Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism 3031304934, 9783031304934

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Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism Wayne Deakin

Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism “A spirited, polemical, and informative survey of the practice and philosophy of literary criticism, charting its historical roots and intellectual underpinnings and laying out an intriguing trajectory for the way forward.” ─Peter Lamarque, Professor of Philosophy, University of York, Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics 1995–2008. “With a grand-vista synopsis of stand-out texts throughout 2500 years of poetics, Deakin prepares readers to assess the major schools of twentieth-century literary criticism, arming them with relevant developments in philosophy before launching into present-day debates. Deakin supports his arguments throughout with analyses of romantic and modernist works. His thrust deserves attention: that rather than repeat established patterns of political messaging, philosophically informed literary criticism continually requires a return to the first principles of the literary arts.” ─Peter Cheyne, author of Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy (Shimane University and Durham University). “Wayne Deakin brings unique inter-cultural insights to his take on Philosophy, Language and Modern Criticism, borne of his experience in teaching and research at Chiangmai University in Thailand. He draws on this positionality to explore the interrelationship, for example, between modernity and postmodernity and its connections with much older traditions, testing his hypotheses against the work of Thai literary critics and novelists. The result is both powerful and provocative.” ─Rachel Harrison, Professor of Thai Cultural Studies, SOAS University of London and editor of Disturbing Conventions: Decentering Thai Literary Cultures (2014).

Wayne Deakin

Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism

Wayne Deakin Department of English Chiang Mai University Chiang Mai, Thailand

ISBN 978-3-031-30493-4    ISBN 978-3-031-30494-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Mark, Noi, Denny and…the children In loving memory of Adrian Williams 1957–2023

Preface

…In true philosophically romantic fashion… this book was originally envisaged as a sort of rough guide for both students studying Literary Criticism and Theory, but also for more intrepid members of the general-­ public. As such, this book, in part, may appeal to those who also wish to explore this sometimes exciting, sometimes infuriatingly difficult, and much of the time, misunderstood field of the humanities. It can be most difficult to even find a way into a subject that has been in its nascent stage for much of history, waiting to be called off the substitute’s bench after nearly 2 millennia, while also having become embroiled with the names of the many (generally-speaking Continental) philosophers, who have had their names used to slander the name of the “philosophical tradition.” Moreover, with more recent claims that it has already died, still-­ born from the substitute’s bench, Literary Criticism has stoked many questions within the humanities and perhaps in some ways caused the humanities to ask searching questions of itself as a superordinate subject-­ category. These are, in the main, regarding its own perspicuity, its sometimes arcane, prose, its oftentimes conflated identification with abstract categories like the postmodern, its equally bizarre (and essentially incorrect) conflation with anything remotely “Left” and perhaps (and most pertinent amongst the objections herein levied), its failure to critically analyse the rhetoric of literary texts, which signifies an object lesson in identity crisis, if ever there was one… vii

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My attempt here is to render answers to some of the understandably large, questions and notions indicated above—anyone can appreciate the difficulty of this task. For one it’s not terribly easy to escape in composition the indeed arcane nature of the prose in this current ballpark and as a gardener or a brain surgeon would no doubt insist given their own respective terrain, I hereby stake my claim to of necessity having to submit to some of the jargon involved to get my point across to my dear reader. This is the reason the first few chapters of this book come across as more of a contextual survey of the field and its potted history, whereas the latter portion of the book comes across like a series of essays attempting to in some ways access the subject while addressing the complex and tangled precis outlined above. My intention is simply to open the subject up for possible debate and question, and as I say at the end of the book, if I’ve upset any apple carts or sensibilities then my work here is done; my main purview is to open the subject up for public debate and to warn against any form of ossification or complacency upon the part of people already involved in the industry of Literary Criticism and Theory. In large part I contend that the subject itself is part of what Maurice Blanchot termed the infinite conversation, and we allow the riverbed (or its possibly attendant propositions) to dry up at our peril. The current book—and I use this term in a number of possible senses, as will hopefully be made clear by the end of this monograph, if indeed I keep your attention for that long, a job never easy given the landscape of the subject under review—is sure to infuriate but hopefully also delight in equal measure; but at least it hopes to pique interest in this strongarm subject of the humanities, whilst returning us to a sense of the Socratic nature of theory and criticism and equally its politically neutral character. This is of course not the same as staking a claim for its politically neutralised character, only that as a tool for political action and engagement, we do not forget to at least come to the any text with an open mind and to formulate our politics as a result of detailed reading, not as a necessary preliminary political adjunct to any reading rendered of a given text. This is a springe into which I feel many contemporary masters and neophytes alike have fallen into not only with regards theory and criticism, but also with regards the wider and sociologically powerful area of the humanities

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as an area in its own right. Given this personal and professional proviso, I have embarked upon the current study. After 18 years of teaching literary criticism at Chiang Mai University, I felt it was time to in some ways attempt to render what I have learned heuristically through valuable interactive sessions between myself and my students, both in the lecture format and more particularly in the mode of the seminar discussion. The personal excitement and originality of this project lies in the fact that as a foreign member of faculty, I have found myself in a unique and perspicuous position to be able to discuss texts (both canonical and non-canonical/Western and Thai) from the standpoint of a uniquely intercultural locus. Moreover, I have also found myself more than a little aware of the potential for irony, self-satire and the ongoing precarious position of critical analysis or ‘critique’. The excitement of engaging in criticism from both a Eurocentric cultural angle and from a South-East Asian angle is something I constantly garner from the fascinating discussions that I have entertained with my student interlocutors.1 One of the current mission statements of my current employer, Chiang Mai University (CMU) is to inculcate Lifelong Education into not only the local community, but also Thai society at large. This is an educational mission statement in line with many universities in the Western academic industry, but only in its nascent stage in Asia, for a number of geopolitical and sociological reasons. Therefore, the putative audience of this book is diverse, ranging from undergraduate students of the humanities (especially but not exclusively in the literature and philosophy streams), to people living and working not only in Thailand but in any foreign culture or climate in relation to the coordinates of their native culture, who share in my passion for adult learning and instruction. One of the key elements behind the original inculcation of the philosophy of Everyman books and the rise of English Studies in the UK.2  Rita Felski’s excellent study The Limits of Critique (2015) provides an interesting analysis of our inherited notions of scholarly critique and some of the assumptions or prejudices about the process, which are often opaque to its practitioners. The theoretical underpinnings of this text, first postulated by Paul Ricouer in his book Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970). 2  See Terry Eagleton’s widely read introductory chapter in the seminal tome, Literary Theory: An Introduction “The Rise of English” pp. 17–53. 1

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At the outset of writing this book, each section of delivered the same essential kernel of information as had been contained in the lectures I had previously conducted with both fourth year and graduate CMU students. However, as the book took shape, I started to develop a narratorial compass that catered for the non-specialist market and in part for my own edification. Based upon my own concurrent lectures and readings in philosophy, I have discerned a deeper connection between philosophy for the humanities and literary criticism as it has been characterised by that self-same modernity; a connection that sees criticism as not only a direct offshoot of the cul-de-sac in which philosophy found itself in the so-­ called modernist period, but also one that a fortiori allows for other literary critical readings using different philosophical underpinnings. In this case, these readings are taken from the ordinary language philosophy of a thinker such as Donald Davidson. In addition, each section contains, if not explicitly, then certainly implicitly, a number of wider questions for the reader to ponder, in order to formulate what the philosopher and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge many moons ago termed an aid to reflection.3 Reflection and speculation are all that should ever be asked of the most philosophical of the reading audience; Socrates adhered to this doctrine and there is no tangible reason to turn away from the elenchus and dialectics which were postulated in the Golden Age of Athens. These questions are in the main raised by the very nature of literary texts, with their concomitant narratorial fissures and aporias, by the very nature, in fact, of the very literary discourse (or idiolect may perhaps be a better phrase—at the risk of having the jargon label pinned firmly to my lapel) in which these texts are formulated.

 Aids to Reflection (1825) was a series of lay sermons aimed specifically at young men and was in essence a commentary in the form of aphorisms and selected passages from the writings of Archbishop Leighton. The Aids, which may be regarded as an eirenicon between faith and reason, and at one time served as a kind of manual of liberal orthodoxy, brought their compiler applause and recognition, and since his death have been frequently republished. This genre of conservative and literary work, would also, after the posthumous Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1840) became a mainstay of Anglo-American cultural criticism, exemplified by thinkers as diverse as Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Arnold, Leavis; and—more recently—Jordan Peterson. One may even discern the roots of the modern self-help genre in extant texts like this. 3

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In delineating the seismic shifts of the twentieth century humanities by way of the shifting landscape of criticism and philosophy in this manner, I intend to dovetail both philosophy and literary criticism into a nodal point, whereby I argue that literary criticism has in some sense displaced philosophy, and that it has come to articulate philosophy—or questions that at some historical precis were central to the make-up of philosophy—through a sort of literary-critical hermeneutics. Therefore, although the shape of this book starts out as a survey of literary criticism in its broadest terms, it morphs into a more expository structure, that intends to locate the gradients and movements within literary criticism and track them in relation to the newly emerging areas of interest in the philosophical world itself; namely through the post-Russell and Fregean “linguistic turn” in philosophy. A turn at times articulated in the guises of analytic philosophy, ordinary language philosophy and hermeneutical phenomenology. In this connection, the work of Peter Lamarque (2010, 2020), Stein Haugom Olsen (1998, 2006), Eileen John (2021), John Gibson (2018), and Stephen Davies (2012), have borne considerable influence upon my analytical approach to aesthetics and literary theory. Moreover, political philosophies such as Marxism, pragmatism and neoliberalism have also played major roles within the newly emerging discourse surfacing herein. This discourse naturally changes definition under certain sociocultural lighting conditions, which is a notion embraced and adumbrated within the pages of this study. This book is also projected to be an English language accompaniment to the other excellent major works on literary criticism currently in a specifically Thai context, such as: Wean Wanna-khadi Thritsadi Ruamsamai by Thanya Sangkhaphantanon (2016) and Thritsadi wanna-khadi Wichian Tawantok Nai Sattawat Thi 20 by Suradech Chotiudomphan (2017). However, this will be the first English language book to outline and assess modern literary criticism from an Anglo-Thai perspective and to further delve into the philosophical connections and implications for the humanities in general, with a dual focus not just on the Western tradition but also with an inclusive view at this terrain from a South-East Asian perspective. At the risk on no doubt sounding utterly cliched here (something my students past and present would no doubt argue is an article of my creed), as the narrative unfolded during the writing of this

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work it also appeared more and more clearer to me that this “text” was attaining a life of its own. This is due in part to its interrogation of the relationship, both with and of, the major Western philosophical tradition in general, and particularly its relationship towards such seminal areas as cultural studies, linguistic philosophy and the more recent flourishing of the various sub-theories such as Posthumanism, Queer Theory and the post-subjective theory, Trans-Humanism. These variegated approaches to modern theoretical criticism and theory have in their own way presented challenges to a number of the philosophical and literary-critical approaches previously taken for granted in both literary studies and philosophy. Their effect upon the academy in general has been in some sense revelatory, yet in other senses they have fulminated against tradition in a not-altogether positive fashion, inculcating a new doxa or status quo, that in some cases needs to be challenged. To use a well-worn trope, the emperor’s new clothes have sometimes prevented full and fair enquiry, especially within the current articulations of the humanities and the social sciences. I say this with a lingering gaze towards the purview of the growing politicisation of identity within the Western academy, and in recognition that this has come out of the new paradigmatic rise of theory and criticism, which has paradoxically led to certain cases where free speech has, in some instances, been stifled. This is of course connected to the political issues with regards theory and criticism flagged above. As a writer and academic, I feel strongly about these issues and have not shied away from addressing their relative merits and intellectual pitfalls, whenever is has seemed necessary to confront them as an inherent part of my overall argument. I am sure (and sincerely hope) that I have upset some of my erstwhile readers and colleagues, whilst at the same time being able to authentically draw out some of the more questionable aspects of these more recent ‘critical’ theories. These questions, raised in critical enquiry, should be able to shine their light in all areas of the new intellectual metropolis, while not being restricted to the areas that muster currency in view of the new intellectual hierarchy. However, one of the interesting aspects of the more recent mushrooming of theories in their various sociological guises has been the fact that while the first wave of theories perhaps acted like the old English acts of land enclosure on cultural discourse, the new wave of “diggers” signified

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the fact that cultural discourse not only exploded, but also—to expand the geopolitical trope—opened up the previously unchartered lands of the female, homosexual, and the subaltern, to a whole new audience. As the poet Tony Harrison brilliantly ejaculated “So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy/your lousy leasehold-Poetry.” In such a spirit of enquiry, each aspect of culture formerly seen through patrician eyes as either pristine, or in some cases, even aesthetically mute, should be screamed out— or Howled, to use Allen Ginsberg’s characterisation—using the tools of the cultural trade. Without exception, the opening up of works from The Break of Day by Collette or The Awakening by Kate Chopin, to Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, or any of the controversial novels that have arisen from both the Western and Thai canon, such as the revealing epistolary Bildungsroman novella—A Young Man’s Fancy by King Rama VI—have all in their own ways illuminated and opened doors in their respective general culture. Moreover, in the academy, they have provided voices that in their own ways have challenged privileged contemporaneous heteronomy at different times in literary-cultural history. One of the objectives of this book is to outline and assess these aspects and challenges, whilst allowing the reader to decide for themselves upon the attendant efficacy of each narrative voice. The structure of the book begins with a chapter on contextualising the meaning of Literary Criticism and hopes to answer some of the bedrock assumptions—and misapprehensions—of non-specialists about this field of inquiry. Chapter 2 gives a (very) brief history of the family tree of the humanities in relation to the subject, with a view to reinforcing its relationship with the philosophical tradition and reads more like an historical survey of the subject in its very nascent stages and epochs, identifying four main epochs for the various phases of criticism, in line with those outlined by M.H.  Abrams in 1953.4 Having thus contextualised this study, the third chapter explores the very notion of criticism and its more objective pretensions as articulated in the twentieth century, within the  I refer to Abrams’ stimulating chapter on the “Orientation of Critical Theories” in his seminal monograph, The Mirror and the Lamp: romantic theory and the critical tradition, New York: OUP, 1953. pp. 3–29. Having read this work twice, I find that it is still possibly the most outstanding of all of the extant studies that subsist in the category of Literary Theory. It also correctly locates the continuing importance of the Romantic tradition in its overall relationship to the subject and its place in the humanities in general. 4

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horizontal measures of formalism, the new criticism and structuralism— whilst also adumbrating the concomitant movements towards objectivism in philosophy for the modern humanities, as explored by Bertrand Russell and thinkers in his wake. The next chapter begins to properly dovetail the two areas of analytical philosophy (which later morphs into ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory), and the concurrent emergence of poststructuralism. It also attempts the mammoth task of demystifying the subsequent doubled two-headed monster: Derrida the deconstructor, and the subsequent furore in a structural teacup that followed, and has somehow continued to flourish, in the wake of this gallic encroachment upon the scenery of the modern humanities. The next chapter, Linguistic Twists, Turns and Dovetails in the Modern Humanities, digs deeper by following the line of argument that if my thesis is correct about the convergence of the twain in these two areas of the humanities, then not only can work from the continental tradition be successfully absorbed by literary criticism, but also work from the ordinary language tradition. This is a thesis that is further developed in the next chapter, by my contention that the work of thinkers such as W.V.O. Quine and, more specifically, Donald Davidson can also be applied to literary criticism with surprisingly fruitful results. This is essentially because both traditions are working within the same sceptical doubts with regards the efficacy of language in dealing with modern philosophical scepticism. This claim is furthered in the next chapter, entitled Literary Méditations Hégéliennes, which is derived from a phrase coined by Wilfrid Sellars that aptly summarises the developing communitarian standpoint of my overall argument: that language as a necessarily social phenomena is developed by both traditions and this is the reason that literary discourse and its attendant criticism is best fitted to both our ordinary and continental language analyses, which are essentially, two sides of the same sceptical coin. The chapter also develops both communitarian and philosophically romantic standpoints as developed by Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell, whose combined oeuvre helps illustrate the strength of connection between literary criticism, the philosophy of language, and scepticism. This ‘philosophical romanticism’ provides tacit acknowledgment of our epistemological limitations, which is an acknowledgment openly endorsed in criticism and theory, as well as in the actual practice of literary discourse.

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The next chapter on postmodernism and modernism develops the main argument by arguing the point that postmodernism, as it has been incorrectly yoked with Marxist thought by reactionary thinkers who attack the ‘Left’, is an offshoot of Liberal Humanism, bolstering the ideology of Late Capitalism. However, I also levy the contention that postmodernism finds itself in many guises, including the philosophical and aesthetic and so cannot be reduced to a one-size-fits-all relativism, cheaply reduced to the status afforded it by thinkers such as Jordan Peterson. In line with the rest of my argument, I posit that High Modernism was in many ways the high watermark of literary discourse, with its self-­conscious treatment of art as a form of sceptical ideology. The final two chapters in effect concretise the foregoing arguments by summarising what has been said hitherto, whilst analysing various literary texts. I crucially connect the scepticism, gaps, dissonances and aporias of current criticism and theory to epistemological tensions stemming back to the age of the Greeks. These are tensions stretching back to the sophists and the logocentric tradition. Moreover, throughout the book are contained numerous analyses of both Western and Thai literary texts, to a fortiori help reinforce the uses of literary criticism and theory, to illustrate the broader philosophical argument. In one sense, the first half of the book can be read as a broad survey and contextualisation of theory and criticism, whereas the second half can be read as a series of discrete essays based upon the communitarian position that I develop and lead up to through the first half of the book. As a whole, one may say that the bald argument developed here follows the lines of the original romantic movement, latterly called upon by thinkers who are labelled philosophical romantics, among whose thought I would place my own, as developed herein.5 As such, it attempts to resituate philosophy and literature in their close proximity as asserted by the Frühromantik (the German romantic movement), whilst drawing a clear line under the ability of philosophy to ascertain complete objectivity. The argument instead partakes in an infinitely open dialectical process, reflected in the reciprocal play, organic movement and openness to continued novel and fragmented processes. This process is checked by an ironic awareness of the necessary scepticism associated with these infinite  See the book Philosophical Romanticism, Nikolas Kompridis (ed). London: Routledge, 2007.

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transformations, or to borrow Blanchot’s phraseology, the infinite conversation. As I stated previously, I hope to in some ways engender discussion and further thought about a topic, which in one sense has been a bugbear haunting the humanities for the past 80 years or so. The book, by self-­ definition, doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive, either in its scope or its argumentation. In fact, due to the romantic position inherited by the author, the text is aware of its own limitations and apprehensions. If the style is sometimes non-academic, the author equally makes no claim that the book is purely an academic study and should be read as such. On one hand, it’s a broad polemic about linguistic philosophy and literary criticism, whilst also acting as a tinder box to perhaps ignite bigger argumentative fireworks that may go off in one’s hand. Perhaps it should come with a safety warning, as did the firework boxes of my childhood, and as it seems, does everything in the current intellectual climate. Perhaps we need to get our hands burnt… Finally, I’d like to extend a thank-you to my friend and colleague Dr. Pasoot Lasuka for encouraging me to write this monograph and also the myriad students and very good friends (both specialist and non-specialist alike), who have helped me develop these materials and equally aided in my own reflective development as a teacher in this stimulating and interdisciplinary area of the humanities. I never gave my friends public health warnings when I broached many of these topics but they are still happy to be counted as my friends…so I can only hope I can retain the second person friend I address directly here. As I say every year to my students at CMU, stick to the subject at hand, through all of the inherent difficulties and potential arcane hurdles, and the rewards will I hope, be many. If not, we’ll still have the existence of national parks and Premier League football afterwards. Moreover, scholars who intend to study at postgraduate level or wish to read more advanced texts in any of the discrete academic areas contained herein will hopefully find the knowledge they glean from this work of great use for their future studies, whether personal, academic, or professional…or just plain philosophically romantic. Chiang Mai, Thailand 2022

Wayne Deakin

Acknowledgments

For various conversations, advice, comments, encouragement, and much more, I’d like to thank the following fellow philosophical travellers: Sing Suwwanakul, Pasoot Lasuka, Piyaboot Sumettikoon, Por Boonpornprasert, Nahum Brown, Peter Cheyne, Brendan George, and Keston Sutherland; and in particular, thanks to Patrick Keeney and Joseph Wheeler—whose precious time and patience are hugely appreciated. In friendship.

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Contents

1 What Is Literary Criticism and Theory?  1 2 A Brief (but Timely) History of Literary Criticism 11 3 The  Philosophical Self-Consciousness of the New Criticism and Formalism 27 4 Structuralism, Semiotics and Ordinary Language Doubts 39 5 Linguistic  Twists, Turns and Dovetails in the Modern Humanities 57 6 L  iterary Méditations Hégéliennes 91 7 Whither Postmodernism? Whether It’s New Liberalism?119 8 Phrónēsis in Literary Criticism—The Pragmatic Denouement141

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9 I n Through the Outdoor161 B  ibliography167 I ndex175

1 What Is Literary Criticism and Theory?

What indeed? And why? The current book itself, as anyone can see from perusing the following pages, covers areas as diverse as cultural studies, the social sciences, anthropology, sociology and philosophy. This is due in part because one of the central theoretical frameworks utilised in modern literary criticism is an interdisciplinary approach called structuralism. Whilst structuralism was originally a new branch of linguistics, it soon spread as a theoretical framework for studying the aforementioned subjects respectively, using a standardised set of metrics. However, the discrete discipline of literary criticism really came into its own in the twentieth century as a major study area in the humanities. This was partly because teachers such as Cleanth Brooks and I.A. Richards intended to place literary criticism on a par with other rigorously theoretical subjects such as physics and biology. Thus, came the inception of movements such as the ‘New Criticism’ and on the continent, ‘Formalism’—both of which were normative and highly theoretical approaches intended to measure literature in the same way that other, more scientific areas—could be measured. However, some critics, such as the British teacher F.R.  Leavis, massively influential in at least early twentieth-century criticism, still took an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_1

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“a-theoretical” approach to the subject, arguing that literature was a special form of discourse that transcended the new age of industrialisation and modern, mechanised civilisations. Leavisite criticism and the literary journal edited by Leavis and Knights, Scrutiny (1932–1953)), became synonymous with what was known as “moral formalism.”1 This was because, echoing the work of nineteenth-century critic Matthew Arnold, certain novelists such as D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and George Eliot, supposedly used a literary form that made the reader more aware of the moral complexities of life, as well as making the reader aware of the best qualities that were required in terms of how to live a complete human life. Other later approaches gradually grew out of other areas of knowledge—psychoanalysis, Marxism and philosophical areas such as phenomenology (the philosophical study of consciousness) and gradually literary criticism became the rich area of study and research that it is today. Even though the field is a difficult (and at times contested) area of the humanities, it is also highly innovative and one of the mainly exciting concepts that seems to have come out of this milieu is that there are a number of prisms through which to read any given text. Thus, even though this is a difficult and at times contested area of study, the reading public can feel in some measure assured by the fact that there is no single and correct way of reading a poem such as “The Flea” or a novel such as Wuthering Heights; a single and correct reading would mean, as the structuralist Roland Barthes famously phrased it, “victory to the critic”2 In some ways, it can be argued that even though literary criticism and theory is a difficult area of learning, it also has rewarding heuristic elements, not least of which is the fact that it “democratises” the text itself, leaving it open to manifold readings and interpretations, taking the power away from the teacher and “critical expert,” while placing it back into the hands of the readers themselves. The paradox then, is that even though the original “new critics” were looking for theoretical stability, by the end of the twentieth century,   The monthly review Scutiny not only ran for 76 issues, but also had contributors and readers as diverse as George Santayana, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, William Empson and I.A. Richards. 2  Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” in David Lodge (ed), Modern Criticism and Theory, New York: Longman, 1991. pp. 167–172. 15

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literary studies had become as open-ended as ever, with a general consensus that there is no fixed, univocal way of reading a text. Indeed, most critics nowadays talk of “re-reading” texts. If there were a simple and correct way to read a text, why indeed would there be such a plethora of literary-­critical texts on the market. Why indeed, would we need to read yet another PhD on Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Eliot’s The Wasteland? The inventiveness of readings and the subtleties of reinterpretation have led in some ways to more readings than ever since the formalists and new critics came along to objectify literary criticism and to fix it as a science—or break its wings on a wheel—not everyone subscribes to the eight division of the syntagmatic high club. One man’s metonymy is another man’s symbolism. Poorly worded technical ‘jokes’ aside, one constant objection to literary criticism that is voiced by both specialists and non-specialists alike, is that taking a mechanical approach such as structuralism, poststructuralism or formalism to a text in some ways destroys not only the integrity of the text, but also the integrity of the reading experience itself. This however is a misnomer. One may use a simple analogy to demonstrate the erroneous nature of this train of thought. Take a brand new, shiny, aesthetically beautiful motorbike—or at the risk of piquing the ire of the Virago Press school of feminist poetics—a brand-new Aston Martin. Now, imagine you were to take the motorbike apart in order to look at the engine inside: the carburettor, the oil filters, the spark plugs: the very engine itself. This gives one a unique insight into the very inner function of the machine itself and it also provides us with special tools and words for understanding the mechanics of the bike itself. However, we can still reassemble the motorbike itself and see it again in all its original aesthetic glory; indeed, we can perhaps appreciate this glory even more if we understand what is under the curvaceous surface of the machine, or what drives this wonderful-looking product. This is the same principle as when we read a poem or short story: we understand devices such as meiosis (understatement), paradox, hyperbole, prosopopoeia (personification), metaphor, simile and onomatopoeia; however, we still appreciate that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and this technical understanding in no way detracts from our overall appreciation of the text as an aesthetic object.

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One may also add that traditionally, literary criticism and literary theory have been viewed as one subject, which is true. A structuralist critic for example, takes a whole theory (semiotics) which is rooted in a structural theory of linguistics and then applies this to a text to understand how the text works or by what rules the text is operating. This form of criticism is rooted in a theory of language (and by extension composition) and may give us theoretical insight as well as critical insight; for example, does the text succeed or fail in what it is ultimately attempting? Whilst literary theory gives us the tools and groundwork to analyse the text, literary criticism is the actual use of these tools in order to critique and interpret a text. If we follow the peregrinations of a literary critic such as Vladimir Propp for example, we understand that he uses the theory of structuralism with which to criticise and hence grasp the structural meanings of the traditional fairy tale. Another often overlooked point in literary criticism is the function of the word “criticism” itself. Traditionally, criticism (spanning back etymologically to the Greek kritikos), means to be able to make judgements or discern. This has often been related to judging in terms of quality. However, in literary criticism the term is used simply as a normative term for understanding the text—or the workings of the text. This in turn gives us a closer comprehension of the text we are studying. I.A. Richards, for example, supposedly provides us with the practical principles with which we can successfully read literary texts. There is however a second and more judgemental node of literary criticism, which is usually connected to the later more political nature of literary criticism. For example, a Marxist critic such as Gyorgy Lukács makes clear distinctions in terms of the difference of political relevance between a writer such as Thomas Mann and a writer such as James Joyce in his essay “The Ideology of Modernism” (1963). Furthermore, feminist critics and postcolonial critics make other such critical judgments that can be seen to be rooted, to some degree, in the political, whether they be rooted in class, sexuality, or ethnic identity. Take for example Chinua Achebe’s assertion that Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness should be removed from the Western canon altogether. Without question the politicisation of literary criticism and approaches to the canon, or to what Barthes also claimed “…Gets taught.

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Full stop”3 has also changed our idea of literary criticism since the time of F.R. Leavis, who celebrates what he sees not only as the moral formalism inherent in Heart of Darkness, but also the accompanying normative view of this moral universe, symbolised by the very pioneering spirit of the merchant service itself, His interest in the tradition of the Merchant Service as a constructive triumph of the human spirit is correlative with his intense consciousness of the dependence, not only of the distinctive humanities at all levels, but of sanity itself and our sense of a normal outer world, on an analogous creative collaboration. (The Great Tradition: p. 32)

Achebe’s latter, more postcolonial critical reception of Conrad’s book, when held in sharp relief to the earlier formalistic Leavisite criticism of this nature, goes some way towards illustrating the politicisation of what has been historically regarded as the literary canon. Achebe4 wrote the following: Whatever Conrad’s problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as “among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language.” And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-­ century literature courses in English Departments of American universities. There are two probable grounds on which what I have said so far may be contested. The first is that it is no concern of fiction to please people about whom it is written. I will go along with that. But I am not talking about pleasing people. I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question. (Achebe, p. 259)  Roland Barthes, “Reflexions sur un manuel,” in L’Enseignement de la littera Serge Doubrovsky and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, 1971) p. 170. (The author’s translation). 4  “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977; pp. 7. 3

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One may of course argue, as has Terry Eagleton, that Leavis’ humanist criticism is in itself ideological and by extension, political—on this reading all criticism is up to a point political as it simply can’t function in an historical vacuum. However, Achebe’s polemic is more overtly political in its self-representation, and much more directly political. Leavisite criticism runs back to S.T. Coleridge’s (post-Kantian)5 idea of a learned cultural intelligentsia or “clerisy” and Matthew Arnold’s own particular humanist call to the middle classes to engage with their working-class counterparts. In wider political parlance it may be contended that whilst the Coleridge, Arnold and Leavis school of literary humanism form a conservative branch of literary (and cultural) criticism, the subsequent schools of criticism and theory have come to represent a more liberal (many would argue Liberal-New Left) school of criticism. One thing this demonstrates is that it’s possibly a mistake to simply relegate literary criticism to an a-theoretical locus, in which it is shielded from the real world in which we live. In point-of-fact, the so-called “culture wars” that have provoked such civil unrest in Tocqueville’s formerly utopian Land of The Enlightenment, The United States, are testament to this very point. Whatever our ideas of literary criticism, there are deep cultural and political implications, which have moved from a stress on form and structure towards a far more political critique of our institutions, at all civic levels—not just on purely aesthetic considerations. One should also remember that the raised political awareness provided by critical theories such as postcolonialism and feminism has meant that the scope of literature readily available to the scholar has increased dramatically since the post-war years. Books such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening are now regularly taught in liberal arts literature classes, however the novel’s reception upon its initial publication in 1899 was  Peter Cheyne writes in his tome Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy, (London: OUP; p. 262) “By 1829, in Church and State, Coleridge recommends ‘a national clerisy’ to disseminate the liberal arts and sciences, thereby to serve as ‘an essential element of a rightly constituted nation’, securing both its permanence and its progression. He is sometimes cited as coining the word ‘clerisy’ (he was first to use it in English), although in doing so he effectively translates Kant’s Klerisei. Klerisei is standard German for clergy, but Kant uses the word for an idealizing church of reason to free faith from historical forms and direct it towards the moral law discoverable by reason. While Kant suggested the term, however, Coleridge thoroughly developed the notion from his 1818 revision of The Friend to its fullest form in Church and State (1829/30).” 5

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nothing short of hysterical. Likewise, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and works such as Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain also currently get the recognition they always warranted. These political changes to the canon would not have been possible were it not for literary-critical theories that challenged and interrogated the political status quo. One further pertinent question is: What about the relevance of literary criticism to Thai students (or other nationalities)—let alone the general public? There are obviously a number of answers to this query; the first response may be to simply throw the question back at your interlocutor—why not? Do all academies simply require Business, Engineering and Science faculties? Perhaps part of the entrenched fear lies in the fact that literature historically makes up a large part of any culture and many conservatives simply don’t want people thinking too critically about narratives that have hitherto informed a particular culture—whether it be Thai, US, Polynesian or British culture. However, this does not necessarily mean that all literary scholars are going to start running around campus, burning their underwear, or wearing Chairman Mao tee shirts. That said, it may mean they will be able to pay closer attention to what the structures of these narratives have in common with other narratives from other cultures. In fact, while possibly raising the spectres of Marx, Derrida or Butler, literary criticism may also provide a basis for more conservative values; structuralism or archetypal criticism can equally bolster the idea that there are eternal verities that perhaps cannot be deconstructed entirely, or archetypal narratives and characters that transcend history; social constructions and what became known as historical or higher criticism.6 These structures present what for the anthropologist Claude Lévi-­ Strauss were universal archetypal symbolic structures; or narratives that

 Historical or Higher Criticism is a form of literary analysis that investigates the origins of a text. And is contrasted with lower criticism (or textual criticism), whose goal is to determine the original form of a text from among the variants and is more connected to the recent scholarship of Close Reading. It is historically linked to the work of the German Biblical School of Hermeneutics as practiced by the scholars of the Tübingen School, led by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). As with Kant’s notion of a “clerisy” These Germanic scholarly ideas in part emigrated to England under the tutelage of Coleridge. 6

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presented, through mythemes, universal a-historical myths, created through the binary structures of the human mind.7 One may also add that we could question why indeed did neoclassic poets such as Pope, Dryden and Grey bother with their ornate and polished art at all in the first place? Their diction and periphrasis were certainly not of an accord with the English spoken by common men? However, they were testing the English language to see what could be done with it and whether or not it was up to the same rhetorical standard or potential of the classical and romance languages—and it turned out it was. As for criticism, why not also see what we are capable of accomplishing in our reception and critique of texts? How far should we interrogate texts and perhaps the received assumptions within texts—whether they be Thai or English. Equally, why should we not move beyond being able to say why we like Collins or Rushdie? Why is Emily Brontë regarded as better than Danielle Steele? Why are Thai authors like Pramoj or Wongsuwan worth closer inspection? Literary criticism gives us the tools to offer arguments that may not be as scientific as the new critics wished but may at least give us some scope of objectivity. Another common objection is to the jargon or specialist language that makes up literary criticism. This is I think connected to the idea of why spoil the reading of the text? outlined above. If one takes a course in human anatomy they will be faced with a plethora of jargon; and in actual fact, if one studies horticulture in-depth they will encounter certain arcane terminology. However, in these cases not a word of dissent is uttered. We rightly feel that literature (and by extension culture) belongs to everyone. However, this does not ipso facto mean that specialist phraseology should not be a part of this particular discipline. The simple answer is that we can usefully employ tools and meta-expressions such as langue, parole, and discourse to provide us with a linguistic rubric with which to antatomise language and literature—as do horticulturists and biologists in their respective fields. Literature, like the model of the body, or the motorbike, can still be reassembled and appear as aesthetically beautiful as ever afterwards.  Lévi-Strauss, as we shall see in the chapter on structuralism, coined the phrase “mythemes” from the linguistic structural study of Ferdinand de Saussure and the binary nature of linguistic phonemes. 7

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Moreover, as the study of Thai literature mushrooms, the use of these critical apparatus will be invaluable for closer readings of the texts that will possibly make up the formative ‘canon’. Books for possible inclusion such as Red Bamboo, Letters from Thailand, The Circus of Life or A Young Man’s Fancy will be susceptible to deep analysis and assessment, perhaps accounting not only for their formal or structural qualities, but also their contextual, psychoanalytical, historicist and of course, political elements. This is an exciting enterprise indeed, and one that promises rich rewards if the scholar is equipped with a strong conceptual apparatus through which to engage these texts: a grounding that engages with these texts at various critical levels. Finally, whether one is more conservative or more radical in one’s persuasion, literary criticism simply offers tools with which to explore a large part of our cultural universe. The reading subject can equally take away conservative views, such as those outlined above and accorded to Coleridge, Arnold or Leavis—or later on Roger Scruton; or more radical views such as those attributed to Gayatari Spivak or Jacques Lacan. Then again, the reader doesn’t have to inherit any of these political viewpoints and may just enjoy the play, jouissance, or the comparative features of the text. Whatever one takes away from criticism, one will be encouraged to challenge traditional, univocal readings or “authoritative” readings of literature. In sum, one will be encouraged to think critically about the text. The text is at least given back to the student, which is after all what the new critics originally wanted.

2 A Brief (but Timely) History of Literary Criticism

Literary Criticism is a complex term that has its roots in antiquity, going back to the ages of classical Greece and later Rome. We can examine ancient texts such as Homer’s The Iliad and its call to the Muses, who inspired the Bards (early poets) to record in a special discourse, the great contemporaneous events. In a sense, the early poets were the chroniclers (or historians) of their time and were therefore always involved in a specialised use of language; an idea that has been handed down throughout the history of literary criticism. These poets and sages were originally part of the epic oral tradition—a tradition that centred on rhetoric and the persuasive nature of the language figures, tropes and arguments contained within these persuasive discourses.1 The Greek poet Hesiod famously wrote of how the muses met him on Mount Helicon, whilst he was tending his sheep, giving him a staff of laurel and a divine voice. Hesiod indeed founded the genre of the Pastoral. Even the legendary Greek philosopher Plato, who was critical of the powers that poets had over language and their influence, wrote that the poets  The “oral tradition” predates the tablet and early scribes in early Classical Culture, as well as other cultures such as Norse and Old English, where the first extant poem was a recorded version of the oral epic Beowulf; with the MS dated at around the year 1000 CE. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_2

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had a mystical, divine voice in his dialogue, The Ion. Moreover, The Greek poet Pindar also saw himself, in writing his classical odes, as being set apart from other men, because he had been being given a special voice in order to transcend the limits of mortality. His belief was also that natural talent would outshine learning, something echoed later on by Longinus. Thus, the early, self-critical attitude of poets often supposed a specialised, divine voice given by the Gods of the Muses to the poet who was a “seer.” Poets were also disclosers of ethical information in the early ages. In Aristophane’s play The Frogs, Aeschylus claims “Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.”2 Ancient literary criticism thus grew out of a philosophical requirement to discuss the actual functions and uses of literature—as it had been perceived as having such a high-­ ranking place in society. The poets also came to be regarded as superior craftsmen, which was another conception that challenged the idea of a more divine inspiration. Pindar himself also endorsed this idea. Indeed, the word “poetry” has its origins in these meanings, the poet became described as a maker poietes and his product is a poiema “a made-up thing.” In an early instance of literary criticism, Aristophanes satirises the ideas of taste and criticism his play The Frogs by pitting the tragedians Euripides and Aeschylus together in a discussion of their poetic “trade” in order to curry the favour of the Greek God Dionysus. This is an early form of informal satire that challenged the differing views of language utilised by tragic writers such as Sophocles, Aeschylus and later Euripides. What the prologue to The Frogs informs us is that Greek writers were becoming more aware of stylistic questions: questions about the effect a poet should have on the audience, while also considering general criticism as a form of discourse itself.

