The Life of Texts: An Introduction to Literary Studies 9789048551903
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The Life of Texts
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The Life of Texts An Introduction to Literary Studies Kiene Brillenburg Wurth Ann Rigney
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Extensively revised and updated edition of: Het leven van teksten. Een inleiding tot de literatuurwetenschap, red. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth & Ann Rigney, Amsterdam University Pres, 2006 isbn 978 90 5356 877 4 © Amsterdam University Press, 2006 Cover illustration: American actors Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) (left) and Nick Adams (born Nicholas Aloysius Adamshock, 1931-1968) listen to actress Natalie Wood (born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, also Natasha Gurdin, 1938-1981) as she reads out loud; Laurel Canyon, California 1956. Hopper and Adams were roommates and Wood dated Adams. (Photo by Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) Cover design: Gijs Mathijs Ontwerpers Lay-out: V3-Services v.o.f. Boekproductie isbn e-isbn doi nur
978 94 6372 083 0 978 90 4855 190 3 (pdf ) 10.5117/9789463720830 617
© Kiene Brillenburg Wurth & Ann Rigney / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.
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To our students
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements Foreword
Introduction
Locating Literary Studies Ann Rigney . . . . . . . .
Introduction: Academic frameworks Knowledge production is work in progress Academic disciplines: ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’? Humanities and the study of culture Cultural studies and its challenges Literary studies at an interdisciplinary crossroads Areas of specialisation within literary studies In conclusion: Discipline and diversity
The Many Dimensions of Literature Ann Rigney . . .. . . . . .
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Introduction: Durable texts Poetic language Narrative Reflection Pleasure Classification: Genres Valuation and canonisation In conclusion: The intersection of text and value
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Texts
Texts and Intertextuality Ann Rigney . .
.
. .
Intermedial Poetics Kiene Brillenburg Wurth . . . . . . . .
Introduction: The Greats escape Texts .. Words, material carrier, aesthetic object .. Paratext Intertextuality: The relationship between texts .. The conventionality of language .. The conventionality of texts .. Intertextual relations Singularity: Between old and new In conclusion: The undead author
Introduction: Intermediality and the poetic Poetic theory, poetry, and beyond Rhythm and metre in sound and image Irony Metaphor and montage Transmediality and remediation Intermedia, intermediality, and multimediality In conclusion: Literary studies and media studies
Narrative Ann Rigney . . . . .
. .
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Introduction: Narratology Narrative and story: Two sides of the same coin .. Word or image? Characters and their world Plot models Narrative techniques .. Narrators .. Playing with time .. Focalisation .. Multiple voices Identity and identification: Gender In conclusion: When is a life completed?
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CONTENTS
9
Reading
Readers, Reading Kiene Brillenburg Wurth . . . . . . .
Meaning and Interpretation Kiene Brillenburg Wurth . . . . . .
Introduction A short history of reading I: Writing to print A short history of reading II: Print and beyond How texts engage their readers (with Harald Hendrix) Reception studies (with Harald Hendrix) Cognitive and sociological studies of reading In conclusion: The agency of readers
Introduction: Interpretation and meaning-making The work of interpretation: Allegoresis and hermeneutics Dialogic hermeneutics Signs and signification: A semiological perspective Word, after word, after word: Différance and deconstruction In conclusion: The range of interpretation
Between Elite and Mass Culture Kiene Brillenburg Wurth . . . . . . .
Introduction: Canons and canon debates Mass culture and artistic culture Symbolic capital and cultural elitism Folk culture and elite culture intertwined Canon-makers and canon-breakers There is art in mass media In conclusion: Power to the users
Contextual Approaches
Imagination in a Changing World Ann Rigney . .
.
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Introduction: A happy househusband Texts and cultural context .. Culture and cultural borders .. How cultures become different How literature keeps changing, and why
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. . .
Can literature change the world? Case study: Ecocriticism In conclusion: A tool for thought
Literature and Postcolonial Criticism Kiene Brillenburg Wurth . . . . .
Introduction: Spaces in the background Imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and decoloniality Colonial discourses and the question of power Strategies of postcolonial rewriting In conclusion: Texts and cultural identities
Literature and Cultural Memory Ann Rigney . Introduction: Literature in/and time . Cultural memory studies . Narrating events .. Experiential narration .. Traumatic realism . Remediation and the dynamics of cultural memory . Literature and ‘unforgetting’ . Canons and their contestation . In conclusion: Literature as mediator
Glossary Schools of Thought in Literary Studies List of Images and Permissions Index
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Life of Texts originally appeared in Dutch with Amsterdam University Press in 2006. This is a translated, revised, and updated version of that book. On the long road to the completion of this project we have run up a huge debt to a large number of people, too many to acknowledge by name here. At the top of the list is Rixt Runia of Amsterdam University Press, whose patience (and, luckily, whose persistence) knew no bounds. Despite the passing of many deadlines, she remained committed to the project and to helping us complete it. As we moved into the final phases, Inge van der Bijl, Chantal Nicolaes and other colleagues at Amsterdam University Press also provided great logistical, editorial, and moral support. We were extremely lucky to have encountered Eline Reinhoud in the transition from the Dutch to the English edition. She proved to be an excellent editor: tenacious, perspicacious, and full of constructive suggestions (well beyond the call of duty, in the weekends). In a similar way, Marisca van der Mark played a crucial role as we moved into the final stages, providing valuable feedback and editorial acumen as well as calm in the storm. Anneloek Scholten and Max Casey also chipped in at crucial moments with invaluable editorial assistance. We are also grateful to Erwin Maas, who gave very useful feedback on the earlier edition and helped us move towards the current one, and to Alana Gillespie, who prepared an initial translation into English. We continue to be indebted to our colleagues Harald Hendrix and Els Andringa for their invaluable contribution to the two chapters on reading in Het leven van teksten. The new English edition called for a reorganisation of materials across the different chapters, but we are happy to warmly acknowledge their inspiration for the new chapter on reading presented here. The Life of Texts is designed as a handbook for teaching, and a special word of thanks goes to our students and colleagues in Utrecht who have helped us make it. We have been very fortunate to have had the chance to
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12 test out our ideas on several generations of students in comparative literary studies and to get their feedback. We are also grateful to all those colleagues who commented on the book or provided us with extra materials and examples. In particular we would like to give a special mention here to Helwi Blom, Frank Brandsma, Frank de Glas, Tom Idema, Birgit Kaiser, Sandra Ponzanesi, and Kila van der Starre. We have learned so much from our students. We hope that this new version will meet their expectations. Above all, we hope that this book will continue to help new generations of talented and committed students to find their way to the study of literature.
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FOREWORD
The Life of Texts: our title has been inspired by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), one of the founders of modern cultural studies. Roughly a hundred years ago he set out his dream of a new branch of inquiry which he called ‘the science of the life of signs in society.’ Where he was interested in signs in general, we are specifically interested in literary texts. But like him, we too are interested in their cultural and social ‘life.’ This means that we will not be approaching literature simply as a collection of novels and poems on a virtual bookshelf. Instead, we will examine how those novels, poems and all sorts of other texts ‘live’ in society: how people write and how they read, but also how one text inspires another text, and how stories and poems migrate from one medium to another. We will be asking how it is that some texts fascinate people so much that they have long cultural lives. They are reproduced and passed on to others in the form of new editions, in adaptations to film and theatre, in classroom settings, in our leisure hours, and, last but not least, in the ways we look at the world and act out our lives. We show how literature matters and offer a toolkit for literary studies to matter as well. In this introduction to the academic study of literature, we offer a first conceptual and methodological toolbox with which to describe ‘the life of texts’ and explain their role in society. Rather than present a history of the discipline, our handbook is designed around particular issues in the field. We begin by positioning literary studies within the broader field of the humanities. Each of the following chapters concentrates on a different aspect of literature and introduces the key debates and the key concepts relevant to its study. The key concepts have also been indicated in the margins and collected for ease of reference in the glossary which follows the final chapter. Where relevant we link specific
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concepts to schools of thought; asterisks* in the main text will lead you to the overview of schools at the back of the book.
Utrecht, June 2019 Kiene Brillenburg Wurth Ann Rigney
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1
LOCATING LITERARY STUDIES ANN RIGNEY
This chapter begins by situating literary studies as an academic discipline within (1) the broader field of knowledge production and (2) the group of disciplines known as the humanities. It then goes on to provide a general outline of the main approaches and areas of specialisation within the discipline. . . . . . . . .
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Introduction: Academic frameworks Knowledge production is work in progress Academic disciplines: ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’? Humanities and the study of culture Cultural studies* and its challenges Literary studies at an interdisciplinary crossroads Areas of specialisation within literary studies In conclusion: Discipline and diversity
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1.1
19
Introduction: Academic frameworks
This chapter offers an introduction to the academic study of literature and its history. Literature is usually associated with the intimate pleasures of reading rather than with an intellectual discipline, but it has also been an object of scholarly inquiry for thousands of years. What does it mean to study literature in an academically disciplined way rather than simply for personal pleasure? This chapter provides an initial answer to this question by positioning the study of literature within the broader field of knowledge production. We first discuss scientific research in the broadest sense, then move on to the humanities, cultural studies,* and finally, literary studies and its specialisations. In locating literary studies within this broader academic context, we show that literary scholars always work within frameworks: of their own discipline, related fields within the humanities, and the scientific community at large. These frameworks are not fixed for all time but are constantly being redefined.
1.2
Knowledge production is work in progress Humanities and Science. The sciences and the humanities, and the more specific disciplines within them, each produce knowledge using different practices. – Oxford Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society
Producing knowledge is always ‘work in progress.’ Dissatisfaction with what we already know underlies all academic disciplines. A scholar is not so much someone who possesses a great deal of knowledge (that is, who collects bits of information like a stamp collector collects stamps). Instead, scholars are defined by the fact that they have been trained to be curious and critical. Pursuing an academic degree is not so much about ‘learning things’ as it is about realising how much it is you do not (yet) know. It is about learning how to pose interesting questions and to look systematically and patiently for answers. To conduct scientific research is to wage a constant battle against the obvious. Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge and how best to produce it. It involves formulating general principles and standards that people in different fields can use to reflect on their own work. Contemporary philosophy of science by and large assumes that knowledge is not there for the picking like fruit on a tree, but first has to be made. Constructivism is the term used to
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philosophy of science
constructivism
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empirical field
concept
theory
method
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describe this understanding of knowledge as something that is ‘made’ and not ‘found.’ It is made when people begin to question things that they previously took for granted, and when they call upon different concepts and theories to explain what they see. Constructivists accept that there is no single objective truth, but that there are different truths depending on the questions that have been asked in a given scientific context. This does not mean that ‘anything goes’ in constructivism or that all statements about the world are equally valid. On the contrary. To qualify as knowledge rather than mere opinion, truth claims must be convincing to peers and be in accordance with norms for evidence and argumentation. Although these norms differ from one field of study to the next, there are some elements that are common to all academic disciplines and that define them as such: 1. An empirical field (‘empirical’ literally means ‘based on experience’ and is derived from the Greek empeiríā: ‘experience’). Modern scientific knowledge ‘is about’ things in the real world – a biological process, a historical event, a social dynamic, a story, a philosophy – and aims to explain their nature. 2. Concepts to map out the empirical field and prepare it for analysis. The development of concepts (‘suspense,’ ‘story,’ or indeed ‘literature’) is particularly important in the humanities, where they serve to shape, identify, and categorise cultural phenomena. Like microscopes in other fields, concepts serve to make cultural phenomena visible and to show similarities between them. For this reason, concepts are an important part of this handbook. 3. Theories (‘theory’ comes from the Greek theoria: ‘contemplation’). A theory is an abstract model used to identify and explain patterns in the empirical field. What is happening and why? How do these elements interact? An engineer can explain why a building collapsed by using a generally applicable theory about the relationship between weight and strength. A historian could look for explanations in the systematic corruption of the city government. Similarly, a literary scholar can explain why a particular novel becomes a bestseller by using a general theory about the relationship between writing style and impact or by showing how it fitted well into broader cultural trends. 4. Methods for data collection and analysis. Scholars are expected to search methodically for answers to the questions they have posed. Sometimes serendipity plays a role in scientific discovery (as when historians uncover new documents by accident), but it is not typical. Instead, people trained in a discipline use recognised techniques for collecting data and testing the validity of theories. Historians do archival research, physicists design laboratory experiments, sociologists interview people, and so on. Methods are usually classified
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either as quantitative (based on statistical analysis) or qualitative (based on the interpretation of samples). Although literary scholars sometimes use quantitative methods (in researching reader responses, for example), they typically apply qualitative methods. Whatever the method chosen: the idea that people can be trained in a ‘discipline’ at university means in effect that they learn how to apply methods. Knowledge is produced by combining these four elements in a critical way. Does the evidence (uncovered with the help of experiments, data collection or textual analysis) confirm our expectations or demand changes to our theoretical framework? This confrontation between evidence and theories is part of an ongoing dynamic, which means that our knowledge is never definitive. As has already been established, science today is practised in a disciplinary framework. A discipline is a research tradition with its own reference points and authorities, and a sense of community. People working in the same discipline usually do so according to the same paradigm: a consensus regarding which questions are relevant, which theories and methods are applicable, and which style of argumentation appropriate. Disciplines serve as points of contact for researchers to interact and benefit from each other’s work over a longer period. They are also the place where arguments and findings are subjected to the scrutiny and critique of colleagues. All of this entails a social organisation: degree courses, associations, and journals provide a framework for these interactions and exchanges, giving authority and support to practitioners. If you speak from an established place within the discipline, your arguments will be more convincing and have greater ‘truth’ than the same arguments advanced by an amateur, according to the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Disciplines are historical alliances that change over time. Sociology, for example, only emerged as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century. The dynamic nature of scholarly research continuously creates new disciplines while it marginalises others that have stopped being productive or no longer seem relevant. Interdisciplinarity is an important driver behind these developments: it creates opportunities for mutual influence and exchange at the crossroads between disciplines. If collaboration across disciplines succeeds in producing new questions and theories, then a new discipline with its own organisational structure may emerge. In this way, ‘psychology’ became a discipline in the late nineteenth century, when medical doctors, philosophers and biologists gathered at the same interdisciplinary meeting point. At the present time, we are witnessing the emergence of new questions to do with sustainability and how people
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quantitative qualitative
discipline paradigm
interdisciplinarity
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tell stories about the planet at the interdisciplinary crossroads between environmental studies and cultural studies in a new field known as environmental humanities.*
Paradigms and paradigm changes The concept of paradigm was developed by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (19221996) in an influential study called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). By ‘paradigm’ he meant the fact that a scientific field can become dominated by a particular theory which provides the framework for research: it defines which aspect of the empirical domain is relevant, which questions are interesting, which methods are appropriate, and what counts as proof. A theory becomes a paradigm when it is accepted by the discipline at large as the basis for their research. It becomes the conceptual space in which scientists move and think. A new paradigm allows people to explain more and to make connections between hitherto disconnected phenomena. Something like this occurred in the study of mechanics when Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) proposed to look at movement in terms of displacement rather than in terms of the shifting qualities of the object, the theory that had dominated thinking and research since Aristotle (384-322 bce). Kuhn’s model of scientific change was radical in considering the history of science in terms of revolutionary paradigm shifts rather than in terms of the continuous accumulation of knowledge. A paradigm is a matter of either/or, he claimed: whoever considers the world through the lens of a new paradigm can no longer look at it in the old way. Questions, concepts, and theoretical models, belonging to the old paradigm, now become redundant; a piece of history rather than things that are still valuable from a scientific point of view. While the existence of paradigms is generally accepted, Kuhn’s theory has been criticised among other things for its assumption that paradigms cannot exist side by side and that everything changes all at once. This is certainly an issue in the humanities where theoretical perspectives are generally less binding and mutually exclusive than they are in the natural sciences.
1.3
humanities
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Academic disciplines: ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’?
So far, we have talked in general terms about knowledge production and disciplinarity. There are also important differences. A distinction is usually made, to begin with in the division of universities into schools or faculties, between three major branches of academic knowledge production: the natural and applied sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. These different branches of inquiry are primarily defined by their empirical focus. Roughly put: the natural (and applied) sciences study
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nature, while the social sciences study human behaviour and the humanities examine our representations of the world: culture. These divisions are by no means monolithic, however. Every category can be subdivided into multiple disciplines and specialisations, each with their own objects of study and methodology. However, nature, behaviour, and culture as objects of study are not hermetically sealed off from each other. They intersect and overlap, and interdisciplinary approaches can illuminate their complex interrelations. For example, anorexia nervosa can be partly explained by the fact that young people are continually exposed to images of very thin models. Understanding how this eating disorder spreads, however, demands a combination of expertise in culture, physiology, and psychology. Likewise, questions about how people relate to the media or how artificial intelligence is changing our lives are situated at a crossroads between the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. Finally, the borders between nature, behaviour, and culture are constantly being redefined in philosophy and the arts (see below for an example of how thinking about the boundary between nature and culture is itself a significant part of culture).
Figure 1.1: Areas of research.
Nature
Behaviour and society
Culture
More than a half century ago, the English essayist C.P. Snow (1905-1980) lamented what he saw as a widening gap between the sciences and the arts. In a famous book called The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), he described the emergence of two parallel worlds populated by ‘scientists’ and by ‘literary intellectuals’ who are no longer able to communicate with each other. The ‘two cultures’ identified in Snow’s title were thus the natural sciences and the humanities. Interestingly, English differs from other languages like German and French in not applying the term ‘science’ to the humanities. This was already reflected in the definition of ‘Humanities and Science’ quoted from the Oxford Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Society at the beginning of 1.1 above, which sets the humanities over against science as if they were worlds apart. Snow believed there was a lack of dialogue between the ‘two cultures,’ and that this was bad for both parties, so he encouraged institutions of higher learning to ensure that young people were taught both ‘languages.’
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In spite of the many changes that have occurred in the academy since Snow wrote his book, a purported opposition between the humanities and the ‘real’ (or ‘hard’) sciences persists in the philosophy of science and in public opinion. There are undoubtedly differences between them – between physics and medieval studies, for example – in the types of questions asked, methods used, and materials dealt with. Such differences are inevitable. They may become a problem, however, if one sort of science is taken to be more valuable than another and a model for the others; as when the quantitative and experimental methods of the natural sciences are taken to be the norm for all other disciplines whose methods are then dismissed as invalid because they are too ‘soft.’ (It is worth recalling that the pecking order used to be different, with disciplines like chemistry having to struggle well into the nineteenth century for equal status with book-based disciplines like philosophy and history.) It is important to recognise disciplinary differences (though we should not exaggerate them) and to respect academic diversity. Humanities scholars, like their counterparts in the natural and social sciences, engage in disciplined inquiry. But their objects of study and hence their methods are different. Only a full orchestra, with many instruments, can perform a Beethoven symphony. In much the same way, diversity is a necessary condition for a rich academic environment.
Why the humanities are needed Why do societies need people with expertise in the field of humanities? In recent decades there has been a growing emphasis in Europe and elsewhere on the importance of a ‘knowledge economy.’ No one doubts the economic benefit of technological advances since they provide the blueprint for the making of new (digital) products. When it comes to medicine, there are few doubts either: new medicines can be patented and sold and, even more important than the economic benefits, medical research has a human value in that it leads to more lives being saved and illnesses cured. In both cases, taxpayers’ money seems well spent. Compared to these, where does the value of the humanities lie? Humanities research does have a direct economic value in the so-called ‘creative industries’: the use of knowledge about culture and the history of culture to make museum exhibitions, television programmes, computer games, and so on. Humanities scholars provide access to a huge range of materials from cultural history, can explain the ingredients of good storytelling and the impact of social media. In addition, those working in the field of language and culture in particular provide valuable data and insights that can help public institutions, for example, in the integration of migrants or in international trade and diplomacy. In these multiple ways, then, humanities research has clear practical applications which need to be stressed and borne in mind. Nevertheless, the core of our
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value lies less in such direct practical applications than in something that is no less important in society: our expert knowledge of culture and its history provides conceptual tools for critically reflecting on the assumptions that guide everyday life and on the rhetoric and stories that shape public life and individual wellbeing. Take the concept of ‘citizenship.’ Humanities scholarship will be interested in the history of the concept and practices relating to it, how the concept translates into other languages and cultures, and what alternatives have been thought up or could be imagined. It provides a virtual laboratory for producing alternative perspectives on the world, and the value of this cannot simply be measured terms of economic benefit. As the name suggests, humanities scholarship take as its remit everything that mankind has produced and for which it is responsible; it involves thinking about the nature of our species in relation to other species, and what it means to be ‘human’ in a world of growing inequality on a planet with diminishing resources. These questions have huge practical implications in the long-term; a society which fails to ask them is heading recklessly and irresponsibly towards the future.
