Gates, while insisting that the turn inward will mean `the black critical theory as great as [the] greatest black art', also looks forward to the impact that such a development will have on theory and `the literary enterprise in general' (Baker and Redmond

1989,

25±9).

This,

then,

is

at

the

heart

of

what

contemporary

African-

Americanists Michael Awkward, Jr, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Mae Henderson, Wahneema Lubiano, Deborah McDowell, Hortense Spillers and Cheryl Wall have made evident in their respective works: a commitment to read back and forth between literature, culture and theory, never presuming that one should wholly explain the other, nor expecting from what direction any explanation should derive.

Yun Hsing Wu

Further reading and works cited Andrews, W. Ð (ed.)

To Tell a Free Story.

Urbana, IL, 1986.

Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass.

Baker, Jr, H. A.

Boston, 1991.

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature.

Ð.

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance.

Ð.

Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy.

Chicago, 1991.

Chicago, 1993.

Chicago, 1984.

chicano/a literature

Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s.

Ð and Redmond, P. (eds) Blassingame, J. (ed.) Carby, H.

Slave Testimony.

Black Women Novelists.

Black Feminist Criticism.

Douglass, F.

Chicago, 1989.

Baton Rouge, LA, 1977.

Reconstructing Womanhood.

Christian, B. Ð.

143

New York, 1987. Westport, CT, 1980.

New York, 1985.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself ,

ed. H. A.

Baker. New York. 1982.

Souls of Black Folk.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Ford, N. A.

Black Studies.

New York, 1961.

Port Washington, NY, 1973.

Impact of Black Studies on the Curricula of Three Universities .

Frye, C. A.

Washington, DC, 1976.

Gates, Jr, H. L. `Binary Opposition in Chapter One of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself', in

Afro-American Literature,

eds R. Stepto and D. Fisher.

New York, 1978. Ð (ed.)

Black Literature and Literary Theory.

Ð (ed.)

The Classic Slave Narratives.

Ð.

The Signifying Monkey.

Ð (ed.)

New York, 1988.

Reading Black, Reading Feminist.

Gayle, A. (ed.)

The Black Aesthetic.

Holloway, K. F. C.

New York, 1984.

New York, 1987.

New York, 1990.

New York, 1971.

Moorings and Metaphors.

New Brunswick, NJ, 1992.

Hull, G. T., Scott, P. Bell and Smith, B. (eds)

Some of Us are Brave.

Black Metafiction.

Jablon, M.

Johnson, J. Weldon (ed.) McDowell, D. F. (ed.)

All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But

Old Westbury, NY, 1982. Iowa City, IA, 1997.

The Book of American Negro Poetry.

Slavery and the Literary Imagination.

New York, 1922.

Baltimore, MD, 1989.

Parker (1976) add at proofs. Stepto, R.

From Behind the Veil.

New York, 1979.

Thelwell, M. `Black Studies: A Political Perspective', Washington, M. H. (ed.) Ð.

Invented Lives.

Black-Eyed Susans.

Massachusetts Review,

Autumn 1979.

New York, 1975.

New York, 1987.

West, C. `The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual',

Cultural Critique,

1, Fall 1985.

20. Chicano/a Literature

Chicano/a

literature

historiography

is

dating

a

complex

much

term

earlier

encompassing

than

the

1940s.

political,

cultural

`Chicano/a'

and

originates

gendered from

the

sixteenth-century name, `Mexicano/a'. `Mexicano/a' derives from the Nahuatl `Mexica', meaning

a

people

who

live

in

the

centre

of

the

maguey

(cactus

plant).

Lingually,

`Mexicano/a' in sixteenth-century speech, was articulated as `Meshicano/a' or `Mechicano/a' and later altered in the twentieth-century to Chicano/a. Yet the literature belonging under this cultural marker can be traced back to 2 February 1848: the year the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. The Mexicans who remained on Mexican-turned-North American lands (as outlined in the Treaty) and those who immigrated `post-1848' from Mexico and other Latin American countries also chose various names for themselves: Mexican-American, Latino/a and/or

modern north american criticism and theory

144

Chicano/a.

The

controversial

term

name

Hispanic

among

(also

Latino/a

linked

groups

to

in

these

the

identity

United

groupings)

States

±

has

specifically

been

a

Chica-

nos/as. In the 1980s, the US Federal Administration (under Ronald Reagan) instituted a `Hispanic month' which automatically placed all Latinos (Mexican-Americans, PuertoRican

Americans,

Cuban-Americans,

etc.)

within

a

`Spanish'

(denoting

Hispania

or

Spain) historical context. The government also designed census forms and other legal documentation to denote all Latinos as `Hispanic'. Some groups do claim true lineage from Spain or `Hispania'. For example, various groups in New Mexico such as communities in Taos or Santa Fe claim Hispanic identity. However, it is important to note that Latino groups should not be considered Hispanic collectively. Chicanos/as especially do not wish to be linked with the term `Hispanic' because they consider their indigenous roots from Mexico primary, not secondary. `Hispanic' or `Hispania' represents a historical marker for indigenous conquest and colonization in Mexico (such as the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs). Chicanos/as then, see their heritage as one of the conquered and the conqueror ± the Indian and the Spanish colonizer. The dichotomous intersection of opposing ancestries emphasizes another term linked to the Chicana/o identity: the Mestizo (mixed blood) or Mestizaje

(a

people

of

mixed

blood).

Chicano

scholar

Rafael

Perez-Torres

describes

Mestizaje:

Mestizaje cannot be separated from the histories of rape and violation from which it emerges. Simultaneously, it cannot be dismissed in search of an original indigenous identity that is not the condition of Chicano praxis. The cultural products that emerge from Chicano configurations

of

identity

carry

with

them

the

conditions

of

mestizaje:

conjunction,

enrichment,

violation, conquest, fusion, violence. Textualized, mestizaje enables a scrutiny of power and knowledge as these have been enacted or erased through history. (1995, 212)

Mestizaje, then, is an important Chicano/a cultural marker for its signification of Mexican history and most importantly, for its cultural concerns on North American soil. Chicanos/ as may see their heritage linked to Mexico, but a Chicano/a is, first and foremost, an immigrant to the United States or born in the United States. Throughout their writings, therefore, the Chicano/a people explore what it means to be an American from a MexicanAmerican perspective. And the perspectives are multifarious: the Chicano/a farmworker struggling

in

the

fields

of

such

states

as

California,

Nevada,

Colorado

and

Texas,

interpersonal relationships which emphasize cultural differences and struggles, religious convictions, cultural traditions and language. Today, the farmworker is also the meatpacker, the factory worker, the sweatshop (maquilladora) worker living either on or near the borders of Mexico or as far as Nebraska, New Jersey, New York. Chicanos/as in Kansas trace their migratory history from those who arrived in Topeka as early as the first decade of the 1900s to work on the railroads. Family units, whose members vary in generation, must contend with symbolic intersections of migration and cultural memory. Religion, as well, is transformed and translated outside and within the family. And of course, cultural traditions  is a good example of a symbolic language migration and language undergo change. Calo Ânez and which appears in Chicano/a literature. According to Chicano scholars Julio Martõ Â, Calo  is `an argot common in barrio slang and speech . . . filled with Francisco Lomelõ metaphoric inventions and creative hybrids of Spanish, English, Spanglish (Spanish mixed with English), and some Nahuatl terms' (474). Chicano scholar Alfred Arteaga writes that  is an `intercultural dynamic', an important ingredient in the construction of `Chicano Calo identity' (1997, 68). He says:

chicano/a literature

145

[B]eing for Chicanos occurs in the interface between Anglo and Latin America, on the border that is not so much a river from the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso and a wire fence from there to the Pacific but, rather, a much broader area where human interchange goes beyond the simple `American or no' of the border check. It is the space to contest cultural identities more complex than the more facile questions of legal status or images in popular culture . . . Mexicans negotiate the border like no others, north and south, south and north, realizing simultaneous cultural fission and fusion. It is this border context that differentiates the styles of linguistic interplay of Chicano

poetry

from

other

styles

of

polyglot

poetics.

The

poetry

of

Eliot

and

Pound,

for

example, incorporates other languages, from the Italian of Dante, to German conversation, to Chinese characters. The poetics of Montoya and Burciaga is similar to Eliot and Pound's in the fact of its linguistic hybridization, but the fact of the border contributes to a different emphasis in the styles of that multilingualism. In Eliot and Pound there is much greater emphasis on quotation and literary allusion; while in Montoya and Burciaga, poetic hybridization tends to replicate the polyglot style of quotidian Chicano discourse. The former often focuses on the content of that form (for example, Dante's Inferno) and interlards `significant' texts; the latter focuses

on

the

form

of

that

form

(for

Â, calo

example,

hybridization

itself)

and

implements

discursive interaction. (Arkeaga 1997, 68±9)

Language is then the vehicle by which hybridization or Mestizaje is created, recreated and laid

open.

Chicano/a

literature

explores

all

of

these

complexities

(history,

culture,

language) inherent in the formation of identities. As previously noted, Chicano/a literature began evolving from the moment the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. In its nascent stage, the literature, by and large, was a literature of

testimonio

(transcribed oral testimonies), history, memoir and protest. By the

1940s, Chicanos/as, colonized and marginalized, were responding to years of oppression in various discursive and performative ways. The Pachuco of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s represented a defiance of assimilation. These were young urban Chicanos from El Paso, Los  ), wore Angeles and surrounding communities who spoke the language of resistance (Calo the

zoot suit

(baggy pant suits, pancake hats, long belt chains) and were involved in petty

criminal activities. While urban Chicanos were creating and proclaiming a resistant identity, a number of Chicanas were focusing upon preserving an identity they did not want to lose. In the southwest,

a

number

of

Chicanas

were

preoccupied

with

gathering

testimonios

or

oral

histories of their communities. Chicana scholars Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero write:

In New Mexico, influenced by the New Deal and the Federal Writers' Project, three New Mexican women began to write about their lives and their cultural heritage: they were Cleofas Jaramillo,

Fabiola

Cabeza

de

Baca

Gilbert

and

Nina

Otero-Warren

...

Along

with

Jovita

Gonzales, who was collecting Texas folklore in the 1920s and 1930s, these women felt the need to document what they saw as a vanishing cultural heritage: their sense that their identity was being assimilated through history and cultural domination . . . Although their writing presents the perspective of a landed society, they nevertheless cultivate the seeds of cultural resistance to Anglo hegemony . . . Close readings of the texts written by these women show that landscape is one symbolic icon for describing the loss of land. In both and

Romance of a Little Village Girl

We Fed Them Cactus

(Cabeza de Baca)

(Jaramillo) the landscape at the beginning of the narration is

a verdant paradise and at the end a windswept purgatory. (1993, 17)

From `verdant paradise' to `windswept purgatory', the theme of abundance and belonging transformed

into

disenfranchisement

is

a

constant

trope

throughout

the

history

of

modern north american criticism and theory

146

Chicano/a literature. By collecting these Jaramillo

and

Otero-Warren,

were

testimonios

primarily

, Chicana writers in the southwest, like

seeking

to

preserve

a

heritage

for

future

generations. Chicanos/as (and this included Pachucos) were also preoccupied with the Second World War as was the rest of the nation. Part of the war effort included inviting new immigrants to join the armed forces. The government offered to speed up the citizenship process in order to allow minorities to join. As a result, many new immigrants from Mexico who sought citizenship in the US enlisted. The war also attracted Chicanos/as who wanted to prove they

were

patriotic

Americans.

Their

hope

was

to

contribute

to

the

nation

and

end

discrimination. However, their enthusiasm and hopefulness was often met with disappointment upon their return. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca writes:

The tragedy for Chicanos was that even though they responded patriotically to the colors during the war, they were still considered `foreigners' by Anglo Americans most of whom had themselves `recently' arrived from elsewhere, particularly Europe. Ironically, the first draftee of World War II was Pete Aguilar Despart, a Mexican American from Los Angeles. Chicanos were to emerge as the American ethnic group having won more medals of honor than any other group of Americans except Anglos. (1931, 12)

Chicana/o writings during this time of the national war effort also included theatre. Artists Ân (from Los Angeles and San Antonio such as Daniel Ferreiro Rea and Carlos Villalongõ respectively) produced shows for free and created

revistas

and

zarzuelas

. A

combination of song and recitation within the confines of a dramatic play. published

writings

(of

plays,

poetry

or

prose

writings)

in

pamphlet

or

zarzuela Revistas

magazine

is a are

form.

Although their efforts were short-lived, Spanish-language theatre remained active due to artists

such

performers

as in

Ân Villalongõ New

York

and

(La

Ferreiro

Chata

Rea.

There

Loloesca)

and

were

Spanish-language

others

working

in

vaudeville

television

and

Âa Astol) during and after the war. Chicanos/as Spanish-language radio (Leonardo Garcõ were not only present in big city theatre venues but also in the agrarian areas of the southwest.

These

were

called

`tent

theatres:'

makeshift

theatres

easily

constructed

for

Ânez and Francisco Lomelõ Â note that `[t]ent theatres also travel. Chicano scholars Julio Martõ continued their perennial odysseys into the 1950s, often setting up right in the camps of migrant farm laborers to perform their young

people

who

would

create

a

revistas

. Through these traveling theatres some of the

Chicano

theater

in

the

1960s

[received]

their

first

exposure to Hispanic theatrical tradition' (1985, 179). These artists and performers were at the forefront of what was to be an important theatrical and literary revival.

In 1965 the modern Chicano theater movement was born when Luis Miguel Valdez founded El Teatro Campesino in an effort to assist in organizing farmworkers for the grape boycott and the strike in Delano, California. From the humble beginning of dramatizing the plight of farmworkers, the movement grew to include small, agit-prop theater groups in communities and on campuses around the country, and eventually developed into a total theatrical expression that would find resonance on the commercial stage and the screen. By 1968 Valdez and El Teatro Campesino had left the vineyards and lettuce patches in a conscious effort to create a theater for a people which Valdez and other grass roots organizers of the 1960s envisioned as working-class, Spanish-speaking or bilingual, rurally oriented, and with very strong Pre-Columbian cultural ties. By 1970 El Teatro Campesino had pioneered and developed what would come to be known as teatro chicano, a style of agit-prop that incorporated the spirit and presentational style of the commedia dell'arte with the humor, character types, folklore, and popular culture of the

chicano/a literature

147

Mexican, especially as articulated earlier in the century by Mexican vaudeville companies that Ânez and Lomele  1985, 179) toured the Southwest in tent theaters. (Martõ

Equally important are the women who were involved with Teatro Campesino from its inception as well as contemporary Chicana artists in theatre today. Â lez writes that `[w]omen have constituted a distinct force within Yolanda Broyles-Gonza the Teatro Campesino and, by extension, within the history of Chicana/o theater' (1996, 134). El Teatro Campesino's writing and production work was never solely created by one person but was a collective effort involving bright, vibrant and hard-working women who had to struggle to defend their presence in the theatre due to cultural patriarchal notions. Historically, Latin American and Mexican women have been relegated to the domestic sphere and women in theatre work, especially, are often not considered respectable. In addition

to

Campesino toward

the

working had

to

against

resist

inclusion

of

these

societal

stereotyped complex

roles

female

attitudes,

written

by

characters.

the the

women men

Olivia

in

within the

El

group

Chumacero,

a

Teatro or

work

member,

describes the way Teatro Campesino produced plays:

We used to develop our scripts as we went along, from the improvisations . . . Sometimes, like when we were doing

La carpa

, which was in

corrido

form [corrido is a popular ballad], we had

nights in which people met who wanted to work on writing the

versos

[verses] for the

corrido

.

Smiley and I would go, along with different other people who were interested in writing. We'd sit down with Luis and work at it that way too. First we would talk ideas, about where we wanted to go in the piece. And then we would write different verses or whatever, and then select from that . . . It was a collective way of working. We made our own costumes, we built our own props  lez 1996, 131) and sets . . . we did all the work collectively. (Broyles-Gonza

Yet in many historical accounts of El Teatro Campesino, the fact that women and men worked together to write and produce these plays is largely ignored. It is important to highlight the collective nature of this organization to understand Chicano/a theatre at this time because then we can see a logical development of the history of Chicano and Chicana  lez emtheatre production as well as literary development of all genres. Broyles-Gonza phasizes the importance of this understanding:

The activities of several of the women from El Teatro Campesino ± Olivia Chamacero, Socorro Valdez, Diane Rodriguez, Yolanda Parra ± and the work of Silvia Wood in Tucson, Arizona; Nita Luna from El Teatro Aguacero in New Mexico; the women and men of El Teatro de la Âa Elena Gaita  rez's or Marõ  n's one-woman shows; the plays by Estela Esperanza; Ruby Nelda Pe Âe Moraga, and more recently by Josefina Lo  vez, Cherrõ  pez, Edit Portillo Trambley, Denise Cha  ndez, all mark the entry into a new cycle of theatrical activity for Villareal, and Evelina Ferna Chicanas

...

The

history

of

women's

participation

in

theater

history,

is

of

far-reaching

significance in and of itself. (1996, 163)

Similarly, the contributions Chicanas have made in fiction and poetry have redefined and repositioned definitions of the Chicano/a within and outside of their respective community. The popularity of Chicano/a theatre which focused upon the human condition and also gave voice to oppressed and impoverished Chicano/a workers prefaced

El Movimiento

which is also known as the Chicano Movement occurring between the 1960s and 1970s. The

Chicano

Movement

flourished

due

to

a

change

in

national

and

international

 mez-Quin Ä ones, `The civil rights political and economic climates. According to Juan Go movement of the 1960s focused attention primarily on the problems of Blacks, while devoting

some

attention

to

the

problems

of

other

minorities.

The

Kennedy

adminis-

modern north american criticism and theory

148

tration's ``New Frontier'' and Johnson's ``Great Society'' environment seemed to be willing to consider the increased demands by Mexicans for equal citizenship rights' (1992, 103). As a result, support and available monetary resources increased within community groups who were organizing for equal rights and justice.

[I]nitiating forces were the Farm Workers Union, the Alianza, the Crusade for Justice, student organizations, and eventually, La Rasa Unida. Workers or persons of working-class origin were key to these forces, and women often provided the organizational backbone. Whatever the particular goals and methods of the political activism, the underlying current was disenchantment

over

the

Mexican's

political,

economic,

and

social

status

in

an

Anglo-dominated

capitalist society. Political activists became increasingly concerned with understanding how economic and class exploitation and racism had shaped the Mexican experience in the United States. The struggle to understand the Mexican American experience increasingly focused on questions of alienation, ethnicity, identity, class, gender and chauvinism. An articulation of a historical understanding of the Mexican experience became a paramount motif, a necessity in  mez-Quin Ä ones 1992, 103) the struggle to shape a future for La Raza in the United States. (Go

Within this context, the era of the Chicano Literary Renaissance emerged. Although most  rico Paredes' important work scholars date the beginning of the Renaissance in 1965, Ame

With A Pistol in His Hand

 Antonio Villarreal's novel (1958) and Jose

Pocho

(1959) point to

a slightly earlier beginning. Chicanas also figured prominently even in this early stage of the Renaissance. Tey Diana Rebolledo writes that `Quinto Sol [a Chicano publishing company]

published

El Espejo/the Mirror: Selected Chicano Literature

(1969),

the

first

anthology of Chicano literature published by Chicanos. Included among the writers were Estela Portillo, Raquel Moreno, and Georgia Cobos' (21). The Poetry, fiction and nonfiction focused on the perspective of the Mexican-American in the United States just as it had done in the earlier plays of El Teatro Campesino. The Teatro was also still quite active during this marked literary period. Â s Rivera, Novelists emerging at this time were Toma (1971); Alurista, Oscar Acosta,

Nationchild Plumaroja

 La Tierra ... Y No Se Lo Trago

(1972); Rudolfo Anaya,

The Revolt of the Cockroach People

Bless Me, Ultima

(1973); and Rolando Hinojosa,

(1972);

Estampas

Del Valle

(1973). In 1975, Chicana novelist Estela Portillo Trambley published

Rain of

Scorpions.

It was one of the first Chicana novels during this era. Ten years after

Rain of

Scorpions,

the nation would see an explosion of Chicana writing. Between that time (1975±

85) Rebolledo notes that publishing was easier for Chicanos than Chicanas:

[A]lthough some women were included among the first writers to be published, it was the male authors who made the initial inroads, were most easily and frequently published, and were the most recognized

. . . These authors became a canonical liturgy for Chicano writing . . . Chicanas

were

writing

during this early period. They were writing, but, having been silenced for long periods of time, the authors found breaking that silence into a public act difficult. (1995, 22)

Instead, the Chicano perspective was privileged with works such as Alejandro Morales,

Verdad Sin Voz

(1979); John Rechy,

Rushes

 squez, (1979); Richard Va

After the publication of the first Chicana anthology,

Grito,

Another Land

La

(1982).

Chicanas en La Literatura y El Arte: El

which was edited by Estela Portillo Trambley in September of 1973, Chicanas began

Âe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldu Âa to publish but activity was slow. Eight years later, Cherrõ published the anthology,

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

(1981). This anthology not only highlighted Chicana writings, but included women of

chicano/a literature

149

colour from a variety of backgrounds and prompted an explosion of writings quite different from the earlier writings of the 1970s. This anthology directly addressed what Chicanas felt had

always

colour):

been

problematic

women's

in

the

Chicano

disenfranchisement,

community

erasure

and

(and

gendered

other

communities

violence

within

a

of

male-

identified community. The development of the personal essay present in this anthology became

a

vehicle

to

express

these

frustrations.

The

anthology

was

a

success

and

also

controversial because, as scholar Tey Diana Rebolledo points out, it placed Chicanas in a dilemma:

`This dilemma often placed Chicanas in a tenuous position between Anglo-feminists and their male Chicano colleagues. It put an additional strain on the Chicana lesbian feminists who felt, moreover, that their heterosexually oriented sisters did not fully support them. These issues raised in Chicana literature are still in a state of dialogue between the various perspectives as writers struggle with issues of unity versus separation. (Rebelledo and Rivero 1993, 24)

However,

it

also

encouraged

communities

to

begin

speaking

about

these

complex

privileged and oppressed positions. These writings paved the way for further introspection  a's work, with Gloria Anzaldu Ana Castillo's work,

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and later

Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1995). New Chicana

 vez, novelists emerged in full force during the 1980s and 1990s: Denise Cha

Last of the Menu

Âa Viramontes, Girls (1991); Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek (1992); Helena Marõ

Under the Feet of Jesus (1996); the aforementioned Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters (1992) and others. All of these works were ground-breaking for their investigation and perspectives of the Chicana in contemporary society ± both within the dominant society and in Chicano communities. Chicano male writers responded by re-investigating their own

male

identity.

Writer

understand his upbringing in  lez's anthology, Ray Gonza Chicanos

and

Latinos

Luis

J.

Rodriguez

returns

to

his

childhood

in

an

effort

to

Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (1993). In

Muy Macho: Latino Men Confront Their Manhood (1996) sixteen

re-evaluate

their

patriarchal

social

conditioning.

As

well,

Luis

Alberto Urrea writes a scathing memoir tracing and critiquing his patriarchal upbringing in

Nobody's Son (1998). Indeed, Chicano/a literature has certainly experienced much growth in

the

past

forty

economically

and

years:

investigating

personally.

In

all

its

of

identity,

these

its

works,

place it

is

within

apparent

society that

politically,

Chicanos

are

moving towards a more inclusive and radical Mestizaje: a consciousness of inclusion and awareness of gendered as well as racial and class-based oppression and privilege. This, above all, is where the Chicano/a acquires her/his power to write.

Amelia MarõÂa de la Luz Montes

Further reading and works cited Arteaga, A.

Chicano Poetics. New York, 1997.

 lez, Y. Broyles-Gonza Âa, A. M. Garcõ

El Teatro Campesino. Austin, TX, 1996.

Chicana Feminist Thought. New York, 1997.

Gaspar de Alba, A. Â mez-Quin Ä ones, J. Go

Chicano Art. Austin, TX, 1998. Chicano Politics. Albuquerque, NM, 1992.

Gonzales-Berry, E. and Tatum, C. (eds)

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Houston, TX,

1996. Â rrez, R. and Padilla, G. (eds) Gutie

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Houston, TX, 1993.

modern north american criticism and theory

150

 ndez-Gutie  rrez, M. de Jesu  s and Foster, D. W. (eds) Herna

Literatura Chicana, 1965±1995.

New York,

1997. Herrera-Sobek, M. and Viramontes, H. M.  nchez Рand Korrol, V. Sa  pez, T. A. Lo

Growing Up Chicana/o.

Mariscal, G. (ed.)

Chicana Creativity and Criticism.

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage .

 n and Viet Nam. Aztla

Berkeley, CA, 1999.

Chicano Literature.

This Bridge Called My Back.

The Decolonial Imaginary.

 rez-Torres, R. Pe

Women Singing in the Snow.

Ð and Rivero, E. S. (eds) Â nchez, G. J. Sa Trujillo, C.

Infinite Divisions.

Becoming Mexican American.

Living Chicana Theory.

16, Fall 1981.

Indianapolis, IN, 1999.

Movements in Chicano Poetry.

Rebolledo, T. D.

Westport, CT, 1985. New York, 1983.

Denver Quarterly,

Ortego y Gasca, F. de. `The Quetzal and the Phoenix', Â rez, E. Pe

Houston, TX, 2000.

New York, 1993.

Ânez, J. A. and Lomelõ Â, F. A. (eds) Martõ Â a, G. Moraga, C. and Anzaldu

Albuquerque, NM, 1996.

New York, 1995. Tucson, AZ, 1995.

Tucson, AZ, 1993. New York, 1993.

Berkeley, CA, 1998.

21. Film Studies

We are sometimes told today that film studies has progressed through `a general movement in approaches to film from a preoccupation with authorship (broadly defined), through a concentration upon the text and textuality, to an investigation of audiences' (Hollows and Jancovich 1995, 8) ± a consecutive pursuit of knowledge about film form, then realism, followed by language, and, finally, cultural politics (Braudy and Cohen 1999, xv±xvi). Such accounts forget the hardy perennials of cinema criticism, social and cultural theory and cultural policy: textual analysis of films, identification of directors with movies, and studies of the audience through psychology and psychoanalysis (Worth 1981, 39). These perennials involve: (a) the identification and promotion of a canon of work that can secure cinema a role as an art form and social text; and (b) anxieties about the impact of the screen on spectators. Under category (a), some film academics separate their work from politics, regarding it as a means of registering and developing aesthetic discrimination `in a relationship of tutelage, to the more established disciplines' (Bennett et al. 1981, ix). They seek to isolate the `basic features of film which can constitute it as an art' (Bordwell and Thompson 1997, ix). Textual ranking identifies authors and focuses on form and style. Such

old-fashioned

disciplinary

self-formation,

whereby

rent-seeking

professors

define

what is art and then instruct others, is a powerful force, as we know from the history of literary studies. But

film

always

exceeds

attempts

to

institute

such

New

Critical

readings,

precisely

because of its history and currency. As a governmental and business technology that spread with

urbanization

and

colonialism

alongside

multifarious

attempts

to

comprehend

the

modernity that it brought into vision (Shohat and Stam 1994, 100±36), film is impossible to delimit in a fetishized manner for long, in all but the most devastatingly intramural cloisters. More political work done under category (a) stresses that the avowed project of elevating cinema to the status of apolitical art is doomed to failure in its attempt to cordon

film studies

151

off the social. This is a challenge to the Eurocentrism and universalism of formalist theory, in accord with social movements and Third and Fourth World counter-discourses (Carson and Friedman 1995). Category

(b)

±

concerns

about

the

audience

±

includes

psychological,

sociological,

educational, consumer, criminological and political promises and anxieties. These have been prevalent since silent cinema's faith in `the moving picture man as a local social force . . . the mere formula of [whose] activities' keeps the public well-tempered (Lindsay 1970, 243); through 1930s research into the impact of cinema on American youth via the Payne Studies (Blumer 1933); to post-Second World War concerns about Hollywood's intrication of education

and

entertainment

and

the

need

for counter-knowledge

among

the

public (Powdermaker 1950, 12±15). For the contemporary left, questions of pleasure have been central, as analysts have sought

to

account

for

and

resist

narrative

stereotypes

and

explain

`why

socialists

and

feminists liked things they thought they ought not to' (Dyer 1992, 4). This difficulty over pleasure accounts for film theory being highly critical of prevailing cultural politics, but never

reifying

itself

into

the

Puritanism

or

orthodoxy

alleged

by

critics

of

political

correctness. The extraordinary diversity of latter-day film anthologies makes this point clear. A feminist film anthology focuses on issues of representation and production that are shared by many women, but it also attends to differences of race, history, class, sexuality and nation, alongside and as part of theoretical difference (Carson et al. 1994), while a black

film

anthology

divides

between

spectatorial

and

aesthetic

dimensions

(Diawara

1993), and a queer anthology identifies links between social oppression and film and video practice (Holmlund and Fuchs 1997). I shall deal with the discourses of categories (a) and (b) serially, picking up from the latter to suggest a way forward for film studies

Film as an art form The first move made under category (a) is to uncover directorial authorship (auteurism). There have been three main currents in debates about film authorship. First, authorship has been a category of legal ownership and textual criticism. US law theorizes the producer of a film as its author. But not so US film studies, which seeks directors with an latter

case,

the

knot

that

allegedly

holds

films

together

across

time

oeuvre

and

. In the

space

is

a

recognizable set of concerns and stylistic norms that can be correlated with an individual director's biography and show a capacity to move from denotative storytelling to connotative thematic tropes. Second, a radical alternative argues for the material conditionality

of

the

category,

suggesting

that

authors

are

constituted

through

discourses

and

institutions rather than through personal vision. Third, an argument exists for the social nature of cultural production, the inevitable cross-pollination of signs, genres and codes that sweep across a landscape rather than originating in specific people. There is something laughably counter-indicative about auteurism. Making films is so obviously collective in its division of labour. Auteurism only makes sense if we consider the medium's claim to art. Authorship is identified and its eminence distributed in synchronization with artistic valorization ± once novels, movies, television drama or web pages are held to be of creative significance, a discourse of individual signatures emerges. The effect is a double one ± certain authors are named and elevated, and the medium or genre itself receives cross-validation from the process. (This person is an author, he/she is gifted. This medium has authors, it is artistic.) The nice irony, of course, is the use of categories from

modern north american criticism and theory

152

high-art appreciation to endorse popular culture in a way that acknowledges the audience imagined by film-makers as integral to their creative practice ± quite unlike the windswept romantic author pondering the infinite. Auteur writings covered a broad sweep of politics, and not always from a humanist perspective ± structuralists believed that auteurs touched on deeply secreted structures of mythic meaning in a culture, unconsciously opening up lines of fissure. Today arguments are

made

for

masculinist

auteurism

concerns

links

between

and directorial surrogates as sites of enunciation within

from

radical

political

projects

±

identifying

texts, or

seeking to promote the work of those marginalized from cinema by virtue of their sex or race. The second move of category (a) is about film form and style, via narratology. Narratives tell stories through an aetiological chain of cause and effect over time via a linear trajectory from the establishment of questions or problems to their resolution. A film moves from a presumed

state

of

normalcy,

or

equilibrium,

for

the

characters

prior

to

the

text,

to

a

disequilibrium set up in the opening of that text, and then through a series of manoeuvres that results in the achievement of a goal and a new equilibrium. Classical narrative cinema focuses on central characters, whose attitudes to the events going on around them and participation in conflicts and their resolution are critical. The success or otherwise of these moves frequently depends on their ability to engage dual forms of verisimilitude ± looking like a film story of a familiar kind, and also resembling the mental processes of ordinary human experience. Much academic narratology is linked to formalism, which divides narratives in two. The

fabula

or story concerns the chronological unfolding of relations between characters, or

actants. This is the immanent structure of the story, the spirit-within that impels a text

syuzhet, or plot (the syuzhet animates the fabula via an array

forward. When that basis becomes orchestrated, it is transformed into a movement from what is told to how to tell it). The

of artistic devices, such as parallelism, retardation, defamiliarization and so on: in short, sources of aesthetic pleasure that do not simply move the narrative forward. Understanding a narrative is more than following the trajectory of a story. It depends on reading the story horizontally as well as vertically ± the narrative thread only makes partial sense of a film, along with an attempt to remember, for example, the

conduct

of a specific

character

through the text. The classical Hollywood narrative is about action ± a search for an object by a person, and the event that closes the search off. This linear model does not deal particularly well with the atmospheric, processual type of film. A series of emotional engagements and disengagements is entered into, often without obvious motivation in terms of the overall narrative drive of the story. Signs float around in a way that is quite incidental to allowing the hero to find his pot of whatever. Instead, information that is supplementary to the excuse for the film becomes its effective/affective centre, the real template for the action. Methods of narration are influenced by the use of camera, and here questions of style arise. Subjective narration, which clearly locates the vantage point or enunciation within a character in the diegesis, often involves point-of-view shooting, whereas hidden enunciation is mimetic and favours objective camera. In subjective narration, the camera takes on the function of that character's vision in the text. Conversely, omniscient and objective narration

are

frequently

achieved

through

a

point

of

view

that

comes

from

nowhere,

outside the action and seemingly without a particular perspective or form of knowledge. But this narration can be interpreted to bring out the site of enunciation if we examine

film studies

153

factors such as the height of the camera. The eye-level shot is taken with the camera horizontal to the ground as if it were in the room in human form but without being seen or reacting to what occurs in front of it. The high-angle shot is taken from above the action. It can emphasize the insignificance of the human actants as opposed to the commercial, natural or architectural features in the frame. Conversely, low-angle shots are tilted up to cover the action, which can inflect it with a certain glow from below as well as highlighting size

and

speed.

This

attention

to

textual

detail

has

been

very

productive

for

the

aestheticization impulses of category (a). What of the social and political aspects to category (a)? I shall examine these with particular reference to class. Attempts to do class analysis in film involve a number of moves: literally observing how a class acts on screen ± its clothing, gesture, movement, work, leisure, home-life; seeing who controls the means of communication behind a film ± technicians, producers, directors, censors, shareholders; analysing the ideological message of stories ± personal transcendence versus collective solidarity, the legitimacy of capitalist freedoms, or the compensations in family and community for social inequality; and noting which

interests

bourgeoisies,

are

men,

served whites,

by

government-sponsored

distributors,

the

people.

In

national textual

film

industries

terms,

those

±

films

local that

foreground class through theme or identification do not exhaust the list of films ready for class readings. Patterns of speech or costume may not only signify the immediate referent of social position, but go beyond that to the trappings, logic and operation of capitalism: how the clothes were made, or the housing conditions that go along with the accent; we might think here of the James Bond series' obsession with small differentiations of social position through food, alcohol and cars, and the way that hotel staff and other employees are easily ordered about. Some of us deem it important that Sean Connery orders the Dom Perignon '52 and George Lazenby the '57. The

price

paid

for

attending

a

film

(exchange-value)

takes

over

from

the

desires

exhibited in the actual practical utility of what is being purchased (use-value). This price expresses the momentary monetary value of that need rather than its lasting utility. That notion of built-in obsolescence and value bestowed via a market is in fact a key to all commodities, popular or otherwise. They elicit desire by wooing consumers, glancing at them sexually, and smelling and looking nice in ways that are borrowed from romantic love but then reverse that relationship: people learn about correct forms of romantic love from commodities, such as love scenes in movies. This culture industries paradigm has alerted film theory to the fact that organizations train, finance, describe, circulate and reject actors and activities that go under the signs film-maker and film. Governments, trade unions, colleges, social movements, community groups and businesses aid, fund, control, promote, teach and evaluate creative persons. They define and implement criteria that make possible

the use of the word `creative'

through law courts that permit erotica on the grounds that they are works of art, schools that require pupils to study film on the grounds that it is improving, film commissions that sponsor scripts on the grounds that they reflect society back to itself, or studios that invite Academy Award voters to parties as promotions for their movies. In turn, these criteria may themselves derive, respectively, from legal doctrine, citizenship or tourism aims, and profit plans. This industrial infrastructure has implications for what it actually means to produce culture: `[T]he popular notion of a struggling artist working isolated in a lonely garret is extremely misleading as a representation of the norm. Creators often struggle economically, but in modern

modern north american criticism and theory

154

societies most of them work in organizational settings ± either directly in an organization or indirectly dependent upon one or more organizations to distribute or exhibit their work .