 Penelope Murray writes: “…in the words spoken by Aeschylus in Aristophanes’ play Frogs: ‘Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.’ It is only against this background of the central importance of poetry in Greek society that we can begin to understand the ways in which ancient literary criticism developed. For Greek criticism is not primarily concerned with ‘literary’ or aesthetic matters, but rather with philosophical questions relating to the moral authority and ethical value of literature. The mainstream of ancient literary criticism takes it for granted that poetry, and literature in general, is a form of communication, and that literature and morality are intimately connected.” Murray & Dorsch (eds)., Classical Literary Criticism, (London: Penguin, 2000). p. 10. 2

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Later orators, such as Gorgias of Leontini, also emphasised the power of language itself to influence people’s thoughts and emotions; indeed, the Sophists were teachers of rhetoric who would instruct pupils on the best ways in which to use language to influence people’s psychology and beliefs and their influence, as we shall see in a later chapter, has been lasting. One may think of advertisements today or even the behaviour of politicians and their use of rhetoric to influence crowd psychology— Donald Trump being one of the more extreme examples. These were all elements of early literary criticism that developed as the ancients sought to discover the best usages of rhetorical language and started to ask questions about who was the best practitioner of the art(ifice) of poetry. The poets (both Comic and Tragic), would compete at competitions for coveted prizes, such as the right to slaughter the sacrificial goat: in fact, the word tragedy means “goat song.” In a perhaps surprising turn of events, given the rhetorical nature of his own rendering of his mentor Socrates’ dialogues, the legendary philosopher Plato wrote about poetry in various dialogues (The Ion, Protagoras, Republic and Laws). However, although in texts such as the Ion Plato recognised the mystical, intoxicating power of poetry, in the Republic he repudiated poets for misleading the people by seizing upon their deeper emotions and leading them away from reason to emotion—something not generally celebrated in the rational Socratic dialogues. Plato argues that in the text through which poets and artists alike represent the world to us—they are removing us from the ideal realm—of the Idea or nous. For example, a bed, as an already “imperfect form” or representation of an ideal bed, in the realm of nous, thus becomes represented a third time when represented as an aesthetic object such as a painting of a bed (or a bed as depicted in a poem) or perhaps as Tracey Emin’s infamous installation art in the Tate Britain—no doubt a feminine take on the Platonic idea of representation. In other words, all we perceive is the representation of an ideal (perfect) world, and then to have this object aesthetically rendered again—as a painting, found object, sculpture or a poem—is to have it at a third form removed from its original Idea. Therefore, through mimesis this mimes the ideal original. Plato is trying to replace poetry with a new form of discourse: that of reason, leading to a higher rational insight through The Logos. His ideal Nous

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contained the ultimate ideas.3 As an ultimate consequence of this philosophy, he wished to expel poets from his republic. He also saw a moral danger in allowing Greek plays to take place, because of the strength of their influence on citizens. Think of debates today about the effects of television and computer games on young people’s minds. Thus, Platonic literary criticism ultimately saw the skill and craftsmanship involved, as well as sometimes great inspiration, but for moral purposes felt that poets should be banned from the ideal democratic polis. The mimetic nature of poetry was one of the major reasons for this, as well as its possible morally corrupt capacity (or its capacity for moral corruption), through false representation and its emotional sway over people’s emotions. Later critics and philosophers such as Plotinus and Schopenhauer would celebrate the power of art to actually by-pass the secondary representative nature of the world and penetrate into the transcendental inner or ideal form of life—or the realm of nous; thus, these Neoplatonic art critics would use the Platonic model but change its emphasis from negative to a more positive approbation. The other bearded bad boy of antiquity, and none other than Alexander the Great’s personal tutor, was of course Aristotle. In his Poetics, he famously saw poetry in a much more favourable light than had Plato in his defence of his putative Republic. For Aristotle, much more the proto-­ individualist, poets didn’t simply imitate, without thinking, as they did with Plato, but actively and rationally constructed their works. This view differed from Plato’s view of the irrational nature of poetic composition and the more simplistic mimetic view. Aristotle actually celebrates mimesis, and argues that Greek Tragedy imitates life, but in so doing instructs the audience and is therefore a positive genre. Whereas Plato feared a deeper engagement with our irrational emotions, Aristotle actually encouraged and celebrated this aspect of Greek Tragedy, claiming it offered the audience a cleansing of their emotions, or a catharsis. Aristotle’s  For Plato, his theory of education is therefore also interestingly rationalist, in that the educator is supposed to appraise the students of these ideas of the noetic realm, already a priori held but forgotten after the trauma of childbirth. Even if one relinquishes the metaphysical implications of this original theory of education, a deflationary (non-metaphysical reading) of Platos’s theory sounds in some ways very similar to much of the neoliberal theories of discovery learning and child-centred educational theories of pedagogy, currently popular and (quite rightly I think) descried by many advocates of a more communitarian approach to modern education. 3

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Poetics is the first real extant text of literary criticism that offers a normative account of the subject and covers aspects such as magnitude, spectacle, unity and plot. Aristotle it would appear was asking everyone but the Greek chorus to get on the couch and get it off their chest and—depending on how you read the translation of the old Greek—was it seems into not just spectacle but also mass sublimation. This was perhaps not surprising given he was very much in favour of a free economy and home ownership, whereas his older counterpart Plato wanted a proto-communist republic that shared pretty much everything. It would appear Plato himself needed to visit a few Aristotlean plays to get some things off his chest. The Roman critic and poet Horace wrote the next famous literary-­ critical tract in history, Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) in which he outlined the classical idea of decorum and propriety in a work of poetry. By this, Horace meant that all aspects of a work must be appropriately chosen; thus, the choice of subject must match the genre, expression, character, meter and tone, all of which must all be appropriately fitted together into a structural whole. Verisimilitude and the non-mixing of different genres (something that is actually a major element in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and much so-called ‘postmodern’ works), were all parts of Horace’s theory of decorum. Like Plato and Aristotle, Horace believes art to be imitative, and this should be reflected throughout the work of art: incongruity was a technical mistake in Horace’s Ars Poetica. Horace also emphasised the concept of practice and polishing your poetry, and thus the craftsmanship element of poetry is ingrained into his poetic theory. Horace looked back to the Hellenistic age of Greece for the great poetics and as such was a classicist and thought the highest aim of literature was to please and benefit people morally—a doctrine echoed below by the neoclassical or pragmatic school of criticism. After Horace, Longinus was a classical critic whose work was discovered in the 1600s and is generally regarded as the critic who introduced the seminal concept of the sublime into criticism. His treatise On the Sublime states the central idea that great literature contains hupsos (grandeur/sublimity) and contains passages that are able to transport the reader, or remove them away in their mind, overwhelming them with its power. Sublimity often manifests itself in individual lines or phrases, as opposed to a whole work and the best writers can occasionally slip into

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the sublime mode. However, echoing earlier critics, Longinus also argues that even though the sublime is innate in the writer, it is still a skill that requires cultivation and needs honing. Powerful emotions, deep thinking capacity, the ability to visualise a scene and present it to an audience (phantasia) and the language of enthusiasm are all central to Longinus’ treatise. His major impact was perhaps felt most strongly in the literature of the Age of Sensibility and in Romanticism and its attendant expressive theory of criticism, discussed at length below. The early part of the Middle Ages followed the dictates of Horace, but also of Cicero and Quintilian. It comprises the main categories of artes poeticae, artes dictaminis (or treatises on letter-writing) and above all artes praedicandi which follow classical precepts. This is be the prescriptive aspect of medieval literary theory; essentially, a series of manuals giving instructions for authorial composition, focusing their attention on the prospective author. These critics and arbiters of taste however, also faced their own particular textual issues. The majority of medieval critics were priests, monks or theologians. Therefore, the hegemony of Christian authority punctuated the Middle Ages in the history of literary theory and criticism. Attempting to assimilate the critical theory of the classical writers, they were doing so within the strict precis of Christian dogma. The resulting critical hybridity made for major developments in the way we approach textuality, language, and developing notions of form and taste. The ultimate textual yardstick was the book of books, the Bible itself. There was a solid basis in the exegesis of the bible and as a result, the human science of hermeneutics was born. The importance of this science of interpretation cannot be stressed enough; as we shall see it was further developed by the latter romantics such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, before being assimilated into modern philosophy by Martin Heidegger and his erstwhile pupil, H.G.  Gadamer. As will be revealed later in this current study, literary criticism also came to the feast, as part of its wider encroachment into modern philosophy. In the early middle or “Dark Ages” the main critics or theoreticians were Augustine, with his seminal texts, The Confessions and The City of God; Boethius, with his De consolatione philosophiae; the English monk Bede, with his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and his De natura

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rerum; and finally, Isidore of Seville, with his Etymologiae. Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), was and still is a hugely popular text. Written during his incarceration, it polemicises the notion that the contemplation of God can reconcile us to sublunary miseries. And what misery Boethius had at this time: he was awaiting execution. In attempting to reconcile the classical tradition of mimesis and decorum with the Herbaic tradition, Bede’s De Arte Metrica produces from this synthesis a formal criticism. In so doing, he argues that Hebrew poets anticipated the classical stylistics of mimesis. Bede also adds writers such as Prudentius, Arator, Sedulius, and Ambrose to the canon of “classical” poetics. By the time of the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” universities and organised monastic orders had emerged, with the mushrooming of both systematic studies and commentaries upon extant texts. These scholastics, (or schoolmen), faced the issue of incorporating the rediscovered texts of Aristotle’s universe to the now extremely powerful hegemony of Christian dogma. In general, the classical authors were usually given a didactic gloss, sometimes producing a Christian political and moral pathology. This is a complexity that, borne of the medieval period of literary criticism, has resurfaced since the Second World War, in the guise of some of the political pathologies of modern theory and criticism. This is a critical praxis that rereads texts in terms of prevailing liberal notions, such as feminist, postcolonialist, and queer theory. In this scholastic period, Ovid, for instance, was a difficult author to scrutinize, because of his perceived immoral notions and tropes. Some more proto-formalist criticism explored the rhetorical forms in Ovid’s oeuvre, noting that we could at least discern the ornatus verborum (aesthetic beauty) of its structure, and its pulchras positiones (syntactical beauty) in works such as his Heroides and Amores. Some commentators also tried to analyse the Heroides through an ethical topology: He uses the example of Penelope to discuss lawful love, the example of Canace to discuss unlawful love, and the example of Phyllis to discuss foolish love. He includes two of the forms, foolish and unlawful love, not for their own sake, but in order to commend the third. Thus, in commending

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lawful love he criticizes foolish and unlawful love. (Minnis et al., Introduction to Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100-c 1375: The Commentary Tradition, 21)

However, other critics, such as Conrad of Hirsau, were not so generous with their critique. Utilising a Christian-didactic pathology, Conrad writes: Why should the young recruit in Christ’s army subject his impressionable mind to the writing of Ovid, in which even though gold can be found among the dung, yet the foulness that clings to the gold defiles the seeker, even though it is the gold he is after? (Minnis et al., Introduction to Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100-c 1375: The Commentary Tradition, 56)

Therefore, the establishment of a canon of classical authors, was generally based upon their usefulness from the point of view of Christian education. In fact, according to Augustine, Cassiodorus and Rabanus Maurus, the chief justification for the study of the classics and other secular texts, was as preparation for study of the Bible. Later medieval poetical exegesis also included the Trivium, which was the linguistic structure of grammar, logic and rhetoric. As we shall see, this was later elaborated upon in the poststructuralist work of Paul de Man, by way of his interrogation of language use and its inherent deconstructive tensions and ironies. It was complemented by the Quadrivium, which consisted of the spellbinding topography of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Poetic studies consisted, in large part, of the application of the Trivium to the critical explication of a work. Another important critic of the latter era of this period was Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who composed his Poetria Nova in the early twelfth century. Just as Longinus’ theory of the sublime was to have a marked effect upon the modern criticism of the romantics, Geoffrey’s emphasis on the power of the mind to give shape to the subject matter, and the primacy of the intellect as a guiding “hand” was to have a clear influence on the latter romantic notion of organicism, as exemplified in the work of S.T. Coleridge. Geoffrey used not only an organic trope to describe process of composition, but also a sartorial trope, in that the idea is “clothed” in the material garments of poesy.

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A final critic of note from this period is Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas famously imposed the literal meaning of the bible over the other three of the fourfold meanings: the allegorical, the tropological (moral) and the anagogical. Aquinas firstly restricted the fourfold method of interpretation to the Holy Scripture—but not for literature in general—because only scriptural literature has this signifying structure. This later scholastic hermeneutics hinges on the notion that the literal sense denotes what is properly Christian doctrine and only after this can one explicate the allegorical or anagogical meanings, which stem from the primary literal meaning. This restricts readings of scripture, but was also later developed by Dante Alighieri, in terms of secular and profane literature. Aquinas also acknowledges the various social and historical conditions of the scriptural authors, and in so doing, introduces into literary criticism the notion of historicist, or biographical, criticism. Moreover, Aquinas and other scholastic critics delimit the mystical meanings of scriptural texts. Figurative language is read as oriented by the literal level, because any intention was consciously motivated by the authors themselves, and not directly by the mouth of God. To summarise, we can observe that many aspects of later critical movements, such as humanism, romanticism, formalism, and even Post-War political criticism, to some degree, have their roots in the criticism of the medieval and the middle-ages. The sometimes-called early modern pragmatic school certainly laid claim to the ministry of classical nomenclature’s attention and with equal certainty adopted the classical notions of criticism described above. They provided us with a background to literary criticism, which in some respects lay dormant until many of these texts were rediscovered and retranslated, having been kept by Arabian custodians, during the Renaissance. In the age of what is commonly called neoclassicism, writers and critics were working to rejuvenate the older critical traditions and philosophical theories and make them “fit” the modern world. Neoclassic writers such as Swift, Addison, Pope and Dryden all tried to imitate the classic poets and orators and as such developed highly ornate standards of criticism, not unlike those of the ancients. Moving away from the more strictly Christian tradition, they championed stylistic devices such as periphrasis, Latinate inversions and epithets to give their work a more

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pronounced veneer. Moreover, they also wrote in poetic metrics that matched those of the ancients. They also argued for poetry that would act to inform and morally educate the reader or audience, with a strong emphasis also placed upon the pleasure derived from the text. Therefore, their theories were formal and stylistic but also strongly pragmatic in that they argued for the importance of the pragmatic or moral effect upon the reader of the text. Thus, examples such as Swift’s satiric Gulliver’s Travels and Pope’s various versions of his magical Essay on Criticism or The Rape of the Lock have a strongly instructional bent. While straight comedy has laughter as its ultimate purpose, neoclassical satire has moral or didactic instruction as its ultimate aim, but the comedy is a formal and pleasing element, very much intrinsic to the text. One noticeable aspect of all of these theories is the lack of proper discussion of, or even allusion to, a ‘human subject.’ After the rejuvenation of the work of Longinus, and other “organic” theories of composition, such as those of the English writers Alexander Gerard and Lord Shaftesbury,4 a revolutionary movement came to Europe that—especially but not exclusively—held prominence in Germany and England that came to be known as Romanticism. Romantic literary critics, especially in Germany, were originally looking back to the classical age of Greece as a lost age, which we had to somehow re-find in the present. Critics such as the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich and August, wrote at length of this in Germany, before formulating their own theory of romantic poetics. These theories, whilst looking for a literary ‘golden age’ were also very original in their emphasis on the mixture of genres, their moves away from the formal objectivism of neoclassicism, their emphasis on the power of the imagination and the politically revolutionary strain in their overall  Shaftesbury’s seminal Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was first published in 1711 and certainly bears the hallmarks of the neoclassic, in that its title reads like a pragmatist manifesto. However, the wonderful prose stylistic is of the ‘age of sensibility’ and comes in the recent wake of the revolution in manners partly inspired by Addison and Steele’s journals, The Tatler and The Spectator. Neither of which were to do with the newer emanations of the said publications but were very much to do with the newly gentrified fashion of manners and politeness. Both Shaftesbury and then later on also Alexander Gerard in his Essay on Genius (1756) advocated the idea of organic and natural genius. Jonathan Cuthbert (the Cambridge Platonist) had similar ideas and his work was taught in German at the Tubingen when Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin were students there, no doubt influencing in part their own neo-Kantian ideas on Organicism. 4

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philosophical ideals. In terms of specific literary criticism, the ‘organic’ was usually privileged over the’ mechanical,’ the imagination over cognitive understanding, (or the fantastical ‘the fancy’) and there was a reaction against the strict compositional strictures of neoclassicism. In England, the two poets William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge, were also looking at new modes of expression, which were outlined in the preface to their 1800 edition of their poems, The Lyrical Ballads. In this preface, Wordsworth famously attacked the prevailing poetry of neoclassicism and its strict adherence to form and ornate decorum, instead advocating a form of poetry that would originate organically from inside the poet’s own mind and would reflect the language really spoken by common men. Thus, this would come to represent an expressive mode of criticism which would centre on the poet’s subjective imagination and his “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”5 These poets also focused on the effects of the sublime, but as a much bigger category of feeling than that originally discussed by Longinus; the impact upon the imagination of sublime encounters was of upmost importance to romantic criticism and theory. Moreover, whereas pragmatic critics had emphasised decorum, sense and the Aristotelian sense of “the golden mean” (a sort of restrained middle way in poetics and versification), these poets celebrated revolution, profound imaginative inner states, a more free-ranging poetic meter and indulgence in subjects often supernatural and fantastic in nature—a long way from the sense of decorum celebrated in the pragmatic/neoclassical period. Coleridge’s book of criticism, Biographia Literaria (1817) also emphasised the organic nature of true poetry as opposed to the mechanical nature of poetry that utilised what he termed the “fancy’ as opposed to the “esemplastic imagination.”4 In short, the poetry of the romantic school usually emphasises subjective states of mind and revelation, celebrating the revolutionary and invigorating power of the imagination. Gothicism is often seen as an offshoot of Romanticism, particularly the gothic novel, for example Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Walpole’s The  This quote was famously part of Wordsworth’s own Preface, which was not part of the original 1798 anonymously published edition of the poems. By the final 2 volume edition of the book (1804), Wordsworth had actually failed to include any of Coleridge’s poetic compositions. 5

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Castle of Otranto or Lewis’ The Monk. It is important to note however that not all poets noted as being “romantic” fit this subjective, or expressive mode. Poets such as Hölderlin, Byron and Shelley for example deal with subjective states of mind but often use much more classical schemes of versification. Another important element of Romanticism is its emphasis upon the solitary individual figure in literature, this is in some sense a reflection of the idea of the subjective imagination—or the expression of the subjective imagination. Individual figures represented in poems such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelley’s Alastor, Byron’s Manfred, or Wordsworth’s biographical self in The Prelude all reflect this solitary individualism, possibly connected and rooted to some degree in Rousseau’s concept of state of nature.6 This romantic individualism is an important trope that connects to the celebration in romantic poetics of the expression of the individual in the work of poetry. Another major element in romantic criticism and poetics is the importance of nature in the work of poetry. This is partly because of the reliance on the individual imagination and the expression of the inner-self, which is in some measure connected to the growth of the individual’s mind and the effect upon this growth that is afforded by nature. This is celebrated in Wordsworth’s encounters with nature in his epic, The Prelude, but also by most of the poets working within the romantic tradition of criticism. Wordsworth famously writes of spots of time in his epic poem, as well as the psychological experiences that come back to the poet in moments of reflection and shape his personality. Nature was also seen as an important element in Romanticism because of the moral lessons one could learn from communing with the external world of nature, and the effect it could have upon one’s mind and imagination. Other aspects of German romantic literary criticism, as outlined by the German romantics (Frühromantik) have also had a continuing influence of not only literary criticism, but also upon cultural studies and  The “state of nature,” sometimes later used synonymously with the so-called idea of “The Noble Savage”, untouched by the chains of civilisation, was predominantly celebrated by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his own book on educational theory: Emile: or on Education (1762); the concept in terms of a natural connection to nature was also explored in his last book, Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776–78). 6

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philosophy. One of these is instanced in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lyceum Fragments (1797) and the Athenaeum Fragments (1798)—a series of fragments and aphorisms that were designed to performatively reflect romantic irony—the concept that the human subject can never have a fully comprehensible ontological grasp upon the external world, or environment. This philosophical limit or lack is one that is not only reflected in certain areas of English Romanticism, but also in much critical analysis; see for example: English Romantic Irony by Anne K. Mellor (1980), The Romantic Ideology by Jerome McGann (1983) and more recently my own Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition (2015). Further examples of this romantic irony are also to be found in both modernist and postmodern works of literature, for example Joyce, Eliot, Pound, HD, Burroughs, Pynchon or Calvino. This sense of romantic irony can also be sensed in modern cinema in works by Tarantino, Nolan, Anderson and in Thailand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It is especially prevalent also in the poetry of S.T. Coleridge, Lord Byron and P.B. Shelley. Another German romantic was the poet and philosopher Novalis, who also introduced an idea of the musical free-play of signifiers in language, which reflect the play and entropy of nature. This can be seen to have certain affinities with both the later postmodernism and poststructuralist criticism to be discussed below. In conclusion, one can see that romantic criticism, in all its variant forms, can be seen to have had a lasting influence in literary studies right up until the present day; indeed, the organic sense of Romanticism also has an affinity with the more recent theory of ecocriticism. One can even see some connection between Coleridge and the Frühromantiker insistence upon an organic connection between the constituent parts of a work of art or poetry to some aspects of the new criticism discussed below, even if the new critics ostensibly set out to remove romantic subjectivism from the process of literary criticism. In the twentieth century, modern literary criticism, which is the main subject of this book, moved back to more formal and objective questions about the nature of the work of art and therefore moved away from the more expressionistic aspects of European Romanticism, instead concentrating on the form over the content of the poem or novel. Whereas for the romantics the content had been the main aspect of the poem, whether it be a romantic symbol, the language of common people, an expression

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connecting us to the higher faculty of the imagination or an experience of the sublime in the natural world; the subsequent generation of critics began to concentrate on the more technical or formal aspects of the poem. This was a move away from what they felt was the enforced subjectivism of romantic criticism. For literary criticism to become more firmly grounded once again, it needed the firm ground of objectivity afforded to the new sciences such as modern physics, biology and economics. Following on the success of the period of Romanticism, criticism in the twentieth century veered towards the newly objective or formalist mode of criticism that moved away from the more subjective literary criticism of the romantics. Critics such as F.R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, T.S. Eliot, W.K. Wimsett and I.A. Richards were central in this critical prism. However, it’s also important to note that the new critics were more or less North American academics. The British mode of moral formalism, or humanist criticism, as discussed in the previous chapter, up to a point retained organic elements of Romanticism, arguing to some degree that culture had been degraded by the onset of industrialisation (and the Great War) and that culture needed to be preserved and saved against the materialist onset of modernity. This argument retains important elements of the organic/mechanical distinction as originally laid out in Britain by Coleridge some 100 hundred years previously. The writer as a humanist and cultural hero also goes back to Shelley’s romantic essay, “A Defence of Poetry” (1821). A central essay in the new critical formal tradition of criticism was actually originally that of a British writer, T.E. Hulme, called “Romanticism and Classicism” (1924). In this essay, Hulme argues against the one-sided view of poetry apparent in what he terms Romanticism, which he defines as an aesthetic obsession with the expression of the self or the soul. For Hulme, any subject matter is worthy of poetic treatment, including “small and dry things.” He intends to examine the poem as a self-enclosed work of art, working as Brooks also later claims, in strange combinations and overlays. Likewise, for T. S. Eliot, the poet, in a reflection of the neoclassical tradition, enters into a great tradition and must thus learn that tradition in the same way that a watchmaker learns his or her craft. As we shall see, the school of new criticism employs normative criteria to the

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workings of a great poem—these reflect in some degree the ideas of Horace in Ars Poetica. The poem is examined as a piece of self-sustained work, with ultimately no reference to anything outside of itself—including the author’s psyche, emotional state—or yearning for a purer imaginative communion with the external world. However, as outlined above, this also has to some degree a connection to Coleridge’s organic-­ imaginative energy that connects all the elements of a successful poem together. The European equivalent of this Anglo-American tradition was Russian Formalism, arguably inaugurated by Victor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Technique” (1917) in which Shklovsky argued that literature is a special form of linguistic utterance, one that “defamiliarises” the reader by unusual uses of language. The formalist critics also paid attention to the words on the page instead of the author’s biography or prevailing social events. Both new criticism and formalism are objective theories in that they contend against their romantic (and later symbolist) predecessors that objective concentration upon the linguistic form of the poem provides the measure of its critical success or failure. It is to these text-based theories that modern criticism turned in the twentieth century, and in what follows I shall explore literary criticism and philosophy for the humanities in light of this modality of criticism.

3 The Philosophical Self-Consciousness of the New Criticism and Formalism

New Criticism and formalism grew out of an attempt to render literary criticism more “scientific,” that is, to make criticism appear more measurable and thus a tool to analyse literary language through its form rather than its content as had been the critical and philosophical bent of the romantics. The organic/imaginative preference of both the Frühromantiker in Germany and the English school of Romanticism had meant that the formal boundaries between different genres of written discourse had been dissolved. In philosophy this had been the age of modern aesthetics and philosophers and poets alike had been exploring the link between aesthetics and human subjectivity. The philosophy of art grew in stature, in works such as Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art in two volumes (1835),1 and Friedrich and August Schlegel’s ‘fragments’ in both The Athenaeum and The Lyceum (1798–1800); moreover, there were also other important treatises on

 The Lectures on Fine Art in Two Volumes was published in Hegel’s name but was in actual fact collated from the lecture notes of one of his erstwhile students, named Hotho—Hegel died in 1831 so the volumes were published posthumously. Hotho must have been a model student; both punctual and attentive. The two combined volumes run to well over 1500 pages. 1

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aesthetics by Goethe, Wackenroder, Tieck and Novalis.2 Meanwhile, in England there was a vast exchange of letters on aesthetics, as well as Wordsworth’s two famous poetic prefaces in 1800 and 1815. There was also Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria and his numerous other articulations of literary criticism. Indeed, the title of this latter text reveals a lot about the romantic form of criticism—it was often intimately bound to the subjective biographical experiences of author-as-human subject. The later humanist forms of criticism, in particular those of Arnold, Pater, Swinburn and more recently, Leavis, while pointing the way to a more formal style of criticism, still retained values such as culture, community and the conceptualisation of the writer or artisan as the humanist hero or cultural custodian. New critics such as T.S.  Eliot, Cleanth Brooks and I.A.  Richards tended to focus on the formal qualities of literary texts. This was, in part, a reaction to romantic or expressive criticism, which had placed emphasis and value upon the relationship between the text and the imagination, or the expression of the inner/subjective. The romantics, and especially Coleridge, had used nuanced phrases such as the mechanical understanding, the fancy (fantasy as opposed to imaginative aesthetics) and the primary/secondary imagination, which signified the special place in their philosophy for the imagination. However, the new critics and formalists removed these philosophical distinctions, which were in some way related to the dominant philosophical concerns of the period. Indeed, the dominant philosophical concerns of the early twentieth century were linguistic and logical. Ever since Frege’s ground-breaking work in formal logic,  Tieck, Wackenroder, Novalis, Hülsen and Hölderlin, along with the Schlegel brothers, constituted a large part of the German romantics (Frühromantik) and wrote in aesthetics journals such as The Athenaeum, The Lyceum and Pollen. See the stellar (pun intended) work of ‘constellation philosophy’ and in particular the work of Manfred Frank, for insightful research into the theory and philosophy of these thinkers. J.V. Goethe had written some undeniably romantic poetry and the tragic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was also a key player in the Sturm und Drang theatrical movement but after his trip to Italy and the resultant travelogue, Italian Journey (1786–88) changed his aesthetic and philosophical position to that of a classicist. He even famously stated “Romanticism is a sickness” and was very critical of much of the German romantic movement and novels such as Friedrich Schlegel’s experimental romantic novel, Lucinde (1799). 2

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thinkers such as Russell, Whitehead, Carnap, and Wittgenstein had been working out both the limits of formal logic and its relational limits to language; this trend was initially known as analytic philosophy. Following this ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, the preoccupation with language use and utterances later became known under the aegis of the later Wittgenstein, J.L.  Austin Gilbert Ryle and A.J.  Ayer as Ordinary Language Philosophy. In fact, the humanities in general were seeking new axiomatic grounds for certainty and this would also go for both our cultural re-imagining and our critical approach to literature. This formal approach to philosophy and social science (partly through verificationism and logical positivism) was largely reflected in the almost anti-romantic stance of thinkers such as Hulme, Eliot and Brooks; while also finding expression in continental formalists such as Jakobson, Shklovsky and Propp. The other big philosophical position of the twentieth century was transcendental phenomenology; however, this was still based upon subjective experience—albeit premised upon a rigorous critique of human consciousness—and later on our very notion of Being itself. One of the first points of departure for new criticism is its emphasis on the form of the text itself, and as such its move from biographical or author-centred criticism. The new critics emphasised the text itself, rather than the author’s background or intentions. Wimsett and Beardsley (1946/1949) wrote of the “intentional/affective” fallacy of a work and claimed that neither the supposed intentions of the writer, nor the effects of a work of art upon a reader should be taken into account when configuring a critical appraisal; for example, whether we respond with sadness or joy, are not important factors for criticism because the important factors are the way the author accomplishes these affects—or the stylistic devices the author employs in order to attain these effects. This also removes the romantic notion of subjectivity from the literary critical prism; notions such as Keats’ negative capability, the egotistical sublime and the Coleridgean primary imagination all presume a large element of personal subjectivity— even its reception of the so-called “second generation” English romantics:

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Keats, Shelley, Byron—was itself derogatory.3 Keats’ a­ pplication of “the egotistical sublime” to Wordsworth, as the phrase itself suggests, was hardly congratulatory. Indeed, much of the early romantics’ work was also very biographical in nature and the sense of romantic irony and the fragment was based upon philosophical un-­certainty, or what we also similarly know as philosophical idealism within the phenomenal world. However, as these philosophical concerns became replaced with the more analytical approach, so the literary text would become closely read in terms of its inherent forms and structures—not through its philosophical relationship and proximity to human subjectivity and the external world at large. This movement was moving synchronically with the more formalised, semantic and linguistic nature of Bertrand Russell’s analytic movement in philosophy, which searched for a more formal-logical schematics of logical annotation that would counter all more relative linguistic usage to the point where many of the previous problems of philosophy would be made redundant. Likewise, for the new criticism of texts, this formal approach was isolating the paralogical and structurally creative nature of aesthetic discourse and thus providing us with a clearer, more precise, less subjective critical prism through which to discern the building blocks of literature. Crucially, in the area of philosophy, Russell, Frege, Whitehead, Moore (and later Austin and Wittgenstein), were also examining language in order to define a logical relationship to the world we inhabit, a logocentric relationship whereby we move away from an expressive epistemological view of the world, or a more philosophically idealist understanding of the phenomenal world to a view of the world where logic is mirrored in  Keats had coined the phrase “the egotistical sublime” for Wordsworth’s particular form of sublime encounter because of its subjective and biographical mediation through the persona of the poet himself. In his second (and very successful) and very satirical book of poetry, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) Lord Byron had ridiculed the ‘Lake School’ of Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth. P.B. Shelley also wrote the satirical “Peter Bell the Third” about Wordsworth and many of the younger romantics accused him of apostasy after his epic The Excursion (1814) and his latter “Thanksgiving Ode” (1816), which celebrated the defeat of Napoleon. An excellent New Historicist study has recently been made about this latter period in Wordsworth’s oeuvre by Jeffrey N. Cox, William Wordsworth, Second Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo, Cambridge: CUP, 2021. 3

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language and the logicality of the world is represented through the logical structure of language itself, hence the early Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s idea of logical form and logical representation in language. Frege had been working against the idea of “psychologism” and in his work on logic and psychology he had separated the realm of logical language from the subjective realm of psychology. On this analytic view of language, the laws of logic are not governed by psychology (psychologism) but are objective and independent, reflecting a position baldly known as logical realism. This was a reaction in tandem with thinkers such as Russell, who in turn was reacting against his own earlier neo-Hegelian philosophical idealism and against the Romanticism in both critical and aesthetic theory, ushering in a new form of empiricism (phenomenalism) that would underpin not only our scientific, but also our social scientific and aesthetic theory. Significantly, this analytic school of philosophy is more than clearly reflected in the then-contemporaneous more analytic approach taken to literary criticism through the prism of new criticism, where the move away from Romanticism, biographical criticism and philosophical idealism spells a concomitant move away from more expressive epistemologies to these more objective modes of criticism and theory.4 However, the analytic model in philosophy, whilst serving its purpose and becoming a mode that is still used today as a tool of philosophical enquiry, did not completely supersede more expressive modes of inquiry, running into its own logical brick walls. Russell himself encountered what became known as the ‘Barber Paradox’ in the early stages of his  Bertrand Russell, the founding father of the analytic tradition in philosophy, had been originally trained in Hegelianism and later turned against this absolute Idealism in favour of the logical, mathematical and analytical approach of matching the logic of sentence structures to mathematics and thus deciphering a language of pure logic through which to underpin our sentences about the empirical world. This was held in sharp relief by Russell to both Romanticism and German Idealism. His (in) famous History of Western Philosophy (1945) was clearly also informed by the political climate at the time of the Second World War, although the roots of his animus also clearly lie in his apostasy with regards Hegelianism. The major irony of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics project is that it was actually very Hegelian in design; just as Hegel’s The Science of Logic (1812–1816) was designed as a foundational text for the sciences and in fact, all forms of knowledge enquiry in general, so Russell’s text was putatively designed to form a bedrock and axiomatic propositional logic to underpin all future inquiry. A further and (as far as I’m currently aware) unacknowledged irony is that the ‘barber shop paradox’ as it later came to be known, would have been sublated-­ through-­negation in the jargon of the Hegelian system of logic. This option due to the mathematical system of sets was simply not available to Frege or Russell. 4

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research into mathematics, language and a pure system of notational logic.5This paradox led to major issues with the purely mathematical/ logical approach to philosophy, meaning that philosophy and criticism still had no firm foundational grounds upon which to place themselves. Even though thinkers such as Carnap, Sellars and Quine have made interesting inroads into the analytic tradition, as Richard Rorty has pointed out, the same intractable issues still ultimately remain. This is partly why concomitantly, objective modes of literary criticism, have in the twentieth century faced challenges from continental theories of criticism, rooted ultimately in the very romantic schools that both the new critics and the analytic philosophers were attempting to supersede. Moving back to the shores of literary criticism, the new critics had a number of canonical texts, and in his book Practical Criticism (1929), Richards argues for a sort of “democratisation” of the text; by this we mean that the text is equally accessible to all students, whatever their  This foundational “glitch” in the Frege/Russell project once again demonstrated the impossibility of absolute grounds for axiomatic philosophical claims—and by extension and within the precis of this book, in any form of literary analysis within the remit of the humanities. Russell’s paradox basically runs like this: First of all in order to bring pure mathematics into the reified world of sentential objects and structures, one had to reduce the pure notations of abstract mathematics to classes; which produced and necessitated Set Theory. Therefore, for any particular collection of objects you name there will be a set. For example, three bottles, the people in the room, your family. The sets themselves become objects, thus, there are higher level sets that have sets as members; the set that has one member and the set that has three spoons. And we therefore identify numbers with sets. So, three will be defined as a set. Then there will be a set whose members are themselves sets (as objects). The higher-level set three will have the set with the three people, the three black cats and the three teachers. However, the set of things not identical with itself-the null set-doesn’t exist but it is still by necessity and definition a set. The logical theory goes that by using these sets with no connection to an abstract notion of numbers we can explain maths by logical concepts. The paradox: is that some classes are members of themselves—and there are some that are not members of themselves. A class is a member of the class of classes (all classes) What about a class whose members are not the same as themselves. A class of classes who aren’t members of themselves. The puzzle shows that an apparently plausible scenario is logically impossible. In the paradox, the barber is the “one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves”. The question is, does the barber shave himself? In answering this question, we instantiate a contradiction. The barber cannot shave himself as he only shaves those who do not shave themselves. Thus, if he shaves himself he ceases to be the barber. Conversely, if the barber does not shave himself, then he fits into the group of people who would be shaved by the barber, and thus, as the barber, he must shave himself. Later, and in a much more half-hearted effort at his mathematical principles, Russell went on to attempt to resolve this logical paradox with the theory of types. 5

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creed or cultural background; this is because we only need to measure the objective variables at work within a text—and any student can do this regardless of his or her cultural background. This worked especially well as a theory of criticism in US schools and colleges, as in the classroom there were so many students with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Students could pledge allegiance to the flag in the morning and be all equal in the eyes of the literature teacher. If in the UK, the Leavisite moral formalists were looking to an idyllic sense of community that had been lost after the first great industrial war and had become downtrodden by the rapid onset of industrialisation, the new critics were still trying to homogenise the US, with a heady mixture of Dewey’s educational pragmatism and post-war reintegration. The US was still finding identity among its localised diaspora; and this meant allegiance to the flag and democratisation of the classroom in the text. Everyone grappled with either Huckleberry Finn or Basil Ransom. There was also a sort of return to neoclassicism in the new criticism. Poet and critic T.S. Eliot also wrote about the fact that, as with neoclassical and classical criticism, an author or poet needed to take years of tutelage to study the tradition of a literary style before becoming an “expert” in a certain literary genre. For Eliot, the individual personality of the poet is not important at all—and as with T.E. Hulme—Eliot was very much reacting against the subjective ideology at work in romantic literary criticism. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) he famously argued that poets enter into a tradition or style of writing, learn that style, and then develop an individualised talent. Thus, for Eliot, poetry was an impersonal exercise, and the best poetry requires a “continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something more valuable.” Some of the key points of the new criticism were that the literary “canon” was naturalised. As such, certain texts that adhered to certain objectively posited variables, were markers of what made a text universally “great literature.” Thus, works of literature in effect become a-­historical; that is, they become recognised in terms of the inherent merits of their internal cohesion and construction, not in terms of their specific place in history. This makes the text more accessible to all literature students from all cultural backgrounds. Moreover, the scholarly

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recognition of the intentional/affective fallacy, which essentially meant that any purported psychological and emotional effects of the text were to be removed in importance (something that would have been anathema to the romantic school of criticism) in a major sense reflects Russell and Frege’s separation of psychologism and logic—another form of philosophical objectivism. Furthermore, the poem or novel was to be seen as an aesthetic heterocosm: a stand-alone object with internal contradictions and tensions of its own. For thinkers such as Eliot, the last great movement in poetry was the group of metaphysical poets, led by John Donne, who used subject matters from various discursive areas to produce their tropes. In their self-­ consciously abstruse juxtapositions of disparate figures and imagery, they were to use devices such as what Eliot described as the “objective correlative” in which various feelings and emotions were troped using various figurative signifiers from fields as various as science, theology and folklore. Therefore, for Eliot, the vehicle (rhetorical device or trope) was most effectively used when signifying the tenor (feeling or emotion to be conveyed) in a number of novel, and interesting formative ways—something which Eliot himself did to great effect in his own epic The Wasteland (1922). However, for romantics such as Wordsworth, the actual feeling of, for example, joy or terror, would arise from a circumstance invoked from everyday life and subjective experience (such as encountering an old man on the road to seeing his dying son, or meeting a young girl tending her sibling’s gravestone, as in the poem “We Are Seven”). In effect, the new critics were displacing the action or event to a secondary and supportive place in the process of poetic construction, with a focus and emphasis moved to be placed upon the rhetorical devices used to convey the poem itself. The main elements under analysis in a poem using the new critical objectivist technique are generally recognised as follows: paradox, irony, ambiguity, tension and ambivalence. As Brooks and Richards point out, the language of art doesn’t stand together in the same logical fashion as that of science, politics or, in the case of the analytic tradition: philosophy. One only needs to examine the linguistic structure of Donne’s “The Flea” or Marvell’s “To His coy Mistress” to see the use of tension, ambiguity, irony and paradox—elements that function as the building blocks for

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poetic devices such as metaphysical conceit. This formula can be applied with equal success to many literary works; one thinks of the use of stylistic devices such as hendiadys or doubling in Hamlet to the structural tensions in stories such as Joyce’s Dubliners collection to see both the successful and technical use of paradox, tension, litotes or chiasmus in literary discourse. However, one can pick obvious issues with the idea that one should pay attention only to the objective “heterocosm” on the page. I shall demonstrate this critical issue below briefly, with examples from two major canonical works of literature, the first of which is Shakespeare’s exemplary sonnet 130. Here is the sonnet in full: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare     As any she belied with false compare.

The obvious brilliance lies in the formative paradox of the sonnet as a whole. The lines function as a series of negatives that distance the muse form any traditional form of comparison as exhibited in the traditional Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet. In a startling use of conceit, the speaker deconstructs the usual uses of simile, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, while negating all of the traditional uses of the five senses in stark imagery. The traditional tropes: red roses, perfume, white snow and innocence, passionate red—and ultimately the figure of a goddess—are all exploited and turned on their head, in a brilliant use of anticlimactic statements that paradoxically culminate in the final climactic statement.

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Moreover, the three quartets culminate in the epigrammatical couplet, whereby the resolution is that this particular series of dead tropes are in no way appropriate for the feelings that the lyric speaker has for his mistress; she cannot be “belied with false compare”. The new critic can have a field day with this sonnet, as the ultimate conceit relies upon all of the main critical elements leading up to the final powerful and self-conscious simile: irony, paradox, ambiguity and ambivalence. These devices all form an obvious tension because of the literary expectations at work here. However, the theoretical issue transpires when one tries to read the sonnet as a heterocosm—self-contained with its own internal tensions— and one cannot accomplish this because the conceit relies upon a prior familiarity with the existing literary conventions involved with the genre of the love sonnet. The series of negatives only make sense and culminate in the final paradox if the reader is aware, however indistinctly, of the formal conventions that are being exploited. One may also use a more formalist mode of analysis and utilise Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation (the literary skill of making the familiar unfamiliar and by extension drawing attention to it through this formal exploitation); in this case, the formal conventions of the sonnet are defamiliarised to profound effect. However, one also requires the literary context of a prior awareness of the formal conventions of the sonnet as a poetic genre, in order for this to become effective as a strategy. Therefore, on one level the use of analytic, objective criticism works in this sonnet extremely well. However, on another level the wider philosophical theory upon which this formal explication relies fails—the paradox comes through reading the poem in a protean fashion and seeing this protean nature emanating in sharp relief from the usual structures involved in this particular poetic genre. The intertextual nature of the field of literature is what accounts for the novel aspect of this particular poem. One may also ironically consider the extensive use of footnotes in scholarly editions when thinking about how much we can read poems or novels in a vacuum. Furthermore, another proposition about the “democratisation” of the classroom text is at stake here. For example, would Thai EFL literature students who were reading this poem for the first time and without prior knowledge of the genre of the sonnet be at an advantage here? The answer is undoubtedly in the affirmative.

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One may also consider an author’s own literary predilections and oeuvre when explicating some of their work. In fact, it is the work of a romantic poet, Wordsworth, that supplies evidence in this regard. In his book The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks explicates Wordsworth’s sonnet in terms of the language of paradox, using both the theoretical context of Coleridge’s theory of the mechanical and the organic and Wordsworth’s treatment of the ‘things of ordinary life’ as outlined in his 1800 ‘Preface’ to The Lyrical Ballads to bolster his argument: The city, in the poet’s insight of the morning, has earned its right to be considered organic, not merely mechanical. That is why the stale metaphor of the sleeping houses is strangely renewed. The most exciting thing that the poet can say about the houses is that they are asleep. He has been in the habit of counting them as dead—as just mechanical and inanimate; to say that they are asleep is to say that they are alive, that they participate in the life of nature. (Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory, 294)

Therefore, for Brooks it appears that one requires a sense of history, or at the very least a sense of the context of English romantic criticism—and by extension Wordsworth’s previous work and attitude to towns and cities—to be able to grasp the underlying paradox of this poem fully. The paradox of the city becoming alive is unified, in-light of the poet’s previous poetic encounters with the urban sprawl, as well as his previous injunctions about how ‘the ordinary’ has been specifically associated with the rustic, picturesque and sublime. The philosophical beauty here is that, as with the concurrent analytic philosophical fixation with the pure forms of mathematics and logic—the paradox not of the barber but of historical acuity—prevents one from the simple ascension to the idea that poetry can be read as a self-enclosed heterocosm. Ontologically and symbolically, the universe refuses to be reduced to an epistemological vacuum. Its beauty and ultimate paradox will confound the pretensions and programmes of both the analytic philosophers and the equally analytical, new critics. The further unintended paradox is that this theoretical paradox is exposed when one of the foremost of the new critics, Cleanth Brooks, utilises the romantic theory of Wordsworth and Coleridge in his apposite analysis of one of Wordsworth’s finest sonnets.

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However, the attentive reader must also remember that the tools of both new criticism and analytic philosophy are of extremely practical usage in the classroom for analysis of logical arguments or poems. For example, Russell’s theory of descriptions in sentence structure is one of the most important aspects of analytic philosophy bequeathed to the current philosopher of logic and language. By the same token, one cannot completely forgo other theories, such as romantic criticism or idealist philosophy. What the limits of both these philosophical and literary-critical Anglo-American traditions have ultimately illustrated has been the wiggle room for other approaches and critical prisms in tackling either philosophical problems or literary texts, or as is often the case, both of these tasks taken together as one. One other important element to consider is that the important factors that the new critics tended to emphasise were tension, paradox, irony, ambiguity and ambivalence, all of which tend to play a part in the overall critical success (or failure) of a piece of literary work. In this analytical framework however, the new critics have also paradoxically retained certain aspects of Romanticism. For example, the emphasis upon the textual interconnectedness of a work, or an underlying central principle that informs the work, has in some ways actually echoed the romantic call for “organic unity” and has reflected the Coleridgean trope (and later Keatsian) analogy of an organic whole made up figuratively like the constituent parts of a tree. Even if romantic metaphysics or subjectivism were removed from new criticism, there was still an ancillary sense of romantic formalism retained. It just didn’t have to connect directly to a primary imagination or to the spiritually gnostic Natura Naturans of nature, as reflected and configured in the higher awareness subjectively reflected in the mind of the poet. In the next chapter, I shall examine a major form of criticism that emerged in the twentieth century, rooted in a continental theory of linguistics, which ultimately became part of a wider philosophical movement that morphed into a theory that challenged not only the assumptions of analytic and ordinary language philosophy—but also of the new criticism. Philosophy and literary criticism were about to converge in the age of structuralism and then poststructuralism.