1.4
Humanities and the study of culture
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Italian philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) wrote The New Science (La Scienza Nuova; 1725). Composed at a time when modern natural sciences were becoming more important, this work laid the foundations for the humanities as a distinctive intellectual pursuit. Vico argued that humans could never really know the natural world since it had been made by God; in contrast, they could aspire to know everything about the products of the human mind since these were literally ‘man-made.’ The ‘new science’ that Vico accordingly promoted should focus on what humans had created over the course of history: products of the human mind or what was referred to above as ‘representations of the world.’ In Vico’s understanding of culture an important role was played by the stories and myths that people across the ages had invented to interpret the world around them. But among the ‘products of the human mind’ he also included law and jurisprudence since they too were ways for humans to shape their world through language. Vico’s opposition between ‘divine creation’ (nature) and ‘human creation’ (culture) led to a new field: study of the human world. We now know that the opposition between nature and culture is never set in stone. This has recently become very obvious in the context of discussions about climate change and humans’ increasing dependence on technology. It is precisely one of the tasks of the humanities to continuously reflect on the categories and binary oppositions we have created in
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culture
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our attempts to understand a world that is continuously changing (we will come back to this in more detail in Chapter 9). The name given to the disciplined study of ‘human creation’ has changed over the years, partly in light of developments in the broader field of science, but also because of the changing interests of scholars. In many universities the term ‘arts’ was traditionally used for the name of the faculty in which languages and history were studied (the term ‘arts’ being derived in this case from the medieval term for intellectual discipline). The German term for the humanities, Geisteswissenschaften (literally: the sciences of the mind), was first used pejoratively, but was reclaimed by the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) in the late nineteenth century to proudly distinguish the ‘sciences of the mind’ from the natural or physical sciences. Dilthey rejected the idea that the natural sciences should be taken as the standard by which to measure all academic fields of study, and instead proposed that the Geisteswissenschaften be recognised as a distinctive cluster of disciplines using qualitative methods that aimed not to explain the world according to fixed laws (in German: erklären), but to understand it (in German: verstehen). Contemporary humanities faculties cover a great deal of the field envisioned by Vico’s ‘new science,’ but not all of it. Law, for example, has acquired a separate status, and new disciplines have emerged in response to new developments in technology and culture, like media studies and gender studies.* The term we now use to describe what Vico called ‘products of the mind’ is culture (as in the triad of nature, society, and culture). We will return to this term in later chapters, so a basic definition will suffice here: culture entails the production and reproduction of meaning through representations of the world in various media (language, text, image, objects, etc.). In contrast to more traditional views of culture, this definition does not distinguish between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms. In the past, humanities scholars focused on cultural products that were considered valuable by the elite and rejected popular culture as being unworthy of serious attention. This handbook takes a more inclusive approach. It challenges the existence of a clear-cut distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ and extends our field of study to popular cultural forms disseminated through mass media. Cultural studies* (of which literary studies is considered here to be a subset) can be used as a general term to describe inquiry into this broadly defined field. Although this handbook does not restrict our field of study to ‘valuable’ cultural forms, we assume that value judgements are themselves an integral part of what we study: people continuously select from the range of representations on offer the ones that make most sense to them or appeal to them in some way. Different groups (e.g. critics, students, older
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people) have different preferences, and tastes change over time. But the desire to select and to rank cultural products seems to be a constant. Contemporary scholarship investigates the ways in which individuals and social groups define their preferences, how these preferences are developed, and how they help ensure that certain representations of the world are reproduced over and again. So far we have defined the humanities with broad brush strokes as revolving around human creation and ‘products of the human mind.’ However, it does not follow from our definition that every humanities discipline is primarily concerned with culture as such (for example, political history is primarily interested in struggles for political power). The rest of this chapter will concentrate on those culture-focused disciplines, with special attention to literary studies. Culture is a dynamic and complex phenomenon. The following list describes its different dimensions and how they influence one another. 1. The medial dimension of culture. This dimension allows us to see culture as made up of artefacts in the form of texts, images, music and theatrical performances, furniture, buildings and so on. The materiality of cultural products (their size, texture, colour, shape, movement and so on) enables them to carry not just meaning, but also affect (feelings). 2. The semantic (or symbolic) dimension of culture. This dimension allows us to see culture in terms of the meanings embedded in cultural artefacts: the representations of the world (how it is, was, should, and might be) that those artefacts bring into circulation. These meanings cannot be observed as things in themselves, but they can be extrapolated from cultural artefacts and from social behaviour. 3. The social dimension of culture. This dimension allows us to see culture in relation to human behaviour that arises from, or bears on, cultural artefacts. How does the beauty of materials used to communicate thoughts enhance the power of ideas in society? Conversely, what impact do schools, museums and publishing houses have on the making and circulation of cultural artefacts and their representations of the world? 4. The historical dimension of culture. Culture continuously evolves through the interplay of cultural artefacts, ideas, and behaviour. Over time this interplay yields changing ideas about the world and our place in it, including changing definitions of what it means to be ‘human.’ The novel Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee (b.1940) provides a good illustration of this interaction. Coetzee’s story stands in a long history of depictions of human-animal interactions. Its distinctive way of depicting the relations between people and dogs in the context of racism in South Africa helps contemporary readers to rethink the re-
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lationship between people and canines. Depending on the extent of its uptake among readers, Disgrace may contribute in the long term to (re)shaping how people think about their relations to animals and, consequently, how they behave towards them. The following chart (Figure 1.2) provides an overview of the different fields of study within the humanities. Below these main fields, we identify the aspect of human creation on which they focus and the perspective from which they approach this interlinked complex. In the various disciplines within the broad field of cultural studies,* cultural artefacts are the starting point for the study of how media interact with human thought, feelings, and behaviour. This chart aims to show only the broad strokes, and therefore ignores specialisations within the various disciplines.
Figure 1.2: Mapping the humanities. 3. social dimension: behaviour and organisation
– theology – philosophy – intellectual history – history of ideas
– political history – socio-economic history
– – – – – – – –
linguistics literary studies film studies theatre studies television studies musicology art history digital media studies
1. media dimension: cultural products, carriers of meaning
2. semantic dimension: ideas, meanings
4. historical dimension: dynamics
Figure 1.2 a. In the bottom-left corner is a long list of disciplines that focus primarily on the material dimension of culture (cultural artefacts in the form of texts, images, etc.). In reality, the study of these artefacts cannot be disconnected from the meaning they carry. Academics in this corner work
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in the borderlands between cultural artefacts (1) and the meaning they carry (2). Others analyse the relationship between cultural products and behaviour (3): contemporary linguistics in particular is becoming more and more a ‘cognitive science’ in collaboration with other faculties, including informatics. b. ‘History’ is not presented here as a discipline, because in reality it is subdivided into various specialisations. Art history and literary history focus mainly on (1), intellectual history and history of mentalities on (2), and political and socio-economic history on (3). These last specialisms are closely connected to the social sciences, which also have (3) as their main focus. c. The above disciplines are all connected to varying degrees by their dependence on sources (cultural artefacts) in various media. These sources are not always the main focus of these disciplines, but they determine in each case the access to the domain being studied. This dependence on sources applies not only to academics on the left side of our map, who study the texts and images in themselves, but also to historians. A historian cannot observe the Battle of Waterloo as a biologist can observe moss: the ‘observation’ of a historian is always mediated by sources. It is no coincidence that a large part of cultural studies was traditionally known as ‘letters’: reading, in the broadest sense of the word (of texts, images), is an essential and defining aspect of our work. d. As with other academic fields, the classification of disciplines within the humanities is not fi xed. New interrelations and disciplines emerge regularly.
Arts and letters The label ‘faculty of arts,’ still common in the United Kingdom, for example, owes its name to the curricula of universities in the Middle Ages, which consisted of the artes liberales (ars meaning ‘art’; liberales ‘suitable for free men’). There were seven liberal arts, three of which were related to language (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and four to mathematics (geometry, astronomy, music, and arithmetic). The contemporary terms ‘bachelor of arts’ and ‘master of arts’ are remainders of this same tradition. The term ‘humanities’ has its roots in Renaissance humanism, that is, the pursuit of knowledge acquired from the intellectual heritage of classical Antiquity as it had been set out in written texts. The introduction of the German term Geisteswissenschaft in the nineteenth century was an attempt to break with these traditions. Many European universities have recently rechristened their old ‘faculties of arts’ as ‘faculties of humanities,’ in the process integrating philosophy and the study of languages and history. This illustrates how names and disciplines change while still containing traces of former constellations.
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Figure 1.3: The Long Room of the Old Library, Trinity College Dublin, built 1712-1732.
Figure 1.4: Public library, Stuttgart, built 2011.
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Cultural studies* and its challenges
What makes the humanities, and specifically the culture-oriented disciplines, distinctive? This section answers this question by listing some of the particular challenges that cultural scholars face as they try to produce disciplined knowledge about the world. 1. Between diversity and universalism. So far culture has been used here as a singular noun. But the fascinating thing about culture is precisely its variety: the fact that people in different places at different times have created and continue to create different ‘cultures.’ One only has to consider the number of languages spoken in the world (about 3,000) to see that diversity is a distinguishing feature of our field. It is only possible to create a single model if we choose to ignore real differences. Historical variation (differences between the Middle Ages, the nineteenth century and the contemporary age) and geographical variation (differences between the Netherlands and England, or between Europe and the Middle East, between dominant and minority groups) are the very heart of the matter. When we study culture we need to find a balance between identifying general tendencies and taking sufficient account of diversity. We must try to draw general conclusions, but must simultaneously be wary of making too easy claims about ‘people in general,’ especially if these claims are little more than the projection of a Eurocentric perspective on the world (see more on this in Chapter 10). 2. Between creativity and predictability. Cultural difference and variation over time make it very difficult to make predictions about the future on the basis of a timeless model. Human creativity, after all, leads to unexpected reactions, new situations, new ways of life, and new technologies. (Could the invention of the smartphone have been predicted one hundred years ago? The graphic novel? YouTube?) Creativity and imagination are especially important in the arts, which are the main focus of several humanities disciplines: the arts is almost by definition unpredictable and often cannot be described using existing categories and theoretical frameworks. Artistic creativity constantly produces new challenges for scholars in cultural studies, while also generating new food for thought. 3. Between past and present. Because culture is dynamic, it is hardly surprising that so much scholarship in cultural studies focuses on developments and transformations. Cultural phenomena are commonly explained in relation to the context in which they were produced. In medieval studies the importance of context is obvious. It is less obvious but no less important in the study of contemporary culture. There too, culture is interpreted in a historical context, albeit one that is situ-
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comparative method
close reading
distant reading
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ated in the here and now rather than in a distant past. Indeed Dilthey saw the emphasis on historical positioning as one of the defining features of humanities research: What we now call cultural studies makes sense of particular phenomena by positioning them within some development. Physics, in contrast, explains phenomena as instances of unchanging principles. 4. Individual disciplines engage with cultural dynamics and different cultural periods to varying extents. Recurring debates about the social dimension of culture often focus on the relevance or ‘purpose’ of knowing about the past: What is the point of today’s society understanding past times? Chapter 9 will argue that learning about cultures that are ‘foreign’ in a historical or geographical sense is a precondition for establishing a critical distance towards the things that we consider to be ‘given’ in our own era and culture. Studying other cultures and their history provides us with an enormous storehouse of examples that we can use to better understand the present and thus imagine the future. For this reason, comparison – across time, across space, and across languages is an important methodological tool in cultural studies. Indeed, we can speak of a comparative method. 5. Methods: Between interpretation and quantification. Learning about culture first of all requires us to read, analyse, and compare a wide variety of texts, images, objects, or performances. While quantitative methods are needed for some research questions, especially ones relating to book history,* media use, reader response, and stylistic patterns in large corpora (see text box ‘Digital humanities* and distant reading’), qualitative methods are more common. In order to explain why certain works succeed in creating something new, individual scholars have to be able to read, analyse, interpret, and compare different works. As a result, close reading (highly detailed textual analysis and interpretation) has long been the dominant method in literary studies, and it relies very much on the skills and knowledge of the specialist reader. This book will provide many examples of close reading. It should be noted here that digitalisation has recently introduced new possibilities for machine reading and big data analysis (distant reading, where a computer analyses and ‘reads’ data files, etc.). The field of digital humanities* can be expected to expand in years to come, but it is extremely unlikely that distant reading will ever replace close reading by individual scholars since expert attention to the nuances of words and knowledge of context is still needed for interpreting and comparing complex texts. 6. Between involvement and detachment. Constructivism, as we mentioned above, maintains that knowledge is always shaped by the input of scholars’ own input, from the questions they pose and the concepts
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they use to the expectations they have based on the scholarly paradigm in which they participate. This subjective dimension, however, does not take from the fact that a scholarly approach must always strive to see the world from a distance. How then, to strike a balance between involvement and detachment? The relationship that students of culture have to their object of study is unique in this regard. They not only reflect upon culture and humanity as disciplined scholars, but they themselves are also users of culture, with their own values and norms as these have been shaped by age, class, ethnicity, and geography. Cultural studies scholars are both observers and participants. A great deal of debate in recent years has focused on this combined position and no single answer has emerged. Should scholars of culture work harder to distance themselves more from what they study? Or should they recognise their positionality, since this would help them become more aware of the limitations of their perspective? According to many scholars in postcolonial or gender studies,* for example, a personal engagement is not just unavoidable, but desirable. Conversely, scholars in fields like linguistics have tended to maximise their distance towards their object of study. 7. Between analysis and critique. A related question is whether scholars in cultural studies should try to change culture and not just study it. Selecting, transmitting, and influencing are key terms in this respect. Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), an extremely influential cultural theorist, once wrote that scholars of culture had a social responsibility to produce what he called ‘criticism.’ Criticism is an important term, especially in the English-language humanities tradition. For Arnold criticism was something positive, free of the negative connotations associated with the term in some other languages. The purpose of literary criticism, he maintained, was to discover and promote the most valuable ideas, perspectives, and literary works available. He described criticism as ‘a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.’ Arnold was following in the footsteps of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who, in the late eighteenth century, had used the related term critique, also in a positive way, to designate an exploratory and reflective approach to objects of study. Many literary scholars build upon this tradition by using valuable sources from both past and present as a starting point for exploring alternative ways of thinking about the world and making sense of it in new ways. In other words: they approach literature as a resource for cultural criticism: the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena in order to reflect critically on our understanding of the world.
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cultural criticism
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At what point does cultural criticism cease to be academic scholarship and become activism? In this book, we maintain that cultural studies scholarship should always be critical, and that it must be so by demonstrating that what ordinary ‘users’ of culture generally consider to be ‘normal’ and ‘timeless’ is neither natural nor universal. Taking a critical detour by way of cultures that are far removed from ours in time or in space is an important method for establishing distance from generally accepted truths. Nevertheless, we have to do more than project our own beliefs, preferences, prejudices, and aspirations on to the field. Whereas artists are free to represent the world as they wish, scholars are always obliged to anchor their reflections in arguments and evidence. The dynamics described above provide some indication of the challenges facing scholars in cultural studies. Uniqueness, unpredictability, qualitative approaches, engagement: while these might seem like obstacles to knowledge in other academic disciplines, they are the core of humanities research; not a bug but a feature. By confronting them head on, cultural studies can produce insights that could not be gained by applying a one-size-fits-all model of science.
1.6
Comparative literature
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Literary studies at an interdisciplinary crossroads
‘Literary studies’ is the current name for the discipline that studies literature in the broadest sense of the word. Older, related names included ‘letters’ and philology* (a Renaissance period word meaning ‘love of learning,’ which is still used to describe our discipline in some European universities). These names reflect the historical importance of reading and of texts in humanities research, especially the deciphering of ancient texts. Writing has been the most important medium for transmitting complex reasoning across space and time. Modern literary studies is made up of several sub-disciplines. Comparative literature (or comparative literary studies) focuses on research questions that are relevant to literature in general rather than specific to a particular language area. It approaches literature as a bearer of culture past and present, and it uses a comparative method to address, on the one hand, historical and geographical variation and, on the other hand, literature’s dynamic relationship with other media. Sub-disciplines focus on historical developments in the literature of one particular language area, while often also engaging in dialogue with comparative literature scholars who generally work in multiple languages. Both those working in comparative literature and those working in specific language areas have in recent decades been paying increasing attention to the
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mutual exchanges between literature and other media. This is not surprising given that literature (and print culture more generally) now operates alongside, and in interaction with, audiovisual culture and digital platforms. German literature, French literature, Italian literature: these languagespecific groupings are well established, but are a relatively new development in literary studies. Until the late eighteenth century only classical literature was taught at European universities; professorships in ‘national’ literature are quite recent inventions. During the nineteenth century, however, a growing interest in the study of national literatures and national languages spread throughout Europe as part of the growth of nationalism. This development made it common to divide up the field of literary studies into programmes devoted to the language and literature of English, Dutch, German, and so on. The establishment in the twentieth century of comparative literature programmes taking a supranational approach to the study of literature was in part a response to this earlier segmentation. Comparatists resisted this division of literature into distinct language areas, because it impeded the development of more general insights, but also because it ignored the fact that, in practice, literature does not respect national borders and ‘travels’ as it pleases in translation. Comparative literature initially focused on diversity within Europe or on cross-currents between literatures written in European languages. In recent times, as the field has opened up more to voices and genres in other languages, there has also been a growing emphasis on the diversity and interconnectedness of literary practice across the globe. Ideally, research within individual language areas should be integrated into the formation of theories in literary studies more broadly. Conversely, literary theories should be tested in comparative research into specific regions, periods, and traditions. The combination of cultural dynamics, changing interests, and the emergence of new media ensures that shifts are always taking place within the discipline and that the various sub-disciplines within literary studies are constantly redefining how they relate to one another. In the humanities at large, literary studies is positioned at an interdisciplinary crossroads where it touches on the following fields: ● Linguistics. The study of literature requires knowledge of how language works, and this brings literary scholars close to linguists. This is evident in (the former) names of degree courses like ‘Dutch Language and Literature’ or ‘French Language and Literature’: linguistics has long been a logical counterpart to the study of literature. ● Art and music history. The study of literature requires an understanding of art; this brings literary scholars close to art historians, musicologists, and other specialists in the arts.
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●
●
●
●
Political, social, and cultural history. The study of literature requires scholars to engage with a dynamic phenomenon that is embedded in a historical context; this brings literary scholars close to historians. Philosophy and theology. The fact that literature reflects upon fundamental questions about life and the meaning people ascribe to it, brings literary scholars close to those working in philosophy and religious studies. Theatre, film, and television studies. To the extent that literary scholars study narratives, they have points in common with those studying narrative in other media. Media studies. Since the contemporary production and reception of literature is closely linked to digital platforms and social media, literary scholarship also overlaps with media studies.
Connections also exist between literary studies and disciplines beyond the humanities. Scholars who wish to analyse how stories or poetry affect readers often collaborate with cognitive scientists; they are more likely to prefer experimental methods over text analysis in order to identify different reader responses (see Chapter 6). The history of the discipline makes clear that literary scholars are always establishing new alliances. Linguistics, once the primary counterpart of literary study, has been largely replaced by new partnerships. Especially in English-speaking countries, the work of literary scholars increasingly resembles that of philosophers of art and culture. Likewise, literary studies has also been converging with the work of historians when it comes to the history of books and ideas. Gender studies* and literary studies have also partnered around their shared interest both in the role of stories in identity formation and in postcolonial cultural criticism. Currently, the most dynamic borderlands are those between literary studies and the study of ‘new’ media: film, television, and digital media. The academic disciplines that analyse these new media have led to comparative insights into the workings of media as such, including literature. This handbook positions the study of literature, an ‘old’ medium that despite its age still has plenty of spring in its step, in relation to the study of media more broadly.
1.7
Areas of specialisation within literary studies
This chapter set out to position literary studies as an academic discipline in relation to the wider field of knowledge production and the humanities. Some of the theories and concepts that scholars of literary studies
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use are also used by other humanities scholars with different priorities and perspectives. As the limits of our discipline are stretched, new and interesting questions arise that transcend traditional disciplinary lines. Literary studies, nonetheless, has its own distinct focus and its own purpose: to describe literary phenomena and their evolution, and to explain their role in shaping ideas about what it means to be human. Interpreting individual texts is an important part of what we do, as will be demonstrated at length in the following chapters, but it is hardly the whole story. In the last century or so, different specialisations within literary studies have at times complemented each other, and at others, competed with each other. Unlike some other disciplines that are dominated by one paradigm, literary studies is characterised by pluralism and hence debate. This has focused on how much distance practitioners of literary studies should take from their field, whether to collaborate with historians or social scientists, whether to prioritise ‘masterpieces’ over popular literature, and whether visual media, given their growing social importance, should be studied alongside texts. But since the 1970s, we do seem to have reached a consensus about one thing: you cannot study texts (or other cultural products) in isolation or in a vacuum. Without authors, texts do not exist, but without readers, texts are just ‘dead letters.’ There is little sense in disconnecting the study of texts from the way they function for people as carriers of meaning and of affect. Recognising the importance of readers and ‘users’ has extended the scope of study from texts as such to their reception: by amateur readers as well as by the other authors, intellectuals, and artists working in different media who may be inspired by them. This broadening of our focus represents a sea change in the discipline, which is reflected in the attention this handbook pays to the ‘life of texts’ in society. We propose that the field of literary studies should no longer just be defined in terms of individual texts designed by individual authors. Instead, it consists of the texts themselves, what they mean to readers, how they interact with other media, and how cultural institutions help to produce and disseminate them. In short, literature is a complex and dynamic phenomenon that needs to be approached from different angles. The following chart (Figure 1.5) gives a general overview of the areas of emphasis and specialisation within literary studies. These are located on the overview with reference to the starting point of the investigation; in practice, the different specialisations overlap.
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Media studies, other art disciplines
social dimension: literary field
media dimension: poetics
C. Reader research: – reading processes – reception
semantic dimension: themes
B. Text interpretation: – cultural analyses – cultural critique
Political, socioeconomical, cultural history
E. Historical research: – contextual analysis – periods and movements – cultural memory studies*
Specialisation within literary studies
Social sciences; cognitive sciences; psychology
A. Text analysis: – genres – techniques – forms – writing styles
D. Institutional research: – publishers – literary criticism – education – cultural institutions
historical dimension Philosophy, theology Related fields
Figure 1.5: Specialisms in literary studies. Figure 1.5 A. Text analysis: Explaining how texts are made (poetics, in the general sense) and how they work as carriers of meaning in comparison to other media. See Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5. B. Text interpretation: Interpreting texts, from a cultural critical perspective, in relation to the cultural context, or otherwise. See Chapters 7, 9, 10, and 11. C. Reader response: Investigating how texts respond to readers’ expectations and how readers engage with texts in practice in the present (psychology of reading) or the past (historical reception studies*). See Chapters 6, 7. D. Institutional research: Investigating how the production and reception of literature is organised in a social context, and the role of certain professions and institutions in this process. See Chapters 2, 8.
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E. Historical research: Investigating with regard to one or more language areas how literature (in all its aspects) changes over time in connection to other aspects of culture. The specialisations mentioned above (text analysis, text interpretation, reader research, institutional research) all touch upon literary history in the general sense of the word. See Chapters 2, 11.