..

even culture production by individuals occurs in collective contexts . . . networks of functionally interdependent individuals, groups, and organizations. (Zollars and Cantor 1993, 3)

Film and its audience Testing the relationship between films and their viewers has produced two main forms of analysis: spectatorship theory and audience research. Spectatorship theory speculates about the effects on people of films, but instead of questioning, testing and measuring them, it uses

psychoanalysis

formation spectator

of

to

explore

subjectivity

is

understood

are

as

how

enacted

a

supposedly on-screen

universal and

narratively-inscribed

in

internal

the

concept

struggles

psyches that

can

of

over

watchers.

be

known

the The

via

a

combination of textual analysis and Freudianism. Audience research is primarily concerned with the number and conduct of people seated before screen texts: where they came from, how many there were and what they did as a consequence of being present. The audience is understood as an empirical concept that can be known via research instruments derived from sociology, demography, social psychology and marketing. The film spectator is generally understood as the product of two forces: first, psychic struggles for personality that psychoanalytic theory claims are characteristic of maturation and the getting of sexuality; and second how both the texts and the physical apparatus of cinema draw out these conflicts. Psychological battles are in the unconscious, which means that they cannot be known through the thoughts or neurones of people. Instead, they gain expression indirectly, via the repetition of various dramas about power and the self, with sexual identity at their core. Not surprisingly, these narratives find some expression in dreams, and may be sources for fiction as well; hence the similarity between film-going and dreams (the darkness and the abandon in story) is matched by a likeness in the texture of film narrative and the unconscious. As Dudley Andrew points out, psychoanalysis has been deployed to account for the unconscious of film-makers and spectators, the nature of film as fantasy, the inevitability of identification for fantasy to come into play, and how the unconscious in film may intersect with wider questions of psychoanalysis and culture (1984, 135). Graeme Turner argues

that

film

is

friendly

towards

psychoanalysis

because

of

`its

collapsing

of

the

boundaries of the real'. The cinema occupies the gap between what we see and what we imagine (1988, 113). Most

1970s

psychoanalytic

film

theory

argues

that

the

gaze

in

film

belongs

to

the

heterosexual male and his screen brothers. Feminist theorists and film-makers responded by supporting and making some determinedly unpleasurable films that confronted spectators with their complicity in patriarchy. The cinema is seen as a sexual technology, a site where practices

are

instantiated

that

construct

sex

and

desire

through

such

techniques

as

confession, concealment and the drive for truthful knowledge about motivation, character and occasion. The reproducibility of virtuosic performance provided by electronic technology has produced an era of performativity. Both simultaneity of instant reception and longevity of recorded life come with electronic media. The technology of visual reproduction

enables

a

multiplicity

of

personalized

perspectives

inside

a

world

of

commodity

reproduction. In some cases, this avant-gardisme denied both women's active address and engagement with classical narrative, and crucial social differences within genders that are

film studies

155

not about the acquisition of linguistic or familial norms or the getting of sexuality, but are to do with race and class (Pribram 1988, 1±3). The notion of overturning dominant forms of stitching spectators into the text relates to criticisms of realism. For example, the conventional documentary sets the spectator's gaze up as competent, once it is guided by the knowing hand±eye±technology coordination of the director and editor. Raymond Williams sees the avant-garde as acknowledging the existence of a `fragmented ego in a fragmented world', defying capitalist neatness and a unilogical realism (1989, 93). There is, of course, intense argument about how different forms of texts can be read. The notion of textually inscribed rules of reading ± interpellations of viewers ± as a function of naturalism/realism problematized the value of, for example, social realism. It has been an orthodoxy that linear, resolved narratives which compel closure are reactionary in their construction of the possibility of perfect knowledge. Instead, audiences should be confronted with the constructedness of their positioning and the seams of weaving of each text made explicit via self-referentiality. Like psychoanalytic theory, this critique makes symptomatic readings of texts, assuming that spectatorship was less a practice than a by-product of being positioned and attracted by narrative and image that implied perfect knowledge and political orthodoxy in their very essence. Psychoanalytic protocols have proved to be remarkably providential for interrogating questions of masculinity, femininity and postcoloniality. While Freud may be considered outmoded in the social sciences, his doctrine of counter-indicative reading and the centrality of sex remain magnetic to film theory, especially when linked to the apparatus of cinema. The apparatus in film theory refers to the interaction between spectators, texts and technology. Apparatus theory is concerned with the material circumstances of viewing: the nature of filmic projection (from behind the audience) or video playing (from behind or in front), the darkness of the theatre or the lightness of daytime TV, the textual componentry of what is screened and the psychic mechanisms engaged. In other words, apparatus theory inquires into the impact of the technical and physical specificity of watching films on the processing methods used by their watchers. This goes beyond issues raised in debates over technological innovation (discussed elsewhere) to focus on cinema as a `social machine'. This machine is more than the obvious machines of the cinema: film, lighting, sound recording systems, camera, make-up, costume, editing devices and projector. A blending of `narrativity, continuity, point of view, and identification' sees spectators become part of the very apparatus designed for them (Flitterman-Lewis 1990, 3, 12). The apparatus takes the spectatorial illusion of seeming to experience film as real life and makes it a combination of power and yet relaxation, of engagement coupled with leisure. Apparatus theory has basically operated at the level of speculation, apart from a brief flurry of writing on technological history and meaning that looked at those moments when the very technology of cinema was highlighted to audiences, or that retrieved cinema's prehistory via studies of panoramas, magic lanterns, dioramas and cineramas (de Lauretis and Heath 1985). This is because the principal interest of apparatus theorists never diverged from how subjectivity is constituted via the imaginary and the symbolic and their dance around the real. The interest in the specific technical apparatus of cinema is inextricably intertwined with an interest in marxist theorization of prevailing ideological norms plus psychoanalytic theorization of fantasies and complexes. The subject is presented with what looks like unveiled, transparent truth, whereby the camera substitutes for the eyes. Spectatorship is like being there, but with intriguingly radical transformations of time and perspective: the distant grows near, the past becomes

modern north american criticism and theory

156

present and points of view shift. The spectator's loss of mobility is compensated by this promiscuous look, which travels to the most dangerous or painful as well as exhilarating places,

and

with

equilibrium

impunity,

through

as

perfect

classical

knowledge.

narrative The

eye

ensures

the

transcends

ultimate

the

body

restoration to

roam

of

across

multiple viewpoints and scenes. Just as ideology is the means whereby social subjects have their conditions of existence represented back to them in everyday life, masquerading as an unvarnished, transcendent truth, so film is a key mechanism for encapsulating such cultural messages (Allen 1997, 19). Initial contributions and ripostes to apparatus theory came from feminist scholars for its failure to distinguish the different experiences and psychic mechanisms of men and women ±

that

male

viewers

were

principally

involved

in

fetishizing

women

on

screen

and

identifying with men on screen, which apparatus theorists had ignored. That engagement, by such writers as Constance Penley (1989), Sandy Flitterman-Lewis (1990) and Teresa de Lauretis

(de

Lauretis

and

Heath

1985),

enlivened

apparatus

theory

by

showing

the

centrality of difference to spectacle and the need for feminist film-making and feminist critical practice to account for and disrupt the association of the apparatus with the male gaze. A further critique of apparatus theory is that it has no mechanism for predicting or investigating

how

spectators

in

fact

process

information.

It

cannot

establish

whether

disavowal occurs or does not. In short, symptomatic theories have no means of being falsified,

because

they

know

the

answers

from

the

theoretical

baggage

that

poses

the

questions. Any interest in the concrete meaning-making of audiences, their ability to engage actively with texts and the apparatus via personal and collective cultural history and

systems

of

interpretation,

would

displace

the

assumption

that

the

unconscious

is

automatically and universally engaged by technologies of viewing. Such conflictual and manifold processes may see a proliferation of cross-identifications that go far beyond not just the limits of the body, but beyond the norms of psychic training and bodily awareness into entirely new territory (men identifying with women in melodramas, women identifying with male action heroes, Native Americans identifying with western pioneers ± in short, the theatre as a site of carnival as much as machine, where viewers transcend the dross of their ordinary social and psychological lives [Stam 1989, 224]). At the same time, this interest in the ability of audiences to make meaning has seen another, seemingly conflictual

paradigm

emerging

under

the

sign

of

Michel

Foucault

that

considers

the

contemporary moment as an electronic transformation of a long history of surveillance under modernity, from the panoptic prison designs of Jeremy Bentham to the all-seeing gaze and internalization of today's mall security and virtual home cinema (Denzin 1995). Between them, these two moves pull apart, replicate and make empirical many of the concerns that apparatus theory sought to synthesize. In short, symptomatic theory valuably problematized the exclusive concentration on representation, demonstrating that materiality and perception, too, had their place. This emphasis on ideology and the interplay of machine, text, culture and person guaranteed that film theory would not be caught in the formalism of much literary criticism. At the same time, its very mechanistic mode of inquiry, strangely redolent of the very metaphors it so disparaged, limited its utility as a paradigm for research. The second discourse of category (b) shifts to the empirical audience. There are three primary sites for defining this audience: the film industry, the state and criticism. In this sense, the audience is artificial, the creature of various agencies that then act upon their

film studies

157

creation. Many discussions of the audience are signs of anxiety: laments for civic culture in the US correlate an increase in violence and a decline in membership of parent-teacher associations with heavy film viewing ± as true today as it was when the Payne Fund Studies of

the

1930s

inaugurated

mass

social-science

panic

about

young

people,

driven

by

academic, religious and familial iconophobia and the sense that large groups of people were engaged with popular culture beyond the control of the state and ruling classes. Before even that, films were connected to gambling and horse racing in various forms of social criticism ± the arts of popular commerce forever threatening an orderly conduct of urban life ± or were lunged for as raw material by the emergent discipline of psychology, where obsessions with eyesight and the cinema gave professors something to do. At the same time, social reformers looked at the cinema as a potential forum for moral uplift; if film could drive the young to madness it might also provoke a sense of social responsibility (Austin 1989, 33±5). But unlike such institutions, the cultural audience is not so much a specifiable group

within

the social order as the principal site

of

that order. Audiences participate in the most

global (but local), communal (yet individual) and time-consuming practice of making meaning in the history of the world. The concept and the occasion of being an audience are textual links between society and person, at the same time as viewing involves solitary interpretation as well as collective behaviour. Production executives invoke the audience to

measure

success

and

claim

knowledge

of

what

people

want.

But

this

focus

on

the

audience is not theirs alone. Regulators do it to organize administration, psychologists to produce

proofs

education,

and

lobby-groups

violence

investigated

by

the

and state,

apathy

to

change

supposedly

psychology,

content,

hence

engendered

marxism,

by

the

link

the

screen

neoconservatism,

the

to

panics and

about

routinely

church,

liberal

feminism and others. The audience as consumer, student, felon, voter and idiot engages such groups. This is Harold Garfinkel's notion of the `cultural dope', a mythic figure `who produces the stable features of the society by acting in compliance with preestablished and legitimate alternatives of action that the common culture provides.' The `common sense rationalities

. . . of here and now

situations' used by people

are obscured by this

con-

descending categorization (1992, 68). When the audience is invoked as a category by the industry or its critics and regulators, it immediately becomes such a `dope'. Much nonHollywood film wants to turn such supposed dopes into a public of thinkers beyond the home ± civic-minded participants in a political and social system as well as an economy of purchasing. National cinemas in Europe, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America and Africa are expected to win viewers and train them in a way that complements the profit-driven sector. The entertainment function is secondary to providing programmes the commercial market would not deliver. Audiences are encouraged not just to watch and consume, but to act, to be better people.

Future developments Perhaps

the

most

historicization processes

must

significant

of context, now

be

innovation

in

recent

such that the analysis

supplemented

by

an

film

theory

has

of textual properties

account

of

occasionality

been

a

radical

and spectatorial that

details

the

conditions under which a text is made, circulated, received, interpreted and criticized. The life of any popular or praised film is a passage across space and time, a life remade again and again by institutions, discourses and practices of distribution and reception ± in short, all

modern north american criticism and theory

158

the shifts and shocks that characterize the existence of cultural commodities, their ongoing renewal as the temporary property of varied, productive workers and publics and their stasis as the abiding property of businesspeople. The crucial link between theories of the text and spectatorship ± one that abjures the idea of the dope ± may come from a specification of occasionality, that moment when a spectator

moves

from

being

`the

hypothetical

point

of

address

of

filmic

discourse'

to

membership in `a plural, social audience'; for that moment can produce surprises (Hansen 1994, 2). Jacqueline Bobo's analysis of black women viewers of

The Color Purple shows how

their process of watching the film, discussing it and reading the novel drew them back to Alice Walker's writing, with all three processes invoking their historical experience in ways quite unparalleled in dominant culture ± a far cry from the dismissal of the film by critics. These women `sifted through the incongruent parts of the film and reacted favorably to elements

with

which

they

could

identify'

(1995,

3).

Similarly,

gay

Asian-Caribbean-

Canadian video-maker Richard Fung (1991) talks about searching for Asian genitals in the much-demonized genre of pornography, an account not available in conventional denunciations of porn and its impact on minorities. Again, this type of historicized specificity is a valuable antidote to any purely textual or symptomatic reading. This is the abiding lesson of film theory: the medium's promiscuity points every day and in every way towards the social. It is three things, all at once: a unstaged pro-filmic event); a

of

recorder

of reality (the

manufacturer of reality (the staged and edited event); and part

reality (watching film as a social event on a Saturday night, or a protest event over

sexual, racial or religious stereotyping).

Toby Miller

Further reading and works cited Allen, R.

Projecting Illusion.

Andrew, J. D. Austin, B. A.

Cambridge, 1997.

Concepts in Film Theory. Immediate Seating.

Bennett, T. et al. `Preface', in Blumer, H. Bobo, J.

Oxford, 1984.

Belmont, CA, 1989.

Popular Television and Film,

Movies and Conduct.

eds T. Bennett et al. London, 1981.

New York, 1933.

Black Women as Cultural Readers.

New York, 1995.

Film Art.

New York, 1997.

Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K.

Braudy, L. and Cohen, M. `Preface', in

Film Theory and Criticism,

eds L. Braudy and M. Cohen. New

York, 1999. Carson, D. and Friedman, L. D. (eds) Ð et al. (eds)

Shared differences.

Multiple voices in Feminist Film Criticism.

Cook, P. and Bernink, M. (eds)

The Cinema Book.

de Lauretis, T. and Heath, S. (eds)

Urbana, IL, 1995.

Minneapolis, MN, 1994.

London, 1999.

The Cinematic Apparatus.

Denzin, N. `The Birth of the Cinematic, Surveillance Society',

London, 1985.

Current Perspectives in Social Theory,

15, 1995. Diawara, M. (ed.) Dyer, R.

Black American Cinema.

Only Entertainment.

Flitterman-Lewis, S.

New York, 1993.

London, 1992.

To Desire Differently.

Urbana, IL, 1990.

Fung, R. `Looking for my Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn', in Object-Choices. Seattle, WA, 1991. Garfinkel, H. Hansen, M.

Studies in Ethnomethodology.

Babel and Babylon.

Cambridge, 1992.

Cambridge, MA, 1994.

How Do I look?, ed. Bad

feminist film studies and film theory Hill, J. and Church Gibson, P. (eds)

159

The Oxford Guide to Film Studies.

Hollows, J. and Jancovich, M. `Popular Film and Cultural Distinctions', in

Oxford, 1998.

Approaches to Popular Film,

eds J. Hollows and M. Jancovich. Manchester, 1995. Holmlund, C. and Fuchs, C. (eds) Lindsay, V.

The Future of an Illusion.

Powdermaker, H.

Shohat, E. and Stam, R.

Turner, G.

Worth, S.

ed. E. D. Pribram. London, 1988. New York, 1994.

Baltimore, MD, 1989.

Film and Theory.

Film as Social Practice.

Williams, R.

Boston, 1950.

Female Spectators,

Unthinking Eurocentrism.

Subversive Pleasures.

Ð and Miller, T. (eds)

Oxford, 1999.

Minneapolis, MN, 1989.

Hollywood: The Dream Factory.

Pribram, E. D. `Introduction', in

Minneapolis, MN, 1997.

New York, 1970.

A Companion to Film Theory.

Miller, T. and Stam, R. (eds) Penley, C.

Stam, R.

Between the Sheets, in the Streets.

The Art of the Moving Picture.

Oxford, 2000.

London, 1988.

The Politics of Modernism.

London, 1989.

Studying Visual Communication,

ed. L. Gross. Philadelphia, 1981.

Zollars, C. L. and Cantor, M. G. `The Sociology of Culture Producing Occupations',

on Occupations and Professions,

Current Research

8, 1993.

22. Feminist Film Studies and Film Theory

Strictly speaking, it is impossible to talk of a single feminist film theory, if by this title we assume

a

coherent,

unified,

intellectual,

academic

and

political

project.

Indeed,

that

feminist film theory, in whatever guise, is, and has always been, avowedly political in its agendas and interests, implies fracture and contest, heterogeneity, difference and diversity in the various interests and perspectives which may be considered to belong to the identity of

`feminist

film

theory'.

Thus,

this

essay,

in

recognizing

the

question

of

political

engagement as necessary to any feminist project concerned with the analysis of filmic modes of gendered identity construction and representation within various historical and cultural contexts, will

seek to

address various aspects

of feminist film

theory,

without

assuming any simple coherence or consonance in the guise of a unified area of study. Furthermore, while this essay addresses a range of feminist interventions in the area of film studies in the broader context of the North American university, this is not to say that feminist interventions in film study or theory are not restricted, on the one hand, to the university exclusively, or, on the other hand, to North America during the last three decades,

roughly

speaking.

Of

course,

no

discourse

evolves

in

isolation

from

other

discourses, and the history of feminist film theory in all its guises is marked by debate, appropriation, intervention and dissent from other theoretical, philosophically inflected, and political languages and processes. However reformulated, and however self-reformulating, so-called feminist film theory is, in part, an epistemo-political project engaging not only with feminist politics obviously, but also with semiotics, psychoanalysis, the discourses of race and gender, questions of culturally determined aesthetics, matters of mimesis and historically informed and mediated processes of identity construction, among a number of intellectual and social frameworks.

modern north american criticism and theory

160

Moreover, this essay does not assume that, in addressing feminist film theory in the US, the subject of this essay has evolved without the influence of work pursued in film studies and related areas from outside the US. The work of French theorist Christian Metz and British critics Laura Mulvey and Jacqueline Rose on matters of the gaze and sexuality has been of crucial importance in the field. However, as far as is possible, while acknowledging the impossibility and undesirability of containing any discourse artificially according to national or continental boundaries, this article will speak to particular strategic moments in the study of film as though there were a specifically North American history.

Polemical beginnings While there is no absolutely justifiable beginning to which we can turn, it is provisionally possible to identify as one initiating moment in the history of feminist film theory the

Women and Film

establishment of the relatively short-lived journal

, the first issue of which

appeared in 1972, at the same time as the emergence of women's film festivals, notably those in New York and Edinburgh. The goal of images

of

women

as

these

represented

and

Women and Film

reflected

the

was to address filmic

oppressed,

stereotyped

and

marginalized position of women in society as brought into focus by the women's movement of

the

1960s.

intervention

Part

the,

in

of

the

polemic

retrospect,

of

perhaps

the

journal

somewhat

was

to

utopian

envision ideal

of

through

critical

transforming

the

representation of women in film so as to reflect more accurately the reality of female experience. Drawing in part on and responding to the work of, among others, Kate Millett and Germaine Greer, as well as Simone de Beauvoir,

Women and Film

thus may be seen in

retrospect as speaking to and exemplifying a sociological approach (as distinct from the perception of feminist film theory in Great Britain, specifically through articles published in

Screen

, as primarily theoretical). Such an approach (however reductive this identification

may be) sought, in the words of the editors, to take `up the struggle with women's image in film and women's roles in the film industry' (1972, 5) as part of a necessary corrective to the `political, psychological, social and economic oppression of women' (1972, 5). As Sue Thornham points out, the journal had a threefold goal: to transform film-making practice, to end ideological oppression, and to establish a `feminist critical aesthetics' (1999, 9±10). Sharon Smith's article, `The Image of Women in Film: Some Suggestions for Future Research', which was published in the first issue in 1972, typifies the political stance and goals of the journal. Smith aims to establish how the range of representations of women in film is limited and stereotyped in both limiting and negative ways which reproduce the experience of lived oppression, thereby perpetuating social marginalization. Film, Smith argues, needs to be transformed so as to represent a greater variety of women's roles and experiences. As Smith suggests, `[t]he role of a woman in film almost always revolves around her physical attraction and the mating games she plays with the male characters', while representations of men extend beyond the physical and biological, to the social and historical worlds (1999,

14±15).

Films thereby

`express the fantasies

and subconscious

needs of their (mostly male) creators' (15). For Smith there is a direct correlation between the representation of women and the access to positions of power in the film industry, including writing, editing and production (19). But, as Smith argues in conclusion, things can only change when cultural perceptions of women outside filmic representation have changed.

feminist film studies and film theory

161

A significant moment in the early years of feminist film study which built on the work of

Women and Film

and the kinds of arguments presented by Smith was the publication in

1974 of Molly Haskell's

From Reverence to Rape

. (Haskell's is, of course, not the only text of

significance, but due to lack of space we can only gesture towards other titles such as Marjorie Rosen's

Popcorn Venus

and Joan Mellon's

Women and Sexuality in the New Film

).

Part of Haskell's significance is in her recognition of film as not merely a mimetic mode of representation but as a complex textual process of encoding and registration around matters of gender and social roles. Haskell's position is similar to Smith's but is significantly more complex in its comprehension of representations of women. Identifying a range of positions and images for women in film across the history of film, Haskell locates what might be termed a typology of restrictive representation. However, where Haskell diverges from Smith

is

in

her

reading

of

film

for

the

heterogeneous and possibly subversive

possibilities

it

contains

for

the

encoding

modes of address. In support of this

of

thesis, she

turns to the `woman's film' of the 1930s and 1940s. While women may well be punished frequently in such films (

Dark Victory

with Bette Davis is a significant example) as a means

of reaching closure whereby women are, finally, recuperated within a male-centred vision, yet, for a while, Haskell argues, the woman dominates and controls the narrative, and it is this

temporary

control

which

may

be

read

as

implicitly,

if

not

explicitly,

because it presents an equally temporary strong, positive image of woman. ( one

such

cautionary

tale;

ambivalent

and

complex,

it

traces

Joan

subversive,

Mildred Pierce

Crawford's

rise

is

to

economic and social importance; she, however, ultimately is chastened and `punished' because her resistance to being subservient to men, it is implied, leads to her youngest daughter's death and her eldest daughter's arrest for murder.)

Theoretical interventions Feminist film theory, while developing in North America in the 1970s, did not remain unaffected by the theoretical explorations of critics in Britain such as Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey. Indeed, by the late 1970s, the signs of a sea change in favour of a turn to theory are marked by the establishment, in 1976, of the journal

Camera Obscura

, and an

article by B. Ruby Rich, `The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism', first published in the journal

Jump Cut

(1978), which took a retrospective glance at the history of feminist

film studies up to that point. Rich addresses the need to theorize as a way of providing a language of analysis where previously silence existed. Drawing on the silencing of the female voice in western culture, Rich argues for an understanding of the female spectator as an active creator of meaning, rather than being merely a passive consumer of stereotyped images. Claire Johnston (1973) argued, as Sue Thornham puts it, that `the figure of ``woman'' functions within film as a sign within patriarchal discourse' (Thornham 1999, 53), rather than being simply a reflection of some unmediated reality. Laura Mulvey, drawing on psychoanalysis, the film work of Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry, and addressing adjunct concerns to those of Johnston, formulated the idea of cinema as an apparatus which situates the spectator (Thornham 1999, 53), aligning the spectator with the gaze of the camera. As Robert Stam summarizes Mulvey's position, `[v]isual pleasure on the cinema thus reproduced a structure of male

looking and female-to-be-looked-at-ness, a binary

structure which mirrored the asymmetrical power relations operative in the real social world' (2000, 174). More specifically, the spectator's pleasure is intrinsically interwoven

modern north american criticism and theory

162

with the gaze, in fetishized processes of voyeurism and scopophilia. At the same time, as Mulvey makes plain and echoing Metz, the spectator, whether male or female, is situated in a gendered position: the spectator is assumed to be male, the gaze that of a male spectator and the code `woman', constituted within the filmic text, an eroticized and fragmented, and therefore fetishized, figure. Such psychoanalytically inflected analysis is exemplified in North American feminist film studies by the work of Mary Ann Doane, Teresa de Lauretis and Kaja Silverman, whose publications punctuate film theory's interrogations in the 1980s. Doane's essay,

Caught

`

Rebecca

and

: The Inscription of Femininity as Absence' (1981) and a number of

other essays subsequently collected in

Femmes Fatales

(1991) move beyond Mulvey in their

analysis of the role and construction of the female spectator. Through examination of the `woman's film', `weepies' and the figure of the `femme fatale', Doane questions psychic processes of identification and alignment between the female spectator and the images of women, whereby the female spectator comes to terms with herself as object of desire. At the same time, however, `the ``woman's film'' centres both our narrative identification and its structures of looking on a female protagonist, so that its narratives claim, at least, to place female

subjectivity,

desire

and

agency

at

their

centre'

(Thornham

1999,

55).

Such

processes come at a cost for the female spectator, however, the cost being that, for being momentarily privileged, situated as the agent rather than the object of desire, such female characters are finally silenced, constituted through narrative as ultimately silent or absent. The

essays

signifier.

Femmes Fatales

of

technologies In

of

cinema

the

figure

dissimulation,

are of

masquerade

extend

employed

`femme and

such so

as

fatale',

duplicity.

analysis to

to

reinforce

woman Female

is

examine the

shown

sexuality

how

the

instability

to is

be

forms

of

constituted

perceived

as

and

`woman'

as

through

threatening

because both emphasized and fetishized (through close-up, lighting, focus and so on), and maintained as a site which troubles epistemological assumptions concerning what can and cannot be known (Doane 1991, 1). Doane thus presents a reading of a variety of films where the woman is unveiled, psychically, the threat explored through the mechanics of the gaze. Silverman and de Lauretis both explore the process of cinematic and psychic identification, while complicating Mulvey's comprehension of the gaze as being always aligned with masculinity.

In

different

ways,

both

examine

how

the

structures

of

identification

can

involve a double, and sometimes paradoxical, engagement on the part of female spectators, whereby they identify with both the `positions of both desired object and desiring subject' (Thornham 1999, 56). Identification for de Lauretis, the engagement of female subjectivity in narrative movement, is inextricably involved with the pleasures of narrative. However, this

is

never

neutral,

for

as

de

Lauretis

argues,

narratives

are

always

in

some

manner

Oedipal. Thus, `[t]he cinematic apparatus, in the totality of its operations and effects, produces

not

merely

images

but

imaging.

It

binds

affect

and

meaning

to

images

by

establishing terms of identification, orienting the movement of desire, and positioning the spectator in relation to them' (de Lauretis 1999, 85). As de Lauretis comments, `[i]f governed by an Oedipal logic, it is because it is situated within the system of exchange . . . where

woman functions

as both

a sign (representation) and

a

value

(object) for that

exchange' (1999, 88). Silverman comprehends cinema as figuring a psychic plenitude, its range of signifiers seducing the viewer with the paradoxically impossible possibility of psychic completion, from which the subject has been separated since infancy. For Silverman, cinema therefore

feminist film studies and film theory

163

re-enacts the primary displacement identified by Freud, by which the human subject comes to be constituted through separation and lack. Woman in film, in Silverman's reading, stands in as both mirror and screen of male lack (Thornham 1999, 56), in a complex reconfiguration of the signs of absence belonging to a Freudian lexical triangulation of castration, disavowal and fetishism (Silverman 1988, 6ff.). `Always on display', woman, Silverman concludes, has so little resistance to the male gaze, `that she often seems no more than an extension of it' (Silverman 1988, 32).

Spectatorship Clearly, the discussion opened between feminism and psychoanalysis in the field of film theory opens up the problematic of the gaze as both assumed locus in the constitution of subjectivity and in its practical-ideological positioning of the female spectator. As psychoanalytic work reveals, the spectator is not simply the person sitting in the cinema but is also the imagined subject constituted by a range of textual effects, not confined to diegesis but extending to framing, editing, lighting, sound and so on. The technology of cinematic representation and projection, in extending its powers of imaginary and phantasmatic constitution beyond the immediate matters of narrative and representation, has arguably greater control over subjectification for its `invisibility' (most members of film audiences do not, arguably, distance themselves from the narrative so as to observe the processes by which those narratives create their effects ± at least, not during a screening). However, it can be argued that the psychoanalytic focus on psychic positioning of the subject and the objectification of woman leaves the female spectator with only a passive role, wherein, constituted always as object of desire and as lack or absence, there is little or no position which runs counter to the structures that psychoanalytically inflected analysis imposes as much as it interprets. Moreover, as B. Ruby Rich appositely summarizes, the political problematic inherent in the psychoanalytic project, inasmuch as `sexuality and psychoanalysis are considered ahistorical, eternal, outside ideology', so analytical procedures addressing sexuality and situated by psychoanalytic reading reproduce in theory the traditional positioning of women (Citron et al. 1999, 117). The feminist focus on the female spectator seeks to redress the balance, by analysing female figures which trouble, albeit

momentarily,

the

effects

of

containment

and

closure

effected

by

mainstream

Hollywood or narrative cinema. Reading those subversive or excessive representations and their effects against the ideological grain extends the possibility of power and resistance for the female spectator. It has thus been a necessary project of feminist film analysis to articulate difference, dissonance and resistance within the mainstream, rather than simply reading displacement and the maintenance of passivity or in seeking to create a purely oppositional filmic discourse. A striking example of analysis which situates the dissident within mainstream cinema with regard to the female spectator is that of Mary Ann Doane, already mentioned, in

Femmes Fatales

. In the first chapter, `Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female

Spectator' (Doane 1991, 17±32; first published in

Screen

in 1982), Doane develops her

Á re's essay arguments concerning a different spectatorship through a reading of Joan Rivie `Womanliness as a Masquerade', first published in

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

(1929). Doane therefore draws on psychoanalytic theory, and yet provides a more active, participatory role for the female spectator. Drawing on Riviere's argument that `womanliness'

is

not

essential

but

a

mask

or

role

to

be

performed,

Doane

suggests

that

the

modern north american criticism and theory

164

masquerade, `in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The masquerade's resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity . . . Masquerade . . . involves a realignment of femininity' (1991, 25±6). There is thus a destabilization in the truth of the image,

which

is

resistant

to

patriarchal

assumptions

concerning

woman's

`truth',

and

which, therefore, has an affirmative potential for dissident identification on the part of the female spectator. Such identification on the part of the female spectator with the fact that femininity is performed (and can thus be changed, denied, abandoned, in favour of other performative masks or affects), leads Doane to the conclusion that `[f]emininity is produced very precisely as a position within a network of power relations . . . the elaboration of a theory of female spectatorship is indicative of the crucial necessity of understanding that position in order to dislocate it' (1991, 32).

Matters of difference We have seen above that psychoanalytic feminist film critique is available to criticism in that

its

concerns

reproduce

the

implicitly

patriarchal

ideologies

of

universalism

and

ahistoricism. In addition, there is a sense in which the woman, whether as spectator or film image, has been analysed or otherwise addressed without due attention to matters of class. While feminist film studies `began' in the United States with specifically sociological and ideological critiques of patriarchal and capitalist structures of aesthetic representation in mind, the transformation of film analysis by the intervention of theory (specifically psychoanalysis) can be read, in retrospect, as a retreat from the political, for all its apparent radicality. While the work of the critics already cited is undeniably of great significance and marks, moreover, a series of urgent interventions, what the various debates between film theorists have revealed are a number of limits to aspects of the theoretically driven project. The binarisms `male-active/female-passive' on which certain theoretical assumptions in feminist film studies rest (Mulvey's essay has been extensively criticized for this static model) do not account for matters of class, race and sexual orientation. In recent years, critics such as Jane Gaines have drawn attention to the blindness in film theory to the possible theorization of a lesbian gaze or to the `elision of the specificity of black women's positioning', to which Lola Young has drawn our attention. Young

has

continent',

as

remarked, follows:

in

the

`There

context

has

been

of

Freud's

white

metaphor

feminist

of

woman

overinvestment

as

in

`the

the

dark

gender

component of the ``dark continent'', which has resulted in the virtual elimination of the racial and colonial implications. Thus this most racialized of sexual metaphors has become synonymous with the concerns of white women' (1996, 177). Jane Gaines has also spoken to the inability of a `high-theoretical' discourse to speak to the historical and cultural specificities

of

race

experience,

while

also

considering

the

relative

silence

on

lesbian

spectatorship. In an essay from 1988, `White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory', first published in

Screen

, Gaines begins by suggesting that

`[p]ositing a lesbian spectator would significantly change the trajectory of the gaze' (in Thornham 1999, 293). She continues, `[i]t might even lead us to see how the eroticised star body might be not just the object, but what I would term the visual objective of another female gaze within the film's diegesis ± a gaze with which the viewer might identify' (293). As an example of such a situation for the gaze, Gaines locates the reciprocal, subversive gaze between Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

, which, as

feminist film studies and film theory Gaines

goes

on

to

suggest,

can

be

read

as

165

excluding

both

the

straight

and

the

male

perspective and location, and effectively erasing the `male/female opposition' (294). On

the

question

of

race,

Gaines

points

out

that

the

`dominant

feminist

paradigm

actually encourages us not to think in terms of any oppression other than male dominance and female subordination'; however, `it is clear that Afro-American women have historically formulated identity and political allegiance in terms of race rather than gender or class . . . Even more difficult for feminist theory to digest is black female identification with the black male. On this point, black feminists diverge from white feminists, in repeatedly reminding us that they do not necessarily see the black male as patriarchal antagonist, but feel instead that their racial oppression is ``shared'' with men' (294±5). Thus, what Gaines brings

into

category,

focus

is

however

the

urgent

much

that

necessity

of

not

categorization

sealing

may

off

appear

the to

subject be

as

based

an

on

idealized questions

concerning gender, from the subject's historicity and her real historical experience. A theorization of position which forgets to account for cultural and historical specificity ultimately undoes its political potential in being structured from its initiating moments around unread assumptions which amount to a retreat from political engagement. bell hooks addresses the question of black female spectators in her

Representation

Black Looks: Race and

(1992). Importantly, in analysing the power of the look, she argues, from a

reading of Frantz Fanon, that `[s]paces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see'. She continues, `[t]he ``gaze'' has been and is the site of resistance for colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ``looks'' to document, one that is oppositional . . . one learns to look a certain way in order to resist' (1992, 116). Criticizing the psychoanalytic paradigm as hegemonic within film studies, hooks resituates the question of resistance in specifically political ways, drawing on models of analysis taken from cultural studies in presenting an argument that the gaze is materially constructed. The work of bell hooks, Jane Gaines and Lola Young has been of vital significance in opening the field of feminist film theory to itself, in order to articulate the various blind spots which have historically developed as a result of, on the one hand, ahistorical and formalist theorization, and, on the other, the institutionalization of radical theorization and the often all too inevitable concomitant effect of depoliticization. Other critics, such as Tania Modleski and Judith Butler, have also sought to redress the balance in addressing matters of race and gender in filmic representation. Modleski (1991) has turned to the psychoanalytic/deconstructive work of Homi Bhabha in the field of postcolonial studies, particularly resistances

his

powerful

to racial and

deconstruction, has also

articulation

of

the

functions

cultural stereotyping. sought to

Butler's

of

mimicry

own

destabilize heterosexist

work

and

ambivalence

as

(1991), informed by

assumptions

concerning

the

authenticity and essentialist truth of gender, addressing gender and sexual identity in terms of impersonation and performativity, as a series of supplements without origin. This is not, of course, to suggest that feminist film theory has arrived at a point where the political problematic has been effectively and comprehensively countered, or that feminist film

theories

methodology,

have

reached

analysis

or

some

concern.

cosy

or

(Nor,

facile

indeed,

consensus should

with

they

regard

to

necessarily,

matters

for

to

do

of so

would be, finally, to announce that film theory's time had come and that there were no more political questions to be asked, thereby negating the very premise on which the very idea of feminist film analysis arose.) As Barbara Christian has remarked, with regard to the

modern north american criticism and theory

166

question of addressing race in relation to gender: `if defined as black, her woman nature was often denied; if defined as woman, her blackness was often ignored; if defined as working class, her gender and race were muted' (cit. in Young-Bruehl 1996, 514). Yet we should not rush, as some have done, to say that so-called feminist film theories, have lost impetus or direction because of what might appear to be `internal' debates. What remains vital is the political

condition

theoretical

or

of

feminist

academic

film

concerns.

analysis,

As

Sue

as

a

politics

Thornham

has

irreducible so

cogently

to

institutional

summarized

the

position, `[i]f that politics has had more recently to recognise divisions and fragmentations in subjectivity . . . and histories and experiences other than those of the white woman under western patriarchy, such recognitions of the differences between women may be seen to signal the further development of and not, as some have suggested, a loss of direction in feminist film theory'.