4 Structuralism, Semiotics and Ordinary Language Doubts

In this chapter I draw attention to a theory that is more scientific in its aspirations than even New Criticism and Formalism. Structuralism, as one should understand from the noun itself, focuses on structure within a literary text. However, it does this at the expense of the reader or the author—rather than concentrating on either of these two “subject positions”, the structuralist concentrates on structures (or codes), and reads the work in terms of the codes that the writer has inherited. This is the reason why many critics have called structuralism apolitical and anti-­ humanist—there is a concentration on decoding texts and finding, through this exercise, various textual codes that different texts have in common—once again without any concern about the author or the reader’s subjective intention or response to a text. However, the reader will recall that even some of the new critics, although focusing upon the words on the page, were still often concerned with the humanistic and moral function of the texts, in a world, which has become overly-technological and indifferent to “real culture.” This was the position of the humanist educator and critic Matthew Arnold and then later with the moral formalism of F.R. Leavis, who would have further hated structuralism due to its highly theoretical nature: if we look © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_4

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back, Leavis was very much anti-theory in his criticism. The culturally polyglot aspirations of Eliot in The Wasteland and Pound in his Cantos are also plain for all masochistic readers to see. It is indeed also arguable that structuralism is much more a form of literary theory than actual criticism. When we apply this approach, all we can really do is show what the writer is doing with an inherited set of codes that it is down to the reader to de-cipher. Some critics, such as Jonathan Culler, have even argued that we have varying degrees of competency as readers and structuralism shows how we as skilled, (or less-­ skilled) readers, respond to the actual text itself; however, the more we read literature, the better and more competent we get at deciphering these codes. Structuralism originated with the genesis of modern structural linguistics, the principles of which were first laid out by Ferdinand de Saussure in a collection of lectures entitled The Course in General Linguistics (1916). In these revolutionary lectures, de Saussure laid out a series of principles for the study of modern linguistics. The following section briefly outlines some of his key points. Firstly, linguistics should be the study of a language’s structure, as opposed to the phonological study of sounds. Next, language is used by a community of speakers who know the rules governing the structure— hence it is a social-phenomena. Importantly, the study of language should be synchronic and not diachronic. The system should be studied as it is used now, contemporaneously, not by looking at its historical development. A language is primarily made up of the sound (signifier) and the concept (signified). Each of these two elements of the sign triggers each other cyclically. Therefore, the sign itself is structured by two symbiotic sides, signifier/signified. We can also apply this to other signs such as visual signs, (in movies or paintings) and other indexical signs such as smoke-signals, the morse code, etc.1 In de Saussure’s semiotic theory, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is an arbitrary rather than a necessary one. Therefore,  C.S. Peirce was the other big proponent of semiotics and his system used the three different forms of the sign: the index (such as smoke signaling fire), the icon (the visual sign such as a bike for a bicycle lane) and the symbol (one thinks of runes of writing in this category). 1

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when I say the word “tree” the linguistic sign registers certain phenomena. However, this is socially constructed and agreed upon by a group of language users—this sign could just as easily mean what is known as “dog” or even in the classroom, “fan;” we just have to agree on meanings, as a group of language users. Also of key importance is the idea that signs work through difference (a key concept for structuralists). For example, “dog” in relation to “cat” in relation to “mouse” and so forth. Signs only gain meaning through their relationship to other signs in a system. One may think of traffic lights: on its own, red may connote a lot of things to different people, but when it is next to “amber” and then “green” the signifier red signifies “stop.” It works in a structural sign system, which can be studied independently of phenomena. Of course, having driven in Thailand for nearly 20 years I can vouch for the relative nature of traffic lights as signs; amber seems to mean follow the car in front as fast as you can and whatever you do, DO NOT LOOK UP! We can also think of other examples such as money (coins, notes) and even musical notes. A note signifies something special in a piece of music, which we recognise, and develops this meaning through its difference from other notes on the system. Roland Barthes actually uses the example of the phoneme “p” and argues this sign registers next to the sign “s” because it signifies or distributes difference in the overall phonetic system. Think of the word “spin”: when we utter this sign, we can hear a “b” (phonetic sound) but our structural system doesn’t register this phoneme as distributing difference when juxtaposed with “s” and therefore we register the “p” phoneme-because the allophone produces the “p” phoneme through the structural difference of this particular linguistic sign system. Think also of Thai sounds such as “ng” in the word for “snake” (ngu). It works in the Thai system because it is recognised as distributing difference with certain phonemes around it and at the start of a word (sign). However, in English this is not the case. Hence, English speakers have trouble with the Thai word “ngu” at this phonetic location. Finally, de Saussure also crucially distinguishes between “Langue” the overall language system, (English/Thai/German) and an individual utterance using the system “parole”, or the words an individual uses to express herself, which is the syntagmatic (combination) pole. The langue is from where we select words (signs), whereas the parole is the individual way

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someone combines these signs to make an utterance. However, without the structure of the overall langue, there could be no parole. These distinctions were crucially applied, in different contexts, by thinkers such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson. In de Saussure’s original lectures, he posited that language was the primary signifying system. However, culture at large was made up of other such signifying systems. In de Saussure’s words: Linguistic factors which at first seem central (for example, the workings of the vocal apparatus) must be relegated to a place of secondary importance if it is found that they merely differentiate languages from other such systems. In this way, light will be thrown not only upon the linguistic problem. By considering rites, customs, etc., as signs, it will be possible, we believe, to see them in a new perspective. The need will be felt to consider them as semiological phenomena and to explain them in terms of the laws of semiology. (Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory, 9)

Therefore, de Saussure is giving birth to a new methodological concept, not just in linguistics, but in the social sciences, anthropology and across the humanities. Structuralism can be applied to all signifying systems that make up a culture. Roland Barthes famously seized upon this ideal in his book, Mythologies (1957), in which he brilliantly applied structuralism to cultural studies. In this ground-breaking study he attempted to analyse all cultural phenomena, including even realia as diverse as Wrestling Matches, Washing Powder adverts and Restaurant Menus, in terms of the structuralist principles laid out by de Saussure. Barthes “reads” the signs and signals applied in these cultural artefacts in terms of the signifier and the signified—signs that have been unconsciously passed down through cultural history—as well as langue and parole. Moreover, he contests that they sustain existing power relationships within society. Therefore, by moving structuralist methodology into the realm of cultural signification, Barthes goes some way to politicising the mechanics of structuralist theory—a significant philosophical move—as we shall see below. For example, when analysing soap powders, Barthes writes: ‘Persil Whiteness’ for instance, bases its prestige on the evidence of a result; it calls into play vanity, a social concern with appearances, by offering for

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comparison two objects, one of which is whiter than the other. Advertisements for Omo also indicate the effect of the product (and in superlative fashion, incidentally), but they chiefly reveal its mode of action; in doing so, they involve the consumer in a sort of direct experience of the substance, make him the accomplice of a liberation rather than the mere beneficiary of a result; matter here is endowed with value-bearing states. (Barthes, 37)

In this way, Barthes demonstrates how simple and “naturalised” cultural phenomena work on assumptions (usually unconscious), at work in the minds of the readers of culture: what he terms the ecrivain. We read these messages through signifiers, and if we take the trouble to decode (decipher) these messages properly, we find that they partake in a wider signification system, a langue, from which these various utterances parole are taken and combined to make, for example, a soap detergent advert. When we watch Thai adverts, for example, adverts for whitening creams, we have the same use of the signifier/signified. White signifies cleanliness, but also middle-class “hi so” society values the privilege of not having had to work in the sun, on the farm, or the rice field. The signifier “white” signifies bourgeois contentment, cleanliness, and social status. Barthes has taught us that there is no innocent, or “transparent” link between signifier and signified. All is ideological, and as in language, all is only arbitrary. One could easily change the apparent transparency of the system to work within a differently coded system: let’s make the signifier “white” signify exploitation, capitalist greed, an erasure of cultural “local colour” and difference. The point is that the arbitrary meanings in these systems are unstable and open to change. In a recent example, which I found perfectly suited to structuralist analysis, a school in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, was roundly criticised and condemned for using mocked-up Nazi uniforms as part of a school parade. Jewish groups, understandably objected in the strongest terms. However, this has been carried out numerous times and in more than one Thai school.2 The issue at stake here would be, upon a Barthesian  The school in question happened to also be a Christian school, to which I sent my son for a number of years; despite the obvious verbal irony in this appellation, I can guarantee there were no brown shirts in sight and not enough drums to produce the sort of cacophony preferred in a parade by card-carrying Nazis.

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structuralist analysis, whether the signifier of the Nazi swastika connoted the same signified in this particular socio-political-cultural context. As anyone who knows the Thai secondary history curriculum would attest, the students would not feel the same sense of historical gravity that a Western pupil would read into this use of the Nazi symbol.3 Other signifiers that led to an overall cultural reading, would be elements such as the fact that it was a parade; moreover, the colours, the salutes and the utterances being made, would all combine to provide a combination of signs that could aid in providing a “reading” for this particular situation. However, (and this is where the more subjective reader-response criticism discussed later comes to the fore also), the reading context of this combination of signs also comes from my own historical context. Am I Jewish? Were my parents involved in the second world war at all? Am I Thai? What is my knowledge of the second world war and the emotive events behind not only the rise of the Nazi party but also aspects such as the Hitler Youth Movement? What also of the Nazi treatment of Jews, Slovaks and communists during the second world war. The system of interpretation runs both ways—the way the signifiers are deciphered by the people (in this instance students and teachers) who use a particular combination of signifiers. In this particular case it was the school “Red House” and unfortunately the red and black inverted swastika is one of the most prominent symbols of the twentieth century; the signs are then also read by another socio-cultural group in a very different manner; in essence, we have what the structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan termed, a floating signifier. That is that the signified “glides” and moves under the signifier.4

 I presented a paper that included a discussion of this event in a wider Thai context “Thailand, Occidentalism and Cultural Commodity Fetishism” at the 1st International Culture, Language and Literature Conference (ICLLS) in Chonburi, Thailand, in 2013. 4  Jacques Lacan is not discussed in this study; however, his work forms a major component of the later poststructuralist theory. He brilliantly used the ideas as Parole and Langue and used them in place of Freud’s theory in The Interpretation of Dreams of condensation and displacement, (by way of Jakobson’s insertion of metaphor and metonymy in their place) brilliantly applying structuralism to psychoanalysis. His main dictum was that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” This may explain why upon reading Lacan, many readers find themselves, understandably, unconscious of what he’s talking about. 3

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As a final, and obvious illustration of this structuralist model, if I had said to someone that I felt “gay” one hundred years ago, it would have signified a deep feeling of happiness or contentment and not my sexual orientation. if I said “I was “‘green’” one would assume I meant I feel angry or jealous/envious about something; whereas now it may signify that I care about the environment and so cycle to work every day. Barthes also used the distinction between langue and parole in much of his earlier work. For example, when I choose a set of clothes from my wardrobe or closet, I am, in fact, selecting from the overall langue of my clothing system. When I make a sequence (trousers, shirt, hat) I make an individual utterance or parole about myself. One can say that there is a Thai parole of university uniform, constructed from a certain combination of (black skirt/white shirt), which is selected and followed. If I dress with green hair and a sex pistols tee-shirt, with a ring through my nose, this is equally a parole, the parole of the “punk.” People often say that clothes “speak” or “speak volumes” about someone, or that someone “expresses” themselves through the clothes that they wear. Another example of this sort of individual utterance or parole, would be a dance D.J. The D.J. selects from a wide selection of music from the langue category of musical signs, and then makes an individual utterance or “tune” on the parole axis—the way the D.J. combines these signs together—the of musical grammar or syntax he used to combine these “samples.” In its most basic methodological form, we can use this model to analyse various literary texts by firstly examining the overall langue of literary terms and methodology. For example, we can begin by deciphering what is available for use and selection. Here we have categories and signs such as imagery, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, simile, prosopopoeia, onomatopoeia, litotes, hen di-a-dys, anaphora, chiasmus and so forth. Then we can examine how a writer has combined these effects in her individual parole and what effect these achieve in the overall work itself. For example, why choose this metaphor, or this other figurative term? Why use it with this type of imagery or this particular narrative structure? Pari passu, the same methodological approach goes for cinema. Why use a certain type of camera shot or angle over another type of shot or angle from the overall available range? Using a basic structuralist analysis, the viewer may be able to decode the film, poem, or the novel under analysis.

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The similarity between structuralism and formalism should be evident here—the critic concentrates on the form or structure of a text rather than the actual content. However, formalists and new critics are examining the verbal icon used in such a way as to use linguistic utterances to perform a function such as, for example, defamiliarising the reader from a certain everyday context. One recalls the Shakespeare and Wordsworth sonnets discussed above. However, the structuralist approach is developed from a particularised linguistic theory and relies upon the relationship between the signifier and signified, which means that for the structuralist these arbitrary relationships can be subject to change depending on historical context. In contrast, the new critic or formalist is looking for a sort of unity within the artwork as a specialised and a-historical utterance, which places them in one sense closer to the romantic and organic form of criticism. The structuralist also applies the system of signifier and signified over differing sign systems within culture; finally, as with Barthes, this leads to (at least the possibility of ) a more political reading and engagement with any given text. This has important philosophical implications, particularly when comparing this notion of language as a sign system to the “linguistic turn” in Anglo-American philosophy. The linguistic turn in philosophy started with the analytical work of Russell and Frege, a sort of formalism of logic and language. Indeed, modern forms of propositional logic have their roots in this type of propositional structure: P V Q. There are also propositional forms of structuralist analysis, that closely examine the propositional structures of narrative, to formulate different combinations of elements that make up the structural elements of texts and, much like modern propositional truth tables, are also supposed to symbolically represent the different possible structures that are at work in a given text. For example, in analytic philosophy Russell famously critiqued Hegel’s system as outlined in The Science of Logic for its confusion of the subject and the predicate, which in Russell and Frege’s modern system of logic is central. In analytic judgments such as “A=A”, the logical concept of identity is invoked and by analytic definition, the predicate is drawn from its necessary identity with the subject. However, a tautological sentence such as “all bachelors are male” is true,

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but only under further synthetic analysis, and is true due to a mediating principle, which is not already contained in the concept of “bachelor”. More recently, Gregory Moss has framed the argument in the following Kantian terms: All empirical judgments are of this sort: ‘all crows are black’ predicates ‘black’ to ‘crow.’ ‘Black’ is not entailed in the concept of ‘crow,’ but is attributed to the subject ‘crow’ by means of experience as the mediating principle. Rather than an immediate identity with the subject, synthetic judgments depend upon a mediating principle. Kant’s main interest of course is the possibility of synthetic, a priori judgments such as ‘everything that happens has a cause.’ The concept of ‘causality’ is not entailed analytically in the concept of an event; it must be added from without. (Moss, 369)

As discussed, this eventually results in Russell’s paradox, whereby we cannot garner a simple first principle of logic without falling into contradiction, or ‘whatever involves all of a collection must not be one of that collection’ whereby a totality set is denied logical existence. In terms of specialised structuralist literary analysis, this propositional formalism analysed the text as a series of sentence structures, which would follow the syntagmatic structure of sentences. However, a mediating third would be added according to the structural motif of the particular narrative in question. Thus, the subject position in a sentence would be inhabited by a stock character who would be syntagmatically connected to a predicate that would be a logical aspect of the character. Finally, these aspects in combination would produce the structural third, which would be the action or plot event associated with this particular structural combination. Structuralist narratology, as it came to be known, would thus follow a syntagmatic pattern of sentential events that would be filled on the paradigmatic scale by stock characters and this combination would enable the critic to decipher the narrative or even to see how a particular narrative may have been considered to subvert these syntactic structures for a particular effect. For example, one here thinks of postmodernist

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narratives such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Crying of Lot 49 or The Name of the Rose. In these texts, the reader’s expectations of the narrative are subverted as the various structural codes are subverted or merged to produce hybrid works of literature.5 In this way, one may be discern a form of philosophical realism deciphered in these structures, which are designed to follow the logic of the fictional narrative; in much the same way that Russell’s ‘theory of description’ or the earlier ‘logical form’ were supposed to mirror the formally realistic logic underpinning the world around us. However, structuralist narratology was supposed to mirror the creative or inventive structures, or the paralogical nature, of the structural fictional universe. A famous example of structuralist analysis that relies heavily upon a reductive structural analysis is that of Vladimir Propp, who reduces the structure of traditional fairy tales down to what he calls its functions, whereby the subject of the sentence is a character: protagonist/ antagonist/ helper and the predicate (object) is the action the character commits as part of the overall narrative structure of the story. For example, the hero resolves the task or the hero slays the dragon. Of course, the structural template can be filled with any content from various tales. In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Frodo returns the ring to the volcano in Mount Doom and resolves the task. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins slays the dragon. In the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke Skywalker saves his father and the evil emperor is slain. The point with this type of narratology is that it is a template applied to various texts from different countries and periods of history. However, the structuralist is looking for the universal structural connections between these various stories. The work of  There are numerous examples of the postmodern subversion of codes. One such instance is the historiographical metafiction, such as Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) in which the code of historical analysis is combined with the code of the detective fiction to produce a history overlaid with a pulp fictional element. Speaking of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarrantino’s recent offerings, Inglorious Basterds (2009) and the brilliant Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) also explore the mixing of codes and genres. Viewers with enough knowledge of the Parole of the ‘spaghetti western’ genre will also pick up this code, as well as the historical narratives in these self-consciously postmodern masterpieces. 5

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Yory Lotman, A.J. Greimas and Tzvetan Todorov use similar structural templates, often more comprehensively, to examine the universal characteristics of narratives.6 At this juncture, the essential difference between theory and criticism once again springs to the fore. The narratologists produced a theory of literary production, which in many respects leaves no wiggle room for actual critical analysis of a text—a discernment of the scaffolding of literary structure tells us little of the actual literary merit of a text. However, others have been critical of the overly mechanistic nature of these types of analyses (one thinks of the romantic organicists once again here, especially Coleridge). Indeed, just as analytic philosophy in the linguistic turn came to be superseded by the ordinary language philosophy of Austin, Quine, Sellars and the later Wittgenstein, so this more anti-­ humanist form of structuralism has fallen out of current usage and has been replaced by more humanist, and less purely objective modes of literary criticism. For example, psychoanalytical criticism takes note of the psychological processes of both the reader and the author; Marxist approaches take notice of sociological and economic influences upon the text and its historical analysis; and reader response notes the role of the reader in constructing meanings—there doesn’t seem to be much room for this in the readings provided by this narratological branch of structuralism. This structuralist sense is one of language and signifying systems— as structures—precluding ultimate autonomy of expression in the human subject—because the human subject is constrained within pre-existing  These structuralist designs at finding universal codes and narratives in myth, folklore, culture and other anthropological aspects were also to some degree employed by critics who used the theory of archetypes to delineate literary theory and criticism. One thinks of Jung and Maud Bodkin. One of my favourite and currently unrepresented critics is the Canadian thinker Northrop Frye. I am also guilty of not giving him the voice warranted in this study; however, this is due to obvious limitations. His classic study Anatomy of Criticism (1957) has been woefully absent in recent decades. One wonders whether this a in part a political move; Frye’s criticism of texts, it can be argued presents a conservative and perhaps patrician view of culture, which is at odds with the more fashionably iconoclastic mood of criticism in the humanities in recent decades. This is something that of course my study hopes to go some way towards remedying—or at least raising awareness of. It also shows that criticism need not and IS NOT only left wing and radical. It can be conservative and in arguing for universal archetypes one is placing a possible check on the notion that all archetypes and figures are open to reconstruction and revision. Structuralism, in other words, when deconstructed itself, also finds two opposing notions within its conceptual scope. 6

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discursive structures and codes. However, this is not to say that some variations on the structuralist them do not allow for more nuanced analysis, rather than a simple theoretical formal template. One thing this approach demonstrates is perhaps why one may watch a movie and predict what is to come or perhaps be surprised by a plot twist. The plot twist arises because in unconsciously following a narrative pattern, our expectations are suddenly thwarted by clever direction or authorship that twists a recognisable syntactic pattern. As a young boy I used to assume my sister had already “read the script” as she was so good at predicting what was to come in a movie or TV programme. Little did I, or even she, know that she had just become used to the structures of narrative at work in these plotlines. In another novel use of structuralist theory, Roman Jakobson’s famous distinction between the metonymic and metaphoric poles was first outlined in a famous essay entitled “The metaphoric and metonymic poles” (1956). Jakobson uses de Saussure’s division between Langue and Parole in a ground-breaking way. In studying children with the speech defect aphasia, Jakobson found that some children tended towards using what he termed the metaphoric pole (or selection) pole of Langue, whereas others tended towards using the metonymic pole (or contiguity) pole of Parole. In extrapolating from these findings, Jakobson argued that in various periods of literary history, either of the poles had assumed the predominant role; an argument that was further developed by David Lodge (1977). To illustrate how this works, one may use a linguistic example such as “ships crossed the sea” from which we can see that we may use the metaphoric pole (selection) and exchange one sign for another. For example, switch the verb phrase to “ploughed,” “coasted,” or “traversed” the sea. Or using the same example, “ships crossed the sea,” we may replace the noun phrase “sea” with “the deep” or “the blue” and then we have used the figure of metonymy (change of name), which means using an aspect of something, to usually present something bigger. Metonymy refers to something else that one figure of speech is often close to and becomes associated with in everyday experience. In Jacobson’ system, synecdoche, which means a part for the whole—may be used by replacing “keels” or “masts” for the sign “ships” and is, according to Jakobson, of the same

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part of speech as metonymy. In his structuralist poetics, both of these terms— metonymy/synecdoche—operate under the metonymic (syntagmatic) pole of signification. Therefore, we could also use “Hollywood” for the US movie industry, or if I like Shakespeare’s work, I may say “I like Shakespeare” meaning I like his overall work—not him in person—who I’ve likely never met unless I’m Doctor Who—or I possess a time-machine. So, for example, a phrase such as “the wheels cut through the night” uses the metaphoric in that “cut through the night” can represented in a non-­ figurative way as “drove all night” and the metonymic (synecdochic) wheels could be replaced by “the car.” According to Jakobson, realist fiction is more metonymical, whereas romantic and symbolist literature is more metaphorical; that is, realist fiction uses more metonymic details to build up an overall contextual picture for the reader, whereas romanticism uses more metaphoric and symbolic description. We can equally use this distinction between certain types of cinematic genre. For example, a horror movie will often use lots of metonymic details in order to build up tension in a scene: a moving door handle, a creaking door, a flapping window, a thunderstorm, the sound of a crow/raven, etc. All of these contextual, and metonymic details, will structurally build up an overall suspenseful picture for the viewer or reader. One way to think about the use of metonymy and synecdoche, (for Jakobson the metonymic pole), is to think of the style in “filmic” terms. For example, when you read the text, imagine if you were asked to film the scene before you with a camera. If the scene appears as if it would be easy to cover with a series (montage) of camera shots and angles, then it is more than likely that the stretch of text you are reading is metonymic, as it is building up a “scene” with contextual details. On the other hand, a highly metaphoric movie may be a surrealist work, such as Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1917) or David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977). These films are harder for the viewer to decipher as they rely more on the metaphoric code for their representation. This is the same in literature, whereby some genres or codes are more metonymic and some are more metaphorical. A more metaphorical stylistic would not lend itself not so easily to more traditional “filmic” imagery as a metonymic piece of text. In applying his model to literary stylistics and history, Jakobson writes:

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In poetry there are various motives which determine the choice between these alternants. The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realised that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlines and actually predetermines the so-called realistic trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details. (Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory, 58–59)

A Jakobsonian analysis therefore concentrates on the application of the various poles to various types of literature, and through this we can examine the structural elements of a text and in effect the structural make up. One consequence is that we can group texts together in terms of stylistic continuities and recognise applications of the metaphoric and metonymic poles. Many writers tend towards both of these devices in their work— often to make a wider point. One such writer is James Joyce, who in his openly experimental modernist novels such as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegan’s Wake (1939), wrote in a wide variety of discursive forms and styles. Joyce was experimenting with the relationship between aesthetic form and content, exploring their textual relationship and their nascent use as techniques for describing our phenomenological experience of the world. One can make a fascinating analysis of Joyce’ earlier short stories from his book Dubliners (1914) using Jakobson’s structuralist system of metaphoric and metonymic poles of discourse. If Joyce’s last book Finnegan’s Wake explores existence in terms of a dream narrative, and relies heavily on the structurally metaphorical, his earlier work relies more upon the dynamic and symbiotic relationship between more traditionally realist modes of literary discourse and more experimental modes of discourse. For example, in the story “Araby”, one discerns a sense of both the romantic mode and the realist mode of discourse, an experimental prism through which he presents the character of an adolescent boy in terms of a both a romantic and at the same time a character facing the harsh vicissitudes of everyday working-­ class life in Dublin.

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In the story’s first two paragraphs, details are presented in an extremely metonymic fashion, illustrating the more realistic bent of the story. Using the filmic analysis of imagery I mentioned above, one can easily imagine a camera taking a mise en scene pan shot of the newly inhabited house and its derelict garden. The scene is described in the following terms, and as we read, we spectate, and glimpse the imagery of dereliction: The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-­ room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes, under one of which I found the late tenant’s rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister. (Joyce, 21)

The reader senses in the stark imagery a very austere, dark, dreary abode. Yet the books in the backroom speak to the exotic and the romantic—novels by Scott and also The Memoirs of Vidocq (a secret agent in the French police)—thus, through subtle but contextual details, the scene is set for the wider scope of the story and in particular, the romantic psychology of the young protagonist. The “straggling bushes” and “rusty bicycle pump” further cementing the harshly objective and realist world, in which the young boy finds his romantic imagination enclosed. As the story progresses, we are made acutely aware of the boy’s fascination, and indeed infatuation, with the sister of one of his friends. Her sensual femininity is presented once again through metonymic details: The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease. (Joyce, 24)

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One imagines in structuralist terms a beauty commercial for lipstick or body lotion, where the camera shows a montage of shots of a female body, usually focusing upon the red lips of the female figure. The young boy romanticises the female form, and we as proxy voyeurs (a recurrent motif in Joyce—also used in this story as the boy watches the girl through the lowered blind), follow the lines of the exoticised female form. However, just before this description, Joyce has brilliantly combined both the metaphoric and the metonymic to emphasise both the romantic idealism of the young boy and the realistic world in which he finds himself. This takes place in the market-place, full of working-class squalor but through which he still manages to retain his sense of romantic idealism, straight from Scott’s Ivanhoe or from a medieval romance: Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. (Joyce, 22–23)

The sparse realism of the “drunken men”, “bargaining women”, “curses”, and “shrill litanies” amongst the other stark imagery once again contextualise a filmic sense for the reader, built up of the stock realist images of the commercial marketplace. However, Gaelic songs about the struggles of the native land suddenly converge, with their realism—but also romantic nationalism—into one romantic image in the boy’s romantic imagination. He tropes himself as carrying a chalice through “a throng of foes”

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and the image culminates in the almost Aeolian-metaphor (something central to romantic poets such as Coleridge and Shelley) of his body becoming like a harp, played by the wind of her sensuous being. This medieval image is, of course, the aspect of this poignant and sensationalist scene in the story, which one cannot picture in a filmic sense. This is the metaphoric axis, juxtaposed against the metonymic and realist axis, providing the reader with a sense of the two aspects of the world, both literally, and of course, literarily. Joyce exploits this trope brilliantly and draws the two senses together into a remarkably ambiguous image at the end of the story, where the boy has finally visited the equally oriental-sounding “Araby” bazaar to obtain a gift, troped as the chalice, through which he can both illustrate his love for the unnamed maiden, whilst simultaneously escaping the springes of the humdrum reality in which he finds himself ensconced. As the lights go out at the bazaar and he realises he will not fulfill his quest, the immortal final lines read “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” (28) The final, terse ambiguity leads us to the conclusion that the boy is either set against the brute nullity of the real world, or else he is defeated…by a realisation that the humdrum reality of the world will forever overshadow his romantic idealism. He is forever lodged in a world in which his youthful hopes and dreams will be eternally estranged. Joyce leaves the character stuck in a perfect equipoise between these two distant marks of the emotional compass. These two points are blurred by the ambiguity of the boy’s tears at the end of the story. Joyce accomplishes this, on a more formalist reading, by the use of verbal irony, tension, ambivalence and of course ambiguity; on a Jakobsonian-structuralist reading as I’ve just demonstrated, Joyce has brilliantly tied together the two codes of the metonymic and the metaphoric into a gordian knot at the end of the story and in doing so, has evidenced both the experimental nature of his own literary form, as well provided a deep exposition into the character of the protagonist, in five pages or so—a remarkable literary feat. To summarise this crucial chapter in modern literary criticism and its relation to philosophy, structuralism has been a widely influential theory of literature (and culture) that held sway in the humanities and the social

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sciences for a while in the twentieth century. Using Saussure’s linguistic model as a broad template, structuralism was applied with verve and gusto across the academic board and its almost scientific formulas (especially in thinkers like Propp, Greimas, Levi Strauss and Todorov), gave it a scientific respectability, which the humanities were perceived to be in great need of after the rise of logical positivism, quantum mechanics and the application of statistical models to psychology and sociology. However, the structurality of this structural approach itself was soon to be called into logical question. Just as the analytic tradition in linguistic philosophy would fall into paradox, despite its seeming initial concrete logical formality, so the linguistic philosophy of structuralism would itself fall prey to similar questions of circularity and infinite regress. The next chapter will explore how the limits of this mode of analysis as an interpretive model soon appeared and how this influenced originally card-carrying structuralists such as Barthes, to develop a more open-­ ended and less restrictive brand of structuralism, which became to be known as ‘poststructuralism.’ It is to this, which we will now turn. This is the period in which philosophy and literary theory finally converged.

5 Linguistic Twists, Turns and Dovetails in the Modern Humanities

In his seminal monograph, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Richard Rorty writes the following timely passage about changes in the philosophical project in both what became known as the Anglo-American Analytic tradition (essentially what I have been describing as the “linguistic turn”) and the continental tradition (essentially phenomenology and hermeneutics): The spirit of playfulness which seemed about to enter philosophy around 1900 was, however, nipped in the bud. Just as mathematics had inspired Plato to invent “philosophical thinking,” so serious-minded philosophers turned to mathematical logic for rescue from the exuberant satire of their critics. The paradigmatic figures in this attempt to recapture the mathematical spirit were Husserl and Russell. Husserl saw philosophy as trapped between “naturalism” and “historicism,” neither of which offered the sort of “apodictic truths” which Kant had assured philosophers were their birthright. Russell joined Husserl in denouncing the psychologism which had infected the philosophy of mathematics, and announced that logic was the essence of philosophy. Driven by the need to find something to be apodictic about, Russell discovered “logical form” and Husserl discovered “essences,” the “purely formal” aspects of the world which remained when

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the nonformal had been, “bracketed.” The discovery of these privileged representations began once again a quest for seriousness, purity, and rigor, a quest which lasted for some forty years. But, in the end, heretical followers of Husserl (Sartre and Heidegger) and heretical followers of Russell (Sellars and Quine) raised the same sorts of questions about the possibility of apodictic truth which Hegel had raised about Kant. Phenomenology gradually became transformed into what Husserl despairingly called “mere anthropology.” and “analytic” epistemology (i.e., “philosophy of science”) became increasingly historicist and decreasingly “logical” (as in Hanson, Kuhn, Harre, and Hesse). So, seventy years after Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” and Russell’s “Logic as the Essence of Philosophy,” we are back with the same putative dangers which faced the authors of these manifestoes: if philosophy becomes too naturalistic, hard-nosed positive disciplines will nudge it aside; if it becomes too historicist, then intellectual history, literary criticism, and similar soft spots in “the humanities” will swallow it up. (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 167–68)

In the story I am unfolding in this book, philosophy inevitably dovetailed into literary criticism partly due to the reasons outlined by Rorty. Both “traditions” became historicised, anthropological and hermeneutic in their findings. This was in part because in tandem with these changes in the Western philosophical project, (which entailed the move away from a “purely logical” or “essentialist” basis founded in the axiomatic roots of geometry, mathematics and by extension language), literary theory and criticism were also shifting from the more objectivist tendencies of formalism, new criticism and ultimately structuralism, towards newer modes of analysis. These newer analytical modes no longer viewed the literary text as in some way ‘bracketed’ off from the social world and forms of life in which they were subsumed. In this way, both philosophy and literary criticism were moving towards a socially, historicised precis and away from the putatively privileged status previously afforded both disciplines. Philosophy was being driven into the arms of literary criticism. This historical fact has had a profound effect, the fulminations of which are still being felt today and are one of the mainstays of the current state of the humanities. Whilst philosophy as a “pure” discipline has been largely

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abandoned, it has become a more descriptive discipline, and less normative, deontological or prescriptivist. The same goes for literary criticism, which has now found fertile ground in its historicist pretensions, and has embraced areas such as anthropology, psychology, sociology and of course philosophy as its bedfellows. Indeed, in a note to his observations about the changing mission statement of Western philosophy, Rorty cites the (in)famous literary critic Harold Bloom as an important interlocutor in assessing this changing tide in the humanities in general: I think that in England and America philosophy has already been displaced by literary criticism in its principal critical function—as a source for youth’s self-description of its own difference from the past. Cf. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), p. 39: The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the teacher of history or philosophy or religion, is condemned to teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of Instruction, leaving the bewildered teacher of literature at the altar, terrifiedly wondering whether he is to be sacrifice or priest. This is roughly because of the Kantian and antihistoricist tenor of Anglo-­ Saxon philosophy. The cultural function of teachers of philosophy in countries where Hegel was not forgotten is quite different, and closer to the position in America. (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 168)

One can here read “countries where Hegel was not forgotten” as signifying countries under the aegis of the continental tradition, where the Hegelian project of ‘speculative philosophy’ entailed a move away from a ‘transcendental subjectivity’ towards a more historicised—and by extension—social formula for philosophy, connecting to both the social and the political world. A move away from epistemology as posited by Descartes and critiqued by the empirical tradition to a more political and social praxis, as originally outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Husserls’

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Cartesian Meditations (1960)1 was a last-gasp attempt at reviving the project of modern epistemology—Heidegger’s hermeneutics signalled a return to historicity; Russell’s move away from his earlier Hegelianism (under the influence of British Idealism), The Principles of Mathematics (1903), was similarly an attempt to salvage the Cartesian plot, while the later Wittgenstein, Sellars and Quine also signalled a movement towards to linguistic historicity, or the primacy of the public over the private in language. These shifts in the tenor of philosophy and literary criticism, produced their cross-pollination. In the remainder of this chapter, I will reconnect to structuralism by discussing poststructuralism as the inevitable rejoinder to structuralism (so-called ‘poststructuralists’ are not actually ‘post’; they are simply taking structuralism to its logical boundaries and as such, remain structuralists). I will establish this by discussing the later work of Barthes, and referencing the work of his controversial contemporaries, Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, while continuing to situate them in the overall dovetailing of philosophy and literary criticism that I have been sketching out hitherto. To broadly contextualise this latter act in the play of the modern humanities, I’d like to start by turning to a thinly-veiled polemic in the form of a book review by the late English philosopher Roger Scruton, about a book by the French philosopher Alain Badiou, in which he wrote tersely “The poetry of Hegelian Idealism gave way to the prose of Marxist newspeak, and the moment of French philosophy met its nemesis in the impenetrable syntax of Badiou, Althuser and Deleuze.”2 Anyone who has read Scruton would have to admit that his prose, arguments and the tenor of his language are very inviting. Anyone who has read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) however, may beg to differ on his characterisation of Hegelian Idealism as “poetry”; at least in the context to  The German edition was published posthumously, which has led to conjecture that Husserl had never designated the lectures as ripe for publication. However, the original lectures were originally delivered at the Sorbonne in February 1929, and a French version had been published as early as 1931. Having read much of Husserl’s other work and judging by the fact that the French edition was partly supervised and translated by another giant of phenomenology, Emmanuel Levinas, I’d contest that these lectures are a fair summation of Husserl’s post-Cartesian mission statement for transcendental phenomenology. 2  Taken from Roger Scruton’s book review of Alain Badiou’s The Adventure of French Philosophy “A nothing would do as well”. In the Times Literary Supplement, August 31st, 2012. 1

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which Scruton is referring to Hegel. Both Hegel’s Phenomenology and his Logic (1812–16) have confounded many a specialist and non-specialist alike—one of my friends to whom I gave a copy of the chapter from The Phenomenology on the Reign of Terror—informed me that it gave him a thunderous (and very literal)—headache. Most people, also specialist or non-specialist alike, would probably contest his purely dismissive analysis, on rhetorical grounds, of pretty much all of the popular (and unpopular, depending upon your politics, it would seem), writers from the French tradition since around 1968. He goes on to write “Unmentioned are the advocates of traditional philosophy, such as Bertrand de Jounvenal or Jacques Bouveresse…” Surely Scruton must recognise the questionable logic of parsing other writers who are not of the poststructuralist or radical Left tradition as “traditional?” The question not only of tradition but of who is to be the arbiter of tradition is necessarily begged here. Martin Heidegger, whom in numerous places Scruton praises, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and of course the ‘Old Mole’ Marx himself, can all be read as adhering to traditions in philosophy, yet also writing against the grain, whether it be materialism, Idealism or Cartesian dualism. It may also be because the other writers had less to say, were less original, or were just too conservative to add much value to the ever-expanding dialogical canon of the humanities. The point is that difficult prose isn’t necessarily bad criticism or poorly articulated philosophy and that this red herring has been levelled against both not only the French tradition, but also the German school of Critical Theory, time and time again. Most unfortunately, it’s often been made by people who have either read internet commentaries on the said scholars, or, at best, have heard lecturers in tweed jackets, with personally signed copies of Scrutiny or unread copies of the Salisbury Review, perambulate about their disgruntled reception of these allegedly Left Wing versions of the Mystery Plays. Heretical and as iconoclastic as these French thinkers may be, it’s possibly too late to lock up your sons and daughters, who have no doubt already been exposed to the horrors of Queer Theory or even Michel Foucault. I only introduce this chapter using these tropes as a warning against the tide of animus and ignorance that pervades much thought from the often equally amorphous ‘analytic’ tradition. My use of speech-­ marks at this juncture will become, I hope, self-explanatory below. Moreover,

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Scruton’s brilliant and illuminating essay “Why I Became a Conservative”3 provides an insightful and as ever concise account of the political reasons for his own philosophical persuasions; his obvious preference for Burke over the “immeasurably less interesting Tom Paine,” is made very clear, and then what still appears to me to be a woefully incorrect reading of Jean Jacques Rousseau: The final argument that impressed me was Burke’s response to the theory of the social contract. Although society can be seen as a contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. The effect of the contemporary Rousseauist ideas of social contract was to place the present members of society in a position of dictatorial dominance over those who went before and those who came after them. Hence these ideas led directly to the massive squandering of inherited resources at the Revolution, and to the cultural and ecological vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to recognize as the principal danger of modern politics. In Burke’s eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchised. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke’s view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on. (Scruton, Why I Became a Conservative)

I take Scruton’s point about the relationship and debt to the future and the past in the present, as indeed would a thinker such as Giles Deleuze or Jacques Derrida; indeed Derrida makes this clear in his book Spectres of Marx.4 I’m not entirely sure how the voluntarist Rousseauean social contract, as opposed to Hobbes’ more ‘mechanically contractualist’ vision  Roger Scruton, “Why I became a Conservative”, The New Criterion, February, 2003. https:// newcriterion.com/issues/2003/2/why-i-became-a-conservative 4  In his book Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Routledge, 1994, Derrida makes it abundantly clear (indeed in the title of the text itself ), why revolutionary thinkers are haunted by historical thinkers, much in the same way Hamlet is by his father, under the figurative stage upon which we reiterate our injunctions for justice. 3

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of a social contract would in any way disinherit either future or past generations? Primogeniture and much of the economics of the physiocrats were already disinheriting future and past social players in the most egregious fashion.5 I also share some of Scruton’s fears. However, from my current historical precis, it’s in terms of the current wave of identarian/woke-ism iconoclasts, who really do seem to work on de-legitimated notions of historicism. They, more often than not, work with either a revisionist view of history or a jaundiced and very selective view—but this is something I will return to below when I discuss the political and ethical turn in deconstruction. Moreover, all of this is also not to say that Scruton is completely incorrect about some of the prose that stems from the French poststructuralist tradition—there are numerous examples to be had of impenetrable, prolix and gratuitous prose—just as there are also many examples of rock stars who do indeed snort coke. I will commence this chapter with such an example of critique, which will paradoxically act as a segue into the wider argument of this book: that the linguistic turn in philosophy of necessity reflected a wider malaise in the humanities that eventually led to coalescence with literary theory and criticism. One needs to recall that the linguistic turn in philosophy was down to the (perhaps paradoxical) search for truth that had been unsatisfactory in terms of correspondent theories of truth, coherence theories of truth, pragmatist theories and an eventual turn to the notion of truth as parsed in the constructively logical utterances of the syntagmata itself; namely, sentences and their t-values. Derrida’s terms are couched partly in the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, whose Course in General Linguistics had, akin to the New Criticism and Formalism in literary studies, moved towards a more rigid and by extension, closed system of analysis. Before we move to John Searle’s ‘ordinary language’ critique of Derrida it’s probably best to lay bare the bones of deconstruction, and the spectre of poststructuralism that haunts the humanities.  This is outlined in much of the political economy of the 1800s but to give a clear example, Marx addresses the issue of both primogeniture and the economics of the physiocrats in his Grundrisse, 1973. 5

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The seeds of poststructuralism can be in part be traced back to the classic structuralist text, mentioned in the previous chapter, Mythologies. In a justly famous essay at the end of the book, Roland Barthes discusses the structuralist methodology he uses in his cultural analysis (of everything from soap powder to wrestling matches). In the essay Barthes talks of “second-order signification,” whereby a sign becomes at a second, or higher stage, a signifier which in turn issues in a new signified and a new sign. For example, Barthes writes in the essay: In myth, we find again the tri-dimensional pattern which I have just described: The signifier, the signified and the sign. But myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth. (Barthes, Mythologies, 114)

Myth takes the first -order sign and then turns it, in a second-order system into a signifier for a meta-language, or a critical language. If we look at the classic example of structuralism of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-­ Strauss, one can discern how he examines the signs of various myths, from Native American Indian culture (an owl in the Iroquois Indian symbolic system) or the Sphynx in the Oedipus myth of Greece—and turns them both into second order signifiers of a higher order (second-order system), that of Strauss’ own myth analysis—his meta-language, which becomes constructed of the mythemes he now uses in his parasitical metalanguage of second-order signification. So, signifying systems can be fed upon parasitically by second-order “parasitical” systems that in turn, logically, could be then again turned into another system. Indeed, and by an infinite extension, theoretically every system of signs could be replaced by another structural higher-order language every time a new descriptive commentary vampirises the old system and brings it back in the structuralist form of a higher-order, descriptive, meta-system. This is how “Myth” functions for Barthes, something becomes drained of its original or first-order signification—and becomes captured by a

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second, third, or fourth-order signifying system. This is, to use an obvious example, clear in the narratives that spin the Greek and Roman mythologies;6 this is how the mythopoetic function works. Furthermore, to use two modernist examples from the Western literary canon, one could argue that both The Wasteland and Ulysses, in using the so-called mythic method to reengage the everyday, humdrum world of modernity in a mythic net, use this type of structuralist second-order signification. The signification is reworked, more simply as connotation in other cultural domains. To use a current cultural Thai example, once again, the case of the currently popular whitening creams/lotions; they may initially signify whitening deodorants, but at a higher order level they are transformed and signify white as opposed to black, which in turn signifies working in the sun/not having worked in the sun, which in turn signifies the class background and relative socioeconomic success of an individual.7 The roots of poststructuralism lie just here, in the relative instability of sign systems; if they can become parasitically taken or appropriated into another “mythic” system—what is to stop any originary sign system from being re-appropriated ad infinitum? In fact, how do we know the original imprints of the putative Ur-system? The answer is, of course, nothing; they can be expropriated again and again and again…as in an infinite narratorial palimpsest. The person who writes the catchment of the second-­order mythic system, such as Lévi-Strauss or Barthes are themselves skin-­ grafting a myth onto a myth, and I in turn, could write a myth built upon their myth—their myth being the myth of modern structuralism. Therefore, Barthes initiates poststructuralism out of his original structuralist system, whereby all sign systems are unstable and cannot come to any final meaning or closure. Final meanings are constantly being disrupted or pushed aside/displaced by other signs, or meta-signs, ad infinitum. Poststructuralism is at its core an anti-system—a theory of non-ultimate-knowledge—wherein we cannot get at any final truth or meaning, just a cloudy web interrelationships and semiotic traces that we cannot step outside of as we are perpetually in media res; or one may argue we’re in a semiotic ground hog day.  This is brilliantly adumbrated by Robert Graves in his “Author’s Introduction” to his seminal two-­ volume edition of the Greek Myths. The Folio Society, 2000. 7  One can of course make an easy connection here to the US synecdochical notion of “the redneck” in this register also. 6

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Barthes later extended this theory in his seminal paper “The Death of the Author” (1968). In this essay he posits the author as continually surrendering himself to the weight of tradition and literary history. Writing becomes the art of constructing ready-to-hand linguistic units in novel ways; however, each time we formulate or choose a combination we lose our personality in textual history: We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author- God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime-and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on anyone of them. (Lodge, Modern Theory and Criticism, 170)

The urge for the presence of the author, that in more traditional historicist or biographical criticism would explain away the text and once again give “victory to the critic” is removed by Barthes as he moves into his poststructuralist phase.8 In one real sense however, there is no “post” structuralism; the theoretical implications hereby impinged are already nascent in the very notion of the structuralist theory itself and are already enunciated by Barthes and, as we shall see below, by Lévi-Strauss himself. Two years before Barthes’ paper, Derrida explored similar principles in a paper he delivered on the structural anthropology of Lévi-Straussdelivered at John Hopkins University in 1966, entitled “Structure, Sign and Play, in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Derrida questions the very notion of structure itself, or the “structurality of structure” and questions how we can guarantee a centre-piece to any structural system that would hold the structure in place—where would it be located? The history of the “Human Sciences” and philosophy, has been a series of structures  A similar argument about authorial agency is also posited by Michel Foucault when he discusses the author function and the effect of early capitalist economics upon our notion of authorship in his essay “What is an Author?” (1969). 8

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built onto other structures ad infinitum. Derrida claims of the infinite “play” of signifying systems as we replace one with another, or another structural totality with another with a supposed newly orienting centre: There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. The focus or the source of the myth are always shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualisable, and non-existent in the first place. Everything begins with structure, configuration, or relationship. The discourse on the acentric structure that myth itself is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center […] (He then goes on to quote Lévi-Strauss himself )… “As the myths themselves are based on secondary codes (the primary codes being those that provide the substance of language), the present work is put forward as a tentative draft of a tertiary code, which is intended to ensure the reciprocal translatability of several myths. This is why it would not be wrong to consider this book itself as a myth: it is, as it were, the myth of mythology.” (Lodge, Modern Theory and Criticism, 116)

Therefore, the second-order signifying system, with no guarantee of center, can be easily superseded by another myth (or discourse). Humankind is, as it were, trapped within the very same sign system they have tried to totalise in terms of latent meta-structures. We cannot step outside our sign system. Or we cannot look down from a metalinguistic Olympian perspective on our signifying practices as if from a mountain top. We are within our signifying systems; we are constituted by our signifying systems and simply cannot get outside of them. To use another striking language trope proposed by the analytical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, we cannot see ourselves seeing. We do it, we see the world through it, but we cannot actually see ourselves seeing. In the same way, we cannot step outside of our signifying practices to reach a final, meta- signifying system. We also, to use another Wittgensteinian figure, can’t cut the branch on which we stand; if we take the ladders away on which we rely for our perspicuous purchase upon the world—we are left with an obvious vacuum. However, we can expand this trope in deconstructionist terms and also claim the ladder is posited/placed somewhere in the field of experience. It orients this arbitrarily positioned structure that then gages experience for us.