Digital humanities* and distant reading The term ‘digital humanities’ is the umbrella term for the new issues and approaches that have come out of the digital revolution. 1. The omnipresence of digital devices and of digitised communications in the contemporary world calls for new questions to be asked in cultural studies* about the interplay between people and machines and between authors and algorithms, about the spread of culture, and indeed about the concept of the human itself in a world where people are becoming increasingly dependent on digital devices. 2. The availability of huge textual corpora has changed the nature of data collection by making so much textual, visual, and audio material available online to researchers. 3. New methods of so-called distant reading have been developed to analyse large amounts of digitally available information so as to reveal patterns, for example, in the occurrence of certain words or stylistic features. Franco Moretti (b.1950), who coined the term ‘distant reading,’ made visible in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005) the rise and fall of the novel around the world through abstract models generated from large amounts of data relating to book production. Since this pioneering work, methods of distant reading have been further elaborated and applied to different corpora, in order for example to predict the popular success of any given novel, using variables such as the number of nouns in a book’s title.
1.8
In conclusion: Discipline and diversity
Literary studies cannot be viewed as one phenomenon, nor can the field of ‘literature.’ In this chapter we have shown that literature is a multidimensional and dynamic cultural phenomenon, which can best be approached within the much wider context of cultural studies* and in relation to other media. We have also identified multiple approaches to the study of literature. Depending on the scholar’s own interests, the emphasis may rest on texts, the themes they address, the readers who
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interpret them, the institutions that evaluate them, or even the multimedial dynamic between all of these elements, which works to keep culture alive and evolving. This introduction, by virtue of its scope, cannot provide a complete history of our discipline’s development in the modern period. The Appendix lists a select number of influential schools within literary studies, but the book prioritises a thematic approach over a historical one. Each chapter introduces one particular aspect of literature as a cultural phenomenon and presents the primary concepts and theories used in studying that particular feature. It does so with reference to the work of literary scholars who represent the different traditions or ‘schools.’ When it comes to choosing a starting point or method, we do not advocate a one-size-fits-all model for every student of literature. We do, however, wish to identify the core activity of the discipline as one of formulating general knowledge about ‘the life of texts in society.’
Further reading Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from the Antiquity to the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity, London: Methuen, 2002, especially pp. 1-19.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5
6
7
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Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962], 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours, Paris: Gallimard, 1969, pp. 7-82. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Wilhelm Dilthey, Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften [1910], Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992. Figure 1.2 (with the added dimension of ‘time’) was inspired by Ansgar Nünning and Roy Sommer, eds, Literaturwissenschaftliche Kulturwissenschaft: Disziplinäre Ansätze – Theoretische Positionen – Transdisziplinäre Perspektiven, Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2004, p. 18. Norbert Elias, What Is Sociology? Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2012. Alternatively, see Norbert Elias, Involvement and Detachment, in The Collected Works of Norbert Elias, vol. 8, ed. Stephen Quilley, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007. Matthew Arnold, Lectures and Essays in Criticism [1865], ed. R.H. Super, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973, p. 283.
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See Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, London: Verso, 2005. Matthew L. Jockers and Jodie Archer, The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, London: St Martin’s Press, 2016.
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2 THE MANY DIMENSIONS OF LITERATURE ANN RIGNEY
This chapter gives an initial overview of what it is we study when we take ‘literature’ as an object of investigation. It surveys different approaches to the concept of ‘literariness’ and, integrating these perspectives, it locates the defining feature of literature in the fact that certain texts are considered valuable ‘in themselves.’ As a result, they acquire durability and enjoy long cultural lives. We describe the combination of factors that lead people to treasure some texts above others so that they serve – in some cases for generations long – as a source of inspiration for readers and writers. . . . . . . . .
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Introduction: Durable texts Poetic language Narrative Reflection Pleasure Classification: Genres Valuation and canonisation In conclusion: The intersection of text and value.
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2.1
Introduction: Durable texts
The cartoon above appeared on 30 August 2004 in the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad as a comment on the impact of wind turbines on the landscape. The cartoon’s humour stems from the contrast between the knight’s antique armour and the hypermodern wind turbines, between current debates and a well-known literary classic.
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Figure 2.1: © Ruben Oppenheimer Don Quichote en windmolens. nrc 30.08.04.
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literariness1 display text
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The image epitomises the difficulties involved in today’s battles over wind energy and it does so through an appeal to our awareness of one of the most famous literary characters in world literature: the imaginary Don Quixote from the 1605 novel of the same name by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). Research has detailed how Cervantes’ novel travelled through Europe in translation (the first English translation was published in 1612 and the first Latvian translation in 1924). Even people who have never read the book are familiar with the name Don Quixote and the phrase ‘fighting windmills,’ which has acquired proverbial status. A novel written more than 400 years ago apparently lives on: in modern editions on bookshop shelves, in film adaptations, cartoons, and sayings – even on coins (the Spanish euro bears the image of Cervantes). The case of Don Quixote shows that some texts are capable of leading lives beyond the singular context of their creation: they appeal over time to new readers and prove applicable to the understanding of new situations. In this a literary work differs from everyday communication. Most linguistic utterances are ‘disposable.’ Even if they are recorded, they are quickly forgotten. Newspapers and emails are usually read as sources of information and then put aside, not reread. It would appear, however, that some texts are not so tightly bound to a single moment. The fact that audiences in different contexts find them interesting and meaningful indicates that they have some exceptional quality allowing them to ‘work’ in different contexts and transcend their role in giving information about the world. The capacity to be re-usable in new settings and to circulate beyond the original setting in which they were written seems to be a key characteristic of literary texts. In making this point, we do not need to confine our perspective to historical ‘greats’ like Cervantes. The novel A Game of Thrones (1996) by George R.R. Martin (b.1948), for example, has already been reprinted dozens of times, translated into several languages, adapted to a video game and board game, and to the television series, which has been seen by millions of viewers since 2011. Cervantes’ work has been a part of the literary canon for generations; in the case of A Game of Thrones it is simply too soon to tell how long it will continue to generate such interest. We know that some authors are remembered only for a generation, while others have cultural lives that extend over centuries. What lies behind their durability? This chapter offers an answer to this question. It starts from the idea that literariness (in the general sense of that which makes a text literary) lies in the fact that some texts acquire a value which is independent of their practical applicability. The term display text is used to describe a text that, for one reason or another, has acquired a value in
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and of itself. This value may lie in the fact that it is written in a captivating way, that it has a riveting storyline, or that it expresses specific norms and values, to name some possibilities. Display texts are circulated, reprinted, discussed, translated, adapted to other media – and people treasure them for many reasons. Unlike yesterday’s newspaper, they do not come with an expiry date; and although not all of them prove equally durable they all have a capacity to be meaningful in new situations. Putting durability at the heart of our understanding of literature, this chapter will survey the various reasons why certain texts acquire cultural lives and survive the moment of their original conception. We will show how the durability of texts comes from the interaction of several factors, whose relative importance will vary from case to case. These factors pertain to (1) textual characteristics, (2) the effect of a text on its readers, and (3) the status ascribed to it by cultural authorities (see Figure 2.2). The organisation of this chapter follows the interplay between these factors, moving from textual characteristics (poetic and narrative) to effects on readers (reflection, pleasure) to the cultural authorities who evaluate and disseminate literature (classification, valuation, and canon formation). These different features do not all have to be present in any given instance for a work to become durable; they should rather be seen as a range of possible features which occur in different combinations in particular cases.
poetic
textual characteristics
canonisation
narrative
classification
reflection
Figure 2.2: Literariness: an interplay of factors.
cultural authorities
pleasure
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effect
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In exploring how the interaction between these factors produces durability (‘the life of texts’), we will be integrating theories from different traditions in literary studies. Our approach is distinguished in several ways. Firstly, we emphasise how literary texts become part of people’s lives and do so in combination with other forms of culture (carried, for example, by television, theatre, and social media). Second, we include many different types of texts in our understanding of literature, including ones that have been transmitted orally and ones belonging to popular culture. Finally, while having a very broad view of what may count as literature, we nevertheless accept the principle that the evaluation and classification of texts are crucial to the way readers deal with them. Understanding the complexity of literature as a cultural and social phenomenon means also explaining why, of all the works with literary qualities, certain works come to be known as Literature (with a capital L), so highly valued as to be worthy of being preserved and promoted.
2.2
poetic function
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Poetic language
Everyday language can be compared to the wrapping around paper tissues. Once the information has been ‘unpacked,’ you throw away the linguistic wrapper and only hold on to what was said and not how it was said or written. In some cases, however, you pay attention to the form the words take (words, sounds, rhythm, etc.) and end up remembering the actual words uttered and not just the information they carried. The Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) described this phenomenon as the poetic function: a text’s ability to draw attention to its own status as text – as expression. He applied this principle not only to poetry as such, but also more generally to ‘poetic language’ be it written or spoken. The revolutionary aspect of Jakobson’s model is that it can be used to identify the ‘poetic’ effect of language in any type of text, from poems and novels to journalism and political slogans. It was based on the idea that every speech act (verbal communication) brings six elements into play: the sender, the receiver, the code (language), the contact between sender and receiver, the worldly context, and the message itself. Usually a written or spoken text will be oriented towards one or other of these elements and, depending on which one, it will have an expressive function (orientation towards the sender), a conative function (orientation towards the receiver), a phatic function (orientation towards the contact), a metalingual function (orientation towards the code), a referential function (orientation towards the context), and finally, a poetic function where the orientation is towards the text (that is, the message) itself. For example,
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the purpose of a Facebook post can be to transmit your feelings or ideas (an expressive function), to re-establish contact with a friend (a phatic function), to mobilise your friends into supporting you (a conative function), to give information about a recent event (a referential function), and perhaps also to draw attention to your skill with using words (a poetic function); or a mixture of all of these. Crucially, Jakobson allowed for the fact that the same text can have multiple functions, even if one is more dominant than the others. His concept of ‘dominant’ and ‘non-dominant’ functions allowed literary studies to think of the ‘poetic’ in combination with other uses of language and to see texts in a multidimensional way. But what makes an utterance ‘poetic’? How does language draw attention to itself? Language that is non-standard or non-idiomatic stands out as different. For example, language as used by non-native speakers of a language may draw attention to itself because of unusual sound patterns and ungrammatical constructions. ‘Poetic language’ also implies non-standard usage but one that is striking because of the perceived skill of the user. People whose language is ‘poetic’ have such a strong command of that language that they can use it to make something distinctively their own. Their writing or speaking stands out as an artefact (arte-factum = made with art). Consider the first lines of Sonnet 30 by William Shakespeare (1564-1616): ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.’ The many ‘s’ sounds create a rhythmic, whispered cadence which forces the reader to slow down and read more carefully. A modern example of attention-seeking language can be found in the experimental work of the Canadian poet-programmer Jim Andrews (b.1959) which invites the reader/viewer to watch words and shapes transform on a computer screen. Jakobson’s concept of ‘the poetic’ assumes that language is a multidimensional medium, consisting of sound, rhythm, meaning, sentence structure and, in the case of written language, the form on the page (see Chapter 4). When different dimensions of language are simultaneously activated, the result is an encounter with complexity, a text with more than one dimension. Because a complex text transcends the mere conveyance of information, it becomes potentially durable rather than disposable.
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One snail isn’t the same as the next The poetic function can be illustrated by way of a comparison between two texts both of which deal with snails. The first is the Wikipedia article on the ‘Snail,’ which begins as follows:
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A snail is, in loose terms, a shelled gastropod. The name is most often applied to land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs. However, the common name snail is also used for most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have a coiled shell that is large enough for the animal to retract completely into. When the word ‘snail’ is used in this most general sense, it includes not just land snails but also numerous species of sea snails and freshwater snails. Gastropods that naturally lack a shell, or have only an internal shell, are mostly called slugs, and land snails that have only a very small shell (that they cannot retract into) are often called semi-slugs. Snails have considerable human relevance, including as food items, as pests, as vectors of disease, and their shells are used as decorative objects and are incorporated into jewellery. The snail has also had some cultural significance, and has been used as a metaphor.
The primary function of this text is to impart information about a certain species of animal: shelled gastropods. It sets out step by step how this species may be distinguished from others and how the word ‘snail’ relates to other terms. It then outlines the human relevance of the snail, including its cultural significance as a metaphor. There is nothing remarkable about the text as text (except the hyperlinks characteristic of Wikipedia, though these have by now become commonplace); and while the ‘s’ sound occurs frequently the poetic potential of the alliteration is hardly noticed given the dominance of the referential function in the text: the capacity of the text to talk about the world. Now read the following poem called ‘Considering the Snail’ (1961) by the English poet Thom Gunn (1929-2004): The snail pushes through a green night, for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes, where rain has darkened the earth’s dark. He moves in a wood of desire, pale antlers barely stirring as he hunts. I cannot tell what power is at work, drenched there with purpose, knowing nothing. What is a snail’s fury? All I think is that if later I parted the blades above the tunnel and saw the thin trail of broken white across litter, I would never have imagined the slow passion to that deliberate progress.
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The most obvious contrast with the Wikipedia article is the layout, characteristic of poetry (Chapter 4). Each stanza has six lines, and each line varies in length between six or seven syllables – except for the last line, which is longer, a fact that emphasises the final words ‘deliberate progress’. The ‘unnatural’ cut-off points between lines (enjambment) and stanzas serves to highlight certain words like ‘stirring,’ ‘desire,’ and ‘passion.’ The overall effect is one of patterned language that as such draws attention to itself in line with Jacobson’s definition of the poetic function. Moreover, the poet’s words are slowly and mindfully measured out in a way that echoes the slowness of the snail’s motion. As readers we are invited to take our time to watch and observe and, in the process, also to reflect upon the ‘slow passion’ of a snail to get to where it wants to be. Where the Wikipedia article is generic (it is about ‘the snail’ as a category), Gunn’s poem is about a particular snail with its efforts and emotions as seen by a human observer. These are brought home to the reader through the slow deliberate patterning of language in a way that generates a new reflection on the world rather than merely giving a reference to it. (In Chapter 9 we will return to the role of creative writers in depicting the natural world; see ecocriticism.*)
enjambment Advertisements regularly have poetic features. Rhyme, sound repetitions, the striking layout of words, the often ironic interplay between words and images: these devices are widely used to attract the attention of potential customers to the advertisement itself. The famous slogan ‘beanz meanz heinz’ (1967) offers a case in point. The poetic function of many advertisements, however, is less important than the conative one (its attempt to persuade the customer). While poetic qualities may initially attract the passer-by, the poetic function usually gives way to an unambiguous message: buy this product. In other situations, the poetic dimension of language creates more ambivalence than clarity, provoking reflection on the meaning of the text. As we will see later, in literature such ambiguity is not a bug but a feature. The poetic function can be observed first and foremost when authors activate different linguistic dimensions simultaneously (sound, rhythm, meaning, etc.). But the term ‘poetic function’ (in the general sense of ‘language that calls attention to itself ’) also applies to other aspects of a text: narrative techniques, humour, irony, and so on. Novels too can be ‘poetic’ in Jakobson’s sense if they deploy unconventional perspectives, use language in a distinctive manner or include unexpected plot twists that cause the reader to focus on the way the story is being told. Chapters 4 and 5 will introduce more specifics about the arts of poetic writing and storytelling. This chapter focuses on the general principle that displays of artistry in the use of the medium makes texts valuable as texts.
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Rhetorical sound bites In politics too the poetic function is mobilised. Catchy phrases and sound bites are designed to make messages ‘stick’ and go viral. One of the most famous examples of a poetic slogan was the one used by General (‘Ike’) Eisenhower (1890-1969), who successfully campaigned for the us presidency in 1952 with the slogan ‘I like Ike.’ Just three words, but they managed to have an internal rhyme (like, Ike) as well as three occurrences of the ‘I’ sound. The ultimate aim of such slogans is to persuade people to vote in a particular way, but it mobilises people through the appeal of the poetic.
Figure 2.3: Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Campaign (1952).
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This applies also more generally to political speeches. If Julius Caesar (ca. 100-44 bce) had not used alliteration when he announced his victory at Zela with the famous words ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’), his achievement would not have gone down in history the way it did. The art of speechwriting – or more generally, skills in effectively using language: eloquence – has long been known as the art of rhetoric (see Chapter 4). Rhetoric has been the subject of much theoretical reflection, for example, in the works of Aristotle (Rhetoric – Rhētorikḗ; ca. 350 bce), Cicero (On the Orator – De oratore; 55 bce) and Quintilian (Institutes of Oratory – Institutio oratoria; ca. 95 ce). The study of rhetoric is closely related to the study of literature: as the concept of ‘poetic function’ shows, linguistic mastery and the impressive use of language are key to both. Take the speech made by the British prime minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) in 1940 when he sought to reassure the public in face of attacks from Germany: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender’ (compare Chapter 4, parallelism). Since 1940, this speech has become one of the most quoted and imitated in history (including its quotation by the rock band Supertramp in their 1977 album Even in the Quietest Moments). Its success is not so much a matter of its content (‘we need to fight’) but the way it was formulated, textually and orally. The repetition of the simple phrase ‘we will fight them’ creates not just a sound play but also a strong rhythmical pattern. If you listen to the speech on YouTube you can hear how Churchill used his intake of breath and the pitch of his voice to end up with the climactic ‘we shall never surrender.’ By mobilising several dimensions of language at the same time (sound, syntax, word choice, pacing), politicians grab and hold the attention of their publics. This in turn enhances their chances of making an impact, as well as increasing their personal authority through a display of their mastery over language. (Nowadays this is often in fact the achievement of professional speechwriters, but not everyone knows this.)
2.3
Narrative
In some cases, the poetic function may be less important in creating literariness than the fact that a given text carries a powerful story. Think of works that have been in circulation for centuries such as Don Quixote and the Epic of Gilgamesh (thirteenth to tenth century bce); or of works that have more recently come on the scene, such as the bestselling Harry Potter (1997-2007) written by J.K. Rowling (b.1965). It is clear that narratives, be they in the form of oral epics, novels, plays, or short stories, make up an important part of literature conceived in terms of cultural durability. The protestant theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546) acknowledged the magnetic appeal of stories in his advice to future ministers, telling
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them that their sermons should always include ‘stories,’ because the minute someone starts telling a story, a sleepy audience will perk up its ears. In 2002, the philosopher Richard Kearney (b.1954) reaffirmed the primacy of narrative: ‘Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what make our condition human.’ It is little wonder that Aristotle’s Poetics paid so much attention to them and that the study of literature since then has focused so much on their varying forms and functions. Chapter 5 will discuss these issues in greater detail. Here, we focus on the broader question of what the essence of a story is, and why the oral and written texts that live long, rich cultural lives so often take the form of narratives. One answer is that stories are a rich source of virtual experiences. Narratives conjure up a virtual world, often with unique characters, interesting settings, and exciting events that the readers can experience in their imagination. Virtuality, then, is a characteristic of verbal representations and not just of digital media. Consider how Cervantes used words to conjure up an image of Don Quixote: En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantes los sábados, lentejas los viernes, y algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda. [...] Frisaba la edad de nuestro hidalgo con los cincuenta años; era de complexión recia, seco de carnes [...]. In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. […] The age of this gentleman of ours was bordering on 50; he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured.
fictionality
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Narratives give people virtual access to the world of other people’s experience, and have a way of triggering our curiosity about the lives of others. Creative writers feed this curiosity by using their imagination and skill with words to invent colourful and interesting characters. The fact that these lives are often imaginary does little to diminish their magnetic appeal – in fact, the opposite is true. In many cases, the added element of fictionality releases storytellers from the obligation to stick to historical facts, giving them freedom to imagine worlds with a broader appeal. Fictionality is the principle that
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public, in certain conditions, engages willingly in a game of make-believe, granting the storyteller an implicit licence to invent things. Or, as the poet Samuel T. Coleridge (1772-1834) famously put it, fiction involves the ‘willing suspension of disbelief for the moment.’ This means agreeing for the duration of the reading experience to accept that the fictional world is real while knowing that it may be invented. Fiction thus has all the characteristics of a game in which readers and viewers are invited to participate. The study of literature and the study of narrative interact at an interdisciplinary crossroads: since language is not the only medium for storytelling, literary scholars share common ground with those working in the field of film, games, and theatre. Looking at stories from an historical perspective also shows how some virtual characters have had such a strong appeal that people have repeatedly prolonged their cultural lives in different media. Oedipus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, the Count of Monte Cristo – the stories of these and many other characters have been adapted multiple times. Adaptation to another medium is a sign of lasting appeal, but also a means of breathing fresh life into old stories by reintroducing them to later generations or different publics in a more contemporary form. It might seem that a story’s durability can be considered separately from the ‘poetic’ features discussed above. Up to a point, this is indeed the case. In practice, however, it would appear that durable narratives also often display artistry in their chosen medium. From the perspective of cultural authorities, the combination of a striking form and a strong story is often considered to be a key characteristic of ‘real’ Literature (and art house cinema) as opposed to ‘mere’ entertainment (see also Section 2.7: Valuation and canonisation).
Footnotes to Aristotle Modern literary scholars working in the European tradition continue to draw directly and indirectly on the work of Aristotle. Contemporary studies of narrative still address issues first raised by the Greek philosopher in his Poetics (Peri poiètikès). Aristotle used the term ‘poetics’ in the very broad meaning of ‘the art of making’ (‘poetics’ is derived from the Greek poieō – ‘I make’). He was especially interested in narrative, particularly narrative in dramatic form, which he described in terms of mimesis (closely related to the concept of ‘imitation’). By mimesis he understood the representation of a human action in a dramatic form. The importance of mimesis lay in its providing general insight into human existence in a way that also engaged the public’s emotions by playing with their fear and its resolution as they identified with characters in action. Aristotle’s theory of narrative continued to be important across the centuries in the theoretical reflection
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on theatre and epic, and it was also a key point of reference in modern understandings of plot structures (which we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 5). In 1946, Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) wrote a classic history of European literature called Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur). Reflecting the influence of Aristotle, Auerbach showed how one can use the concept of mimesis to describe the evolution of narrative art in different periods and how this has reflected shifting views of what it means to be human.