Julian Wolfreys

Further reading and works cited Butler, J.

Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of `Sex' . London, 1993.

Citron, M. et al. `Women and Film', in de Lauretis, T.

Ð. `Oedipus Interruptus', in Doane, M. A. Ð.

Feminist Film Theory, ed. S. Thornham. Edinburgh 1999.

Alice Doesn't. Basingstoke, 1984. Feminist Film Theory, ed. S. Thornham. Edinburgh 1996.

The Desire to Desire. Basingstoke, 1987.

Femmes Fatales New York, 1991.

Erens, P. (ed.)

Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington, IN, 1990.

Gaines, J. `White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory', in

Feminist Film Theory, ed. S. Thornham. Edinburgh, 1999. Haskell, M.

From Reverence to Rape. Chicago, 1974.

Black Looks. London, 1992.

hooks, b.

Johnston, C. `Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema', in

Notes on Women's Cinema, ed. C. Johnston.

London, 1973. Kaplan, E. A.

Modleski, T. Ð.

Women and Film. New York, 1983.

Woman at the Keyhole. Bloomington, IN, 1990.

Mayne, J.

The Woman who Knew Too Much. New York, 1988.

Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a `Postfeminist' Age . London, 1991.

Mulvey, L. `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Pietropaolo, L. and Testafarri, A. (eds)

Screen, 16, 3, 1975.

Feminisms in the Cinema. Bloomington, IN, 1995.

Rich, B. R. `The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism', Silverman, K. Ð.

Jump Cut, 19, 1978.

The Acoustic Mirror. Bloomington, IN, 1988.

The Threshold of the Visible World. New York, 1996.

Smith, B. `Toward a Black Feminist Criticism', in

The New Feminist Criticism, ed. E. Showalter.

London, 1986. Smith, S. `The Image of Women in Film', in

Feminist Film Theory, ed. S. Thornham. Edinburgh,

1999. Stam, R.

Film Theory. Oxford, 2000.

Thornham, S. (ed.)

Feminist Film Theory. Edinburgh, 1999.

Women and Film, Editorial, 1, 1972. Young, L.

Fear of the Dark. London, 1996.

Young-Bruehl, E.

The Anatomy of Prejudices. Cambridge, MA, 1996.

23. Ethical Criticism

The recent incarnation of ethical criticism in literary studies functions both as a response to the alleged nihilism of poststructuralist theoretical concerns such as deconstruction and postmodernism, as well as to the return to humanistic interpretation. By the mid-1980s, deconstructionist,

marxist

and

postmodernist

methodologies

appeared

to

reach

their

influential apex, prompting a critical backlash from a variety of quarters. As David Parker remarks: `The irresistible expansive moment of post-structuralism in the 1970s and early 1980s has suppressed some discursive possibilities which, constituted as we partly are by various religious and humanistic traditions, we stand in abiding need of, and are poorer without. The possibilities I mean are evaluative, and especially ethical ones' (1994, 3±4). With the evolution of a number of new, socially challenging and culturally relevant modes of critical thought ± including, for example, gender studies, historical criticism and other forms of cultural criticism ± poststructuralist schools of interpretation, deconstruction in particular, increasingly endured charges of `anti-humanism' and the development of `antitheory'

movements

that

persist

in

the

present.

The

emergence

of

these

movements

accounts for the revival of ethical criticism, an interpretive paradigm that explores the nature of ethical issues and their considerable roles in the creation and interpretation of literary works. The

recent

apotheosis

of

ethical

criticism

finds

its

origins

in

the

North

American

academy ± and particularly as a result of the institutionalization of English studies and literary theory in the United States. In European circles, ethical criticism has taken on entirely different theoretical dimensions. While some British critics ± Christopher Ricks, for example ± have sporadically challenged the place of theory in literary studies, many European

scholars opt to examine ethical

issues

in terms of their

philosophical possi-

bilities rather than through the interpretive lens of cultural studies. The current North American re-evaluation of poststructuralism's theoretical hegemony finds its roots in the initial critical responses that often accompanied the promulgation of the trend's various sub-movements. This is, of course, not at all unusual, for new critical paradigms inevitably blossom amid a fury of debate. Jean-Franc Ë ois Lyotard's widely acknowledged postmodernist manifesto almost

The Postmodern Condition

concomitantly

(1979), a

volume

with

the

(1979), for example, enjoyed its publication

appearance

that problematizes

`the

of

myth

Gerald

Literature against Itself

Graff's

of the postmodern

breakthrough'

as a

literary and critical movement destined to implode because of postmodernism's dependence

upon

its

own

extreme

elements

of

scepticism,

alienation

and

self-parody.

As

a

historical response to modernist conceptions of art as a panacea for the chaos of the early twentieth century, postmodernism posits that art lacks the required faculties of consolation

to

assuage

the

human

condition

in

the

post-industrial

world.

`Postmodernism

modern north american criticism and theory

168

signifies that the nightmare of history, as modernist aesthetic and philosophical traditions have defined history, has overtaken modernism itself', Graff writes. `If history lacks value, pattern,

and

rationally

intelligible

meaning',

he

continues,

`then

no

exertions

of

the

shaping, ordering imagination can be anything but a refuge from truth' (1979, 32, 55). Rather than asserting its utter impossibility in the postmodern world, Graff's search for truth in literature and criticism underscores one of the principal arguments emanating from the practitioners of ethical criticism: that literature and its interpretation

do

offer

readers the possibilities for locating truth and defining value despite the persistence of a contemporary landscape that seems to rest upon a sceptical and chaotic social foundation. `Postmodern literature', Graff remarks, `poses in an especially acute fashion the critical problem raised by all experimental art: does this art represent a criticism of the distorted aspects

of

modern

postmodernist

life

literature

or

a

mere

evokes

addition

likewise

to

it?'

(1979,

subverts

the

normative

55).

The

roles

criticism

of

meaning

that and

value in literary interpretation. In

Truth and the Ethics of Criticism

, Christopher Norris examines the ways in which

literary theory has redefined itself in a contemporary hermeneutic circle concerned with epistemological

rigour

and

cultural

critique.

Norris

argues

that

literary

theorists

can

implement a series of correctives that may yet infuse the theoretical project with much needed doses of pragmatism and social relevance. Norris characterizes this paradigmatic shift as `the retreat from high theory', as an era in which `a great deal depends on where one happens to be in terms of the wider socio-political culture and the local opportunities for linking theory and practice in a meaningful way' (1994, 1, 5). By providing readers with the means to establish vital interconnections between texts and the divergent, heterogeneous community in which we live, ethical criticism attempts to empower the theoretical project with the capacity to produce socially and culturally relevant critiques. This way of reading, Norris

writes,

allows

critics

to

alternative where the difference the

common

differences ethics

of

ground,

between

criticism

the

look

within

measure

to

`the

prospect

of

a

better,

more

enlightened

each and every subject is envisaged as providing

of

shared

humanity,

whereby

to

transcend

such

ethnic and national ties' (1994, 94). In this way, Norris posits an that

self-consciously

assesses

the

theoretical

presuppositions

under-

girding the moral character of contemporary hermeneutics. In one of the more forceful ethical critiques of literary theory, Tobin Siebers identifies the crisis that confronts modern criticism ± an interpretive dilemma that `derives in part from an ethical reaction to the perceived violence of the critical act' (1988, 15). He further argues that an ethical approach to literary study requires critics to engage their subjects selfconsciously with sustained attention to the potential consequences of their interpretive choices: `The ethics of criticism involves critics in the process of making decisions and of studying how these choices affect the lives of fellow critics, writers, students, and readers as well as our ways of defining literature and human nature.' Siebers ascribes the aforementioned

crisis

practice.

in

criticism

`Modern

to

literature

a

linguistic

has

its

own

paradox cast

of

that

inevitably

characters',

he

problematizes writes.

`It

critical

speaks

in

a

discourse largely concerned with issues of language, but behind its definitions of language lie ideals of human character' (1988, 10). Siebers argues that acknowledging the place of ethics in critical theory affords practitioners of the discipline the autonomy to offer relevant conclusions

about

literary

texts

and

their

considerable

social

and

ideological

import.

`Literary criticism cannot endure without the freedom to make judgements', Siebers notes, `and modern theory urgently needs to regain the capacity to decide' (1988, 41). The ability

ethical criticism to

render

sound,

169

moral

interpretations,

then,

provides

the

foundation

for

an

ethical

criticism that fully engages the remarkably human nature of literary study. Such a reading methodology allows for the self-conscious reassessment of our evaluative procedures and their

potential

for

the

production

of

meaningful

critiques.

As

Siebers

concludes:

`To

criticize ethically brings the critic into a special field of action: the field of human conduct and belief concerning the human' (1988, 1).

The Company We Keep (1988) and Martha C.

Volumes such as Wayne C. Booth's Nussbaum's

Love's

Knowledge

(1990)

demonstrate

the

interpretive

power

of

ethical

criticism, as well as the value of its critical machinery to scholarly investigations regarding the

nature

of

motivations of

literary satire ±

character, the

the

narrative

cultural

landscapes

manoeuvres that

of

Booth

fiction,

and

ascribes to

the

ethical

our desire to

`make and remake ourselves' (1988, 14). Critics such as Booth and Nussbaum avoid the textual violence of censorship to advocate instead a form of criticism that explores the moral sensibilities that inform works of art. In

Love's Knowledge, Nussbaum illustrates the

nature of ethical criticism's recent emergence as a viable interpretive paradigm: `Questions about justice, about well-being and social distribution, about moral realism and relativism, about the nature of rationality, about the concept of the person, about the emotions and desires, about the role of luck in human life ± all these and others are debated from many sides with considerable excitement and even urgency', she writes (1990, 169±70). In its desire to examine the ethical nature of these artistic works, ethical criticism seeks to create a meaningful bond between the life of the narrative and the life of the reader. Although ethical criticism hardly functions as a conventional interpretive paradigm in the tradition of marxist, Lacanian or gender textual readings, it serves effectively nevertheless as a selfreflexive means for critics to explain the contradictory emotions and problematic moral stances that often mask complex and fully realized literary characters. Ethical criticism provides its

practitioners, moreover, with the capacity to posit socially relevant inter-

pretations by celebrating the Aristotelian qualities of living well and flourishing. In this way, ethical criticism evokes the particularly `human character' of literature that Siebers extols the merits of in In

The Ethics of Criticism.

The Reader, the Text, the Poem (1978), Louise M. Rosenblatt supplies ethical critics

with an interpretational matrix for explaining the motives of readers and their `transactions' with literary texts. Rosenblatt identifies two different types of reading strategies ± aesthetic reading, in which the reader devotes particular attention to what occurs

during

the actual reading event, and non-aesthetic reading, a reading strategy in which the reader focuses attention upon the traces of knowledge and data that will remain

after the event.

Rosenblatt designates the latter strategy as a kind of `efferent' reading in which readers primarily interest themselves in what will be derived materially from the experience (1978, 23±5). Efferent readers reflect upon the verbal symbols in literature, `what the symbols designate, what they may be contributing to the end result that [the reader] seeks ± the information, the concepts, the guides to action, that will be left with [the reader] when the reading is over' (1978, 27). Booth argues that ethical criticism functions as a methodology for distinguishing the `efferent freight' that results from this reading strategy (1983, 14). Rosenblatt describes the act of reading itself ± whether aesthetic or non-aesthetic ± as a transaction that derives from the peculiar array of experiences that define the reader's persona: `Each reader brings to the transaction not only a specific past life and literary history, not only a repertory of internalised ``codes'', but also a very active present, with all its

preoccupations,

anxieties,

questions,

and

aspirations',

she

writes

(1978,

144).

This

modern north american criticism and theory

170

recognition of the complexity of the reading transaction underscores the deep interconnections

between

readers

and

the

human

communities

in

which

they

live

and

seek

personal fulfilment. Rosenblatt argues that the transaction of reading involves `laying bare the assumptions about human beings and society and the hierarchy of values that govern the world derived from the text' (1978, 149±50), a conclusion regarding the ethical value of art in the human community that John Gardner illuminates in his influential volume, (1978).

He

knowledge

argues from

its

that

literary

pages,

the

art

should

possibility

offer

±

readers

rather

than

the the

On Moral Fiction

opportunity didactic

for

receiving

requirement

±

of

emerging from a reading experience with a heightened sense of communal awareness. Gardner writes:

We recognize art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms. As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientific hypotheses, moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action. (1978, 19)

The role of the ethical critic, then, involves the articulation of a given text's ability to convey

notions

of

knowledge

and

universal

good

to

its

readers,

whether

through

the

auspices of allegory, satire, morality plays, haiku or any other fictive means of representation. In Gardner's estimation, ethical critics can only accomplish this end through the fomentation of understanding in their readership. `Knowledge may or may not lead to belief',

he

writes.

But

`understanding

always

does,

since

to

believe

one

understands

a

complex situation is to form at least a tentative theory of how one ought to behave in it' (1978, 139). Thus, ethical criticism examines the ways in which literary characters respond to the divergent forces they encounter in the fictional landscapes that they occupy. Their human

behaviours

and

conclusion. As Gardner notes in

actions

provide

On Moral Fiction

the

interpretive

basis

for

moral

reflection

and

, however, practitioners of ethical criticism must

invariably confront the spectre of censorship, a dangerous commodity rooted in the human tendency to instruct without regard for the plurality of competing value systems at work in both

the

theoretical

`Didacticism',

he

realm

cautions,

of

literary

`inevitably

criticism

and

simplifies

the

morality

larger and

world thus

of

humankind.

misses

it'

(1978,

137). Similarly, critics must avoid the perils of attempting to establish models of behaviour and codified moral standards of acceptability, for such practices inevitably lead to the textual injustice of censorship. Gardner writes: `I would not claim that even the worst bad art should be outlawed, since morality by compulsion is a fool's morality' (1978, 106). Despite his own admonitions to the contrary in

On Moral Fiction

± and because of the

dearth of genuine scholarly wisdom inherent in his study of moral criticism ± Gardner himself nevertheless trolls dangerously close to the shores of censorship when he speaks of carrying out `art's proper work': art `destroys only evil', he argues. `If art destroys good, mistaking it for evil, then that art is false, an error; it requires denunciation' (1978, 15). Such a proposition inevitably leads to the establishment of singular standards of good and evil in the heterogeneous, pluralistic spheres of criticism and human reality. Can

ethical

critics, in good conscience, operate from superior positions of moral privilege and arrogant didacticism?

ethical criticism

171

Understanding the place of moral philosophy in the latest incarnation of ethical criticism offers

a

means

Philosophy

for

exploring

this

dilemma.

Bernard

Williams's

Ethics and the Limits of

(1985), for instance, discusses the ways in which the tenets of moral philosophy

provide a context for us `to recreate ethical life' in the sceptical world of contemporary western culture (1985, vii). In addition to examining the Johnsonian question of how to live, Williams devotes particular attention to assessing the role of the ethical critic. `Given people who are in some general sense committed to thinking in ethical terms, how should they think?' he asks. `Are their ethical thoughts sound?' (1985, 71). The issue of a valid ethical criticism itself poses a spurious philosophical quandary, for it requires the critic to define standards of moral correctness, or, as Williams concludes, to dispense with establishing them altogether. `An ethical theory is a theoretical account of what ethical thought and practice are', he writes, which `either implies a general test for the correctness of basic ethical beliefs and principles or else implies that there cannot be such a test' (1985, 72). Williams suggests that critics can only surmount this dilemma by interpreting a given set of events from an empathetic

position,

and,

moreover,

through

their

`ability

to

arrive

at

shared

ethical

judgements' (1985, 97). In this way, ethical critics and moral philosophers alike engage in a form of ethical practice that allows for the reflexive process of critical contemplation, a self-conscious methodology for critically articulating the pluralistic nuances of that which constitutes a shared sense of moral correctness. In addition to questioning the nature of our communal sense of ethical propriety, moral philosophers such as Williams attempt to account for the motives of those critics who dare to engage in the interpretation of human values. Such critics must assume the risks ± whether or not they employ an equitable and pluralistic system of evaluation ± of impinging upon the current

direction

of

the

philosophical

conversation

regarding

human

ethics.

`Critical

reflection should seek for as much shared understanding as it can find on any issue, and use any ethical material that, in the context of the reflective discussion, makes some sense and commands some loyalty', Williams notes, although `the only serious enterprise is living, and we have to live after the reflection' (1985, 117). For this reason, the principles of moral philosophy

charge

ethical

critics

with

the

maintenance

of

a

sense

of

free

intellectual

discourse, in addition to obliging them to render sound moral conclusions. `We should not try to seal determinate values into future society', he warns, for `to try to transmit free inquiry and the reflective consciousness is to transmit something more than nothing, and something that demands some forms of life more rather than others' (1985, 173). Ethical criticism endeavours, as a matter of course, to communicate the meaning of this `something' and its greater social relevance through the interpretation of literary works. In

The Company We Keep

, Booth offers an expansive account of ethical criticism and its

potential for literary study, while also attempting to allay any fears that his heuristic rests upon dogmatic foundations. Booth affords particular attention to the range of hermeneutic functions that ethical criticism performs, as well as to its unfortunate lack of clarity as an interpretive paradigm:

 . It is practised everywhere, often We can no longer pretend that ethical criticism is passe surreptitiously, often guiltily, and often badly, partly because it is the most difficult of all critical modes, but partly because we have so little serious talk about why it is important, what purposes it serves, and how it might be done well. (1988, 19)

Booth

notes

didactic

in

that

ethical

nature.

criticism's

Instead,

Booth

opponents argues,

often

`ethical

misread

criticism

the

paradigm's

attempts

to

intent

describe

as

the

modern north american criticism and theory

172

encounters of a storyteller's ethos with that of the reader or listener. Ethical critics need not begin with the intent to evaluate, but their descriptions will always entail appraisals of the value of what is being described.' In this way, Booth supports a reflexive interpretational methodology, an ethical criticism that allows for the recognition of the interconnections between the reading experience and the life of the reader. Ethical criticism acknowledges, moreover, the powerful factors of language and ideology in its textual assessments. `There are no neutral ethical terms', Booth writes, `and a fully responsible ethical criticism will make explicit those appraisals that are implicit whenever a reader or listener reports on stories about human beings in action' (1988, 8±9). Booth criticism

defines ±

as

these

acts

of

instances

of

`coduction',

appraisal

referential

±

these

moments

practical in

applications

which

critics

of

ethical

compare

their

reading experiences with the conclusions of others. Like Siebers, who argues that `the heart of ethics is the desire for community' (1988, 202), Booth notes that the act of `judgement requires a community' of trustworthy friends and colleagues (1988, 72). Coduction, in Booth's schema, valorizes the reflexive relationship that develops between texts and their readers, as well as the equally reflexive manner in which texts postulate meaning. `The question of whether value is in the poem or in the reader is radically and permanently ambiguous, requiring two answers', Booth writes. `Of course the value is not in there,

actually, until it is actualized, by the reader. But of course it could not be actualized if it were not

in potential

there,

,

in

the

poem'

(1988,

89).

Booth

also

notes

ethical

criticism's

pluralistic imperatives and their value to the understanding and operation of ideological paradigms. In his analysis of feminist criticism, for example, Booth discusses the ways in which `the feminist challenge' derives from fundamental ethical dilemmas inherent in the construction of literary texts: `Every literary work implies either that women can enter its imaginative world as equals or that they cannot ± that instead they must, in reading, decide whether or not to enter a world in which men are a privileged center' (1988, 387). As Booth reveals, feminist criticism itself functions as a type of ethical criticism, a means of literary

interpretation that seeks

to repair an abiding social injustice

that, through

its

misogyny, problematizes the lives of the larger community of readers. In

The Ethics of Reading

, J. Hillis Miller posits an `ethics of reading' that seeks to explain

the reflexive process that occurs between the text and the reader, in addition to offering testimony Miller

to

the

argues

ethical

that

the

possibilities

act

of

reading

of

poststructuralism,

ethically

transpires

particularly

when

`an

deconstruction.

author

turns

back

on himself, so to speak, turns back on a text he or she has written, re-reads it' (1987, 15). For Miller, such a process allows readers ± the

de facto

authors of the texts that they appraise

± to offer relevant conclusions about the moral properties of literary works and the ethical sensibilities

of

otherwise. In

the

readers'

theoretical

Versions of Pygmalion

the `ethics of narration'

and

the

premises,

whether

they

be

deconstructive

or

(1990), Miller proffers a similar argument regarding

shifting,

performative aspects

of reading

experiences.

Miller derives the title of his volume from the story of Pygmalion in Book 10 of the

Metamorphoses

± a narrative in which something inanimate comes alive, just as reading

ethically creates a vital, living relationship between the text and the reader. Miller devotes special attention to the ways in which reading defies stasis, as well as to the manner in which reading ethically, moreover, evolves during successive readings of a given text: `Reading occurs in a certain spot to a certain person in a certain historical, personal, institutional, and political situation, but it always exceeds what was predictable from those circumstances',

he

observes.

`It

makes

something

happen

that

is

a

deviation

from

its

ethical criticism context,

and

what

173

happens

demands

a

new

definition

each

time'

(1990,

22).

In

his

paradigm for the ethics of reading, Miller allows for the negative possibilities of reading, aspects that Booth, in his effort to celebrate ethical criticism and its myriad of affirmative outcomes, prefers to ignore: `A theory of the ethics of reading that takes seriously the possibility that reading might lead to other morally good or valuable actions would also have to allow for the possibility that the reading even of a morally exemplary book might cause something morally deplorable to occur', Miller writes (21). In this manner, Miller postulates a valuable corollary to the reflexive properties of ethical criticism and the ways in which context and temporality possess the propensity to alter the quality of reading experiences. Like Williams, Nussbaum advocates an ethical criticism with tenable foundations in moral philosophy, as well as an interpretive mechanism that functions as an impetus for sustaining

moral

discourse

and

social

interconnection.

In

addition

to

her

enthusiastic

subscription to many of the arguments inherent in Booth's ontology for an ethical criticism, Nussbaum proffers a series of essays in

Love's Knowledge that sharpen the ethical paradigm's

focus through her discussion about the interrelations between philosophy and literature, as well as through her close, ethical readings of a diversity of writers, including Henry James, Proust, Ann Beattie and Samuel Beckett, among others. Drawing upon selected works by these figures, Nussbaum examines the ways in which style and content impinge upon ethical issues, while also deliberating about the manner in which the ethical interpretation of literary works offers readers a means for exploring the moral import of emotions and locating paths to self-knowledge. Nussbaum affords particular attention to the roles that stylistics,

linguistics

and

structure

play

in

articulating

the

moral

essence

of

a

given

narrative:

Form and style are not incidental features. A view of life is of

genre,

formal

structures,

sentences,

vocabulary,

of

told. The telling itself ± the selection

the

whole

manner

of

addressing

the

reader's sense of life ± all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life's relations and connections. Life is never simply

presented by a text; it is always represented as something. (1990, 5)

In Nussbaum's schema, then, the literary artist bears the responsibility for honourably positing narratives that allow readers the opportunity to discover their own paths to selfunderstanding and meaning, to formulate their own strategies for living well. Like Booth, Nussbaum equates the quality of life with the ethical dimensions of literature. `The novel is itself a moral achievement', she writes, `and the well-lived life is a work of literary art' (1990, 148). In addition to advancing the ethical notion of community in her work, Nussbaum argues for the place of love as a subject in the evolving discourse of ethical criticism. `The subject of romantic and erotic love is not often treated in works on moral philosophy', she admits (1990, 336). For this reason, Nussbaum differentiates between the Kantian notions of `pathological' and `practical' love in her analysis. Pathological love, she notes, signifies the often irrational emotions of romantic love in sharp contrast to the more enduring qualities of practical love, an emotion that Nussbaum defines as `an attitude of concern that one can will oneself to have toward another human being, and which is, for that reason, a part of morality'. The moral dimensions of practical love, therefore, merit considerable attention as a methodology for understanding the many ways in which readers respond ethically to literary texts. Moreover, `if one believes, in addition, that the realm of morality is of special

modern north american criticism and theory

174

and perhaps of supreme importance in human life . . . one will be likely, having once made that distinction, to ascribe high

human

worth to practical love' (1990, 336±7). In this way,

the acknowledgement of practical love provides additional insight into human conceptions of living well and the manner in which literary texts depict love's capacity to produce personal fulfilment. Nussbaum also refines the communal aspects that mark the ethical paradigm. She extends the metaphor that ethical criticism forges a type of community between text and reader to allow for not only the possibility of living well as an individual, but living together well in a much larger sense of the word. `A community is formed by author and readers', she writes. `In this community separateness and qualitative difference are not neglected; the privacy and the imagining of each is nourished and encouraged. But at the same time it is stressed that living together is the object of our ethical interest' (1990, 48). In

Poetic Justice

(1995), Nussbaum advances this concept through her exploration of

the value of ethical reading as a means for influencing political theory and public discourse: `If we think of reading in this way, as combining one's own absorbed imagining with periods of more detached (and interactive) critical scrutiny, we can already begin to see why we might find in it an activity well suited to public reasoning in a democratic society' (1995, 9). By widening the scope of the ethical paradigm to account for a range of emotional states, as well as a variety of public and private modes of discourse, Nussbaum shares in the creation of an ethical criticism that provides for the relevant interpretation of the social, political and cultural nuances of the human community.

Getting It Right

In

, Geoffrey Galt Harpham continues Booth's and Nussbaum's efforts to

elaborate the ethical paradigm as an interdisciplinary means of interpretation. Ethical criticism should `be considered a matrix, a hub from which the various discourses and disciplines fan out and at which they meet, crossing out of themselves to encounter each other', he writes. `Ethics is perhaps best conceived as a `conceptual base' ± neither as organic drive nor as properly conceptual superstructure, but rather as a necessary, and necessarily impure and unsystematic, mediation between unconscious and instinctual life and its cognitive and cultural transformation' (1992, 17±18). Harpham supports this endeavour through his examinations of such `ethical terms' as `obligation', `

ought

', `ethical duty' and `ethicity'. Through their delineation, he

seeks to establish meaningful interconnections between ethical criticism and other means of textual inquiry. Harpham argues that the issue of choice lies at the heart of obligation. `One can ± one must ± choose which principle to be governed by', he observes. `Ethics in general is a species of risk that affords no rigorous way to tell ethical reasons from other reasons, choices from obligations' (1992, 37). Harpham further asserts that `at the dead center of ethics lies the

ought

', or the ethical obligation. This notion of an

ought

± the moral obligations of an ethical

person ± reveals that person's `commitments, values, character. To be ethical, an

ought

must

not refer itself to threats or desires, coercion or self-ends' (1992, 18). Harpham defines `ethical duty' as a form of critical reflection: `One must always reflect', Harpham writes. `This is the law that ethical discourse virtually presumes as well as teaches' (1992, 42). Finally, in Harpham's conception of an ethical terminology, `ethicity' refers to the interpretive moment in ethical criticism: `the most dramatic of narrative turnings, the climactic point just between the knitting and unravelling of the action, the

fort

and the

da

, the moment when the rising line of

Ânouement'. Addressing the complication peaks, pauses, and begins its descent into the de narratological and characterological essences of this evaluative instance ± what Harpham calls the `macro-turn' ± enables ethical critics, through their obligations to their own sets of values and commitments, to reflect upon and interpret the moral choices depicted in narratives (1992, 171).

ethical criticism Despite

the

175

publication

in

recent

years

of

a

number

of

volumes

devoted

to

the

humanistic study of literary works, ethical criticism must still successfully contend with several issues of historical and contemporary import in order to authenticate itself as a viable interpretive paradigm. Apart from continuing to underscore its usefulness to literary study, ethical criticism must effectively differentiate itself from the contemporary critical prejudice associated with the `traditional humanism' previously associated with such figures as F. R. Leavis and Northrop Frye. Practitioners of ethical criticism are succeeding in this regard in a variety of ways, including their critical alliance with the ethical philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and via the recent emergence of the law and literature movement. By also

demonstrating

its

significant

pedagogical

value,

as

well

as

establishing

itself

as

a

meaningful component in the future of the theoretical project, the ethical paradigm may yet realize Booth's vision in

The Company We Keep of a reading methodology that shuns

theoretical dogma in favour of `critical pluralism' and highlights the ethical interconnections between the lives of readers and their textual experiences (1988, 489).

Kenneth Womack

Further reading and works cited The Company We Keep. Berkeley, CA, 1988.

Booth, W. C.

The Moral Imagination. Iowa City, IA, 1986.

Clausen, C.

Davis, T. F. and Womack, K. (eds) Eaglestone, R. Gardner, J.

On Moral Fiction. New York, 1978. Agents and Lives. Cambridge, 1993.

Goldberg. S. L. Graff, G.

Mapping the Ethical Turn. Charlottesville, VA, 2001.

Ethical Criticism. Edinburgh, 1997.

Literature against Itself. Chicago, 1979.

Harpham, G. Galt. Lyotard, J.-F.

Getting It Right. Chicago, 1992.

The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis, MN, 1984.

Miller, J. Hillis.

The Ethics of Reading. New York, 1987.

Ð. `Is There an Ethics of Reading?', in Ð.

Reading Narrative, ed. J. Phelan. Columbus, OH, 1988.

Versions of Pygmalion. Cambridge, 1990.

Newton, A. Z. Norris, C.

Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA, 1995.

Truth and the Ethics of Criticism. New York, 1994.

Nussbaum, M. C.

The Fragility of Goodness. Cambridge, 1986.

Ð.

Love's Knowledge. New York, 1990.

Ð.

Poetic Justice. Boston, 1995.

Parker, D.

Ethics, Theory, and the Novel. Cambridge, 1994.

Parr, S. Resneck.

The Moral of the Story. New York, 1982.

PMLA, Special Issue, `Ethics and Literary Criticism', 114, 1, January 1999. Posner, R. A. `Against Ethical Criticism', Rosenblatt, L. M.

Philosophy and Literature, 21, 1997.

The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Carbondale, 1978.

Salmagundi, Special Issue, `Art and Ethics: A Symposium', 111, Summer 1996. Siebers, T.

The Ethics of Criticism. Ithaca, NY, 1988.

Spacks, P. Meyer. `The Novel as Ethical Paradigm', in

Why the Novel Matters, eds M. Spilka and C.

McCracken-Flesher. Bloomington, IN, 1990. Tirrell, L. `Storytelling and Moral Agency', Williams, B.

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48, Spring 1990.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, 1985.

Worthington, K. L.

Self as Narrative. Oxford, 1996.

24. Postmodernism

Any

discussion

of

postmodernism

in

the

USA

must

adopt

an

interdisciplinary

and

comparative perspective. The intellectual history of postmodernism can only be understood

in

literary

its

intricate

criticism

we

interconnections associate

with

that

straddle cultures,

postmodernism

is

for

fields

the

and

most

practices.

part

The

theoretical,

concerned not only with `literature as a question' (Lucy 1997, 141) but also with questions of

language,

representation,

identity,

origin

and

truth.

At

the

same

time,

the

`global'

features of postmodernism can be studied more efficiently in their specific `local' manifestations. Despite its increasing globalization, postmodernism has continued to encourage cultural differentiation and local solutions. The evolution of American postmodernism is a case in point. Many innovative practices in poetry, fiction, architecture, the visual and the performing arts

were

developed beginning in the

mid-1950s

in direct response to

the

economic and political environment of post-Fordist, Cold War America. These practices have benefited from an interaction with the emerging poststructuralist theories of France (deconstruction, oriented

Lacanian

theory),

or

with

psychoanalysis, the

literature

French

of

the

feminism)

European

and

Germany

avant-gardes

and

(reader-

the

Latin

American boom, but they cannot be seen as derivative. Theo D'haen and Hans Bertens's recent

book

(1997)

on

the

reception

of

postmodern

American

fiction

in

four

West

European countries demonstrates not only the impact of American postmodernism abroad but also the extent to which the dialogue with other literary experiences has helped expand the definition of American postmodernism to include alternative experiences and issues of gender, ethnicity or subjectivity. The earliest American uses of the term `post-Modern' to describe tendencies in postwar literature can be found in Charles Olson's essays beginning with `Projected Verse' (1950). Olson reserved the term for the anti-modernist and anti-rationalist aesthetics pursued by the poets and artists associated with the Black Mountain College. Limited originally to discussions of poetry and architecture, the term was gradually expanded to other artistic and cultural endeavours that reacted against modernism's emphasis on transcendent reason and its separation of art from history and mass culture. The early postmodern theorizings (William

Van

O'Connor,

Leslie

Fiedler,

Susan

Sontag)

encouraged

an

anti-elitist,

experiential approach to art. This approach was subsequently developed along two lines: one

existential-phenomenological,

ontological Altieri,

pluralization

Richard

emphasizing

(Richard

Pearce);

the

Wasson,

performative William

immediacy,

Spanos,

structural-epistemological,

other

Richard

process

art

Palmer,

Charles

highlighting

a

and

range

of

`doubly-coded', dislocating and reconfiguring procedures in literature (Jerome Klinkowitz, Larry

McCaffery,

Charles

Jencks,

Marjorie

Kenneth

Perloff,

Linda

Frampton),

the

Hutcheon), visual

arts

architecture

(Leonard

B.

(Robert

Meyer,

Venturi,

Hal

Foster,

postmodernism Rosalind

Krauss,

177

Craig

Owens),

photography

(Douglas

Crimp,

Linda

Andre),

theatre

È l Carroll) and dance (Sally Banes). Ihab Hassan was the first to (Herbert Blau), film (Noe pull these directions together into a comprehensive definition of postmodernism as an epistemic mutation in the `Western mind', a vast `unmaking' of the `tyranny of wholes' and their replacement with `fragments or fractures, and a corresponding ideological commitment to minorities in politics, sex, and language' (1977, 55). Hassan mapped this mutation in binary oppositions: abstraction, metaphor, depth, transcendence, technologism, elitism, the genital and the phallic are modern; new concreteness, metonymy, surface, immanence, runaway technology, anti-authoritarianism, the polymorphous and the androgynous are postmodern. First introduced in

The Dismemberment of Orpheus

contrastive features were amplified and revised in

methean Fire according

a

(1979)

and

non-linear,

the

retrospective

`paracritical'

style

collection that

(1971), Hassan's lists of

Paracriticisms

(1975),

The Right Pro-

The Postmodern Turn

imitated

the

experimental

(1987),

nature

of

postmodernism itself. The break with modernism was viewed from the outset in contradictory ways. For critics formed at

the school

of modernist and

New Critical principles,

postmodernism was a

retrograde assault on the values of Enlightenment rationalism and an `anti-intellectual' abandonment of aesthetic and cultural standards (Irving Howe, `Mass Society and PostFiction', 1959; Harry Levin, `What Was Modernism', 1960). For supporters, postmodernism was `everything that is radical, innovative, forward-looking' (Perloff 1998, 6); it was a `new sensibility' that attempted to `close the gap' between highbrow literature and mass culture, art and life (Susan Sontag, `One Culture and the New Sensibility', 1965; Leslie Fiedler, `The New Mutants', 1965, `Cross the Border ± Close that Gap: Postmodernism', 1969; Ihab Hassan, `POSTmodernISM: A Paracritical Bibliography', 1971). This divided way of thinking about postmodernism has continued unchanged until today. Many critics still

oppose

a

reproductive,

`neoconservative'

postmodernism

to

an

emancipatory

or

`resistant' one. For example, Charles Russell has typically distinguished an academic form of postmodernism, that has led to the `embourgeoisement' of the old avant-garde (1982, 54), from a socially-conscious form `which attempts to combat the reigning discourse and substitute alternate codes' (57). More recently, Paul Maltby has contrasted the `introverted' self-reflection of Nabokov, Barth and Gass, which exposes `the operation of its narrative codes or rhetorical strategies' (1991, 1, 5, 15), with the `dissident' self-reflection of Acker, Barthelme, Burroughs, Coover, DeLillo, Pynchon or Reed, that engages more directly the `surrounding or contemporaneous discourses (including literary narrative forms and the meaning-systems they embody') (17). This division has been replicated in the social sciences where one can identify an `affirmative social discourse (Drucker, Etzione, Ferre and theorists of the post-industrial society) [which] reproduced the 1950s optimism . . . that technology and modernization were making possible the break with an obsolete past' (Best and Kellner 1991, 14), and a negative discourse `that reflected a pessimistic take on the trajectories of [post]modern societies' (Toynbee, Mills, Bell, Steiner, Baudrillard). Despite persistent disagreements regarding its definition and applications, postmodernism became an established term in literary and art criticism by the mid±1970s. About the same time it began to be acclimatized in the discourses of social and physical sciences as a catch-all

designation

for

a

new

cultural-scientific

episteme

 (Ferre

1976;

Spanos

1982;

Rorty 1983; Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Postmodernism was drawn in this phase into a `poststructuralist

orbit'

(Bertens

1995,

5),

being

associated

at

first

with

the

textualist-

deconstructive practices inspired by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, then with the

modern north american criticism and theory

178

ideas of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze who anchored textuality in

La condition

relations of power, knowledge and subjectivity. The translation of Lyotard's

postmoderne

(1984), in which a prominent poststructuralist adopted the term `postmodern',

acknowledging his indebtedness to Hassan, `seemed to many to signal a full-fledged merger between an originally American postmodernism and French poststructuralism' (Bertens 1995, 6). In the comprehensive definition supplied by Lyotard and other cultural critics of a poststructuralist or neo-marxist ilk (Jameson, Foster, Harvey, Lash) postmodernism was the `cultural logic' of a new phase in the development of western societies: the phase of post-industrial consumerism, informational glut, and multinational capitalism. In a few years, postmodernism `became an indispensable concept in theories of the contemporary' (Bertens 1995, 111), especially through Jameson's contributions beginning with `Postmodernism paradigm

and

and

Consumer

brought

Society'

home

the

(1983)

that

theoretical

turned

debate

postmodernism

between

Lyotard

into and

a

global

Habermas

concerning the limits of this episteme. Another contributor to the rethinking of postmodernism along systematic sociocultural lines was William V. Spanos, founder of the first American journal of postmodern theory, 1970s

and

early

1980s

reoriented

the

boundary 2

discussion

(1972). Spanos's essays through the

of

postmodernism

from

a

Heidegger-

inspired phenomenology (Spanos's 1972 essay, `The Detective and the Boundary', praised postmodernism's Charles

Olson

`existential

a

imagination'

neo-Heideggerian

and

reading)

gave

to

an

the

poetry

emphasis

of

on

Robert

Creeley

cultural

revision

and that

reconciled Heidegger's critique of the onto-theo-logical tradition with Foucault's prosecution

of modernity's

reassessment, contributed

the

to

the

Enlightenment'

totalizing

emergence break

and

the

up

modes

of thought.

of

oppositional

of

the

As

Spanos

`anthropological

`(neo-)imperial

put

postmodernism

structure

of

in

structure

it

in

the

his

most

1960s

privileged

by

American/European

recent

and the

1970s post-

modernity',

foregrounding possibilities `utterly precluded . . . by the instrumental logic of the dominant discourse' (Spanos 1996, 67, 68). The turn of postmodern discourse to (poststructuralist) theory and cultural analysis has been

questioned

endedness

of

by

the

practical

movement.

critics

interested

Marjorie

in

Perloff

preserving

has

thus

the

idiosyncratic

deplored

the

shift

open-

from

a

literary-utopian postmodernism prevalent in the early 1970s, that `involved a romantic faith in the . . . ability of [the literary and artistic discourses] to transform themselves', to a theoretical-prescriptive postmodernism in the 1980s which hardened art `into a set of norms'

(1998,

9).