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As we shall see below, with regards the politicisation of literary theory, poststructuralism in general has been applied across literary criticism and cultural studies, and theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Homi K. Bhabbha and Gayatari Spivak have all applied poststructuralist principles to psychoanalytic criticism, feminism and postcolonial criticism. The latter work of Derrida took the so-called ethical turn. This entailed the application of the theory of deconstruction to ethical and political matters, with some startling results and consequences—some good and some awful—and with what I propose were eventually startlingly misguided uses of the theoretical approach of deconstruction. To help relocate poststructuralism back into its locus with regards to the analytic tradition, it’s very instructive to examine Derrida’s critique of J.L. Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, which in turn stems from an obvious interest in Austin’s speech act theory and its ideal of contextual immediacy that is attached to language utterances. Indeed, Derrida’s own rendering of Austin in his essay “Signature, Event, Context” (1977) only adds to this sense of an inevitable dovetailing of both sides of the coin of the philosophy of language, with Searle’s own response in many ways crystalising the mutual prejudices that still stood asunder the two sides of the Great Wall of the Linguistic Humanities asunder. Following on from the later Heidegger’s idea of language as the “House of Being” that is, Being constructed by language, Derrida develops these ideas to the extreme point of arguing that our whole conception of ontology is bound up with language, but moving beyond Heidegger, Derrida draws on the methodological toolbox of structuralism/semiotics to really get into this.9 This de-structuring implies that there is no stable subject position because all “positions/doxa” are based upon our linguistic/semiotic conception of reality. In Paul Ricoeur’s parlance, this is due to the modern hermeneutics of suspicion, which becomes an open-ended, permeable and variable  Jacques Lacan famously took the Jakobsonian ideas of metonymy and metaphor and then used these structuralist tools to describe the Freudian notions of displacement and condensation. Derrida is also taking the terminology of structuralism and this time applying it to Heideggerian phenomenology. It is quite clear upon reading Heidegger’s seminal text, Being and Time (1927) that without the possibility of the linguistic development of Heidegger’s work, there would never have been a further de-struction of metaphysics pace the paradoxical centre to Derrida’s oeuvre. 9

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modality of thought and being.10 However, as we shall also see below, this is not the same as Postmodernism—nor is it a positive indictment of the current trend of identarian politics, woke-ism or neoliberalism. In fact, the so-called ethical turn in deconstruction actually acts as a check and audit on any ideological limit that proclaims itself arbiter of enquiry and academic acumen, dismissing other variations of theory tout court. The reason for Derrida’s point of difference with Austin lies not exactly in the former’s performative/constative argument about linguistic representation,11 but with his truly Logocentric apprehension of the “world” (or in Heidegger’s parlance the hermeneutics of “worldhood”) and the sense of logical realism that this view necessarily entails. In one sense, Derrida carries on the tradition of Idealism, except his form of Idealism is linguistic, and, in particular, a form of semiotic idealism. In this essay, Derrida analyses the philology of the word “communication,” which he argues designates “non-semantic movements.” However, “the value of displacement, of transport, etc., is constitutive of the very concept of metaphor by means of which one allegedly understands the semantic displacement which is operated from communication as a non-­ semiolinguistic phenomenon…” (Derrida, 310) In other words, the metaphor of displacement or transport (involved in the concept of communication) is itself a metaphor bound up in the nature of language itself—so how do we step outside of this “metaphoricity” of all signifiers? How can we have these pure speech acts when the very nature of language is to move (commute) a signified from one place to another (a message); therefore, pure presence is constantly absent in an utterance. Indeed, Austin himself speaks of the “infelicities” in language, where the pervading/fixed context is not there, such as a theatrical soliloquy; in this sense, Austin’s own text deconstructs itself because it finds gaps in the meaning or in the theory itself, which need accounting for. However, this implied open-ended nature of meaning, without anchor, is in a sense pushed aside by Austin. For Derrida, however, this repetition or “iterability” of speech/writing leads us to the conclusion that all utterances are, in my  Ricouer’s notion of “the hermeneutics of suspicion” was first initiated in the introduction to his brilliant Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, 1970. 11  Austin famously delineates between constative utterances that generally relay information that is true or false and performative utterances that are being enacted as they are stated, often in the present continuous or present simple construction of the verb. 10

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own terminology, “orphaned” and open to new interpretation, even the so-called performatives—which are not disavowed by Derrida anyway, but just need to be given their correct contextual praxis. One may also consider Thai examples of orphaned signifiers to support both my own and Derrida’s position on the dynamism of shifting contexts. I have in the past also written of this in a Thai context, when considering my own example of the symbology of the swastika, which has become (in my reading) what one may call “orphaned” but then has also been “adopted” by the Thai youth on tee-shirts and school walls as was mentioned in the previous chapter on structuralism. In actual fact, the school in Chiang Mai actually had a student parade, where students were wearing not only swastikas, but were also on parade and making the gesture of the infamous Nazi salute.12 The issue was not that the students were disrespectful of historical injustices or prejudices, they were simply taking on signs that were, to use Barthes’ phraseology, “drained” of all historical context. The performative function of the salute (let alone the signifier itself ) was recontextualized; in much the same manner that the original swastika was recontextulised by the Nazis themselves. This “position” amounts to a rejection of fixed (logocentric) notions of language and meaning, i.e. meanings are constantly being constructed and de-­ structed—hence the term deconstruction, which entails destruction and construction in one signifier—to amalgamate these two necessary oppositions and to exemplify this continual, infinite, binary process. For Austin, this episode would have been another infelicitous instance. For Derrida, texts such as Austin’s, Husserl’s, Hegel’s and Lévi-Strauss’ (to name a few) deconstruct themselves by their very intertextual nature. This is because of the nature of the sign (going back to Saussure’s original theory) and the lack of a grounding, or a transcendental signified: an idea that stands outside of and orients any given structural sign system, such as God-the father of the Logos; the intuitive Cogito; or the Husserlian eidetic essences of the mind; or Hegelian absolute Spirit-Geist. The subject under examination by linguistic thinkers such as Searle, Austin, de Man and Derrida is the notion of modern semantics. This entails an interrogation of the very notion of ‘truth’; notice here how the  https://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/advanced/258682/anger-over-nazi-show

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singular speech-marks (“…”) themselves as marks bring something to the purity of the sign ‘truth’—what does this signifier refer to? And how we can affix truth to meanings in their very essence—or lack of essence as is the case with deconstruction. There is a difference between the idea that signs have meaning because they conform to a tradition of use, and the assumption that signs express inner, conscious, authentic intentions, as is proposed by philosophers such as Austin and Husserl. Declaring a meeting open or declaring somebody husband and wife is always a kind of theatrical speech act, something indigenous to all forms of ritualistic language, and the attempt in Searle and Austin to ban all theatrical or “non-serious” uses of language from playing a role in philosophical language theory is therefore doomed from the outset upon this reading. Signs, contrary to the logocentric theory of correct usage, can function without direct referents or signifiers; they can be placed into speech marks—as I did above—and the marks themselves provide theatrical meaning and context. Derrida argues that “Every sign … can be cited, put between quotation marks; in doing so it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.” (Derrida, 321). This goes for signatures too (Derrida finishes the essay with a copy of his signature), as well as for every visual icon, such as the swastika. He goes on to say, correctly, it seems to me, “To state it now in the most summary fashion, I would like to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather in what way its determination is never determined or saturated” (322). Thus, a context is thus subject to many determinations and cannot be “fixed” outside of the realm of signification.13 From this academic furor (or storm in an over-sized teacup) we can see a crystallisation of Derrida’s conception of the intentional, which is rooted in his critique of Husserl’s The Origins of Geometry (1962) and the notion of a “metaphysics of presence;” we can also clearly discern that Searle’s  To further this argument through the self-determinations of the human science of linguistics, one only has to examine the work that has been done in Pragmatics by thinkers such as Grice, Leech and originally, Austin himself. Ideas such as NVC (Non-Verbal-Communication), implicature and of course speech act theory itself all have their basis in contextualized situations. Both Derrida’s and Austin’s formal arguments rest upon the importance of context and their major difference is of course a metaphysical assumption about the distance between the signifier and signified in a linguistic sign and how this can be influenced by contextual praxis. 13

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linguistic conception of the philosophy of mind and intentionality is thoroughly imbedded in Austin’s “ordinary language,” speech-act philosophy. A theme of Derrida’s work is that philosophy has always had a conception of meaning that rests on a pure presence of meaning. He holds that there is a commonality across philosophical writings and traditions. His interest and obvious respect for Austin lies partly in the fact that Austin tries to break out of the idea that there are, fixed exterior concepts to an utterance, (logoi) to which logocentrism refers and to understand language in other terms, whereby speech acts function by their own self-representation, or to use a technical term they function autologically. However, Austin, he argues, still requires logoi, to which a speaker’s intention refers (or defers) that a speaker deploys in order to distinguish the speech acts that do what they are supposed to do from the various ways (infelicitous) in which they can fail. This can be related to the example of the speech act performed by an actor on the stage. Derrida’s critique of Austin partly notes that, in distinguishing “felicitous” from “non-felicitous” attempted speech acts, Austin had recourse to intentions, and that mere convention will not remove the need for a supplementary intention. Therefore, the idea that there is nothing else contextually behind language making words meaningful has radical implications for Derrida that it does not have for Searle. The great example here is of an actor (especially in a play by Brecht!) on the stage who intends to alert the audience that there is actually a fire in the theatre and would have genuine difficulties if the performance makes it possible that “There is really a fire!” is a part of the performance. Searle’s development of speech act theory entails the idea that horizontal conventions will solve difficulties about whether a speech act is serious—but this just begs the question about the self-referential nature of the speech act. Whatever the horizontal conventions that determine that something is a play, it is difficult to see how convention can separate the real from the pretend, since any such conventional sign can be part of the pretense. Austin is in effect shrinking the distance between the signifier and the signified, whereas Derrida is emphasising their distance, allowing for undecidability and much more

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context to rush into the resultant gap. At the end of the essay, Derrida again rails against this idea of the “performative” or ordinary language as being in a sense privileged speech, not by arguing that performatives don’t exist, but by arguing they should not be set off against Austin’s “infelicitous” language uses. In fact, performatives are themselves subject to the same “iterability” as other (for Austin “constative”) usages (and not just constative-also reflexive constructions, imperatives, etc). All locution is subject to iterability, before we even get into perlocution and illocution. In the final instance, we can see how Derrida is claiming that this idea of a pure presence of a speaker is something that echoes Western philosophy’s search for an unmediated, truth or metaphysics of presence that is ultimately unattainable. At least, that is so if you subscribe to his structuralist methodology, clearly something that people in the “analytic” tradition (Searle, Ryle, Austin), would most likely not do. Personally, I have sympathies for both sides of the tradition, and thinkers such as Rorty and Stanley Cavell have themselves more recently “deconstructed” this binary opposition, between continental/analytic philosophy. The resultant animosity between both Searle and Derrida after this “controversy” only serves to substantiate the claim once made by Henry Kissinger that “I formulated the rule that the intensity of academic politics and the bitterness of it is in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject they’re discussing. And I promise you at Harvard, they are passionately intense and the subjects are extremely unimportant.”14 Of course, this is also contextual and in the current climate of academia, the stakes have become way higher. Philosophically however, and in terms of philosophy for the humanities, the ‘quibble’ between Searle and Derrida does act as an index to something much larger in terms of

 One here recognizes the formulation of ‘Sayre’s Law’; William Sayre was alleged to have stated “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” However, if I’m correct in the assumptions behind my thesis about the dovetailing of literary criticism and philosophy, and the more recent historicising of criticism, then the tenor of the dialogue between Derrida and Searle (taken as two obvious players in a much larger play in the modern humanities), and numerous other commentators, teachers and critics, has ramifications that move beyond the obvious comedic element of Sayre’s Law. 14

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hermeneutics.15 The larger implications are discussed in the final chapter of this book. While the humanities may not have had the historical and  The first English translation of “Signature Event Context” appeared in the first volume of the new journal Glyph in 1977. The editor of Glyph, Sam Weber, invited John Searle to write a response to “Signature Event History.” In his response, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Searle points out a number of flaws in Derrida’s argumentation and his understanding of Austin. For the second volume of Glyph (also published in 1977), Derrida contributed a response to Searle’s “Reply” called “Limited Inc. a b c.” In contrast to Searle’s ten page “Reply,” Derrida’s “Limited Inc” ran to ninety pages. Derrida’s “Limited Inc” is an almost merciless criticism of Searle, whom he calls “Sarl.” For instance, he points out that Searle in his “Reply” hardly mentions signature, event, or context. “Limited Inc” indicates Derrida’s growing frustration with the reception of his work, especially in the Anglophone world. Derrida having been offered an honorary degree at Cambridge University in 1992, a group of analytic philosophers wrote an open letter (see below) to the Times of London, in which they objected to Derrida receiving this honorary degree. Despite the letter, Cambridge University awarded Derrida the degree. It’s hugely ironic that one of Derrida’s main detractors, as well as someone who clearly hasn’t read Derrida—and who’ll I’ll discuss more in the chapter on postmodernism—Jordan Peterson similarly had an invitation to Cambridge rescinded back in 2021. The authorities eventually saw the erroneous nature of this policing and Peterson was quite rightly allowed to go and share his thoughts at Cambridge. I’m pretty certain it wasn’t a talk on deconstruction although, given the context, the irony would have been too good to be true. Here is a copy of the original open letter to the Times of London; one can’t help but think of Kissinger’s use of Sayre’s Law again here: The Times (London). Saturday, May 9, 1992 Sir, The University of Cambridge is to ballot on May 16 on whether M. Jacques Derrida should be allowed to go forward to receive an honorary degree. As philosophers and others who have taken a scholarly and professional interest in M. Derrida’s remarkable career over the years, we believe the following might throw some needed light on the public debate that has arisen over this issue. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the marks of writings in that discipline. Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy – in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature. In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour. We submit that, if the works of a physicist (say) were similarly taken to be of merit primarily by those working in other disciplines, this would in itself be sufficient grounds for casting doubt upon the idea that the physicist in question was a suitable candidate for an honorary degree. Derrida’s career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns (‘logical phallusies’ and the like), and M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets. Certainly he has shown considerable originality in this respect. But again, we submit, such originality does not lend credence to the idea that he is a suitable candidate for an honorary degree. Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule. Derrida’s voluminous writings in our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all—as every reader can very 15

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political significance they once had under the aegis of different State and Church socioeconomic relationships, especially in the time of Galileo, Copernicus and Descartes, they are starting to have a more tangible and sometimes pernicious effect in the realm of the apparent humdrum and the everyday. In the context of literary studies and criticism, deconstruction has had had a large effect, but it has perhaps had some unintended consequences in the realm of ‘culture’ at large. I will just say for now that the second part of the century of literary theory and criticism, where philosophy in some ways dovetailed into literary theory through the ‘linguistic turn,’ also became the politicised era of theory and criticism, where in some ways it turned away from its more traditional purview of rhetorical analysis and ‘cultural quality control’ and became a more political instrument. This movement largely took place after the rise of deconstruction in the academy—although it’s also incorrect to loosely brandish terms such as “The Left”, “Postmodernism,” and of course, “Deconstruction,” without a full and detailed contextual discussion as I am attempting here.16 easily establish for himself (and for this purpose any page will do)—his works employ a written style that defies comprehension. Many have been willing to give M. Derrida the benefit of the doubt, insisting that language of such depth and difficulty of interpretation must hide deep and subtle thoughts indeed. When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university. Yours sincerely, Barry Smith (Editor, The Monist)  One only needs to examine the evidence of classes in literary criticism themselves: how many actually critique texts and how many talk about the political context of texts, while in some cases having become self-appointed arbiters of what gets taught as ‘the canon.’ Moreover, I’ve have been in meetings, at which a self-appointed guardian of culture has informed me that we should move more female poets onto the syllabus. We already had a large presence of female poets on the given syllabus—in proportion to the historical record the ratio was skewed in any case. The person gave a self-congratulatory snigger when I dared to mention the literary canon and said “we haven’t recognised a thing called the canon for years in the US”. The irony of the fact that the same person had been at pains to say we should in no way indulge in hegemony or ideological instantiation in any shape, form or guise whatsoever, seemed lost upon my colleague, who was patronising the (female) course coordinator and implying his Neoliberal/humanist/‘progressive’ model was the par16

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A friend of Derrida, and a man not without controversy himself, Paul de Man, is without question a better writer to talk about in terms of deconstruction and its closer approximation to literary theory and criticism.17 De Man wrote two amazing works of literary criticism, Blindness and Insight (1983) and Allegories of Reading, (1982) which both bring in the relationship between philosophy and literary theory and their gradual encroachment into each other’s world of ideas. Difficult as it is to pin de Man’s work down, he seems closest to H.G. Gadamer’s hermeneutics in that he constantly interrogates the position of the critic concerning the historical, philosophical and cultural location of both the text and the critic and so the blindness and insights in both the text and the critic are constantly refigured as we re-read the text and the critical reception of the text.18 Therefore, and in true deconstructive fashion, any fixed location and set position of ideas are difficult to establish. One of de Man’s best essays is one of his last, in which he examines literary criticism and the inherent “Resistance to Theory,” particularly from the New Critical Tradition that had taken hold not just in the classroom but in the academy at large. De Man argues here that a major factor in the elusive nature of language itself is the elision of clear-cut boundaries between the old scholastic model, flagged in Chapter Two, between logic, rhetoric and grammar. For de Man, these boundaries continually deconstruct themselves in the structuration of the text itself. For example, the ticular codification that our department needed to follow. People often do not realise the patronising nature of this sort of discourse and the implied power-relations themselves that this insinuates; especially in my opinion, in a context where we are teaching a truly representational Introduction to Poetry model; a model where the “interpretive community” to use Stanley Fish’ phrase, needs to be taken into account. With regards to the notion of the canon, this is something to which I will return in the final chapter. 17  After de Man’s death in 1983, it was discovered that he’d penned antisemitic journalism for the Belgian newspaper Le Soir. Because of the storm in the humanities that deconstruction had caused, de Man had many supporters who offered weak and quite frankly embarrassing excuses for his somewhat shady literary soirees in the past—the worst of which was probably that proffered by Derrida. That said, I wouldn’t refuse to employ a great painter and decorator if they were philanderers, so I don’t see why we can’t celebrate and recognize the brilliance and originality of de Man whilst holding his decidedly questionable political views in abeyance. I’ve also read and enjoyed Lous Ferdinand Celine… 18  Gadamer’s seminal text, Truth and Method (1975), uses the newly developed techniques of hermeneutics and historicism to demonstrate how our historical and social juncture will invariably affect our reading and reception of given texts, works of art or cultural artifacts. I’ll discuss Gadamer more in the chapter that concerns reception theory.

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syntagmatic, metonymic or grammatical axis of subject-verb-­complement in a phrase such as “Wayne is a doctor”: in syntagmatic language, the verb “be” becomes for grammarians the copula; however, it also works also in a metaphoric/rhetorical fashion, because of the substitutive and appositive, Wayne/doctor/senior lecturer/language specialist. Therefore, there is an undecidability between the grammatical or the rhetorical in the very structure of language itself. Crucially, de Man sees literature as being a sort of self-conscious idiolectical discourse, which gives it a special place. Unlike a discourse such as science or geography, the process of literary discourse acknowledges its indirect (fictional) connection to the world of phenomena. Hence the power of rhetorical devices such as irony, chiasmus and paradox—and the world of postmodern and modernist aesthetics, which acknowledges their precarious and purely rhetorical connection to the “real” world.19 In another essay, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” de Man brilliantly shows how a question can be both rhetorical and grammatical. He starts by pointing out how structuralist literary theories such as those proposed by  Greilling articulated the semantic paradox “Greilling’s Paradox” in 1908. Essentially, some words have the same property as what they signify, such as “short”; however, “long” doesn’t have this property. “Polysyllabic” does in itself have an unusually long number of syllables, so is also the same; monosyllabic does not have the semantic properties that is suggested by the signifier however, as it only has one syllable. Words such as “polysyllabic” and “short” are homological or autological; words such as “long” and “monosyllabic” are heterological. The paradox arises with the word heterological itself: if it’s “heterological” it does not instantiate its meaning but this is what heterological means, therefore it’s also “autological”. On the other hand, if “heterological” is “autological”, then it must instantiate the character of applying to itself: therefore heterological is also heterological. In my adapted usage of Greilling’s notion, Literature is an autological discourse and not heterological; even though it semantically purports to non-representation of the real it’s actually autological in that this non-representation is in fact, representational; this is a way of seeing the self-referentiality of Modernism and later Postmodernism as referring to itself as fiction, therefore as literary discourse making itself more autological than say, Realism. As subject to de Man’s critique, other discourses on de Man’s reading would be heterological because they don’t acknowledge the tenuous, mediative nature of the linguistic sign. This is in part the basis for perhaps his famous essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969) in which he treats of Romanticism’s contingent relationship to allegory and symbol. The Platonic (and more conservative) notion of referentiality, the original correspondence theory of truth would invert this model and see discourses such as science and history as autological and view literary discourse (the poets) as heterological because the “sophistry” that they weave as truth. The phrase “sophistry” is philologically taken to be negative in common parlance but originally was connected to rhetorical skill, such as that used by politicians, lawyers and, in Plato’s case, the false prophets, three times removed from the original, the poets. This in itself, is of philosophical interest and warrants further investigation. 19

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Greimas, Barthes and Todorov, are derived from the work of Roman Jakobson and by using the syntagmatic and paradigmatic models of sentence structure and applying them to literary theory, do not recognize the strict affinity hereby insinuated between grammar and rhetoric, or at least don’t fully acknowledge this: One of the most striking characteristics of literary semiology as it is practiced today, in France and elsewhere, is the use of grammatical (especially syntactical) structures conjointly with rhetorical structures, without apparent awareness of a possible discrepancy between them. In their literary analyses, Barthes, Genette, Todorov, Greimas and their disciples all simplify and regress from Jakobson in letting grammar and rhetoric function in perfect continuity, and in passing from grammatical to rhetorical structures without difficulty or interruption. Indeed, as the study of grammatical structures is refined in contemporary theories of generative, transformational and distributive grammar, the study of tropes and of figures (which is how the term rhetoric is used throughout this paper, and not in the derived sense of comment or of eloquence or persuasion) becomes a mere extension of grammatical models, a particular subset of syntactical relationships. (de Man, Allegories of Reading, 8)

Therefore, de Man defines the importance of the analytical discourse of the French theorists, by pointing out that all textuality, right down to the most simple, contains these indestructible undecidabilities. By way of example, and using Jakobson’s own argument in his other famous formalist essay, “Linguistics and Poetics” (1958), the reader may have noticed the sound devices I used above in the phrase “indestructible undecidabilities” without even really considering the acoustic properties of this formulation; whereby language (langue) in other words to an extent has a life of its own that constantly comes to the surface, even in our most everyday enunciations (parole) such as in the commonly used phrase “innocent bystander”. This, of course, is part of the reason for the prevalence of “literary theory” in the late-modern age. In a brilliant piece of deconstruction, that I will quote at unusual length—it’s very hard with de Man to find very short passages for referential citation—we are informed:

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Let me begin by considering what is perhaps the most commonly known instance of an apparent symbiosis between a grammatical and a rhetorical structure, the so-called rhetorical question, in which the figure is conveyed directly by means of a syntactical device. I take the first example from the sub-literature of the mass media: asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoe laced over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers with a question: “What’s the difference?” Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only ire. “What’s the difference” did not ask for difference but means instead “I don’t give a damn what the difference is.” The same grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive: the literal meaning asks for the concept (difference) whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning. As long as we are talking about bowling shoes, the consequences are relatively trivial; Archie Bunker, who is a great believer in the authority of origins (as long, of course, as they are the right origins) muddles along in a world where literal and figurative meanings get in each other’s way, though not without discomforts. But suppose that it is a de-bunker rather than a “Bunker,” and a de-bunker of the arche (or origin), an archie Debunker such as Nietzsche or Jacques Derrida for instance, who asks the question “What is the Difference”—and we cannot even tell from his grammar whether he “really” wants to know “what” difference is or is just telling us that we shouldn’t even try to find out. Confronted with the question of the difference between grammar and rhetoric, grammar allows us to ask the question, but the sentence by means of which we ask it may deny the very possibility of asking. For what is the use of asking, I ask, when we cannot even authoritatively decide whether a question asks or doesn’t ask? (de Man, Allegories of Reading, 8–9)

The deconstruction here points to the notion of language as a whole schema, one that is constantly overshadowing our utterances and constantly forcing our “verbal icons” into patterns of ambiguity, whether the author means this or not; this, for de Man, is an allegory of reading and it illustrates the opaque and undecidable nature of language. So, of course, one of the keys to unlocking the inherent difficulties of Modernism is the realization that an HD, Joyce, Mallarme, Pound, Yeats or Proust is aware of this difficulty and the constant cross-over of codes, to the point that they weave this into their texts by playing with the referentiality of

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the text, whether it be to itself as text, tradition, other texts or even to an ultimately unknowable world just outside of the text. De Man goes on to apply this logic—or inventive paralogy—may be a better if not jargon-ridden phrase, to the last line of Yeats’ poem “Among Schoolchildren,” where we are given the question “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Of course, the undecidability is here something Yeats as poet draws our attention to, and in so doing draws out the irresolute self-deconstruction of the poem itself: It is equally possible, however, to read the last line literally rather than figuratively, as asking with some urgency the question we asked at the beginning of this talk within the context of contemporary criticism: not that sign and referent are so exquisitely fitted to each other that all difference between them is at times blotted out but, rather, since the two essentially different elements, sign and meaning, are so intricately intertwined in the imagined “presence” that the poem addresses, how can we possibly make the distinctions that would shelter us from the error of identifying what cannot be identified? The clumsiness of the paraphrase reveals that it is not necessarily the literal reading which is simpler than the figurative one, as was the case in our first example; here, the figural reading, which assumes the question to be rhetorical is perhaps naive, whereas the literal reading leads to greater complication of theme and statement. For it turns out that the entire scheme set up by the first reading can be undermined, or deconstructed, in the terms of the second, in which the final line is read literally as meaning that, since the dancer and the dance are not the same, it might be useful, perhaps even desperately necessary—for the question can be given a ring of urgency, “Please tell me, how can I know the dancer from the dance?” (de Man, Allegories of Reading, 11–12)

The subtlety of deconstructive readings, whilst not easy, obviously give rise to close readings that, if de Man and Derrida are correct in their structuralist methodological assumptions, ask truly profound questions about our relationship with the world and language. It seems to show how the impossibility of analytic philosophy to hook on to the world with its nomological net of mathematics, can, by extension, easily be applied to language and the logic that all sides of this crisis in the humanities realise is inherent in language itself, when it—as logocentric

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locus—also attempts to hook itself onto the world. Hence, we are left with literary theory in the final instance and as the final arbiter because this hermeneutic discipline (and practice) acknowledges in its very nature that the world cannot be entirely trapped within a nomological net. However, there are ways in which the word is disclosed to us, in a truly Heideggerian sense, and in which we can through our relative ontological relationship come to deeper understandings of the world we inhabit— through and within a hermeneutic circle. For Frege and Russell the numericity of number was encoded in set theory (or perhaps furnished is a better phrase). In symbolic language, there is no set of the non-set as in number. There is just the paradox of the set of all sets, Langue, which can only be presented in discrete modalities of parole, or to use Wittgensteinian terminology, in language games. There is no Ur-language outside of all linguistic sets. For de Man, however, there is an autological function of literary discourse—the representation of non-representation—in discourse a necessarily fictive discourse. In this sense, and we see it in de Man’s profound reading of Proust’s different modalities, his mimetic and diegetic speech-acts, his necessarily rhetorical and metaphoric grammar, and his representation of the outside from the inside. Literature is the new discourse of philosophy, the discourse that dare not speak its name, except in criticism and theory. As Schlegel, the high priest of German Romanticism had already said back in the age of Frühromantik; “the poet can tolerate no law above himself.”20 In terms of literary criticism, deconstruction has been a very popular—and divisive—theoretical approach since the 1970s in both the Western and later the Far Eastern university system. Part of the reason for this is probably the emphasis on the fact that there are many ways into the text, or many undecidable readings—not one of which should be privileged over another; every privilege produces what Derrida calls a  F.W. Schlegel also saw the intertextual predilections of philosophy and also argued for the transcending of rhetorical, semantic and grammatical textual boundaries. Hence the philosophical importance of his (admittedly poor) novel Lucinde (1799). His idea on the inability to completely master epistemic knowledge of “worldhood” was also reflected in the Lyaceum and the Athenian Fragments. It appears to me that these were also powerful influences on Nietzsche’s poetics in his approach to philosophy—both in his aphorisms and also in the poetics of works such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885).

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“violent hierarchy.” In de Man’s view, all texts deconstruct themselves in anything from Yeats to Proust (as with de Man himself above) and also other sorts of discursive texts, such as the example from popular US culture, Archie Bunker. As a more literary example than our pop culture friend Archie, we can look to William Blake and the fact that he famously examined John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost and argued that the poem, although traditionally read as a Christian morality tale about the fall of Satan, can also be read in terms of a certain sympathy for Satan. The undecidabilities in much of Shakespeare’s work are very clear (or rather murky), for example, in Hamlet; the central soliloquy of “To be, or not to be…” can be read in terms of a central crux of Hamlet’s being trapped between two binary oppositions, each of which “supplements” the other. Critics have traditionally found it difficult to take a side in Hamlet, or formulate a decisive reading, and the reason for this is the skill of Shakespeare as a writer, and his ability produce all of these uncertainties in the texts— uncertainties that reflect the binary nature of our real lives. For Harold Bloom, human nature has been crystallised and made richer by Shakespeare’s work, as exemplified in his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). Yet another Yale school critic, Geoffrey Hartman in a famous book on Wordsworth’s epic poem The Prelude, (actually written before the term “deconstruction” became part of critical parlance), published in the book Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814 (1964), famously writes of the poet’s attempt to attain imaginative autonomy (a commonplace of romantic criticism) and his reliance upon the necessity of nature as an aid to his romantic imagination, or his necessary receptivity to the external world. On Hartman’s seminal reading, Wordsworth remains in a sense “beached” between the two alternatives, which inform and counter-infect each other; they are Akedah and Apocalypse; in a sense, two undecidable readings of the relationship between nature and the self-sufficiency of the romantic imagination. This I discuss, along with de Man’s treatment of the romantic relationship between symbol and allegory, in my Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition (2015). Three great poems to re-read both in tandem and in a deconstructive light, whilst offering good examples of the critical utility of this methodological approach are Wallace Stevens’ “The Anecdote of the Jar,”

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S.T. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and P.B. Shelleys’ “Ozymandias.” In Stevens’ poem, we are given the stark idea of a signifier placed in the middle of a desert, and how the central signifier, arbitrarily placed, is the locus for a whole symbolic ecosystem to thrive. Stevens starts the short, imagistic poem, with the following lines: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The arbitrarily placed jar is set amongst the “slovenly wilderness,” but it so transpires that the wilderness “…rose up to it/And sprawled around, no longer wild”. The central signifier, St. Paul’s Cathedral, The Eiffel Tower, etc., sets off a signifying plain and reifies the notion of the process of city-building by repeating the imagery of “And round it was, upon a hill” with the imagery “The jar was round upon the ground.” The hill becomes level. On this horizonal ground, the syntagmatic axis of signification can now openly thrive. The vertical height of the hill is not displaced, but is forged into a central signifier upon an axis which can act, like transformative grammar, in any number of directions or locales. The imagery of “tall” is still emphasized. However, the paradigmatic vertical axis crosses with the horizontal, with the locus of the jar set as the central signifier in this arbitrary social scheme. The jar, however, is “gray and bare” because it’s function as a grammatical signifier is paramount here; the jar’s content is of little consequence; Stevens is addressing its arbitrary function as a signifier within a newly formed and arbitrarily codified system of difference. Stevens had also

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written of “The Idea of Order at Key West”; however, in this particular poem the very notion of order is deconstructed along its metaphoric and metonymic axis, in point of fact, the wilderness is recognised as wilderness because of difference, because of what it is not—it’s brought into existence by the existence of the central signifier, the jar. Upon reading this, one may think of the “plain of jars” in Laos PDR, which, though more recently noted as ritualistic burial signifiers, were at one point surrounded in mystery, because they originally didn’t have the contextual signification provided by this parole. Demystification occurs once a system of signifiers is discerned, meaning is then given to the world, even aspects of the world that otherwise have no pointed character or identification. The jar, of course, can also be a symbol for culture—one thinks of containment or a jar/petra dish, signifying culture in both senses of the term. It can infect things around or if the culture escapes from the jar, a more literal metaphor it can be seen as producing the ensuing signifying ecosystem. Furthermore, that jar can be seen as producing culture in its social sense, and in this reading the yearning for a return to nature—or the noble savage—is only signified by the instantiation of the jar. As in Levi Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked, one signifying notion comes into a binary relationship with another. We have a yearning for the signifier “originary nature” precisely because of what it is not: culture. In “Kubla Khan,” Coleridge similarly places a signifier, the pleasure dome, in a much less stratified signifying space than that envisioned by Stevens. Coleridge’s work is already known for its fragmentary nature. The poem is subtitled “A Vision” and a “Fragment.” It follows the structure of a hortus conclusus narrative;21 however, the famous troping of the garden surrounded thus: “So twice five miles of fertile ground/With walls and towers were girdled round;” (6–7), which runs in stark contrast to the barren imagery of Stevens’ poem, emphasising the syntagmatic horizontality of his own poiein. Coleridge is addressing (in some senses the act of the process of poesy itself, on its own self-representational  The hortus conclusus refers to an aesthetic representation of the Virgin Mary both in pictorial and in actually constructed gardens, which began in the late Middle Ages. Coleridge’s depiction of the landscape in “Kubla Khan” (1797) can be seen as connected to this aesthetic symbolism. See my own chapter on “Intellectual Intuition in Coleridge’s Poetics” in Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 21

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paradigmatic axis). The wilderness of “that deep romantic chasm which slanted/Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!” (12–13). The romantic and metaphoric imagination cannot be sustained for any prolonged period, locked up within with the symbolic structure of the hortus conclusus. Indeed, the unconscious bubbling to the surface of Langue is once again addressed by the Khan-poet who “’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far/Ancestral voices prophesying war!” (29–30). In Bloom’s phraseology the anxiety of influence of symbolic and overridingly linguistic history haunts the poet through its historical palimpsest, revealed through Coleridge’s symbolic language, a symbolism that is, on the one hand functioning as a pure romantic symbol, at the functional rhetorical praxis; whilst at the same time, it’s equally important grammatical (and allegorical hortus conclusus axis) strives to bind it within the structural troches of its expressive meter. Therefore, the poem itself works self-­ consciously, between the allegorical and symbolic. Furthermore, and to cement the unsustainability of the romantic vision or fragment, we are given a series of opaque images through which to view the transcendental, but never directly attainable, central romantic signifier: “The shadow of the dome of pleasure/Floated midway on the waves” (31–2); “That sunny dome, those caves of ice!” (47) the signified is refracted, ventriloquised and never beheld directly, because of its fragmentary and symbolic nature. The floating signifier, in Lacanian terms, glides under the weight of the symbolical language, reflecting, refracting and paradigmatically hanging. If Steven’s poem is an allegory for the categorizing process of poetry, then Coleridge is allegorically presenting the deeply symbolic nature of his view of expressive poetic language, his romantic hermeneutics of romantic composition, in his necessarily fragmented and broken vision. Shelley’s famous sonnet “Oxymandias” perhaps at this point, and given the signification of the first two poems, should on my deconstructive methodology have already deconstructed itself: I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

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And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.—”

The lyric speaker is addressed in the second person, once again by history and time as a palimpsest, as the signifying and codified discourse of immutable time and history. This reminds one that without any given signifying context, without the correct cues and discourse traces, meaning is just as easily lost as it is created-hanging on a mediated yet necessary play between the presence and absence of key signifiers. The decay and the paradoxical power of the ancient sovereign are sustained only through the lack of symbolic signifiers that are contextually lost in the wilderness, upon the sand where inscription or trace cannot be sustained. “Nothing beside remains,” and it’s the strange paradox of the “colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” The signification of non-signification, the oxymoronic power of the negative signifiers that in turn signify their own “ancestral voices prophesying war”. One is reminded of the tenuous nature of existence, the folly of pride, the fact that without the “Works” and signifiers of history, there are indeed only lifeless things—things given life because of what they are not— or because of what they bear traces of…logoi. The three readings afforded here demonstrate the continued utility and fruitfulness of deconstruction as a form of hermeneutics and as an exemplar of the linguistic turn in both philosophy and literary theory. Juxtaposing Coleridge, Shelley and Stevens provides not only an interesting interpretive rubric through which to read these poets respectively, but also a structuralist framework of positive tools that can be applied to these writers in their various guises as both poets and thinkers in general. In terms of Thai popular culture, and thinking about the example of Archie Bunker above, one can draw many examples where the ‘text’ can be

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read and then reread in other manners. In popular Thai culture the nam nao drama, which roughly translates into English as ‘soap opera,’ can be seen to exhibit stock characters, each of which exhibits archetypal traits and enables them to act as binary foils to each other. If we take the examples of the nang rai and nang ek stock characters, (the beastly bad girl and the virginal homely lady), we can see how this works. Both of these characters are female and are at odds with one another. The Nang Rai is perfidious, ambitious, cunning, self-centred, ambivalent and indulges in more promiscuous sexual behaviour than her counterpart, who is abstemious, cordial, selfless, servile and very conservative in her behaviour. In her, we can see the Snow White, Cinderella, or Rapunzel stereotype in popular culture. The usual pattern that unfolds is one where the nang rai will come undone because of her behaviour. She will be foiled and will not attain the societal status she may have desired. In fact, she ends up getting her ‘just deserts’ and is often rewarded by social exclusion, ostracisation, or even worse, penal punishment or death. The nang ek will be rewarded with a stereotypical happy ending with a handsome prince male character, who will have been tempted, like the chivalric knights of yore, by the sexual enchantments and entrapments of the female antagonist. In some cases, the male antagonist, nearly from a traditional, old-monied, well-to­do and conservative family, may have actually slept with the female antagonist, whilst being portrayed as being a victim of entrapment or of unsolicited sexual advances. In some cases, the male character even has been seen to abuse or rape women, only to come to his senses and adjust his moral compass to one of a conscientious and civil young gentleman.22 Interpreted from a more conservative locus, these morality dramas enforce the moral law of Thai-ness, with their attendant warning of the dangers of perfidious behaviour, especially by women. However, read from another angle, these dramas can also be seen as pointing out the hypocritical nature of the status quo, or the distance of rights between males and females within this society. For example, a  For an excellent and engaging discussion of the Thai romance genre and its distribution in Thai literary discourse, please see Dr. Sasinee Khunkaew, Femininity and Masculinity in Three Selected Twentieth-Century Thai Romance Fictions; School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University: unpublished PhD Thesis, June, 2015. 22

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feminist reading of these programmes may well advocate for the Nang Rai character, as she is simply going after the same aspects of desire that a young man, with a certain social privilege within society, will be set to achieve or desire for his own satisfaction. The feminist reading may problematise the more conservative reading but stand up equally strongly. If we add the socioeconomic context to our analysis, we may be using a Marxist analytical framework; equally, a reading of the combination of the id, ego and superego could interpolate a Freudian/psychoanalytic reading. A study of desire and the movement of metonymic signifiers to represent this displaced and constantly recurring desire—along with an examination of the way this female character is subverting the symbolic order of this cultural signifying system, chosen from a background of possible instances of parole, would instantiate a Lacanian-poststructuralist reading. In any of these readings deconstruction/structuralism act as methodological tools to facilitate the particular reading at play here. The obvious objection would be that of the intention of the author or director, but there are two obvious objections to this: the first is the Wimsatt/Beardsley intentional fallacy argument, which is a type of formalism in itself and the second is the more general idea of theory itself, whereby langue is in the background, constantly bubbling to the surface so that even an authorial intention is subject to the same pressures any purely objective reading would be subject to. If also we refer back to a canonical writer such as Wordsworth or Shakespeare, we see the undecidabilities of the various readings of Hamlet or any of the 26 extant manuscripts of The Prelude and we still encounter that bugbear: hermeneutics. We’re also aware that what may be regarded as the canon can be constantly up for review, depending upon the historical context, changes in what Stanley Fish calls the interpretive community, and what R. Jauss and especially J.H.  Gadamer would argue are the cultural horizons of the time. Has theory really just worked on a self-fulfilling prophecy and self-­ sustaining economy? Are all of the new researches, PhDs, advances in theory down simply to an academic industry? This would seem a difficult position to adhere to and sustain. If we take hermeneutics seriously and we see Saussure’s position as the father of synchronic and diachronic modern linguistics as tenable, then it seems even more difficult to question the relevance of theory.