2.4
literariness2
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Reflection
Serious, thoughtful, educational, philosophical, stimulating: texts can become durable if they remain relevant to our intellectual lives by dealing with existential or moral themes that define our understanding of the world. Authors and readers share a virtual platform from which to explore human experience and ethical questions. What is happiness? How do I find true love? Are animals really that different from people? What is crime and what is justice? Crime and Punishment (Преступленіе и наказаніе; 1866), the aptly titled novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (18211881), responds to the latter question by focusing on how a young man who kills an old woman in order to get ahead in life is punished. Since questions about life, death, love and justice are timeless, texts that deal with such themes can in principle withstand the test of time by appealing to readers as reflective beings. If literature deals with such questions, often ethical in nature, what makes it different from a sermon or a handbook? Does literature offer simply an interesting packaging around ready-made ideas or is there a special type of reflection unique to literature, or to art in general? One dominant idea in modern art theory is that art indeed has its own way of ‘thinking.’ Many debates on this subject in literary studies can be traced to the influential literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984), a key figure in Russian formalism.* His theory is based on the idea that literature does not promulgate new truths or present fully formed ideas – that is more common to didactics – but instead leaves it up to the reader to draw conclusions. Art as art works by making other people think: it creates room for reflection more than that it makes statements. It makes people think; it does not tell them what to think. (For this reason, it also it generates many different interpretations, as we shall see in Chapter 7.) Shklovsky used the Russian term literaturnost to define literariness, while restricting its application to an exclusive sub-category of ‘high-art’
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texts. Building on a body of thought that had been slowly emerging in the previous century, he maintained (a) that literary art was capable of deactivating received wisdom and fixed parameters of thought and (b) that it achieved this using its own (i.e. artistic) means. In this view, the form of the work is inseparable from its role in provoking reflection. Shklovsky’s theory proceeded from the realisation that modern life had become thoroughly automated. He believed that people were living on autopilot: they watched and listened, carried out tasks, had certain prejudices, and used language, but did all of this unthinkingly. Habit, Shklovsky believed, was a powerful force that blinded people and alienated them from true experience: it dulled perception and our capacity to engage critically with the world around us. Only art could wake us from our stupor and interrupt our automatic responses by allowing us to see everyday life through fresh eyes: Considering the laws of perception, we see that routine actions become automatic. […] [Y]ou will agree with this if you remember the feeling you had when holding a quill in your hand for the first time or speaking a foreign language for the first time and compare it to the feeling you have when doing it for the ten thousandth time. […] This is how life becomes nothing and disappears. Automatisation eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife, and the fear of war. […] And so this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony. The goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things; the device of art is the ‘estrangement’ of things and the complication of the form, which increases the duration and complexity of perception, as the process of perception is, in art, an end in itself and must be prolonged.
Works of arts are not easy to consume because their poetic features make them complex. If a text’s language and structure are complex – or in Shklovsky’s words, if the language is ‘crooked’ or ‘contains obstacles’ – then it can hold its readers’ attention: their automatic thought pattern is interrupted (temporarily). If a narrative describes familiar things from a new perspective, for example, the reader also faces an ‘obstacle.’ Defamiliarisation thus gives literature a critical function: through its unusual forms, it resists commonplaces and experiments with new ways of seeing familiar things. Shklovsky illustrates the principle of defamiliarisation by reference to a short story by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) called Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse (Холстомер; 1886). Tolstoy invites his readers to see the world through the perspective of a horse who is puzzled about the idea of ownership and the importance humans attach to it:
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For instance, many of those who called me their horse never rode me, while completely different people did. Neither did they feed me, but yet others did. The ones who were good to me were not those who called me their horse either but the coachman, the horse doctor, and people who didn’t know me at all. Later, having widened the scope of my observations, I realized that, not only in relation to us horses, the notion of mine had no basis apart from a low animal instinct people have, which they call sense of property or property right. A man says ‘my house’ and never lives in it but only worries about its building and upkeep. A merchant says ‘my shop,’ ‘my cloth shop,’ for instance, and does not have any clothes made from the best cloth in his own shop.
singularity
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The theory of defamiliarisation is well suited to modern art: in word, sound, and image, many modern artists have set out to provoke people into critical reflection. Pre-modern literature can also be seen to stimulate reflection through its use of form (and in this sense, Shklovsky’s basic theory still applies), but it tends to do so through a subtle dialogue with existing perspectives rather than through overt provocation. Contemporary literary studies owes much to Shklovsky’s general principle that literariness should be linked to the way texts make people think and perceive the world in new ways. This principle is especially strong in the tradition of cultural criticism (which we will discuss in more detail in Chapters 9, 10, 11). In The Singularity of Literature (2004), Derek Attridge (b.1945) provides an account of literature that resonates closely with Shklovsky’s defamiliarisation, while locating the core of the literary, less in the formal characteristics of the text, than in the dynamic between reader, text, and author. Attridge argues that literariness has to do with the creative disturbance of one’s own ‘idioculture’ (the way that individuals, be these writers or readers, view the world). This disturbance occurs first in the author (in the creative act of writing) and then in the reader (in the encounter with the text). For Attridge, as for the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) on whose work Attridge builds, we should understand literariness as an ‘event’ and not a predetermined quality of the text. Literariness represents the experience of singularity; an encounter with something unique which is the product of creativity. Literariness as it occurs in the act of writing and in the act of reading, provides an endlessly renewable opportunity to see things differently and to rethink one’s place in the world. This explains why multivalence, ambivalence, confusion and generally wondering what things mean are defining for literary experience. Remaining open to the new and the unknown prevents us from getting stuck in an intellectual and emotional standstill. Attridge claims that this open stance also has an important ethical dimension: the ability to remain open to new things (the core of creativity and its effects)
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is also necessary when adopting a welcoming attitude to strangers and, more generally, to that which is different and unknown. The reflection literature inspires cannot be disconnected from the way that texts appeal to our feelings. Seen in this light, literature can function not only as a laboratory for thought experiments, but also for ethical training. It means (temporarily) disabling the mental and affective patterns on which we normally rely and becoming open to alternatives.
Eye-opening trees The popular essayist Alain de Botton (b.1969) waxed lyrical in The Art of Travel (2002) about the beauty of cypress trees in Provence: their shape, their colour, and the way in which they move in the wind: ‘With its cone-like shape (cypresses rarely exceed a metre in diameter), the tree takes on the appearance of a flame flickering nervously in the wind.’ De Botton admits that he could only have noticed all of this because of the work of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), who had painted many images of cypress trees. Thanks to the mediation of the artist, these particular trees had become visible to the general eye: they had become objects of beauty, to be noticed and admired. In terms Figure 2.4: that echo Shklovsky, De Botton calls the work Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses (1889). of Van Gogh literally an ‘eye-opener.’ The Dutch painter had not invented anything, and yet he had re-created Provence by painting it. Van Gogh’s Cypresses was painted in 1889, three years after Tolstoy had used the defamiliarising perspective of a horse in his story ‘Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse’ (and some fifteen years before Shklovsky would develop his theory of defamiliarisation). The interest in defamiliarising strategies grew in the twentieth century, often in combination with topics that were more directly political than cypress trees. This can be illustrated by reference to one of the installations by artists Christo (b.1938) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009). In July 1995, they used enormous cloths to wrap up the Reichstag, symbol both of democracy in Germany today and of its failure in the 1930s. The idea was to defamiliarise the building and, by making it visible again (ironically by hiding it behind wraps), to get people to think again about the significance of this historical building and the vulnerability of democracies.
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2.5
affect
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Pleasure
Beautiful, moving, funny, amusing, witty, fascinating, unexpected, mysterious, sinister, terrifying, shocking: it is in such terms that the experience of reading or viewing is often described. The appeal of certain texts (or of narratives in other media) seems inextricably tied to the feelings they arouse. In cultural studies* the term ‘affect’ is by now the preferred term to describe this arousal. Affect entails emotions as we usually think of them (happiness, fear, excitement, etc.), but the term emphasises more the process whereby (sometimes undefined) feelings are physically triggered and impact on our disposition towards the world. Anyone who has ever felt goose bumps while reading a book or listening to music knows what this is like. Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) certainly did (or at least, her character) in The Seven Year Itch (directed by Billy Wilder, 1955); in a famous scene involving music by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), she gushes: ‘Every time I hear it, I go to pieces. […] It shakes me, it quakes me. It makes me feel goose-pimply all over!’ Literature and other art forms arouse a wide range of affects in different combinations, but generally leading overall to a positive outcome. It has long been one of the puzzles of literary studies how films or books that trigger fear or disgust, nevertheless leave us with a sense of satisfaction. Regardless of how tragic and sad, how terrifying or horrific certain books and films are, people continue to seek them out. They must offer some sort of reward which we will simply call ‘pleasure’ here for the sake of simplicity. Much has been written about literature as a source of pleasure. These studies usually distinguish between the pleasure related to escapism (entertainment; a reading ‘for pleasure,’ or enchantment) and the pleasure related to aesthetic experience. The success of mystery novels, thrillers, or romances (the names suggest the intended effect) is determined in part by the extent to which people can become absorbed in such stories. Their dominant function is less defamiliarisation than distraction, excitement, relaxation, and letting the fantasy run free. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) once described this sort of pleasure in his essay ‘On Reading’ (‘Sur la lecture’; 1905), explaining how, as a young boy, he used to slip away for hours to immerse himself in stories and escape the boring world around him. During dinner, he used to long for the moment that he could return to the virtual world of his books. A lot of reading and viewing behaviour is presumably motivated by a similar wish to lose oneself in a virtual world. But there is also another sort of pleasure of a supposedly ‘higher’ order, one more closely connected to the defamiliarising and unsettling
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effect of art discussed above. Aesthetic experience, as it is traditionally known in the philosophy of art, is a more detached form of pleasure. Aesthetics, in the broad sense, refers to ‘the art or study of sensory perception’ (derived from the Greek word aisthètikos). Since the eighteenth century, aesthetics has also been a separate branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the nature of ‘beauty’ and artistic taste. What does it mean to call a certain text, film, or musical composition ‘beautiful’? Today, most literary scholars believe that beauty is ‘in the eye of the bolder’ and determined by historically and culturally specific ideals. At the same time, they continue to aim for a general understanding of the nature of aesthetic experience as such. A number of general principles can be identified as conducive to it. First, the presence of an ‘artefact’ demanding special attention and inspiring admiration – for example, through the inventive use of language, a well-made plot, humour, an interesting thought process, or surprising narrative techniques – would seem to be necessary. Second, a certain distance towards the artefact: when readers stop to admire a text, they step out of its virtual world and stand back to observe how it is constructed. Reading like this is no longer only an immersive experience with respect to the story being told, but one that involves the process of reflecting on and engaging with the cultural artefact itself. The question then arises how the skill or creativity put into the making of something can function as a source of enjoyment for someone else. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant provides one of the most influential answers to this question. His theory still shapes, directly and indirectly, debates in aesthetics. Building on the work of several British and German theorists, Kant defined aesthetic experience as a ‘disinterested pleasure’ in his Critique of the Power of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft; 1790). By ‘disinterested’ Kant meant that the artefact generating aesthetic experience has no practical purpose in human life (i.e. it serves no direct interest). In a world that places so much value on utility (the ‘useful’), art preserves a space for the expression of human creativity. Precisely because we are not trying to use the work to achieve a practical objective, we are free to view its composition and content ‘for its own sake.’ The possibility of being ‘disinterested’ in our appreciation of a work has a spin-off effect in giving us a renewed sense of freedom from the demands of the everyday. For Kant, then, the aesthetic was less a matter of the properties of an artwork, than of the free play it triggers between our knowledge (of what is) and our imagination (of what might be). The novelist Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) explained the Kantian aesthetic experience by analogy with a man falling off a high building
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who, despite plummeting towards certain death, becomes fascinated by what he sees in passing the wall. According to Nabokov, our human capacity to wonder is what allows art to take us, momentarily, out of ordinary time: I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top storey of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering […] at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit […] are the highest forms of consciousness.
Nabokov presents aesthetic experience as a momentary release from everyday reality (where death is always imminent). In doing so, he exhibits an art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art) perspective that cherishes art as a value in its own right and sees it as detached from the world. Other theorists have built upon the concept of ‘disinterested pleasure’ in order to link aesthetic experience back to a greater involvement in material reality. These include the aforementioned Attridge, who has argued that aesthetic experience can help enhance an ethically responsible openness to new ways of seeing and being. Although this section began by approaching entertainment and ‘aesthetic experience’ as two separate phenomena, we do not wish to suggest that they are mutually exclusive alternatives. There are plenty of hybrids and combinations. Escapist pleasure is not only to be found in ‘popular’ genres like thrillers and detective novels; nor is aesthetic experience exclusively a feature of ‘high’ literature. A comic page-turner can inspire admiration through its clever one-liners just as much as through the artistry of the narrative. Furthermore, popular genres and bestsellers can also occasion ethical reflection, as a recent study of book clubs has shown. As we will see in Chapter 10, the line between popular forms and ‘high’ art is more flexible (and artificial) than is often believed: between the two extremes, any number of combinations exists. In any case, ‘entertainment’ and ‘aesthetic experience’ have one element in common: the idea of play or a game and the sense of freedom that follows from it. When we read for pleasure – for the sake of the story or for art itself – we effectively participate in a game that requires us to suspend the rules of everyday life.
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2.6
Classification: Genres
Readers expect different things from news stories than they do from a novel or prose poem. If a news report is unclear, or if it seems the journalist has not checked their facts, we are likely to criticise the article for being unprofessional. In the case of poetry, in contrast, complexity and ambiguity are par for the course, while novelists are free to invent characters, events, and even entire worlds. In other words, classifying texts as belonging to one type rather than another is a significant part both of writing and of reading. Consequently, it is also an important part of literary studies, especially of literary history, where scholars map the emergence of new types of texts and the disappearance of others (see Chapter 9 for examples). Language is not invented by individual authors, and even texts that aim to disrupt always acknowledge earlier models in some way. Texts that are written and read according to a shared model are described as belonging to a particular genre (from the Latin genus = type). A genre is constituted by a recurring combination of particular forms with particular themes Literary history distinguishes a large variety of genres. Some of them are short-lived while others lead longer cultural lives. The oral epic, for example, which recounts the deeds of heroes, was an important, highstatus genre from Antiquity until the eighteenth century, when it evolved into the mock-epic. It has since virtually disappeared from European literature – though it made something of a come-back in the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), the fantasy series kicked off by A Game of Thrones, and the epic space-opera media franchise Star Wars (1977-2019), created by George Lucas (b.1944), which all depict the deeds of heroic warriors in an episodic story in a distant world. The continuously shifting divisions of genres shapes both the production and reception of texts within society. When texts are either implicitly or explicitly assigned to a genre, the presentation as such affects readers’ expectations, as it presumably affected the genesis of the work. Within this general framework, moreover, certain genres are considered to be specifically literary (epic, tragedy, lyric, etc.). This means that their use triggers the expectation that the text will be interesting in and of itself, that it may be fictional, that it deserves sustained attention, and that it could have long-term value (in short: all aspects of literature discussed in this chapter). It is important to realise that definitions of literary genres are neither timeless nor universal. There is no limit to the number of possible genres and creativity keeps throwing up new ones. Since the second half of the twentieth century, for example, the graphic novel has become a new literary genre at the intersection between comics and the novel. Since novels
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dominate the literary scene today, it is easy to forget that it too is a relative newcomer to European literature. The novel emerged as a recognisable genre only in the eighteenth century and, for a long time, people believed that the genre’s themes were too trivial to be considered highquality Literature (we can still see signs of this distinction in book shops where ‘literary fiction’ is sometimes presented as a separate category, next to thrillers and detective novels). It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that fiction lost its reputation for being purely entertainment for the common people, women, and intellectual lightweights who could not possibly digest anything more serious. Only gradually did the novel come to be recognised as a literary genre with artistic value. There is an interesting similarity between the status of the novel around 1850 and that of a critically acclaimed television series like The Sopranos (dir. David Chase [b.1945], 1999-2007): in both cases, we are dealing with a genre that has migrated from the realm of popular culture to that of valued art. In the ongoing evolution of genres, the boundary between non-literary and specifically literary ones can shift. Historiography offers a case in point. History was long believed to be one of the most important and serious forms of literature: Voltaire (1694-1778), for example, wrote works of historiography as well as philosophy and drama. During the nineteenth century the writing of history became more and more of matter of professional historians working from universities. As the novel was gaining ground and respectability as literary genre, historiography came to be placed outside the system of specifically literary genres. Sometimes, a history book will still be praised for its literary qualities (for example, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen [1919, translated as The Autumn of the Middle Ages in 1924) by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga [1872-1945]). But it earns this status by being written in a striking way or by having a strong narrative component; it is not given this status automatically by virtue of the genre to which it belongs. The classification systems used by libraries and bookshops also help determine the literariness of certain works. The status of writings by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) offers a case in point. The Library of Congress, the largest library in the United States, first categorised his work as ‘fiction’ (thus implying it was merely for ‘entertainment’), but later assigned it to a new category: ‘literature.’ This reclassification indicated that Hemingway’s work should be considered as ‘fiction plus something extra.’ Hemingway’s writing itself did not change during this process, but his critical standing rose in the eyes of critics; his work was added to educational curricula and, as a result, was reprinted and then discussed in scholarly studies. In other words: in terms of social visibility, Hemingway’s work became Literature at a later stage. Being
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given this label by such an important cultural institution considerably increases the likelihood that his oeuvre will continue to be cultural significant a century from now.
From letters to leisure In 1800, Madame de Staël (1766-1817), herself a novelist and one of the first female theorists of literature, published an important study called ‘De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales’ (‘A reflection on literature in relation to social institutions’). It asked whether there was a correlation between the way particular societies are organised and the literature they produced. In asking this question, De Staël’s work can be seen as a predecessor of modern literary sociology.* More important here is her very broad definition of literature: it included everything to do with what she called the ‘exercise of thought in writing’ (‘l’exercice de la pensée par les écrits’). The genres it covered ranged from philosophy and theology to drama and epic poetry. This broad definition was deeply rooted in the tradition of ‘belles lettres,’ in which literature was considered in terms of the art of good writing and good thinking about serious topics, be this in fictional genres (poetry, drama) or in non-fictional ones (history, philosophy, theology). From the late eighteenth century onwards, however, this broad understanding of literature as ‘good writing’ was gradually replaced by a more restrictive definition limited to creative writing in fictional genres – with the novel becoming the most important genre and with imagination, creativity, and aesthetic experience becoming the most prized features of literature rather than knowledge as such. The shift from a broad to a more restrictive definition of literature was the result of a new division of labour. Thanks to professionalisation and the growth of universities, historiography and philosophy became increasingly associated with specially trained academics whose task it was to produce knowledge. In a parallel development, literature became more and more associated with a distinct group of especially talented writers who produced fictional texts with an aesthetic function. To use the terms of literary sociology:* literary production became an autonomous field linked to the growth of the publishing industry in the first half of the nineteenth century. This was in turn linked to the rise of ‘leisure time’ and to an increasingly clear distinction (at least among the middle classes) between ‘work’ and ‘leisure.’ Recent research has shown that people nowadays read relatively less than a century ago in their leisure time since there are now so many other forms of distraction available. It is difficult to predict how things will go in the future. But we should not exclude the possibility that the slow reading of literature may yet acquire a new value in today’s fast-paced world, as a source of mindfulness on a par with slow food and slow travel.
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2.7
cultural authorities
Valuation and canonisation
Is this novel or poem worth reading? Should I recommend it to my friends? Should it be translated for others? Should it be taught in schools? Texts that belong to the literary genres are constantly being judged. Precisely because they have no practical application, they must prove their value repeatedly over time. The literary characteristics that we have dealt with so far (of texts that are poetic, narrative, thought-provoking, pleasurable, and which belong to a recognised literary genre) are all possible reasons to treasure a text and recommend it to others. When particular readers judge a text, certain features have greater significance than others. The use of defamiliarising strategies, for example, is commonly taken to be an indicator of ‘real’ art in the modern period, characteristic of Literature rather than ‘mere’ popular fiction. Cultural authorities have an important role to play in such evaluations. This category includes professional critics as well as the cultural institutions that select works and authors, promote them, and effectively award them a ‘stamp’ of approval. The greater the supply of cultural products, the more important will be the mediating role of the cultural authorities in filtering out the things worthy of attention. This entire process begins with the publisher, who selects certain manuscripts and rejects others. Selection involves qualitative judgements, but also judgements regarding a book’s chances of attracting readers. Once a book has been published, critics respond in reviews, blogs, and programmes on radio and tv that recommend particular books to read and ignore others. Literary criticism developed in close conjunction with the spread of newspapers in the eighteenth century, but commentary on literary texts existed before that
Figure 2.5: Bookstore: handcrafted labels. Photograph Ian Collins (2014).