As

she

notes,

in

spite

of

`all

the

talk

of

rupture,

transgression,

antiformalism, the breaking of vessels ± in Lyotardian terms, the deligitimation of the great metanarratives ± there seem to be more rules and prescriptions around than ever' (10). The conflation of postmodernism with poststructuralism is problematic from another point of view. French poststructuralism has focused primarily on modern and premodern literary phenomena, with rare sallies into postmodern popular culture. Its chief contribution, according to Andreas Huyssen, is `an

archeology of modernity,

a theory of modernism at

the stage of exhaustion' (1984, 39). The application of poststructuralist theories to the analysis of postmodern discourses has often resulted in an overrating of their deconstructive features

at

the

expense

of

the

transformative

ones.

The

emphasis

on

disruptive,

anti-

representational aspects of postmodernism predominated in the criticism of the late 1970s and 1980s (Federman's Thiher's

Surfiction

Words in Reflection

(1975), Klinkowitz's

(1984), Cristopher Nash's

Literary Disruptions

World-Games

(1980), Allen

(1987)), even though

one can identify also the beginning of a counter-trend which argued for a socially-conscious

postmodernism

179

definition of postmodernism (Jonathan Arac's collection Brian

McHale's

Hutcheon's

ings

Postmodern Fiction

(1987),

The Politics of Postmodernism

Tom

Postmodernism and Politics

LeClair's

The Art of Excess

(1989) and Jerry A. Varsava's

(1986), (1989),

Contingent Mean-

(1990)).

But criticism was not alone in emphasizing the disruptive, self-referential side of the project. Innovative writers and artists share with their critics the responsibility for their misrepresentation, overstating initially the playful, self-cancelling aspects of their work. Ronald Sukenick's 1970s `digressions on the act of fiction' called for a radical version of `nonrepresentational'

fiction

whose

`main

qualities

are

abstraction,

improvisation,

and

opacity' (Sukenick 1985, 211). By making its language opaque, innovative fiction resists the game of make-believe, calling attention to the structure and `truth of the page' (212). This reorientation toward the materiality of the novel was regarded by unsympathetic critics as an act of ideological `recoiling', creating `a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense' (Jameson 1991, 9). Yet it is clear from other more considered statements made by Sukenick and his colleagues that the point innovative writers were trying to put across was not that the world exists solely within the word, but that our versions of reality depend on perceptual and discursive systems that offer biased representations under the guise of a `natural' order. Therefore, it is the writer's duty to challenge naturalized conventions of representation, imagining better aesthetic and sociocultural

syntheses.

On

an

experiential

level,

postmodern

literature

disrupts

the

consensual boundaries of `reality' through improvisation and `invention' in order to allow more experience to slip through. On a cultural level postmodern literature interrogates the `great system of constraints by which the West compelled the everyday to bring itself into discourse' (Foucault 1979, 91), rearticulating our narrative and cultural options. Criticism has often dissociated the disruptive and rearticulative sides of innovation, describing the postmodern project alternatively as overly critical and socially destabilizing, or

as

non-implicated

concept

of

literary

and

self-fetishizing.

discourse

as

an

Underlying

effective

both

integrating

descriptions

machine.

is

Within

a

nostalgic

this

model,

epistemological and compositional concerns are ignored or subordinated to the representational function of literature. What the contemporary novel needs, according to Charles Newman, is not poetic self-interrogation but comprehensive acts of order-making that reinforce `the positive socializing function of literature' (1985, 5±6). Critiques of postmodernism on the left have not been more helpful. The prevailing view among theorists like Jean Baudrillard, Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton, Hal Foster, Fredric Jameson and Christopher Norris is that postmodernism is an art of pastiche and simulation that renders history `reified, fragmented, fabricated ± both imploded and depleted' (Foster 1985, 123). In Jameson's critique, postmodernism confines itself to a narrow textual and ideological circuit that reinforces `the logic of consumer capitalism'. But Jameson's own argument suffers from circularity, focusing on forms of art that give support to his deterministic view that postmodernism is complicit with late multinational capitalism: the fiction of E. L. Doctorow, that `epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past' (1991, 24), nostalgic-parodic architecture and film, or the science fiction of Philip K. Dick. On the other hand, he ignores the political polysystemic novel of Coover and Pynchon, surfiction, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, feminist literature and film, and oppositional uses of video that have successfully tested

some

of the

methods envisioned by him,

such

as `global

cognitive mapping' and `transcoding' (1991, 54). Critical terminology has also prevented a more balanced understanding of postmodern

modern north american criticism and theory

180

innovation. Used all too often to describe experimental forms of narrative, concepts such as `metafiction', `anti-narrative', `pure fiction', `parody', `pastiche' have reduced postmodernism to an `either-or' logic that opposes invention to imitation. A prevailing trend in the criticism of the 1970s and 1980s has been to regard innovative literature as a heterogeneous collection of anti-referential procedures (self-reflection, digression, distortion, decomposition, displacement, cancellation, pla[y]giarism, arbitrary formal patterning, collage, cutups),

estranging

narration

from

reality.

More

recent

criticism

has

re-evaluated

the

postmodern agenda through finer theoretical tools (feminist, new historicist, postcolonial), amending

its

earlier

view

of

experimentation

Politics of Postmodernism

Hutcheon's

(1989)

as

politically

found

uninvolved.

self-reflection

For

example,

compatible

with

a

politically significant stance interested in revising the culture's power systems. Likewise, Brian

Constructing Postmodernism

McHale's

acknowledged

the

`double-coded',

culture-

conscious nature of postmodern fiction (1992, 2). In lieu of the inventory of structuralthematic features which undergirded the `descriptive poetics' of

Postmodern Fiction

(1987),

McHale's new book proposes `a plurality of constructions' that valorize postmodernism's bifurcating options: ontological construction vs. political destabilizing, centring microworlds vs. living in the `zone', paranoid reading vs. reading `otherwise' (2±3). While appropriately rehistoricizing innovative literature, inscribing literary aesthetics within the framework of a cultural politics, such re-evaluations continue to waver between two theoretical descriptions of postmodern innovation: one explains the writer's task as a `purification' of language by `rendering [it] seemingly incoherent, irrational, illogical, and even meaningless' (Federman 1993, 33); the other emphasizes the socially relevant task of reformulation, arguing that `the techniques of parody, irony, introspection, self-reflexiveness directly challenge the oppressive forces of social and literary authorities' (32). At the root of this conceptual hesitation is a simplified application of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction and of Michel Foucault's and Jean-Franc Ë ois Lyotard's critiques of the universalizing

discourses

of

modernity.

The

role

of

postmodern

writing,

as

Lyotard

saw

it,

is

to

undercut the powerful metanarratives that societies resort to in order to minimize risk and unpredictability.

When

it

does

not

simply

suggest

an

economy

of

the

`unpresentable'

(1984, 82), Lyotard's theory of resisting writing translates into `discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable,

and

paradoxical

petits reÂcits

'

(66).

These

local

stories

recognize

`the

heteromorphous nature of the language games' (66), but also prevent a comprehensive view of the cultural system as a whole. Against

Lyotard's

agonistic

theory

of

postmodern

signification,

other

writers

and

theorists have sought a transactive model that would valorize the mediating-transformative role

of

literary

imagination.

One

such

model

has

been

found

in

(poly)system

theory,

applied to postmodern literature by Tom LeClair, Joseph Natoli, William Paulson, Molly Hite, David Porush and Marcel Cornis-Pope. As a radical development of the `dynamic functionalism' proposed by the Russian formalists, polysystem theory describes `system[s] of various systems, which intersect with each other and partly overlap, using concurrently different

options,

yet

functioning

as

one

structured

whole,

whose

members

are

inter-

dependent' (Even-Zohar 1990, 11). Itamar Even-Zohar urges us to think of polysystems not `in terms of

one

center and

one

periphery, since several such positions are hypothesized'

(14), but as dynamic stratifications that incessantly redefine centre and periphery. This theoretical perspective is particularly useful in rethinking the functions of postmodern innovation. We can argue that postmodernism employs strategies of decentring and framebreaking as part of a transformative agenda that converts closed hierarchical systems into

postmodernism

181

dynamic polysystems that acknowledge `multiple forms of otherness as they emerge from differences in subjectivity, gender, sexuality, class, and ``race'' ' (Sarup 1996, 101). While traditional literature tried for the most part to mask the `difference of disorder' within a system

(Natoli

1992,

203),

postmodern

literature

exploits

the

subversive

potential

of

boundary-crossing and intersystemic interference. The ` ``motley'' society macroimage' that Joseph Natoli recognizes in Acker, Barth, Pynchon or Sorrentino allows us to see `what a social order cannot see but has already been made ``see-able'' by the ``dissident'' acts of narration' (124). The task of delineating a cooperative rather competitive model of signification that would reconcile the disruptive with the rearticulative side of postmodernism has been pursued more vigorously by postcolonial and postmodern feminist theorists. Feminism's challenge, according to Sandra Harding, has been to articulate a gender-specific epistemology as a defence against male claims of `objectivism/universalism', on the one hand, and self-denying relativism on the other (1990, 87). For this particular task Lyotard's `agonistic theory of language and paralogistic theory of legitimation cannot serve as basis' (Benhabib

1990,

122).

The

tendency

of

Lyotard's

version

of

postmodernism

to

put

everything `under erasure' pre-empts important cultural concepts such as those of knowing subject, gendered agent and female experience. As Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson insist, feminism still requires these concepts or `at minimum large narratives about changes in social organization and ideology' (1990, 26). And yet, in spite of their mutual mistrust and different discursive paths, the two `most important political-cultural currents of the last decade' (19) have had reasons to cooperate, correcting/enhancing each other's critiques of the

master

narratives

of

modernity.

Feminism

has

called

into

question

the

excessive

fragmentation of the postmodern sociocultural vision and the marginalization of female issues in the male avant-gardes. In turn, the postmodern perspective has been useful in challenging the separatism characteristic of some versions of cultural feminism, and the feminist recourse to conventional narrative forms or to essentialist categories like `sexuality, mothering, reproduction, and sex-affective production [that] group together phenomena which are not necessarily conjoined in all societies' (Fraser and Nicholson 1990, 31). From the blend of a feminist standpoint epistemology (Harding) and a revisionistic literary poetics has resulted a stronger, politically oriented version of postmodernism. The concept of difference itself has been re-evaluated in recent postmodern feminism and certain postcolonial projects, being removed from the earlier emphasis on a `single concept of ``otherness'' [that] has associations of binarity, hierarchy, and supplementarity . . . in favor of a more plural and disprivileging concept of difference and the ex-centric' (Hutcheon 1989, 65). Navigating between a `politics of difference' focused on `building new political groupings with categories neglected in previous modern politics such as race, gender,

sexual

preference,

and

ethnicity'

and

a

`politics

of

identity'

that

attempts

to

construct `identities through political struggle and commitment' (Best and Kellner 1991, 205),

postmodernism

reification

of

has

difference.

managed

The

play

to

of

develop

cultural

diversified

differences

strategies

has

been

that

evoked

avoid in

the

recent

postmodern/postcolonial literature (Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukherjee, Â a, Zygmund Bauman, Homi Bhabha, Rey Thomas Pynchon) and theory (Gloria Anzaldu Chow, Susan Stanford Friedman) not in order to enhance divisions based on race, class, gender

or

sexual

preference,

but

rather

to

create

a

more

responsive

framework

for

intercultural translation. Much of this work of rethinking and mediation has been carried out by the writers

modern north american criticism and theory

182

themselves in the oblique, self-questioning forms of postmodern theorizing that shares Richard Rorty's aversion for context-transcendent claims to truth. Theoretical reflections can be found in the most unlikely places, such as in the story of the cyborg Abhor in Kathy Acker's

Empire of the Senseless (1988), in the debate between two philosophic dogs in

Robert Coover's

Pinocchio in Venice (1991), or in the adventures of an electric bulb called

Byron in Pynchon's criticism,

analysis

Federman's

Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The very distinction between fiction and

and

performance,

breaks

down

in

Hassan's

Paracriticisms (1975) or

Critifiction (1993), two leading compendiums of postmodern poetics that

emphasize the `extemporaneous', open-ended nature of narrative and theoretical articulation. Sukenick's own critical `digressions on the act of fiction' follow a `questioning' rather than `answering' mode, being carefully dissociated from the `hierophantic complications' of `formal thinking' (1985, 4). Like Sukenick's `surfiction', his `working theory' depends on a revisionistic type of `experiential thinking' that seeks to `undercut official versions of reality in favour of our individual sense experience' (67). Sukenick thus shares with other recent reformulative projects (postcolonial literature, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, innovative feminist fiction and film) a basic principle of narrative and cultural rewriting. Rewriting devises `new sets of rules by which the familiar pieces could be rearranged' (Federman 1993, 125); it also `re-invents what [has] been banished, hidden, or expelled from individual or collective memory' (128). As defined further by postmodern feminism, rewriting is both an `act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes' ± hence an `act of survival' for those who have been misrepresented ± and an act of looking forward, `seeing difference differently' (Rich 1979, 35). In this sense, `rewriting' covers a broad range of possibilities from mere parody to cultural intertextuality wherein a text engages and transforms not only previous texts but also an old discursive system. An important object of rewriting in postmodern literature and theory has been history. Taking its cue from the philosophies of history developed during and after the Second World War (the `negative dialectic' of the Frankfurt School, Heidegger's emphasis on the gap between `historicity' and `real history', Sartre's questioning of history's intelligibility in terms of the individual's aspiration to freedom, or Foucault's critique of unified notions of historical

agency

and

memory),

postmodern

fiction

has

foregrounded

the

problematic

nature of all historical representation. Coming of age in the `decade after Hiroshima', John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed and Kurt Vonnegut denounced the ideological myths on which official representations relied, retelling history in a satirical key. Other writers emerging after 1968 and associated with the trend of surfiction (Walter Abish, Russell Banks, George Chambers, Raymond

Federman,

Madeline

Gins,

Steve

Katz,

Clarence

Major,

Ursule

Molinaro,

Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick) rejected mimetic realism altogether, denouncing its `silent agreement with the official discourse of the State' (Federman 1993, 28±9). Their `critifictional discourse' attacked `the vehicle that expressed and represented that reality: discursive language and the traditional form of the novel' (32). Innovative

literature

and

criticism

share

with

postmodern

historiography

(Fernand

Braudel, the Annales School, Michel Foucault, Jean-Franc Ë ois Lyotard, Hayden White, Gianni Vattimo, Michael Rogin) a suspicion of linear evolutionary models, regarding them as verbal fictions. But while subverting history's metanarratives, postmodernism has also tried to retrieve those details of everyday life that do not fit into easy patterns. The fiction of Coover, DeLillo, McElroy and Pynchon illustrates a dialogic vision of narrative that accommodates alternative histories and voices. Resorting to what Morrison has called acts

postmodernism

183

Beloved chronicle

of `re-memory' in rather

than

, postmodern feminist fiction has also tried to `

it'

(Marshall

1992,

150),

retrieving

ignored

intervene

events

in history

and

shifting

attention from `winners' to `ordinary people' or the `historically displaced'. Significant work of rewriting/revision has been carried out also in the area of cultural identities. To the extent the current geopolitical scene is more hospitable to intercultural understanding, some credit is due to the revisionistic imagination of postmodernism that has deconstructed the polarized ideology of the Cold War era, replacing it with polysystemic

mappings.

descriptions

of

marginalized

Us

As

Rorty

and

minority

the

and

put

it,

Other

human

are

women

beings

available

writers

has

come

(1989, been

together

xvi).

The

particularly

when work

useful

imaginative

of in

previously rethinking

questions of identity. Charles Johnson, Clarence Major, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison,

Leslie

poetically, moorings.

Silko,

taking Their

it

or

out

Alice

of

re-creative

its

Walker

have

traditional

impulse

radicalized

patriarchal,

bears

out

the

novel

rationalistic

Barbara

thematically and

Christian's

and

monocultural

observation

that

`[P]eople of color have always theorized ± but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. . . . [O]ur theorizing . . . is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language' (1987, 52). Drawing on their work, Henry Louis Gates Jr, Hortense Spillers, Robert B. Stepto, Mae G. Henderson, David Cowart and W. Lawrence Hogue have articulated a new poetics for African-American and multicultural literature, one that problematizes received ideas about identity, gender, race and history. It is also true that postmodernism has raised at times unrealistic expectations about the emancipatory potential of its rewritings. The events of 1989 have brought some of these limitations into focus. While the collapse of the Cold War system may be regarded as a success story of the type of experimental thinking that postmodernism itself has been deploying

for

two

decades,

it

has

also

raised

questions

about

the

role

that

literary

experimentation can play in the `new world order'. Are the idioms of cultural `resistance' and

artistic

innovation

viable

strategies

in

the

age

of

globalized

capitalism

and

the

dominance of market culture that renders the work of intellectuals all but superfluous? Can literary discourse mediate between the ethnocentric concepts of culture that have reemerged in many places? As Susan Suleiman put it, in the post-1989 world `Things are [no longer] so simple; the idea of a postmodern paradise in which one can try on identities like costumes in a shopping mall . . . appears . . . not only naive, but intolerably thoughtless in a world where ± once again ± whole populations are murdered in the name of (ethnic) identity'

(1996,

54).

But

Suleiman

is

first

to

admit

that

a

revamped

form

of

`ethical

postmodernism', without `universal values, but also without the innocent thoughtlessness of

the

``happy

essentialist Lyotard's

cosmopolitan'' '

conception

of

post-totalitarian

self' ethic

(55), (56) of

is

needed

that

today

informs

discourse

but

to

interrogate

ethnocentric

strengthening

`the

conflicts. its

unitary Building

mediating

and on

function,

this ethical postmodernism would emphasize multicultural translation, making the world `safe for dialogue' again (63). In order to better respond to these new solicitations, postmodernism has undergone a slow process of reconstruction in the 1990s, both in literary studies (McHale, Hutcheon, Maltby, Suleiman, Gates Jr) and in social theory and philosophic/religious thought (Laclau and

Mouffe,

Best

and

Kellner,

Michael

Walzer,

Vincent

Leitch,

Charles

Taylor).

As

William Spanos has argued recently, this revamped postmodernism can participate in the `urgent project of interrogating the post-Cold War discourse of the New World Order'

modern north american criticism and theory

184

(Spanos 1996, 69), breaking the dualities of self and other, First World and Third World, global and local, that still haunt this emergent order. Susan Stanford Friedman has likewise highlighted in

Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter

(1998) the

contribution postmodernism can make to the articulation of a post-Cold War epistemology, `specify[ing] a liminal space in between [self and other, western and non-western], the interstitial sight of interaction, interconnection, and exchange' (3). The theorists' guarded optimism about literature's potential for renewal in the post-Cold War age is shared by experimental poets and writers. A 1990 collection of essays on

Politics of Poetic Form

The

made bold claims for literature as a form of cultural `resistance',

`provocation', `remaking', active historical `recovery' and subversive `public plasma'. In response to the contemporary `crisis of expression', this collection rallied innovative writers around an oppositional poetics meant to re-empower art. Innovative writing was credited with the capacity to reconfigure the larger sociocultural situation, offering its innovations `not only as alternative aesthetic conventions but also as alternative social formations' (Bernstein 1990, 243). This liberationist project may appear utopian in the rapidly shrinking space that literary discourse

occupies

in

the

current

high-tech

mediascape.

But

postmodern

writers

have

discovered new possibilities at the intersection of literature and the electronic media. The `postlinear'

poetry

of

Clark

Coolidge,

Steve

McCaffery,

Karen

MacCormack,

Charles

Bernstein, Susan Howe and Bruce Andrews has explored the possibilities of intertextual and mediatic crossovers. The new cyberpunk and avant-pop fiction of Mark Leyner, Mark Amerika,

William

Vollman,

Eurudice

or

Criss

Mazza

has

tried

to

reconcile

narrative

innovation with techno-pop, using a range of recycling/rewriting strategies to expose the `hyperreality' of consumer culture. The literary and theoretical work produced since 1989 demonstrates postmodernism's capacity to refashion itself in response to the challenges of the post-Cold war transition. The

series

of

Federman's (1998),

Bag

novels

published

in

the

1990s

±

Coover's

To Whom It May Concern Vineland Mason & Dixon Mosaic Man (1990),

Pynchon's

(1990)

(1994) and

Pinocchio in Venice Jazz Paradise Doggy (1991),

Morrison's

and

(1992)

(1997),

or

and

Sukenick's

(1999) ± give ample proof that contemporary innovative

writing has not surrendered its commitment to transformative thinking. The input of their narrative imagination that emphasizes counter-hegemonic mappings ± fluid, multiplex, interactive ± can play a significant corrective role in the current ideological restructuring. The kaleidoscopic range of definitions and agendas that we continue to associate with postmodernism also testifies to its `discursive centrality'. For `only those signifiers around which

important

social

practices

take

place

are

subject

to

this

systematic

effect

of

ambiguity' (Laclau 1988, 80).

Marcel Cornis-Pope

Further reading and works cited Benhabib, S. `Epistemologies of Postmodernism', in New York, 1990.

Feminism/Postmodernism The Politics of Poetic Form

Bernstein, C. `Comedy and the Poetics of Political Form', in Bernstein. New York, 1990. Bertens, H.

The Idea of the Postmodern

. London, 1995.

, ed. L. J. Nicholson.

, ed. C.

postmodernism

185

Postmodern Theory Five Faces of Modernity Against Postmodernism Cultural Critique American Postmodern Fiction in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands Poetics Today Critifiction Shaping the Future Recodings Power, Truth, Strategy Feminism/Postmodernism Feminism/Postmodernism Mappings Feminism/Postmodernism Amerikastudien Race, Modernity, Postmodernity The Politics of Postmodernism New German Critique The Anti-Aesthetic Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Literary Disruptions Universal Abandon Postmodernism Postmodern Literary Theory. The Postmodern Condition Postmodern Fiction Constructing Postmodernism Dissident Postmodernists Teaching the Postmodern Mots d'Ordre The Post-Modern Aura Poetry On & Off the Page. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence The Consequences of Pragmatism Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Chicago Review Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World The Question of Textuality International Postmodernism In Form International Postmodernism

Best, S. and Kellner, D.

. New York, 1991.

Calinescu, M.

. Durham, NC, 1987.

Callinicos, A.

. New York, 1989.

Christian, B. `The Race for Theory',

, 6, 1987.

D'haen, T. and Bertens, H. (eds) `Closing the Gap': . Amsterdam, 1997.

Even-Zohar, I. `Polysystem Theory', Federman, R.

, 11, 1, Spring, 1990.

. Albany, NY, 1993.

 , F. Feroe

. New York, 19

Foster, H,

. Port Townsend, NY, 1985.

Foucault, M.

, eds M. Morris and P. Patton. Sydney, 1979.

Fraser, N. and Nicholson, L. J. `Social Criticism without Philosophy',

, in

, ed. L. J. Nicholson, New York, 1990.

Friedman, S. Stanford.

. Princeton, NJ, 1998.

Harding, S. `Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques', in

,

ed. L. J. Nicholson. New York, 1990.

Hassan, I. `The Critic as Innovator',

, 22, 1977.

Hogue, L. W.

. Albany, NY, 1996.

Hutcheon, L.

. New York, 1989.

Huyssen, A. `Mapping the Postmodern', Jameson,

F.

`Postmodernism

and

, 33, 1984.

Consumer

Society',

in

,

ed.

H

Foster.

Port

Townsend, NY, 1983.

Ð.

. Durham, NC, 1991.

Klinkowitz, J.

. Urbana, IL, 1980.

Laclau, E. `Politics and the Limits of Modernity', in

, ed. A. Ross. Minneapolis,

MN, 1988.

Leitch, V. B.

. Albany, NY, 1996.

Lucy, N.

Oxford, 1997.

Lyotard, J.-F.

. Minneapolis, MN, 1984.

McHale, B.

. New York, 1987.

Ð.

. New York, 1992.

Maltby, P.

. Philadelphia, 1991.

Marshall, B. K. Natoli, J.

. New York, 1992.

. Albany, NY, 1992.

Newman, C.

. Evanston, IL, 1985.

Perloff, M.

Evanston, IL, 1998.

Rich, A.

. New York, 1979.

Rorty, R.

. Minneapolis, MN, 1983.

Ð.

. New York, 1989.

Russell, C. `Subversion and Legitimation', Sarup, M.

, 33, 2, 1982.

. Athens, OH, 1996.

Spanos, W. et al. (eds)

. Bloomington, IN, 1982.

Ð. `Rethinking the Postmodernity of the Discourse of Postmodernism', in , eds H. Bertens and D. Fokkema. Amsterdam, 1996.

Sukenick, R.

. Carbondale, 1985.

Suleiman, S. Rubin. `The Politics of Postmodernism after the Wall', in eds H. Bertens and D. Fokkema. Amsterdam, 1996.

,

25. The Role of Journals in Theoretical Debate

The place of literary theory within journals is necessarily tied in with the development of the literary journal, and the literary essay, as a whole. All literary criticism is at some level a contribution to the field of theory in that it contains a range of aesthetic, ideological and philosophical assumptions. Sometimes these assumptions are heavily veiled, but nonetheless the reviews and more general literary articles contained within nineteenth-century forerunners ± notably the

Atlantic Monthly

, which was founded in 1857 by a group of

literary-minded Republicans at the time that their party was developing its pro-abolition stance ± may be regarded as contributions to the theoretical debates of their day. Some of the issues raised ± about literary value and what we would now term canonicity, about the relationship between texts and morality/ethics, about the effects of reading, and about literatures and national identity ± are still very much with us. Although literary theory may be defined as that which focuses on the conceptual and abstract, on form and structure, effect and ideology ± rather than, say, on content or the biographical aspects of an individual author ± the dividing line between literary theory and literary criticism remains a necessarily blurred one. This has been true from the inception of the subject-dedicated journal,

which

may be

dated

to

the foundation of

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

±

in

1884.

PMLA

As

an

±

the

organ

of

association, it has, in addition to its role as a generalist journal publishing scholarly articles relating to modern languages (in an Anglo-and-euro-centric understanding of the term), had an important role in diffusing information about the profession, especially in North America. Thus its advertisements valuably highlight coming publications, and both the requests for conference papers and for articles for edited volumes, and the programme of papers to be delivered at the annual MLA conference, when taken together with its annual bibliography, function as a symptomatic index of the state of literary studies, including trends in theoretical work. In recent times, special issues have highlighted areas of particular relevance to literary theory, such as reader-response criticism (1991), colonialism and the post-colonial

condition

Atlantic Quarterly

(1995),

queer

theory

(1995)

and

ethnicity

(1998).

The

South

, founded in 1901, has changed even more conspicuously with the times,

having no obligation to fulfil the utilitarian requirements of a profession's journal. Now published exclusively in special issues, it both debates the work of individual intellectuals and creative writers (Bakhtin 1998; Deleuze 1997; Walcott 1997) and analyses particular issues (domestic tragedy, 1998; psycho-marxism, 1998; nations, identities, cultures, 1995). Other long-established journals, such as

Modern Philology

(founded 1903), while rarely

containing articles of direct interest to literary theorists, nevertheless bring their readers

the role of journals in theoretical debate

187

into dialogue with theoretical issues through the generous number and length of their book reviews. But the most notable decade in the first half of the twentieth century for literary theory's development within the periodical was the 1930s. The (founded

1935)

and

Kenyon Review Sewanee Review

the

Ransom), as well as the close

reading

which

(1939,

under

the

editorship

Southern Review of

John

Crowe

(1892), were all instrumental in disseminating the

was

beginning

to

take

hold

as

a

dominant

critical

method

in

universities. This stressed formal and aesthetic values, de-emphasized both textual scholarship

and

regionalism,

and

Partisan Review History

the

was

quite

distinct

New Republic

criticism published by the

from

the

(founded 1914),

far

more

cultural

The New Masses

(founded 1936). It was sharply differentiated, too, from

and

political

(1926±48) and

English Literary

(founded 1934), which, with its continuing commitment to publish studies that

interpret

the

American

conditions

literary

affecting

texts,

has

the

been

production

flexibly

and

receptive

dissemination

to

the

of

English

historiographic

and

shifts

and

ideological self-interrogation in recent literary-historical scholarship, as well as to issues of gender

and

race.

Modern Language Quarterly

changes

within

the

opening

article,

by

field. J.

D.

Founded M.

Ford,

in

has

1940,

was

on

its

even

more

original

`Some

conspicuously

stance

Principles

of

was

adapted

philological

Linguistic

to

(the

Change

in

Romance'). But from March 1993, an issue devoted to `The State of Literary History', it added `A Journal of Literary History' to its masthead. As the editorial matter explains, when it was launched, `literary study often meant a quest for origins ± in sources and influences,

in

Subsequent

authorial

critical

intention,

movements

in

have

the

history

sought

of

to

ideas,

disrupt

and

such

in

the

efforts,

fixing but

of

a

texts'.

constant

undercurrent has been provided by calls for a new literary history ± prompted in particular by, but not limited to, `new historicism'. The journal now seeks out contributions on all aspects of literary change, whether these encompass influence, reception, or dissemination of texts themselves, or the historical dimensions of semiotics, hermeneutics and deconstruction, or the poetics of history, the history of the profession or the history of literary history. Claiming `we particularly welcome theoretical reflections on these topics, and on historicism in relation to feminism, ethnic studies, cultural materialism, discourse analysis, and

all

other

forms

of

cultural

representation

and

cultural

critique',

one

can

see

very

clearly how the turn towards historicism, and cultural history above all, in the 1990s has enabled new life, informed by critical theory, to be breathed into old journals without them rupturing entirely with their former identities. John Fisher, in an article surveying a century of

PMLA

, notes how the decade of social

and academic ferment between 1960 and 1970 witnessed a leap in the MLA's membership from

12,000

to

30,000,

and

simultaneously

periodicals in fields once largely served by

saw

the

PMLA

inception

of

over

two

thousand

. Specialization, and to some extent

fragmentation, of the discipline had arrived. As will be seen, the specialization on the page was often symbiotically linked to the development of a particular critical emphasis within a university department.

Victorian Studies dialogue become

between a

Many of the period-specific journals founded

(1957) and

notable

Modern Fiction Studies

literature feature

of

and

theory,

pioneered

contemporary

literary

at this

time, like

(1955), which actively encourages a the

inter-disciplinarity

studies.

The

publication

which

has

history

of

others provides an indicative pointer to broader developments within social and ideological conceptualizing. Shifts in racial nomenclature and self-perception, for example, lie behind the retitling of the

American Literature Forum

Negro American Literature Forum African American Review

(founded 1967) to the

in 1976, to

Black

in 1992. What remains

modern north american criticism and theory

188

constant,

however,

is

this

publication's

commitment

to

diversity

within

its

particular

ambit: thus in 1992 alone it produced special issues on the black church and black theatre, film, the literature of jazz and fiction. Many of the journals which have made the biggest impact in terms of literary theory were founded at the very end of the 1960s, or during the 1970s. When Ralph Cohen,

New

Literary History's long-standing editor, established this highly influential quarterly in 1969, he wrote that he envisaged it becoming `a challenge to the profession of letters', and it has sought to maintain this role ever since, through interrogating the relationship between works from the past and current critical and theoretical needs. Focusing on the reasons for literary change, the definitions of periods and the evolution of styles, conventions and ideologies, it has been notable for introducing writing from some of the most significant European theorists of the last quarter-century, starting, in the very first issue, with Georges Poulet, on `Phenomenology of Reading', and Robert Weimann, on `Past Significance and Present Meaning in Literary History'. On occasion ± as with the translation of Roland Barthes' `An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative' which appeared in 1975 ± the journal has been responsible for disseminating through translation work which had been available for some time in its original tongue (Barthes' piece first appeared in the French periodical found

a

whole

Communications in 1966) but which subsequently, and dramatically,

new

Anglophone

audience.

It

has

always

been

open

to

experimental

 le Á ne presentation, whether in the form of Ihab Hassan's `POSTmodernISM' (1971) or He Cixous's introspective `Without End/no/State of Drawingness/no, rather:/The Executioner's Taking off' (1993). More recently, the journal has manifested a self-awareness of its own Euro-and-American centricity: the 1998 issue entitled `Theoretical Explorations', for example, contains an interview with Fredric Jameson, a stalwart contributor to the journal, conducted by Xudong Zhang, which from a Chinese perspective interrogates the relationship between western scholarship and critical theory during the past fifty years.

New Literary History's emphasis has, more than that of most other journals, been on `pure' theory ± on hermeneutics, phenomenology, formalism and concepts of history and ideology.

SubStance (founded 1971) which explicitly devotes itself to issues concerning the

perception of contemporary culture, be these humanistic or scientific in their emphasis, ranges through literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art criticism and film studies.

diacritics, launched the same year from the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell (again indicative of the impact of European continental thought on the discipline) has similarly always stressed interdisciplinarity in that it is interested in films and drama as well as the written word. From the start it has been deliberately polemical. From 1978, it has quite

explicitly

stated

in

its

editorial

policy

that

it

is

`concerned

primarily

with

the

problems of criticism', its diacritical discussion ± typically taking the form of a review, and a response to the issues raised in the review ± setting out to distinguish `the methodological and

ideological

issues

relation to them'.

which

critics

encounter

and

setting

forth

a

critical

position

in

boundary 2, originating in 1972 from the English Department of the State

University of New York at Binghampton under the editorship of William V. Spanos (and in 1990, when its publication was taken over by Duke University Press, coming under the  ), began as `an guidance of an editorial collective under the overall leadership of Paul Bove international journal of postmodern literature' and now announces itself as `extending beyond the postmodern'. Throughout its history, it has been especially valuable for the political, historical and theoretically informed analysis its contributors have brought to bear on a range of topics and problems within literature and culture, such as Poetry and

the role of journals in theoretical debate Politics

(spring

1999),

Aesthetics

(summer

1998),

189

Edward

Said

(spring

1998)

and

Feminism and Postmodernism (summer 1992). The two issues edited by Donald Pease, in spring 1990 and spring 1992, importantly focused on the redefinition of what may be said to constitute `American' culture in contemporary critical approaches.