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Another objection is the idea that with deconstruction, there are infinite interpretations of a text and we can’t find a meaning. This is singularly incorrect and bred of willful ignorance to either engage with theory or to read second-hand sources (such as Jordan Peterson) who is happy to incorrectly align Derrida with Marxism. Anyone who has understood either Derrida, de Man, Hartman or Bloom, or even what I have doggedly attempted to explicate above, should recognise the fallacy of this claim. There is more likelihood of my having read all 73 volumes of The Talmud than Peterson to have read a single essay of Derrida—he hasn’t. The idea is that the texts’ ultimate meanings are undecidable or it’s ultimately impossible to find an arche or ultimate telos in which to locate any of these texts, pace the limited nature of our interpretive faculties.23 Heidegger, who was the father of the thought under discussion here, and its overall precis, was also a Christian. However, the implicit claim in poststructuralist analysis is that the various theses about texts are not impregnable, are revisable and are always connected to traces and supplements outside or inside the text in question. The other claim is that deconstruction (or poststructuralist theory in general) sanctions any reading, or bathes in the ether of relativism. So, on this reading, one could not technically argue against Hitler’s discursive ideas as expounded in Mein Kampf, or the vile racist sentiment of William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. However, this illustrates a staggering misapprehension of the sentiments of deconstruction, which is attractively democratic. It’s certainly not a theory of didactic normativity, in the socialist sense of a thinker such a Gyorgy Lukacs. In fact, it’s a watchdog to remind us that all these normative theories, including Marxism, are open to investigation and critique. It’s a theory in the purest sense, borne of a synthesis of hermeneutic phenomenology and structuralist linguistics.  The obvious objection to this is to stand by the alternative absolute Idealism of Fichte or Hegel, which relies upon a teleological logic exemplified brilliantly in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), where Hegel uses theories such as Anerkennung (mutual recognition) to demonstrate how the human subject can escape subjectivity and enter into the realm of intersubjectivity and eventually absolute spirit, Geist, or knowing. Or in faith-based reason, the Abrahamic faith in a God or Holy Trinity. In poststructuralist terms these ideals are “transcendental signifieds” that stand outside the chain of signification and are therefore unknowable. 23

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When I was an undergraduate, my teacher in philosophy, who had precious little time for poststructuralist thought (although, when pressed he again admitted he’d also never actually read any Derrida), argued incorrectly that a proponent of deconstruction would have to contend that there was even an unlimited number of possible readings for a car instruction manual. Of course, there are texts that one does not need to really theorise about! I don’t think any other theorist would spend much time on that ultimate classic, The Audi Quatro Users’ Manual, circa 1984. As Roland Barthes argued, in his later poststructuralist phase, some texts are more readerly and some are writerly. Put another way, a text such as Ulysses is more based upon the authorial technique, whereas a crime novel by Lee Child is probably more down to the reader’s interpretive skill in reading the genre of the crime novel and following the structural and textual clues. A car user’s manual is without question more metonymic/ syntagmatic, using much less of a metaphoric or paradigmatic technique. It’s still infected by other signifiers and traces, while supplements are found in the discourse of the manual. The space between signifier and signified is still open, and although the interpretive gap is obviously not nearly so wide as with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose—it can’t be read in a pure void—just as a car cannot be worked in a void without a chain of signification. Once people get over the mistaken idea of infinite interpretability, they can hopefully flag this error and recognize the wasted time inculcated by this red-herring reasoning. However, I’ll spend more time on the more general ramifications of Theory in the chapter on Postmodernism, which comes later in this readerly book of yours…

6 Literary Méditations Hégéliennes

Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most important analytic philosophers of the Twentieth Century, whose propensity for philosophical acuity was unfortunately matched by his apparent love of gin. As a philosopher in the tradition of Frege, Russell, Carnap and Quine, one certainly wouldn’t have placed Sellars on a list of philosophers with a penchant for meditations Hégéliennes but those were his words. His principle work was in the philosophy of mind and language. As with all the other successful analytic philosophers, he seemed to end up at the same Janus-faced revolving door that led either back to the European room of academic scepticism or an holistic room that, whilst dispelling the so called myth of the given (or logoi to parse the jargon I’ve used thus far), dropped one into a post-­ metaphysical linguistic garden. A garden in which he would have encountered W.V.O. Quine, if not Alice herself. After the continental tradition had embraced the linguistic through phenomenology and hermeneutics, it seemed the analytic was heading down the same cul-de-sac, with the difference that the continental had a tacit embrace of the limits of language from the outset. This occurred partly after Heidegger’s Kehre (change of direction towards an emphasis on language) and Gadamer’s brilliant development of hermeneutics, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_6

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which I will discuss briefly below. However, the analytic tradition was still holding onto the post-Kantian synthetic-analytic distinction and still determined to find that elusive set of all sets, without falling into paradox or, worse still, the Sturm und Drang of theory itself. Philosophers were perhaps finally coming to the realization that historicity would trump all universality. However, I added the modifier “Literary” to the title of this chapter and this chapter will indeed bring the second modifier to the table. This allows a future based not upon parochial notions of identity, but upon commonality, historical perspicuity and an altar where we won’t sacrifice our literature teachers or academics, who have finally firmly awoken from the nightmare of history. In the wake of Paul de Man having challenged the “resistance to theory” that was incumbent on all humanities professors in the early 1980s, a couple of new incumbents, Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels decided to raise the bar with the notorious neo-pragmatist paper, “Against Theory.”1 Roland Barthes had challenged “victory to the critic” that was supplied by the sleight-of-hand provided by biographical-historicist criticism, bringing theory back to the fore. However, these straight-talking neo-pragmatists, obviously influenced by Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, were trying to wipe the pragmatist slate clean by in some ways flagging E.D. Hirsch’ phenomenological criticism. This was a criticism wherein one could find a meaning or pure essence or pure intentionality by discovering—much to the ire of Wimsett and Beardsley—the author’s intention: victory once again to the critic. Knapp and Michaels argued: Contemporary theory has taken two forms. Some theorists have sought to ground the reading of literary texts in methods designed to guarantee the objectivity and validity of interpretations. Others, impressed by the inability of such procedures to produce agreement among interpreters, have  This is covered brilliantly and in great detail by Yale Professor Paul Fry, in a remarkable series of Literary Theory lectures that are all available in the public domain on YouTube and are well worth the time for anyone who not only wants a free course at Yale but also wants to hear a true master at work. The lecture on Knapp and Michaels is very clear and concise, showing the importance of their neo-pragmatic contribution to the whole literary theory debate. The whole series of lectures are available for perusal here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YY4CTSQ8nY&list=PLD0 0D35CBC75941BD 1

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translated that failure into an alternative mode of theory that denies the possibility of correct interpretation. Our aim here is not to choose between these two alternatives but rather to show that both rest on a single mistake, a mistake that is central to the notion of theory per se. The object of our critique is not a particular way of doing theory but the idea of doing theory at all. (Knapp & Michaels, 723)

They go on to state their main thesis that “The mistake made by theorists has been to imagine the possibility or desirability of moving from one term (the author’s intended meaning) to a second term (the text’s meaning), when the two terms are the same. One can neither succeed nor fail in deriving one term from the other, since to have one is already to have them both.” (724). Given this desideratum, the simple truth is to find this purported apodictic truth (the authorial intention), which is for example perhaps bound up in a particular speech act. However, there were a series of essays published in response to this seminal paper on what is not just a critique about theory itself but also (and more pertinently) a position about philosophical scepticism and the modern epistemological enterprise as modern philosophy, which acts a good catalyst with which to commence this chapter. It deals with the certainty of meaning and the idea that theory only finds space to thrive in an area where there is space for scepticism about final meanings, intentions and foundations. We can read this space between foundational meaning and the variously posited meanings of theory as in one sense the juncture where literary theory and philosophy cross. One of the responders was a writer who is a philosophical romantic in that he challenges the idea that there is a clearly defined gap between genres such as psychoanalysis, film studies, philosophy, literary theory and criticism: Stanley Cavell. His book of essays, Must We Mean What We Say (1969), and his magnum opus The Claim of Reason (1980), neatly summarise his signature position of acknowledgment. This is a version of Hegel’s idea of “mutual recognition,” or Anerkennung; but a deflationary or non-­ metaphysical position. It posits that acknowledgment (as opposed to avoidance) of someone, something, or some extrinsic logoi held by two subjects is how we foster knowledge (ac-knowledge) any posited

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hypothesis about the logoi of the phenomenal world.2 Cavell argues that this inter-subjective position is one explored by many Hollywood movies, classical myths or modern novels—as well as by psychoanalysis. This mutual acknowledgment can be the basis for knowledge about the world and deals with areas such as Wittgenstein’s work on the incorrigibility of things such as raw feels and pain, because of how knowledge is deduced or induced, in the sphere of public reason. Thus, acknowledgment also locates knowing in a post-Wittgensteinean loci and is deeply connected with both de Saussure’s and Peirce’s ideas on the logically prior public nature of semiotic systems and structures before they are private. Within the scope of these systems, we hold a series of propositional attitudes that come bound with subjective stances and positions on these topics. Once again, we can also clearly discern (or acknowledge) in this semiotic ecosystem the connection between the whole system of Langue and individual Parole. It can be discerned how the nature of sign systems is once again autologically represented by a system such as that of an aesthetic idiolect, optimally explored in the self-conscious aesthetics of Romanticism, Modernism and (up to a point), Postmodernism. Another philosopher whose work I’d like to offer up as a counterpoint to the anti-theoretical approach of Knapp and Michaels is Donald Davidson. His culminated response to the issues explored by Sellars and Quine, comes out in close proximity to Cavell’s, Derrida’s and de Man’s work. Davidson also rejects the bald notion of philosophical certainty, while positing that by a form of mutual acknowledgment about propositions, translations and triangulations—without subscribing to a holistic nomological theory of meanings, or a fixed schematic model that explains the whole of the external world for us—we can semantically communicate in mutually meaningful and reasonable ways. It is because of this continued sense of the subject negotiating the physical world, the breakdown of different genres or

 The title of his seminal book of essays “Must We Mean What We Say” of course goes a long way to indicate the theoretical position taken by Cavell. There is a philosophically loaded concept regarding the identity of “saying” and “intention” in this very statement itself. Another pregnant Cavellian statement is his dictum: “I can know the meaning of a word, but can I know the intention of a word”. 2

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criticisms, or the reorientation of the relationship of literary theory to philosophy, that I label all of these philosophers, Philosophical Romantics. In this chapter, I shall briefly breakdown the arguments of the philosophers just mentioned, arguments that culminate in the re-instantiation of theory, before examining the further possible political ramifications of what I would call this Communitarian literary theory. I supplement these theoretical standpoints by first offering a reading of William Carlos Williams’ seminal modernist poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923) and then I offer a reading of a more recent and highly regarded poem, Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy” (2007). I go on to outline the concomitant phenomenology and hermeneutics of Heidegger, Gadamer and Wolfgang Iser, which explicitly embraces the communitarianism that is only implied within the work of philosophical romantics such as Rorty, Cavell and Davidson. I conclude the chapter by illustrating its own utility in reading a short story by Ernest Hemmingway. John Searle, in addition to his war of the words with the Gallic upstarts, was also the philosopher who famously took on the mantle of the intentionalist theory of Austin’s speech act theory in the 70 and 80s by developing a whole new range of speech acts, with perfomativity at their centre. He also invented the famous Chinese Room argument for a computer that could eventually learn all of the correct moves in following certain speech acts or transformational-grammar-syntax rules to allow for the computer to become a competent speaker.3 However, because of the rules of implicature and context—in short pragmatics—Searle still argued we could tell if it was a human being or a machine who was conversing with us. This  Searle provides a concise summary of his famous Chinese Room Argument:

3

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese. Searle, J., ‘The Chinese Room’, in R.A. Wilson and F. Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

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was in tandem with his Berkeley colleague Hubert Dreyfuss, who tackled the same subject of AI from a phenomenological angle in his book What Computers Can’t Do (1972); Searle’s was one of the first influential philosophical ideas to tackle the subject of AI. For Dreyfuss, phenomenological intentionality is key in reading and for Searle the bare intentionality bound up with a speech act bears inscription upon a text. However, in their own philosophical area, Quine and Sellars were working within an empiricist tradition that was still looking for other hallmarks of epistemic/empirical certainty within the post-­ analytic tradition. The Sellars-Quine approach is premised upon the idea that there is a relation of knowledge to reality, which is either the prospective given structure (the holistic framework of “the given”) for Sellars; or for Quine, it is an ultimately holistic analytic-physicist ur-vocabulary or radical reductionist schematic model. However, by following the logic of his most famous essay, “The Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine starts to distrust “privileged representations” because he can’t logically justify or discern the “‘idea’ idea” itself—which in poststructuralism is akin to the transcendental signified. His logical-empiricist realism may appear strategically different from continental hermeneutics, but he is also led to the denial of extra-linguistic transcendent meanings in objects themselves (logoi). The “‘idea’ idea” in modern epistemology is connected to direct, unmediated representation, or what Rorty tropes as the mind as “the mirror of nature” and something that can be now replaced by post-­ Wittgensteinean epistemological behaviorism. The Geisteswissenschaften (modern humanities, which are opposed to the Naturwissenschaften) under the aegis of both the ‘continental’ and ‘analytic’, should be replaced in Rorty’s eyes by epistemological behaviorism or what he later called “ironism” because there is no “philosophical point” to be made about translation or “intentionality” or “certainty” of the “problem of other minds”.4 The Quinean attempt to distinguish between “scientific” and “unscientific” explanations, or for what for  Rorty speaks at length about “ironism” in his next major work after Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in which he introduces various other works of philosophy and literature as “ironist”; these include Nietzsche, Derrida, Heidegger and even Hegel. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989). This work is interestingly also way less analytical in its methodological approach, and as such it’s a much easier read than its predecessor. 4

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Sellars would be a more holistic schema, for Rorty were pointless. Rortyan Ironism, Derridean Poststructuralism, or what has loosely and incorrectly been grouped as ‘postmodernsim’ are the forms of philosophy that are the off-cuts of this crisis of modern philosophy for the humanities. However, they can now produce some great readings and historically acute hermeneutics in our tradition of reception, or in the newer tradition of critical forms such as New Historicism. As Wheeler has recently pointed out in the often-missed connection between figures who appear as historically and epistemologically diverse as Derrida and Quine: Both Quine and Derrida, then, attack the hidden realism built into the kind of present meaning-content that will make the necessary the a priori. Whatever has the full presence required either by phenomenology or by logical positivism has to have some objectively real objects, and so some objective necessities. Furthermore, they both see no way to separate the meaning from the sign. Meaning as pure, extracted, semantic content is an incoherent notion. This hyperbole, once the special concerns of Derrida are disregarded, makes the Quinean point that there can be nothing behind writing or speech but more writing- or speech-like phenomena. While Quine does not discuss “logocentrism,” his treatment of speech and thought as inscription supposes that the model of thought is writing. (Wheeler, 9–10)

In the same clear and revealing essay, Wheeler goes on to discuss Davidson’s understanding of metaphor in terms of its truth value, claiming that Davidson is following up on the idea that there is no privileged representation outside of language. This is the logical rejoinder to Quine’s empiricist position. These self-deconstructions of barriers between different representations are similar to the barriers that as we saw earlier, were self-deconstructed under the lens of de Man as he interrogated the line between the rhetorical and the grammatical: Once we have lost the contrast between the rhetorical and the truth- conditional, it should not be surprising that the contrast between the metaphorical and literal could not be sustained. In fact, this breakdown seems to follow directly from there being no level of representation which is not language-like. Davidson himself has made this kind of point in a widely

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misread paper. Davidson argues, apparently, that there is only the literal meaning of any term or sentence. The metaphorical “This essay is a quagmire of self- descriptive traps” is to be explained, not in terms of some alternative meaning which the metaphoric context directs us to, but as the production of a sentence for a purpose other than alerting the hearer to the drainage problems of my prose. Davidson is widely held to have assigned a special privilege to something called “literal meaning.” In fact, given Davidson’s dogmas of empiricism, Davidson’s view could not be that metaphors have literal meaning. Davidson’s claim is that to give the meaning of a metaphor is the same as giving the meaning of any other use of language. A theory of meaning pairs sentences with truth-conditions. “This essay is a quagmire of self-descriptive traps” est vrai en Anglais si et settlement si cette essai est une fondriere de trappes soi-descriptives. Such a sentence gives all there is to give of the meaning of the sentence. The point is that there is nothing behind language but more language-like phenomena, and any explication of a metaphor will itself have metaphorical as well as non-­ metaphorical uses. (Wheeler, 14–15)

The newer, Quinean-Davidsonian interpretation is always “situated” in that the interpretation is done from a particular specific cultural standpoint, which we can call a “theory.” That “situation,” though, changes during interpretation. I learn something when I grow to understand and accommodate my own discourse with that of the discourses of physicists, chemists, theologians or Jordan Peterson. Learning something is changing my “theory.” That learning is a change in my theory, my standpoint of interpretation, or my current vocabulary, to use Rorty. To use Gadamer in Truth and Method, it’s connected to the horizon structure of my phenomenological-­historical location. To use the phraseology of Martin Seel, we need to “let ourselves be determined” by history and contingency, instead of trying to remain in control of our experience of history; we should constantly hit the “refresh” button on our mental bowser.5 Something of an anathema to the local Trotskyite group. Furthermore, Rorty writes of Davidson’s deconstruction of the barrier between what he calls intensional and extensional vocabularies; once again  See Martin Seel “Letting Oneself be Determined: A revised concept of self-determination” in Komprdis (ed)., Philosophical Romanticism. London: Routledge, 2007. 5

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the idea that different vocabularies hold different values but are also subject to “bridging laws”. For Davidson there are no bridging laws that bind internal or psychic vocabularies with extensional vocabularies—therefore he denies psychophysical parallelism as logically impossible. This means that there cannot be a pre-conceptual holistic schema that precedes reality—or at least not one that is discoverable through bridging laws between nomological laws that explain the external world and those that describe the psychical, or internal world. Therefore, he also rejects radical empiricist reductionism as an explanatory device for the logoi that lie behind all reality. As Rorty summarises this: In Davidson’s view of the relation between different explanatory vocabularies, there is no reason whatever for thinking that those vocabularies which lend themselves to truth-functional formulations “limn the true and ultimate structure of reality” in a way in which intensional vocabularies do not. The extensional-intensional distinction turns out to have no more and no less philosophical interest than the distinction between nations and people: it is capable of inciting reductionist emotion, but not capable of providing a special reason for embarking on reductionist projects, so he does away with psychophysical parallelism and reductionism in empiricism. (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 205–06)

Important to Davidson is the idea that mental phenomena resist being “captured in the nomological net of physical theory;” this is a rejection of deterministic, non-normative laws bridging mental states with both physical states and other mental states. Therefore, in arguing against the possibility of psychophysical laws, Davidson has in mind the following kinds of Bridging Laws (BL):

 BL  x  x is in M iff x is in P 

Here, “M” denotes some mental state or event and “P” denotes some physical state or event and “iff” abbreviates “if and only if.”6 This crucial  A stronger version of a bridging law claims identity of properties from different theoretical discourses. A weaker version claims only that whenever an object instantiates one property—then it instantiates the other; either way these laws are rejected at the outset by Davidson—this goes some 6

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rejection of bridging laws for Davidson indicates that one remains only within another hermeneutic circle; one open to constant negotiation and alteration—within its own semantic limits. Therefore, (and also in the same sense as Rorty and the poststructuralists), Davidson is against holistic or reductivist epistemology of any kind. For Davidson, there is no “underlying mental reality whose laws we can study in abstraction from the normative and holistic perspectives of interpretation.” Therefore, in a major sense, what we get with the Davidsonian theory of meaning is an analytical-hermeneutics, which is suddenly not so far from the hermeneutics of Gadamer. Crucially, Davidson finds that it is an a priori and apodictic truth that mental and physical predicates are not logically connected to each other. This is because both mental and physical phenomena have distinctly different sets of features incompatible with each other. Therefore, bridging laws linking properties from two distinct theoretical discourses (in this case the mental and physical) would transmit properties from one distinct discourse to another. In the case of mental and physical phenomena this would lead into incoherence. Consequently, propositional attitudes, or intentional states as they are sometimes called, are nothing more than various cognitive attitudes: we can have hope that the proposition p is true, we can fear that p is true, we can desire that p is true, and so forth. You and I can have different attitudes toward the proposition “All swans are white.” I hope that all swans are white, whereas you believe that it is but don’t hope it is. The proposition itself, namely, that “All swans are white,” towards which one has an attitude, is said to give the content to one’s mental state. Due to this nomological gap between the mental and the physical, radical interpretation is another interesting theoretical standpoint that Davidson inherits and develops from Quine. For Davidson, we infer and triangulate meaning as part of an ongoing interpretive process where we use prior theory which in turn can become passing theory in the transactional process. In fact, as stated above, Davidson’s theory is also about considerable way in moving away from the Quinean notion of an Ur language based upon theoretical properties of a field such as quantum mechanics. This would it seems to me signify that ideas such as those expounded by Danah Zohar in The Quantum Self (1991) would at some epistemological juncture face problems of translation from one discourse to another.

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letting oneself be determined by both prior and passing theory, which in terms of literary theory is hugely interesting. Objectivity is actually attained through subjectivity because without there being this triangulation of the world there would be no objectivity. Therefore, walls of propositional statements are being constantly amended, tested, teased out and modified though one’s intersubjective interactions with others. These interactions help forge the development of one’s triangulated standpoint towards an objectivity that is constantly being postulated and triangulated, as in Cavell’s sense of mutual acknowledgment. Therefore, the social is logically prior to the personal. In fact, as with radical interpretation, the notion of the objective world is developed and passed along through communitarian, social interactions, in the very first place. Another interesting point to note about Davidsonian ordinary language philosophy, is that contra Searle’s ordinary language notions of speech act theory and performativity as noted above, Davidson is an externalist in that the subject gets to (possible) intentions through the process of radical interpretation. In contrast, Searle is an internalist because he starts out with the intention. Like Knapp and Michaels as literary critics, a definite intention is postulated at the outset by the speech act itself. For Davidson, Rorty, Cavell (and in this sense Quine too), the social is logically prior to the personal, and even the objective with Davidson. Consequently, it is constantly being triangulated, radically interpreted, acknowledged, and reconstructed. So, the bald argument I postulate here, is that ordinary language philosophy has also resulted in two sub-branches: one which is externalist and one internalist. In light of the foregoing arguments, I’d like to postulate that in terms of letting oneself be determined, constantly allowing literary interaction to remodify one’s schematic of the world is a Davidsonian (and Perhaps Proustian), notion. This notion crucially entails a buttress against stagnation and falling back into one’s stultified identity (or identarian) politics. If the most honest way we can receive the word is represented through the joyous, representational, and symbolic art of literature, then perhaps this is the best way we can constantly hit the “refresh” button in our mental schema of the world. This certainly goes some way towards explaining our propensity towards literature and the theory of literature’s encroachment

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(along with, to a degree) the social sciences, into the modern philosophical landscape. Furthermore, the work of thinkers such as David Damrosch and the rise of World Literature as a sub theory can also be, to an extent, explained by the rise of the theory of literature in the last 100 years or so.7 If philosophy is running out of paradigms and historicity is the way to explore ideas and new concepts, then perhaps the bridging laws we alluded to above are in one sense only to be drawn or constructed through projects like those of Damrosch. He posits the subject of World Literature as a connective polyglot tissue, which will open up new horizons for us rather than closing them off under the politicisation and weaponisation of the various identities that make up the rich cultural tapestry spoken to by World Literature. It’s to two apparently very different texts that I now turn, to substantiate the major claims of this communitarian argument. The first poem is very well known and is, in the same sense as Hemmingway in prose, deceptively easy to decipher at first glance. It also celebrates the new ‘red face’ tradition of American literature.8 The poem is William Carlos Williams’ seminal “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923). It works in such a way as to straight away problematise the notion of intention, but also to triangulate the reader in such a way as to reconsider their phenomenological relationship with the external world of the everyday;  David Damrosch’ interesting work in the study and heuristic dissemination of World Literature itself implies the communitarian notion of literary criticism that I am promulgating here and delineates a similar educational ethos. Princeton University’s promotional blurb for his 2003 book What Is World Literature reads as follows: “Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process.” Damrosch gave a similarly positive account of his work when I met him at Chiang Mai University a number of years ago. The communitarian aspect of this project and its attendant notion of World Literature is without doubt a perfect corollary for the type of literary criticism in the humanities that I am proposing for our new world of global citizenship. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691049861/what-is-worldliterature 8  The distinction between ‘pale face” and “red face” literary sensibility was postulated by US critic Philip Rahv, who contended that the two poles were best represented by Henry James as the Anglophile writer and man of ‘pale face’ sensibility as opposed to Walt Whitman or Mark Twain, who presented the authentic ‘red face’ indigenous US sensibility. One may of course take issue with this dichotomy on postcolonial grounds. 7

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it asks the reader to suspend or bracket (epoche) their everyday or ‘natural’ attitude and reformulate their Being-in-the-everyday. The poem is a short four stanza work and reads as follows: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

The first thing one notices is the concrete nature of the poem. The stanzas are typographically spaced, to almost represent and concretise the shape of the red wheelbarrow. The reader has the sense of the modernist interrogation of form and content and in this work the actual form does inform the content of the poem. One also notices how the form informs the content in terms of the series of noun-phrases that sit underneath and support their modifying phrases: “barrow” “water” “chickens”; couple this with the fact that these phrases in turn sit beneath the highly symbolic prepositional phrase “so much depends upon” and we discern a structural pattern, based upon the layout of the sequence of the poem. Williams is asking us (perhaps?) to consider the various codifications and formats that make prose poetry. Wordsworth had famously written in his literary criticism that there is essentially no difference between prose and poetry and here Williams seems to be offering the same conclusion. If we read the ‘poem’ as a series of simple sentences, paratactic in their structure, and rewrite the poem in the style of syntagmatic (horizontal) grammatical structure one may not even discern a poem. However, once the prosody and lines are broken up in this fashion, the syntagmatic axis becomes combined with the paradigmatic axis, and we now have the form of a poem. Again, the lines between the grammatical and the rhetorical are blurred, in such a performative way as to challenge their scholastic and traditional parsing as separate linguistic encodements.

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One can also read this as a combination of two semiotic codes in a Peircean sense. So, the first code is the symbolic code where we read each signifier in terms of its denotative or connotative meaning, and the second is the iconic, where we examine the layout of the signs to represent the formatting of a poem. These combinations seem to imply that Williams is perhaps interrogating the way things get presented as ‘art’ in much the way as continental modernists such as Marcel Duchamp did with his ready-made sculpture, R Mutt (1917). In the final instance, based upon this purported interrogation of the boundaries between form and content, grammar and rhetoric or the symbolic and the iconic, one also senses an instance of Shklovsky’s key formalist notion of defamiliarization at work here. The notion of the everyday wheelbarrow-itself presented as a Duchamp-style ready-made sculpture; but perhaps there’s also an interrogation at work of the use of language itself? As the wheelbarrow or tool that composes the grammar of our social reality to us. These very nouns and modifiers that are premised upon this prepositional relationship of the fabric of our reality are all linguistic and all carry our everyday world for us. As so much depends ALSO upon the red wheelbarrow as an everyday farmyard tool. To use Heidegger’s famous example of Being ready-to-hand and Being-at-hand: when we use a hammer or drive a car, we aren’t really considering our relationship with the car or hammer as utensils unless they are damaged. Once they are damaged, our relationship with them is completely changed, as is our phenomenological sense of Being. So, in one sense, we can perhaps pinpoint an interior meaning but equally we can also read this poem as challenging the very notion of our place in the world. This can also mean opening a new horizon of Davidsonian triangulation, through which to radically interpret our world. This can in turn be accomplished simply by the actual process of reading the poem and the concomitant reformulation of the form-content relations within this poem itself (as a poem). The second poem I’d like to explicate, using this novel, Davidsonian form of reading, is Keston Sutherland’s original and powerful 2007 poem, “Hot White Andy”. This poem is much more overtly experimental and very long indeed. Similar to Williams however, Sutherland is very much interrogating the perceived difference between various presentational

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formats. The first thing we notice at work here is the gap between written and spoken language; on the one hand the poem is clearly meant for recitation, because of its verbal play and dexterity. On the other hand. it’s also designed to be read because of the ‘notation’ of the punctuation within the poem. Therefore, there’s straight away a sort of deconstruction of the grammatical and the rhetorical difference in language, if we take punctuation marks as functioning under the logic/grammar rubric, but also, in this poem, acting as rhetorical and deictic devices illuminating or lighting our path through the poem itself. The poem commences: •    A Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them. Now swap buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck, phlegmophrenic, want to go to the windfarm, Your * kids menu lips swinging in the Cathex-Wizz monoplex; Your * face lifting triple its age in Wuhan die-cut peel lids; ng pick Your out the reregulated loner PAT to to screw white chocolate to the bone. The tension in an unsprung r trap co

“The tension in an unsprung/r trp co,” is actioned in the very graphemes on the page. Try for example to type the poem into word and see how much resistance the AI algorithms give you in simply typing this into your computer. Through AI, we have Langue again pulsating in the background and forcing itself to the surface. One even thinks of the unconscious elements flowing and pressing to the surface in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” once again-the “ancestral voices prophesysing war” but here it’s the language itself in late modernity and the tension between the individual Parole and the overall Langue pressing itself to the surface. Sutherland’s “intention” seems almost inimical to a “correct” reading of the poem, the poem functions, flows and feeds on the tensions thrown up by the language itself at all levels: the grapheme, the verbal icon, the sound patterns and the stress. There are also the allusions and puns, which themselves appear almost randomly, yet the staccato cadence works as poetry and drives the reader on. The absence of euphony is itself a device here in that

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it seems Sutherland leaves nothing off the table and takes Pound’s modernist call to “make it new,” taking also the different codes as similarly explored by William Carlos Williams, to new levels and heights. Lavrov was the Russian foreign minister and so we have again the ideal of communication embodied in the symbolism of this person’s involvement in the poem—possibly a diplomat who also represented the former Soviet Union. This allusion just adds to the communicative, ancestral pressure placed upon a simple ‘univocal’ reading of the poem. Because, without any putative theory whatsoever, Sutherland is challenging the transparency of language to simply transmit and codify linear messages. The allusions, prosody, cadence and “sprung traps” of the poem further remove simple and linear pursuance of meaning. In fact, meaning is exploded in this poem. What, for example, may seem a difficult poem for Thai EFL students, paradoxically challenges linguistic hierarchies and in thus could be said to democratise the text. The uncanny allusions to Wuhan and Lavrov are, given current sociopolitical circumstances, extremely prescient. However, this again reminds us of how hermeneutics is a dynamic science. For example, back in 2007, this would not have had the effect upon the reader’s reception that the currently changed horizon holds about the war in Ukraine and Covid 19. Moreover, the phrase “Stock Wizard” can also be a possible refence to a stock character or a person who invests in stocks, even though he’s from the formerly communist empire of the Soviet Union. This is because things change, and you can swap your words, tonality and voices in tandem with the fashion that history drastically fashions our signifiers, or someone’s historical role. Moreover, the tonality also switches pace in the poem, and one thinks of the German romantic poet Hölderlin’s tonal theory of poetry, whereby the modulating tones of the poem are also supposed to transport one and act as an epiphenomenal effect of the poetry itself. Historical aspects, characterisations and free-associative wordplay all attest to this further tonal reading of the poem. Furthermore, in terms of tone there is also an interesting signifier used in this dramatic opening of the poem: the sound “ng”. Going back to the brief discussion of structuralism, one is reminded of how this sound doesn’t distribute ‘difference’ in the English language but does in tonal languages such as Thai and Chinese. So, in this poem, Sutherland initiates the “ng” sound but as it doesn’t distribute meaning it

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becomes a sort of Lacanian floating signifier—a homeless inscription that haunts the first lines of the poem—and of course draws attention to the tenuous nature of the structure of the linguistic utterances under observation. This novel phonetic configuration also emphasises the alliterative repetition of this sound in a language that was not phonetically designed for this type of phonemic structure. Therefore, in “Hot White Andy,” even the language itself sheds its identity and breaks down under this extra tonal pressure. In addition, the name of the apparently randomly selected Andy Cheng is that of a Hong Kong-born Hollywood stuntman and given the stunt-like performative nature of the poem, and its dissection of stable identity (at every level), this choice makes perfect sense. The poem self-consciously defenestrates linguistic windows. All this garnered from the first few lines of what appears to be a pretty ambiguous set of utterances. This supports the hugely significant question in the context of my overall argument about theory: there does not seem to be a simple angle available for finding one’s intention or meaning. There is only interpretation (radical in the Davidsonian sense of the term) and triangulation, as we negotiate a space within the ambiguous tonality and structure presented here. In this work, as with all literary utterances, the text opens-up interpretive spaces for us, and in challenging our interpretive faculties, explodes the world for us. More importantly, it allows us to be determined by the objective world through this triangulated, interpretive horizon that has been rent in the mind. Also, these stylistic operations also open a political aspect of the poem for us. There is also contained the notion of the Marxist commodity fetish and its attendant desire, pressing in and hemming one in from all sides; corroborated by glottal, voiced, unvoiced, and various other linguistic traps; the fetishized world wrapped up, packaged and disguised in delivery numbers and serial code numbers. The world at your fingertips. The poem moves so fast and is stylised in such a way that one cannot but feel hemmed in by a sensory overload: I am adaptable for Binzel and Lincoln and Panasonic my swan neck my shielded arc, my gap of hot fire Lavrov sidesteps in the long arabesque of equivalence. What is being this lids clampdown, being this cheek slant

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onto something, being this duck breast implant but what is there to eat in a specific fang, defecation being otherwise a welding helmet, being a gas lens, being this hot skit spilt on glass eat all of me like a dispassionately incinerated fish cheek, I want being phonic into your intestine, to cry into my own blistered eyes on the inside of your stomach, not dead as the sea but cracking; disjunctive part lives will then cancel the asymmetry of self-inclusion, each of them will have the whole of love in it. You witness protection flourish as autonomy, CPA Order Number 22, Camp Bermel, hot white Vietnamization et. al.

The incantation of the Asian fetish for the white, the occidental, is herein personified by someone who traverses these cultural boundaries AND does stunts for a living. But then traversal of the cultural boundaries is not enough, and in the age of desire and fetishism the visceral boundaries are also crossed “but what is there/to eat in a specific fang/defecation being otherwise a welding helmet,/being a gas lens,/being this hot skit spilt on glass/eat all of me like a dispassionately incinerated fish cheek…” The liminal imagery blends and rolls out like Hegelian desire that eats itself from the inside out and as love that is grounded in the body (as the Marlowe quote that prefaces the poem tells us) “the asymmetry of selfinclusion/each of them will have the whole of love in it.” There is also the desire that turns into the acknowledgment of “the I that is We, and the We that is I” in Hegel, which becomes “them” before becoming “it.” In other words, this is the desire that cannot be transcended. In a Lacanian sense, the desire is metonymic and linked in a chain of signifiers that cannot be elided, the floating signifier of the “ng” in Cheng’s name is the Lacanian self-desire that links-up throughout the poem. This is accomplished through sounds, words, morphemes, identities; in fact, in chiasmatic modulation, it moves back and forward and ultimately you can take the Andy out of Cheng, but you can’t take the “ng” out of Cheng. This floating signifier that ultimately elides any final, transcendental, fixed identity, wonders about and mutates throughout the poem.

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Therefore, the chiasmatic image of desire presented by a white hot—hot white Andy Cheng, floats until the end of the poem, through a play, we are told, and various other forms until: this finale to the whole Chang question the whole problematic congelation of hot genitals wrapped in the Houston Chronicle to crack its metaphysic ad banner. In white out your tenses are the wanton of desire, gazing through the Xi’an YMCA window at The imitation Gap lit up scampi-eyed desire krush ex necromat it lives my own way, soft hard soft hard soft, skewered by Metulla and Kfar Kila, and other names besides, names to know and do. I accumulate you: sky crated in Binzel and Change, crated in Illumination, I accumulate you: hot sky deserted by Abner and tax phosphor. The superpower to come is love itself. Articles 2 up and the Antepasseist 0. But since this is my only life I accumulate you Andrew Lumocolor, not fit for waiting away uptight in fire shopped to spit, but a real man accumulating men, desire and intensity until I die.

The repetition of “accumulating,” “other names besides,” the insistence of the phoneme “ng” in the Lacanian unconscious, “problematic/congelation of hot genitals…,” and the final shanti shanti of “but a real man/ accumulating men, desire and intensity until I die.” The pronominal ambiguity, and the final Pindaric links work through more metonymic fusion. Finishing with Andrew Lumocolor: the Hot White canvas on which any lumocolor identity can be inscribed. We of course remember that if Andy is a stuntman, then changing identity is also part of his oeuvre. The oriental fetish for the white perhaps being superseded by the occidental fetishisation of “color”. Whatever this poem does, whether you like it or not, it surely opens-up your horizon structure of experience and lets you be determined. You feel like you’re losing control reading this poem about a possible Asian stuntman and so much more; that you yourself are part of this whole collection of anonymous speech acts that career into each other like so many stunts.

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Keston Sutherland’s “Hot White Andy” and William Carlos Williams’ deceptively simple “Red Wheelbarrow” appear fine instances of the version of literary criticism and theory that Knapp and Michaels railed against. Intention is certainly not clearly bound up with any postulated univocal meaning of these poems; but the poems stand as fine testaments to the idea of triangulation and radical interpretation that I feel goes into every reading of every poem. Moreover, the poems also serve as fine exemplars of the objective space that is opened-up and refined further, every time we allow poems into our psychic sphere. This allows them to refine our perceptual schemata and perhaps more finely attune our Being-­ in-­the-World. Sutherland’s poem is also testament to the idea that we can still find original and novel ways of rethinking our usage of language and the way we use language to interrogate our relationship with ourselves, others, and the world at large, through a very much thriving system of hermeneutics. Before fine turning the discussion to the state of the amorphous and at the very best, loosely defined postmodern realm of literary criticism and philosophy, it will also be of interest to see how the most subjectivist of all of the literary-critical approaches, reader response and reception theory, both coalesce with the more communitarian, triangulated theory of Davidsonian ordinary language philosophy. This is because these theories are also categorised under the hyponymic phrase ‘hermeneutics,’ which is the seeming-buzz word for theory that has given up the post-Kantian ghost in the machine of Enlightenment universals, along with Latinate phrases in the bathwater, such as a priori, a fortiori or apodictic truth. To begin with, reader-response criticism places emphasis on the processes of the reader themselves in the production of meaning, so that meaning within a text depends on a reader’s reaction to that particular text, and without their reaction, meaning would not even inhere wholly in the text itself. Thus far, the Davidsonian sense of letting the theory pass you, triangulating meaning, and the performance of radical translation, all sit very well with reader response theory. In its broadest terms, this type of reception theory can be broken up into roughly three camps or approaches. The first places emphasis on the individual background of the reader in interpreting a text. For example, as Thai student the reader may have a

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completely different reading of a book such as Botan’s classic 1969 novel Letters from Thailand, to what I would as a Western reader and interpreter/interlocutor. Moreover, a book such as Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or Red Bamboo by Kukrit Pramoj may also solicit different responses from a reader from Isaan (the North-East plains of Thailand), for example, due to their evocation of agrarian themes in different political climates and from different cultures. The psychologist and literary critic Norman Holland in his text 5 Readers Reading (1975), examined at close quarters the response of a small group of readers based upon their subjective orientations and yielded some interesting results. However, one wonders how much more Holland may have garnered had he applied the triangulation and radical interpretation of each of these readers in light of their respective backgrounds and linguistic competencies. Again, we can only speculate on the possible results a Davidsonian analysis could have brought to the research. One should also take caution in remembering that whilst this seems a fair point of criticism of the construction of meanings, it also tends to perhaps downplay the roles of the writer’s stylistic endeavours when trying to influence our reaction to a text. However, a second school of reader response criticism, most famously represented by the critic and scholar Stanley Fish, has actually placed more emphasis upon the way the writer stylistically influences and manipulates our reaction to the text, by formalistic techniques. Fish’ close reading approach requires that we pay close attention to the way sentences are manipulated and change our expectations as we gradually read and as such is a form of rhetorical criticism, similar to that advocated by another scholar, Wayne Booth. This rhetorical analysis is of the sort exemplified below in my micro-analysis of Hemmingway. One can also apply this (or any of these methodologies) in tandem with a structuralist analysis such as that advocated by Jonathan Culler, whereby theory comes to prominence in our close reading of a text and we pay attention to existing codes and structures, or linguistic units. In the case of an analysis of myth, perhaps we would consider the smallest units, such as the mythemes. When analysing a writer such as Joyce, Pound or Eliot, who are using the so-called ‘mythic method’ in their narrative, theoretical attention to mythic structures or patterns will obviously pay dividends for the perplexed scholar. This may also be the case when analysing certain texts

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from the romantic period, particulary the Frühromantik, who clearly have taken on the rhetoric and tropes of myth as part of their self-representations. This second sense of reader-response theory also places emphasis upon the more communitarian aspects of modern literary criticism; there is an ongoing dialogue and form of translation forming a dynamic triangulation between the author and the reader; the dynamic nature of this passing theoretical discursive practice also means that the conventions of the world as inhabited by the reader are constantly under interrogation. Moreover, he is allowing himself to be determined and has not taken the position of mastery associated with forms of criticism that denote a simply correct or incorrect manner in which to read the text under question. The educational aspect of literary criticism here functions in the more Platonic sense of the phrase: the ideals are drawn out of the reader—not poured into the reader in the manner of the old ‘jug and mug’ pedagogy. We formulate our responses and answers in an ongoing discussion or dialogue, which is not available to someone who simply gets taught what is the correct explication of a text. In the final instance, one may think of the more traditional and formalist reading of the work of art as a spatial one; however, the hermeneutic, historicised, Davidsonian theoretical approach, is temporal in its actual praxis. It’s worked out through constant mediation and rather than assuming a position of generalised mastery over the text, the position is mediative and open to a symbiotic relationship with the novel itself. The myth of the textual given is also exposed and there is no static and formalist encounter with a statuesque, given truth. Instead, pragmatic and communitarian truths are worked out through a dynamic, mediative encounter with both the literary narrative and with temporal history itself. Reader response theory also of course encapsulates the hermeneutical phenomenology of Heidegger; a form of phenomenology that goes beyond the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, which sought the same certainties as did Russell’s logical form. The Heideggerian ideas of being as “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) or of Being-already-there (Dasein) produce the notion of philosophy as dealing with subject positions very much in a state of ontological uncertainty and this is obviously reflected in the notion that criticism and theory are also part of a changing

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ontological plane. Consequently, they are also subject to the historicism later explored by Gadamer. Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological reception theory even contended that meaning was very much constructed in a virtual space between the reader and the author. Therefore, it was constantly being modified and supplanted with every rhetorical twist and turn within a text; the author could have an implied reader, but the economic success of a poem or novel depends upon what the actual reader makes of the rhetorical confabulations speaking to them. This of course means that textual analysis is a variety of close reading whereby the critic takes careful notice of the traps and devices set by the author in a particular text. This is also why, in many respects, this type of criticism goes back to the original rhetorical criticism of Aristotle. However, in the phenomenological method, the reader is paying little notice to the pragmatic or didactic aspects of the text, but instead concentrates on the effect itself on the changing Gestalten (shapes of consciousness) of the reader. In his Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle certainly emphasised the importance of the audience and the way in which a writer (or orator) could manipulate an audience by the use of rhetorical devices. However, reader-response critics also place emphasis upon the novelty of ways in which people can respond to different texts—and triangulate with passing theory—as they renegotiate their experience through this textual interaction. Why for example, does Kate Chopin, in her novel The Awakening, suddenly switch between a regular register to a more abstract, and more hypotactic sentence structural style on page 16? She had been using more paratactic sentence structures up until this point. This is part of her reflecting upon the symbolic freedom experienced by Edna Pontellier when she is near the sea, or in the presence of great aesthetic beauty. In his short story “Appointment in Samarra,” W. Somerset Maugham uses lots of conjunctions and compound sentences—hypotactic sentence structures—that act to propel the reader forwards in the story. We don’t pause until we realise at the end of this very short story that the mystery character is “Death” himself. Maugham doesn’t give us the opportunity to reflect upon where the short narrative is heading for us. The opening of the story also produces the formula of the classical fairy tale “There was a merchant in Baghdad…” This adds a sense of the fantastical to the story and helps us to suspend our belief as the rest of the tale unfolds.