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too, albeit on a smaller scale. Professionally trained critics – and increasingly also amateurs – highlight the texts they consider valuable and help them become better known; conversely, a negative review can contribute to a work being quickly forgotten. By now, a large network of institutions shares responsibility for disseminating, evaluating, and reproducing texts. The work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) has been extremely influential in the sociology of literature,* providing models for understanding how literary and other cultural activities (visual arts, music, cinema, theatre, and so on) are organised in society. After Bourdieu, literary production came to be seen as a field where different institutions or actors compete with each other to produce literary value together with the commercial value that comes through book sales. Alongside reviewers, the juries of literary prizes have an important role to play in the literary field in establishing and enhancing literary value. Being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in England or the Prix Goncourt in France is already a boost to prestige (and to sales). Positive remarks from reviewers or juries often literally become part of the ‘package.’ A blurb on the back of Carrie (1974) by Stephen King (b.1947), for example, reads: ‘One of the few horror writers who can truly make the flesh creep.’ A long blurb to Proust’s In Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu; 1913-1927) compares the book to other famous works: ‘Truly important books are rare: [...] Recherche is one such book. Like Dante’s The Divine Comedy (La divina commedia; 1308-1320) and the plays of Shakespeare, it does not reproduce the world, but creates it.’ Though chosen at random, these examples illustrate the significance of critical commentary, while also displaying the variety of criteria on which recommendations are based. The combination of Proust and King also shows that books circulate within different networks, each with their own critics and appreciative readers, and sometimes with little overlap. King, whose books have sold in the hundreds of millions, has won several prizes for his horror stories and there are fan sites devoted to comparing and ranking his novels. Nonetheless, his work is unlikely ever to be considered for a Nobel Prize and will most likely never be defined as Literature. In the last decade or so, new phenomena have emerged that are affecting this entire process of valuation: social media and an increase in alternative circuits for the exchange of information about what is or is not worth reading. The internet has become a central forum for all sorts of new sub-circuits as well, where fans share their opinions without the mediation of literary authorities. Today, far-reaching processes of democratisation have elevated the value of input from ‘ordinary’ readers. More than in the past, opinions are formed by informal groups who welcome participation from all those interested and allow each person to have their say. As an important study has recently argued,many contemporary read-
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ers value the opinion of their peers more highly than the authority of professional reviewers. The social cataloguing website Goodreads and the online retailer Amazon, for example, are increasingly powerful platforms for fans to get potential new readers excited about certain books. In these cases, amateur reviewers still act as mediators between individual readers and authors. Selection and valuation continue apace, but with different criteria and methods.
literary canon
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To summarise, authors work with publishers to ensure the production of books. Cultural authorities, including ‘ordinary readers’ today, contribute to their reproduction: by generating the belief that a certain text is valuable, cultural authorities and readers together ensure that more readers discover it, that it receives more attention, and is eventually reprinted (see Figure 2.2). Literary critics (both professionals and peers) issue other readers a sort of guarantee that they will receive good ‘value’ for investing their effort in a particular work. In the past, the influence of cultural authorities was based on their expertise and independence from the book market. In the Amazon era of online book sales, marketing, quality ratings, and popularity have become intertwined in a new way. These changes are in full swing and have radical implications for how the field of literature operates and for scholars’ understanding of how literary value is produced. One thing is sure: when a book is positively reviewed or enthusiastically recommended on social media, it triggers a positive feedback mechanism. When appreciation for the work grows and is reflected in sales, publishers will issue a reprint, this time complete with blurbs quoting glowing reviews by critics and juries. The educational system is also part of this feedback mechanism: selecting a text to be read as part of the curriculum increases its chances of being passed on to the next generation. When it comes to reaffirming the lasting value of particular texts, and stimulating the reproduction of classics, education has always been an important force. The selection and promotion of particular works by cultural authorities, including online communities, creates a literary canon: a collection of works that are considered valuable – the best books, just as people have ‘best friends.’ Literary studies takes the term ‘canon’ from Christianity, where it refers to the collection of biblical texts that the Church has deemed authentic (Greek kanōn = yardstick). By analogy, ‘literary canon’ refers to works considered so valuable that they are presumed to form a crucial part of our common heritage and express shared values. Canonisation belongs to all ages. Homer was taken as the yardstick by which to measure all other works in the world of Aristotle and Horace (65-68 bce), while Virgil (70-19 bce) was the standard in the age of Dante (1265-1321). Once a text is deemed a masterpiece, it will receive renewed attention and, through the workings of a positive feedback mechanism, become more
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Readers have their say Goodreads came on the scene for book lovers in 2006 and since then has served as an online platform for sharing information about books and reading preferences. By now the site, which was taken over by the online giant Amazon in 2013, has arguably become the most important forum for books, with a total of 50 million user reviews having been posted by 2016. Goodreads exemplifies the enormous changes that have taken place in the evaluation and promotion of books in the age of social media. The site is based on the principle of ‘user-generated content’: it gives non-professional readers a platform for airing their views online, recommending and comparing books, suggesting which ones should be adapted to the screen, and so on. Users are invited, not only to make recommendations and offer reviews, but also to vote in multiple categories for the ‘best book’ – of last year, in this genre, by this author, and so on. In exchange, they are given access to the preferences of other people with regard to multiple genres, from chick lit and romance, to stories about the paranormal, philosophy, graphic novels, history and so on. The idea is that everyone, no matter their preferences, should be able to find their way with the help of various navigational tools through the enormous wealth of books, both old and new, that is available in bookstores and libraries. The aim is not only to create an exact match between personal preferences and reading choices, but also to create virtual communities of like-minded readers who can share their views and their experience of ‘good reads.’ In this regard, Goodreads marks a sea change in relation to the tradition whereby readers were ‘told’ by professionals what was good for them: this is canonisation based on voting and not on the authority of cultural experts. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the names of Homer and Dante do not figure prominently in the top tens of recommended books on Goodreads: in November 2014, no fewer than two million users had voted for The Hunger Games (2006), the bestseller by Suzanne Collins (b.1962), as the best book ‘ever.’ Nota bene: in these online elections, every vote has the same weight irrespective of whether or not the voter is an experienced reader who can actually compare The Hunger Games with a wide range of other works or, instead, has just a few books to go on. While Goodreads began as a platform for ‘bottom-up’ input by readers, it has become more and more bound up with commercial interests since the takeover by Amazon. This makes it increasingly difficult to draw a line between peer-to-peer reviewing and market research. Since Amazon acquired Goodreads, recommendations for ‘customers who liked this, also liked…’ are also computer-generated. In these multiple ways, Matthew Arnold’s expert literary critic selecting what is the ‘best’ for the public and writing for newspapers and journals, is making way for algorithms using stored data about people’s book-buying behaviour. Book lovers may have freed themselves from the authority of experts, but more and more they have become dependent on commercial forces in sometimes invisible ways.
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widely known and famous over time. Selecting, preserving, and promoting things of value appear to be integral to the way that culture works. Literary canons, though, are never fixed once and for all. To be sure: some works have been seen as classics or masterpieces for centuries. They make up part of the ‘hardcore’ of the literary canon which is surrounded by a changing constellation of books whose cultural lifetime is more fleeting. In Western culture, this hardcore includes Homer’s Odyssey (900-700 bce), The Divine Comedy by Dante and the works of Shakespeare. The blurb praising Proust cited above was intended to give the modern French novelist a place on the pedestal of the timeless ‘great authors,’ right next to Dante and Shakespeare. It is inconceivable that Dante will ever be removed from this hall of fame or considered uninteresting, simply because he has held this position for so long, and because so much has been said and written about his work that he has become a collective point of reference. Besides the hardcore of classics, the canon at any given time includes authors who become the literary standard for a single generation, only to be consigned to oblivion 50 years later because of changes in aesthetic norms (a case in point is offered by Walter Scott [1771-1832], a hugely popular novelist and poet whose works were put on a par with Shakespeare by his contemporaries but who was gradually forgotten by the public at large). Literary canons benefit communication between different actors by functioning as a common point of reference: a reservoir from which people can draw ideas, stories, and sayings. We have already seen how a cartoon from a Dutch newspaper appeals to people’s familiarity with Don Quixote. The same case also illustrates how canons are not always restricted by national or linguistic boundaries, even if the concept of national heritage often informs ‘the canon debate’ (see Chapter 11). Because canon formation relates closely to a shared sense of community, it is regularly redefined in the light of changing values and, by extension, of social transformations.
Figure 2.6: The literary field and the production of value.
AUTHOR TEXT
PUBLISHER BOOK
CULTURAL AUTHORITIES Professional reviewers Cultural institutions Online forums
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Canon wars In 1994 the Yale professor Harold Bloom (b.1930) published a controversial book entitled The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. In this work, he wondered which books should be taught in literature courses in American schools and universities. This question came out of debates – often called the ‘culture wars’ – that had started in the us in the 1980s. Discussion concentrated on the question of whether it was time to extend the focus on masterpieces from the Western tradition to include works from minority authors (including women) and from non-Western traditions. This question had become topical given that an increasing number of Americans had roots outside of the West, and that feminist-inspired scholarship had, since the 1960s, been challenging the assumption that ‘masterpieces’ could only be written by men. In face of these challenges, Bloom presented what he considered to be a definitive canon of Western literature (which by implication, was the only literature that counted). His canon consisted of twenty-six authors, only four of whom were women: Jane Austen (1775-1817), Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), George Eliot (1819-1880), and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). That these authors were all Western (either American or European) was par for the course given Bloom’s title. Less self-evident was the fact that his choice of authors reflected a clear bias on several fronts: although he purported to speak of ‘Western’ literature, no fewer than half of his authors wrote in English; although he purported to reference ‘the ages,’ more than half of his authors wrote in the last two centuries. Not surprisingly, Bloom’s work was seen by its critics as a rearguard attempt to buttress up a Euro-American tradition and to sideline other writers on the grounds that their work had less value as literature. Of course, the crux of the difficulty lies in the problem of disentangling the attribution of literary value from prejudices regarding the purported incapacity of minority groups (including women, writers from earlier ages, and writers from foreign cultures), to produce things of value. Since the appearance of The Western Canon, the discussion about literary value and how to recognise it has continued. One of the results has been a growing interest in world literature even if this entails reading more literature in translation. The magnificent Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004), which includes texts from across the world and from down the ages, came out of this attempt to go beyond modern Western examples and adopt a more global perspective. Since it is impossible for courses or anthologies to cover everything, selection is unavoidable. Indeed, the more texts to choose from, the greater the need for mediators.
world literature The contents of the literary canon have changed in recent years. More importantly, literary scholars and educationalists have challenged the idea that one canon can ever be defined for an entire society. In the first place, social media and the increasing democratisation of aesthetic judgements have combined to undermine a historically important aspect of canon formation: the very idea that leaving such decisions about quality to the
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experts is desirable. Second, the internet has created more independently operating networks, making it difficult to pinpoint one public sphere in which ‘the’ canon is valid. Finally, globalisation is forcing literary scholars to reconsider the relationship between local (national) literature and literature from other traditions, and to adjust their understanding of the canon to allow more attention for world literature. In literary studies, the role of institutions and authorities in producing literary value also raises a fundamental question about the relative importance of cultural authorities and the power of the text itself in creating literary value. While recent scholarship has highlighted the role of institutions in this process, the challenge still remains to explain on the basis of the writing itself why some writers outshine other authors in the same genre. According to the celebrated author Italo Calvino (1923-1985), it is neither cultural authories nor the book industry that turns a work into a classic, but something in the book itself that continues to intrigue readers. In his words, ‘a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.’ A work that never exhausts itself? To make sense of this phenomenon, we need more than an understanding of the effect of cultural authorities and social media. However important we now know these to be, these contextual factors do not seem capable of providing the whole answer to the question of why some books live longer and have a greater impact than others.
Why there is no Nobel Prize in Painting The Nobel Prize in Literature is arguably the biggest and most prestigious literary prize. It is the equivalent for writers of what an Olympic gold medal is for an athlete. The prize has been annually awarded since 1901 (with only a few interruptions because of war and, in 2018, a sex scandal) along with comparable prizes for science, medicine, economics and peace. Behind the choice of prizewinner lies the humanistic ideal of the Nobel foundation which was set up to reward achievements ‘for the greatest benefit of mankind’ (see www.nobel.se). But why is there a prize for writers and not for painters, composers, or film directors? The answer lies, on the one hand, in the millennial-old prestige of the written word as a cultural medium and, on the other hand, the expectation that writers, more than other artists, can give nuanced expression to a new vision of the world. The status of literature is changing in light of intensified competition from audiovisual media, but so far, the Nobel Foundation still considers literature to represent the highest form of art with the strongest powers of expression. Given the aims of the foundation, it is not surprising that the prize for literature is usually awarded to authors who are deemed ‘serious’ and in support of humanistic values; who, in the words of the foundation, ‘have produced in the field of literature the
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most outstanding work in an ideal direction.’ In awarding the prize the jury usually praises the winner for some combination of ‘being able to write very well’ and ‘having something important to say.’ In other words, the prize usually goes to someone whose work elicits both admiration and thoughtfulness. The jury wrote, for example, of the American Toni Morrison (b.1931), the winner in 1993, that her novels are ‘characterized by visionary force and poetic import’ and of the Portuguese José Saramago (1922-2010), the winner in 1998, that his ‘parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.’ Patrick Modiano (b.1945), the winner in 2014, was praised for his stories about World War ii and ‘the art of memory with which he has exposed the most ungraspable human destinies.’ Bob Dylan (b.1941), winner in 2016, was praised ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,’ praise that also elevated song lyrics into the realm of poetry. Whoever looks at the list of winners, will be struck by a number of things: ● Winning the Nobel seems to offer no guarantee of eternal fame: Who still recognises the names of Salvatore Quasimodo (1959), Grazia Deledda (1926) or Carl Spitteler (1919)? ● The vast majority of the winners are men, with only fourteen women ever having won the prize. ● The Nobel jury is assumed to be in search of specifically literary qualities, but in practice seems often to be led by political considerations. In 1991, the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) was honoured as the apartheid regime was collapsing. An even more notable case: a half century earlier, the prize went to Winston Churchill, who had lived his finest hour as British prime minister during World War ii, for his memoirs of the war and for his speeches; he was praised ‘for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.’ ● Despite incidental attempts to honour writers from across the world, most of the prizewinners still come from Europe.
2.8
In conclusion: The intersection of text and value
In this chapter, we defined literature broadly as a body of ‘durable texts.’ We moved on to demonstrate how this durability (literariness) is closely connected to appreciating a text ‘in and of itself.’ We then explored several factors that influence how readers assign value to a text: the way it is written, how it affects readers, and the status awarded it (does it belong to a genre that is considered literary? Do experts call it wellwritten and thought-provoking?) Overall, this discussion shows that ‘literariness’ is a matter of degree and not of either/or: texts can be literary to a greater or lesser extent. Where one text can present just some poetic elements (by being a narrative, for example), another text can combine several literary features by being, for example, not only a nar-
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rative, but also defamiliarising and highly valued. Both those texts that are highly literary and those that are only literary in a minor way fall within the scope of literary studies. We also showed that literariness is partly determined by history: the things that people find pleasurable or the formal characteristics that fascinate them change over time. Finally, we demonstrated that texts acquire value in different networks. In short, the phenomenon of literature exists at a crossroads where ‘texts’ and ‘value’ meet, but the precise location of this intersection is constantly being debated. People appreciate different things for various reasons, which are in part deeply personal and in part a reflection of the values then dominant in society. The cultural lifetime of a text is determined by the interaction between these different factors. Literary studies aims to understand why some texts have a richer cultural life than others, and to develop ways of describing precisely their singularity.
Further reading Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, London: Penguin, 1996. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980, especially ‘Good Readers and Good Writers.’
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10
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See Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, London:Verso, 1998, p. 172. The term ‘display text’ comes from Mary-Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech ActTheory of Literary Discourse, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977, pp. 32ff. Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics,’ in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language, 350-377, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960, p. 356. Jim Andrews, www.vispo.com (accessed May 2019). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail (accessed August 2018). Thom Gunn, Selected Poems¸ ed. August Kleinzahler, New York: FSG Books, 2007, p. 20. See, more generally, Susan Ratcliffe, ed., Little Oxford Book of Quotations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Supertramp, “Fool’s Overture”, Even in the Quietest Moments..., A&M, 1977. Richard Kearney, On Stories, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 3. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha [1605], Barcelona: Ramon Sopena, 1931, p. 45. English translation: Miguel de Cervantes [Saavedra], Don Quixote, trans. John Ormsby, 2004, Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/996 (accessed August 2018).
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria [1817], New York: Dent, 1965, p. 69. For the theory of fictionality as a game, see Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard B. Trask, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. The relationship between ethics and literature is discussed in, for example, Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. See also Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading¸ Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. See, for example, Ernst van Alphen, Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art, as Device’ [1917], trans. Alexandra Berlina, Poetics Today 36.3 (2015): 152-174, pp. 161-162. ibid., p. 171. Quoted in ibid., p. 164. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, London: Routledge, 2004. Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2002, p. 194. This case is further discussed in Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford University Press, 2003. Marcel Proust, Journées de lecture, ed. Alain Coelho, Paris: UGE, 1993. For a valuable overview of reading practices, see Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, London: Penguin, 1996. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. See further https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/ (accessed June 2019). Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, New York: Harvest Books, 1982, pp. 373-374. Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. See Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, eds, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 361-374. Example from Alvin B. Kernan, Peter Brooks and J. Michael Holquist, eds, Man and His Fictions: An Introduction to Fiction-Making, Its Forms and Uses, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, p. 1. Madame De Staël, De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, Oeuvres completes, vol 2, Geneva: Slatkine reprints, 1967, p. 200. This interplay of social and cultural developments is described in, for example, Siegfried J. Schmidt, Das Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Stephen King, Carrie, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols, Paris: Robert Laffont, 1987, vol 2, translation A.R. See, for example, https://stephenking.com/xf/index.php (accessed July 2019). Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture became Popular Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads and https://www.goodreads. com (accessed July 2019). Harold Bloom, The Western Canon:The Books and Schools of the Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. David Damrosch et al., ed., The Longman Anthology of World Literature, 6 vols, New York: Longman, 2004. Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? [1991], trans. Martin McLaughlin, New York:Vintage, 2000, p. 5. All jury reports can be found at www.nobel.org.
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3 TEXTS AND INTERTEXTUALITY ANN RIGNEY
This chapter explains the concept of ‘text’ in relation to shifting ideas about ‘authorship.’ We begin by describing the basic elements of a text: words and the physical means by which they are conveyed. We will then look at ‘intertextuality,’ the way in which new texts derive their form and meaning from existing texts. We will demonstrate that while literary works are indeed the unique products of individual authors, they only take on meaning within a dynamic created by other texts and by the expectations of the reader. Finally, we will show how recent insights into the nature and function of texts have changed our perspective on the phenomenon of ‘authorship.’
3.1 Introduction: The Greats escape 3.2 Texts 3.2.1 Words, material carrier, aesthetic object 3.2.2 Paratext 3.3 Intertextuality: The relationship between texts 3.3.1 The conventionality of language 3.3.2 The conventionality of texts 3.3.3 Intertextual relations 3.4 Singularity: Between old and new 3.5 In conclusion: The undead author
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Introduction: The Greats escape
In any large city, you will find testaments to the ‘greats’ of literature. Visitors to the Mall in Central Park, New York, for example, will encounter statues, not only of Shakespeare, but also of Robert Burns (1759-1796), Walter Scott (1771-1832), and Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), the first statue of an American to be placed in the park. Ten years after his death, Halleck was apparently still so beloved that over 30,000 adoring fans came to the unveiling of his statue by the us president (today few people will recognise his name). Whether they take the form of statues or of street names, these public tributes to writers (almost invariably male writers) generally date from the late nineteenth century. They represent a period in which culture was primarily approached in terms of outstanding individuals. Cultural heritage – literature, painting, music – was like a national team of gifted ‘great men.’ Reflecting this idea, the academic study of literature and the other arts was conducted along biographical lines, focusing on ‘the man and his work.’ Even today, one can find humanities courses designed around the oeuvre of individual authors, composers, and artists. But starting in the second half of the twentieth century, critics began to question this biographical approach, as the marginalisation of women writers and authors from the global south began to be questioned as well. Of course, individual writers (male and female) play a key role in the making of literature. Without writers there would be no texts for others to read, publish, and review. Novels and poems usually fly under the banner of an author’s name and if that name is already famous, any new work is guaranteed some measure of public interest. If you were asked to identify the core of the Western canon, you would probably come up with a list of writers (Shakespeare, Dante, etc.) rather than the titles of individual plays, stories, or poems. These names are in a very real sense a guarantee of quality. Scholars of literature try to establish whether or not the work of a given author is innovative. We also try to understand the process whereby authors ‘make a name’ for themselves and their subsequent role in public life. In contemporary literary studies, then, individual authors continue to be relevant. But they are no longer seen as anchors of meaning as they were some forty years ago. Or rather, the question of individual creativity is posed differently in the context of contemporary understandings of texts and how they are made. As we will see in this chapter, research in contemporary literary studies focuses on the dynamic tension between two principles: • Literary texts should be viewed as the unique products of individual authors
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• Every text is informed by the texts that came before it, and people make connections to those texts in order to make sense of what they are reading. The dynamic between these principles is the focus of this chapter. We will first look at the various dimensions of texts and the relationship between different texts, and then survey the different concepts of ‘authorship’ that have emerged over time.
text
3.2
Texts
3.2.1
Words, material carrier, aesthetic object
In earlier chapters, we defined the object of our study as the life of texts in society. Having looked, in Chapter 2, at the phenomenon of literariness, we will now take a step back and ask the more fundamental question: What is a ‘text’? The word text is derived from the Latin texere (to weave), and so is related to the term ‘textile.’ And just as fabric is made up of threads connected together, so too a text is made up of words that are combined and connected in a particular way. More precisely, a text is a unique collection of words that are seen as belonging together, thus creating the expectation of their yielding a coherent meaning. The term ‘work’ is commonly used interchangeably with ‘text,’ with the caveat that ‘work’ places more of a focus on the creative force behind the verbal composition, while ‘text’ puts more emphasis on the relationships between the words independently of the author or reader. Consider, for example, the following poem written in 1971 by Roger McGough (b.1937). 40 middle couple ten when game and go the will be tween
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LOVE || || || || || || || || || || ||
aged playing nis the ends they home net still be them
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This poem is presented here as a stand-alone text (it could also be read as part of a poetry collection). It is a cultural artefact, consisting of a unique combination of words that interact with and influence each other as seen on the page (title, lines of verse, sounds, blank spaces, etc.). When readers get to the end of the poem, they are implicitly invited to return to the beginning to reinterpret the title ‘Love’ in light of the playful layout of the text as a whole and its framing as a tennis match. In practice, as McGough’s poem illustrates, no combination of words is ever separate from its material embodiment. If words are to be perceived by others as a text they must be presented in some material form. They may be carried, for example, by a human voice, a manuscript, a book, an image on a computer screen, or a graffito on the side of a building. There are multiple possibilities. Up to a point, the same words can be presented in different material carriers without their meaning being fundamentally changed. Nevertheless, scholars are becoming increasingly aware of how the material embodiment of words (font, colour, layout, illustrations, sounds, and so on) influences how they are perceived and hence what they mean. Writers themselves already use language differently when they know that their text will be read in print rather than heard. McGough anticipated on the printed medium when designing his poem: there is an iconic relationship (visual similarity) between the poem’s playful layout and its content. If we hear ‘Love’ but do not see it on the page, we miss the reference to the tennis net. In this case, meaning is conveyed both by words and by the image that the words combine to make. Such cases support the argument that ‘the medium’ (material carrier) and ‘the meaning’ are inseparable, as Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) controversially claimed in the 1960s when he wrote that ‘the medium is the message.’ Contemporary literary studies devotes a great deal of attention to the materiality of the medium in which texts are set down and circulate in culture. The digital revolution has initiated a new wave of interest in such questions. As e-books and the internet become commonplace, we have paradoxically become more aware of the materiality of ‘the book’ and, more generally, of the influence of writing and printing technologies on the composition and distribution of texts through the ages. In the study of medieval manuscripts for example, interest in the materialities in which texts were recorded (the parchment, handwriting, illustrations) has increased dramatically. This in turn has drawn fresh attention to the differences between orally transmitted texts and written ones, and to the impact on storytelling practices when writing became the dominant mode of transmission in Europe. Thanks to the availability of digitised texts that capture not only words, but their original material appearance, the study of book history* has made great advances in recent decades. It
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orality
secondary orality
has among other things brought to light the role that illustrations have historically played alongside words in producing meaning and affect. This was something that had long remained outside the purview of literary studies although it was a fundamental part of contemporaries’ reading experience. For a long time, human memory was the chief medium for the storage of texts, and vocal cords the primary channel for their transmission. The works of Homer, for example, were passed on for many generations through oral performances, before ever they were written down in the form in which they are now known. Even though different media technologies have been developed for recording texts (from manuscript, to print, to the digital), orality has continued to be important, alongside writing, as a carrier of texts. Think, for example, of the viral spread of jokes and of urban legends (the ‘true stories’ of grisly events involving murders, monsters in the sewers, etc., that are known far and wide without ever having been written down), or of the current popularity of ‘poetry slams,’ where poets use not only their voices, but a full repertoire of ‘body language’ on stage to impress an audience. Finally, one can think of the growing popularity of podcasts and audio books, which shows how electronics can in turn breathe new life into orality. It should be noted, however, that audio books are read from written texts – this combination of writing and oral transmission is what Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) called secondary orality a reshaped orality that operates in a literate society where texts are omnipresent be this in print or in digital form.