Critical Inquiry

, probably as influential as

New Literary History

, albeit, again, in a more

interdisciplinary way, was inaugurated in 1974. On its original title page ± a proclamation almost instantly dropped ± it glossed itself as `A voice for reasoned inquiry into significant creations of the human spirit', and in its first editorial statement, Sheldon Sacks wrote that its instigators were `interested in criticism that aspires to be a special kind of ``learning'' ± not in any sense dispassionate or impersonal but something akin to that fusion of human commitment'. This emphasis was reflected in its first pair of articles, Wayne C. Booth on `Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing' and a somewhat pained response by Burke himself, and has

been

continued

in

Critical Inquiry

's

willingness

to

publish

articles

which,

while

maintaining scholarly and philosophical rigour, nonetheless find space for the personal voice, the speculative, and the stylistically daring, whether these include Marjorie Garber's speculations concerning ` `` '' ' (1999), or Michael Taussig's meditations on `the beach' (2000), or some of the contributions of the `Intimacy' issue of 1997, with its investigations of the interplay of privacy and public in the intimate sphere.

Critical Inquiry

has a particular

knack for spotting current trends and then interrogating the particular assumptions that are in danger of becoming ossified by them. Thus Homi Bhabha, in his introduction to the `FRONT LINES/BORDER POSTS' number of 1997, writes of how the crossing of cultures, and the hybridity of knowledges and identifications thus produced, have become `the

activity

of a theoretical enterprise that negotiates a range of critical conditions with the

post

mark ± poststructuralist, postfeminist, postcolonial, postmodern'. But why, he asks, `never post-

the other

?'

Certain articles, even if subsequently published in volume form, may be isolated not just for their intrinsic importance, but for their role as setting down pointers for the direction in which subsequent critical trends were to develop. French feminism's introduction into the United States, for example, owes a good deal to the publication in translation of Luce Irigaray's `Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre' in a 1981 issue of

Signs

. Or one might cite

Stephen Greenblatt's formulation of `new historicism' in his introduction to `The Forms of Power and the Forms of Power in the Renaissance', which appeared in a special issue of

Genre

in 1982; or Donna Haraway's launching of the post-gender concept of the cyborg ±

that utopian notion of what humans might just possibly become ± in `A Manifesto for Cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s', in 1985;

or

Homi

Bhabha's

`Signs

Taken

for

Wonders:

authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817', in these

cases,

the

authors

subsequently

published

questions

of

Critical Inquiry

these

pieces

as

Socialist Review

ambivalence

,

and

, 1985. In each of

part

of

fuller,

single-

authored volumes, but the ideas they contain received their earliest airings, and established their influence, through journal publication. The journal, too, provides a site for graduate students and others early in their career paths to make an impact before they bring out a whole

book.

In

certain

areas,

and

postcolonial

study

is

perhaps

notable

here,

the

publication of a well-received article can carry at least as much weight as a longer volume. On

occasion,

particular

issues

of

periodicals

have

taken

on

a

seminal

importance,

something reinforced by their subsequent publication in separate volume form. In 1992, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates edited the `identity issue' of

Theory

Critical

, which shifted the issue of identity from the terrain of personhood (whether this be

modern north american criticism and theory

190

understood in terms of the individual or community) and resituated it as a question of historical and geographical positioning. Or, to take an earlier example, in 1981

Yale French

Studies published a rare ± for this journal ± feminist issue, edited by a collective of seven Dartmouth faculty women, and combining feminist analysis with psychoanalytic theory: a timely conjunction with the appearance of Irigaray in

Signs. Signs was not, however, the

earliest major journal fostering an analytical response to feminist issues.

Feminist Issues was

started in 1969, early in the contemporary women's movement, by Ann Calderwood, who, as a note from the editors in February 1978 informs us, for years ran it `as an out-of-pocket, out-of-apartment operation. She not only helped to solicit manuscripts and scrupulously edited them, she also set the type, handled the subscriptions, and addressed the envelopes' ±

a

significantly

different

enterprise

from

the

scholarly

journal

with

its

departmental

backing. The journal went mainstream in 1973: while a barometer of changing trends in feminist theory and criticism, it has maintained its explicitly politicized, and optimistic aims of not just interpreting women's experiences, but of changing women's condition, through looking to alter consciousness, social forms and modes of action.

Signs, which

began in 1975 under the editorship of Catherine Stimpson, has consistently published articles which have employed philosophical and conceptual formulations to interrogate the material conditions of women's' lives, and which have, likewise, used concrete practices and examples to challenge theoretical assumptions. Its very first issue, on the theme of power, included Julia Kristeva's `On the Women of China': the first English translation of Kristeva, `among the most provocative and respected contemporary French intellectuals', and its focus has been global ever since, contributing to discussions, within its own pages and elsewhere, of the consistent factors and the necessary variables that must be taken into account in assessing the methodology of feminist theories. A number of other journals devoted to feminist studies have ranged somewhat less widely in their foci.

Tulsa Studies in

Women's Literature (founded in 1982) has a strong tradition of publishing feminist literary analyses and articles on women's literary history.

Hypatia, which first appeared in 1986, has

its roots in the Society for Women in Philosophy: intended to encourage and communicate many different kinds of feminist philosophy, it debates issues of knowledge and identity, particularly at the intersection of gender, race and nation, and discusses the nature of love, desire and the emotions, as well as manifesting an increasing interest in ecofeminism.

camera obscura (1976) has offered innovative (in presentation as well as in critical methodology) feminist perspectives on film, television and visual media. The boundaries of feminist criticism became very fluid from the late 1980s onwards, transforming not just in dialogue with other critical categories, especially those of race (and earlier, class), but under the influence of gender studies. The direction taken by

differences,

founded in 1989 as `a journal of feminist cultural studies' and affiliated with the Pembroke Centre for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, is symptomatic of these

developments,

both

in

its

desire

to

interrogate

how

concepts

and

categories

of

difference ± notably but not exclusively gender ± operate within culture. The Fall 1997 number, guest edited by Joan Wallach Scott, epitomizes the anxious self-questioning of the entire field: her own introduction is called `Women's Studies on the Edge', and others are entitled `The ``Women'' in Women's Studies', `The Impossibility of Women's Studies' and `Do Women's + Feminist + Men's + Lesbian and Gay + Queer Studies = Gender Studies?' Having helped to create a field and to disseminate debate within it, the proliferation of subfields bring into question the very identity of the originating field itself.

GLQ (founded

1993) has explicitly taken on board the task of offering queer perspectives on all issues

the role of journals in theoretical debate

191

touching on sex and sexuality, whether these are within law, science, religion, political science

or

literary

periodicals, to

which

and,

cultural

structuralist founded

studies.

in

studies

theory

in

1983

From

particular,

as

a

with

±

the

the

originally,

dominant

an

early

1980s,

character

editorial

an

force

of

import

within

board

the

new

direction

journals,

from

the

co-chaired

Britain

US by

taken

has ±

has

academy. Svetlana

by

reflected

established the

degree

supplanted

post-

Representations was

Alpers

and

Stephen

Greenblatt: the first issue, featuring articles by each of them, also published pieces by D. A. Miller

(English

literature).

literature),

While

its

Thomas

opening

Laqueur

number

(history)

contains

no

and

Jean-Joseph

explicit

editorial

Goux

(French

statement

±

the

approach which was to become labelled `new historicist' is left to speak for itself ± the order form which it contains carried the endorsement of the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, explaining that the periodical will provide `intellectual discovery and delight to the many readers who want to understand how cultural forms are made', and it has continued to provide leadership in the practice of materialist cultural history.

American Literary History

(founded 1989) has notably concerned itself with how one thinks

about America, and has

played a very influential role in shaping the agenda for what constitutes American cultural studies. It has given especial weight not just to the social, economic and political aims of American literature, and to such issues as the reading process, reception and the institution of American criticism, but it has foregrounded the problematics of canon formation, and has emphasized ethnic and native American issues. Likewise,

American Quarterly (1949),

especially under the editorship of Lucy Maddox, has broadened the standard understanding of

what

constitutes

`American

studies',

and

has

hypertext scholarship in the field. In broader terms,

also

started

to

investigate

the

role

of

Social Text (founded 1979) was an early

leader in the area of cultural studies and cultural theory, consistently focusing on gender, sexuality, race, the environment and labour relations: it has been especially notable for the range of provocative interviews it carries. Launched in 1987, the

Yale Journal of Criticism

has published a range of polemical work in the humanities, including not just scholarly articles

and

review

essays,

but

original

artwork,

and

experimental

and

performative

material, developing the possibilities of such critical genres as memoir, confession and fable. More recently still, a number of journals dedicated to analysing cultural practice among specific ethnic groups from theoretically inflected viewpoints have been established, such as the

Journal of Asian American Studies (1998), and Hopscotch (1999), which

looks at a whole range of material from past and present Hispanic cultures, from African slaves to later waves of immigration, covering art, literature, cinema and politics. The 1990s, too, has seen a growth of journals dedicated to specific areas of cross-disciplinarity, bringing critical theory to bear on the intersections between disciplines.

Configurations, for

example, was launched in 1993, and is dedicated to the study of discourse pertaining to the theories and practices of science, technology and medicine, exploring the relationship of literature and the arts to these areas. The next year,

modernism/modernity was founded,

focusing systematically on the methodological, archival and theoretical exigencies particular to modernist ± i.e. post-1860 ± studies, whether in music or architecture, the visual arts or intellectual and literary history. The interest in globalization which one finds within journals, particularly in connection with postcolonial theory, is also reflected in the mobile publishing contexts and histories of some publications. For example, the twice-yearly

History and Memory (founded 1989) is

based in both Tel Aviv and Los Angeles. Unsurprisingly, its emphasis is on historical consciousness, the area in which collective memory, the writing of history and other modes

modern north american criticism and theory

192

of shaping images of the past continually returns to the example of the Holocaust, thus both drawing from and helping to establish the centrality of this atrocity within memory studies, a prominent area of 1990s theoretical investigation.

Transition

was founded in

Uganda by Rajat Neogy in 1961 (suspended 1968±71 and 1977±90): now published in the US as an official publication of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute under the editorship of Appiah and Gates, it retains a strong African link, not least by having Wole Soyinka as chair

of

its

editorial

board.

It

is

particularly

striking

both

for

its

imaginative

use

of

photography and its incorporation of creative writing, and for its broad-based investigation of ethnic diversities, whether concerning itself with Romanian street children or the legacy of James Baldwin, contemporary Indian fiction or French identity politics.

Callaloo

, started

in 1976 as an offshoot of the creative writing workshops conducted by its editor Charles H. Rowell at Southern University, Baton Rouge, initially fostered the writings of the AfricanAmerican Southern writing community that had emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, but soon became more internationalist in scope, featuring a combination of scholarly and creative writing and visual art from throughout Africa and the African diaspora: as it approached its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2001, the redirection of its mission to `discovering, nurturing, and publishing new and young writers from marginalized communities' was announced. The trend towards globalization ± and the speed of dissemination of ideas which is a key factor

in

periodicals'

power

of

influence

±

has

been

yet

further

accentuated

by

the

development of the on-line journal, whether this puts material from the printed publication onto the web, or whether it exists solely as an e-journal. The latter tend to have irregular postings, and, at least in the realm of literary theory, are less remarkable than individuals' postings on their own websites or one-off projects (the theory sections of the on-line resource, Alan Liu's provide

quick

links

to

Voice of the Shuttle CTHEORY

, at http://vos.ucsb.edu/shuttle/english.html,

such

resources).

,

however

(at

http://ctheory.com)

provides an exception: in existence since 1993, this on-line journal of theory, technology and culture contains a combination of analytical thinking (a series of articles by Jean Baudrillard from 1994 is notable here) and more meditative and creative pieces concerning contemporary culture. Journals invite their own mode of reading, which differs from single-authored volumes. The juxtaposition of articles both engages the conceptual imagination of the browsing reader, who may, among the heterogenous offerings, serendipitously encounter new ideas that

they

would

not

otherwise

have

been

let

to

read.

Undoubtedly,

the

energetic

enthusiasm shown by American university presses (who derive a considerable percentage of their profits from journal publication) to launch and devote journals dedicated wholly or largely to theoretical matters has had an enormous effect on the spread and popularization of theory throughout the American academy and, indeed, further afield. The economic advantages to college libraries of an annual journal subscription, as opposed to buying a handful of books, are obvious: both a range of viewpoints, and information and opinion about volume publications, are placed into rapid circulation, and an atmosphere of debate, even

urgency,

created.

In

turn,

this

generates

discussion

about

the

degree

to

which

American concerns translate, or fail to be readily adaptable, to other localized sites.

Kate Flint

whiteness studies

193

Further reading and works cited Association of American University Presses. http://aaup.princeton.edu/journals/subjects/ Chielens, E. E. (ed.)

CTHEORY,

American Literary Magazines.

Westport, CT, 1986.

however. http://ctheory.com

PMLA 1884±1982', PMLA, 99, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory. London, 1992. Voice of the Shuttle. http://vos.ucsb.edu/shuttle/english.html

Fisher, J. H. `Remembrance and Reflection:

1984.

Gallop, J. Liu, A.

Project Muse. http://muse.jhu/journals/index.html

26. Whiteness Studies

Whiteness studies investigates the parameters of white racial identity, locating its scope and function in systems of representation. This field of study takes as its founding premise the constructed nature of identity, a poststructuralist concept heralded by race theorists who

argue

that

race

itself

is

not

a

natural

or

biological

category

but

rather

a

social

construction given meaning through historical contexts. Whiteness studies gained academic prominence in the 1990s after minority theorists such as Toni Morrison and bell hooks challenged white critics to examine their own `racial' speaking position instead of solely focusing on the `Other'. The rise of multiculturalism and the pluralization of `the canon' did much to further whiteness studies; as ethnic traditions gained visibility and strength, many critics questioned why texts written predominantly by white male authors had never been treated as `white' texts but rather as `universal' texts representing all people. This tendency of whiteness to occlude or erase markers of particularity is now recognized as one of its characteristics. Investigations in the field have spread from feminism, labour history and literary studies to cultural studies, psychoanalysis and beyond. Whiteness studies owes it origins in part to all of those who have agitated against the privileges

of

`white

skin',

who

have

sought

to

unsettle

social,

political

and

economic

hierarchies based upon categories of race. While movements against social injustice have occurred across disciplines and beyond the academy, whiteness studies in its current sense finds

articulation

privilege'

and

primarily

power

through

through

the

academic

analysis

of

theorists

who

whiteness.

focus

This

on

critical

upsetting project

`white

finds

its

antecedents in the works of writers of colour who have examined the characteristics of white identity. Most germane for contemporary studies is the work of Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1926, Hughes published `The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain' that outlined the attributes of ` ``white'' culture', a culture distinguished by rigid `manners, morals and Puritan standards' (694). For him, whiteness operates as a set of oppressive beliefs and values which could be adopted at will; he describes `this urge within the [black] race towards whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible' (692). Hughes' assimilation theory finds voice in later sociological renderings of Americanization and contemporary theories on whiteness. As a historian and race theorist, W. E. B. Du Bois

modern north american criticism and theory

194

explores the labour arena, defining whiteness as a set of benefits white workers accrue which offset any economic disadvantages they may experience in a classed society. In his

Black Reconstruction in America , he argued that white workers received a `public and

study

psychological wage' which included `public deference', access to public facilities, judgement in a court of law by peers of one's racial group, better schools, etc. to compensate for economic inequities (1975, 700±1). Instead of fighting for all workers to forward the cause of democracy, white workers turned to racism for social and political gain (30). Labour historians rely on Du Bois's constructs to understand white working-class identity today. Research in the history of white racism also serves as a backdrop for contemporary whiteness studies whose critics rely on a range of analytic tools borrowed from a number of disciplines ± psychoanalysis, cultural studies, marxism among others ± to understand the persistence of `white skin privilege'. Early psycho-cultural studies locate a combination of cultural and psychological forces as the source of white identity. Winthrop Jordan's

White

Over Black serves as a case in point. Jordan outlines the ways Elizabethan concepts of blackness and darkness, whiteness informed

the

imaginary

and light

constructs

of

(to symbolize evil and

colonizing

Europeans

who

good respectively) perceived

African-

Americans as sexualized primitives and Native Americans as errant savages. Like others who

followed,

Jordan

relies

on

psychoanalytic

theory

to

show

how

a

certain

psychic

splitting and projection occurs, an interpretative process which remains in vogue even if the

psychological

explanations

for

such

projections

vary.

Jordan's

approach

garners

criticism for being ahistorical and dependent on the concept of a collective psyche whose existence cannot be supported (Saxton 1990, 11±12). Many historians turn instead to a socio-economic example

in

approach,

Edmund

S.

one

which

Morgan's

finds

its

most

well

regarded

and

comprehensive

American Slavery/American Freedom: The Ordeal of

Colonial Virginia. According to Morgan, racism did not originate overseas but rather found root on American soil among legislators who sought to control the labour force through racial division. Fearing the combined uprising of African-American slaves and European-American

bond-labourers

following

Bacon's Rebellion of

1676, the

Virginia

Assembly passed a series of acts meant to `foster the contempt of whites for blacks and Indians' (1975, 331). Sounding much like Du Bois, Morgan argues that such laws provided `social, psychological, and political advantages' to white labourers to encourage them to align their loyalties with Anglo slave holders (1975, 344). While Morgan's work retains wide currency, he fails to consider the persistence of racism and white identifications under other economic and social circumstances. Contemporary theorists such as David Roedigger and Alexander Saxton instead rely on ideological arguments to more completely explain the existence of racism, strategies now widely adopted by whiteness critics. Saxton, for example, argues that racism is not simply economically driven but rather constitutes a system of beliefs and values which shape `reality'. Like Morgan, Saxton gives weight to economic benefits but, turning to the theories of Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, stresses more completely the manner in which social identities are constructed through scientific, historical, religious and economic discourses intended to sustain class hegemony (1990, 13±15). In

The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, he points to the origins of racism

in the mid-fourteen hundreds when Western Europeans sought to expand and conquer in their

desire

skinned,

to

while

accumulate the

peoples

capital. they

He

writes,

encountered

`Since are

Europeans

generally

were

dark,

for

generally three

and

whitea

half

centuries basic human relationships centered on the domination of whites over people of color'

(14).

Racism

became

a

series

of

discourses

which

supported

such

hierarchies,

whiteness studies

195

expressed through the religious and scientific theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (15). Whiteness studies also locates its historical origins in the first and second wave of AngloAmerican feminism which, with its failure to attend to racial identity, enacted its own racial ideology. Instead of locating themselves as middle-class white women, activists and academics tended to focus on gender as the only significant axis of identity. In the early  n among 1980s, women of colour such as bell hooks, Barbara Christian and Norma Alarco others protested widely, showing how racism pervaded the (white) women's movement that took as its primary subject, in its early years, the oppression and plight of (white) domestic housewives. Adrienne Rich suggests that early white feminists suffered from a type of `white solipsism ± not the consciously held

belief that one race is inherently superior

to all others, but a tunnel-vision which simply does not see non-white experience or existence as precious or significant' (1979, 306). French feminists, of course, were guilty of the same oversight. The privileging of gender as the initial site of oppression found its way into

feminist

psychoanalysis

in

which

white

feminist

theorists

argued

that

all

other

oppressions, such as race and class, find their origins in the recognition of sexual difference. In the mid to late 1980s, white academic feminists responded in part by trying to build coalitions with women of colour or by shifting their attention from texts written by white women to those authored by minority writers. Such moves unfortunately left unexamined whiteness as a speaking position and inadvertently reactivated traditional hierarchies in which the `Other' either became responsible for educating whites about the nature of her oppression or once again became the object of investigation. The real work on whiteness did not take place until writers such as Marilyn Frye and Peggy McIntosh sought to give voice to the nature of whiteness and white privilege. Frye offered what is now considered common

sense to whiteness theorists. She writes, referring

to herself and other white

feminists, `[I]t never occurred to us to modify our nouns . . .; to our minds the people we were writing about were

people.

We don't think of ourselves as

white.

It is an important

breakthrough for a member of a dominant group to come to know s/he is a member of a

group,

. . . only

`invisible

a part

knapsack'

of humanity' (1983, 117). McIntosh outlined the contents of an

of

`skin-colour

privileges'

benefiting

those

phenotypically

white

±

again reminiscent of Du Bois's wage ± including varied images in greeting cards, dolls, toys, etc. to curriculum materials, welcoming attitudes in middle- to upper-class neighbourhoods, wide representation in courts of law and police forces, and easy access to simple items appropriate for one's group such as hair care products and `flesh' colour bandages (1990, 33±4). Such observations corresponded with the work of Richard Dyer, a film critic, whose ideas now form the bedrock of the field. In his study of US and British popular films, he compares the way whiteness functions representationally in US and British culture to colour theory:

Black is always marked as a colour (as the term `coloured' egregiously acknowledges), and is always particularizing; whereas white is not anything really, not an identity, not a particularising quality, because it is everything ± white is no colour because it is all colours. This property of whiteness, to be everything and nothing, is the source of its representational power. (1988, 45)

Whiteness tends to be `subsumed into other identities' (45), much like Hughes' equation of whiteness with `American standardization'; whites tend to identify themselves according to nation, region, gender or class, etc. rather then race so that the explicit characteristics of

modern north american criticism and theory

196

whiteness disappear behind the definitions of the `norm' (46). As Dyer notes, `Power in contemporary society habitually passes itself off as embodied in the normal as opposed to the superior' (45). Such a sense of invisibility makes it difficult to name the ways white domination operates; whites tend to experience their identities more as a case of `historical accident, rather than a characteristic cultural/historical construction, achieved through white domination' (46). Dyer's advances in film study found reflection in the scholarship of Toni Morrison who

Michigan Quarterly Review

in a 1989 article in the widely known study

articulated the premises of her more

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination .

She brings

whiteness to the forefront of the literary arena, asking readers to consider ways American literature is shaped by white imaginations responding to an African-American presence and

more

inclusively

to

`Africanism',

`the

denotative

and

connotative

blackness

that

African peoples have come to signify' (1992, 6). Her work fundamentally shifted the focus for many literary critics from the conceptualization of American literature as representing `universal' themes to a literature in which race functions as a founding marker of identity. Morrison writes, `Africanism is inextricable from the definition of Americanness' (65): `[I]ndividualism is foregrounded (and believed in) when its background is stereotypified, enforced dependency. Freedom (to move, to earn, to learn, to be allied with a powerful centre, to narrate the world) can be relished more deeply in a cheek-by-jowl existence with the bound and unfree, the economically oppressed, the marginalized, the silenced' (64). Huck's freedom and individuality becomes visible in light of Jim's enslavement. Morrison's critique centres not only on the books themselves but also on critics who historically have ignored figurations of race. Her work has revolutionized American literary studies and has spawned countless investigations, from rereadings of American `classics' such as Melville's

Moby Dick Pym,

(racing the white whale) and Edgar Allan Poe's

The Voyage of Arthur Gordon

to surveys of whiteness in early American literature, regional literature, modernist

drama and poetry, and contemporary fiction by writers of all ethnic backgrounds. Coincident with Morrison's breakthrough in literary analysis was David Roedigger's innovations

in

labour

Alexander Saxton's

history.

While

The Wages of Whiteness

Roedigger's

The Rise and Fall of the White Republic,

followed

it made a more lasting impact

on the field. Roedigger refuses traditional marxist tendencies to privilege class over race, an act which erases the relational and integrated nature of the terms. He rejects the simplicity of earlier split-market labour theories which located fault with the ruling class for the promotion of racism. Such theories position workers, Roedigger argues, as innocent `dupes' instead of participants in their own ideological becoming, constructing their identities in response to a range of economic and social pressures (1999, 9). He turns to Du Bois's concept

of

the

`public

and

psychological

wage'

and

the

linguistic

theories

of

Mikhail

Bakhtin who, in Roedigger's words, reveals the ways meaning is `socially contested . . . neither absent nor unconnected with social relations' (15). Roedigger traces the way white workers linguistically registered racial identity in the urban North in the early nineteenth century.

For

example,

white

labourers

adopted

the

signifier

`help'

and

`hired

man'

to

replace the word `servant' (synonymous with `slave' at the time) (47±8) and `boss' to replace `master' (54). Such assertions signalled their membership in a free republic and difference from the bound, servile black population of the South (49). Roedigger also makes a considerable contribution to interpretations of black minstrelsy. He argues that the popularity

of

`preindustrial

minstrelsy past'

in

which

Northern

blacks

cities

in

represented

the

(97).

early

1800s

Driven

by

signalled a

a

capitalist

desire regime

for

a

that

whiteness studies

197

required more and more regimentation in daily living, white labourers turned to blacks to express their own desire for spontaneity. Roedigger's work finds later comment in texts which more completely address the changing face of minstrelsy and the anxieties which surround white working-class masculinity. Such early work on whiteness has resulted in a burgeoning of whiteness studies such that critics no longer separate race from gender or class. Advances have been made across the spectrum, most notably in gender and cultural studies. The meanings of white femininity have found critical comment, from histories on the construction of white womanhood during the suffrage, abolitionist and women's movements to contemporary investigations into the meaning of whiteness for white women in today's world. To a far greater extent, however,

white

straight

masculinity

has

attracted

critical

attention,

with

particular

emphasis placed on a culture of white male victimhood which has emerged in response to advances in feminism, civil rights and economic changes that have disempowered the working-class white male since the 1950s. Reactions against affirmative action and gay rights legislation have helped fuel an image of white heterosexual manhood as under siege. Critics have tracked this image through the popular press, film and the predominately white men's movement of the 1980s, unpacking the ways in which white masculinity is constructed as multivalent and contested. For example, in his inaugural study

Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference , straight

masculinity

megalomania,

is

a

`single,

instrumental

monolithic

rationality,

and

White Guys:

Fred Pfeil challenges the belief that white

category the

...

shot

obsessive

through

desire

for

with

violence,

recognition

and

definition through conquest' (1995, viii). He suggests it functions as a `dialectical coconstruction whose on-going identity is at least partially dependent on the very forms and modalities of femininity it seeks to dominate and control' (ix). He argues that like other identities,

`the

modalities

of

white

straight

masculinity

are

multiple,

and/or

riven

by

contradictions and fissures, and and/or subject to flux and change' (x). Such advances in gender and race theory throw in question any easy opposition between races or genders and highlight

the

limits

of

multiculturalism.

If

all

identities

result

from

historical

change,

varying according to social context, it becomes difficult to maintain the oppositions that gave birth to whiteness studies as an area of academic study. As the field reaches the end of its first decade of study, it wobbles on its ontological moorings. Some regard it as a form of `vulgar multiculturalism' in which whiteness becomes essentialized as evil (Wray and Newitz 1997, 12, note 7). Repeated characteristics attached to the category create a form of cultural racism, replacing earlier biological forms. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz argue that not all forms of whiteness function oppressively. In their anthology

White Trash: Race and Class in America,

the authors, paraphrasing the words

of John Waters, write, ` ``white'' trash' is not just a classic slur ± it's also a racial epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves' (1997, 2). Pointing to the eugenic studies of the early twentieth century which labelled poor whites as inferior, Wray and Newitz suggest that the category of white trash resists what one might call the `invisibility' argument of Dyer in favour of a certain visibility ± in scientific studies and more recently in the media and popular culture. Elvis becomes the white trash king and pornographic movies are analysed as a form of `social and moral protest' (10). The anthology usefully draws attention to the ways `white trash' as a signifier alleviates middleand upper-class anxiety about class inequities in a democratic yet capitalist culture. Yet simultaneously it seeks to claim a place for `white trash' alongside other ethnic groups. The authors write: `[W]hite trash is one place multiculturalism might look for a white identity

modern north american criticism and theory

198

which does not view itself as the norm from which all other races and ethnicities deviate' (5). While Wray and Newitz argue that `[p]erhaps white trash can also provide a corrective to what has been called a ``vulgar multiculturalist'' assumption that whiteness must always equal terror and racism' (5), they veer towards creating the very dynamics they seek to avoid. Lower-class whites become stripped of racial privileges to be located as `victims', a position

that

bespeak

a

belies

certain

work

desire

to to

date

on

locate

working-class

whiteness

whiteness.

outside

of

its

The

authors' comments

historical

constructions

as

dominating in ways that throw the goals of the larger critical project into disarray. Similarly,

while

anthologies,

panels,

special

issues

and

articles

reveal

an

ardent

en-

thusiasm to eradicate `white skin privilege', their very existence may have the opposite effect in the academy. In 1997, Howard Winant charged that studies that aim to `abolish whiteness' may actually preserve the category in order to transcend it. Most representative of such studies was Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey's activist/academic journal

Race Traitor,

an early 1990s series republished as an anthology in 1996. The authors sought to move beyond academic meditations on whiteness to actions individuals could take to `abolish' the `white club', `which grants privileges to certain people in return for obedience to its rules' (1996, 35). Winant's charge find its echo in criticism of the rise of whiteness studies which suffers, many argue, from a certain narcissism, or willingness to dwell on racial subjectivity by those who are `white', redirecting academic attention once again from margin to centre. Such an appropriation of margins offers white critics a new opportunity to enter the multicultural fray, having found a sanctioned enterprise for hawking academic wares on the marketable topic of race. Despite

such

criticism

and

epistemological

dangers,

the

future

of

whiteness

studies

remains hopeful. While many critics have investigated the ways whiteness depends on blackness for definition (either through contrast or appropriation of cultural forms), several now acknowledge the ways whiteness functions antithetically or multiply in relation to a range

of

other

ethnic

interrogations of

identities.

whiteness

in

The

the

cultural

studies

popular media,

arena

from

has

Rush

exploded

Limbaugh

with

talk

varied

shows

to

country music. In addition, critics working within gay and lesbian studies are helping shed the light on the long association of white maleness with heterosexuality. Finally, interesting work has emerged which looks at whiteness as a series of performative acts, whether that be in ethnographies, in which women of colour assume a white masculinist gaze in order to critique it, to the performance of whiteness on stage as a deconstructive act. The inventiveness of such strategies for `seeing' whiteness bodes well for a future that may be textured and rich, one which moves beyond analyses of United States culture as vested completely within black and white dualities.

Betsy Nies

Further reading and works cited Allen, T. Babb, V.

The Invention of the White Race. Whiteness Visible.

Delgado, R. and Stefanic, J. (eds) Du Bois, W. E. B. Dyer, R. `White', Frankenberg, R.

London, 1994.

New York, 1998.

Critical Whiteness Studies.

Black Reconstruction in America.

Screen,

Philadelphia, 1997.

New York, 1975.

29, 4, Autumn 1988.

White Women, Race Matters.

Minneapolis, MN, 1993.

masculinity and cultural studies Ð (ed.)

Displacing Whiteness.

Frye, M.

The Politics of Reality.

Hill, M. (ed.)

Whiteness.

199

Durham, NC, 1997. New York, 1983.

New York, 1997.

Hughes, L. `The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain', Ignatiev, N.

How the Irish Became White.

Ð and Garvey, J. Jordan, W. D.

Race Traitor.

Lott, E.

Morrison, T.

Pfeil, F.

31±6, Winter, 1990. New York, 1975.

New York, 1992. Durham, NC, 1998.

London, 1995.

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.

Roedigger, D. Ð.

National Manhood.

White Guys.

Rich, A.

Independent School,

American Slavery/American Freedom.

Playing in the Dark.

Nelson, D. D.

New York, 1996.

New York, 1993.

McIntosh, P. `White Privilege', Morgan, E. S.

Chapel Hill, NC, 1968.

White by Law.

Love and Theft.

122, 3181, 23 June 1926.

New York, 1996.

White Over Black.

Lopez, I. F. Haney.

The Nation,

New York, 1995.

New York, 1979.

Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.

Wages of Whiteness,

London, 1994.

afterword D. Roedigger. London, 1999.

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,

Savran, D. `The Sadomasochist in the Closet',

8, 2,

1996. Saxton, A. Ware V.

The Rise and Fall of the White Republic.

Beyond the Pale.

London, 1990.

London, 1992.

Winant, H. `Behind Blue Eyes', in Wray, M. and Newitz, A. (eds)

Off White,

White Trash.

eds Michele Fine et al. New York, 1997.

New York, 1997.

27. Masculinity and Cultural Studies

What does it mean to be a man? One response to this question is fairly straightforward: one might define being a man in terms of biology, the possession of a male anatomy, and in particular, of course, the possession of the principal sign of sexual difference, the penis. But being is, of course, not merely a biological fact, since we exist and become conscious of ourselves and others within culture, within, that is, a system or systems of values. It is through culture, then, that we begin to attribute and internalize a certain significance to being one sex or another, so that being a man is as much about the consequences attendant on the possession of a particular anatomy as it is about the mere possession of it. Hence, the familiar distinction made in gender studies between sex and gender, where sex denotes biology,

and

gender

those

cultural

norms

conventionally

attributed

to

biological

sex.

Masculinity, then, is the gender associated with maleness, and in essentialist thinking is considered the natural expression of this biological condition, whereas in cultural studies, which broadly challenges the conservatism of such forms of essentialism, masculinity is regarded as a construction grounded in nothing more than social discourses and practices. Consequently,

this

cultural

studies

perspective

promotes

the

view

that

the

qualities

associated with masculinity are open to challenge and change. In more recent work, as we will see, the `necessity' of viewing masculinity as an expression of maleness ± whether culturally conditioned or otherwise ± has even been called into question.

modern north american criticism and theory

200

This approach to masculinity within cultural studies is largely a product of feminist thinking

from

the

late

1960s

and

1970s

which

interrogated

the

relationship

between

female and feminine, arguing that the assumed `naturalness' of the relationship between these was one of the crucial means by which women were oppressed. Indeed, it is possible to see the contemporary interest in masculinity as arising from this period, specifically as a response to feminist concerns and the issues that these raised for men, since

men, in

patriarchal society, were the problem, the ones who exercised, or were at least invested with, power. Andrew Tolson's book,

The Limits of Masculinity

, for instance, emerged from

his involvement with a men's group formed in response to feminist challenges to the privileges and powers accorded to men, though that experience was the reverse of the kind of empowerment which women's groups emphasized at that time:

In all our practical activities, we faced an immediate contradiction. As men, as the agents of a patriarchal culture, we remained the dominant gender. In a certain sense, we were imperialists in a rebellion of slaves ± concerned, defensively, about the threat to our privilege. The very notion of `men's politics' was paradoxical. We had no experience of sexual oppression, violence, jokes at our expense. There were no issues to unite us ± no basis for action against a system that already operates in our favour. (Tolson 1977, 143)

Tolson therefore highlights one of the problems with studies of masculinity and what has become known in some quarters as `men's studies', and some feminists have remained suspicious of this increasingly common focus. In her critique of Kaja Silverman's book

Subjectivity at the Margins well

and

good

for

Male

, for instance, Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes that `It is all very

male

scholars

and

theorists

to

problematize

their

penises,

or

their

Á cle . . . in which, relations to them, but is this so very different from a postmodern mal de sie once again, it is male subjectivity that becomes the privileged term' (1995, 76). Whether or not the growth in studies of masculinity is itself a manifestation of the male ego's typical absorption in self-pity at a time of emotional change, it does appear to be the case that the contemporary interest in masculinity ± and not just in the academy ± is related to

social

changes

in

men's

roles.

Lynne

Segal,

writing

in

1997,

points

out

that

the

`ineluctable rise in men's studies and the accompanying glut of books on masculinity (over 400 new texts in the last 10 years alone), register a topic newly fraught with personal doubts, social anxieties and conceptual fragmentation' (1997, xii), and this surge in interest in masculinity is characteristic of literary and cultural studies on both sides of the Atlantic (I will be discussing both British and US work here). It has even become conventional to talk about a `crisis in masculinity'. But if there is such a crisis it is not only bound up with the

impact

of

feminism

±

though

we

shouldn't

minimize

feminism's

social

gains

in

challenging, for instance, men's leadership in the workplace, or the automatic assumption that

the

women's

heterosexual sexual

role

male

is

should

primarily

be

to

a

family's

service

the

breadwinner, requirements

or of

the men.

conviction Men's

that

sense

of

diminishing power is also related to other, economic changes; principally, the erosion of job security as a consequence of the economic policies which have dominated government policies in Britain and the US since the 1980s (on this see, for instance, Rutherford 1996, 4±5).