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Gadamer’s seminal work of modern hermeneutics Truth and Method, argued that we can only interpret from our personal historical perspective. This means, of course, that interpretations can and do change in different historical epochs. Thus, the reader is once again key in finding meaning in a text, because of their historical location. This position supports the idea that at certain points in history certain texts are canonised and recognised over others and this is corroborated by the fact that since the advents of feminism and postcolonialism, certain texts such as Chopin’s The Awakening or Achebe’s Things Fall Apart have taken on a much stronger canonical influence in the newer intellectual landscape. It also accounts, as described in Chapter Two, for the scholastic rereadings of texts such as Ovid’s, and the religious exclusion of certain texts from the medieval canon. However, it also begets a further worrying question about our current age: the age of soundbites, distraction and social media. Are we in a historicist locale where the reading subject as was known in the great age of the novel is disappearing and being replaced by a new set of responders? It seems that the age of the novel and the time spent reading longer texts has perhaps been superseded by an age in which the human subject is prone to more distractions and influences, which are not congenial to the serial (or indeed serious) reading of a text such as Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Or, to proffer an even more extreme instance, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This is perhaps part of a much wider question that is not within the purview of the current study but warrants further attention.9  I have also started conducting a study in this area tentatively entitled “Reading Dickens’ Little Dorrit in the Age of Distraction” in which I argue that the “Age of Enlightenment” has been replaced by the “Age of Entitlement” and that a major factor in the new age ethos is the return to tablets and a digital scribal culture. In line with Foucault’s argument to which I refer to above, the author-function has once again changed and with new platforms such as Facebook and Tik Tok, our conception of both publication and authorship has moved into a whole new paradigm. Moreover, in terms of Reader-Response criticism, I argue that the response of reading subjects and their response times have changed to such a degree that the skill of responding to hypotactic sentences used by a writer such as Charles Dickens is no longer phenomenologically available to a worryingly large demographic of the implied reading public. This is connected to the short cuts to real textual analysis and thinking expounded on the plethora of social media platforms. This is arguably connected to a new historicist phase in which we now find ourselves—an age where the concept of self-authorship has also given rise to an extreme lack of trust in the mass media, even promulgated by the former President of the United States, Donald Trump. 9

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To conclude this chapter, I’ll give a micro-analysis of Hemmingway’s exceptional short story, “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927). Hemmingway was notoriously sparse as a writer and used a mimetic rather than a diegetic style of narrative, providing a mirror to the action and events in the plot but providing very little in terms of authorial voice or intervention. This method came to be known as the “iceberg” method, because the implied reader only got to see the surface events but none of the hidden psychological phenomena below the surface, which in Freudian terms provides most of the psychodynamics of human agency. In turn, this makes Hemmingway perfect for reader-response criticism, because the reader responds to the narrative gaps, or blind spots, left open in Hemmingway’s style. Also, for EFL literature classrooms, the narrative structure and the linguistic register are easier to understand. In the story, there are two main characters, a younger American girl named Jig and an unnamed older man, who is accompanying her on a trip to Spain. The action takes place at a train station, which is instantly symbolic of being at a crossroads in one’s life. The fact they are also in the Ebro valley seems to signify that the two sides of the valley represent choices that are available to the couple. The story is mainly constructed of dialogue, but the power-relations can be discerned within this dialogue. The girl asks questions such as her opening line “What should we drink,” and then goes on to ask over 15 more questions about the landscape, an operation she’s speculating on having (likely an abortion), and his feelings towards her. She also asks almost childlike questions such as “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?” This apparent insecurity about their relationship, demonstrates her insecurity, although this is never overtly stated by Hemmingway. Therefore, the reader fills this narrative gap, through a Davidsonian triangulated interpretation and a reader-response sense. The reader brings their own experience and semantic apparatus to the fore. At the end of the story, there feels as if there is a shift in the dynamics of the characters: “Do you feel better” he asked.

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“I feel fine” she said, “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine”.

The story ends with the older man asking a question, which is a clear reversal of the power dynamic, and the girl making what appears as the most declarative sentence of the whole story—a sentence repeated—for added effect. The symbols in the story are also connected with transitory and liminal elements associated with the trope of passing through: a bead curtain that separates the man and the woman, the station itself and the fact the man and the woman finish the story on different sides of the room, after he’s been out alone to the train tracks, which may signify a sense of abandonment or separation. The girl holds on to two of the beads on the curtain, which could also signify a rosary, and the setting is a Catholic country, Spain. The implications of abortion, given this context, are clearly lurking in the narrative gap. Importantly, and as part of my radical translation of the text, my own reading of these symbols opens-up a dialogue, based upon my own assumptions, on whether the girl will go-ahead and have the abortion after the story is completed. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of teaching a story like this, is also the opportunity it affords both the teacher and the students to provide possible endings to the story itself. There is also the element that a white elephant sale can signify something that’s unwanted in Western parlance, which again could figure as an aborted child. In Asia however, this is often read as a rare white elephant, and can this signify the special and rare nature of a child itself. Yet another translation one may bring to the story is the idea of an elephant in the room, which of course signifies something figuratively in the background of a scene, huge, unwelcome, but nonetheless lurking in the picture. This idea fits well the idea of the nascent abortion and the fact that it is never alluded to directly in the story itself. It’s clear that the abundance of possible interpretations that one brings to Hemmingway opens-up a classroom and helps us each interrogate our own assumptions and suppositions, as do all forms of literary discourse. It’s communitarian sense thrives on the fact that we interrogate our own bedrock assumptions, when entering-into a discourse that requires that

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we take a tightrope walk, throwing or interrogating any pre-existing keys or apparatus. Thinking outside of our own structural boxes in this way can in no small measure act as a bulwark against ignorance and prejudice. This is because we are expected to inhabit a territory that acknowledges the sceptical limits of language and embraces this limit by exacting an act of acknowledgment on the part of the careful and sensitive reader. Or perhaps even upon the careful philosopher of language, such as Sellars or Davidson, who further recognise the communitarian, social—and by extension Hegelian—nature of language.

7 Whither Postmodernism? Whether It’s New Liberalism?

On May 2nd, 2015, the Filipino boxer-cum-politician, Manny ‘the Pac-­ man’ Pacquiao came up against the illustrious Floyd Mayweather Jr. It was billed as the fight of the decade-if not even longer in calendrical terms. It wasn’t very good. It was akin to watching Thomas Hardy produce one of his lasagna-like hypotactic sentences—clause upon clause of appositional, rebarbative, dusty, Victorian statements. The last clause of my self-avowedly, self-conscious sentence perhaps being itself a touch insensitive and the general tenor of my statement was, to say the least obscure. Something, which the main subject of this chapter, Postmodernism, can also be accused of some, if not most, of the time. Just over four years later, on 19th April, 2019, another rumble in the cerebral jungle was set up between two more so-called intellectual heavyweights: Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek. This was a return to the heavyweight “sluggers” of the late 70s and the debate, just like the fight, certainly failed to live up to its purported relevance. In some ways, troping an intellectual discussion in this fashion, is however, pretty postmodern, as it bridges sundry gaps between various cultural discourses, it democratises the intellectual higher ground for all to see and behold, it challenges received dogmas and wisdoms and it most certainly asks the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_7

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perennial question: whither postmodernism? This was (almost) the original title of a 1994 conference in Irvine, California, “Whither Marxism,” with once again the ethereal involvement of that dark deconstructive angel, Jacques Derrida.1 The question resonates now louder than ever, the boxing analogy acting as a vehicle for the central theme of postmodernism: Power. However, as with much of what seems postmodern, the fight and the debate seemed to Peter out into not a great deal. The postmodernists do like their puns and their irony; I can’t speak for Jordan, but I can only guess at his quivering bottom lip upon hearing my limey accent attending upon the playful, polyglot cloakrooms of the seamless, de-­ historicized halls of the postmodern. I digress… Literary theory and postmodernism seem not only to have dovetailed, but they both seem to have become bogged down in discussions of the postmodern; however, this term is usually used as a shortcut to actual analytical thinking and thinkers such as Jordan Peterson have hooked onto this Rylean category error, in order to rubbish the ‘New Left,’ or even worse to use completely illegitimate phrases such as “cultural Marxism” (which is deeply offensive to anyone who has really read and understood the tenor of Marx’s work), while obfuscating their actual misunderstanding of Marx.2 Because of the political bent of literary criticism and theory  One of the finest and clear-headed responses to deconstruction was delivered by that stalwart of Literary Criticism and its attendant history, M.H. Abrams. His talk, at the MLA conference of 1976 addresses his fellow attendee J. Hillis Miller, directly. The talk was entitled “The Deconstructive Angel” Lodge, 264–276. At least the spirit and tone in which Abrams addresses deconstruction echoes the tones and the precis of my own work: in the spirit of an on-going conversation with criticism and history. 2  The currently popular conspiracy theory of a more Marxist radical system of institutionalized warfare was originally promulgated in the essay “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’” (1992) written by Michael Minnicino, which was originally published in Fidelio magazine. Later, in 1998 Paul Weyrich equated “Cultural Marxism” with the concept of “political correctness”; even though “political correctness” originated under the aegis of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who were hardly bastions of the Left. Later in the 1990s, Paul Weyrich commissioned William S. Lind to write a history of “Cultural Marxism,” and hence in 1998 the term was formally born. However, it has only been since around 2011 that the term has slowly gained currency. One reason for this may of course be the mushrooming of the “freedom” of the internet. The interesting semiotic aspect of this is how so many conspiracy theorists take this as what Emile Durkheim would call a social fact, with precious little, if any, actual historical acuity or actual serious academic research. I covered this aspect of Social Science Research and the new dangers of conspiracy thinking/crippled epistemology in a talk given at the Faculty of Political Science, Chiang Mai University; entitled: What Is Theory and What Are it’s Uses in E-Government Research and Practice: A philosophical perspective. On Thursday March 17th, 2022. 1

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since the second world war, it’s hardly surprising that the postmodern has become the superordinate term for all the ‘post-isms’ such as ­poststructuralism, posthumanism and postcolonialism; much the same happened with its predecessor modernism, which became the superordinate term for all of the ‘isms’, such as futurism, cubism and surrealism. The Postmodern seems to be a church of plural aspirations and sometimes, in open arms against the Hysteria and Anglicanism of the old high priest of modernism, T.S. Eliot. Joyce’s headmaster in Ulysses found history a tough nut to crack and Prufrock (there’s a lot in a name) was paralysed by the passing of time and history. It’s never easy to locate postmodernism, but it seems that a good place to start, like Stevens’ lone jar, is somewhere in the middle of the Wasteland, or with modernism as its antipode. The modernist fixation with history was just that—a fixation, a site, whether it be cultural, aesthetic, sometimes nefariously political, or just plain parochial.3 This locating would save one from drowning, from the sirens, and remind one of the power of the mythic method to spruce up the seemingly meaningless world after the horrors of The Great War. The cultural cost, for all of the young men who survived Flanders, was that the high modernism of Eliot, HD and Pound was out of the grasp of their cultural horizon. The accompanying mythopoetic, patrician sense of art also left very little room for the voice of the drinking classes, apart from the odd allusion in Eliot to the mechanistic soundtrack of the modern office space and the local public house at closing time.4 However, all the same, the Fisher King, with a copy of Miss Western’s book under his one arm and The Golden Bough under the other had set up his own particular jar of mythic dreams, just within sight of the Metaphysical poets, but just short of the sort of commodity fetishism required by a world of expanding capital and commodified culture.5 Hence the “culture wars” in their first truly modern instantiation. The roots of which, as this new battle for postcolonial, late capitalist, cultural  I say nefarious because one always remembers Pound’s relationship with Italian fascism. Heidegger was no card-carrying modernist but he was a card-carrying Nazi. 4  Both of these locations figured in The Wasteland (1922). 5  Eliot acknowledged his debt to the metaphysical poets and their influence upon his theory of the poetic ‘dissociation of sensibility.’ Furthermore, his poetic notion of the ‘objective correlative’ to represent a thought or emotion is also clearly influenced by their poetics. 3

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hegemony, were going to spin a historicist tornado that deposited much detritus and hidden oriental treasure at the doors of the new multicultural plain of jars. The desideratum of the modernist was to follow Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” In one sense the modernists, whether in Bloomsbury or on the Left Bank, were arguably the first group of revolutionary artists, each with their own hypernym or “ism.” From the early Cabaret Voltaire of Dadaism, (with their revolutionary cry of ‘hobby horse’) to the combination of flea markets and psychoanalysis that became surrealism, to the hard-edged fantasies of desire and capital that became Vorticism, Futurism and the grainy creaturely lines of Fauvism. The so-called High Modernists of the literary elite were also self-consciously tearing at their historical bootstraps and in some cases self-consciously examining the phenomenological limits of their Weltanschauung, as in novels such as Virginia Woolfe’s brilliant Mrs Dalloway (1925), Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), or at times, Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in Ulysses (1922). However, the other dimension of high modernism was its interrogation of the relationship between form and content; in particular, in what ways could form determine the content of the text? Pound and Eliot often worked within these literary-critical paradigms. This meant that, the new Formalism and New Criticism were, broadly speaking, testing out their theoretical loci in the praxis of their high modernist art—hence they self-consciously brought the “high” to modernism. Pound’s interminable Cantos are full of this mythopoeia, structural experimentation, formalist self-­ consciousness and literary self-referentiality, as on a considerably smaller scale, is Eliot’s metaphysical, neoclassic, classic “The Wasteland.” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” here bears out this battle cry of modernism for several reasons, and stands as a marvelous exemplar of high modernism, partaking as it does, in all of the stylistic devices adumbrated above. First and foremost, it’s an exemplary piece not only of metaphysical poetry, but also addresses two of Eliot’s central theoretical set pieces: ‘the objective correlative’ and the ‘dissociation of sensibility.’ In this light, one can see the inner workings of high modernism in practice and the formal praxis in the poetic text itself. The now infamous lines that start the poem read:

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Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question … Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. (1–12)

The striking opening simile is instantly a profound example of the objective correlative: here a man, a lyric speaker, a poet, a would-be lover or player and a fine example of Eliot doffing his cap to the nightmare of history, metaphysical poets and their propensity to “affect the metaphysics.”6 The subsequent imagery of the poem is scattered like linguistic detritus across the page. However, all the time the imagery is, as the self-conscious poem itself, broken, fragmented, synesthetic and liminal. We are treated to “muttering retreats” “restless nights” “one-night cheap hotels” “oyster shells”, and the punctuated assonance, which all of the time pins the speaker down to the self-reflexive page “deserted”, “muttering”, “retreats”, “tedious” and “insidious” (5–6). Then, there is the refrain of frustrated intent that delimits the poem ever gaining wings (both sexual and aesthetic) “What is it?” Then the culmination of history, history repeated, personified and through women who almost voyeuristically “come and go” staring at the ceiling and also the more than accidental allusion to the most famous ceiling in the world: the Sistine Chapel. At work is a deep-rooted salacious metaphor, the vehicle of which, is itself, a metonym, a cleverly reversed metonym of the historical female muse-­ musing at this most-famous of aesthetic muses. The sense of bathos is reversed as the anti-climax (literally and metaphorically) is exemplified through one of the most historically pertinent works of art in antiquity.  John Dryden famously claimed that John Donne, as an exemplar of a then new style of poetry, “affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign”. “A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693). 6

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This objective correlative sets the tone for the reversal of the rest of the poem and the theme of age and ages. Grammatically, Eliot rhetorically ties the code of the self-reflexive pronoun, bullied by his-story, into the reflexive present, only ever stepping out of this indicative mood of the verb to cautiously try the temporal stream of time and then step back into a present perfect frame of reference. The second strophe, constructed of staunch Elizabethan pentameter, starts in a resolute past simple construction before the amorphous, zoomorphic, yellow Dickensian Parole falls asleep and we are given the injunction that “there will be time”: The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; (15–25)

And for the rest of the poem, the lyric speaker is trapped in the present of the poem, constantly aware of uncertainty through the tonal modulations7 of his rhetorical temporality and his modal verb constructions “Shall I say,” “I should have been a pair of ragged claws” (73)—every editor’s nightmare, both figurative and it seems literal (perhaps the most poignant literal metaphor ever uttered)“And would it have been worth it, after all…” (87). These ‘verbal icons’ signify this chiasmatic temporality, whereby the poet continually returns and reverses his positions and tropes in the poem:  Hölderlin famously formulated a poetology that included a theory of tonal modulation throughout the progression of a poem; the tonal modulations seem to have been worked through brilliantly by Eliot pace his use of the varying sites of allusion and imagery as vehicles for developing his argument or complaint, in much of his poetry. 7

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Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. (45–49)

This rhetorical and grammatical lag of Eliot’s reflects the earlier semiotic examination of the rhetorical and grammatical as beautifully postulated by Paul de Man, playing out in a wonderfully performative praxis. In one sense, the whole poem is one long speech act almost written for a selfconscious, Brechtian, Elizabethan theatrical audience. After defamiliarizing the audience and the lyric speaker, in true modernist style, we are reminded at the close of the poem that: I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (126–131)

Anyone familiar with Pound’s Cantos, will here see the intertextual influence of Pound here, and the brilliant bathos at the end of the poem, the human voices in which we ultimately drown. For all our rhetorical tropes, figures, characterisations and nightmares of history, we are reminded that history and language are all too human. It’s not the sirens, the wreckers, the mermaids, the music of poesy that will drown us, not the mythopoetic but the literal. The final chiasmatic turn is that drowning comes with the awakening of the grammatical at the poem’s end. Once again, the rhetorical is laid to rest (like the zoomorphic ambiguity in stanza one) reversed all the way down through the indecisions and non-­poetic starters to the end of the poem, where we are snapped back to history and we “drown” in yet another figure. A figure piled on hypotactically to the other blind tropes of the modernist poetic. This is the brilliance of the highest modernism and the sublimity of Eliot’s patient gaze. The strange tropes attest to Eliot’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ thesis and also to the idea that, in this anti-subjectivist metaphysic, Eliot has strong affinities with the later work of Roland Barthes, because both reject the

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proto-humanism inherent in the metaphysics of subjective presence in Romanticism, the author-ity of the author; for Eliot the author surrenders his or her personality to tradition, while formulating their own voice somewhere through the voice of their individual talent. Perhaps, had Eliot attempted ‘Prufrock’ at a later stage in his career, he would not have drowned in other human voices at the end of the poem.8 In a beautiful further twist to this rich poem, Eliot takes the former protestations of two canonical poets in the metaphysical tradition and he debunks their original stance towards their prospective ‘sexual quarry’ or partners. For example, in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker opens with the lines “Had we but world enough and time, /This coyness, lady, were no crime,” whilst finishing with the rhetorical flourish: Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run. (41–46)

So, Marvell takes up an actively erotic position of agency and switches the common troping of the sun as life-sustainer and life-giver. In so doing, he combines the apparent opposites of sweetness and strength, in order to overrun the natural energy of the sun and transcend the movement of time itself. He elongates the night that no longer belongs to the springes of cyclical temporality. Likewise, Donne’s The Flea also uses conceit and paradox to use an abstruse scholastic linguistic logic, to challenge once again and open-up the gaps between the triumvirate of logic, rhetoric and grammar, as also flagged earlier by de Man. The brilliance in Eliot is also to subvert these codifications, demonstrating the opposite in the ability of the speaker (or so it seems) to consummate the figural sexual  The historical voices can also be read psychoanalytically, as in Harold Bloom’s argument in his monograph The Anxiety of Influence (1973) in which he claims the writer searches for a voice but has to labour under the Oedipal (or Electra) influenced anxiety of the historical influence of their parental figure in their selected genre. For example, for Wordsworth in his epic work The Prelude, this would be the influence of John Milton in Paradise Lost. 8

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relationship. The logic of the discourse itself and any rhetorical unity that would play into a more unified notion of temporality. The result is the startling high modernist negotiation with tradition and history that is self-consciously, and autologically, played out in the actual praxis of the poem itself. But what of this reading of high modernism? Once again, we find ourselves in a situation where, to use a structuralist trope, we can perhaps now at least partially define postmodernism by what it is not. Perhaps we can find our way past the myopic protestations of Jordan Peterson & Inc., by defining the post-modern primarily as an art form that challenges or attempts to give art back to the people, or remove the inherent elitism of Lawrence, Woolf, Pound, and Yeats. Or is it a form that supports the commodification of art in the age of capital? True to the form of the rest of this book, it’s also necessarily a corresponding philosophy of sorts, to which this literary genre can of necessity be, at least partially, yoked. The answer is that there is no clear truth, either in the work of art, the text, or any philosophical system or hermeneutics of being that gives one the topographical key to Being itself. The modernist appeal to both tradition, mythology, a lost golden age, or a more self-conscious work of art is one that was mirrored in the philosophical and mythopoetic tropes of the Frühromantiker themselves.9 This is the high—and as yet unachieved— ideal of art and culture in social life, the linguistic and public-sociological organisation of the polity that sociological thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas have repeatedly endorsed.10 The conservative bias against this type of philosophical outlook—an outlook which is not at all new, when judged by philosophy’s own terms and self-representations—goes back at least as far as Socrates with his  Both the German romantic and Idealist relationship to a new mythology of the aesthetic for modernity is discussed at length by Andrew Bowie in his excellent in Chapter 4 “Schelling: Art as the Organ of Philosophy” in his study Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietszche. Manchester, MUP, 2003. 10  It came as no surprise that a friend of mine who teaches at the neighbouring Payap University, mentioned a number of years back that when he stays at the home of his German wife, they notice a sociologically wide interest in aesthetics and lots of civic promotion at both a local and national governmental level of arts and cultural events. 9

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injunction that “the unexamined life is not worth the living” and his oxymoron “The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.”11 Therefore, it’s nothing new for philosophy to be in this state of epistemological remonstrance with the powers-that-be; whether it be card-­carrying Functionalists such as Habermas on the Left, or on the right Talcott Parsons; or with the good old Sophists and Cosmogonists. One should also remember that the use of irony is hardly new. Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, must have been long in the teeth with her husband as he strolled around ‘ironising’ in the local markets while she ironed his togas. The modern philosophical era commenced with the academic and Pyrrhonist scepticism, engaged by Bacon and Descartes and never really truncated until it found its way inside the mind of Hegel. Unfortunately, history did not culminate in the Prussian State of 1821 and the young Hegelians were allegedly, even arguing over poor Friedrich’s grave ten years later. So, anyone who thinks academic scepticism is something novel needs to get out more. Postmodern irony and scepticism display a marked distrust of what Lyotard termed ‘metanarratives’ but after a twentieth century that produced Nazism, Communism, Fascism and EastEnders, who could really blame them? These philosophical roots of the current postmodern debate are something I will return to in the concluding chapter of this study. The “postmodern” is often used by thinkers as a strawman, and more recently this has been the case with the outspoken Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has courted celebrities such as Stephen Fry and philosophers such as Roger Scruton.12 Besides this, he partook in the infamous and utterly tedious ‘debate’ with Slavoj Žižek, to which I  In point of fact we can locate this sort of proto-nihilism even further back, to the first metaphysicians and the pre-Socratics. One thinks of Heraclitus’ famous dictum that one can’t jump in the same river twice. 12  Peterson’s work in his own field is way better, as if the case with his excellent 1999 tome, Maps of Meaning. I also largely agree with his distrust of much of what now passes as political correctness and identarian politics in the academy. The occurrence of what I would be as bold as to call linguistic fascism and the bullying in the academy that has run in tandem with this new paradigm is something that warrants genuine concern. I am also a member of the organisation SAFS (the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship), www.safs.ca and sincerely hope more new academics will join organisations like this, rather than bowing to divisive and often unwarranted, pressure from faculty and admin staff keen to tick the PC checklist. 11

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alluded at the commencement of this chapter: a spectacle that made the presidential debates between Trump and Biden appear like the World Mensa Finals. Peterson’s early monograph, Maps of Meaning (1999), is excellently articulated and makes perfect sense in an age of what Heidegger frames by the term Gestell and in which Being is disclosed in such a technological, alienating and industrialised fashion, that people are essentially dehumanized and seen as raw products. However, as is the case with Peterson’s more recent polemical postulations, one should perhaps be more cautious than to use the hyponym ‘postmodern’ as a nomological net within which to grasp all of the current existential crisis. I will attend to the logic—or in Lyotard’s formation “Inventor’s Paralogy”—of the postmodern artwork/science/political praxis, before then assessing its connection to what certain thinkers term ‘postmodern’ philosophy. This being a philosophy placed in speech-marks precisely because I don’t actually believe there exists such a body of philosophy (I’m sure someone would accuse me taking a typically postmodern position in making this utterance); certainly, not in the sense that there existed a coherent analytic or phenomenological tradition of philosophy. The term has more recently come to be used in a derogatory fashion, much as the term “romantic” was used once by more conservative thinkers. To commence with, there are a number of key aspects or notions that postmodernism shares with its modernist predecessor, such as what one might call the self-conscious nature of the work of art itself, and the ontologically interconnected nature of various works of art, (people sometimes use Julia Kristeva’s phrase intertextuality in this sense). There is a natural leaning towards poststructuralism here, although Derrida himself was loathe to use the term (or even the term postmodernism). The inherent difficulty of the work, as with my argument of homology or autology used throughout this book, the self-reference to a discourse as inherently negative or indirectly linked to an ultimately unknowable logoi, Quine’s Idea idea, or Wilfrid Sellars’ Myth of the Given, is obviously destined to be as clear as mud. None of this is going to add up to clarity of formulation in the final instance; what is known is known by ambiguity and a

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naturally limited or indirect formulation.13 One may even say that in Marcuse’s sense of recuperation, the work of art is postmodern before it is recuperated and transformed into a modernist work. The new is always already postmodern and becomes modern once it is recuperated, so, boundaries are constantly being interrogated with the postmodern. Perhaps writers such as John Fowles best personify the aesthetic postmodern, in novels such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Fowles constantly steps out of the text: referring for example to a young man working away at that time in The British Library Reading Rooms (Marx) and another young man digging away at a different form of stratification, (the geological work of Thomas Lyle), on another part of the Dorsett Coast. Alternative endings are produced, and the author is constantly reminding us of his tenuous ontology as author. The movie that was made in 1981 is equally self-referential and postmodern, starring Jeremey Irons and Meryl Streep. The screenplay by Harold Pinter is about a movie being made about the book, brilliantly reflecting the postmodern aspect of a hall of mirrors without a fixed original (all is simulacra—another major theme of postmodernism). A theme of course explored by various other authors of the postmodern novel, who developed one of its most successful sub-­ genres, that of Sci Fi. Most famously, one thinks of Phillip K. Dicks’ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), which of course, became the movie Bladerunner (1982). Much of the British popular comedy of the nineties was postmodern in its origins, from Ricky Gervais’s brilliant—and at times bathetic—The Office, Ali G, Trigger Happy TV, the brilliant satirical newsroom spoof, The Day Today to the comedic tour-de -force, Brasseye. The self-conscious nature of the postmodern aesthetic, the reshaping of boundaries and the elevation and admixture of high and low culture made for an explosive cocktail of comedy where boundaries and limits were constantly rechallenged and reinterpreted. It would seem that even the most patrician and traditional cultural guardians were no match for the satirical speed and wit with which postmodern humour would take its merciless aim.  In reductionist terms, one even thinks of the Heisenberg principle of measurement in experimental physics; it seems that there will always be a statistical degree of freedom, whichever tool of measurement we employ. 13

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Then there was the rise of much of postcolonial studies in universities, such as Sussex and cultural studies departments such as that of Birmingham (in the UK), under the aegis of Ranajit Guha, Homi K. Bhabha and Stuart Hall. The last bastion of the elite was being challenged, culture, along with the cultural superiority of (E)nglish; the pluralisation and nominalisation of RP (Received Pronunciation) “RIP RP” as Tony Harrison memorably put it in his poem “UZ and Them”; the age of knowledges, englishes and epistemes was well and truly upon UZ. Now we could all take the episteme—or so it seemed. In short, very short, there was no place left to hide and a Welsh bloke was reading the BBC News as 6 pm. Hugh do you think you are?14 The last symbolic system was finally being eaten by capital, and as it turned out, it was quite the feast. The only issue with liberal humanism on such a scale was that with the cultural system’s structurally self-deconstructing identity was suddenly rearing its Janus-faced, hybrid visage. If set theory had been set for a collapse, if Russell had ruined Frege’s Christmas one hundred years or so previously, if Husserl’s psychologism had fallen to linguistic psychologism after the Origins of Geometry, then philosophical scepticism was to be given free reign again; call it postmodernism, poststructuralism, or even The Left, as many thinkers with intellectual Turret’s syndrome—a propensity for philosophical category errors and badly misused terms of metonymy—were prone to do. The fact is, there aren’t many people in the twenty-first century who are prone to go all Martin Luther and nail their demands upon the door these days. One only needs to take a cursory glance at twentieth century paradigms such as Stalinism, Maoism, Fascism and Nazism to remind oneself why we have identity crises; at least, in the achieved or political sense of the phrase anyway. One of the reasons ascribed identity has been politicised is the fact that it seems the one form of identity that can be safely bet upon in a neoliberal casino where the stakes on achieved  The awful pun above was inspired by the fact that throughout the 90s, the early evening BBC 1 main news was read by the Welshman, Hugh Edwards. I could however still remember the age of Alistair Burnett and Angela Rippon, where RP was still in full swinging parlance on the main evening news. I hope to be excused my silly and profoundly tacky puns on the grounds that Postmodernism is the subject under discussion and in the name of authenticity, I’m trying to break down as many barriers as possible. 14

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identity are way too risky. The philosophical game of Texas Scepticism is alive and well, but the terms have been refreshed and you’re no longer a card-­carrying political player but a passport-carrying player. Bio-identity became politicised while the lights were out. The stakes are way less risky too: there’s no political position to ostensibly defend—with history invariably against you—you simply show your passport and history is NO LONGER the nightmare from which you’re trying to awake. In fact, it does all of the legwork for you—a late capitalists’ wet dream. In 1945, Bertrand Russell made another one of his bold claims about the university system in general but it stuck in my head at the time I read it and even though I was a just starting out as a doctoral candidate: With the Reformation, the situation changed. Many of the most earnest Protestants were business men, to who lending money at interest was essential. Consequently, first Calvin, and then other Protestant divines, sanctioned interest. At last the Catholic Church was compelled to follow suit, because the old prohibitions did not suit the modern world. Philosophers, whose incomes are derived from the investments of universities, have favoured universities ever since they ceased to be ecclesiastics and therefore connected with landowning. At every stage, there has been a wealth of theoretical argument to support the economically convenient option. (Russell, The History of Western Philosophy, 199)

Lutheranism did indeed sit well with the underlying theological arguments; and the newer one-size-fits-all options inherent in Lutheran eschatology also sat well the new Protestant profs, who took tenure in perhaps more ways than the simple academic parsing of the phrase. If this sounds suspiciously Marxist (in the genuine and now ironically conservative/classical sense of the phrase—as opposed to Jordan Peterson’s fairytale version of the Left) then it indeed is. The fact is that the university system, while allowing for a number of great teachers and philosophers, was also singing to the tune of modern Liberalism and Adam Smith’s hidden hand, or Marx’ base was sitting just below the superstructural surface. In fact, the idea of tenure in this ironic landowning sense has now burgeoned into something far more perilous, and querulous. For professors,

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tenure is now tenuous at best, depending on your overall politics and unfortunately sometimes upon your ascribed status. Politics have come to mean something much more than previously imagined. The new doxa (or intellectual status quo), has also been illustrated also by Steven Connor in his excellent monograph, Postmodernist Culture: Sheer size does not in itself disprove the charge of impotence levelled at the academic humanities, however, and it would be possible to point to this as the mode of the academy’s withdrawal from real life, in a bureaucratic multiplication of devices for How Not To Do It, like Dickens’s Circumlocution Office. The point is that, despite all this involution, the humanities in Britain and the US have maintained a clearly visible and highly successful function of accreditation for all the traditionally privileged professions and social functions—which includes banking, commerce, and individual management alongside ‘humane’ occupations like teaching and social work. Far from being merely ‘irrelevant’, or sacrificing their task of oppositionality, the humanities have come to act as a it were, via their lack of direct effectuality, and in their claims to provide ideological completeness and adaptability as an important kind of lubricant in the machine of higher education, in its reproductions of power and privilege. (Connor, 15)

In terms of SE Asia, one only has to see the reflection of this in the courses that are for example provided by English Departments for other specialisms, in particular, the growing roles of on-campus Language Institutes to provide generic language courses for non-English majors in the various areas of business language. A fine reflection of this was that two years ago, after I’d been invited to give a keynote speech at a small One Day Conference on The Rise of the New Left at CMU, the conference was moved, for no ostensible reason, off-campus. The postmodern politics we are discussing here, as opposed to the aesthetic postmodernism delineated above, has also been accused of complicity by Terry Eagleton. The complicity is in not only forging ahead with an ideological agenda, but further neutralizing the critical and aesthetic transmissions of modernism, to the point where once again the genuinely new Avant-garde postmodern is recuperated, neutralised and then re-acculturated into becoming an acceptable cultural discourse itself.

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Alongside this account of the role of the academy in assimilating modernism goes a conventional account of the progressive withdrawal of institutions of criticism from social. political and cultural engagement. For Terry Eagleton, the high point of criticism was the bourgeois ‘public sphere’ of the eighteenth century, when it was still possible for the activity of criticism to still be seen as a form of conversation in its conflict and disagreements, set against a ground of consensus and free communicative exchange. The subsequent academisation of criticism, during the nineteenth century and in accelerated form in the twentieth century provided it with an institutional bias and professional structure, but by the same token signalled the beginning of its sequestration from the public realm. (Connor, 12–13)

For Eagleton, as for myself, the romantic period seemed to mark the high watermark of the humanist critic as hero, from Hogg, Hunt, Pater, Coleridge, Carlyle, Shelley, to Hazlitt and Cobbett. Examples of public debate about Wordsworth himself as the poet laureate after his Excursion (1814) and his “Thanksgiving Ode” in 1815 really signify an original ‘culture war’ that was gloriously public and beautifully articulated on all sides; this includes also the work of caricature by brilliant artists such as the magnificent Gillray.15 One however needs to add yet another political proviso to the postmodern/liberal politicisation not just of academic discourse, but also of discourse in the public sphere of reason. Habermas’ dream of ‘communicative rationality,’ it seems to appear, has found a fertile ground in the fecund jungle of social media. Yet here perhaps, we have all been prithee to the great tech n’ scroll swindle. Suddenly, the intellectual dream of a Coleridgean clerisy is no longer needed because we have all been given our 15  minutes of infamy—we have all subscribed to the great online public debate. While Rome is sizzling, between cross-cultural burger baps, we have all switched off to the rational instrumentalisation of the university campus and the rationalisation of the sphere of public discourse. Unfortunately, it’s way more postmodern (and ironic) than that.  Jeffrey Cox’ monograph William Wordsworth, Second Generation Romantic: contesting poetry after Waterloo, CUP, Cambridge, 2021 does a great job of historicising Wordsworth, whilst outlining and assessing the cultural reaction to his perceived political apostasy after Waterloo, by thinkers such as Hunt, Byron and Shelley. 15

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We freely give our biodata to Facebook, in the hope of having some idea how we’ll look when we’re 64 (I’m sure that WAS NOT what McCartney had in mind in Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), and we’re freely farmed every day of the year, 365 DAYS… The real irony is of course the situational irony of someone waxing lyrical on the Facebook platform about Julian Assange’s rights or their (perish the thought—yet alone notion) freedom to say what on earth they damn well please. These very nefarious aspects of postmodernism, also attest to the other frightening fact of screen time in the digital age. Reading energy is indeed lost in the rabbit hole that is social media, and the simple fact is that yes, we’ve retuned to a culture of tablets and yes, the literacy rate seems about as high as what it did when the original stone tablets were in place a few millennia back. Can anyone hear a cultural Tik Tok? Even our use of language LOL, has become shortsighted. If Wittgenstein was correct in assuming that the “limits of my language are the limits of my world” then we need to stop our myopic somnambulism sooner rather than later. Prescient as ever, Heidegger wrote this in the introduction to his lectures on the seminal German poet, Hölderlin: One now speaks and writes of the “uni” and means the university. The hideousness of this linguistic construction perhaps corresponds to the degree of understanding one is able to summon for the aforementioned institution. This Americanization of language and increasing erosion of language to a technical instrument or vehicle of communication does not stem from some casual neglect or superficiality on the part of individuals or entire professions and organizations. This process has metaphysical grounds and for this very reason cannot be “stopped,” which would indeed also only be a technical intervention. We must reflect upon the event that is transpiring [sich ereignet] in this process: that the contemporary planetary human being no longer has “time” left for the word (that is, for the highest distinction of his essence). All of this has nothing to do with the corruption or purification of language. This process––in which the word is denied time and a phonetic abbreviation is seized upon––extends back into grounds upon which Western history, and thereby European, and thereby modern planetary “history” in general, rests. (Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” 25)

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Heidegger was however aware of—even before his own Kehre (turn)—the dangers of a truly truncated linguistic world disclosure and where nations could be heading if this decline was left unchecked. Our essence and its development could, (and in my opinion) has, been paradoxically halted in the wake of the fusion of the linguistic turn, in a sense we need to refresh our home screens and start reusing language in such a manner as to still give us all communitarian hope for the future. If literary theory and philosophy dovetailed to disclose the postmodern world to us, it can equally reenvisage—as it’s constantly prone to do—or refresh its vista of the world for us, to reinvigorate our sense of Being-in-the-world. The verbal brilliance and dexterity of postmodern aesthetics paradoxically also reminds us of the power of our self-conscious, autological discourse, to re-disclose the world to us. Our human ability’ as linguistic arbiters of ‘worldhood’, to reengage, reconstruct and refresh the screen, reminds us not only of the ethical parsing central to deconstruction but also of the new form of communitarian pragmatics that I will offer in the subsequent chapters as one of the solutions to the current crisis of the humanities— and culture at large. The refresh button is also required in light of the crippled epistemology that the internet autodidactics are daily offering up as cultural knowledge. One indeed cannot expect more when confronted with the dizzying array of conspiracies that form the current spectrum under the refraction of the internet. One of the amazing sleights of hand has been the fact that the so-called ‘New Left’ has become so parsimonious, as to reorganize categories using ‘Newspeak’ in a manner by which Orwell himself would have been more than impressed. A certain man, recently elected to the highest office in the world, became a ‘fascist.’ Yet his predecessor, Barack Obama, not only sold out en masse to the banks both during and after his tenure as president, but also dropped more bombs by way of drone strikes than any other president in US history.16 Moreover, “fake news” and “fake narratives” are about as postmodern as things get. When we have a president falling victim to the legacy of  This is not to politicise my polemic—I’d still personally vote for Barack Obama over Donald Trump anyway—this is just to try give to some deictic sense to the sort of chicanery that goes on under the aegis of the ‘postmodern.’ And Trump himself is also guilty of exploiting the literary and cultural theory we have inherited, as are his Democratic opponents. 16

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theory and in particular the synchronic/diachronic disjunct of modern linguistic theory, it’s no surprise that the partisanship reaches such ugly proportions and the covid 19 ‘metanarrative’ has becomes so questioned by the general public. Perhaps the most colossal irony of all lies giftwrapped in the lack of a metaphysics of ‘presence’ that, after the supposed rigours of both Peircean and Saussurean semiotics/semiology, was bequeathed the so-called ‘soft humanities.’ People are staggering around without any idea who Jean Baudrillard or Jean Francoise Lyotard were.17 The narratives that I have claimed inherent instabilities for in this study have been the formalist/ structuralist and analytical signifying systems that in formal mathematics, logic and semantics were, by the very nature of their DNA, doomed to paradoxical failure. These tectonic shifts of linguistic scepticism aren’t going away; in fact, they’ve just finally erupted in media res on an historical faultline, that stretches all the way from ancient Greece to modern Washington. The irony is that the “postmodern” is a symptom and not cause of this historical instability and needs to be addressed accordingly. The state of the democratic praxis is due, in large part, to the problem that seasoned signifiers such as ‘left’ and ‘right’ should now be disbanded altogether. The old binary logic needs realignment with new political realities, which are bound up with the dynamism and the synchrony of the changing structuralist landscape—otherwise there will be many more cries of fake news and much more division amongst the working classes and the rapidly shrinking middle classes. This is why the limits of  Jean Baudrillard famously made the claim that the 1991 Gulf War never happened-meaning that in the age of simulacra/simulation and the hyperreal it’s hard to actually tell where the original is located pace the mass media bombardment of our senses: therefore, how much of the presentation of the war was mass media manipulation? Furthermore, one recalls the horror of 9/11 and the often heard rection of people to those macabre events: ‘it was like watching a movie.’ Given current claims about fake news narratives and sinister manipulation of the ‘real’ it’s hard to say just where one stands ontologically, which of course is not to be taken literally but only in the context of the symbolic exchange of signs in a mass-media habitat. Without question, the general public’s trust in the mainstream media is down exponentially. Baudrillard’s work and thought was always recognised as one of the mainstays of postmodern thought. As was Foucault, and now many on the ‘right’ would find it hard to contend Foucault’s claims about the uses and manipulations governments make of narratives in order to fit and facilitate political structures to new civic programmes or paradigms. The obvious current example, which is connected to bio-identity, social gatherings and the organization of labour amongst other things, has been the political and civic fall out from the Covid 19 pandemic. 17

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Liberalist political economy have been dressed up as Marxism. The problem is, and here is yet another of the proliferation of fake narratives, Marxism, like Christianity and Hegelianism, is one of the metanarratives to which Lyotard referred in The Postmodern Condition, so it seems odd that it’s been aligned by otherwise erudite thinkers such as Jordan Peterson with postmodernism? This monumental category error was also outlined and countered by Terry Eagleton’s neo-Marxist argument way back in 1986, in which he correctly situates postmodernism as the aesthetic currency of Late Capitalism. But the fact that modernism continues to struggle for meaning is exactly what makes it so interesting. For this struggle continually drives it towards classical styles of sense-making which are at once unacceptable and inescapable, traditional matrices of meaning which have become progressively empty, but which nevertheless continue to exert their implacable force. It is in just this way that Walter Benjamin reads Franz Kafka, whose fiction inherits the form of a traditional storytelling without its truth contents. A whole traditional ideology of representation is in crisis, yet this does not mean that the search for truth is abandoned. Postmodernism, by contrast, commits the apocalyptic error of believing that the discrediting of this particular representational epistemology is the death of truth itself, just as it sometimes mistakes the disintegration of traditional ideologies of the subject for the subject’s final disappearance. In both cases, the obituary notices are greatly exaggerated. (Lodge, Modern Theory and Criticism, 395)

For Eagleton, the traditional humanist subject is brought under scrutiny and these two forms of aesthetics instantiate two divergent responses. One can trace this back to the implacable bourgeois subjectivity of Prufrock to see the selfsame narratorial subject under scrutiny. However, for Eagleton the postmodern results in a negation of this subjectivity (a notion I’m confident is also shared by Peterson—but under the incorrect nomenclature of Marxism). However, according to Eagleton, the political agitator, the Marxist man of political action hangs onto this subjectivity, whilst the aesthetic currency of Late Capital, postmodernism, does not require this subjectivity. The Warholean soupcan or the re-printable, restampable commodity that is fed by the fetishism of capital and wage

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labour has no need of this subject. The aura, once so messianically calibrated by Benjamin is now celebrated by its absence. This well-thoughtout position is a long way from the oversimplified straw man Marxism carved under the hammer and battery-driven scythe of Peterson.18 Eagleton’s vision of postmodernism and modernism was not the only version in town, as was the case when The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory analysed modernism. Their sense of the uses of modernism, was not the same as either Benjamin or Brecht at the time.19 The whole point, however, is that the one-dimensional argument of Peterson is a straw man. One also imagines a very different ‘rumble in the jungle’ had Peterson encountered Eagleton instead of the carnivalesque Slavoj Žižek.