A thousand lines of poetry by heart In 1960 Albert Lord (1912-1991) published a milestone work called The Singer of Tales, a study of oral poetry in Serbo-Croatian. This work was based on extensive field research in the Balkans among guslars, the name traditionally given to poet-singers who, even into the twentieth century, performed epic poetry from an ancient oral tradition. Lord showed how the guslars managed to sing thousands of lines of poetry that they had learned by heart. He explained this extraordinary skill in recitation by reference to the guslars’ use of formulaic expressions and a regular metre: these worked as mnemonic devices to help the performers remember where they were in the story. Lord showed how the poets both respected the tradition and continuously introduced new variations into the poems they were singing. This points to an important difference between printed texts, in which words have a fixed quality, and oral texts which have less of a fixed form. For this reason, printed texts can go out of date as the world changes around them, while oral texts can be continuously updated. According to Lord and the scholars he inspired,
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it is accordingly pointless when studying oral cultures to look for the original version of a particular poem as if this were the only ‘authentic’ one: all versions and all performances are equally valid parts of the tradition. This insight has had wider implications in the study of medieval literature, for example, composed at a time when poetry was still in large part orally transmitted. In line with Lord’s research, medievalists now consider the study of variation itself as valuable in its own right for the insight it affords into changing preferences. In The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983), Elizabeth Eisenstein (1923-2016) showed how the invention of print gradually led to texts becoming stabilised in one particular version. Though, as Adrian Johns (b.1965) showed in The Nature of the Book (1998), there continued to be many exceptions to this rule in the form of pirated editions. Nowadays, digital media make it possible for texts to be easily copied and adapted, meaning that variation has become more a feature of cultural life than it was in the age of print.
Figure 3.1: Gusle player Rasid Hasovic Sjenica; Ethnographical Museum Belgrade.
As interesting as oral performance is, our concern here will be primarily with written texts, be these in the form of manuscripts and printed works or in the form of e-books. With the rise of digitisation, it has never been easier to reproduce and illustrate texts. Despite the fears of some, however, this has not meant that the ‘good, old-fashioned’ paper book no longer has an important role in the dissemination of literature. In fact, amid the rise of electronic formats, there are more books being printed in unusual and colourful designs than ever before. This renewed attention to the materiality of the book itself (as something that feels good to hold in your hand, something you can leaf through and something that attracts the eye as an object in itself ) can be seen as a response to the cold and sterile surface of an iPad. Clearly, this is an area undergoing rapid
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change, and any pronouncements about it are at risk of being outdated the moment they are made. What we do know is this: since the invention of the printing press, and particularly from the late eighteenth century on, there has been an increasingly clear division of labour between authors, on the one hand, and those responsible for the material presentation and distribution of texts – the publishers – on the other. The text that reaches today’s reader in book form is ultimately a collective product. Just as a film is the product of a team (if one considers the end credits of most films, a very large team), book publication is also teamwork, involving not just the author but a range of specialists working for the publishing house (editors, translators, copy editors, graphic designers, and illustrators, to name just a few). It is with good reason that the title page gives both the name of the author and that of the publisher. Although the internet has created new opportunities for self-publishing, it remains difficult to distribute literary texts on a wide scale, and earn royalties from them, without the help of a publisher. The considerations outlined above lead us to make a distinction between (1) the text as verbal composition (the collection of words produced by the author), (2) the text as material carrier (usually manufactured by the publisher, though authors and poets can be involved in layout and design) and (3) the text as an aesthetic object, a mental-affective constellation which takes shape in the act of reading and which is made anew, and differently, with each new reader and reading experience. Within the last 50 years, as mentioned in Chapter 1, the insight that texts are only completed, and then just temporarily, in the act of reading has initiated a shift of focus in the study of literature. After publication, a text still needs to find enthusiastic readers for it to have a cultural life. In that sense, it resembles a musical score that only becomes music when it is played.
3.2.2
Paratext
The back flap of the Faber edition of Immortality (Nesmrtelnost) (1991) by Czech writer Milan Kundera (b.1929) is full of praise for the novel. We are first told that the novel is ‘typical’ Kundera: ‘This breathtaking, reverberating survey of human nature finds Kundera still attempting to work out the meaning of life without losing his sense of humour.’ This is followed up by the claim that this is ‘one of those great unclassifiable masterpieces that appear once every twenty years or so.’ Its ‘unclassifiability,’ it is implied, is part of what makes the novel a ‘masterpiece’: it is something original and without precedent. This general summary, presumably written by the publisher, is followed by a series of quotes from reviewers in by and large ‘quality’ newspapers telling us, for example, that Immortality is a
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Figure 3.2: Abraham’s sacrifice, anonymous manuscript from the 14th century; collection Árni Magnússon Institute.
‘banquet for the brain’ (Observer), that it is ‘an important and memorable book’ (Guardian) and that the author ‘can be ranked among the greatest novelists of post-war Europe’ (Sunday Telegraph). Blurbs like this are also part of the reading experience and may even be a reader’s first encounter with the work. This leads us to the concept of paratext, derived from the Greek para, meaning ‘alongside.’ Paratext is an umbrella term for those bits of information that appear ‘alongside’ the author’s text when it is presented in book form. The term refers first and foremost to expressions in language, but can also be used more broadly to indicate all those elements accompanying the author’s text that carry meaning (including images). In addition
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to the jacket text (as in the example above), this includes the cover, publication details, possibly a foreword, footnotes, and illustrations. Although each of these textual elements communicates information, they fall ‘outside’ the primary text. The seminal work by Gérard Genette (1930-2018) on the phenomenon of paratext is aptly called ‘thresholds’: French Seuils (1987), translated as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997). The metaphor of the threshold indicates that textual boundaries are not sharply defined, and that in order to gain access to the author’s text, readers must first climb over all manner of other texts which play a role in shaping their expectations. As the example of Kundera indicates, publishers do their utmost to sell their products by offering praise in the jacket text or using intriguing cover art to catch the eye of potential customers. Imprints matter too: books bearing the name of renowned publishing houses like Penguin or Random House project a sense of status and quality that self-published works still lack. Images from film adaptations, including close-ups of famous actors and actresses, are also regularly used on book covers so as to take advantage of a film’s popularity. Publishers are not the only one to produce paratexts. In the case of historical works, which might not be easy for contemporary audiences to understand, academically trained editors may add introductions and footnotes. Most anthologies used in courses on historical literature are compiled by experts and are accompanied by a sometimes staggering amount of paratext. The need for supplementary explanation comes from the fact that a text has remained fixed through the ages, while the world in which it circulates has changed. Where oral texts are continually adapted over time to changing language use, written and printed texts retain a fixed form. This means that they are preserved, but also that they can become incomprehensible over time. Scholars have accordingly developed methods to preserve the meaning of old texts for new audiences. The annotation of classical texts flourished in the Renaissance with the rise of philology;* the modern printing press helped make footnotes possible; today digitisation offers entirely new possibilities for creating paratext in the form of pop-ups and hyperlinks. Writers who know their work will appear in book form sometimes produce forewords and footnotes as an integral part of their writing. The result can be described as an embedded paratext. Since the seventeenth century, authors have regularly invented fictional ‘editors’ who then present a so-called found manuscript that tells a curious tale, complete with a foreword and possibly a few footnotes as well. Don Quixote, which is supposedly based on a manuscript found under dubious circumstances, is one of the best-known examples of this phenomenon; more recently the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who frequently cites Cervantes, produced stories with multiple editors and found man-
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uscripts. Sometimes, the found manuscript device catches readers offguard and makes them unsure whether the found manuscript really existed or if it is merely part of the fiction. Or to put it differently, in light of our discussion in Chapter 2: by playing with paratext, the author can defamiliarise and unsettle readers by making them wonder about the precise location of the boundary between the fiction and the real world in which the material book, which they are reading, was actually published.
A mirror to the medium In Chapters 1 and 2 it was pointed out that writers often stand back and reflect on the culture to which they belong and the aesthetic forms they use. House of Leaves (2000), written by Mark Z. Danielewski (b.1966) offers a case in point. On its first appearance, this novel was presented as the second edition of a book that had appeared earlier on the internet. Danielewski plays extensively with language, layout, footnotes, and other aspects of the paratext in such a way as to make it difficult to distinguish the main text from the paratext, or even to speak of a ‘main’ text given all the extras that surround it. Especially remarkable is his systematic use of the colour blue, reminiscent of hyperlinks, whenever the word ‘house’ is used. In this regard, the book is an imitation of an online hypertext and, as such, a clear illustration of the ways in which new media technologies feed back into the way that books are written. In contrast to more traditional texts that one reads from beginning to end in the order set out by the author, House of Leaves compels its readers to work out their own route through the text. Luckily, contemporary readers, being used to the internet, are more up to the task than their predecessors from earlier ages would have been (see Figure 3.3 ).
3.3
Intertextuality: The relationship between texts
3.3.1
The conventionality of language
Contemporary literary studies is informed by a view of language that stresses its social character: language is used for communication by groups and the individuals entering them (as babies, children, immigrants) inherit a language that has evolved over a very long time. Individual users of language, including creative writers, partake in a common practice and use words that others have used before them. Building on such ideas, semiotics* has complicated our understanding of literary creativity and challenged the idea that any writer can ever be completely original, as
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Figure 3.3: Excerpt from Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves, copyright M. Danielewski © 2000.
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the romanticised veneration of the ‘great’ authors discussed earlier in this chapter supposed. Semiotics* as a field took off in the 1960s, when critics began attending less to individual creativity and more to the collective aspects of culture – a shift helped along at the time by new ideas about equality and the importance of community. This change in mentality shows how concepts of authorship are intertwined with ideas about individual subjects and what they can achieve as individuals or as members of a group. Central to semiotic thought is the principle of the conventionality of language: the idea that language is based on conventions and traditions (‘convention’ is derived from the Latin convenire, to convene, to agree). The assumption behind this is that language is not a ‘natural ‘phenomenon, but functions thanks to a set of unwritten rules that prescribe how certain sounds can be combined to produce meaning. The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure referred in this regard to the ‘arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign,’ by which he meant that there is no natural connection between a word and its meaning: the only reason that the set of sounds that form the word ‘tree’ refers to ‘a certain type of plant’ is convention (a traditional agreement between people). In fact, a tree might just as well be called ‘a mushroom’ or ‘a rubbish bin,’ and indeed the thing known as ‘tree’ in English has a different name in other languages: Baum, boom, arbre, arból, crann, shajara, etc. ‘Tree’ is no better than these other words, but because it has been used for generation upon generation, it has grown to be the word used in English to refer to the category of plant that the Romans called ‘arbor.’ To utter a comprehensible sentence in English requires the use of a whole range of language-specific rules. These ‘linguistic conventions’ are not only related to the link between words and concepts, but also to other aspects of the language (for example, the distinction between significant and non-significant sounds, word order, and so on). This brings us to the second aspect of Saussure’s linguistic theory: the idea of language as a system. He distinguished between language as a system (in French: langue) and language as it is actually used in specific utterances (in French: parole). Learners of languages try to grasp the langue, the system of rules whereby you can say comprehensible things within a given language. These rules relate to the meaningful distinctions between sounds, to the link between sounds and concepts, and to the nuances between concepts, as well as to the rules of grammar. That individuals do not always have a grip on language as a system of rules becomes abundantly clear when we try to express ourselves in a foreign language. We find ourselves using terms the scope of which we do not fully understand, and our interlocutors may end up hearing different things than those we intended. This can also happen to native speakers: they may never fully grasp their own language in all its complexity since they themselves did not invent the
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rules. Languages are always already ‘there,’ and speakers, whether from birth or as learners, are entering an existing system. The concept of ‘conventionality’ is thus informed not only by the idea that language is constructed, but also that it is socially constructed. It is social both in the sense that it connects people and that it is a product of countless generations of language use. Speaking your native language does not mean you are speaking your ‘own’ language. As its name suggests, your ‘mother tongue’ is not just yours, but belongs also to the people who raised you and to the society where you belong. Utterances produced by individuals are shaped in part by other people. This also applies to writers. When authors want to put ideas, experiences, and even their deepest emotions into words, they too have to use a language that has long been used by others. The emphasis on the conventionality of language in contemporary literary studies not only entails a critique of authorial ‘originality,’ then, it also has far-reaching implications for how we think about individuality. The conventionality of language implies that it is more than a transparent means of communication. It is a cultural product that has developed throughout history and that people collectively use to represent their world and make it meaningful. Words, in that sense, can shape social life. ‘Learning a language’ means internalising certain ways of thinking and acting – if only because some languages like German and French distinguish between a formal and informal form of address (between Sie and du, and vous and tu). The fact of being able to make such a distinction shapes and constrains social interactions, and how we think about them, in ways that are impossible in English. Languages, in helping us to communicate, also shape our thinking. Building on this basic insight, the philosopher Michel Foucault developed his influential concept of discourse in a series of publications beginning in the 1960s. For Foucault, ‘discourse,’ denoting ‘language’ in the sense of a dominant system of concepts and vocabulary, is used by those with authority to order, interpret, and ‘discover’ the world and turn it into an object of knowledge (‘discourse’ in this broad sense is closely related to the concept of ‘ideology,’ which we will be discussing in more detail in Chapter 9). For example, after September 11, 2001, a ‘security discourse’ – using language and other forms of representation to promote the need for security above freedom and privacy – became prevalent in public life. As Foucault showed, a discourse derives its strength from the fact that it has acquired the authority of a self-evident and long-proven ‘truth.’ The power of a dominant discourse, however, is regularly challenged by minority voices proposing a different vision. At stake in this struggle is the power to define or redefine what qualifies as ‘normal’ or ‘true’ in the real world.
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Making music on a cracked cauldron That individuals borrow language from other people is well illustrated in Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). The novel is about a romantic young woman called Emma who, while married to a village doctor, becomes involved in a torpid affair with a local aristocrat. She sees this affair as the fulfilment of her wildest romantic dreams (which were fed by the many romantic novels she had devoured during her schooldays). She keeps expressing this passion to her lover; but he becomes bored listening to her, having heard these words so often before: ‘– Oh! c’est que je t’aime! reprenait-elle, je t’aime à ne pouvoir me passer de toi, sais-tu bien? J’ai quelquefois des envies de te revoir où toutes les colères de l’amour me déchirent.’ [...] Il s’était tant de fois entendu dire ces choses, qu’elles n’avaient pour lui rien d’original. Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l’éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage. [...] on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres; comme si la plenitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles. ‘Oh! It’s because I love you! She went on, love you so much I can’t live without you, did you realize? Sometimes I’m longing to see you again and the furies of love pull me apart.’ […] He had heard such stuff so many times that her words meant very little to him. Emma was just like any other mistress; and the charm of novelty, falling down slowly like a dress, exposed only the eternal monotony of passion, always the same forms and always the same language. […] Because he had heard such-like phrases murmured to him from the lips of the licentious or the venal, he hardly believed in hers […] as though the soul’s abundance does not sometimes spill over in the most decrepit metaphors, since no one can give the exact measure of their needs, their ideas, their afflictions, and since human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing-bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars.
The drama depicted here by Flaubert is not just about romantic feelings. It is also about language and our limited powers of expression: Emma can only give voice to her love in the form of clichés (‘It’s because I love you!... love you so much I can’t live without you’). As a result, her lover, with a lot of previous affairs under his belt, fails to recognise her singular passion and hears only formulas that he has heard many times before. Having shown this misunderstanding between the two characters, Flaubert then adds an explicit reflection on language and its limitations. In order to give expression to our
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most intimate feelings, he suggests through the narrator, we need to call upon a common language that has been developed by other people. To ‘use language’ means in effect to re-use other people’s words in a new setting. Even if these words do not quite match our feelings, they are the only ones we have. Emma Bovary herself did not invent the expression ‘And the furies of love pull me apart’; she has taken this phrase from novels. She is literally talking like a book. And she is no exception, Flaubert implies: to use a language is to imitate other people’s use of words. At the same time, Flaubert’s almost (but not quite) kitschy image of a dancing bear demonstrates that it is possible to master language enough at least to capture feelings in an approximate way. Indeed, the whole passage can be read as a manifesto for modern writers: having recognised the limitations of language and the discourses it carries, they go and invent new forms of expression which one day will ‘move the stars’ and give voice to our longings and sadness. Flaubert invents characters who struggle with language at the same time as he demonstrates his own mastery of language. He bends it to his own purposes in ways that Emma could only dream of.
3.3.2
The conventionality of texts
Like other language users, authors are bound by the rules of the language system within which they work – though they may decide to resist them as James Joyce (1882-1941) did in Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s novel is a notorious work, which is considered by most to be essentially unreadable – and with good reason. Joyce combines an English very far removed from ‘ordinary’ English with words from other languages, seemingly at will, into what becomes a linguistic potpourri. What linguistic competence do you need to decipher the following ‘sentence’ from the first page of the book? ‘Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.’ Obviously, Joyce’s playful, multilingual and very musical use of words is an extreme case, and the fact that this book is so famously ‘unreadable’ confirms the existence of the basic respect that most authors do have for the rules of the language in which they work. At the same time, Finnegans Wake reminds us that authors of literature also love to creatively bend the rules of language and stretch the limits of its expressive power. Of course, an author’s work depends on more than the conventions of the language system as such. There are also conventions for the making of texts: when something is recognisable as a ‘poem’ or as a ‘novel,’ it is because it fits a certain genre or model. Letters, for example, are generally drafted according to a cultural model in which address, salutation, body,
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and closing follow each other in a fixed order. This order is conventional, but no less mandatory for that reason: other sequences would have been conceivable, but in the end, history produced this model. This raises the possibility of transferring Saussure’s distinction between ‘language system’ and ‘linguistic expression’ to the composition of texts and the evolution of genres. Inspired by Saussure’s work, scholars of literature began searching for the ‘system of rules’ behind the production of texts. This line of research had its heyday in the 1970s, when the prevailing assumption was that a text is analogous to a sentence: just as the meaning of the sentence is made possible by the underlying rules of the language system, so too must there be rules that enable the generation of ‘grammatical’ (meaning: readable) texts. This line of thought was primarily pursued by structuralists* and produced various results, including major studies of the underlying structure of narrative, which we will consider in more detail in Chapter 5.
The value of constraint The role of conventions in poetry can best be illustrated with reference to the sonnet, a poetical form consisting of fourteen lines of verse in a recognisable metre. During the Renaissance the sonnet became an extremely popular verse form. The sonnets of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), and Shakespeare were particularly well known and widely emulated. Despite its relative complexity, the sonnet form has had a long cultural life and has been especially used to give expression to intimate thoughts and feelings. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), for example, was still using this form in 1812 in order to write intimately about his grief at the death of his young daughter (‘Surprised by Joy – Impatient as the Wind / I turned to share the transport’). The basic ingredients for sonnet-making might be summed up as follows: 1. Choose a suitable theme (for example: love or death) and treat this in fourteen lines. 2. Work with a recognisable rhyme scheme (for example: ABBA CDDC EFEFEF). 3. Use a recognisable metre (in English: the iambic pentameter). 4. Make sure that there is a thematic change of direction (the so-called volta) at line 8 or line 12. But as many amateur cooks know, the art of cooking demands more than just a recipe; it also takes know-how and craftsmanship. Shakespeare used the sonnet form, for example, in order to mourn the loss of a friend in 1609; the fact that a rule-bound poem can nevertheless evoke personal grief so strongly, is evidence of his mastery of language:
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When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste: Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow, For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe, And moan th’ expense of many a vanish’d sight: Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before, But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.