Of

course,

no

one

±

other

than,

possibly,

the

CBI

and

other

such

employers'

representatives ± would want to celebrate the economic disempowerment of male workers, but one problem with the resistance to, or dissatisfaction with, such transformations is that it is often expressed in gendered terms and in ways which result in women bearing the brunt of the anger that is generated.

masculinity and cultural studies

201

Consequently, while the academic world has seen the rise of studies of masculinity in response to the changes outlined above, outside it we have witnessed the emergence of anti-feminist movements and spokespersons, as well as other less explicitly reactionary, but nonetheless problematic, social phenomena which betoken a resistance to change. We have seen in the US in the early 1990s, for instance, the emergence of the men's movement inspired

by

the

mythopoetic

writings

of

Robert

Bly,

encouraging

men

to

separate

themselves from women in order to commune with their inner masculinity (see Schwalbe 1996). In Britain, we have witnessed the New Laddism associated with various men's magazines, representing a transmutation, rather than a transformation, of masculinity in its combination of a self-consciousness ± possibly even an ironic consciousness ± of aspects of masculinity with a reluctance to abandon its privileges, reflecting in this way a disjuncture between traditionally defined roles and changing realities. But

even

though

I've

begun

to

touch

here

on

the

historically

variable

nature

of

masculinity, there has still been a tendency in my account so far to write about it as if it were a coherent and easily recognizable phenomenon. When we start to consider the qualities associated with the term, however, what should strike us is the diversity, even contradictoriness, connotes

of

rationality

masculinity

is

the

its

connotations.

and

self-control.

struggle

to

tame

In

certain

Jonathan

and

subdue

contexts,

Rutherford the

for

instance,

argues

emotional

and

that

masculinity

`A

sexual

history self

and

of to

recognise the ascendant and superior nature of reason and thought' (Rutherford 1996, 26). Yet

often

sexual

masculinity

virility.

is

Indeed,

associated

such

is

the

with

an

uncontainable

diversity

of

ways

in

aggression

which

or

(threatening)

masculinity

has

been

constructed, enacted or even embodied, that it has become usual to talk in the plural of masculinities, rather than of a singular masculinity (though we might also want to consider the limits to such fashionable pluralizing since masculinity cannot be endlessly variable without ceasing to be recognizable as a phenomenon, and it is surely at least as important to develop some sense of those overarching features which render different forms of masculinity still discernibly masculine). Herbert Sussman has pointed out that `the emphasis on the constructed rather than the innate, and on the multiple rather than the unitary view of the masculine calls attention to the historical contingency of such formations of manliness and of male power itself, thus questioning male dominance and supporting the possibility of altering the configuration of what is marked as masculine' (Sussman 1995, 9), and, indeed, one of the features of studies of masculinity has been to emphasize its historically variant features. In the twentieth century, for instance, masculinity has tended to be defined against homosexuality since homosexuality has tended to connote effeminacy (even though there are masculine, even macho,

styles

of

homosexuality,

it

is

a

common

feature

of

gay

personal

ads

that

an

individual will describe himself as `straight acting', thus confirming the elision between homosexuality and effeminacy). Eve Sedgwick has famously noted that in the spectrum of different forms of male homosociality, or male bonding, ranging from business contacts to sports

camaraderie

to

sexual

relations

between

men,

there

is

a

`prohibitive

structural

obstacle' (Sedgwick 1985, 3) in the form of homophobia which renders that spectrum discontinuous. Yet, as Alan Sinfield has recently argued, prior to the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895 the effeminacy of the dandy tended to be associated with a generalized libertinism, and only after this watershed was the specific cultural link established between homosexuality and effeminacy (Sinfield 1994). The change signalled by the Wilde trial is a particularly dramatic one, whereas typically changes in gender formations tend to take

modern north american criticism and theory

202

rather longer and may be uneven, but nonetheless it is indicative of the extent to which constructions of gender are subject to historical forces.

Masculinity and history In the short space available here, it would be impossibly reductive to attempt a survey of the extensive historicist work on masculinity. What I intend to do, therefore, is to provide some sense of the work that has been carried out in one particular historical period which has seen a significant increase in the number of texts on this subject ± the Victorian period ± while at the same time using this work to signal certain broader themes in the treatment of masculinity. One of the classic texts in the discussion of masculinity in the Victorian period is that of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall,

Family Fortunes

. This charts the ways in which both

masculinity and femininity were constructed by the economically, and therefore culturally, increasingly important middle class. Davidoff and Hall's approach to the study of gender, in itself, alerts us to the ways in which particular expressions of gender have been bound up with other forms of difference (in this case, class, but other studies have focused on the determining forces of `race' and nation). They argue that a religious, and especially Pauline, discourse of male dominance was reinforced by an increasing physical segregation of work and domestic space in the spatial organization of nineteenth-century industrial cities, as businesses and factories were located away from suburban living areas, thus consolidating and intensifying the distinctions between public and private, masculine and feminine, and helping to constitute the Victorian `separate spheres' ideology (Davidoff and Hall 1987). But Davidoff and Hall's account does not represent an exhaustive discussion of the multiple determinants of gendered identity in the Victorian period. Medical discourse is also crucial to Victorian perceptions of masculinity and femininity, though in ways which connect Victorian perceptions with more persistent attitudes. Simone de Beauvoir has pointed out that man `thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance' (Beauvoir 1972, 15). The status of women's perceptions as bound up with an overwhelming

subjectivity

in the Victorian period was a consequence of their supposed

greater susceptibility to nervous instability, ultimately to hysteria, something confirmed by the medical discourses about the nervous system which developed in the late eighteenth century (see Logan 1997). The consequences of this discourse were particularly important, not

merely

in

terms

of

specific

relations

between

men

and

women,

but

in

terms

of

consolidating the conservatism of Victorian attitudes, since, as I have argued elsewhere, revolutionary politics in the period following the French Revolution were perceived as hysterical in contrast to the `rational', gradualist and therefore manly character of British politics (Alderson 1998, esp. 34±9). In this sense, manliness was at the heart of an English ± and, by extension, British ± national character. That same stable, manly sensibility which was considered definitive of British constitutional politics, though, was also considered to be a specifically Anglo-Saxon trait (Alderson 1998, 32±4), and this further reflects the way in which gender has been bound up with race and colonialism. Other races ± notably, among European races, the Celts (Cairns and Richards 1988, 42±57; Alderson 1998, 98±119), and beyond Europe, Asians (see, for instance, Sinha 1995) ± were feminized, at least in part because imperial ideology attributed to these groups an incapacity for autonomous government. Indeed, the relation-

masculinity and cultural studies

203

ship between gender and imperialism has been the focus of numerous studies (see, for instance, Bristow 1991; Dawson 1994; McClintock 1995; Midgley 1998; Phillips 1997), not least since one of the characteristic tropes for colonial or imperial conquest, from late sixteenth-century

Ireland

to

late

nineteenth-century

Africa,

has

been

one

of

sexual

conquest, often of a virgin territory awaiting, even inviting, masculine penetration. Elaine Showalter has further discussed the late nineteenth-century context and the perceived remasculinization of the novel in relation to the Scramble for Africa of the late nineteenth century. She discerns a shift in fictional themes and genres away from the domestic novel towards

the

`male

quest

romance',

typically

centred

on

Africa

and

`represent[ing]

a

yearning for escape from a confining society, rigidly structured in terms of gender, class, and race, to a mythologized place elsewhere where men can be freed from the constraints of Victorian morality' (Showalter 1991, 81; on the male quest romance more generally, see Fraser 1999). Showalter's argument is problematic in that she goes on to suggest that this flight from feminine domesticity is bound up with homosexual desire, thus eliding the homosocial and the homosexual in ways which Sedgwick's distinction between the two hoped to avert, but it nonetheless indicates the ways in which the imperial context was structured by gender. There

has

perhaps

been

a

tendency

to

dwell

too

heavily

on

the

consequences

of

imperialism for those white men who dominated empires, though, whereas an awareness of empire ± and of the slave trade and racism which were integral to it ± behoves us to consider its damaging effects and legacies on those who were subject to it.

Masculinity and race Black men's relationships to masculinity, in particular, have been deeply influenced by racist social structures and by those anxieties of white men which have their roots in the most powerful structuring oppositions of western culture. As Daniel P. Black points out, `black men have wrestled with the concept and the attainment of manhood since the days of their enslavement by Europeans' (Black 1997, 4). Frantz Fanon has famously written that `For the majority of white men the Negro represents the sexual instinct (in its raw state).

The

Negro

is

the

incarnation

of

a

genital

potency

beyond

all

moralities

and

prohibitions' (Fanon 1986, 177). Further, this essentially biological condition attributed to

Thinker

black men is in opposition to the cerebral, since there are `Two realms: the intellectual and the sexual. An erection on Rodin's

is a shocking thought' (Fanon 1986, 165). This

opposition has been both tenacious ± infecting even black self-images ± and pernicious. Historically ± and let us not forget that history is far from finished ± it has determined the most brutal manifestations of racism: in the American South the widely practised lynchings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for instance, commonly culminated in the castration of the black man. Indeed, one of the common justifications of such acts was the `need' to protect white women, and the association between black men and rape has been a persistent

one.

Lynne

Segal

records

that

`To

this

day,

although

50

per

cent

of

men

convicted of rape in the Southern states are white, over 90 per cent of men executed for rape are black (mostly accused of raping white women). No white man has ever been executed for raping a black woman' (Segal 1997, 179). Moreover, the significance of recent high-profile

cases,

involving

figures

such

as

Clarence

Thomas,

Mike

Tyson

and

O.

J.

Simpson, has been overdetermined by issues raised by this history ± which is not to say that issues of guilt or innocence are insignificant ± and often black activists have been set

modern north american criticism and theory

204

against feminists. In this sense, in so far as masculinity connotes sexual potency, black men have been defined as excessively so, but in so far as masculinity connotes greater rationality and self-control, the black man has been viewed as insufficiently so. Moreover, racism has affected the material construction of black masculinity. Crucially, there is `a close connection between the disproportionate representation of black male youth in unemployment data and their over-representation in crime statistics' (Mercer and Julien 1996, 113±14). Hence black males have been denied the role of wage earner which, in western societies, has been a principal source of male dignity, and at the same time and partly in consequence of this, they have been associated with a malevolent hostility to those societies they inhabit, reinforcing the well established link between white±black oppositions

and

metaphysical

concepts

of

good

and

evil.

The

legacies

of

all

this

are

profound and consequently raise profoundly sensitive matters. Crucially, the black struggle not merely for political rights, but for a recognition of human dignity has frequently been gendered, taking on the form of a struggle for black

male

dignity which has involved a

corresponding high investment in forms of black masculinity, and causing problems for those ± for instance, women and black gay men ± who may be stigmatized or disempowered by it. The most obvious recent expression of this tendency took the form of the Million Man March of 1995 which explicitly excluded women's participation ± prompting protests from black feminists ± and which encouraged black men to embrace their patriarchal responsibilities for themselves, their families and their communities. As Segal points out, this message was `fully in line with conservative attacks upon affirmative action, welfare and public resources generally' (1997, xvii). These

are

some

of

the

principal

questions

which

have

been

interrogated

by

the

substantial rise in studies of black masculinity. Respect for the complexity ± not least the

political

complexity ± of the subject matter, especially given the limitations of space

here, lead me to foreclose discussion at this point and to point readers in the direction of some of this material (Blount and Cunningham 1996; Gilroy 2000; Majors and Billson 1992; Marriott 2000).

Masculinity and sexual difference I

began

this

piece

by

stating

the

conventional

wisdom

that

masculinity

is

the

set

of

culturally defined norms attributed to maleness. That is a definition whose adequacy has been increasingly challenged, though, since if masculinity is a cultural norm rather than a biological given we should not expect the relationship between masculinity and maleness to be automatic: men may demonstrate feminine traits and might even, in the face of stigmatization, adopt

consciously

masculine

adopt

identifications.

feminine Indeed,

identifications,

this

and

women

(in)appropriation

of

may

gender

become celebrated as a mode of subversiveness following Judith Butler's

assume norms

or

has

Gender Trouble

.

Butler's argument revisits the sex/gender division so influential on feminist thinking in order to argue that the body too is constructed in and through discourse, and is therefore itself

a

cultural,

rather

than

straightforwardly

biological

phenomenon.

Instead,

the

relationship between gender and sex is a performative one, that is, dependent on certain modes of (imitated or learnt) behaviour:

That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality . . . acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires

masculinity and cultural studies

205

create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. (Butler 1990, 136)

Hence,

Butler argues for the importance of those forms of gender performance which

suggest a radical dislocation of gender and sex, seeing in drag in particular an erosion of the assumed connection between the two by highlighting precisely the performative element involved in that relationship. More recently, Eve Sedgwick has argued that `it is important to drive a wedge in, early and often and if possible conclusively, between the two topics, masculinity and men, whose relation to one another it is so difficult not to presume' (Sedgwick 1985, 12). Judith Halberstam's recent book-length study,

Female Masculinity,

attempts to assert alternative forms of masculinity to those hegemonic forms embodied in, or performed by, white men, since `transsexuality and transgenderism . . . afford opportunities to track explicit performances of nondominant masculinity' (1998, 40). Such

emphases

Winterson's narrator

is

are

also

characteristic

of

recent

cultural

production.

In

Jeanette

Written on the Body, for instance, the gender of the sexually `promiscuous'

never

specified,

leaving

us

to

speculate

on

whether

s/he

is

a

`womanizing'

heterosexual or a lesbian who challenges the `proper', sexually restrained behaviour of women. Jackie Kay's

Trumpet deals with the aftermath of the death of an apparently male

jazz trumpeter, Joss Moody, who is discovered by the coroner ± representative, perhaps, of the normalizing institutional forces in our society ± to have been (biologically) a woman. Just to complicate matters, Joss was married ± his `widow' lives on ± and has an adopted son. Significantly, at one point in the novel, he denies that he is a lesbian ± as does Brandon Teena, the central character in the film

Boys Don't Cry (Peirce 1999) which presents the

true story of a woman, Teena, who dressed as a man in order to have relationships with women, and who was raped and ultimately murdered by two men as a punishment for her `perversion'. It is not at all clear in either

Trumpet or Boys Don't Cry that these characters'

rejection of lesbianism is a form of self-denial or false consciousness ± as it might have been treated in lesbian cultural productions of, say, the 1970s or 1980s ± so that in both cases we are forced to confront the question of whether gender identity, rather than sexuality, is the primary

organizing

category

for

such

characters

and

in

such

relationships

(for

further

commentary on this issue, see Sinfield 2000). But these narratives also raise questions about the tenacity of what Sinfield calls the `cross-sex grid' (1994, 161±75) and the effectiveness of attempts to transgress them. One of the significant features of Kay's novel, for instance, is the pursuit of Joss Moody's story by an opportunistic journalist who clearly wants to frame the narrative in a populist way, treating it as a form of perversion and a betrayal of the son's relationship with his father, and, while ultimately the journalist is thwarted by the son's refusal to co-operate, the novel makes us aware

that

dominant

discourses

have

their

own

ways

of

constructing

transgendered

identities. This reminds us therefore that, as Butler herself recognizes (1990, 137), the efficacy of `parody' as a form of subversion is dependent substantially on how its message is received (though it should be noted too that, according to the narrative, Moody succeeded in passing as a man, and in this respect his masculinity did

not point up the performative

aspects of gender; it simply fooled people). This

emphasis

on

gender

as

performance,

pose

or

style

has

probably

become

the

dominant one in contemporary studies of masculinity (and femininity, for that matter), and, in this respect, there is a discernible if subtle shift in the direction of such studies: from

modern north american criticism and theory

206

an emphasis on the denaturalization of masculinity as a privileged term in male±female and other relations to an emphasis on masculinity as a depthless style or performance on the part of persons of either sex. This latter emphasis need not necessarily exclude a sense of the former, of course, but it does seem to me that there is at least the risk that the emphasis on masculinity as a `performance' might obscure our sense of it as bound up with the possession of power and the desire to retain that power. Clearly, overtly performative versions of masculinity, such as those by drag kings, may dislocate the relationship between masculinity as a set of signifiers and the male body, but the further relationship between that masculinity and the power that is attendant on its `authentic' relation to the body is surely another thing.

That

relationship is beyond individual stylistic choices or identifications,

and one of the problems with the emphasis on `performance' ± at least in some invocations of it ± is that it tends towards an emphasis on voluntarism and choice, on gender as a commodity. I

will

end

this

survey

of

recent

work

with

a

few

observations

which

may

not

be

particularly original but which seem to me to bear repetition. First, it may be that there are problems attendant on regarding masculinity as an identity ± whether ironized or not ± in the first place, on talking about it as a kind of possession ± that is, as `my' or `his' or `her' masculinity. Speaking for myself ± and self-reflexiveness is a significant feature of many studies of masculinity ± my sense of my own gender is a variable one, bound up with specific contexts and with roles which are expected of me which I might adopt or ± possibly in the face of strong pressure and involving the refusal of certain rewards for `good' conduct ± decline. This leads me to an attendant observation, that in talking about gender we are dealing with the body, its socialization and its social meaning and value, and indeed our relations to our bodies will always be culturally mediated in one way or another. But to say this is not to say that the body is simply a product of discourse: bodies have needs and are characterized by differences which may themselves have social significance. For instance, the capacity to bear children, whether exercised or not, has consequences in terms of people's relationship to their work and the rights which they might want to claim, though whether or not our current distinctions between male and female are helpful or adequate may well be a matter for debate. The ultimate political challenge implicit in these debates about

gender

is

to

create

social

values

and

relations

which

do

not

assign

power

and

privileges on the basis of particular configurations of the body.

David Alderson

Alderson, D.

Mansex Fine

Further reading and works cited . Manchester, 1998.

Territories of Desire in Queer Culture The Second Sex Constructing Masculinity Dismantling Black Manhood Representing Black Men Empire Boys Gender Trouble Writing Ireland Male Order Family Fortunes

Ð and Anderson, L. (eds) Beauvoir, S. de.

Berger, M. et al. (eds)

. London, 1995.

Black, D. P.

. New York, 1997.

Blount, M. and Cunningham, G. P. Bristow, J. Butler, J.

. Manchester, 2000.

. Harmondsworth, 1972.

. London, 1996.

. London, 1991.

. New York, 1990.

Cairns, D. and Richards, S.

Chapman, R. and Rutherford, J. Davidoff, L. and Hall, C.

. Manchester, 1988. . London, 1996.

. London, 1987.

comics studies

207

Dawson, G. Soldier Heroes. London, 1994. Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks. London, 1996. Fraser, R. Victorian Quest Romance. Plymouth, 1999. Gilroy, P. Between Camps. Harmondsworth, 2000. Halberstam, J. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC, 1998. Kay, J. Trumpet. London, 1998. Logan, P. Nerves and Narratives. Berkeley, CA, 1997. McClintock, A. Imperial Leather. New York, 1995. Majors, R. and Billson, J. Mancini Cool Pose. New York, 1992. Marriott, D. On Black Men. Edinburgh, 2000. Mercer, K. and Julien, I. `Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity: A Dossier', Male Order, eds R. Chapman and J. Rutherford. London, 1996. Midgley, C. (ed.) Gender and Imperialism. Manchester, 1998. Phillips, R. Mapping Men and Empire. London, 1997. Schwalbe, M. Unlocking the Iron Cage. Oxford, 1996. Sedgwick, E. Kosofsky. Between Men. New York, 1985. Ð. ` ``Gosh, Boy George, You must be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity!'' ', in Constructing Masculinity, eds Berger M. et al. London, 1995.

Segal, L. Slow Motion. London, 1997. Sinfield, A. The Wilde Century. London, 1994. Showalter, E. Sexual Anarchy. London, 1991. Silverman, K. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York, 1992. Ð. `Transgendered identities', in Territories of Desire in Queer Culture, eds D. Alderson and L. Anderson. Manchester, 2000. Sinha, M. Colonial Masculinity. Manchester, 1995. Solomon-Godeau, A. `Male Trouble', in Constructing Masculinity, eds M. Berger et al. London, 1995. Sussman, H. Victorian Masculinities. Cambridge, 1995. Tolson, A. The Limits of Masculinity. London, 1977. Winterson, J. Written on the Body. London, 1992.

28. Comics Studies

Although both film and comics in their currently recognized forms emerged in the nineteenth century, film acquired much earlier critical academic recognition, even though as early as the 1830s the comic strip began to distinguish itself from already established fields of printmaking and caricature. Despite its being the older medium, the comic strip and its cultural significance have only recently begun to be appreciated in academic studies. As a result, the relatively recent rise in comics studies and comics scholarship has led to a number of different debates concerning origins and seminal influences and sources. È pffer (1799±1846), others cite the origins of the While some scholars credit Rodolphe To comic strip with either George Cruikshank (1792±1878) or William Hogarth (1679± 1764), the latter's narrative cycle The Rake's Progress being offered as a prototype of the comic strip. Other comics scholars have, more radically, assigned the origin of the comic strip to the Bayeux tapestries (1077), produced after the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon

208

modern north american criticism and theory

England eleven years earlier. There is, though, no absolutely agreed starting point. In this article, therefore, I will focus on the development and reception of, briefly, the comic strip, and subsequently the comic book, in the United States through the twentieth century. Comic strips preceded the comic book in North America, but publishers soon realized the potential of reprinting strips in comic book form. The once widely held view that R. F. Outcault (1863±1928) created what was recognized as the first modern American comic strip with The Yellow Kid (1895) is now discredited, even though Outcault's creation, the Yellow Kid, was a hugely popular phenomenon of its time, boosting newspaper sales in which the comic appeared. Amongst scholars of the comic strip, the first American comic book proper is now generally considered to be Funnies on Parade (1933), which was not produced specifically as a comic book, but was reprinted from already published newspaper strips. The early twentieth century was a particularly fruitful period for comic strips: Windsor McKay's Little Nemo (1904±13, revived briefly in 1924) and George Herriman's Krazy Kat (1916±44) are discussed in almost every scholarly work on comic strips. By 1935, in the midst of the Depression, the comic book established itself as a medium of mass entertainment and communication. As a result, comic-book reproduction of previously printed material in newspapers and magazines was superseded by the regular publication of original material. Soon afterwards, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster's Superman opened the floodgates of superhero comics in Action Comics #1 (1938). The `Golden Age' of comic books, a term developed by the collectors' market, continues from around this time until the early 1950s and has been the subject of much amateur, trade and academic writing over the years. The number of popular books published about Superman, Batman and other superhero icons born in the Golden Age is, at an initial glance, overwhelming, but as yet, no definitive academic monograph on this period or any of its cartoonists has emerged. The first critical commentaries contemporaneous with the first half of the twentieth century and its comics output were generally less than favourable, tending to dismiss the field as harmful at worst or vapid at best. Favourable criticism was limited to arguments that a specific strip or book was an exception to the rule. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester's Arguing Comics (2004) recovers such `lost' criticism, sampling articles from 1895 through to the early 1960s. The most negative and damaging critical attack on comics was Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Presently out of print, it was of great significance both at the time of its publication and subsequently, in that it brought about comics' self-censorship via the institution of the Comics Code Authority (CCA). As a result comic books established in the genres of horror and crime narrative were occasionally forced out of business. EC Comics, the best-regarded of the Horror and Crime comics publishers, all but went under, surviving only in the form of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad Magazine. Around the same time at the end of the 1950s, fanzines began to appear, discussing and defending comics, as well as serving to establish art and writing credits (most comic books being, up to this time, uncredited). The turmoil caused by the Comics Code did not have any substantial impact on what are known as `funny animal' comics, one of the medium's most enduring and best selling genres. Little critical attention has been paid to these comics, or their greatest talent, Carl Barks. After the institution of the Comics Code, the Silver Age of Comics begins, characterized by Spiderman and the X-Men, and given their most significant and inventive interpreters in artist Jack Kirby and editor/writer Stan Lee. By the end of the 1950s, scholarship on comic strips and comic books had begun to develop in North American universities, even though publication of articles was not

comics studies

209

forthcoming. Sol Davidson earned his Ph.D. with a thousand-page dissertation on comics (the first on the subject in the US) in 1959, but no academic books on comics would appear until the 1970s. The underground comics of the 1960s and 1970s varied as widely in quality as they did in distribution, but they contained elements that opened doors for future work

and

scholarship:

the

countercultural

impulse

to

break

taboos,

the

artist-writer

(already a staple of comic strips), and autobiographical elements. Robert Crumb is the most famous of the underground artists, and his mixture of self-loathing and extreme sexual candor has had a lasting influence. Visual art and design journal

Graphis

put out two issues,

one on comic strips and one on comic books, in 1972. Out of print now, this is an early and key example of how to bring serious writing and lavish art reproductions together and is, in addition, one of the very few transatlantic works on comics. Amongst the first monographs on comics are David Kunzle's

The Early Comic Strip:

Picture Stories and Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 second volume,

The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century.

and the

Kunzle's books offer

histories and necessary cultural contextualization, while focusing exclusively on comic strips. The nineteenth-century volume is of particular interest, establishing the centrality È pffer, Hogarth and Cruikshank, and later to comic strip study of early innovators such as To popular caricaturists such as Cham, Busch and Petit ± all of whose work appeared in popular magazines of the day, particularly

Charivari, Punch

and

Fliegende Blatter.

Out of

necessity, Kunzle formulates a working definition of the comic strip as dominated by images rather than text and consisting of a sequence of images. However, while such a focus may be

now

Kunzle's

considered key

as

insights

misplaced, was

to

Kunzle's

describe

work

comics

did

as

effect

important

mass-produced

changes.

and

topical,

One

of

thereby

anticipating the `cultural history' genre of comics scholarship. Additionally, he established the necessity of taking the comic strip seriously as a field of academic inquiry, while also drawing

attention

to

the

lack

of

such

interest.

Furthermore,

Kunzle's

groundbreaking

publications more or less irreversibly exploded the fallacy that comic strips began in North America and are a uniquely North American art form. Since the publication of Kunzle's work, there has been a great deal of debate as to whether it is primarily sequential images or the combination of text and image that defines comics, but his significance is not to be diminished. At the same time as Kunzle's work appeared in print, comics study made its first forays into the university classroom. In 1974, Donald Ault created a `Literature and Popular Culture' course at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the first to include comic books as course readings, placing them alongside animated films, conventional literature and literary theory in the classroom. As a result chiefly of the initiatives of Kunzle and Ault, comics studies has emerged subsequently as a field over a period ironically in which comic book sales have continued to decline and comic strips are increasingly cramped for space. In such difficult times, post-underground comics have taken off in an increasing variety of directions, from Art Spiegelman's avant-garde comic

Raw

to self-published `ground level'

comics and, in addition, to deliberately unpolished mini-comics. Will Eisner's groundbreaking

A Contract With God

(1979), is often incorrectly identified

as `the first graphic novel'. It was neither the first graphic novel, nor was it properly a `novel', being instead a collection of short stories. In retrospect such determinations merely reveal on the one hand the lack of academic awareness of the widespread extent of avantgarde and underground work already under way, and on the other, something which comic book readers had known for some time: that the comic book had already established itself,

modern north american criticism and theory

210

via counter-cultural means, as a serious aesthetic medium. This is not to diminish Eisner's significance, however. Eisner did popularize the term `graphic novel', his book proving a crucial turning-point in its being among the first works to reach a wider audience than hitherto. It drew attention to itself in being the work of a single author-artist (it is also, interestingly,

semi-autobiographical),

like

much

other

underground

material,

and

was

intended from the start as a book, not just a comic, for distribution and sale primarily in bookstores, aimed at a general ± though generally adult ± audience.

Comics and Sequential Art

Eisner followed this up with the seminal text were

already

guides

to

cartooning

technique,

but

Eisner's

book

was

(1985). There

broader

in

scope,

conveying a lifetime's experience about how to use the elements of the medium to achieve dramatic

effect.

Watchmen

The

Batman

revisionist

following

tales,

year,

collected

editions

The Dark Knight Returns,

and Spiegelman's

Maus,

were

Alan

released

Moore

of Frank

and

Dave

Miller's

Gibbons's

thereby consolidating previous work and establishing

irrevocably the graphic novel as its own genre. This `holy trinity' of comic books would result in the first of many furores over the `new' comics, and all have subsequently become

Maus

staples of academic teaching and research. classes,

while

both

it

and

Watchmen

have

is taught in many Holocaust literature

de rigeur

become

for

classes

on

comics

as

literature. All three have been the subject of many journal articles book chapters, but as yet none have received dedicated monographs. A major entry into the field occurred in 1990 with the publication of M. Thomas Inge's

Comics as Culture

and Joseph Witek's

Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack

Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar . Comics as Culture

anthologizes Inge's essays,

published

under

between

1983

and

1990.

Inge,

who

had

studied

Eisner,

persistently

contextualized American comics, showing how specific writers and artists were influenced by

works

and

cultural

influences

outside

the

field

of

comics

and

how

they,

in

turn,

influenced others, in counterpoint to often-insular fan and popular work. Witek, who had been one of Ault's students, took an opposite tack, considering how Jackson, Spiegelman and Pekar depicted history in and through their work. Witek's tightly focused monograph may be the first to consider a small number of comics in great detail, to offer close readings of

the

genre

narratives.

and,

moreover,

Comics as Culture

to

and

give

careful

cultural

Comic Books as History

and

historical

grounding

to

the

were the first Comics Studies titles

published by the University Press of Mississippi, which has since become a major publisher of monographs, essay collections and interview books in the field. The 1990s witnessed something of a tumult in the comic book industry, the meteoric rise and fall of Image Comics and the collapse of an over-inflated collector's market being amongst the most notable phenomena. At the same time, there was a marked shift in critical interest, as a result, largely, of the influence of Scott McCloud's

Comics: The Invisible Art

Understanding

(1990) as readers started to be more interested in scholarship and

the general public became more aware of comics. No book has done more to shape Comics Studies

as a

readers

became

field,

or readers' perceptions of

more

interested

in

the

field

comics. as

a

From

McCloud's

scholarly

concern,

work, academic while

a

greater

awareness of the comic book and graphic novel developed among the general reading public. Written entirely as a comic book, McCloud's

Understanding Comics

is something of

a sea-change. It takes Eisner's definition of comics as `sequential art' and founds a theory on that definition, making the `gutter' or space between panels the single most important element

in

any

comic.

He

follows

from

Kunzle

and

others

in

excluding

single-panel

cartoons and caricatures as `not comics', providing a widely used typology of the transitions

comics studies

211

between panels. McCloud, not an academic himself, has drawn some fire from those who feel

Understanding Comics

is too proscriptive or lacks scholarly rigor. Nonetheless, virtually

all books and papers on comics since have cited McCloud, even if only to refute him. Robert C. Harvey's book

The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History

The Art of the Comic Book

(1994) and follow-up

(1996) are both published by a university press, though

Harvey, like McCloud and Eisner, is not an academic but a professional comics creator. Harvey

unapologetically

focuses

on

the

works

he

considers

to

be

the

best

and

most

innovative, making his books more formal critiques than survey histories. Like McCloud, he takes a proscriptive stance, but his criterion for aesthetic and formal evaluation is governed by elements of verbal-visual blending. He favours comics where image and text are as complementary as possible and only allows for wordless or `pantomine' comics as the exceptions that prove the rule. One

particular

university:

that

of

critical

voice

British

of

note

academic

emerged

Roger

during

Sabin.

His

the

1990s

from

within

the

Adult Comics: An Introduction

(1993) examines the origins of comics written for adults, both in and before the underground commix. It was written largely as a corrective to the idea that comics `grew up' in the 1980s. Sabin draws examples from

 es manga, bandes dessine

(French comics) and

fumetti

(Italian comics), but is mostly interested in Anglo-American comics. His follow-up book,

Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels

(1996), is a coffee-table book in a similar vein, though

broader in scope. Here, Sabin made the case that British work generally leads rather than follows the American comics scene. Sabin

was

not

alone,

however.

By

the

mid-1990s,

two

major

threads

of

Comics

Scholarship had been established: cultural histories placing and contextualizing comics on the one hand and, on the other, explanatory theories of what the medium is and can do. Notably, writing in the field up to this point tends largely to be defensive, with many publications establishing

offering the

not

only

bona fides

of

critical

the

field

analysis and

its

but

also

subject,

acting

as

showing

apologia:

why

comic

intent

on

books

are

relevant and worth studying, and establishing that they are different from and not inferior to movies, novels and picture-books. As the decade proceeded, the number of academic works

on

decreased.

comics By

increased

1998,

Amy

the decade, could produce

dramatically

Kyste

Nyeberg,

and

the

typical

amount of

of

comics

defensive

scholarship

Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code ,

manoeuvring at

the

end

of

speaking of the

much-reviled CCA as a forerunner to other industry self-regulation, such as the MPAA movie ratings. Similarly, Ian Gordon, in

Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890±1945

(1998), was free to focus on consumer culture and merchandising as a driving force behind comic strips, ignoring many of the most renowned strips. The turn of the century witnessed a redoubling of the volume and scope of Comics Studies. It also attracted scholars from other fields with an interest in the subject. David Carrier,

for

historian to

example,

brought

his

background

The Aesthetics of Comics

as

an

analytic

philosopher

and

an

art

(2000). Bradford D. Wright compared Golden and

Silver Age comics to American culture more broadly perceived in

Transformation of Youth Culture in America

(2001).

The

Comic Book Nation: The

work

of

these

two

men

is

noteworthy for particular reasons. Carrier's text offers an explanatory theory most notable  Daumier's caricatures and other for giving credibility to the comparison between Honore work by `fine' artists and that of comics; Wright, on the other hand, offers a cultural history that combines extensive cultural analysis grounded in a sense of the historical specificity of popular national identity in the US as this is mediated in the singular form of the comic.

modern north american criticism and theory

212

In the first years of the twenty-first century, the breadth and diversity of disciplinary approaches to comics studies has increased markedly, with works applying techniques from the areas of Cultural Studies, Film Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Geoff Klock's

Read Superhero Comics and Why

How to

(2002) applies Harold Bloom's theory of the anxiety of

influence to comics, and Neil Cohn's self-published work (2002±present), departing from McCloud's work, argues that there is a sentence-like grammar to the comic strip or page and that visual elements can be `read'. At present, there are no clear divisions among comics scholars, though the emergence of one or more dominant `schools' of comics studies seems likely. There is, though, increasing availability of, and ease of access to, source material and institutional support for those working in the field. The first academic journal devoted to comics studies,

Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies

(1994±7), was of great significance to the

field, only to disappear after three years, leaving a void not filled until 1999 by John Lent's

The International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA), notable for its 2004, Donald Ault inaugurated

ImageTexT,

proactive internationalism. In

an e-journal for comics and animation studies

that places an emphasis on theoretical reflection on and intervention into the field, as the necessary means of producing rigorous analysis from a multidisciplinary base. In 2002 M. Todd Hignite's

Comic Art

emerged as a serious trade publication that welcomed academic

input. The other serious trade magazine, Gary Groth's

The Comics Journal

(1977±present)

has, unfortunately, traditionally been skeptical of academics and academic writing. University libraries are expanding their holdings in comics, particularly Michigan State University,

whose

collection

of

comics

may

exceed

that

of

the

Library

of

Congress.

Bowling Green State University and the University of California, Riverside also have large collections. Masters and doctoral tracks in Comics Studies have been introduced at the University of Florida (UF), and the library there is expanding its holdings in comics. The University of Mississippi Press is putting out a series of interview books with notable comics creators and animators, including Robert Crumb, Carl Barks, Charles M. Schultz and Milton

Caniff.

Forums

for

comics

scholarship

are

well

established:

the

Comics

Arts

Conference at the San Diego Comic-Con has been going since 1992 and the International Comics Art Fest since 1996. The UF Conference on Comics is four years old and the Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association has an Area Chair for Comics. Increasingly specialized works are being put out by popular presses, including Patrick Rosencranz' definitive work on the Underground Comics,

Comix Revolution 1963±1975

Rebel Visions: The Underground

(2002) and Trina Robbins's books on many aspects of women

and comics, including most recently,

The Great Women Cartoonists

(2001). Academic

publications are likewise becoming more focused, as with Jeffery A. Brown's press-specific look at race in comics:

Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics and their Fans

(2001). In recent

years there has also been a steady growth in the market for `alternative' comics, `zines', mini-comics comics.

and

Charles

graphic

novels,

Hatfield's

against

a

continued

decline

in

sales

Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature

of

`mainstream'

(2005)

describes

these phenomena and links alternative comics to the underground comix, while Daniel Raeburn's

Chris Ware

(2004) takes a fine-art approach to Ware's comics, design and objects

d'art. As a field, Comics Studies has grown to embrace galley exhibitions and counterculture(s), art history, cultural studies and the gap between old and new media. Thus, both in the university and beyond, comics studies has developed, often despite prejudice and in unexpected ways, and shows every sign of continuing to do so.