 Both Benjamin and the famous US Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson, saw mass media production in a much more positive light than did Eagleton. Jameson adumbrated his much more positive rendering of the postmodern and the Marxist in his tome Postmodernism, or the Cultural logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Benjamin’s famous and much-lauded essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) celebrates the revolutionary potential of the industry of mass reproduction whilst famously adumbrating the potential loss of the ‘aura’ of an original work of art. 19  The Frankfurt school of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, saw modernism as a tool for alienation that could both provide verisimilitude to the true state of the subaltern’s class position under the labour conditions of capitalism, whilst also heightening their awareness of their situation in a Brechtian sense by defamiliarising the familiar state of the mass-produced commodity markets through its requirement for deeper intellectual engagement by the individual subject. By way of contrast, the SS (Soviet Socialist) Realists, as represented by the thought of György Lukács in “The Ideology of Modernism” (1963), argued that experimental novels written by writers such as Joyce simply reflected the static consciousness of the human subject under capitalism, presenting a sort of pathology that was normalised and in actual fact prevented the subject from acting in any politically revolutionary manner whatsoever. Lukács compared a ‘realist’ monologue of Goethe’s novel Lotte in Weimar with Molly Bloom’s interior monologue at the end of Ulysses, arguing that Goethe’s work showed up the real historical context and circumstances, whereas Joyces ‘static’ representation did nothing but replicate and reinforce the subjective pathology of the alienated proletariat under the aegis of capitalism. Therefore, from a critical perspective Goethe’s work demonstrated more verisimilitude and was consequently more valuable as a work of art. 18

8 Phrónēsis in Literary Criticism—The Pragmatic Denouement

All of the arguments adumbrated in this study arise from the idea that literary theory and criticism came about in the modern sense of ‘theory,’ that is, out of a dovetailing of philosophy and the original notion of literary criticism. This can be traced back to the fact that both philosophy in its Anglo-American formations and its broadly labelled continental formations, both reached limits within the guise of the scepticism by which it has it has partly been characterised by since the classical era. The Anglo-­ American tradition morphed from the logical form postulated by Russell and Frege, as a counterattack upon the then Hegelian continental tradition, (which at that time also dominated British philosophy), into the ordinary language philosophy and its important sub-categories such as speech act theory. Concomitantly, the continental tradition morphed into Husserlean transcendental phenomenology, then into hermeneutical phenomenology and its own sub-categories of poststructuralism, deconstruction, etc. The scepticism upon which both traditions found themselves beached, was now linguistic in its bent. I’ve also argued that as philosophy for the humanities, it has become more and more identified with literary criticism and theory. This is, in the main, due to this linguistic scepticism. This © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1_8

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was also the reason why thinkers such as Rorty, Cavell and Taylor have come more and more to base their philosophical work in the purview of literary theory and criticism and in particular theories such as Rorty’s behavioural pragmatism, which give us a deictic sign towards new forms of knowledge based not upon the traditional philosophical questions about certainty or scepticism itself, but upon asking new pragmatic questions based upon historical contextualisation and hermeneutics. Such questions find a congenial home within the purview of literary criticism and theory. In this chapter, by way of summary, I’d like to follow this line of argument for literary theory and criticism, pointing to possible future developments, and also assessing some of the pernicious dangers that have also arisen from the politicisation of literary theory and criticism since the Second World War. In what has very loosely been labelled: the postmodern era. The Greek term phrónēsis is loosely translated into English using phrases such as prudence, practical value, and pragmatic. It’s a form of knowledge or wisdom that relates to what John Dewey, William James and later Richard Rorty, parsed as pragmatism. It implies also both good judgment and character, in a similar vein to what Spinoza would call fortitudo and generositas. Through Medieval times, it was commonly discussed in the categories first brought to light by the ancient Greeks. For the purposes of our discussion, this form of knowledge is somewhat different from the certainty that is implied within the remit of analytical, positivist, empiricist or verificationist notions. The more general purview of phrónēsis is closer to the sort of knowledge commonly farmed within the husbandry of the humanities—the reason the humanities are held in such high regard as an area of knowledge in Germany is because, going back to their romantic movement, Das Geisteswissenschaften was regarded as an epistemological category in its own right, as distinct from Das Naturwissenschaft—which is the area of the natural sciences. Perhaps one reason that philosophy for the modern humanities strayed into the ball-park of set theory paradox and phenomenological hermeneutics was that it partially took on the extra ballast of Naturwissenschaft. However, philosophy clearly didn’t climb back through the fence without a newly reinvigorated game of Phrónēsis. This, I would contest, is the reason that humanities professors have been hammering out the finer

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points of Sayer’s Law throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps the telos of knowledge in the humanities was in the paradoxical recognition or acknowledgment of our epistemological, ethical, and ontological limits. From here-on-in, philosophers and theorists can peruse their institutional libraries (or LRCs as they’re fashionably labelled), without the Manichean baggage of avoiding either Lacan, Lyotard or Žižek, in preference for Austin, Ryle or Russell. I dare them… Of course, language, and, more specifically, rhetoric, are commonly sighted as a salient reason for the avoidance of much of the continental side of the library.1 However, this also has deeper roots in the wider history of both Western philosophy and theology. This was more recently flagged by the conservative critic and theorist Leo Strauss, who argued that in the Western tradition the apparent schism between Athens and Jerusalem, or Western philosophy and the Judaic-Christian tradition has led into our modern crisis of the Humanities (or culture) and can be traced to, amongst other things, the difference between the conceptions of mythos and logos and the sophists or the Platonists. These initial tensions are contestably inherent in the DNA of modern Liberalism, between the Millenarian narrative of the Logos and the pre-socratic metaphysical scepticism that was outlined in Plato’s dialogue on the philosopher Gorgias.2 The original sophists, who attracted the ire of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, had argued pace the cornucopia of metaphysics concocted by the pre-Socratics, and as exemplified by Gorgias, that we can’t know knowledge, however, we can know the human world of politics and can therefore understand this through a non-metaphysical, social constructivist notion of the world.3

 Samuel Wheeler claimed that he once gave Derrida a copy of a clear and concise example of analytic philosophy; the book Naming and Necessity by Kripke. Derrida said he couldn’t make sense of the text, which may indicate a residual difference in reading methods and philosophical training in the humanities. I personally find Heidegger less labourious to read than I do Donald Davidson or W.V.O Quine. It would appear the sword of comprehension cuts both ways. 2  Strauss’ dichotomisation of Jerusalem and Athens was not the first as this was also flagged by the second century African theologian Tertullian. 3  This is of the original form of ‘ethical egoism’ and so has its terminus in the work of another conservative philosopher, Ayn Rand. 1

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The baton of the Logos was however taken on by Christianity, which was one of the reasons that Strauss argued that the idea of reason as against revelation was a misnomer (a notion that would no doubt depend upon one’s wider faith and politics). Having joined the historical relay, Christianity refined pre-Socratic narratives such as the apeiron and post-­ Socratic notions such as the demiurge, the unmoved mover, and the forms. Moreover, these narrative schematics also theologically matured later through St. Augustine’s famous Chapter 13 of The Confessions.4 The Logos comes from this lineage and is a foundationalist ontology and epistemology that stemmed from challenges to the sophistry of the Sophists.5 These two positions have changed masks at the historical ball but have remained within the genome that has blossomed in the numerous tensions in Modern Liberalism.6 Indeed, in a prescient article in 1967, “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections” Leo Strauss wrote: However much the science of all cultures may protest its innocence of all preferences or evaluations, it fosters a specific moral posture. Since it requires openness to all cultures, it fosters universal tolerance and the exhilaration which derives from the beholding of diversity; it necessarily affects all cultures that it can still affect by contributing to their transformation in one and the same direction; it willy-nilly brings about a shift of emphasis from the particular to the universal. By asserting, if only implicitly, the Tightness of pluralism, it asserts that pluralism is the right way; it asserts the monism of universal tolerance and respect for diversity;  The notion of Christian values disguising their face in Enlightenment garb was also discerned by Schopenhauer who had allegedly claimed that taking on the values of Kant’s ethical system of the categorical imperative was like dancing at a masque all night with an Enlightenment notion and then at the end of the night the dancer removes its mask and one sees that they’ve been dancing with a Christian ethical system hidden in the deontological ethics (of duty) as argued in Kant’s theory of the moral law. 5  Once again, under a philological microscope we see how a word has changed meaning due to historicist happenstance. Sophistry has come to attain negative connotations since the historical success of the Logos narrative. When people cite the sophistry of postmodern thought, they likely do not realise how accurate they actually are—even though it’s in the original sense of the word. 6  Derrida has been criticized for his characterization of the “Logocentric” nature of the dominant Western philosophical narratives. This is because it has been charged as an attack upon “logic” as it has been characterised in this book. However, upon a close reading and in the context of the historical facts delineated here, we can see that Derrida is critiquing the tradition of the Judeo-­ Christian narrative as inherited from the Socratics and the claim that it’s an attack on the hegemony of “Western” logic and reason is an utter straw man argument. 4

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for by virtue of being an “-ism,” pluralism is a monism. (Strauss, Jerusalem and Athens)

The paradox of the monism of pluralism, that, according to Strauss, back in 1967 was an issue amongst cultural studies, has its roots in the narratorial tradition of the logos and its failure to be able to fully incorporate simple differences between cultures, unbridgeable gaps that are currently manifest in not just Liberal Praxis, but also in the ethnocentric execution of cultural studies.7 Transposing these ideas into the area of Thai culture and much of its own literary persuasions, one may not be entirely incorrect in considering the fact that a large region of the modern cultural doxa could be regarded as way more conservative than its Western counterpart. Theravada Buddhism, as opposed to Mahayana or Zen Buddhism is certainly in practice more oriented towards a group mentality than an individualist mentality and one would have to consider whether or not this is a mere coincidence, or related to the wider cultural ideology or logos.8 A Marxist take on this cultural praxis would indeed see the adoption of this branch of Buddhist thought, as suited to the wider economic base and as part of the superstructure and as such it orients citizens towards sustaining that branch.9 Literary texts in Thai often seem to reinforce this status quo. However, the ultimate undecidabilities in meaning also reflect the tensions discerned in the wider  Without straying too far beyond the remit of the current study, one thinks of Edward Said’s 1979 classic postcolonial challenge to Western ethnographic hegemony, Orientalism. 8  In Thai secondary education, the humanities are very conservative, and often referred to or seen as synonymous with “Thai Social Studies” and are very much an ideological tool through which to communicate the ideational and hegemonic aspects of Thai culture. In Wittgensteinian terms the forms of life communicated are often conservative; as in the West, the praxis of the Thai educational system matches that in the Western system, as outlined by the neomarxist sociologists, Herbert Bowles and Samuel Gintis, whereby a “hidden curriculum” is communicated through the structure of the Thai school system, preparing Thai youth to be good citizens within the parameters of the wider Thai culture. 9  Marx’ famous diagrammatic of the superstructure and the base was in actual fact popularised due to the seismic growth of sociology during the second half of the twentieth century. Marxist theory is a large contender for the crown in economics and philosophy but also more latterly in the field of the social sciences, where this actual minor aspect of his political economy was outlined in a small number of pages in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political of Economy (1859). It was also explored as part of the main thesis in The German Ideology (1945), although in the main that particular monograph became an Ad Hominem attack on Max Stirner and a survey of the main figures involved in International Communism at that time. 7

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DNA of foundational epistemology in general, which returns us to the contestation between a Logos and the sophistry of the knowledge of unknowing, or a pluralism and monistic aspect that can be deconstructed in the wider self-representations of Thai culture, or waddthantham. In Thai literary history, an apparent conservative bias can at first be discerned in texts such as Kukrit Pramoj’ Red Bamboo, in which the metonymic “red” signifies the threat of communism to the social order, and the bamboo itself synecdochically represents agrarian promise, honesty and labour. The bamboo can also represent nature itself and the red can therefore be seen as sullying the natural purity of the bamboo. The conservation of a natural order, a tree that is indigenous to Thailand, can signify the danger of what would be lost when the natural state of things fails to be preserved.10 The short preamble to the book ends: Apart from the parallel here mentioned, the writer attempts to depict a Thai village as it actually is, especially at the moment when life there comes into contact with the new Thought and new Doctrine, which seem to drive the world into a mad series of international conferences at the present moment. (Pramoj, 2)

The “new thought and doctrine” are, of course, communism and its perceived threat to the hegemony of the newly established world hegemon, the United States, especially after the Marshall Plan and the economic and national successes of World War Two. After this terse introduction, Pramoj uses the literary device of local colour to metonymically (in a Jakobsonian sense of the phrase) build up a rural idyl of an untainted and almost Elysian village in a significant locale well north of Bangkok, which of course signifies the new and cosmopolitan ideas threatening the idyllic village in the north. We are also told, in a slightly ironic fashion that “…the name of “Red Bamboo” may have an influence on the actions if those who have chosen that village as a place to make a living or carry on  Pramoj acknowledges the plagiaristic nature of the original serialised text, which was based upon the series of short stories about the conflict between the pig-headed and tenacious priest Don Camillo and the communist mayor Peppone in the Italian work of Giovanni Guareschi. The twentieth century literary fashion in Thailand for plagiarising European texts, especially in the genre of Romance, is also deftly coverd in Sasinne Khunkaew’s unpublished PhD thesis, Femininity and Masculinity in Three Selected Twentieth-Century Thai Romance Fictions, 2015. 10

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their religion, which, broadly speaking, may be described as the way towards self-expression.” (4). The remainder of the often highly amusing text is centred around the conflict, more often than not portrayed in a satirical and commedia dell’arte fashion, between the abbot of the monastery and the man with the ideas towards self-expression, Kwaen. One more amusing chapter will suffice to illustrate the satirically conveyed conservatism, and also the inherent historicist tensions bubbling below the unconscious of the text.11 In chapter five, which commences: Kwaen Kaemchorn used to have a wireless set, but now he had it no more. It was a set run on a very great number of flash light batteries and it used to give out capitalistic news, reactionary opinions an poisonous music. When the price of batteries went up out of proportion to their short life, Kwaen threw the receiving set into the canal, in full view of his comrades, saying emotionally: “We do not want our clean ears to be polluted by the corrupt and dirty vice of exploiting capitalists!” (Pramoj, 65)

One hears the naiveté of the character, who functions as the symbiotic foil to the Abbot, who in turn is subject to the humorous disdain of the Lord Buddha idyl throughout the text, as his hyperbolically-charged rhetoric rails against the “exploiting capitalists” and bemoans the loss of his “clean ears.” Pramoj then uses the imagery of light as a predominant literary device in the story, inheriting the archetypal binary relationship between light and dark, with the image of red being exploited in the title of a “False Dawn.” This seems to play on the semantics of a “red dawn” and the metonym “red” as being similarly false. Then, as the character Thom gets excited about the mistaken Red Army invasion he thinks is taking place, Pramoj plays with comic effect on the specular imagery of the stars in his head: Kwaen sat as still as a statue. His heart was beating in a way it had never done before. Hot blood seemed to rush to his head, making it reel and  There is indeed more to be said of the specific Thai modality of hegemonic didacticism of this text in comparison with that of two other books, A Young Man’s Fancy and The Circus of Life, which this author intends to write about in this sociopolitical vein, for his next major project. 11

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causing his eyes to see a constellation of red stars shining brightly in front of him. He did not notice whether each red star had its supporting sickle and hammer or not, since other thoughts were coming into his mind with a terrible rush. (Pramoj, 67)

The humorous allusion to the symbol of the flag is conflagrated with dizziness and uncertainty, after being hit over the head and becoming confused. Furthermore, when Kwaen goes to the Abbot’s cell to warn him of the coming danger, there is a light shining, which is the light of Buddhism that shines when all around is either darkness or dizziness, represented by the alternative faith in a communist future. However, having listened to the Abbot’s speech about his loyalty to the synecdochic cloth and by extension the Thai Nation, the rebel villagers begin to be taken over by romantic nationalism. “But wait, Kwaen,” Thiem said and nodded to Sai as though they already had an agreement, “I’ve listened to the Abbot and I’m beginning to wonder whether we’re on the right track. Everyone loves his own country, and we don’t really know who is invading our country at this moment…” (Pramoj, 76)

The singular, logocentric, metanarrative of international communism has been superseded by the narrative of romantic nationalism. This is another pluralistic narrative that draws on the paradox of cultural primitivism and purity, in light of the monistic narrative of cultural materialism; emphasising the sense that there is always another reading of history, culture, or economics. The idea that none of the narratives that have been spun in history are ever going to discern ultimate truth and certainty. In the case of Red Bamboo it is true that Pramoj is defending against the very real threat of both the cultural and material hegemony of the Communist International, and is no doubt a writer with a conservative bias.12 Yet, even with the inherent conservative ideology, as well that of his major novel, Four Reigns (1950), the historical ambiguities and ambivalences  As well as being a polymath scholar, Kukrit Pramoj established the conservative Social Action Party, the conservative newspaper Siam Rath in 1950 and was the Prime Minister between 1975 and 1976. 12

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brought to the fore also illustrate, (whether Pramoj meant this or not),13 the undecidabilities of our knowledge of the world and the instability in taking any one clear epistemological position because of the inherent uncertainties entailed in historicism and hermeneutics. The uncertainties and undecidabilities in this theoretical praxis always lie just below the textual surface, manifest inn Saussure’s langue and parole, or in the multifarious categories of C.S. Peirce, which stem from the hypernyms index, icon, symbol, or the tension between logos and sophistry. All of these claims of reason have one thing in common, which is that there is always necessary room for scepticism, unless we take a metaphysical leap of faith. Such a leap might resemble the Coleridgean romanticism of the organic versus the mechanical, or the supremacy of the linguistic symbolic over the allegorical, which is based upon a faith in contemplative reason, leading one to the steps of the divine.14 Coleridge’s romantic argument runs back to the Platonic notion of an idea and runs as a form of noetic contemplation, based partially on Jakob Böhme’s Christian mysticism and ultimately has its own roots in the theory of the Logos as the ultimate divine being and structural anchor, or transcendental signified.15 One other different but equally fruitful perspective on the dynamics of language and its relationships to new technologies is the novel fusion of sociolinguistic and historicist frameworks as expounded by Walter J. Ong, particularly in his brilliant Orality and Literacy (1982), in which he specifies the variegated forms of language use and the notion of narratorial genres such as biography, law, narrative and literary criticism as being suited to specific historical epochs and precis. For Ong, the various  One of the arguments for theory over and against Knapp and Michaels’ “Against Theory” argument is that this form of neo-pragmatism doesn’t take into account the Saussurean split between langue (as an independent linguistic whole) and parole (as individual speech) and assumes langue and parole are one and meaning is simply the author’s intention. The ethos of theory is of course that langue is constantly at odds with individual utterance and as such constantly interfering with the idea of meaning being as simple as the author’s intention. In Pramoj’ text the overall langue produces meaning beyond any simple conservative intention that may have been intended by the author. 14  I discuss both Coleridge and Goethe’s linguistic analysis of symbol and allegory in Chapter Two of my own Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition (2015), providing a poststructuralist bent to the kernel of my thesis. 15  See Peter Cheyne’s excellent study; Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy, OUP, 2020. 13

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linguistic paradigms within which these narratives are bound, such as the oral tradition of language use, the written form of its use, and the more recently technologised formats are part of the key to both comprehending various texts, and to interrogating our own historical regionality.16 Ong’s polemic entails the idea that language, as seen in structuralist analyses as a fixed architectonic structure, was only inculcated after the codification and systematisation implicit in the alphabetised and then the subsequently developed written formats of language. In sum, if philosophy is reflective about its own nature, what is it to make of the fact that philosophical thinking cannot be carried on by the unaided human mind but only by the human mind that has familiarised itself with a deeply interiorised technology of writing? What does this precisely intellectual need for technology have to say about the relationship of consciousness to the external universe? And what does it have to say about Marxist theories concentrating on technologies as means of production and alienation? Hegelian philosophy and its sequels are packed with orality-literacy problems. The fuller reflective discovery of the self on which so much of Hegel’s and other phenomenology depends is the result not only of writing but also of print: without these technologies the modern privation of the self and the modern acute, doubly reflexive self-awareness are impossible. (Ong, 173)

Ong, in drawing attention to the relationship between the oral and the textual as a mark of civilisation, is here ironically perhaps, drawing attention towards the self-consciousness that textual expansion brings to simple orality.17 The technology of print, as adumbrated earlier by Foucault,  One can also see a lose connection here with the rise of the academic discipline The History of the Book, which rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. This fascinating subject area, which I studied as part of my MA, traces the social, economic, aesthetic, historical and anthropological factors that led to the various paradigms of book production, construction and reception. Notable scholars in this field are William Ivin Jr. (1953), Martin and Febvre (1958), McLuhan (1962), Eisenstein (1979) John’s (1998), Sherman (2008) and Blair (2010). It would seem with the decline in readership, the change in reading interfaces and book reception in the technological age this subject is now as timely as ever. 17  Ong also brilliantly draws attention to the possibility of reading philosophy comparatively, hence a locus for “comparative philosophy” as well as comparative literature. How for example does the relationship between textuality and orality reflect upon our understanding and reading of medieval philosophy as opposed to Greek philosophy and in turn of course modern post-Cartesian philoso16

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and the printing press’ early capitalist mode of production also helped shaped our notion of the “author” (the “author-function”). Ong also draws our attention to deconstruction’s parsing of the Logocentric and the Phonocentric traditions in philosophy. In relation to my own argument, the technologising of the word has meant holding the word up to itself in a mirror and seeing itself as ontologically divided. The result in modernity has been the rise of the novel and its various forms18 as a form of knowledge dissemination and as the literary critic as the theoretical-heretic who stands on the fence in this no man’s land between the newly historicised oral and textual traditions.19 One may even see a strong link between modern philosophy, after Descartes, Newton, Galileo and Bacon, as also reflecting the new age of McLuhan’s “Guttenberg Galaxy” after the codification of the Logos as language and the ensuing post-Lutherean religious and market conditions. This new historical paradigm expected closed systems, not just in the ontology of the universe, but also in the newly codified universe of the written word.20 The structuralist search for closed structural systems, and the “rupture” as Derrida called it, that comes from this anthropological codification: the question of the “centre,” or “structurality of structure,” both stem from an historical epoch. It is an epoch that has now phy in relationship to its own relation to textuality and its distance from the oral tradition? While strictly speaking his characterisation of Hegel’s work as phenomenological is incorrect (it’s a form of Absolute Idealism), the self-consciousness and concurrently divided nature of his work, especially his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is accurate. The notion that this is purely due to its self-­ conscious relationship to the oral tradition as a textual work itself is I’m sure in part correct. 18  The Bildungsroman, the Roman a Clef, etc. 19  Moreover, if the thrust of my historicist argument is correct, then the technologising of the word has also had a paradoxical effect in that it has culminated in a less-literate populous. This means the logocentric (in both meanings as the privileging of “the Word” and as the tradition of ontological narrative inherited from Socrates), has led to both a “postmodern condition” where metanarratives such as Christianity have left town, or need ‘get out of jail free’ cards; or where the presence of ‘the Word’ is less felt and has been superseded by less literacy, the return of a scribal/tablet relationship with culture and in Peirce’s terminology, the rise of the icon as the dominant semiotic signal. So, Ong’s technological-historicist analysis of orality, technology and the word seems more prescient now than ever. 20  Such changing codifications and openings up in the British English of the burgeoning Second Empire, caught between the twin peaks of Protestantism and classical linguistic influences were no doubt in part the reasons for ships such as The Mayflower with its puritan baggage and the need for a “good old lad” such as Noah Webster to reinvigorate into parlance, such stock phrases as “the fall” instead of the lovely new “autumn.”

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been superseded by what people disparagingly parse as the “postmodern” but is actually the tension between the Logos and Sophistry, a fixed parole as opposed to an unfixable, dynamic, sophistic undercurrent that continually rises to the surface, as in the subterranean forces of history and tradition in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” When language is made self-­ conscious as logos, is turned upon itself, the inevitable result will be the logical paradox of Russell’s set theory, or the rupture from transcendental phenomenology to hermeneutical phenomenology, or the rupture of structuralism to poststructuralism. Language as form was never supposed to be closed in the first place, which is what I think Ong and the poststructuralists agree upon. In Ong’s words: But why should all the implications suggested by language be consistent? What leads one to believe that language can be so structured as to be perfectly consistent with itself, so as to be a closed system? There are no closed systems and never have been. The illusion that logic is a closed system has been encouraged by writing and even more print. Oral cultures hardly had this kind of illusion, though they had others. They had no sense of language as ‘structure’. They did not conceive of language by analogy with a building or other object in space. Language and thought for the ancient Greeks grew out of memory. Mnemosyne, not Hephaestus, is the mother of the Muses. Architecture had nothing to do with language and thought. For ‘structuralism’ it does, by ineluctable implication. (Ong, 169)

Ong’s reference point is the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. However, one can interchange this for the ‘logical form’ sought by Russell or the ‘logical investigations’ pursued by Husserl—as I have formulated this study. The temporal modality of the linguistic sign—as opposed to the spatial model deployed in analytical, formalist and structuralist epistemologies—and recognised by Heidegger in his refreshed ontological page, implies an ongoing conversation with history, as implied by the historicism of his pupil Gadamer, and also implied in the work of Derrida’s teacher: Maurice Blanchot. In his brilliant, yet sometimes obscure, 1969 book The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot commences with the following claim:

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Yet when I speak of the “end of the book,” or better, “the absence of the book,” I do not mean to allude to developments in the audio-visual means of communication with which so many experts are concerned. If one ceased publishing books in favour of communication by voice, image, or machine, this would in no way change the reality of what is called the “book”; on the contrary, language, like speech, would thereby affirm all the more its predominance and its certitude of a possible truth. In other words, the Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thought over language, and the promise of a communication that would one day be immediate and transparent. (Blanchot, 2)

In the very notion of “the book,” is the notion of a coming unity, a unity that in this study has been characterised as Logos and is a-historical so that even in an age that has jettisoned the notion of the unitary book in favour of social media, still inherent, in Blanchot’s Saussurean terminology,21 is the notion of the book-as-logos in the current post-digital age. For Blanchot, this will-to-knowledge as power will no doubt be encapsulated in a digital parole or speech, that will still come up against the recalcitrance of langue and the whole, infinite system of signs that will continue to bubble to the top, producing elisions, paradoxes and new forms of theory. This is the same notion of the unitary book transmuted in Russell to be language as a purified, yet unitary, logical form. The communitarian term acknowledgement best sums up the epistemological state in which we continually find ourselves as human subjects, the closest we come to foundational knowledge is through foundations based upon common, reciprocated, acknowledgment. We acknowledge things in science, engineering, logic, and, of course, philosophy. Stanley Cavell first formulated the notion of acknowledgment as opposed to avoidance and in the very word itself we indeed find ‘knowledge’. Acknowledgement is a non-metaphysical version of what Hegel termed Anerkennung, or “Mutual Recognition.” Cavell claims that our sense of acknowledgment is also due  So, one here remembers that speech and language are no doubt being used in the Saussurean sense. The notion of parole mastering langue is key to the idea in Russsell, Frege, Husserl and even (to a point) the latter Heidegger after the Kehre. The notion of a pure, unitary language providing certainty—for Russell at least—in place of his older search for certainty through the British take on the absolute Idealism of Hegel. Of course, Russell would no doubt dispute the Saussurean claim. 21

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to our recognition of the sceptical limits of our everyday existence. It functions as a replacement of philosophical certainty, so, we can only know the world within the limits of our mind. However, we can acknowledge another’s pain, or even freedom, without entering-into an inter-subjective mode of recognition, which leads to the discovery of Spirit (Geist) as it does in the metaphysical work of his predecessor, Hegel. Cavell’s version of Hegel’s social theory of mutual recognition (Anerkennung) differs crucially in retaining the sense of scepticism localised in the “problem” of other minds. Whereas Hegel seeks an inter-­subjective route out of scepticism through mutual recognition in the famous chapter 4 of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),22 Cavell retains a scepticism that can only be countered by mutual acknowledgment. However, we, as human subjects, always remain haunted by scepticism, and avoidance of any formal truth acknowledgement is always a possibility.23 Therefore, scepticism is something, which, although avoidable in Hegel’s formulation of Spirit, is ultimately part of the limitation of the human subject in Cavell’s work—and is something we live with as human subjects. For example, Cavell famously exemplifies the abdication scene at the beginning of Shakespeare’s King Lear, where the king enacts the impulse to scepticism towards his daughter Cordelia, and this failure to acknowledge his daughter, or avoidance of love, feeds the logic of the eventual tragic outcome of the play. Lear personifies the sceptical impulse that haunts our human condition. In avoiding acknowledgement of  I am here using the term “acknowledgment” more specifically in Cavell’s sense in that knowledge acquisition, in a similar vein to that of Richard Rorty, in the sense that is not necessarily a discovery of a truth that is in some way “out there” but an acknowledgment of something previously not recognized by a human subject and thus literalized within a pre-existing discourse. This is also a further expansion of recognition beyond that of Anerkennung as posited by Hegel. For the key passage of Hegel’s movement into “Spirit” and eventually ethical substance, Sittlichkeit, see his Phenomenology (110–12). Moreover, Cavell’s development of “acknowledgment” was outlined in the essay “Knowing and Acknowledging” (Cavell Reader 46–71). It is in this sense of acknowledgment that poets such as Hölderlin and Wordsworth add to existing experience of the natural world, not in the sense of acknowledgment between two agents (as with Hegel). For a further discussion of this in relation to romantic poetics, see my own “Acknowledgment and Avoidance in Coleridge and Hölderlin.” In The European Romantic Review, Vol. 26, No. 2, 225–239, https://doi.org/1 0.1080/10509585.2015.1004548 (2015). 23  Hannah Arendt springs to mine here and the concept of “dehumanization” of whole ethnic groups. The worst case avoidance would be the callous and instrumentally rationalised treatment of the Jews, meted out by the Nazis during the Second World War. 22

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Cordelia’s love, he forgoes his knowledge of the responsibility the claim of Cordelia has upon his person. This can likewise be instanced by the claims that others have upon our person, and how our failure to acknowledge them leads to scepticism and recognitive breakdown. Cavell’s application of the philosophical concept of acknowledgement to Shakespeare can likewise be applied to all texts and narrative forms. It is in this sense that Cavell is a romantic thinker: he retains the sceptical sense in media res or infinite Sehnsucht, central to the thought and poetics of the romantics and the poststructuralists.24 This reading of Lear is also applied brilliantly in a Marxist framework by Terry Eagleton. However, Eagleton uses Lear to exemplify the ultimate “disembodiment’ of sovereign geopolitical power states such as the USA (of course, one should also add Russia to this very short list, something often unmentioned in Marxist commentaries). Eagleton’s reading of Lear does however reflect nicely the idea of avoidance—as opposed to acknowledgement—inherent in Lear’s actions. This changes, when he finally recognises his biological, familial, and national ties, to his family and his subjects, after he wonders off on the heath and gets lost in a literal and figurative storm, which awakens his senses and forces him into an acknowledgment of his “creatureliness” Eagleton writes: The storm has thrown Lear’s creatureliness into exposure, deflating his hubristic fantasies. He has discovered his flesh for the first time, and along with it his frailty and finitude. Gloucester will do the same when he is blinded, forced to ‘smell his way out to Dover’. He must learn, as he says, to ‘see feelingly’—to allow his reason to move within the constraints of the sensitive, suffering body. When we are out of our body, we are out of our mind. Lear’s new-found sensuous materialism takes the form of a political solidarity with the poor. (Eagleton, After Theory, 183)

He goes on to add “If power had a body, it would be forced to abdicate.” So, Eagleton combines Marx’s early materialism—his theory of our shared “species being” (Gattungsweisen)—with Aristotle’s biological and social theory of flourishing. The sense of bodily context, in media res, is  See Cavell’s discussion of Lear and his relationship with Cordelia in “Prologue: The Avoidance of Love (The Abdication Scene)” in The Cavell Reader. London: Blackwell, 1996. pp. 22–30. 24

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taken up to illustrate that in a materialistic economy, from the personal sense of flourishing right up to our sociological sense of Eudaimonia, a key recognitive factor is our sense of acknowledgment—of someone else’ pain, grief, suffering, happiness—to our geopolitical sense of acknowledgment of another nation’s sovereignty or political autonomy. This is so, whether we are theorising from a liberal or a socialist perspective. In just the same manner, Red Bamboo, through the vehicle of informal satire, also presents our sense of acknowledgment. However, in Pramoj’ sense, it’s the sense of distance literature gives us, the sense of an incomplete book, an incomplete framing, a romantically ironic performative praxis through which our incomplete grasp of ‘worldhood’ will forever lead to a sense of epistemological aporia. Acknowledgment is always partial, mutual, limited and based upon the sceptical realisation of our cognitive and logical limitations. The sense of acknowledgment engendered by our sceptical, post-­ Wittgensteinean limits, is articulated two millennia earlier in the character of the Sophists and has been more recently characterised by the poststructuralists. This seems to me the reason that “Literary Theory” has in some senses become the ventriloquised philosophy of the humanities. Moreover, it shows us why ultimate readings are contestable and also why we crave these sorts of discourse in order to make human sense of the milieu in which we find ourselves. However, this scepticism has helped engender a political turn in criticism (both cultural and literary), which has fuelled the currently misunderstood attacks on “Postmodern” philosophy and also warrants attention, before we close the current study. If literary theory demonstrates the limits to our knowledge, or the in media res nature of our human experience, it often uses its intellectual arsenal to articulate certain political claims that are themselves highly contentious, whilst ignoring the value of New Critical and Formalist approaches to literary theory. After all, is literary theory and criticism (according to the definitions set out at the beginning of this book—perhaps one may contest my particular brand) not supposed to address actual texts themselves? One would perhaps find themselves at best bewildered and at worst in a state of bemusement, were they to sit in on some classes in this particularly late-modern subject in the humanities. Upon

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my argument, philosophy—and to a certain degree of necessity—has morphed into the specter of literary criticism. However, whilst allusions are proudly made in relation to other subject areas such as anthropology, sociology, economics, and psychology—as they have been to an extent in this tome—students often find themselves treading inter-disciplinary water and yet not being offered an actual literary lifeline. This is of course understandable, and further substantiates the inter-disciplinary claims made within these pages. However, are we not throwing the baby out with the bathwater if we cease to allude to actual literary texts themselves? Something that I’ve endeavoured to do within the scope of this book. One thinks back to Achebe’s claim about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness adumbrated earlier in the book. However, there are many other examples of this type of reading, or perhaps rereading is a better phrase to articulate this process. This is not to denigrate the clear advances made in important areas such as feminist or postcolonial theory, but mainly to caution against accepting all novel-political readings as the best route to the critical reception of texts. One should at the very least incorporate other critical apparatus when rereading an historical text, rather than just utilising a somewhat myopic view instanced by taking one political reading. One thinks back to the Christian hegemony discussed in relation to the reception of the classics back in the Middle Ages. When considering the readings of King Lear offered by both Cavell and Eagleton above, one clearly discerns how these may be mutually beneficial. In the case of Conrad, one can easily discern equal economies in applying New Historicist, Psychoanalytical and Formalist readings, in addition to Postcolonial readings. In his 2013 monograph, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, the sociological thinker Vivek Chibber even argues that a theory such as postcolonialism fails to address the ills of Late-Capitalism and Neoliberalism and has in fact become a political tool which needs to be readdressed in more traditionally Marxist terms. Whilst I recognise Chibber’s point here, one must remember his target is mainly the area of sociology and cultural studies, and one must be weary in literary criticism of simply replacing one critical polemic with another. However, there is no doubt that postcolonial theory in literary studies has led at times to

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woefully one-sided readings.25 These readings, for example, will recognise characteristics such as hybridity or double-voiced discourse as illustrating the strength and literary worth of a text, whilst ignoring the structural and formal qualities that genuinely give the text its literary-critical recognition.26At the end of his own book, Chibber lays down the gauntlet for future scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences, taking more particularised aim at the area of subaltern studies and what he sees as its institutionalised self-serving political ends: Postcolonial theory came to prominence during a period of massive political defeats for the Left, all across the world. Indeed, I rather doubt there has ever been a time since the birth of the modern Left that its forces were as enfeebled as they have been since the 1980s. It is now a commonplace that the turn to irrationalism within the self-styled “radical” intelligentsia was very closely linked to their retreat into the academy. But it was not just that this brought about a change in intellectual culture, narrowly conceived. Over the past quarter century, enormous resources have been sunk into the material infrastructure that sustains the theory. (Chibber, 295)

The current academic paradigm, on top of this infrastructural networking within the area of the humanities, has helped pave the way for a wider sociological doxa that has come to pervade much of the thought on the  One thinks of Fredric Jameson’s forceful point, which is made at the outset of his classic study The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. New York: Cornell University Press, 1981. Jameson wades right in, but, given the climate of literary studies at the time, and the controversy within the academy, this really was the only way to go about this task. The opening paragraph reads as follows: “This book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optional luxury to other interpretive methods current today—the psychoanalytic or the myth-critical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural—but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation”. Talk about coming out with all your Left-hand guns blazing! Upon the argument presented in my own study, the stage Jameson talked of has very much passed, and his wish for the political as the horizon came very much true. However, this polemic has now itself become dated and the time has come to perhaps reorder the priority of the political, as it now risks occluding genuine critical engagement. 26  The fact also mentioned earlier about critical reappraisals (or “re-readings”) of ‘the canon’ or the constant rejection of formerly recognised texts, from Shakespeare to Dickens, to Kant and Hegel as being no longer suitable or at least in need of editorial bowdlerisation, is something that has formed what has become both the political and existential crisis in academia; particularly in the area of the humanities. This warrants further examination and sustained assessment, which is outside the purview of the current text. 25

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“Left,” a doxa that brings within its purview identity politics and the consequent weaponisation of otherwise attractively democratic fields such as feminism, gender studies, queer theory, race studies and trans-humanism. What has this to do with the current plot I am pursuing here? The answer is, aside from the fact that just as totalising philosophical projects such as those adumbrated by Russell and Husserl ended up drawn down into the centripetal orbit of literary theory and criticism, so the new theories have mushroomed in a centrifugal fashion out of the new universe of theory and criticism that has pervaded the humanities. Some may wish to use the label “postmodernism,” which I hope to have pointed out by his point, is a short-cut to genuine discussion and debate about the current practice that lines the walls of the humanities’ sacred halls. The whole idea of the so-called “ethical turn” in areas such as deconstruction, has been to challenge, (as I pointed out in the chapter on poststructuralism), the “violent hierarchies” that are created through theories of exclusivity, identity politics and individual rights-based political and moral economies; that is, in contrast to the more open, inclusive, and communitarian approach to philosophy and literary theory. The performative acknowledgment of our epistemological and biological limits engendered through the practice of literature, with all of its attendant theories, or its perspectival form of phenomenological representation, occludes the weaponisation of individual rights-based theories over and against more communitarian theories. Furthermore, it reminds us of the necessarily autological nature of the linguistic sign as it is represented in literary discourse. This indeed, as I have also been arguing, is what gives literature its special and continued predominance as a semiotic system of symbolic representation. The danger may be, as Ong flagged for us, a new technology of language, or in Heidegger’s parlance, a new form of world-disclosure, threatening the nature of the book as we currently conceive of its textual boundaries. However, as Blanchot argued, the notion of structural unity that was born with the early codification of linguistic signs, and the limits based upon market conditions, (Foucault’s so-called “author function,”)

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and the sense of delimitation ushered in by the notion of the Great Book, will in some sense remain with us, even if the narrative is a comic book, a gaming narrative, or some other manifestation of new technological “advancement.” The drive or will-to-power entailed in the concept of the great logocentric book, Ur-language, or any other systematised form of notation, (such as formal logic,) is what eventually drove philosophy into the cul-de-sac that was the twentieth century. It returned, not empty handed, but with the masque of literary criticism and theory firmly attached to its now wan visage. If the humanities are not to return to a newer form of logocentrism, a centrifugal force that feeds on identity and division, which, as Chibber I think correctly argues, not only disguises, but is also in bed with the truer nature of Liberal Humanist—Late Capitalist discourse— then they need to acknowledge its limits. Moreover, they need to recognise the necessary intervention of literary discourse and criticism as a driving force in the current precis of the humanities.