Being more familiar with so-called ‘free verse,’ people nowadays tend to see such formal constraints as merely a nuisance. However, this example from Shakespeare shows how, in skilled hands, these constraints give traction to the ideas and feelings of the poet by providing a shape within which to mould them and bring them to expression.
aesthetics of identity
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The history of poetry shows the evolution of a huge variety of sometimes very complex forms, of which the sonnet is just one. So why would writers make life so difficult for themselves? Would it not be easier and more daring to have invented their own form? Why not simply ‘write freestyle’? These are typically questions from our time. Until approximately 1800, authors would not even have asked them. The long-held belief was that the more you placed yourself within a tradition, the better – this may be difficult to imagine from a modern perspective, what with the strong emphasis today placed on ‘freedom,’ ‘novelty,’ and ‘being yourself.’ Today free verse (see chapter 4) is very much the standard (though there are still authors who choose to express themselves within the restrictions of a fixed form), but it was not until the late nineteenth century that poetry without metre was accepted at all. All authors are children of their own time, and no matter how innovative their writing may be, they always speak the ‘language’ of their cultural moment. We must not forget that throughout the ages, ‘conventionality’ and ‘conformity’ have been defined and valued differently. Since around 1800, both terms have had negative connotations, but this was not always the case. To describe the shifting attitudes towards conventionality, Yuri Lotman (1922-1993), founder of the Tartu school of semiotics,* distinguished between the aesthetics of identity, characterised by a positive attitude to-
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wards existing models (authors try to optimise what already exists), and the aesthetics of opposition, in which deviation from the norm is valued (authors try to create new forms and perspectives). Lotman argues that until the end of the eighteenth century, an aesthetics of identity was dominant. Texts were praised for resembling older texts, in particular for emulating (imitating) writers from classical Antiquity. Contemporaries were encouraged to pursue an ideal that had already been achieved, or so it was believed, in (Greek and Roman) Antiquity. Accordingly, writers aimed to master the rules of selected genres so as to create work that was distinctive in its own right while also being closely modelled on ‘the ideal.’ The genre of poetics helped authors achieve this goal. The term ‘poetics’ refers here to the tradition, going back to Aristotle’s Poetics, of formulating ideas on how to write well in the literary genres, often set out in a handbook with that title. Some poetics are more descriptive (they describe existing works), while others are more prescriptive (they set out norms for good writing and encourage people to follow them). Following a long period dominated by the aesthetics of identity, Romanticism (ca. 1790-1840) ushered in the aesthetics of opposition: originality, creativity, and innovation gradually came to reign supreme in the artistic value system. Instead of seeking to master an existing language, writers and other artists began moving in the opposite direction, developing new ‘languages’ to express their personal ideals and to surprise and unsettle their audiences. The idea that defamiliarisation came to be seen as the core task of the arts (see Chapter 2) is an expression of this aesthetics of opposition. Lotman’s cultural-historical dichotomy dates from 1970 and is still broadly accepted in literary studies – with some adjustments. These adjustments were necessary to recognise that the aesthetics of opposition also existed in earlier periods even if it was not dominant, just as the aesthetics of identity has persisted into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the present time, we are arguably witnessing another major shift in the value system. Digitisation presents unprecedented possibilities for saving, manipulating, and reproducing texts as well as images and sound. As a result, in today’s culture (and certainly in the contemporary YouTube culture) ‘recycling’ and ‘sampling’ flourish in forms of artistic expression that rework and combine earlier texts, images, and music. Today’s artists are producing new forms of expression through creatively reworking the legacy of their predecessors in ways that seem to transcend the dichotomy between ‘identity’ and ‘opposition.’ How value systems change and how these changes relate to shifting notions of individuality is an interesting subject in its own right. Here we are concerned, however, with the more general point: that new texts are always in some respect conventional, the outcome both of individual creativity and of the cultural tradition in which writers and readers are operating. This
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Modernism
applies not only to seventeenth-century writers imitating the authors of earlier works but also to contemporary artists who ‘sample’ their predecessors. It also applied to Modernism and the many authors who collectively tried to be ‘radically’ new (as in the example of Finnegans Wake above). In all cases, texts derive their particular power of expression from their relation to previous texts. This is not just true of literary masterpieces, but also of works in more popular genres (such as thrillers and science fiction), which often follow certain established formulas but still need to surprise readers. If new texts only repeated known works, they would have no added value. However, they must also echo earlier works in some way for them to be readable and classifiable. Innovation often boils down to
Classicism
No such thing as an educated woman or a boorish Frenchman In 1639 the French man of letters Jules de La Mesnardière (1610-1663) published a set of rules for how writers should go about making successful theatre. His book was called Poétique (Poetics) and was prescriptive, rather than merely descriptive, in character. It exemplified the principles of Classicism, then dominant in France, which explicitly aimed to produce art (in theatre, painting, architecture, and literature) resembling as much as possible that of ancient Greece and Rome. Poétique was guided by the idea that successful art will have obeyed certain rules of composition that could be extracted from the classics. In the case of a tragedy, accordingly, playwrights should design their plays so that all episodes belong together as part of the same plot, occur in one location, and cover no more than a single day (these were the so-called unities of time, place, and action). La Mesnardière went a step further: if a drama is to please the public, he argued, then the playwright should not only respect the three unities, but should also ensure that the action is ‘believable.’ This meant that the characters should meet the public’s expectations regarding the sort of behaviour that could be anticipated from the type of person depicted. Writers should avoid inventing characters who contradict expectations in a flagrant way. In order to be credible, La Mesnardière argued, playwrights should therefore avoid presenting Asians as warriors, Germans as subtle, Spaniards as modest, Frenchmen as boors. Unless it is strictly necessary, they should also avoid courageous girls, learned women, or opinionated servants: ‘Putting on stage women or servants with these noble attributes would be to transgress the rules of everyday credibility.’ In short: La Mesnardière believed that writers should appeal to preconceived ideas about types and classes of people (what nowadays we would call stereotypes). This is a radical version of the aesthetics of identity. At the same time, his prescriptions for credibility also illustrate how literary conventions work together with the promotion of certain ideas about the behaviour appropriate for particular social classes, genders, or ethnic groups. In this classicist poetics, credibility (in French: vraisemblance) and propriety (in French: bienséance) are inseparable, with literature expected to keep everyone in their proper place.
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unexpected combinations of familiar elements – as we have already seen in Mark Danielewski’s repurposing of paratextual conventions.
3.3.3
Intertextual relationships
Contemporary literary studies not only assumes that creative writing is dependent on conventions, it also assumes that each particular text draws its meaning from earlier texts, and that the relationships between texts are as interesting as the composition of individual ones. Intertextuality is a key concept in this respect, developed by Julia Kristeva (b.1941) and others in the 1960s. It refers to the way that texts relate both overtly and implicitly to each other and absorb the meaning and impact of earlier works in a continuous reworking of their legacy (more recently, this principle has been extended to the field of cultural memory; see also Chapter 11). In the broadest sense of the term, ‘intertextuality’ refers to all the possible relationships between a text and previous utterances. In some cases, this involves the influence of an entire literary tradition or the ‘language’ of a certain genre, as in the stories of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), which involve a creative reworking of the oral tradition of Russian folk tales. Intertextuality is implicit here in the choice of themes and storytelling techniques. Studying the way in which echoes of existing ‘languages’ resonate in new texts is an important part of literary history and provides insight into the genealogy and development of particular genres in which forms and themes are combined in distinctive ways. Intertextuality also has a more specific meaning that refers to an aesthetic device whereby a new text cites, with varying degrees of explicitness, a specific text. The earlier text, called a pre-text for ease of reference, functions as a ‘second voice’ in the new text. In being cited, its cultural life is extended through the intermediary of the new work. Different forms of intertextual citation exist, of which we will name just a few: a. Allusion: A text invokes another text as relevant to its own treatment of a particular theme. In The Divine Comedy, Dante makes the Roman poet Virgil one of his characters, in a move that explicitly places his own work in relation to Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid. The novel Samarkand (Samarcande; 1988) by French-Lebanese author Amin Maalouf (b.1949) is about the Persian poet, philosopher, and mathematician Omar Khayyam (ca. 1048-1131) and the later reception of his poetry. Maalouf invokes the earlier text through direct quotation; in many other cases, allusion takes the more indirect form of a brief reference to a title, author, or literary character. b. Creative retelling: A text that retells a well-known story in a new way. Cassandra (1983), a novel by Christa Wolf (1929-2011), written in the
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context of communist East Germany, is a modern feminist retelling of the ancient Greek myth about the fall of Troy, from the perspective of a woman who can see the future but is despised and ridiculed for her abilities. Creative retellings of the classics are regularly used for commenting critically on contemporary society, including the legacy of colonialism (a point we will return to in Chapter 10). c. Pastiche: A text produced by a writer who, often out of admiration, imitates an earlier text so closely that it reproduces the uniqueness of the language used in the pre-text. British author Charles Palliser (b.1947) writes novels that are almost identical to the late-nineteenthcentury novels of Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), but with plenty of winks and nudges for the contemporary reader. Using fiction to reflect on the phenomenon of pastiche, Borges famously wrote a short story called ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’; 1939) about a man who rewrote Cervantes’novel word for word in the twentieth century, and thereby raised the question if this was the ‘same’ text as the seventeenth-century one since many of Cervantes’ allusions were now forgotten and many new points of reference had emerged in the intervening period. d. Parody: A text produced by a writer who comically imitates a pretext. The English author Henry Fielding (1707-1754) wrote a parody named Shamela (1741) of the massively popular, sentimental novel Pamela (1740) by his contemporary Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). The above list is not elaborate enough to cover all instances of intertextuality. But short as it is, it indicates the wealth of possibilities available. Scholarly research in this area is thriving, partly because intertextuality has proved to be such a popular device in contemporary literature within the more general culture of recycling and sampling across different media, mentioned earlier. The male protagonist of the popular novel Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) by Helen Fielding (b.1958), for example, is named ‘Mark Darcy,’ linking the book to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). The connection was strengthened in the film adaptation of the novel (2001), because the actor who plays Mark Darcy, Colin Firth, also played the role of Mr Darcy in the 1995 television adaptation of Austen’s novel. The later text and the film breathe new life into the earlier text by Jane Austen, and both have fed into a vibrant fan culture around her work that includes new versions of the novels in the form of fan fiction. These allusions invite readers to see the new story as a creative retelling or ‘remake’ of the nineteenth-century novel. Similarly, popular films such as Men in Black (directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997) and the tv series Penny Dreadful (created by John Logan, 2014) are full of allusions to other films and novels. The fun comes precisely from the process of recognising the references. The popularity of remakes and
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citations has been attributed to the need to find something to hold on to in a rapidly changing world: recognising references gives readers and viewers a sense of belonging, allowing them to identify with each other in sharing cultural knowledge. Although the circumstances were obviously hugely different, Dante’s allusions to Virgil can be said to have played a similar role in creating a sense of community based on shared cultural references. Used as an aesthetic device, intertextuality can have multiple effects. Along with humour, it can provoke (more or less profound) reflections on the historical distance between an earlier text and a new one (Bridget Jones’ world resembles but also differs in many respects from that of Jane Austen’s characters). It can also be used to provoke critical reflection on a particular cultural legacy, as in the recent case of the film BlacKkKlansman (2018), directed by Spike Lee (b.1957): this depiction of contemporary racism in the us recalls in its cinematography the black-and-white film Birth of a Nation (1915) by D.W. Griffith (1875-1948), one of the classics of American cinema which had also been a source of inspiration for the Ku Klux Klan. In recalling the earlier film, Lee is both calling on and sharply criticising his predecessor’s work. In short: the concept of intertextuality allows us to capture the multiple ways in which meaning is created in the interaction or dialogue between one text and another. The exact shape that conversation follows ultimately depends on the reader’s previous knowledge and cultural repertoire. The importance of intertextuality as a concept in contemporary literary studies is closely related, therefore, to the growing recognition of the active role of readers in producing meaning.
3.4
Singularity: Between old and new
Having established the importance of convention and intertextuality to literature, and shown that writing by individuals always has a collective dimension, we now turn back to the concept of singularity. As indicated earlier, literary scholars face a double challenge: conventionality and the collective must be accounted for, but so too must the phenomenon of individual creativity. The paintings of Van Gogh have specific features (colour, theme, technique, and composition) that clearly identify his work as ‘his’: literally and figuratively, his paintings bear his signature. The same is true of many writers. Their artistry and creativity give their work distinctive qualities that make them instantly identifiable, just as a Van Gogh painting is clearly ‘a Van Gogh’. The individual elements that combine to make up a text may indeed have been taken from somewhere else and already used by many other people, but the final product has its own unique flavour or look and feel: it has its own style. All of the words Roger
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McGough uses in the poem ‘40-Love’ are well known, but his playful configuration of these everyday words changes the way they work (playing with everyday language and situations is almost a trademark of this ‘pop’ poet). Stylistics* is the specialism that focuses on the study of the stylistic features characteristic of particular writers. Let us recall the opening lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.’ Again, all the words in these lines from Shakespeare, along with the metre he uses, are well established. Nevertheless, something happens to them in their poetic reworking. The repeated ‘s’ sounds force one to read slowly. Moreover, the words ‘sessions’ and ‘summon’ are both drawn from legal practice (in law, a ‘session’ is a meeting of the court and a ‘summons’ is a court order ‘summoning’ an individual to appear in court at a specified place and time). At first sight it is surprising to find a legalistic vocabulary in a personal evocation of how friendship and memory work. But the references to a courtroom are used here metaphorically: the speaker presents himself as a judge who summons his younger self to account for what he has done with his life. The metaphor in this complex text thus opens up a new way of seeing human relations while building on familiar things. This example resonates with the discussion of singularity in Chapter 2. It will be recalled that Attridge defined literariness in terms of an ‘event’ that occurs when writers and readers make a leap from the familiar into the unknown. ‘Singularity’ in this sense resembles ‘uniqueness’ but also implies that uniqueness can exist only – and be identified only – in comparison to the old and the familiar. Within a given culture, creativity is experienced against the background of a common language, recognisable genres, and shared expectations. Attridge argues that when readers are swept off their feet by a particular work of literature, it is because they experience a ‘singularity’ that transcends comparisons with other works (by the same author or otherwise). Life is a Caravanserai – Has Two Doors – I Came in One – I Went out the Other (Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei – hat zwei Türen – aus einer kam ich rein – aus der anderen ging ich raus) is the title of a novel, first published in 1992, by the Turkish-German writer Emine Sevgi Özdamar (b.1946). The length of this unconventional title is instantly eye-catching as is the fact that it offers an entire statement, drawn out without punctuation as in a poem, rather than just a name or a theme. On seeing this title, literary scholars cannot predict that all readers will experience Özdamar’s work as singular in Attridge’s sense. Each reader’s experience of ‘singularity’ will be shaped by their individual knowledge and expectations and their willingness to work through a difficult text and become open to its enchantments. This cannot be predicted on the basis of textual characteristics alone. However, the theory
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of singularity does help us explain why certain works affect certain readers, fascinating them and giving them the sense that they have truly encountered something new. And a close textual analysis, carried out with a deep knowledge of the literary tradition in which a novelist is writing, can help to explain after the fact why a particular work could generate such excitement.
electronic literature
How computers are becoming co-authors In 2005, literary scholar N. Katherine Hayles (b.1943) wrote a book called My Mother Was a Computer (2005). With this provocative title, Hayles signalled what she saw as the growing interdependence of people and machines: What does it mean nowadays to be human since we are becoming ever more dependent on machines to do our mental work for us? Is it conceivable that we would ever outsource the writing of literature to a computer and to the algorithms that drive it? If so, what sort of literature will that be? A decade and a half later, it still seems unlikely that computers will take over the work of creative writers entirely. But there is no doubt that things are changing, and that there are many experiments being conducted in the field of electronic literature. The term ‘electronic literature’ is used here to refer to ‘digitally native’ literature produced within a digital environment and not easily translatable into print, if at all. One can think here of the possibility of getting words to move across the screen, as in the ‘moving’ poetry of Dutch writer Tonnus Oosterhoff (b.1953), or having readers add something to the text or create their own order for reading a story by following hyperlinks. The latter was exemplified in Patchwork Girl (1995) by Shelley Jackson (b.1963). often seen as a rewriting of Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797-1851). Where Shelley used only words and the printed page to present her story, Jackson used combinations of words and images, and invited her readers to find their own way among all the different elements in order to make sense. As Chapter 4 will show, experiments in the field of electronic literature are ongoing. The jury is still out on the extent to which these experiments mark a radically new departure or not, or whether instead, they are just the latest version of the creative use of media that has long been the hallmark of literature. It is worth noting, along with media theorists, how some of the characteristics of hypertext were already imagined by creative writers well before digitisation had made this technically possible. Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963) by Julio Cortázar (1914-1984) and Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs (1914-1997) invited people to read their chapters in whatever order they chose. Apparently, the idea of breaking away from the linear order dictated by the pages of a book was ‘in the air’ before digital technologies, and alternatives to it were being imagined, not just among computer technologists, but also among creative writers. Indeed, creative writing entails by definition continuously stretching the possibilities of the medium in which one is working.
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3.5
In conclusion: The undead author
‘Ismail Kadare asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work’: this statement appears in the publication details opposite the first page of Elegy for Kosovo: Stories (1998), the English translation of Tri këngë zie për Kosovën by Albanian writer Ismail Kadare (b.1936). The name ‘Ismail Kadare’ is printed on the title page, so why is it necessary to ‘assert the moral right to be identified as the author’? And what is that moral right? Similar statements appear in almost all the novels published in the uk in recent years, so Kadare is not alone in this practice. What does it mean to be identified as the‘author’ and why make the effort to assert one’s identity as such? The short answer is: to protect intellectual property from being stolen. Statements like these are for authors what ‘patents’ are for the inventors of new machines: it is not permitted to copy the work without permission, and if permission is granted, fees may apply and reference to the ‘owner’ of the idea in question is mandatory. Someone who publishes Kadare’s stories either in whole or in part under their own name is committing plagiarism (plagium, Latin for ‘kidnapping’). For a large part, society functions on a ‘good faith’ basis and to break this trust is to break a social norm. But since norms are not always respected, legal regulation has also been put in place to protect intellectual property. Books found to contain plagiarised material and hence in violation of the ‘moral right’ of the author may be subject to publication bans and removed from bookshops. By explicitly including ‘moral right claims’ in the publication details, authors assert legal ownership over their intellectual property, which can serve as proof in court if plagiarism cases arise. The internationally recognised copyright symbol © also appears in Kadare’s book: this designates the right to publish and reproduce the text (socalled exploitation rights). In some cases, authors own these rights, but in modern times – and in Kadare’s case – they are usually owned by the publisher. Whereas the moral right to be identified as the author of a work relates to the intellectual content of a work broadly defined, copyright applies to the right to produce and distribute a particular text as a material object.
Who owns a text? Our familiarity with the © copyright sign does not mean that it was always there. International and national laws regarding copyright and the rights of authors are of quite recent date, namely the second half of the nineteenth century. They arose out of several developments:
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Figure 3.4: Jean-Jacques Sempé, Je vous envie beaucoup: ‘How I envy you. How I would have liked to do what you’ve done: write a book. To have the impression of rising above the masses.’ © 1984, by Sempé et Éditions Denoël.
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a. Commercial and technological changes. Technological developments in printing had made it possible from around 1830 for books to be mass-produced at a relatively low price. These provided opportunities for publishers to feed the demands of the new groups of readers that were emerging at this time thanks to expanding literacy. Publishing, in particular of novels, became big business. It still is. Witness the enormous commercial, as well as critical, success of J.K. Rowling, the inventor of Harry Potter and currently one of the richest women in the uk. The commercial exploitation of literature (and, more recently, of music and film), meant that literature came to be treated in law like any other product. Just as imitation Rolex watches are illegal, so too is the reproduction of texts without the permission of the copyright holder. b. New ideas about authorship. As noted above, the value attached to the emulation of older authors gave way in the Romantic period to the prizing of originality. Romantics believed that individual authors produced something unique; that it literally and metaphorically carried their signature. Originality also helped writing become a commercial product since it gave authors a ‘unique selling point’ in the rapidly expanding book industry mentioned above. Where earlier writers had largely been supported by their own wealth or by patrons, as of the mid-nineteenth century they could also independently earn their own living from royalties even if this meant, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has shown, a tension between market value and symbolic value, between a ‘disinterested’ commitment to art and commercialism (we will come back to this tension in Chapter 8). The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886 marked a milestone in the international regulation of copyright and for the legal division of profits between authors (creators of the text) and the publishing houses (the producers and sellers of books). It determined that works are copyrighted until at least 50 years after the death of the author (in the EU this has now been extended to 70 years). All countries who signed up to the Berne Convention have used these principles in developing their own national laws. The Universal Copyright Convention of 1952 was another milestone, responsible for the introduction of the © sign. Copyright entails the right to control the reproduction of a particular work. Depending on the circumstances and agreements reached, either the author or the publisher will hold the copyright. Permissions must be sought from the copyright holder for the translation of a work or its adaptation to a movie or graphic novel, and this may in turn result in additional royalties. If an author has been dead for more than 70 years, the copyright elapses and anyone is free to reproduce or adapt the text. In that case, however, publishers may still claim a copyright on illustrations or layout. Partial reproduction of a text in the form of a quotation in a scholarly text is usually permitted, however, constituting a form of ‘fair use’ as long as due acknowledgement is given of the source. Copyright law has to be regularly updated to keep pace with technological changes that make it ever easier to copy texts, images, and music. The ease with which cultural
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products can be reproduced nowadays has opened a new chapter in discussions about intellectual property. Cover versions, remakes, sampling, and fan fiction have become such a part of cultural life that it is sometimes difficult to identify a single author as the progenitor of any particular piece of music or poetry. When does an intertextual relation become a breach of copyright? This is a challenging question for literary scholars as well as legal ones.