Christopher Eklund

comics studies

213

Further reading and works cited

Barker, M.

A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign.

Jackson, MS,

1984. Brown, J. A. Carrier, D. Cohn, N.

Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics and their Fans.

Jackson, MS, 2001.

University Park, PA, 2000.

The Aesthetics of Comics.

Early Writings on Visual Language.

Dowd, D. B. and Hignite, M. T. (eds)

Carlsbad, CA, 2003.

The Rubber Frame: Essays in Culture and Comics.

St Louis, MI,

2004. Eisner, W. Ð.

Tamarack, FL, 1985.

Comics and Sequential Art.

Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative.

ÐÐ.

A Contract with God.

Fingeroth, D.

Tamarack, FL, 1996.

Tamarack, FL, 1979.

Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us about Ourselves and our Society.

New York, 2004. Gordon, I.

Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890±1945.

Groth, G. and Fiore, R. (eds) Hatfield, C.

Jackson, 2005.

The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History.

The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History.

Heer, J. and Worcester, K. (eds)

Washington, DC, 1998.

New York, 1988.

Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature .

Harvey, R. C. Ð.

The New Comics.

Jackson, MS, 1994.

Jackson, MS, 1996.

Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium.

Jackson, MS,

2004. Herdeg, W. and Pascal, D. (eds) Jones, G. Klock, G.

How to Read Superhero Comics and Why.

Kunzle, D.

New York, 2004.

New York, 2002.

Berkeley, CA, 1973.

The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century.

Juno, A. (ed.) McCloud, S.

Berkeley, CA, 1990. New York, 1997.

Dangerous Drawings: Interviews with Comix and Graphix Artists.

McAllister, M. P. et al. (eds) Ð.

Zurich, 1972.

The Early Comic Strip: Picture Stories and Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet from

c.1450 to 1825.

Ð.

Comics: The Art of The Comic Strip.

Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book.

Comics and Ideology.

New York, 2001.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.

Northampton, MA, 1993.

Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form.

New York,

2000. Nyeberg, A. K. Phelps, D.

Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code.

Reading the Funnies.

Raeburn, D.

Chris Ware.

Robbins, T.

The Great Women Superheroes.

Ð.

Jackson, MS, 1998.

Seattle, WA, 2001.

New Haven, CT, 2004. Northampton, MA, 1996.

From Girls to Grrlz: A History of Women's Comics from Teens to Zines.

San Francisco, 1999. Ð.

The Great Women Cartoonists.

Rosenkranz, P. Sabin, R. Ð.

New York, 2001.

Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963±1975.

Adult Comics: An Introduction.

Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels.

New York, 1996.

Schutz, D. and Kitchen, D. (eds)

Will Eisner's Shop Talk.

Thomas, I. M.

Jackson, MS, 2000.

Comics as Culture.

Varnum, R. and Gibbons, C. T. (eds) Wertham, F. Comics.

Jackson, MS, 2001.

New York, 1954.

Comic Book Rebels: Conversations with the Creators of the New

New York, 1993.

Wright, B. D. 2001.

Milwaukie, OR, 2001.

The Language of Comics: Word and Image.

Seduction of the Innocent.

Wiater, S. and Bissette, S. R. (eds)

Seattle, 2002.

New York, 1993.

Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America.

Baltimore, MD,

29. Anglophone Canadian Literary Studies

As the product of a relatively young country ± young in terms of its written history and young in terms of its political construction as a nation ± the tradition of Anglophone Canadian literary studies is inevitably a recent one. The moment of origin of a distinctively

Canadian

literature has always been in dispute, but the beginnings of Canadian literary

criticism can be traced back to around the mid-nineteenth century. At this time, just before the

Confederation

of

1867,

when

unity

and

rebellion

were

key

political

concerns

throughout what was then British North America, a number of critical essays and articles appeared in which the state and function of literature in Canada was being discussed. (Many early critical pieces are collected in Ballstadt 1975.) In particular, there emerged a common argument for the need of a distinctive national literature to reflect and encourage a national unity. Typifying this nationalist sentiment, Edward Hartley Dewart introduced his

1864

Selections from Canadian Poets

anthology,

literature

±

with

the

statement:

`A

national

±

the

literature

first

is

an

anthology

essential

of

Canadian

element

in

the

formation of national character.' Literature, he argued, is `the bond of national unity, and the

guide

of

national

energy'

(1864,

ix).

Dewart

pointed

to

the

common

belief

that

Canadians were too practical-minded, too lacking in wealth and leisure, and simply too busy forging a living from the wilderness that surrounded them to engage with poetry. But above all such considerations, he blamed Canada's lack of an internationally renowned literature on its colonial position, which he argued undermined `interest and faith in all indigenous literary productions' (1864, x). Dewart's early analysis pointed to a number of themes that have continued to recur throughout Anglophone Canadian literary studies. The nationalist sentiment of

from Canadian Poets

Selections

explicitly politicized the role of literature as a national unifier, and

when this view was countered by a growing demand for regionalism ± for recognition of difference and diversity of style and experience ± the literary beginnings of an ongoing Canadian

tension

were

forged.

Other

important

points

are

touched

on

in

Dewart's

introduction: the presence of practical barriers to a flourishing literary production, the weight

of

a

colonial

tradition

and,

in

the

conclusion

to

his

introductory

essay,

a

significantly meek and self-effacing reference to Canada's youth when he states: `Though poor in historic interest, our past is not altogether devoid of events capable of poetic treatment' (1864, xix). Canadian literature, it has variously been said, is psychologically bound

by

its

artistically Northrop

colonial

past,

overwhelmed Frye

wrote

of

by

is its

emotionally British

his native

and

land:

`It

crippled

by

American is

its

former

literary

practically

the

Puritanism,

counterparts.

only

country

and

In

left

is

1971, in

the

world which is a pure colony, colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics' (1971,

iii).

Such

views

of

course

have

always

been

challenged,

but

they

have

held

anglophone canadian literary studies

215

surprisingly firm in the popular imagination. Indeed, it was not until the mid-twentiethcentury

`renaissance'

critically

examined

of

Canadian

and

literature

dismantled,

and

that

it

is

these from

stereotypes this

later

really

period

started

to

onwards

be

that

Anglophone Canadian literary studies began to engage with Canadian and world literature from a much broader and more diverse point of inquiry.

Frontier Writing ± First Writers, First Readers Earle Birney's 1962 poem `Can. Lit.' famously concludes with the line, `It's only by our lack of ghosts/we're haunted' (Atwood 1982, 116), and the lack of indigenous literary tradition has been a defining factor in the study of Canadian literature. Whilst European writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were anchored within

a multifaceted literary

heritage, the location and existence of a Canadian literature remained uncertain. From John Cabot's first entry into the Gulf of St Lawrence in 1497 to the division of Upper and Lower Canada by the Canada Act of 1791, from the 1867 Confederation of the Dominion of Canada to well into the post-war twentieth century, the notion of `Canada' has been a contested site, both culturally and geographically. Accordingly, Frye posed the conundrum `where is here?' as the crux of Canadian identity, more potent a query than `who am I?'. Place, argued Frye, is central to Canadian sensibility, and the shaping of Canadian history and geography is reflected in the development of its literature (1971, 220). The

first

texts

that

came

out

of

Canada

were

largely

descriptive

and

instructive

documents of varying literary quality written by explorers, travellers and early settlers. Various permutations on the `Travels in North America' theme were published from the late sixteenth century onwards, with texts such as Alexander Mackenzie's

Voyages from

Montreal on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in the Years 1789 and 1793 Elder's

1776

(published 1801) and Alexander Henry the

Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories between the Years 1760 and

(published 1809) charting a specifically Canadian experience. These writings tended

to combine adventure story and natural history with journal writings and social observations. Placing such texts as the origin of Canadian literature is contentious for a number of reasons. Firstly, the men who wrote them ± and it was primarily men, although women travel writers later made their mark in the field, most notably Anna Jameson with

Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada works.

Secondly,

the

authors

were

Winter

(1838) ± had little intention of creating `literary'

not

natives

of

Canada

and

their

work

was

largely

published in Europe and intended for a European readership. And finally, these texts were for

a

long

time

regarded

as

historical

documents

rather

than

literary

works.

Canada's

heritage of exploration and travel literature, however, contains many thematic connections to its contemporary literature. Novelist and poet Margaret Atwood, for example, addresses Frye's question, `where is here?' and suggests that this is what `a man asks when he finds himself in unknown territory, and it implies several other questions. Where is this place in relation to other places? How do I find my way around in it?' (Atwood 1972, 17). Atwood connects the earliest explorations of Canada with an ongoing literary inquiry into the construction of a Canadian sensibility and an uneasy interaction with the country's wilderness and wildlife which can be traced through a significant amount of Canadian literature. This retrospective lineage, plotted from Canada's earliest texts to its contemporary writers, was important to the thematic critics of the 1960s and 1970s, but it is also

modern north american criticism and theory

216

significant in providing evidence of a Canadian literary heritage that extends beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Other, more obviously literary, works were also written in this early period, for example Frances

Brooke's

epistolary

The History of Emily Montague

novel,

(1769),

which

is

considered to have been the first Canadian novel. Brooke, however, was born in and lived in England, and although she resided with her husband in Quebec for part of the 1760s ± providing the setting for her best-known work ± she published the novel on her return to England where it found an enthusiastic European audience, making it, in W. J. Keith's words, `an English novel that happens to exploit Canadian subject matter' (1985, 42). Much later, the works of two of Canada's most famous pioneer writers were, like those of

Brooke,

still

characterised

by

their

focus

on

an

intended

European

±

and

indeed

American ± readership. Sisters Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill were British born, moving

to Canada

with their

husbands

in the

1830s.

However, unlike Brooke,

Moodie and Traill emigrated with the intention of settling and consequently, while they chronicled the curiosities of an alien land for the edification of `outsiders', as settlers rather than visitors, they wrote as `insiders' to the newly forming Canadian nation. Although their subject matter was superficially similar, the writing styles and sensibilities of the two sisters were very different. Moodie, best known for

Roughing It in the Bush

(1852), is

renowned for her occasionally romantic and often melodramatic sketches, based on real life but consciously fictional in their use of character, parody and roughly sequential plot. Where Moodie was self-consciously literary in style, Traill, author of

The Backwoods of Canada

(1836),

is generally regarded as being the more pragmatic and optimistic of the two. Speaking of a poet's lament that Canada was too young to inspire art, Traill merely notes that the immigrant labourers `feel no regret that the land they labour on has not yet been celebrated by the pen of the historian or the lay of the poet' (1836, 154). Even in two writers of such strikingly similar background and experience, no singular `Canadian voice' can be located, and their contrasting similarities and differences have contributed to evolving interpretations of their work. While Moodie was most often recalled for clinging to `the refinements and luxuries of European society' (1852, vii), Traill was seen to have embraced the democracy of a new, less rigidly hierarchical society. With time, however, later critics have applied a psychological reading to Moodie's work. Keith, for example, suggests that `while reading Moodie we frequently receive painful glimpses of a mind at the end of its tether' (1985, 21), and in

Journals of Susanna Moodie

The

, a poetic interpretation of Moodie's experiences, Atwood depicts a

woman haunted by ghosts and `divided down the middle' (1970, 62). With such poetic and critical analyses as these, Canada's early texts move much beyond documents of pioneer life and become crucial aspects of a constantly revisited and redefined literary heritage. The multiple aspects of these early texts, which frequently vacillate between documentary, anecdote, commentary, romance and narrative, and were often not intended for a Canadian readership, point to the ill-defined boundaries of early Canadian literature. From such

beginnings,

therefore,

nurturance and definition

of

the a

main

task

national

of

Canadian

literature

that

literary

could

studies

withstand

became

both

the

the geo-

graphical and political pressures of Canadian pioneer living and the psychological pressures of European cultural domination. The Confederation of 1867 went some way to attaining this goal by at least asserting the existence of a Canadian nation, but colonial barriers to a national literature persisted, as Canada continued to be perceived as parochial, uncultured, unromantic Lighthall's

and

`poor

in

historic

interest',

Songs from the Great Dominion

as

Dewart

(1889),

had

conceded.

published

William

twenty-five

Douw

years

after

anglophone canadian literary studies Selections from Canadian Poets,

217

moved to address this view. Like Dewart, Lighthall was a

nationalist, but where Dewart sought to elevate Canadian poetry to the benchmark of European literature, Lighthall organised his anthology under confident headings such as `The New Nationality' and `The Spirit of Canadian History' (1889, vii; xiii). His anthology aimed to choose `only what illustrates the country and its life

in a distinctive way'

(1889,

xxxiv) and he called on Canadian poets to celebrate their nation's youth and great natural beauty. Whilst certainly not challenging Canada's position as the `Eldest Daughter of the Empire' (1889, xxi),

Songs from the Great Dominion

pointed to a newer, post-Confederation

confidence in Canada's unique qualities and in the capacity of its literature to embody those qualities in a wholly individual and proficient manner. As Canada moved towards the twentieth century, the practical difficulties of writing in a country with a limited publishing infrastructure continued. The `lack of ghosts' of course persisted, and, despite Lighthall's call for optimism, observations of the famous Canadian inferiority complex continued to colour literary analysis. Increasingly, it became clear that this malaise ± always related to Canada's lack of a strong national identity in the face of British

and

French

cultural

and

political

history,

and

increasingly

in

contrast

to

the

burgeoning confidence of the United States ± needed to be addressed, and in the twentieth century, the Canadian government moved towards a policy of state sponsorship of the arts. This led to increased national literary production, but it also stimulated the production of Anglophone Canadian literary studies as Canadian literary heritage came under renewed scrutiny from an increasingly diverse range of perspectives.

The Twentieth Century From

its

opening

to

its

close,

the

twentieth

century

saw

a

remarkable

evolution

and

diversification of Canadian literature, and a correspondingly productive and diverse period of

literary

Paraphrase,

criticism.

In

his

preface

to

Frank

Davey's

1983

critical

text,

Surviving the

Eli Mandel stated: `From its earliest beginnings, Canadian criticism has been a

surprisingly aggressive art' (Davey 1983, i). Whilst early critical studies worked defensively to establish and define Canadian literature, criticism in the mid- to late twentieth century became increasingly combative as crucially ideologically opposed critics entered into public debate on the direction in which Anglophone Canadian literary studies should be heading. At the start of the period, however, many features and difficulties of the nineteenth century

remained.

American

and

British

imports

continued

to

be

more

economically

viable than locally published books, few Canadian publishing houses existed and there was a small indigenous readership. The nature of Canada's literary contribution remained in dispute and the period between Confederation and the First World War saw the continued production

of

critical

surveys

and

anthologies

attempting,

above

all,

to

confirm

the

existence of an established body of Canadian literature: for example, Archibald MacMurchy's

Handbook of Canadian Literature

Literature

(1914). European modernism reached Canada with some difficulty and many

critics,

(1906) and T. G. Marquis's

who still largely continued to equate

English-Canadian

realism with nationalism, viewed it with

suspicion. Poet Arthur Stringer prefaced his 1914 collection,

Open Water,

with a call for

recognition of free verse and literary experimentalism, and the progressive critical magazine

Canadian Forum,

founded in 1920, moved to disseminate modernist principles. But on the

whole, Canadian literature moved into the twentieth century slowly, retaining many of its nineteenth-century influences.

modern north american criticism and theory

218

The

continuing

popularity

of

the

Confederation

Poets

±

a

loose

association

based

predominantly on its affiliates being born around the 1860s ± provides, with their nature poetry heavily influenced by the European Romantics, an example of the perpetuation of Victorian

sensibilities.

Perhaps

more

significantly

however,

the

Confederation

Poets

represented the first Canadian `school' of writers, creating a poetic voice which distinctively belonged to Canada. Animal stories provided another, more idiosyncratic Canadian school of writing. The most famous examples of these are Ernest Thompson Seton's

Wild

Animals I have Known (1898) and Charles G. D. Roberts's Earth's Enigmas (1896). A little later in this period, sentimental stories of provincial life also became very popular, typified by L. M. Montgomery's

Anne of Green Gables (1907), based on Prince Edward Island, and

the gentle humour of Stephen Leacock's Ontario-based

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

(1912). These developments ± particularly the realistic animal stories of Seton and Roberts ± helped

to support the idea that there were literary conventions that could truly be

described as indigenous to Canada. In 1922, Lorne Pierce and Albert Watson published another anthology,

Our Canadian Literature, which, as the first post-war anthology, and the

first to include prose alongside poetry, moved to further entrench the notion of a unique Canadian cultural identity, while still clearly struggling to disentangle Canadian literature from its European roots. This key theme of identity in Canadian literary studies persisted well into the twentieth century. By the 1920s, Canada had experienced a number of distinctive literary movements, various anthologies of national literature had been collected and critics had begun to identify the recurring patterns and themes of a maturing corpus. However, in a 1928 essay published in

Canadian Forum, entitled `Wanted ± Canadian Criticism', A. J. M. Smith

argued

with

that,

its

coming

of

age,

Canadian

literature

must

be

judged

openly

and

critically for its literary merit. Smith argued for a rejection of uncritical nationalist literary  s of Canadian life and nature over studies which valued sentimental and romantic cliche aesthetic worth, and called for a period of maturity in Canadian literature and criticism: `Sensibility is no longer enough,' he stated, `intelligence is also required. Even in Canada' (1928). The split between nationalist or native, and what was sometimes termed internationalist, and sometimes cosmopolitan or modernist, criticism widened throughout the twentieth century and became increasingly important in Anglophone Canadian literary studies.

Unity and Individuality The move to develop a strong and uniquely Canadian literary canon evidently pre-dates the twentieth century, but the 1960s finally saw it come to fruition, partly as a result of the new

publishing

infrastructure

that

had

steadily

been

put into place over the previous

decade, and partly as a consequence of a growing cultural nationalism which also fuelled government funding of the arts through the Canada Council. At this time in particular, Canadian writing was politicized by nationalist sentiment and Canadian criticism flourished alongside Canadian publishing. There were a number of reasons, both optimistic and defensive, for the increase in Canadian nationalism during the late twentieth century. Keith, for example, writing in 1985, suggested that it `is partly the result of greater cultural confidence, but it also reflects the anxiety of a sparsely populated country in an overcrowded world of superpowers' (1985, 5). The proliferation of Canada's literary successes came at a time when the United States was rapidly gaining international power, and the

anglophone canadian literary studies

219

declining influence of Britain and France in Canada's affairs was balanced by the rising shadow

of

America's

cultural

domination

of

its

northern

neighbour.

Yet

despite

this

growing cultural imperialism, Canadian literature succeeded in undergoing a period of significant productivity in the 1960s and 1970s, with Canadian authors such as Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Leonard Cohen and numerous others achieving international success. The earliest symptoms of this renaissance are clear: the New Canadian Library was established by publishers McClelland and Stewart in 1957, and in 1959 George Woodcock founded existed

the

and

journal was

Canadian Literature,

appropriate

for

sending

academic

a

clear

attention.

In

signal

1965

that

the

Coach

phenomenon

House

Press

was

founded, followed in 1966 by Oberon and in 1967 by Vancouver-based Talonbooks and Toronto-based publisher House of Anansi Press. Also in 1967, Norah Story edited the

Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature .

At this time, Canadian publishers

really began to publish Canadian authors in significant numbers. Literary newsletters and

Tish,

magazines sprang up, such as

a Vancouver-based poetry magazine edited by a number

of poets, including Frank Davey. From its nineteenth-century beginnings as the published commentaries of various professionals ± clergy, lawyers, politicians ± during the 1960s, Canadian literary

studies became

noticeably academic.

The

first

university

courses

on

`Can. Lit.' appeared on university syllabi, and frequently both writers and critics were themselves university-affiliated academics. The best-known academic-critic is Northrop Frye, whose

Anatomy of Criticism

(1957)

was hugely influential. However, in his later work, Frye chose not to apply his universal mythopoeic structure to Canadian literature and instead, in his 1971 collection of essays,

The Bush Garden,

produced

a

critical

reading

based

on

images

and

themes

unique

to

Canadian writers. Frye propounds a form of environmental determinism, demonstrating unique

characteristics

geography

and

of

history,

the

and

Canadian evident

literature. In his 1965 conclusion to

Garden,

in

sensibility recurring

prompted patterns

largely

and

A Literary History of Canada,

by

themes

the in

country's Canadian

included in

The Bush

Frye outlined his best-known idea of the Canadian sensibility ± what he called the

`garrison mentality':

Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological `frontier,' . . . communities that provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted

with

communities

are

a

huge,

bound

unthinking,

to

develop

menacing,

what

we

and

may

formidable

provisionally

physical call

a

setting

garrison

±

such

mentality

(1971, 225).

This

mentality,

according

to

Frye,

was

characteristic

of

Canadians

and

consequently

characteristic of their literature. Frye's thematic criticism was incredibly influential, and the best-known proponents of his argument were Douglas Jones's (1972) and John Moss's

Butterfly on Rock

(1970), Margaret Atwood's

Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction

Survival

(1974). In each of

these largely essentialist texts, a unifying mythology and pattern of themes is identified in Canadian literature and

the Canadian experience

is largely perceived in terms of the

defining struggle with nature ± evident in images of `isolation' according to Moss, `survival' according to Atwood. By each of these analyses, Canadian literature is more realistic, more pragmatic, and less visionary or optimistic than American literature.

modern north american criticism and theory

220

Thematic criticism dominated Anglophone Canadian literary studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and eventually there was a strong backlash against the determinism of the doctrine. This was largely led by Davey, who delivered his essay `Surviving the Paraphrase' as a lecture in 1974 and published it in

Canadian Literature

in 1976 (1983, 1±12). In this

essay, much influenced by the New Critical promotion of text and technique, he accused the thematic critics of lacking confidence in Canadian literature, of being `anti-evaluative', looking towards `alleged cultural influences and determiners' instead of working to `explain and illuminate the work on its own terms' (1983, 1). Other critics such as Michael Dixon, Eli Mandel and Barry Cameron joined Davey in his disavowal of what Cameron has termed `the

vulgar

sociology

of

Frye,

Jones,

Atwood,

and

Moss,

which

stereotypes

Canadian

consciousness' (1990, 129). In a 1978 interview, Atwood responded to such criticisms by arguing: `One can only afford ``a thoughtful consideration of technique'' when the question of

mere

existence

is

no

longer

a

question'

(1978,

85).

With

this

retort,

Atwood

was

identifying pre-1970 Canadian literature with the unstable `adolescence' that Smith had argued in 1928 it had already outgrown. Davey's main concern was that thematic criticism subsumed the individual identity into a humanistic cultural whole. The cultural-nationalist compulsion to define an artistic unity was working to silence the individual voice; the independent artist and the unique text were being compelled to speak for the whole, and authors and texts that failed to coincide with the ideological mainstream were being disregarded by the critical authorities. Davey complained that `books which begin ostensibly as attempts to illuminate separate instances of Canadian writing become messianic attempts to define a national identity or psychosis' (1983, 3). His essay was a call for regionalism and individualism, for a New Critical concentration on technique rather than a historicist focus on cultural and environmental determinism. The regional diversity which had always been an obstacle to overcome in the great task of unifying the second largest country in the world was increasingly being hailed as a strength to be celebrated. National literary unity was instead denounced as stultifying ± diminishing Canada's multifaceted strengths and diversities to a homogeneous whole of quaint animal images and isolation themes. In contrast, Patricia Marchak argued that only through regional difference can Canada create `a culture strong enough to resist American dominance and to establish a culture of national unity' (qtd in Cameron, 1990, 134). By this view, regionalism is actually an aid to nationalism. In her 1982 introduction to

New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English

The

, Atwood observed that ` ``regional'' has

changed in recent years from a bad word to a good word' (1982, xxviii). Regionalism became connected in the theorising of Davey and others with an increasingly postmodern project and with a valuing of fragmentation and difference over centrism and unity. Clearly, Canada has never been the unified state that many have wished it to be. Even in

The Bush Garden

, Frye acknowledged that `identity is local and regional, rooted in the

imagination and in works of culture', but he believed that `unity is national in reference, international in perspective' (1971, 2). This differentiation between identity and unity subsumes the regional identity to the project of national unity, but it still acknowledges the pull of regionalism in a writer's imagination. Frye in fact stated that the famous problem of Canadian identity is a regional rather than a national problem, and suggested that `an environment turned outward to the sea, like so much of Newfoundland, and one turned towards inland seas, like so much of the Maritimes, are an imaginative contrast' (1971, ii). The rising interest in regionalism in the late twentieth century led to a renewed emphasis on

the

heterogeneous

nature

of

the

literatures

of

Canada's

provinces,

which

posed

a

anglophone canadian literary studies

221

significant challenge to the nationalist project to identify a unified Canadian literature. In a 1987 essay on thematic criticism, T. D. MacLulish suggested: `whether Canada has one ``national'' literature or two, or whether it possesses only a mosaic of regional literatures, is still

a

matter

of

debate'

(1987,

18).

In

contrast

to

the

unifying

notion

of

a

uniquely

Canadian identity, regionalism celebrates the differences of Canada's geographically vast experience.

Ex-centricities: Postmodernism, Multiculturalism, Post-colonialism The backlash against thematic criticism resulted finally in the increased critical concentration on close textual analysis and appreciation of experimentalism and fragmentation that Smith had called for in `Wanted ± Canadian Criticism', well before thematic criticism had

reached

however,

the

was

height

more

of

its

significant

influence. for

This

paralleling

late

and

twentieth-century

informing

the

development,

rising

influence

of

post-structuralism and postmodernism in Canadian criticism. A number of critics (Barbara Godard, Cameron, Davey) have argued that structuralism and post-structuralism occurred simultaneously in Canada, with the consequence that the Canadian postmodern was a peculiar phenomenon, unique to the literary and critical culture of the nation. One of the most notable proponents of the idea that there exists a uniquely Canadian form of postmodernism is Linda Hutcheon. A key element of her thesis is the idea that `since the periphery or the margin might also describe Canada's perceived position in international terms, perhaps the postmodern ex-centric is very much a part of the identity of the nation' (1988, 3). Canada, which has always been `ex-centric' to the centralised powers of Britain, France and America, has always defined itself in terms of oppositions and differences. Consequently, many of the principles of postmodernism are natural to Canadian aesthetics and Hutcheon suggests that `the post-modern irony that refuses resolution of contraries' is an appropriate framework from which to read many Canadian writers such as Kroetsch, Atwood, Ondaatje and Munro (1988, 4). The rise of postmodernist criticism had a number of consequences for Anglophone Canadian literary studies. For a nation so long preoccupied with identifying a literary tradition, the postmodernist rejection of the humanist practice of canon-formation was inevitably a central concern. The long-standing and self-conscious move to identify a national literature resulted in, for example, the founding of the New Canadian Library. In many ways, this attempt to entrench Canadian literature within a qualitative structure was a

natural

instinct.

Whereas

`time

itself,

in

the

older

countries,

has

been

the

great

anthologizer' (Atwood 1982, xxix±xxx), Canadian history afforded no such assurances of

quality

and

longevity,

so

the

construction

of

a

canon

became

a

deliberate

act

of

collective consensus. However, as Canadian postmodernists attempted to push Canadian literary criticism towards a repudiation of such universalizing processes, others refused the idea that Canada was so quickly ready to reject the canon that it had barely begun to form. The most notable defender of the canon has been Robert Lecker, who, in

The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature ,

Making it Real:

accused the poststructuralists of `repudiat-

ing or ignoring the connection . . . between the country and its literature' (1995, 15). Lecker argued that the rejection of the developing canon worked to undermine Canada's still relatively unstable sense of self and, on this point, entered into public dialogue with Davey

during

the

1990s,

as

argument

published between the two writers.

and

counterargument

for

canonization

were

modern north american criticism and theory

222

The politics of canonization had further consequences for a growing body of multicultural writers and critics. Multiculturalism became an official policy in Canada in 1971, was made part of the Charter of Rights in 1982 and was entrenched in domestic policy by the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988. Around this period, a wealth of ethnic literary anthologies

appeared,

but

with

little

impact

(a

representative

list

is

given

in

Smaro

Kamboureli 2000, 132±3), and the first anthology to receive significant critical attention was the 1990 text,

Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions,

edited by Hutcheon and

Marion Richmond. Hutcheon and Richmond undertook to interrogate the parameters of `ethnic literature', and their decision to place established Canadian writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Mordecai Richler within the context of multiculturalism caused so much debate that Hutcheon was later moved to respond with the observation that all Canadian literature is marginal and other, and that `there is an argument to be made that the canon in Canada has been, from the first, a creation of women and ``minorities'' ' (1996, 13). However,

the

debate

continued,

and

in

her

2000

text,

Scandalous Bodies,

Kamboureli

suggests that this inclusive view of multiculturalism merely works to sidestep the problems of marginalism and ethnicity within Canadian literature. In the late twentieth century, both postmodernism and multiculturalism have been increasingly

prominent

in

Anglophone

Canadian

literary

studies.

Both

turn

on

the

multiplicities and marginal identities that are in many ways integral to Canada's identity and both, as can be seen by the protests over

Other Solitudes,

point to the tensions between

canonical and diasporic literatures in English Canada. Furthermore, post-colonial criticism has also risen in influence in recent years. Canada's position as a post-colonial nation is, for many critics, an unstable one. Some have denied that Canada, as a white-settler colony, can accurately be understood as a post-colonial nation when placed within the context of emerging African nations, for example (Williams 1993, 4), whilst others point to the heritage of white Canada as a coloniser of its own indigenous peoples (Bennett 2004; Bannerji 2004). As a unique aspect of imperial history, Canadian post-colonial studies increasingly contributes to the complexity of a wider post-colonial discourse. Canada remains a country with limited unity in terms of language, culture, myth, religion, ethnicity and region. Ultimately, and despite a history of attempting to define and unite the nation through its literary culture, it is this diversity that has best come to characterize Canada and its writing. With the rising influence of post-colonial criticism and multicultural studies, the multiplicities, contradictions and shifting identities that have always been present in the developing body of Canadian literature can be seen to continue to inform Anglophone Canadian literary studies as it develops into the twenty-first century.

Fiona Tolan

Further reading and works cited Atwood, M. Ð (ed.) Ð.

The Journals of Susanna Moodie.

Survival.

Ballstadt, C.

D.

Toronto, 1982.

1972. Toronto, 1996.

The Search for English-Canadian Literature.

Bannerji, H. `Geography Lessons', in Bennett,

Toronto, 1970.

The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English.

`English

Canada's

Peterborough, ON, 2004.

Unhomely States,

Postcolonial

Toronto, 1975. ed. C. Sugars. Peterborough, ON, 2004.

Complexities',

in

Unhomely States,

ed.

C.

Sugars.

anglophone canadian literary studies

223

The History of Emily Montague. London, 1769.

Brooke, F.

Cameron, B. `English Critical Discourse in/on Canada,' in

Studies on Canadian Literature, ed. A. E.

Davidson. New York, 1990. Davey, F. `Surviving the Paraphrase.'

Canadian Literature 70 (1976): 5±13. Repr. in Surviving the

Paraphrase, Winnipeg, 1983, 1±12. Dewart, E. H. Frye, N. ÐÐ.

Selections from Canadian Poets. Montreal, 1864.

The Bush Garden. Toronto, 1971.

Anatomy of Criticism. (1957). Princeton, 2000.

Godard, B. `Structuralism/Post-Structuralism', in

Future Indicative, ed. J. Moss. Ottawa, 1987.

Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories between the Years 1760 and 1776.

Henry, A.

(1809). Toronto, 1901. Hutcheon, L.

The Canadian Postmodern. Toronto, 1988.

Ð and Richmond, M. (eds)

Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions . Toronto, 1990.

Ð.

Cultural Difference and the Literary Text, ed. W. Siemerling and K.

`Multicultural

Furor',

in

Schwenk. Iowa City, 1996.

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. London, 1838.

Jameson, A. B. Jones, D.

Butterfly on Rock. Toronto, 1970.

Kamboureli, S. Keith, W. J. Lecker, R.

Scandalous Bodies. Don Mills, 2000.

Canadian Literature in English. London, 1985.

Making it Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature. Concord, ON, 1995.

Lighthall, W. D. Mackenzie, A.

Songs from the Great Dominion. London, 1889.

Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Laurence, through the Continent of North America

to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans in the Years 1789 and 1793 . London, 1801. MacLulish, T. D. `Thematic Criticism, Literary Nationalism, and the Critics New Clothes',

Essays on

Canadian Writing, 35, Winter 1987. Qtd in Leandoer, K. From Colonial Expression to Export Commodity. Uppsala, 2002. Handbook of Canadian Literature. Toronto, 1906.

MacMurchy, A. Marquis, T. G. Moodie, S. Moss, J.

English-Canadian Literature. Toronto, 1914.

Roughing It in the Bush. London, 1852.

Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction . Toronto, 1974.

Oates, J. C. `Dancing on the Edge of the Precipice', in

Margaret Atwood, ed. E. G. Ingersoll. Princeton,

1990. Pierce, L. A. and Watson, A. D. Roberts, C. G. D. Seton, E. T.

Our Canadian Literature. Ryerson, 1922.

Earth's Enigmas. Boston, 1896.

Wild Animals I have Known. New York, 1898.

Smith, A. J. M. `Wanted ± Canadian Criticism',

Canadian Forum, April, 1928.

Stevenson, L.

Appraisals of Canadian Literature. Toronto, 1926.

Story, Norah.

Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature . Oxford, 1967.

Stringer, Arthur. Toye, W. (ed.) Traill, C. P.

Open Water. New York, 1914.

The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto, 1983.

The Backwoods of Canada. London, 1836.

Williams, P. and Chrisman, L.

Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. New York, 1993.

30. Francophone Canadian Literature

The development of Francophone Canadian literature has been shaped and influenced by the history of French Canada itself, starting with the travel accounts of the first explorers who recorded the discovery of the `New World', as well as the conflicted relations with the Native population. These constitute the earliest writings in French in Canada and include

Des sauvages, ou voyage de Samuel Champlain, de Brouage (1603), the description of Samuel de Champlain's travels and settlement in baron de Lahontan in

Nouvelle France, the exploration accounts of the

 rique septentrionale (1703), and PierreNouveaux voyages dans l'Ame

Franc Ë ois Xavier de Charlevoix's

 ne  rale de Nouvelle France (1744). Histoire et description ge

Another important aspect of this period of settlement is illustrated by the exchange of letters between French missionaries come to convert the Native population through the colonial

effort

and

their

superiors

in

France;

these

are

known

as

 suites Les relations je

(published between 1632 and 1673) and offer a valuable testimony of life in Canada in the seventeenth century. Similarly, Marie de l'Incarnation's letters to her son, as well as her dictionaries of Algonquian and Iroquois, describe the process of setting up the Ursulines Convent in Quebec City in 1639 and the education and conversion of the local Native population. The publication of the first French Canadian work of fiction would have to wait until 1837, with

 sors ou l'influence d'un livre by Philippe Aubert de Gaspe  fils, a Le chercheur de tre

novel which draws on what would become the French Canadian tradition of the diabolical folktale.

 pe Á re (1863), follows a similar trend and Les anciens Canadiens, by Aubert de Gaspe

also takes inspiration from local folk legends and traditions. However, the publication in 1839 of the `Durham Report', by Lord Durham, the governor-general of British North America at the time, has critical consequences on the development of French Canadian literature: in the wake of the violent insurrections of 1837±38, Lord Durham recommends the assimilation of the French Canadian population into the English-speaking majority as the best way to control their aspirations to independence, famously declaring that French Canada is `a people with no history and no literature'. Proving this assertion wrong has been a central preoccupation for French Canadian authors and intellectuals ever since, starting with Franc Ë ois-Xavier Garneau's

Á nos  couverte jusqu'a Histoire du Canada depuis sa de

jours (1845±8), which is considered still today a seminal work of historical study. Another significant work of the period is Laure Conan's romance

set

in

nineteenth-century

French

Angeline de Montbrun (1884), a historical

Canada

and

revolving

around

the

female

protagonist of the title; this is also the first French Canadian novel authored by a woman. The

genre

of

historical

fiction,

popular

in

the

nineteenth

century,

would

become

prominent again in the latter part of the twentieth century. The

nineteenth

century

also

sees

the

emergence

of

an

important

trend

in

French

francophone canadian literature Canadian letters: the

roman du terroir

225

(novel of the land). The trend celebrates some of the

key beliefs on which French Canada strove during the period of the first

half

of

the

twentieth

patriarchal lifestyle

berceaux

where

century. the

These

Catholic

beliefs

church

were

based

held sway

on

and

survivance, an

where

idyllic the

until the

rural

and

revanche des

(revenge of the cradles) played an important role: women were encouraged to

have large families as a way to ensure the future of the French Canadian nation and save it from the threat of assimilation. Some important Lajoie's

Jean Rivard

Chez nos gens arpents,

romans du terroir

Marie Chapdelaine

 mon's (1862), Louis He

 rininclude Antoine Ge

(1914), and Adjutor Rivard's

Trente

(1918). The genre was brought to an end in 1938 with Ringuet's

which

received

the

Prix

de

 mie l'Acade

Franc Ë aise

(1939)

and

the

Prix

de

la

 bec (1940). The novel offers a more cynical vision of rural life in French Province de Que Canada, and its success is indicative of the increasingly secular and urban aspirations of the nation. The first half of the twentieth century thus marks the arrival of modernity in French Canadian literature, with the work of poets Emile Nelligan ( Emile

Nelligan et son oeuvre,

published in 1904), and Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau ( Regards

et jeux dans l'espace,

published in 1937). They were influenced by the European Modernist movement which also inspired the creation of the

 cole litte  raire de Montre  al E

in 1895, an important school of

thought which lasted over thirty years. The realistic urban novel is another aspect of this modernity, as with

Les Plouffe

(1948) by Roger Lemelin, and

Bonheur d'Occasion

(1945) by

Gabrielle Roy, a novel which has achieved canonical status through its depiction of the difficult life of a working-class neighbourhood in Montreal in the early years of World War II. The realistic urban novel is also a reflection of French Canada's changing lifestyle in the twentieth century, and its increasing disillusion with the restrictive ethos imposed by the Catholic church. The arrival of modernity also brings about the period of the `Quiet Revolution' in the 1960s, an important moment of self-definition and search for a cultural identity in French Canada. One of the outcomes of this fascinating period of literary innovation and cultural self-assertion

 be  cois, Que

is

the

fact

that

the

term

Canadien franc Ë ais

is

progressively

replaced

by

as a means of both emphasising a difference from the rest of the Confederation

and asserting the belonging to a specific territory (Quebec). The use of the

joual,

a local

form of French with Quebecois colloquial expressions, becomes another way to assert the importance and the worth of the `local' against the backdrop of a hegemonic Parisian French; this is the case for instance in Michel Tremblay's play where

language

is

the

means

of

defining

place

and

identity.