9 In Through the Outdoor

The sense of the role of literary discourse and criticism as moral philosophy is what ultimately takes us back to the period of German Romanticism, with its self-conscious fragments, self-conscious irony and its celebration of literature and philosophy as being interdependent in their philosophical roles and cultural value. I return via the long road home, to the Philosophical Romanticism alluded to at the beginning of this book. In fact, the sense of ironic limit to the self-conscious work also pervades the book I’m writing here, as I try to find closure to my argument, a sort of denouement: a sense of closing off of the book as a unitary whole. Blanchot’s sense of the book as limit, as a specter that haunts both exclusively the literary, and the literary-critical landscape, whilst other aspects are constantly bubbling underneath the surface, trying to force themselves through the literary and aesthetic idiolect. The argument presented here has shown both the inherent strengths of the critical tradition, whilst also flagging implicit weaknesses in the direction of the discipline after the Second World War, and more specifically after the so-called ‘ethical turn’ in poststructuralism. Criticism became a

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formalistic discipline with scientific aspirations in tandem with the concomitant analytical bent within the philosophical tradition, after the work and aspirations of both Husserl and Russell. However, after the dead end within which Russell, Frege, Husserl, and others, found themselves after the analytical impasse and the structuralist crystallisation into poststructuralism, these subjects merged under the aegis of literary criticism—at least in terms of their pretensions at moral and ethical verisimilitude. The fact that the aesthetic idiolect of literature acknowledges its limit as descriptive discourse, or its ontological limits as a correspondence theory of reality, makes it an autological discourse. It “does what is says on the tin”, so to speak, or it acknowledges its limit with regards its fictional representation of reality. This is something that the analytical and objective discourses that made their appearance at the turn of the century signally failed to do, making them, in my parlance, heterological discourses. Furthermore, it allows for distance, irony, authorial intervention, and questions about the reliability of the narrator. Or, in Friedrich Schlegel’s romantic formulation: wit, parabasis, and the wonderful phrase, transcendental buffoonery.1 This self-consciously ironic stance is not obviously available to discourses that adhere to a rarified notion of logical form. Of course, there are subsequent political implications that take root in this rich, yet subversive soil, composted of cultural bricolage and inevitable precautionary, yet consequently didactic, seedlings. One of the political implications of this newly discovered and particularly modern sense of the perspicuous and accurate nature of literary criticism and theory has been the more recent politicisation and in one sense unfortunate weaponisation of identity, leading in some cases to critical amnesia when it comes to the reception and recognition of literary texts

 Schlegel’s concept of the wit, distance irony encapsulated in transcendental buffoonery was taken from Italian renaissance commedia dell’arte plays and the buffoon character—something also taken up by Shakespeare in his own final, and very self-conscious play, The Tempest in 1611. 1

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as canonical.2 A work such as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, with its racial tropes, or The Taming of the Shrew, with its fairly obvious sexist tropes, faces the danger of further cultural bowlderisation. Whereas, a poem that ticks the correct (tropical) boxes, such as an emphasis upon hybridity, a raised awareness of double-voiced discourse, or more generally sensitive characterisation, would be critically celebrated in terms of its political pretensions, rather than in terms of the more traditional formalist, rhetorical and acoustic devices.3 This begs the question as to whether one is engaging in literary criticism or sociological research into attitudes and popularised rhetorical figures at various points in textual history. Is someone engaging in historical exegesis or genuinely going back to the Greek kritikos at which we started this journey into formal, literary and  Christopher Hitchens in his at times super-egotistical autobiography, (I suppose it comes with the terrain) dates the decline of the Left and the swerve towards identity politics to the end of the swingingly ubiquitous 1960s. “As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.” Hitchens’ divorce from the Left was played out in great theatrical fashion through the ‘spat’ he had years later with his old comrade; non-other than our own champion of the Left: Terry Eagleton. I have to say, a debate between Eagleton and Hitchens, given their history would have been well worth the ticket price. Although their later exchange was more concerned with Hitchens’ much publicised and slightly tedious foray into atheism. One has to respect both of these giants of this period for their verve and gusto when it came to discussion and debate. Hitch 22: A Memoir. New York: Hatchette, 2010. p. 121. 3  A number of years ago at a conference, I raised this issue when it seemed that many of the texts under discussion were being given critical recognition by virtue of their adherence to aesthetic devices such as hybridity and double voiced discourse, as posited by Homi K. Bhabha, rather than for their own merit it terms of the more formalist structures inherent in the works themselves. Bhabha himself, as I understand his (post Edward Said) postcolonial theory, justifiably celebrates these aspects of the wider multicultural milieu, but doesn’t suggest a critical checklist in which these potential aspects of a text are checked off in order to measure the critical worth of a particular text. Suffice to say, in the main it appeared that my interjection was perceived at best as simply dated and at worst, politically incorrect. 2

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cultural taste? After all, is not literary criticism at the very least, or in part, a form of rhetorical criticism? The other danger in this politically correct game of the Monopoly of Taste, is whether, in falling over oneself to tick all of the correct boxes on your task sheet, you’ve actually become so neutral as to have lost your own identity. No one wants to become Switzerland at a drinks party. After all, we are all formed from cultural creeds and traditions, some no doubt more un-savoury than others. But, if we only claim to adhere to what is always expected as the best form, it really wouldn’t take someone with a higher qualification in sociometrics to find the best place to seat us at a wedding ceremony: somewhere at the back, alone, where even if we couldn’t upset anyone, we certainly couldn’t bore anyone to tears. The political dangers of the said whitewashing of criticism and theory have been touched upon within the body of the book but have not been my primary focus. However, they are certainly something to consider when thinking about the wider institutional ramifications of this type of rationalisation of the academy. As I’ve also pointed out, the dangers of taking what one might term “automated subject positions” and the further danger of critics being unable to freely, and without perceived intellectual prejudice, discuss many issues that have slowly become off-limits altogether, without causing “trauma,” is of deep concern. Consequently, the newly appointed ministers of philology and nomenclature may need to be on their guard against an eventual intellectual rebound, if they continue to police not only the academy and the humanities, but also the wider society at large in such a fashion as to revise what starts off as literary history, and soon becomes a disfigurement of history in general. The critical sphere should be not only critical about the rhetorical quality of whatever gets recognised as literature, but also whatever gets recognised as having intrinsic value in the wider socio-cultural sphere. Deconstruction was initiated as a way of auditing ideological boundaries and preferences that naturally occur in texts that deconstruct themselves and do indeed present historical doxas at certain points in history. However, the conscious replacement of one cultural tower of Babel with another, using the very self-conscious critical tools of poststructuralism, is ironic beyond words (that can self-deconstruct). Replacing one violent hierarchy with another is not what this philosophical methodology was

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aiming at, raising our awareness of the linguistic nature of our practices and the relationship between our mind, phenomena and speech certainly was what this phenomenological theory was about. This philosophical hybrid of Saussurean linguistics and Heideggerean phenomenology was posited as a descriptive precis, but not as a prescriptive one. The final issue which I hope to have gone some way to disentangling in this book is that of the other dreaded specter that haunts theory, criticism and the humanities in general: postmodernism. In this text I hope to have shown that a postmodern ‘condition’ is not something that is unique to the contemporary intellectual landscape. The rupture that can be at least traced back to Greek civilization, between the logocentric and the sophistic, through the Enlightenment to Hegel’s absolute monism and Kant’s dualism, and now the postmodern versus other forms of culturally absolute epistemology, has always in some way haunted the humanities and perhaps always will. These indeed build up the essence of inquiry, because without some subterranean forces haunting or challenging our traditions, we find ourselves without critical enquiry and without challenges to any form of existential cultural, epistemic, or ontological hegemony. If Marx didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent him. The reason why Marx and Engels themselves spent precious little time pontificating about aesthetics, art history and hegemony was because, (judging by the allusions and references Marx makes in Capital Volume One to works of cultural significance), they seemed to have recognised the freedom and distance engendered by great works of art and were inculcating a positively Hegelian notion of aesthetics, at least in their recognition of the value, significance, and the special place of aesthetics in the overall structure of political economy.4 Finally, as indicated itself in the chapter on postmodernism, the notion that Marxists—at least in the classical sense of the term, in which someone like Jordan Peterson parses the phrase— are in any way postmodernists, with a concurrent disavowal of meta-­ narratives, is self-evidently deeply ironic!  Aside from the allusive references to art works in Capital and the reference to classical works of art at the start of The Grundrisse, which is Hegelian in its bent, Marx certainly exhibits precious little “Marxist” theorising about literature, or indeed about art in general. 4

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However, one can see the deep water within which one may find oneself if they embark too deeply upon the political exigencies and possible ramifications of criticism and theory. This is not to say the political should be divorced from literary theory and criticism, as this notion is itself absurd. However, one should take care in then allowing the political, as an epiphenomenon or by-product of criticism and theory, to become the over-determining factor in divining theory and in then legislating which theory is good and bad. Neither should we allow it to arbitrate which texts should be read or not read, and whether there should be a canon in the first place. We forget our place as critics if our criticism becomes determined from without by pre-existing political pathologies that take us away from the privileged and autological nature of literary language, philosophical theory, and criticism itself. The Christian-hegemonic condition of scholasticism itself should bear witness to the inherent dangers of these pathologies. I can only close this sense of the “book” by affirming that if I’ve upset anyone of offended their moral or intellectual sensibilities at all, then my job here—for better or for worse—is done. Now we can all get on with the job of reinventing, interrogating, triangulating, or rediscovering our sensibilities though the critical enjoyment and assessment of novels, poems and plays, in true philosophically romantic fashion… * * *

Bibliography

Abrams, M.H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: OUP, 1953) Achebe, Chinua, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” Massachusetts Review, Vol. 18. 1977 Augustine, St., Confessions, Trans. R.S. Pine- Coffin, (London: Penguin, 1961) Austin, J.L., Philosophical Papers (Oxford, OUP, 1961) Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: OUP, 1962) Bhabha, Homi, K., The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) Roland Barthes, “Reflexions sur un manuel,” in L’Enseignement de la littera Serge Doubrovsky and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: 1971) Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, Trans. Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1993) Barthes, Roland, A Roland Barthes Reader (London: Vintage, 1993) Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, Trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999) Blanchot, Maurice, The Infinite Conversation, Trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993) Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999) Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: OUP, 1997)

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Index1

A

Abrams, M.H., xiii, xiiin4, 120n1 Academic scepticism, 128 The Academy, 164 Achebe, Chinua, 4–7, 114, 157 Acknowledgment, 93, 94, 101, 108, 117, 143, 153–156, 154n22, 159 Acknowledgment and Avoidance in Coleridge and Hölderlin, 154n22 Addison, Joseph, 19, 20n4 A Defense of Poetry, 24 Adorno, Theodor, 61 The Adventure of French Philosophy “A nothing would do as well.”., 60n2 Aeschylus, 12 Aesthetic heterocosm, 34

Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietszche (n), 127n9 Against Theory, 92, 149n13 The Age of Sensibility, 16 Akedah and Apocalypse, 82 Alastor, 22 Ali G, 130 Alighieri, Dante, 19 Allegorical, 19 Allegories of Reading, 76, 78–80 Althuser, L., 60 Ambrose, 17 Among Schoolchildren, 80 Amores, 17 Anagogical, 19 Analytical, 142, 152 Analytic philosophy, xi, 29, 38, 46, 49, 73, 80, 143n1 The Anatomy of Criticism, 49n6

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 W. Deakin, Modern Language, Philosophy and Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30494-1

175

176 Index

Ancient Literary Criticism, 12, 12n2 The Anecdote of the Jar, 82 Anerkennung (mutual recognition), 89n23, 93 An Essay on Criticism, 20 Anglo-American, 141 Anglo-Thai, xi The Anxiety of Influence, 85, 126n8 Apeiron, 144 Appointment in Samarra, 113 Aquinas, Thomas, 19 Araby, 52, 55 Arator, 17 Archie Bunker, 79 Arendt, Hannah, 154n23 Aristotle, 14, 15, 17, 59 Arnold, Matthew, 2, 6, 9, 28, 39 Ars Poetica, 15, 25 Art as Technique, 25 Artes dictaminis, 16 Artes poeticae, 16 Artes praedicandi, 16 Art of Rhetoric, 113 Ascribed identity, 131 Assange, Julian, 135 The Athenaeum, 27, 28n2 Athenaeum Fragments, 23 Augustine, Saint, 16, 18, 144 The aura (Benjamin), 139 Austin, A.J., 30 Austin, J.L., 49, 68–73, 69n11, 71n13, 74n15, 95, 143 Autodidactics, 136 Autological, 159 Autological/autologically, 72, 77n19, 81 Autological discourse (literature), 162 Autologically, 127

Autology, 129 Automated subject positions, 164 Avant-garde, 133 Avoidance, 93 The Awakening, xiii, 6, 113, 114 Ayer, A.J., 29 B

Bacon, Francis, 128 Badiou, Alain, 60, 60n2 Bangkok, 146 The Barber Paradox, 31 The Bards, 11 Barthes, Roland, 2, 4, 41–43, 45, 46, 56, 60, 64–66, 70, 78, 90 Basil Ransom, 33 Baudrillard, Jean, 137, 137n17 BBC News, 131 Beardsley, Monroe, 29, 92 Bede, 16, 17 Behavioural pragmatism, 142 Being ready-to-hand/being-at-­ hand, 104 Benjamin, Walter, 138, 139, 139n18 Beowulf (n), 11n1 Bhabbha, Homi K., 68, 131, 163n3 The Bible, 16, 18, 19 Biden, Joe, 129 Biographia Literaria, 21, 28 Bladerunner, 130 Blanchot, Maurice, viii, xv, 152, 153, 159, 161 Blindness and Insight, 76 Bloom, Harold, 59, 82, 85, 89, 126n8 Bodkin, Maude, 49n6 Boethius, 16, 17 Böhme, Jakob, 149

 Index 

Booth, Wayne, 111 Botan, 111 Bouveresse, Jacques, 61 Bowie, Andrew, 127n9 Brasseye, 130 Break of Day, The, xiii Brecht, Berthold, 72, 139 Brechtian, 125, 139n19 Bridging laws (BL), 99, 99n6, 100, 102 British Philosophy, 141 Brontë, Emily, 8 Brooks, Cleanth, 1 Burke, Edmund, 62 Burnett, Alistair, 131n14 Burroughs, William, 23 Butler, Judith, 7 Byron, Lord, 22, 23, 30, 30n3 C

Cabaret Voltaire, 122 Calvino, Italo, 23 Cambridge University, 74n15 The Cantos, 40, 122, 125 Capital Volume One, 165 Carlyle, Thomas, 134 Carnap, R., 29, 32, 91 Cartesian dualism, 61 Cartesian Meditations, 60 Cassiodorus, 18 The Castle of Otranto, 22 Category error (philosophical), 131 Catharsis, 14 Cavell, Stanley, xiv, 73, 93–95, 94n2, 101, 142, 153–155, 154n22, 157 The Cavell Reader, 154n22 Celine, L.F., 76n17

177

Centrifugal, 159, 160 Centripetal, 159 Cheyne, Peter, 6n5 Chiang Mai, 43, 70 Chiang Mai University (CMU), ix, x, xvi, 120n2, 133 Chibber, Vivek, 157, 158, 160 Child, Lee, 90 Chinese Room, 95 Chinese Room argument, 95, 95n3 Chopin, Kate, xiii, 6, 113, 114 Chotiudomphan, Suradech, xi Christian dogma, 16, 17 Christianity, 144, 151n19 Christian mysticism, 149 Cicero, 16 The Circus of Life, 9, 147n11 The City of God, 16 The Claim of Reason, 93 Classical Literary Criticism (n), 12n2 Cobbett, William, 134 Coleridge, S.T., x, 6, 6n5, 7n6, 9, 28, 30n3, 37, 49, 55, 83–86, 84n21, 134 Coleridgean clerisy, 134 Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy, i, 6n5 Collete, xiii Collins, Wilkie, 8 Commedia dell’arte, 147 Commedia d’ellel arte plays, 162n1 Commodified culture, 121 Commodity fetish, 107 Commodity fetishism, 121 Communism, 128 Communitarian (hope), xiv, xv, 136 Communitarian literary theory, 95 The Confessions, 16, 144 Connor, Stephen, 133, 134

178 Index

Connotation, 65 Conrad, Joseph, 2, 4, 5, 157 Conrad, of Hirsau, 18 Constative utterances, 69n11 Constellation philosophy, 28n2 Contemplative reason, 149 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 96n4 Copernicus, 75 Cordelia, 154, 155, 155n24 Cosmogonists, 128 The Course in General Linguistics, 40, 63 Covid 19 ‘metanarrative,’ 137 Cox, Jeffrey, N., 30n3, 134n15 Crippled epistemology, 120n2, 136 Critical Race studies, 159 Critical Theory, 61 Critique, The Limits of, ixn1 The Crying of Lot 49, 48 Cubism, 121 Culler, Jonathan, 40, 111 Cultural bowlderisation, 163 Cultural hegemony, 121–122 ‘Cultural’ Marxism, 120, 120n2 Cultural studies, 68 Cultural tower of babel, 164 The “culture wars,” 121, 134 Cuthbert, Jonathan (n), 20n4 D

Dadaism, 122 Damrosch, David, 102, 102n7 Dark Ages, The, 16 Dasein (Being-already-there), 112 Das Geisteswissenschaften, 142 Das Naturwissenschaft, 142 Davidson, Donald, x, xiv, 94, 95, 97–101, 99n6, 117

Davies, Stephen, xi The Day Today, 130 De Arte Metrica, 17 De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), 16, 17 De Jounvenal, Bertrand, 61 de Man, Paul, 18, 60, 70, 76–82, 76n17, 77n19, 89, 92, 94, 97, 125, 126 De natura rerum, 16–17 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 40–42, 50, 56 The Death of the Author, 2n2, 66 Deconstruction, 63, 68–71, 74n15, 75, 76, 76n17, 78, 79, 81, 82, 86, 88–90, 141, 151, 159 The Deconstructive Angel, 120n1 Defamiliarisation/ defamiliarization, 36, 104 Deleuze, G., 60, 62 The Demiurge, 144 Demystification, 84 Derrida, Jacques, xiv, 7, 60, 62, 62n4, 63, 66–73, 68n9, 71n13, 73n14, 74n15, 76, 76n17, 79–81, 89, 90, 94, 96n4, 97, 120, 129 Descartes, Rene, 59, 75, 128 Dewey, John, 33, 142 Diachronic, 40, 137 Dialectics, x Dick, Phillip K., 130 Dickens, Charles, 114, 114n9 Dickensian Parole, 124 Difference, 41, 43, 49, 59, 69, 71, 71n13, 79, 80, 83, 84 Dionysus, 12 Discourse, 2, 8

 Index 

179

Dissociation of sensibility, 121n5, 122, 125 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 130 Doctor Who, 51 Donne, John, 34, 123n6, 126 Double-voiced discourse, 158, 163 Dreyfuss, Hubert, 96 Dryden, John, 8, 19 Dualism, 165 Dubliners, 35, 52 Duchamp, Marcel, 104

Epistemological behaviorism, 96 Epoche (bracket), 103 Eraserhead, 51 Essentialist, 58 Ethical (limits), 143, 144n4, 154n22, 158n25 Ethical turn (in deconstruction), 63, 69, 161 Etymologiae, 17 Eudaimonia, 156 Euripides, 12 The Excursion, 30n3, 134

E

F

Eagleton, Terry, ixn2, 6, 133, 134, 138, 139, 139n18 Eastenders, 128 Eco, Umberto, 48n5 Ecocriticism, 23 Ecrivain, 43 Educational pragmatism, 33 Edwards, Hugh, 131n14 EFL literature classrooms, 115 The egotistical sublime, 29, 30, 30n3 Eidetic essences, 70 Elenchus, x Eliot, George, 2, 3 Eliot, T.S., 23, 24, 28, 29, 33, 34, 40, 121–126, 121n5, 124n7 Elizabethan, 125 Elizabethan pentameter, 124 Emile: or on Education, 22n6 Emin, Tracey, 13 Empson (n), 2n1 Engels, 165 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 30n3 English Romantic Irony, 23 The Enlightenment, 6, 165

Facebook, 135 Fake narratives, 136, 138 Fake news, 136, 137, 137n17 The fancy, 28 Fascism, 121n3, 128, 128n12, 131 Fauvism, 122 Felski, Rita, ixn1 Femininity and Masculinity in Three Selected Twentieth-Century Thai Romance Fictions, 87n22 Feminism, 68, 159 Feminist reading, 88 Fetishisation, 109 Fidelio magazine, 120n2 Film studies, 93 Finnegan’s Wake, 52 Fish, Stanley, 76n16, 88 5 Readers Reading, 111 The Flea, 2, 34, 126 The floating signifier, 85 Flourishing, 155, 156 Formalism, xiii, 1, 3, 27–39, 46, 47, 58, 63, 88 Formalist self-consciousness, 122 Formal logic, 28, 29

180 Index

The forms, 144 Fortitudo, 142 Foucault, Michel, 61, 66n8, 68, 137n17, 150, 159 Four Reigns, 148 Fowles, John, 130 The fragment, 27, 30 Frank, Manfred, 28n2 Frankenstein, 21 The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, 139 Frege, G., 28, 30, 31, 31n4, 32n5, 34, 91, 131, 141, 153n21, 162 The French Lieutenant’s Woman (movie), 48, 130 Freud, Sigmund, 44n4 Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, 69n10 Freudian/psychoanalytic reading, 88 The Frogs, 12 Frühromantik, xv, 22, 28n2, 81 Frühromantiker, 127 Fry, Paul, 92n1 Fry, Stephen, 128 Frye, Northrop, 49n6 Futurism, 121, 122 G

Gadamer, H.G., 16, 76, 76n18, 91, 95, 98, 100, 113, 114 Galileo, 75 Gattungsweisen, (species being), 155 Geist, 70, 89n23 Geisteswissenschaften (modern humanities), 96

Gender studies, 159 Generositas, 142 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 18 Gerard, Alexander, 20, 20n4 The German Ideology, 145n9 German Romanticism, 161 Gestalten (shapes of consciousness), 113 Gestell, 129 Geworfenheit (thrownness), 112 Gibson, John, xi Gillray, James, 134 Ginsberg, Allen, xiii Glyph, 74n15 Goethe, J. V., 28, 28n2, 139n19 The Golden Bough, 121 The golden mean, 21 Gorgias of Leontini, 13 Go Tell it on the Mountain, 7 Gothicism, 21 The Grapes of Wrath, 111 Graves, Robert, 65n6 Greece, 137 The Greek Chorus, 15 The Greek Myths, 65n6 Greeks, the, xv Greek Tragedy, 14 Greilling, K., (Greilling’s paradox), 77n19 Greimas, A.J., 49, 56 Greimas, H., 78 Grey, 8 Grice, P., 71n13 Grundrisse, 63n5 Guareschi, Giovanni, 146n10 Guha, Ranajit, 131 Gulliver’s Travels, 20 Gyorgy, Lukács, 4

 Index  H

Habermas, Jürgen, 127, 128, 134 Hall, Stuart, 131 Hamlet, 3, 62n4, 82, 88 Harrison, Tony, xiii Hartman, Geoffrey, 82, 89 Hazlitt, William, 134 HD, (Hilda Doolittle), 23 Heart of Darkness, 4, 5, 157 Hegel, GWF, 27, 27n1, 31n4 Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition, 23, 82 Hegel, G.W.F., 20n4, 58–61, 70, 89n23, 128, 165 Hegelian continental tradition, 141 Hegelian notion of aesthetics, 165 Heidegger, Martin, 16, 58, 60, 61, 68, 68n9, 69, 89, 91, 95, 96n4, 104, 112, 121n3, 129, 135, 136 Heideggerean phenomenology, 165 Hemmingway, Earnest, 95, 102, 111, 115, 116 Heraclitus, 128n11 Hermeneutical Phenomenology, 141, 152 Hermeneutic circle, 81 Hermeneutics, xi, 16, 19, 57, 58, 60, 69, 69n10, 74, 76, 76n18, 81, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91, 95–97, 100, 106, 110, 112, 114 The hermeneutics of suspicion, 68 Hermeneutics of worldhood, 69 Heroides, 17 Hesiod, 11 Heterological discourses, 162 The hidden hand, 132 Higher Criticism, 7, 7n6

181

High modernism, 121, 122, 127 High Modernists, 122, 127 Hilda Doolittle (HD), 79, 121 Hills Like White Elephants, 115 Hirsch, E.D., 92 Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, 16 The History of Western Philosophy, 31n4, 132 Hitchens, Christopher, 163n2 Hitch 22, 163n2 Hitler, Adolph, 89 Hobbes, Thomas, 62 Hogg, James, 134 Hölderlin (poetology), 124n7, 135 Hölderlin, F.W., 20n4, 22 Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” 135 Hölderlin’s tonal theory of poetry, 106 Holland, Norman, 111 Holy Scripture, 19 Homer, 11 Homology, 129 Horace, 15, 16, 25 Horizontal (speech) conventions, 72 Horkheimer, Max, 61 Hortus conclusus, 84, 84n21, 85 Hot White Andy, 95, 104, 107, 109, 110 Houellebecq, Michel, xiii Huckleberry Finn, 33 Hulme, T.E., 24, 29, 33 The humanities, vii–xiv, xiiin4, xvi, 57–90, 133, 136, 141–143, 143n1, 145n8, 156, 158–160, 158n26 Hunt, Leigh, 134, 134n15

182 Index

Hupsos, 15 Husserl, Edmund, 57–59, 60n1, 70, 71, 131, 162 Huxley, Aldous, 2n1 Hybridity, 158, 163, 163n3 Hybrid visage, 131 Hybrid (works of literature), 48

Irigaray, Luce, 68 Ironism, 96, 96n4 Irons, Jeremy, 130 Iser, Wolfgang, 95, 113 Isidore of Seville, 17 Italian Journey, 28n2 Iterability, 69, 73 Ivanhoe, 54

I

The Iceberg method, 115 The "idea,” 96 The Idea idea, 129 Idealism, 61, 69, 89n23 Identarian politics, 69 The Ideology of Modernism, 4, 139n19 The Iliad, 11 Imperatives, 73 Implied reader/actual reader, 113, 115 Infelicitous (utterances), 72 The Infinite Conversation, viii, xv, 152 Inglorious Basterds, 48n5 Intensional and extensional vocabularies, 98 Intentional/affective fallacy, 29, 34 Intentionalist theory, 95 Intentionality, 72 The Interpretation of Dreams of condensation and displacement, 44n4 The interpretive community, 76n16, 88 Intertextuality, 129 The intuitive cogito, 70 Inventor’s Paralogy, 129 The Ion, 12, 13

J

Jakobson, Roman, 29, 42, 44n4, 50–52, 78 Jakobsonian, 146 James, Henry, 2 James, William, 142 Jameson, Frederic, 139n18 Jauss, H.R., 88 Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections, 144 John Milton, 82 John, Eileen, xi Jouissance, 9 Joyce, James, 4, 23, 35, 79 Judeo-Christian narrative, 144n6 Jung, C.G., 49n6 K

Kafka, Franz, 138 Kant, Immanuel, 6n5, 7n6, 144n4, 158n26, 165 Kantian, 6 Keats, John, 29, 30, 30n3 Kehre, 91 Kehre (turn), 136 King Lear, 154, 157 Kissinger, Henry, 73, 74n15

 Index 

Klerisei, 6n5 Knapp, Stephen, 92–94, 92n1, 101, 110 Knights, 2 The knowledge of unknowing, 146 Kompridis, Nikolas, xvn5 Kripke, Saul, 143n1 Kristeva, Julia, 129 Kritikos, 4, 163 Kubla Khan, 83, 84, 84n21, 105, 152 Kuhn, Thomas, 58 L

Lacan, Jacques, 9, 44, 44n4, 68, 68n9, 143 Lamarque, Peter, xi Language as ‘the House of Being,’ 68 Language games, 81 Language Institutes, 133 Langue, 8, 41–43, 44n4, 45, 50, 78, 81, 85, 88, 94, 105 Laos PDR, 84 Lasuka, Pasoot, xvi Late Capitalism, 138 Late capitalist, 121, 132 Lawrence, D.H., 2 The Laws, 13 Leavis, F.R., 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 28, 39, 40 Leavisite criticism, 2, 5, 6 Lectures on Fine Art in two volumes, 27, 27n1 Leech, G.N., 71n13 Le Soir, 76n17 Letters from Thailand, 9, 111 Letting oneself be determined, 101

183

Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 27 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 7, 8n7, 42, 56, 64–67, 70 Liberal Humanism, xv Liberalist political economy, 138 Liberal-New Left, 6 The Liberal Praxis, 145 Liminal, 123 Liminal elements, 116 Limited Inc. a b c, 74n15 Linguistic psychologism, 131 Linguistics and Poetics, 78 Linguistic scepticism, 141 Linguistic turn, 57, 63, 75, 86 Literal meaning, 19 Literary criticism, 1–9, 58–60, 68, 73n14, 75n16, 76, 81, 141–160 Literary Criticism and Theory, vii, viii, xv Literary Theory: An Introduction, ixn2 Little Dorrit, 114, 114n9 Local colour, 146 Lodge, David, 2n2, 37, 66, 67, 120n1, 138 Logic, rhetoric and grammar, 76 Logical form, 48, 141, 152, 153, 162 Logical positivism, 29 Logical realism, 31 Logocentric, 30 Logoi, 72, 86, 91, 93, 94, 96, 99, 129 Logos, 13, 143–146, 144n5, 149, 151–153 Longinus, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21 The Lord of the Rings, 48 Lotman, Yory, 49

184 Index

Lotte in Weimar, 139n19 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 122 Lucinde, 28n2 Lukács, György, 89, 139n19 Luther Pierce, William, 89 Luther, Martin, 131 Lutheran eschatology, 132 The Lyceum, 27, 28n2 Lyceum Fragments, 23 Lyle, Thomas, 130 Lyotard, J.F., 128, 129, 137, 138 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 143 The Lyrical Ballads, 21 M

Magnitude, 15 Mahayana Buddhism, 145 Mallarme, Stephane, 79 Manfred, 22 Mann, Thomas, 4 Mao, Tse Tung, 7 Maoism, 131 Maps of Meaning, 128n12, 129 Marcuse, Herbert, 130, 139n19 The Marshall Plan, 146 Marvell, Andrew, 34, 126 Marx, Karl, 61, 63n5, 120, 132, 165, 165n4 Marxism, xi, 2 Marxist, xv Marxist analytical framework, 88 Marxist approaches, 49 Materialism, 61 Maugham, W. Somerset, 113 Maurus, Rabanus, 18 Mayweather, Floyd, 119 McCartney, Paul, 135

McGann, Jerome, 23 McLuhan’s “Guttenberg Galaxy,” 151 Mechanical, 149 Medieval Criticism, 16 Meditations Hégéliennes, 91 Meditations of a Solitary Walker, 22n6 Mein Kampf, 89 Mellor, A.K., 23 The Merchant of Venice, 163 Metanarratives, 128, 137, 138 The metaphoric and metonymic poles, 50, 52 Metaphysical conceit, 35 The Metaphysical Poets, 34, 121, 121n5, 123 Metaphysics of presence, 71, 73 Metonymy, 44n4, 45, 50–52 Michaels, W.B., 92–94, 92n1, 101, 110 Middle Ages, the, 16, 19 Miller, J. Hillis, 120n1 Mimesis, 13 Mise en scene, 53 Modern Criticism and Theory, 2n2, 37, 42, 52 Modernism, xiv, 77n19, 79, 94, 121, 122, 125, 127, 133, 134, 138, 139, 139n19 Modern semantics, 70 Modern Theory and Criticism, 66, 67, 138 Modern Washington, 137 Molly Bloom’s interior monologue, 139n19 Monism, 165 The Monist, 75n15 The Monk, 22 ‘Monk Lewis’ Matthew, 22 Moore, G.E., 30

 Index 

Moral formalism, 2, 5 Moss, Gregory, 47 Mrs Dalloway, 122 Murray, Penelope, 12n2 The Muses, 11 Must We Mean What We Say, 93, 94n2 Myth, 64, 65, 67 Mythemes, 64 The ‘Myth of the Given,’ 91, 129 Mythologies, 42, 64, 65, 67 Mythopoeia, 122 Mythos, 143 Myth Today, 158n25 N

The Name of the Rose, 48, 48n5 Naming and Necessity, 143n1 Nam Nao Drama, 87 Nang Ek, 87 Nang Rai, 87, 88 Natura Naturans, 38 Naturwissenschaften (modern sciences), 96 Nazi salute, 70 Nazism, 128, 131 Nazi swastika, 44 Negative capability, 29 Neoclassic, 122 Neoclassic poets, 8 Neoliberalism, xi, 69 New Criticism, xiii, 1, 27–39, 58, 63 New Historicism, 97 New Historicist, 157 The New Left, 120, 136 New Liberalism, 119–139 Newspeak, 136 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 79, 81n20

185

Nolan, Christopher, 23 Nomological net of physical theory, 99 Nous, 13, 14 Novalis, (Friedrich Von Hardenberg), 23, 28, 28n2 O

Obama, Barack, 136, 136n16 Objective correlative, 34, 121n5, 122–124 Objectivism, xiv The Office, 130 Olsen, Stein Haugom, xi Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 48n5 Ong, Walter, J., 149–152, 150n17, 151n19, 159 On the Sublime, 15 Ontological limits, 143 Orality and Literacy, 149 Ordinary Language Philosophy, x, xi, xiv, 29, 68, 141 Organic, 149 Orientalism, 145n7 The Origins of Geometry, 71, 131 Ornatus verborum, 17 Orphaned signifiers, 70 Orwell, George, 136 Ovid, 17, 18 Ozymandias, 83 P

Pacquiao, Mani, 119 Paine, Thomas, 62 Paradise Lost, 82, 126n8 Paralogical, 48 Parasitical (signifying) systems, 64

186 Index

Parole, 8, 41–43, 44n4, 45, 48n5, 50, 78, 81, 84, 88, 94, 105 The Pastoral, 11 Pater, Walter, 28, 134 Payap University, 127n10 Peirce, C.S., 40n1, 94 Peircean, 137 Performative function, 70 Performatives (utterances), 69n11 Performativity, 101 Peter Bell the Third, 30n3 Peterson, Jordan, xn3, xv, 74n15, 89, 98, 119, 120, 128, 128n12, 129, 132, 138, 139, 165 Phantasia, 16 Phenomenalism, 31 Phenomenological criticism, 92 Phenomenology, xi, 2, 57, 58, 60n1, 61, 68n9, 89 The Phenomenology of Spirit, 60, 89n23, 151n17, 154 Philosophically romantic, vii, xiv, xvi Philosophical Romanticism, 93, 95, 98n5, 161 Philosophical romantics, 95 Philosophical tradition, the, vii, xii, xiii Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 57–59, 92, 96n4, 99 Phonemes, 41 Phrónēsis, 141–160 The Physiocrats, 63, 63n5 Pindar, 12 Pinter, Harold, 130 Plato, 11, 13–15, 14n3, 57, 59, 77n19 Plato’s Gorgias, 143 Plot, 15 Plotinus, 14

Poetria Nova, 18 Poiema, 12 Poietes, 12 Political economy, 165 The Politicisation of literary theory, 68 Pollen, 28n2 Pope, Alexander, 8, 19, 20 Positions/doxa, 68 Positivist, 142 Postcolonial, 121, 131 Postcolonial criticism, 68 Postcolonialism, 121 Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 157 Post-digital age, 153 Posthumanism, xii Post-Lutherean, 151 Postmodern, vii The Postmodern Condition, 138 Postmodern era, 142 Postmodern irony, 128 Postmodernism, 119–139 Postmodernism, or the Cultural logic of Late Capitalism, 139n18 Postmodernist, 23 Postmodernist Culture, 133 Postmodern novel, 130 Poststructuralism, xiv, 56, 60, 63–65, 68, 96, 121, 129, 131, 141, 152, 159, 161, 162, 164 Poststructuralist, 18, 23 Pound, Ezra, 23, 40, 79, 121, 121n3, 122, 125, 127 Practical Criticism, 32 Pragmatic Denouement, 141–160 Pragmatics, 71n13 The Pragmatic School of Criticism, 21 Pragmatism, xi, 142

 Index 

Pramoj, Kukrit, 8, 111, 146–149, 146n10, 148n12, 149n13, 156 “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political of Economy (1859), 145n9 Preface to The Lyrical Ballads (1800), 37 The Prelude, 22, 82, 88, 126n8 Pre-Socratic, 143, 144 The primary imagination, 29, 38 Primogeniture, 63, 63n5 The Principles of Mathematics, 60 Prior theory/passing theory, 100, 101, 113 Privileged representations, 96, 97 The problem of other minds, 96 Propositional truth tables, 46 Propp, Vladimir, 4, 29, 48, 56 Protagoras, 13 Protestant Profs, 132 Proto-Formalist Criticism, 17 Proust, Marcel, 79, 81, 82 Prudentius, 17 Prufrock, 121, 126, 138 Prussian State (of 1821), 128 Psychoanalysis, 2, 93, 94, 122 Psychoanalytical criticism, 49 Psychologism, 31, 34, 131 Psychophysical parallelism, 99 Pulchras positions, 17 Pulp Fiction, 48n5 Pynchon, Thomas, 23 Pyrrhonist scepticism, 128 Q

Quadrivium, 18 Quantum mechanics, 56 Queer theory, xii, 61, 159

187

Quine, W.V.O., xiv, 32, 49, 58, 60, 91, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101 Quintilian, 16 R

Radical empiricist reductionism, 99 Radical reductionist schematic model, 96 Rahv, Phillip, 102n8 Rama VI, King, xiii Rand, Ayn, 143n3 The Rape of the Lock, 20 Rationalisation (of public discourse), 134 The Raw and the Cooked, 84 Readerly (texts), 90 Reader response theory, 110, 112 Reading Dickens’ “Little Dorrit” in the Age of Distraction, 114n9 Realism, 69, 77n19 Received Prounciation (RP), 131 Recognitive breakdown, 155 Recuperated, 130, 133 Red Bamboo, 9, 111, 146, 148, 156 Red face/pale face literature, 102, 102n8 The Red Wheelbarrow, 95, 102, 110 Reflexive constructions, 73 Reiterating the Differences:A Reply to Derrida, 74n15 The representation of non-­ representation, 81 The Republic, 13 The Resistance to Theory, 76 The Rhetoric of Temporality, 77n19 Richards, I.A., 1, 2n1, 4 Ricouer, Paul, 69n10 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 22

188 Index

Rippon, Angela, 131n14 The Rise of the New Left, (keynote speech), 133 R Mutt, 104 The Romantic Ideology, 23 Romantic irony, 23, 30 Romanticism, 16, 19–24, 94, 126 Romanticism and Classicism, 24 Romantic movement, the, xv Rorty, Richard, xiv, 32, 57–59, 73, 92, 95–101, 96n4, 142, 154n22 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 22, 22n6, 62 Rushdie, Salman, 8 Russell, Bertrand, xiv, 29–31, 31n4, 32n5, 34, 38, 57, 58, 60, 81, 91, 112, 131, 132, 141, 143, 152, 153, 153n21, 159, 162 Ryle, Gilbert, 29, 73, 143 S

Said, Edward, 145n7 Santayana, George (n), 2n1 Sartre, J.P., 58 Sasinee, Khunkaew, 87n22 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 63, 70, 88, 94 Saussurean, 137 Saussurean linguistics, 165 Sayer’s Law, 143 Sayre, William (Sayre’s Law), 73n14, 74n15 Schelling, F.W., 20n4 Schiller, Friedrich, 27 Schlegel, August, 20, 27, 28n2 Schlegel, Friedrich, 20, 23, 27, 28n2 Schlegel, F.W., 81, 81n20, 162, 162n1

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 16 Scholastic critics, 19 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 144n4 The Science of Logic, 31n4, 46 Sci Fi, 130 Scrutiny, 2 Scruton, Roger, 9, 60–63, 60n2, 128 Searle, John, 63, 68, 70–73, 73n14, 74n15, 95, 95n3, 96, 101 Second-order signification, 64, 65 The Second World War, 161 Sedulius, 17 Seel, Martin, 98 Self-conscious idiolectical discourse, 77 Sellars, Wilfrid, xiv, 32, 49, 58, 60, 91, 94, 96, 97, 117 Semiology and Rhetoric, 77 Semiotic idealism, 69 Semiotics/semiology, 4, 39–56, 120n2, 125, 137 Semiotic systems (and structures), 94 Sensitive characterisation, 163 Set theory paradox, 142 Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 135 Shaftesbury, Lord, 20, 20n4 Shakespeare, William, 15, 35, 82, 88, 154, 155, 158n26, 162n1, 163 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 82 Shelley, P. B., 22, 24, 30, 30n3, 83, 85, 86, 134, 134n15 Shklovsky, Victor, 25, 29, 36, 104 Signature, Event, Context, 68, 74n15 Signifier/signified, 40–46 Simulacra/simulation, 130, 137n17 The Sistine Chapel, 123 Sittlichkeit, 154n22

 Index 

Smith, Adam, 132 Smith, Barry, 75n15 The social contract, 62, 63 The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS), 128n12 Socrates (Socratic), viii, x, 127, 128 The ‘soft humanities,’ 137 Sangkhaphantanon, Thanya, xi Sophistry, 128 The Sophists, 13, 128 Sophocles, 12 The Sorrows of Young Werther, 28n2 South East Asian, xi Southey, R., 30n3 Soviet Socialist Realists (SS), 139n19 Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 62 Speech-act philosophy, 72 Speech act theory, xiv, 68, 71n13, 72, 141 Spivak, G.C., 9, 68 Spots of time, 22 Stalinism, 131 Star Wars trilogy, 48 Steele, Danielle, 8 Steele, Richard, 20n4 Steinbeck, John, 111 Stevens, Wallace, 82–84, 86, 121 Stirner, Max, 145n9 Strauss, Leo, 143–145, 143n2 Streep, Meryl, 130 Structuralism, xiii, 1, 3, 4, 7, 8n7, 39–56, 58, 60, 64–66, 68, 68n9, 70, 88 Structuralist narratology, 47, 48

189

Structure, Sign and Play, in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, 66 Sturm und Drang, 28n2, 92 Subaltern studies, 158 The Sublime, 15, 16, 18, 21, 24 Submission, xiii Superstructural surface, 132 Surrealism, 121, 122 Sutherland, Keston, 95, 104–106, 110 Swift, Jonathan, 19, 20 Swinburn, A.C., 28 Symbol and allegory, 82 Symbology of the swastika, 70 Synchronic, 40, 137 Synecdoche, 45, 50, 51 T

The Taming of the Shrew, 163 Tarantino, Quentin, 23 Taylor, Charles, 142 The Tempest, 15, 162n1 Tertullian, 143n2 Thai culture, 145, 145n8, 146 Thailand, Occidentalism and Cultural Commodity Fetishism, 44n3 Thai popular culture, 86 Thai Secondary Education, 145n8 The Thai Social Action Party, 148n12 Thanksgiving Ode, 30n3, 134 Theory of descriptions, 48 Theravada Buddhism, 145 Things Fall Apart, 7, 114 Tieck, Ludwig, 28, 28n2 Tik Tok, 135 The Times(London), 74n15 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 6

190 Index

Todorov, T., 49, 56, 78 To His Coy Mistress, 34, 126 Tolkien, J. R. R., 48 Tolstoy, Leo, 114 Tradition and the Individual Talent, 33 Transcendental buffoonery, 162, 162n1 Transcendental phenomenology, 29, 141, 152 Transcendental signified, 70, 89n23, 96, 149 Transformational-grammar-syntax rules, 95 Trans-humanism, xii, 159 Translations (radical), 110, 116 Triangulated interpretation, 115 Triangulations, 94, 101, 104, 107, 110–112 Trigger Happy TV, 130 Trivium, 18 Tropological, 19 Trump, Donald, 13, 129, 136n16 Truth and Method, 98, 114 The Turner Diaries, 89 Twelfth-Century Renaissance, 17 The Two Dogmas of Empiricism, 96 U

Ulysses, 52, 65, 90, 121, 122, 139n19 Un Chien Andalou, 51 Unity, 15 The Unmoved-Mover, 144 Ur-language, 81 Ur-system, 65 Ur-vocabulary, 96 UZ and Them, 131

V

Verbal icons, 79, 124 Verificationism, 29 Verificationist, 142 Violent hierarchies, 82, 159 Virago Press, the, 3 Vorticism, 122 W

Wackenroder, W. H., 28, 28n2 Waddthantham, (Thai culture), 146 War and Peace, 114 The Wasteland, 3, 34, 40, 65, 121n4, 122 Weaponisation of identity, 162 We Are Seven, 34 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong, 23 The Well-Wrought Urn, 37 Weltanschauung (World view), 122 The Western Tradition, xi Weyrich, Paul, 120n2 What Computers Can’t Do, 96 What is an Author, 66n8 Wheeler, Samuel, 97, 98 Whitehead, C., 29, 30 Whither Marxism, 120 Why I Am a Conservative, 62 Williams, William Carlos, 95, 102–104, 106, 110 William Wordsworth, Second Generation Romantic: Contesting Poetry after Waterloo, 30n3, 134n15 Wimsatt/Beardsley (intentional fallacy), 88 Wimsett, W.K., 24, 29, 92

 Index 

Wittgenstein, L., 29–31, 49, 60, 67, 94, 135 Woke-ism, 63, 69 Women in Love, 122 Wongsuwan, Rong, 8 Woolfe, Virginia, 122 Wordsworth, William, 21, 21n5, 22, 46, 126n8, 134, 134n15 Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814, 82 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 139n18 World Literature, 102, 102n7 Writerly (texts), 90 Wuthering Heights, 2

X

Xanthippe, 128 Y

Yeats, W.B., 79, 80, 82, 127 Young Hegelians, 128 A Young Man’s Fancy, xiii, 9, 147n11 Z

Zen Buddhism, 145 Žižek, Slovaj, 119, 128, 139

191