Les belles-soeurs

Local

sources

of

(1968), cultural

reference, together with language, are celebrated as the sign of a difference which is no longer synonymous with `minor' or `peripheral', as it was previously in the context of a literature fashioned after France's and England's artistic canon. Quebec's national and artistic claims during the Quiet Revolution are also a reaction against the period known as

la grande noirceur,

which refers to Maurice Duplessis's years as

the Prime Minister of Quebec (1936±9 and 1944±59) and the conservative values his government imposed, with the support of the Catholic church. Underlying these various preoccupations is the central concern with obtaining Quebec's cultural but also political independence from the Confederation; this would eventually lead to the first referendum  rard Bessette (Le on separation in 1980 and finds expression in the novels of Ge 1960),

Hubert

1966)

and

Aquin

Jacques

(Prochain

Godbout

 pisode, e

(Salut

1965),

 jean Re

Galarneau!,

Ducharme

1967),

and

in

Âe (L'avale the

Libraire,

 s, des avale

poetry

of

Yves

modern north american criticism and theory

226

 fontaine (Pays Pre

 , 1970), Fernand sans parole, 1967), Gaston Miron (L'homme rapaille

 sie: Ouellette (Poe

Á mes 1953±1971, 1972) and Miche Á le Lalonde (Speak White, 1974). poe

The

circulation

of

these

works

was

greatly

aided

by

the

establishment

of

small,

local

publishing houses, such as Hexagone which was founded in 1953, and the publication of new intellectual and political journals, such as

Parti pris.

An offspring of this central concern with independence is also the emergence of the genre of the

fantastique in Quebecois literature ± a genre influenced both by the English

Gothic

by

and

French

nineteenth century with  Gaspe

Canada's

tradition

of

the

diabolical

folktale,

emerging

in

the

 sors ou l'influence d'un livre by Philippe Aubert de Le chercheur de tre

 pe Á re. The fantastique becomes a fils and Les anciens Canadiens by Aubert de Gaspe

way for Quebecois authors to express their artistic and political claims during and after the period of the Quiet Revolution, while developing a literary form very much their own. The not strictly realistic quality of the genre provides a means through which a frustrating reality can be altered and a new world, filled with endless possibilities, can be imagined.

fantastique draws on themes of alienation, madness, hidden monstrosity and the evil

The

double to express deep anxieties linked to the uncertain future of Quebec; this is the case in the short stories of Jacques Ferron ( Contes

du pays incertain, 1962) and Roch Carrier (Jolis

 dans l'oeuf (1969). The genre can also deuils, 1964), and in Michel Tremblay's novel La cite enable

the

critique

and

satire

of

the

limitations

 bert's patriarchal society, as in Anne He

imposed

by

an

oppressively

religious

Les enfants du sabbat (1975).

With the advent of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s, female writers in Quebec begin to express radical subversion through literary experimentation and to address their symbolic absence from the essentially male

 be  cois aesthetics developed during the que

period of the Quiet Revolution. The ideal of the

revanche des berceaux (revenge of the

cradles) in particular is criticised by authors such as Marie-Claire Blais in

Une saison dans la

 bert in Kamouraska (1970). That period sees the rise vie d'Emmanuel (1965) and Anne He of a particular type of women's writing seeking to renew the way women are perceived and proposing new strategies in terms of form; as a result, experimentalism becomes a norm in the

work

of

Quebecois

female

authors,

as

seen

in

the

writings

of

Louky

Bersianik

 lionne, 1976), Nicole Brossard (Amantes, 1980) and in Denise Boucher's play (L'Eugue  es ont soif (1978). In the 1980s, after the feminist movement has reached its peak, Les fe Quebec women's writing enters a new phase described as

 tafe  minisme (Saint-Martin me

1992, 81). Rejecting the intense experimentalism of the 1970s, the new trend expresses objectives which differ from those of feminist writing and its overt political agenda, such as abolishing patriarchy and developing a feminine culture.

 tafe  minisme takes distance Me

from the feminist movement and although its authors do agree with its political views, many feel this should not restrict their creativity to the defence of a particular cause (SaintMartin 1992, 81). Examples of

 tafe  ministe fiction include Yolande Villemaire's La vie en me

prose (1980), Nicole Houde's La maison du remous (1986) and Monique Proulx's Le sexe des  toiles (1987). e The concept of `Quebecois literature', originally envisaged as a unified body, a project based on a collective memory and a totalizing vision, has come under scrutiny in recent years

through

the

emergence

of

Francophone

writing

outside

the

borders

of

Quebec's

province: Acadian author Antonine Maillet, for instance, achieved fame and won the prix Goncourt

in

1979

for

her

novel

 lagie-la-Charette, Pe

a

description

of

the

trials

and

tribulations encountered by the Acadian nation in the eighteenth century; while more recently the Franco-Ontarian novelist Daniel Poliquin distinguished himself with

Visions

francophone canadian literature

227

de Jude (1990), a novel which opens up the cultural and linguistic borders of Francophone Canada.

Moreover,

the

presence

of

Aboriginal

writing

in

French,

as

with

Jovette

Le crachat solaire (1975) and An Antane Kapesh's Qu'as-tu fait de mon

Marchessault's

pays? (1979), testify to some of the many First Nation responses to the 1969 government `White

Paper'

written

in

proposing

French,

the removal of

complicate

the

special

notion

of

status

for Native

Quebecois

people. These

literature

as

authored

texts,

by

the

descendants of the original French settlers, and challenge traditional visions of national and cultural borders. Additionally, immigration on a large scale since the 1970s has meant that a growing number of nationalities and ethnic groups are now represented in Canada. A great part of these have found a voice and a role to play on the Quebecois cultural scene, Â gine Robin expressing such themes as diaspora, exile and displacement, as in the work of Re (La

 be  coite, 1983), Mona Latif Ghattas (Le double conte de l'exil, 1990) and Ge  rard Que

Etienne (La

pacotille, 1991). This has also further complicated the claims of the Quiet

Revolution to a national unity based on the use of the French language, and has questioned the link between language, culture and identity. Consequently,

the

idea

of

`Quebecois

literature'

has

been

denounced

as

being

an

increasingly totalizing concept and becoming simply a formula, an empty shell (Nepveu 1988,

13);

it

has

fragmentation

been

and

the

progressively idea

of

replaced

movement

by

within

an

emphasis

texts

which

on are

plurality,

diversity,

constantly

evolving

(Nepveu 1988, 14). The project of developing a national culture and literature, which was one of the key objectives of the 1960s, has thus simultaneously been realised and dissipated; this

marks

the

`end'

of

Quebecois

literature

beginning of a new phase described as

as

it

was

originally

conceived,

and

the

 rature post-que  be  coise (Nepveu 1988, 14). litte

An important aspect of this new phase is the concern with re-reading and re-evaluating Quebec's past and its role in the formation of the nation; this is visible in Quebecois authors and intellectuals' recurrent need to go back to the period of the Quiet Revolution in order to examine how the national discourse was initially formed and question the linguistic, political and cultural beliefs set in place at the time. As a consequence, the historical novel has seen a resurgence since the 1980s, a historical fiction which explores the fundamental aspects of both Canadian history, specifically, and the writing of history, more generally (Wyile et al. 2002, 4). The Francophone Canadian historical fiction is indeed not only concerned with the politics of historical representation, addressing `some of

the

darker

corners

of

Canadian

history',

but

also

with

drawing

`attention

to

the

mechanics of historical representation ± the conventions and textual devices that both permit and complicate the representation of pastness' (Wyile et al. 2002, 4). This form of writing is described as `post-modern historical novel' (Paterson 1993, 54) and it has allowed renewal of the genre of historical fiction, while giving rise to some fresh thinking on both history and historiography (Desjardins 1999, 47). The

trend

is

particularly

prominent

in

the

work

of

women

historical novel, offer new readings of narratives of the Quebec

history

oppressed

in

female

 oret (Nous The

creating

figures

are

specifically given

an

female

historical

opportunity

to

writers

past and spaces

make

who,

attempt to

in

which

themselves

with

the

`re-write'

traditionally

heard.

France

 crit, 1982), Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska ( La maison parlerons comme on e

 bert (Le premier jardin, Tresler, 1984), Arlette Cousture (Les filles de Caleb, 1985), Anne He 1988), Nancy Huston (Cantique

des plaines, 1993) and Rachel Leclerc (Noces de sable,

1995) all locate their fiction in the past and use actual historical figures in order to question hegemonic and national historical discourses.

modern north american criticism and theory

228

The writing of historical fiction thus holds a political purpose: it is linked to overcoming the weight of colonial cultural hegemony which dictated that, previously, Quebec was `a people with no history and no literature'. Through the re-assertion of their local values Quebecois writers are pushing against the notion of what has been traditionally accepted as aesthetically worthy. Such traditions have been established in the past and it could be argued that these writers' attempts at re-visiting the past, and at re-interpreting it, have much to do with their will to assert a renewed sense of self in the present and influence the way in which their nation's future is defined.

Elodie Rousselot

Further reading and works cited  recompose  : la pre  sence de l'Histoire dans le roman que  be  cois contemporain Desjardins, N. `Le passe (1980±1995)', in Nepveu, P.

Á se, antithe Á se, synthe Á se II, ed. M. Coulombe and Y. Duchesne. Montreal, 1999. The

 cologie du re  el. Montreal, 1988. L'e

Paterson, J. M.

 be  cois. Ottawa, 1993. Moments postmodernes dans le roman que

 tafe  minisme et la nouvelle prose fe  minine au Que  bec', Saint-Martin, L. `Le me

Voix et Images, 18,

1992. Â ', Wyile, H. et al. `Past Matters/Choses du passe

canadienne, 27:1, 2002.

  rature Studies in Canadian Literature/ Etudes en litte

Contributors Kenneth Womack, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley William Baker, Northern Illinois University Imre Salusinszky, University of Newcastle, Australia Mark Currie, Anglia Polytechnic University Jeremy Lane, University of Sussex Ortwin de Graef, Katholieke universiteit, Leuven William Flesch, Brandeis University Carolyn Lesjak, Swarthmore College John Kucich, University of Michigan Ruth Robbins, University College, Northampton Megan Becker-Leckrone, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Anne Donadey, San Diego State University Virginia Mason Vaughan, Clark University David Van Leer, University of California, Davis Malini Johar Schueller, University of Florida Marcel Cornis-Pope, Virginia Commonwealth University Yun Hsing Wu, Indiana University  de la Luz Montes, University of Nebraska, Lincoln Amelia Maria Toby Miller, New York University Julian Wolfreys, University of Florida Kate Flint, Linacre College, Oxford University Betsy Nies, University of North Florida David Alderson, Manchester University Christopher Eklund, Deparment of English, University of Florida Fiona Tolan, Lecturer, Department of English Studies, University of Durham Elodie Rousselot, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury

Index

Abrahams, Julie, 114

Barnes, Harry Elmer, 27

Abrams, M. H., 30, 31

Barthes, Roland, 27, 128, 177

Achebe, Chinua, 119

Bataille, Georges, 52

Acker, Kathy, 182

Baudrillard, Jean, 57

Acosta, Oscar, 148

Baudry, Jean-Louis, 161

Addington Symons, John, 111

Beal, Frances, 97, 99

Adler, Mortimer, 13

Beardsley, Monroe, 49

Adorno, Theodor, 55, 58, 127

Beauvoir, Simone de, 79, 160, 202

Ahmad, Aijaz, 119

Bellow, Saul, 17

 n, Norma, 100, 101, 117, 195 Alarco

Belsey, Catherine, 108

Alavi, Hamza, 120

Benjamin, Walter, 51, 58

Alighieri, Dante, 82

Bentham, Jeremy, 156

Alkon, Paul, 15

Benveniste, Emile, 50

Allen, Paula Gunn, 99, 100, 102

Berlant, Laurent, 116, 117

Althusser, Louis, 57

Berry, Ellen E., 133

Anaya, Rudolfo, 148

Bersani, Leo, 116

Anderson, Benedict, 124

Bersianik, Louky, 226

Anderson, Perry, 61, 62

Bertens, Hans, 176

Andrew, Dudley, 154

 rube  , Allan, 111 Be

Anger, Kenneth, 111

 rard, 225 Bessette, Ge

 a, Gloria, 99, 101, 102, 117, 124, 131, Anzaldu

Bhabha, Homi K., 47, 68, 118, 119, 120, 121,

148, 149

122, 165, 189

Appadurai, Arjun, 124

Birney, Earle, 215

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 189

Black, Daniel P., 203

Aquin, Hubert, 225

Blackmur, R. P., 4

Aristotle, 12, 15, 16

Blais, Marie-Claire, 226

Armstrong, Nancy, 76

Blake, William, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25

Arteaga, Alfred, 144

Blanchot, Maurice, 46, 49, 50, 51

Asensi, Manuel, 48

Bleich, David, 33±9

Ashberry, John, 46

Bloch, Ernst, 56, 58

Atwood, Margaret, 215, 219

Bloom, Harold, 18, 22, 23, 31, 40±8, 50, 51,

Ault, Donald, 209, 210

53, 54, 76, 212

Austen, Jane, 121

Bly, Robert, 201

Austen, Jane, 76

Bobo, Jacqueline, 158

Austin, J. L., 38

Bond, Donald F., 15 Bontemps, Arna, 139

Baker, Houston, 119, 138

Boone, Joseph Allen, 112

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 16, 196

Boose, Lynda E., 108

 de, 57 Balzac, Honore

Booth, Wayne C., 13, 15, 16, 30, 169, 171,

Bambara, Toni Cade, 100, 140 Barks, Carl, 208

172, 175 Boswell, John, 111

index Boucher, Denise, 226 Bourdieu, Pierre, 52

231

Crane, Ronald Salmon, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 26

 , Paul Bove

Crawford, Joan, 161

Brant, Beth, 99, 102

 , 98, 117 Crenshaw, Kimberle

Brecht, Bertolt, 55, 59

Crews, Frederick, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94

È , Charlotte, 75 Bronte

Crumb, Robert, 209

È , Emily, 76 Bronte

Culler, Jonathan, 26, 28, 29, 31, 34, 39

Brooke, Frances, 216 Brooks, Cleanth, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 27

D'Emilio, John, 111, 112

Brooks, Gwendolyn, 77

D'haen, Theo, 176

Brooks, Peter, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92

 , 211 Daumier, Honore

Brossard, Nicole, 226

Davey, Frank, 217, 220, 221

Brown, Jeffrey A., 212

Davidoff, Leonore, 202

Brown, Judith C., 111

Davidson, Sol, 209

 lez, Yolanda, 147 Broyles-Gonza

Davis, Angela, 99, 127

Burke, Edmund, 94

Davis, Bette, 161

Burke, Kenneth, 4, 10, 92, 189

Davis, Natalie Zemon, 191

Butler, Judith, 47, 52, 80, 84, 85, 115, 116,

De Charlevoix, Pierre-Franc Ë ois Xavier, 224

165, 204, 205

De Graef, Ortwin, 49 De L'Incarnation, Marie, 224

Cabot, John, 215 Calderwood, Ann, 190

De Man, Paul, 10, 14, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 40±8, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 92, 93, 94

Callaghan, Dympna, 108

De Ortego y Gasca, Felipe, 146

Camus, Albert, 121

Deely, John, 1

Cantor, Paul, 109

DeKoven, Marianne, 129

Carby, Hazel, 100, 123, 140

Deleuze, Gilles, 50, 52, 57, 122, 178

Carrier, David, 211

Derrida, Jacques, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32,

Carrier, Roch, 226 Caruth, Cathy, 51

40±8, 49, 50, 53, 57, 64, 94, 95, 113, 123, 177, 180

Case, Sue-Ellen, 115

Devi, Mahasweta, 122

Castillo, Ana, 98, 149

Dewart, Edward Hartley, 214, 216, 217

 , 120 Cesaire, Aime

Dick, Philip K., 179

Chase, Cynthia, 51

Dickens, Charles, 23

Chase, Cynthia, 87, 92, 93, 94

Dickinson, Emily, 76

Chatman, Seymour, 39

Dillon, G., 39

Chatterjee, Partha, 119, 124

Dirlik, Arif, 119

Chauncey, George, 111

Doane, Mary Ann, 162, 163, 164

Chavez, Denise, 149

Doctorow, E. L., 179

Chow, Rey, 123

Donaldson, Laura, 99

Christian, Barbara, 100, 102, 165, 183, 195

Douglass, Frederick, 138

Chumacero, Olivia, 147

Du Bois, W. E. B., 136, 193, 194, 195, 196

Cisneros, Sandra, 149

Duberman, Martin Bauml, 112

 le Á ne, 188 Cixous, He

 jean, 225 Ducharme, Re

Cliff, Michele, 102

Duplessis, Maurice, 225

Clifford, James, 65

Dyer, Richard, 117, 195, 196

Cohen, Ralph, 188 Cohen, Walter, 109

Eagleton, Terry, 4, 11, 24, 26, 32, 66, 71, 123

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 23

Easthope, Antony, 127

Collins, Patricia Hill, 100, 101

Edelman, Lee, 53, 112

Comfort, Alex, 111

Eisner, Will, 209, 210

Conan, Laure, 224

Elam, Diane, 80, 83

Connery, Sean, 153

Eliot, George, 75, 76, 94

Conrad, Joseph, 57, 64, 67, 88, 89, 90, 121

Ellis, Havelock, 111

Coover, Robert, 179, 182

Ellmann, Mary, 72, 73, 79

Corrington, Robert S., 3

Ellmann, Maud, 88, 92

Cousure, Arlette, 227

Epstein, Mikhail N., 133

index

232 Erickson, Peter, 108 Etienne, GeÂrard, 227 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 180 Faderman, Lillian, 112 Fanon, Frantz, 120, 121, 131, 203 Fekete, John, 4 Felman, Shoshana, 46, 51, 87, 90, 91, 92 Ferron, Jacques, 226 Fetterley, Judith, 79 Fiedler, Leslie, 126 Fielding, Henry, 12, 16 Fish, Stanley, 33±9 Flaubert, Gustave, 94 Fletcher, Angus, 23 Flitterman-Lewis, Susan, 156 Foerster, Norman, 5 Ford, J. D. M., 187 Foster, Jeannette H., 111 Foucault, Michel, 84, 104, 105, 112, 112, 121, 122, 156, 178, 180, 182 Frankenberg, 117 Fraser, Nancy, 181 Freedman, Estelle, 111, 112 Freud, Sigmund, 49, 51, 52, 53, 83, 87, 88, 90, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 111, 155, 163 Friedan, Betty, 70, 71, 76, 114 Friedman, Arthur, 15 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 83, 84, 184 Frye, Marilyn, 195 Frye, Northrop, 18±25, 43, 214, 215, 219, 220 Fuller, Margaret, 138 Fung, Richard, 158 Funt, D., 29 Gaines, Jane, 164, 165 Gallop, Jane, 81, 82, 83 Garber, Marjorie, 189 Gardner, John, 170 Garfinkel, Harold, 157 Garneau, FrancËois-Xavier, 224 Garneau, Hector de Saint-Denys, 225 Garvey, John, 198 Garvey, Marcus, 131 GascheÂ, Rodolphe, 31 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 75 Gaspe (peÁre), Aubert de, 224, 226 Gaspe (fils), Philippe Aubert de, 224, 266 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 119, 131, 138, 141, 189 Gayle, Addison, 141 Geertz, Clifford, 105 Genet, Jean, 72 Genette, GeÂrard, 16 GeÂrin-Lajoie, Antoine, 225 Ghattas, Mona Latif, 227

Gibbons, Dave, 210 Gilbert, Sandra M., 76, 79 Giovanni, Nikki, 77 Giroux, Henry, 127 Gissing, George, 57 Godard, Jean-Luc, 50 Godbout, Jacques, 225 Goldberg, Jonathan, 52, 106, 108 GonzaÂlez, Ray, 149 Gould, Janice, 99, 102 Graff, Gerald, 4, 13, 14, 17, 26, 27, 167, 168 Gramsci, Antonio, 194 Greenblatt, Stephen, 47, 52, 103±9, 130, 189 Greer, Germaine, 160 Greif, Martin, 111 Groth, Gary, 212 Guattari, FeÂlix, 57 Gubar, Susan, 76, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85 Guillory, John, 52, 53, 129 Guinier, Lani, 98 Halberstam, Judith, 117, 205 Hall, Catherine, 202 Hall, Stuart, 117, 132, 133 Hamacher, Werner, 53 Hamilton, A. C., 25 Haraway, Donna, 131, 189 Harding, Sandra, 181 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 174 Harriot, Thomas, 105 Harris, Bertha, 111 Harsnett, Samuel, 105 Harth, Philip, 15 Hartman, Geoffrey, 18, 40±8 Harvey, Robert C., 211 Haskell, Molly, 161 Hassan, Ihab, 178, 188 Hatfield, Charles, 212 HeÂbert, Anne, 226, 227 Heer, Jeet, 208 Hegel, G. W. F., 49, 60, 123 Heidegger, Martin, 40, 49, 53, 182 HeÂmon, Louis, 225 Henry, Alexander (the Elder), 215 Herrera-Sobek, MarõÂa, 100 Herriman, George, 208 Hertz, Neil, 52, 53, 87, 92, 93, 94 Hignite, M. Todd, 212 Hill, Christopher, 53 Hinojosa, Rolando, 148 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 111 Hitler, Adolf, 127 Hogarth, William, 206 Hoggart, Richard, 126 Holland, Norman, 16, 33±9 Hong Kingston, Maxine, 102

index

233

Hooker, Richard, 104

Krupat, Arnold, 130

hooks, bell, 82, 119, 123, 124, 131, 165

Kunzle, David, 209, 210

Hopkins, Mary Frances, 15

Kurtzman, Harvey, 208

Hopkins, Pauline, 136 Houde, Nicole, 226 Howard, Jean E., 107, 108, 109

Lacan, Jacques, 50, 52, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 178

Hughes, Langston, 193

LaDuke, Winona, 99

Hurston, Zora Neale, 77, 136

Á le, 226 Lalonde, Miche

Huston, Nancy, 227

Lamming, George, 120, 123

Hutcheon, Linda, 180

Landa, Louis A., 15

Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 13

Larsen, Nella, 77

Huyssen, Andreas, 178

Lauretis, Teresa de, 116, 128, 156, 162 Lazenby, George, 153

Ignatiev, Noel, 198

Leacock, Stephen, 218

Inge, M. Thomas, 210

Lecker, Robert, 221

Irigaray, Luce, 114, 189

Leclerc, Rachel, 227

Âaz, Ada Marõ Âa, 98 Isai-Dõ

Lee, Stan, 208 Lemelin, Roger, 225

Jablon, Madelyn, 142

Lent, John, 212

Jaimes, M. Annette, 99

Lentricchia, Frank, 109

Jakobson, Roman, 28, 50

Levinas, Emmanuel, 49, 51, 52

James, C. L. R., 120

 vi-Strauss, Claude, 53 Le

James, Henry, 91, 116, 173

Lewis, Wyndham, 55

Jameson, Fredric, 46, 55±62, 105, 128, 129,

Lidov, David, 2

130, 132, 178

Lighthall, William Douw, 216, 217

Jarrell, Randall, 10

Ling, Amy, 100

Johnson, Barbara, 46, 51, 140

Liu, Alan, 52, 192

Johnson, Barbara, 80, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 94,

Â, Francisco, 144, 145 Lomelõ

95

Long, Elizabeth, 128

Johnson, James Weldon, 136

Longinus, 16, 94

Johnston, Claire, 161

Lorde, Audre, 99, 101, 102, 116, 123

Jones, Douglas, 219

Lowe, Lisa, 120, 124

Jonson, Ben, 108

 cs, Georg, 58, 59, 60, 61 Luka

Jordan, Winthrop, 194

Lyotard, Jean-Franc Ë ois, 59, 105, 167, 181

Kamuf, Peggy, 80

McCloud, Scott, 210, 211, 212

Kanafani, Ghassan, 67

McDowell, Deborah, 140, 142

Kant, Immanuel, 50, 53, 94, 123

McHale, Brian, 180

Kapesh, An Antane, 227

McIntosh, Peggy, 195

Katz, Jonathan Ned, 111

McKay, Windsor, 208

Kauffman, Linda, 80

Mackenzie, Alexander, 215

Kay, Jackie, 205

McKeon, Richard P., 13, 14, 15

Keast, W. R., 13, 15

MacLean, Norman, 13, 15

Keats, John, 50, 53

MacLulish, T. D., 221

Keenan, Thomas, 51, 53

McRobbie, Angela, 128

Keith, W. J., 216, 218

Maddox, Lucy, 191

Kenny, Shirley Strum, 15

Mahmood, Saba, 133

Kermode, Frank, 28, 90

Mailer, Norman, 72

Kirby, Jack, 208

Maillet, Antonine, 226

Kleist, Heinrich von, 50

Malek, James, 15

Klock, Geoff, 212

 , Ste  phane, 50 Mallarme

Kolb, Gwin J., 15

Mandel, Eli, 217

Kolodny, Annette, 127

Mandel, Ernest, 60

Kornillon, Susan Coppelman, 73

Mankiller, Wilma, 99

Krafft-Ebbing, Richard von, 111

Marchak, Patricia, 220

Kristeva, Julia, 57, 93, 122, 190

Marchessault, Jovette, 227

index

234

Marcuse, Herbert, 56

Norris, Christopher, 26, 167, 168

Âa, 53 Â rquez, Gabriel Garcõ Ma

Nussbaum, Martha C., 169, 173, 174

Marquis, T. G., 217

Nyeberg, Amy Kyste, 211

Marshall, Paula, 77 Martin, Biddy, 84

Olson, Charles, 176

Martin, Robert K., 112

Olson, Elder, 13, 14, 15, 19

Ânez, Julio, 144, 145 Martõ

Ondaatje, Michael, 222

Marx, Karl, 56, 58

Ong, Aihwa, 124

Matsuda, Mari, 98

Ong, Walter J., 39

Maus, Katherine Eisaman, 109

Orgel, Stephen, 106, 108

Mellon, Joan, 161

Ouellette, Fernand, 226

Memmi, Albert, 120, 131

Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine, 227

Mercer, Kobena, 114, 117

Outcault, R. F., 208

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 50

Owens, Craig, 112

Merrell, Floyd, 2 Metz, Christian, 160, 161

Parain, Brice, 50

Michaels, Walter Benn, 52

 rico, 148 Paredes, Ame

Miller, D. A., 52, 112

Paris, Bernard J., 16

Miller, Frank, 210

Parker, David, 168

Miller, J. Hillis, 30, 31, 40±8, 52, 172, 173

Parry, Benita, 65

Millett, Kate, 114, 160

Pascal, Blaise, 50

Milton, John, 8, 18, 19, 21, 37

Patai, Daphne, 85

Minh-ha, Trinh T., 123

Pearce, Roy Harvey, 27

Mirikitani, Janice, 101

Pease, Donald, 189

Miron, Gaston, 226

Pechter, Edward, 108, 109

Modleski, Tania, 165

Penley, Constance, 156

Moers, Ellen, 74, 76, 114

Perez-Torres, Rafael, 144

Mohanty, Chandra, 99, 123

Perloff, Marjorie, 132, 178

Moi, Toril, 73

Pfeil, Fred, 197

Monroe, Marilyn, 164

Phelan, James, 13, 16

Montgomery, L. M., 218

Pierce, Charles Sanders, 1±3

Montrose, Louis Adrian, 106, 107, 109

Pierce, Lorne, 218

Moodie, Susanna, 216

Plath, Sylvia, 76

Moore, Alan, 210

Poe, Edgar Allan, 94, 95, 196

Âe, 99, 101, 102, 117, 148 Moraga, Cherrõ

Pope, Alexander, 51

Morales, Alejandro, 148

Porter, Catherine, 109

More, Paul Elmer, 5

Poulet, Georges, 43, 44, 188

More, Sir Thomas, 104

 fontaine, Yves, 226 Pre

Morgan, Edmund S., 194

Preminger, Alexander, 13

Morgan, Robin, 114

Presley, Elvis, 197

Morrison, Toni, 77, 102, 182, 183, 196

Proulx, Monique, 226

Moss, John, 219

Pynchon, Thomas, 179, 182

Mullaney, Steven, 108 Mulvey, Laura, 115, 160, 161, 164

Rackin, Phyllis, 108 Raeburn, Daniel, 212

Natoli, Joseph, 181

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 104

Neely, Carol Thomas, 108

Ransom, John Crowe, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 17, 26,

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 120

27, 187

Nelligan, Emile, 225

Rea, Daniel Ferreiro, 146

Neogy, Rajat, 192

Reagan, Ronald, 144

Newitz, Annalee, 197, 198

Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 145, 148, 149

Newman, Charles, 179

Rechy, John, 148

Newman, Karen, 108

Retamar, Roberto Fernandez, 120

Newton, Esther, 115

Rich, Adrienne, 97, 115, 195

Nicholson, Linda J., 181

Rich, B. Ruby, 161

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 30, 49, 53

Richards, I. A., 6, 7, 8, 10, 28, 39

index

235

Richardson, Dorothy, 75

Shelley, Mary, 76

Richler, Mordecai, 222

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 46, 50, 53

Rivard, Adjutor, 225

Shohat, Ella, 133

 s, 148 Rivera, Toma

Showalter, Elaine, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 112,

Rivero, Eliana, S., 145

203

Á re, Joan, 115 Rivie

Shumway, David, 127

Robbins, Trina, 212

Siebers, Tobin, 168, 169, 172

Roberts, Charles G. D., 218

Siegal, Jerry, 208

 gine, 227 Robin, Re

Silverman, Kaja, 162, 163, 200

Robinson, James Harvey, 27

Silverstein, Charles, 111

Rodriguez, Luis J., 149

Sinfield, Alan, 205

Roedigger, David, 194, 196, 197

Sisley, Emily, 111

Rorty, Richard, 183

Smith, A. J. M., 218, 220

Rose, Jacqueline, 160

Smith, Barbara, 77, 98, 99, 100, 102, 117, 131

Rose, Wendy, 99, 102

Smith, Paul, 127

Rosen, Marjorie, 161

Smith, Sharon, 160

Rosenblatt, Louise, 39, 169, 170

Smith-Rosenberg, Carol, 112, 114

Rosencranz, Patrick, 212

Sokal, Alan, 53

Rosenfeld, Isaac, 17

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 200

Rosenheim, Edward W., 15

Soyinka, Wole, 192

Rosenthal, Sandra B., 3

Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 73, 74, 76, 77

Rossetti, Christina, 76

Spanos, Willliam V., 188

Rousseau, George, 112

Spengler, Oswald, 24

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 50

Spenser, Edmund, 104

Roy, Gabrielle, 225

Spiegelman, Art, 209, 210

Ruegg, Maria, 32

Spillers, Hortense J., 101, 119, 140

Ruggiero, Guido, 111

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 46, 52, 82, 83,

Rukeyser, Muriel, 77

98, 101, 119, 121, 122, 123, 131

Russell, Charles, 177

Stam, Robert, 133, 161

Russell, Jane, 164

Starobinski, Jean, 43

Russo, Vito, 111

Steiner, George, 17

Rutherford, Jonathan, 201

Stimpson, Catherine, 190 Story, Norah, 219

Sabin, Roger, 211

Strauss, Leo, 50, 52

Sacks, Sheldon, 13, 16, 189

Stringer, Arthur, 217

Said, Edward, 31, 32, 63±9, 118, 119, 120,

Strout, Cushing, 27

121, 131

Sukenick, Ronald, 179, 182

 , 124 Saldivar, Jose

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 183

Sandoval, Chela, 98

Sussman, Herbert, 201

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 49, 50, 55, 58 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 50

Takaki, Ronald, 119

Saxton, Alexander, 196

Tate, Allen, 4, 7, 8, 9,

Schomberg, Arthur, 136

Taussig, Michael, 189

Schor, Naomi, 80, 81, 82, 84

Taylor, Charles, 132

Schueller, Malini, 125

 oret, France, 227 The

Schuster, Joe, 208

Thody, Philip, 28

Scott, Joan Wallach, 85, 86, 190

Thornham, Sue, 160, 161, 166

Searle, John, 31, 38

Tillyard, E. M. W., 104

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 52, 53, 80, 81, 115,

Todorov, Tzvetan, 28

201, 203

Tolson, Andew, 200

Segal, Lynne, 200, 203

Traill, Catherine Parr, 216

Sembene, Ousmene, 60

Trambley, Ester Portillo, 148

Senghor, Leopold, 120

Tremblay, Michel, 225, 226

Seton, Ernest Thompson, 218

Trilling, Lionel, 92

Shakespeare, William, 104, 105, 108, 109

Truth, Sojourner, 98

Shanley, Kate, 99

Turner, Graeme, 154

index

236

Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 111

White, Edmund, 111

Urrea, Alberto, 149

Wiegman, Robyn, 81, 82, 84, 85, 117 Wilde, Oscar, 116, 201

Van Leer, David, 117

Williams, Bernard, 171, 173

 squez, Richard, 148 Va

Williams, Raymond, 17, 104, 127, 128, 155

Vico, Giambattista, 24, 65, 67

Wilson, John Dover, 104

Ân, Carlos, 146 Villalongõ

Wimsatt, W. K., 7, 27, 49

 Antonio, 148 Villarreal, Jose

Wing, Adrien, 98

Villemaire, Yolande, 226

Winters, Yvor, 4

Âa, 149 Viramontes, Helena Marõ

Winterson, Jeanette, 205 Witek, Joseph, 210

Walker, Alice, 77, 97, 100, 102, 140, 158

Woo, Deborah, 100

Walker, Margaret, 77

Woodcock, George, 219

Warminski, Andrzej, 47

Woolf, Virginia, 75, 82

Warner, Michael, 116

Worcester, Kent, 208

Warren, Robert Penn, 4

Wordsworth, William, 46, 47, 50, 52, 82, 92,

Washington, Mary Helen, 100

93, 94

Washington, Mary Helen, 139

Wray, Matt, 197, 198

Watson, Albert, 218

Wright, Bradford D., 211

Watts, Edward, 125 Wayne, Valerie, 108

Xun, Lu, 60

Weber, Max, 52, 58 Weiksel, Thomas, 94

Yamada, Mitsuye, 100, 102

Weimann, Robert, 188

Yarbro-Bejaranu, Yvonne, 100

Weinberg, Bernard, 15

Young, Lola, 165

Weinbrot, Howard, 15 Â , 5, 27, 28 Wellek, Rene

Zhang, Xudong

West, Cornel, 135

Zimmerman, Bonnie, 114