Putting aside for now the legal background to author’s rights, let us now consider what it means to be seen as an ‘author’ at all. What statements can we make about authorship in light of what we have already learned about texts and intertextuality? We started out with a traditional approach to the concept of ‘the author’ as ‘a great artist’ – a remarkable individual who uses their genius, creativity, and sensitivity to produce masterpieces so ‘original’ that nothing else compares. This sums up the romantic ideal of the artist, which came to prominence in the late eighteenth century. This revolutionary new way of looking at authorship replaced the ideal of the writer as a craftsman, which had long served as a model for writers, especially those who wanted to follow in the footsteps of the ‘Greats.’ The later part of the eighteenth century saw the publication of several reflections on concepts like ‘originality,’ ‘creativity,’ and ‘genius’ (e.g. Essay on Original Genius [1767] by William Duff [1732-1815] and Conjectures on Original Composition [1759] by Edward Young [1683-1765]). All this attention to originality, creativity, and individuality marked the beginning of a period dominated by the aesthetics of opposition. These developments fed into the new interest in individual rights in a political sphere that was becoming more democratic. The romantic idea of authorship and the related notion of individuality have become deeply engrained in our culture, but they are losing some of their critical capital. As we have seen in the past few pages, in contemporary textual criticism, it is increasingly hard to accept the notion that any individual text can be viewed as an absolutely original product created by one individual. The following points are noteworthy in this respect: ● Texts are made of language, a means of communication that has been used and shaped by other people. ● Texts are modelled on existing texts and use devices, themes, and perspectives that have already featured in older texts. ● New texts characterise themselves in relation to older texts: their singularity is not ‘locked in’ the text per se, but is manifest in a unique intertextual relationship to other texts.
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death of the author
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Texts that reach contemporary readers in book form are a coproduction of author and publisher, in which the latter’s paratext (and marketing material) accompanies the author’s own text. Texts are in principle ‘works in progress’: they only start to ‘live’ once the reader becomes involved; some texts (e.g. some types of hyperfiction) are made with the express aim of further developing this interactive dimension.
Insights like these have changed the focus of literary research, which is now less organised around specific ‘writers and their work’ than it was a generation ago. (Today, you are more likely to find courses about ‘migrant literature in the Netherlands’ or ‘the reception of foreign literature in France’ than studies that focus exclusively on the work of one author.) This turning point arrived under the influence of a controversial 1967 essay by French philosopher and critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980): ‘The Death of the Author’. This provocative title pointed to what Barthes regarded as the fact that the term ‘author’ had lost its function as an anchor and reference point. In the past, he wrote, literary critics and scholars had seen the author as an almost godlike figure who was both the ‘creator’ and ‘source’ of the text. In this approach, reading meant projecting one’s self into the author’s mind (or ‘soul’) in order to discover what her/his ‘intentions’ were. Barthes argued that this approach is no longer satisfactory because, as the theory of intertextuality demonstrates, we now know that in practice texts function as part of a network of other texts. Moreover, authors do not have the final say in deciding which other texts make up a relevant framework for the reading of their work. Readers may find connections that the author never intended or may read the text in a different cultural context. Barthes’ death of the author is thus closely connected to the ‘birth’ of the reader. To grasp this idea, it is helpful to keep in mind that in reflecting on what authorship means, today or in the past, we need to connect it to ideas about individuality and authority. In today’s climate of far-reaching democratisation, notions of ‘authority’ have changed and people are more likely to believe that all people are equal (for more on this, see Chapter 2). The idea that readers are as important as authors when it comes to literature has been gaining ground among scholars of the field and nonprofessional readers alike. The traditional concept of ‘the author’ may well be dead in theory, as Barthes claimed 50 years ago, but it has not been buried. On the contrary. For two reasons we can better speak of the ‘undead’ author who has returned to haunt current literary debates: 1. The ‘author’ is still extremely important in the social organisation of the literary world. After all, flesh-and-blood people win awards, not texts, and modern publishers do their best to ensure a mar-
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ket and an audience for ‘their’ writers (who represent their brand). People are still deeply interested in the biographies of writers and other artists (to learn about the ‘person’ behind the work). It remains a fact (supported by sales figures and public discussion) that some authors are perceived as ‘better’ and as producing ‘more interesting’ work than others. The attraction of their work may stem in part from marketing campaigns advertising their work or from their use of certain themes or techniques that happen to be popular with critics and the wider public, but the question remains whether success comes only from external factors. Above, we argued that ‘singularity’ forms the basis of literariness. For scholars of literary studies, the million-dollar question, already raised at the end of Chapter 2, still remains: Why can some writers create an experience of singularity while others fall short and how can we put our finger on what makes them different?
To sum up: the emphasis in recent literary scholarship has been on the collective aspect of writing and on the reader’s role in determining the meaning of a text. Since creative writers, as the name suggests, are capable of creating something new it follows that existing models are not always applicable to the understanding of their work. While the individual components making up particular texts have origins in other texts, the result may still have a unique look and feel; its own ‘style’ that sets it apart from other texts, just as Rembrandt’s style can be distinguished from that of his students. It is easier to sense something special about certain texts than to describe what makes them so. Techniques of close reading, paying attention to style and to intertextual relations, afford insight into the methods of individual authors and the particular features of their creativity. But the close reading of a single text is never enough if the person doing the reading has not acquired knowledge of a large literary repertoire allowing one to compare and understand the particular qualities of individual works.
Further reading Graham Allen, Intertextuality, London: Routledge, 2000. Sean Burke, Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern – A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds, The Book History Reader, London: Routledge, 2002. N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
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Notes 1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
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Roger McGough, Collected Poems, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 95. See, among others, Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen, 1982. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge, 1964. Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Ong, Orality. For the background to this discussion, see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Bernard Cerquiglini, Eloge de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie, Paris: Seuil, 1989. On the renewed importance of books as objects, see Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Kári Driscoll and Jessica Pressman, eds, Book Presence in a Digital Age, London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi, London: Faber and Faber, 1991. Gérard Genette, Seuils, Paris: Seuil, 1987. English translation: Gérard Genette, Paratexts:Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves/By Zampanó, with an Introduction and Notes by Johnny Truant. 2nd ed., London: Doubleday, 2001, p. 141. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Moeurs de Province [1857], Paris: Gallimard, 1972, p. 253. English Translation: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary [1857], trans. Geoffrey Wall, London: Penguin, 1992, p.154. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake [1939], London: Faber, 1975, p. 3. William Wordsworth, ‘Surprised by Joy,’ in Stephen Greenblatt, gen. ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed., New York: W.W. Norton, 2012, p. 347. William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 30,’ in M.H. Abrams, gen. ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed., New York: W.W. Norton, 1986, p. 876. Yuri Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text [1970], trans. Ronald Vroon, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977. Quoted in Gérard Genette, ‘Vraisemblance et motivation’, in Figures II: Essais, 71-100, Paris: Seuil, 1969, translation A.R. The study of how literature carries and helps create stereotypical images is called imagology; for an introduction, see Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, eds, Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. See, for example, Graham Allen, Intertextuality, London: Routledge, 2000. An elaborate typology of intertextual relations can be found in Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré, Paris: Seuil, 1982; . English translation: Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Deidre Lynch, ed., Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. See, for example, Douglas Rushkoff, Children of Chaos >*: [Surviving the End of the World as We Know It], New York: Flamingo, 1997. For more on this point, see Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds, The New Media Reader, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. Ismail Kadare, Three Elegies for Kosovo [1998], trans. Peter Constantine, London: Harvill Press, 2000.
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Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, London: Routledge, 1984 See also Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010. This section on copyright is indebted to Frank de Glas. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ [1967] ubuWeb, http://www.ubu. com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.htmlbarthes (last accessed July 2019).
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4 INTERMEDIAL POETICS KIENE BRILLENBURG WURTH
What is the relation between literature and other arts and media? How to analyse and describe this relation? We answer this question with reference to poetics and poetry. On the one hand, we approach mainstream poetical concepts (rhythm, metre, metaphor, irony) from an intermedial perspective: we consider how these concepts can be used as instruments for analysis without being tied to one particular medium. On the other hand, we show how concepts from media studies can be used to analyse new poetic procedures that have been experimented with in modern poetry, roughly since the nineteenth century. Such procedures tend to fall outside the framework of traditional poetic theory as they are informed by visual, sonic, and – since the last four decades – digital techniques. . . . . . . . .
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Introduction: Intermediality and the poetic Poetic theory, poetry, and beyond Rhythm and metre in sound and image Irony Metaphor and montage Transmediality and remediation Intermedia, intermediality, and multimediality In conclusion: Literary studies and media studies
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Introduction: Intermediality and the poetic
In Chapter 3 we have shown that texts can be seen as nodes in a network of other texts. In its turn, this textual network is connected to other media and art forms, such as cinema, visual art, and music. Literary texts are present in other arts and media, just as these other arts are present in literary texts. Think of cinematic adaptations (see adaptation studies*) of novels, of novelisation (novels made on the basis of films), of electronic poems using moving images, of poems evoking paintings, of paintings invoking biblical scenes, of poetry set to music. Or even more fundamentally: think of the musical potential and imaginative power of words, or of the narrative potential of images. The general term to describe this dynamic between arts and media is intermediality. As this chapter will show, intermedial relations may take on different forms. For instance, multimediality revolves around the combination of different media in a movie or an opera. Transmediality is the result of ‘transposing’ a story, idea, theme, or motif from one to the other medium, as is the case with adaptations. The concept of intermediality is also used in a narrower sense to refer to a dynamic between (inter = between) two or more media resulting in a new form that cannot (yet) be clearly determined. Intermediality in this sense is about artistic objects, events or performances that cannot yet be categorised according to established, formal criteria. Installation art by Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) or conceptual-electronic works like Noplace (2007-2008) by the artist collaboration mw2mw are cases in point. Bourgeois’ art hovers between visual, sculptural, and performance art. Noplace invited visitors to create their own favourite version of utopia on the basis of visual, textual, and auditive material on the internet. What kind of art is this? Visual, narrative, performative, autobiographical? Noplace (its name is suggestive) is none of these, but crosses the borders between established categories and integrates different modes of expression. This chapter addresses intermediality both in a broad and in a narrow sense, taking poetry and poetics as its points of departure. On the one hand, it shows how a number of concepts from poetic theory and rhetoric (the art, study and uses of written, spoken, and visual language as a persuasive instrument) function in intermedial contexts. Concepts traditionally reserved for the analysis and composition of poetry and speeches turn out not to be exclusively tied to literature and language. Such concepts can be made to travel between different media. Here we will discuss some of these concepts: rhythm and metre, irony and metaphor (the latter two known as tropes; see section 4.4). On the other hand, we show how new poetic procedures that have been developed
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and experimented with since the late nineteenth century often exceed the frames of poetic theory. Existing concepts do not suffice to analyse poetry that consists of electronic visual collages, of incomprehensible word groups, or of (synthetic) sounds. Literary creativity continuously challenges us to develop new tools of analysis. And yet, these works have still been presented as poetry. This chapter offers an approach to such composite poems from the perspective of media and intermedia theory (intermedium: an object, performance or event hovering in-between existing media). This approach will only enhance our grasp of printed, word-based poetry.
4.2
Poetic theory, poetry, and beyond
The American poet and publisher Ezra Pound (1885-1972) opened his abc of Reading (1934) with the assertion that ‘great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree’; it is language that has been condensed. The Dutch and German verb dichten (to write poetry) captures this verb in its second meaning: to fill in a gap, or to compress something. To compose poetry is to compress as much meaning as possible into a word, a line, or a sentence. Alternatively, one could say that to compose poetry is to design a text in which form matters as much as content. Poems can be structured with rhyme schemes, figures of speech (section 2), rhythm, metre (section 3), and figures of meaning such as metaphor (section 5). However, are these formal dimensions limited to the genre of poetry? As Chapter 2 has shown, the intermingling of form and content is just as crucial to prose texts, commercials, or political speeches. Indeed, Caroline Levine (b.1970) has shown, forms organise poetry as well as political life and every aspect of our experience. Defined as ‘patternings, shapes, and arrangements,’ Levine argues, forms ‘can organise both social and literary objects’ – and she considers these configurations and arrangements more stable than genres. They ‘organise materials in distinct and iterable ways. [...] Forms migrate across contexts in a way that genres cannot’ and endure across time and space. Such an open view of poetic form coincides with Ezra Pound’s definition of poetry as Verdichtung, as a creative act as such: Dichtung, and the forms attached to it, need not be limited to the genre of poetry alone. Consider the following two examples, one a poem by the Dutch poet Remco Campert (b.1929), the other a longer section of the speech by Winston Churchill already discussed in Chapter 2.
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(1 Een vergeefs gedicht
A poem in vain
Zoals je loopt, door de kamer uit het bed naar de tafel met de kam, zal geen regel ooit lopen.
As you walk, through the room from the bed to the table with the comb, no line will ever run.
Zoals je praat, met je tanden in mijn mond en je oren om mijn tong, zal geen pen ooit praten.
As you talk, with your teeth in my mouth and your ears around my tongue, no pen will ever speak.
Zoals je zwijgt, met je bloed in mijn rug door je ogen in mijn hals, zal geen poëzie ooit zwijgen.
As you whist, with your blood in my back through your eyes in my neck, no poetry will ever silence.
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(2) ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
In his poem, Campert uses a repetitive construction called parallelism (a procedure involving the repetition of the beginning of a sentence, or the structure of that sentence: the successive use of identical rhythms, grammatical patterns of words, phrases, or sentences). One could call this a typically poetic technique. However, in Chapter 2 we saw the same technique at work in Churchill’s 1940 speech. That speech turned out so convincing and compelling because of the dramatic repetition of the phrase ‘we shall fight.’ Such repetition grants clarity, balance, and coherence, and, perhaps most importantly, is likely to build dramatic tension. Churchill is in good company: from Julius Caesar (‘Veni, vidi, vici’) to Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) in his Gettysburg Address (‘Government of the people, for the people, by the people’), and from Martin Luther King (1929-1968) (‘I have a dream’) to Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) (‘It is a very different world, with different challenges and new freedoms’), parallelisms have worked well to persuade
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or move listeners. They are indicators of the poetic function discussed in Chapter 2. Besides repetition, poets often use inversion (a deviation from the normal word order by turning it around). Usually, the order of a sentence is: subject-verb-adverbial clause. By contrast, inversion puts the adverbial clause first in order to emphasise something or to render something in a deliberately stately or formal style. One could say: ‘I have seldom seen such talent’ or ‘Seldom have I seen such talent.’ The latter option sounds more dignified. The first and third line in the first stanza of Emily Dickinson’s poem 829 offer a case in point: Ample make this Bed – Make this Bed with Awe – In it wait till Judgement break Excellent and Fair.
chiasmus
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‘Ample’ – meaning: plentiful, abundant, generous, copious – is the gateway for the reader to the poem. There is no way to navigate around this word and with good reason: ‘ample’ immediately indicates that this shall not be just any bed, but a bed made plentifully. In the next line order is restored: ‘Make this bed with Awe’ (respect, reverence, esteem, but also: wonder and worship). It is as if this command organically flows out of the inverted command in the opening line: >*: [Surviving the End of the World as We Know It] (1997). In the 20 years since Rushkoff ’s book appeared, it has become even
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more evident that economic precarity has taken away individuals’ sense of their lives as a purposeful part of a greater story that is moving in a clear direction. However, contrary to Rushkoff ’s claim that the new generation is living in the here and now more than projecting themselves into the future, the threat of catastrophic climate change has also given rise to new versions of the ‘Last Judgement.’ This suggests that people continue to make sense of their lives through stories, but that the structure of those stories and the ‘sense of an ending’ gradually changes in character.
Studies of the underlying structure of stories by Greimas and others have generated countless useful insights into the way people understand and depict actions according to fixed patterns. They have also done much to reveal intertextual connections between multiple stories. Nevertheless, a general model, like that of Greimas, also has its shortcomings; while it can be applied to many stories, its very broadness prevents it from capturing specific differences between genres. For example, it does not help us to discriminate between the adventure story, the Bildungsroman (novel of personal development), or the detective story – all genres with their own typical structure, each creating suspense in a different way. It also fails to account for the fact that some narratives have multiple storylines. For example, the novel Crash (1973) by J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) and its adaptation in the film Crash (2004) by Paul Haggis (b.1953) use a traffic accident as the point of intersection for multiple stories reflecting social and racial tensions in Los Angeles. The search for general models applicable to all instances also presents a more fundamental problem. By overemphasising what all stories have in common, narratologists run the risk of overlooking ways in which creative writers consciously play with readerly expectations and challenge predictable schemata. Indeed, in some cases, narrators succeed in shifting the focus of the narrative from the story itself to the complex way in which it is being told. This can be illustrated by the film Rashomon by director Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998). Based on the short story ‘In a Grove’ (1922) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927), Rashomon presents one murder from six different perspectives, consequently casting more and more doubt on what actually happened. Instead of just sitting back and enjoying the story as it unfolds, viewers are provoked into thinking about the nature of truth and how it can be established. Moreover, as we shall see in the next section, writers regularly invent new narrative techniques that depict characters in such a way as to challenge stereotypes, and not merely confirm preconceived ideas about how people (should) act in moments of crisis.
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Cinderellas by the hundred Narratologists took over the concept of ‘motif ’ from the study of folklore and vernacular culture. This branch of scholarship had come into its own in the nineteenth century within the framework of emerging nationalism, when scholars became committed to extending the study of culture beyond the book-centred culture of the social elite to the oral-based culture of the (rural) masses. The famous collection of fairytales put together by the Brothers Grimm ( Jacob, 1785-1863, and Wilhelm, 1786-1859) marked a milestone in the curation and study of oral culture. It quickly became apparent to folklorists that there were many similarities between stories told in different languages. Across the world there are hundreds of known variations, for example, on the story of Cinderella (an orphan girl is mistreated by her stepmother but ends up marrying a prince with the help of a protective power). An important step in the study of folk tales was the Aarne-Thompson index. This encyclopaedic work was compiled by Stith Thompson (1885-1976) in 1955 on the basis of earlier work by Antti Aarne (18671925). It offered a classification of the underlying motifs in thousands of folktales from across the world. Every motif was assigned a number, so that it became possible to map the spread of particular motifs across different stories and different cultures. (The Pied Piper of Hamelin motif, for example, involving a magician who uses his pipe to entice all the children of the city away with him, was given the number D1427.) The question arises, of course, why there are so many similarities between stories across so many different regions. Is it because oral transmission encourages the use of formulas? Are the similarities the result of people having to react to similar experiences (of deprivation, desire for redemption)? Or have stories travelled from one culture to the next? The current consensus gravitates towards the latter while not dismissing other factors.
5.5
Narrative techniques
In a famous experiment called Exercices in style (Exercises de style; 1947), French writer Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) demonstrated how the same story could be told in no less than 99 different ways, including variation in language use, the position of the narrator, sequencing, and narrative point of view. Queneau’s experiment inspired 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005) by Matt Madden (b.1968). Where Queneau displayed his mastery of the medium of language, Madden excels in another medium, that of comics, and displays his mastery by telling a short story in different visual languages (including the style of manga, superhero comics and the famous medieval Bayeux Tapestry). These experiments illustrate very well how the composition of the narrative text impacts on
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the way the world of the story takes shape in the readers’ imagination and influences how they interpret it. There is no representation without interpretation. Representing a story world – be this in a fictional or a non-fictional genre – always entails making sense of it. Interpretation starts with word choice: the term ‘martyr,’ for example, has a different connotation from the word ‘terrorist.’ Choosing one of these words rather than another is a way of assigning someone a role in the overall plot. Characters described as ‘terrorists’ are unlikely to act as subjects, and are far more likely to function as opponents. Terminological choices thus influence readers’ expectations and perceptions. In addition to word choice, narrative techniques are also important in shaping stories. Storytellers can draw on a huge repertoire of techniques, to which creative storytellers are regularly adding new devices. The job of the literary scholar is to identify this dynamic repertoire and to investigate the potential impact of new techniques as they emerge. In what follows, we will discuss some of the most important ones.
5.5.1
narrator
Narrators
At the beginning of this chapter, we referred to the distinction made by Plato between mimesis (stories presented through performance) and diegesis (stories told indirectly through a narrator). Our focus here will be on diegesis and the phenomenon of the narrator: the voice we literally hear in oral storytelling and figuratively hear in written texts. In reality, the author of the narrative text is the actual narrator, because it is he or she who has put the story into words and – if it is fictional – has also invented the action and characters. That being said, authors may invent all sorts of narrators to speak for them and establish a more or less distant relationship to both their characters and their readers; they may even choose to tell their story through a character. For this reason, it is important to make an analytical distinction between the author and the narrator. The narrator’s use of words and other narrative techniques introduces a subjective element to the perception of the story. This subjective element may be more or less prominent as the following two examples illustrate. The first is the opening passage of ‘The Judgement’ (‘Das Urteil’; 1913) by Franz Kafka (1883-1924): Es war an einem Sonntagvormittag im schönsten Frühjahr. Georg Bendemann, ein junger Kaufmann, saß in seinem Privatzimmer im ersten Stock eines der niedrigen, leichtgebauten Häuser, die entlangs des Flusses in einer langen Reihe, fast nur in der Höhe und Färbung unterschieden, sich hinzogen.
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It was on a Sunday morning in the nicest time of Spring. Georg Bendemann, a young merchant, sat in his private room on the first floor of one of the lightly built low-rise houses of a long row facing the river, differing only in their height and the colour of their façades.
In this excerpt, an anonymous narrator tells a story about a third person (‘he’: Georg Bendemann). We are given no explicit information about the narrator as a person. You could say that the word ‘nicest’ (schönsten) shows a certain preference for a particular period in the spring, but this could also be more of a clichéd statement than a personal preference. Apart from this, the excerpt above contains no words that express a value judgement: the emphasis is on the visible characteristics of the location about which the narrator seems all-knowing (he can apparently see Georg Bendemann alone in his room). The approach is very different in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), which is told in the first person by a woman who is confined to her room by her husband John (apparently because of some mental illness) and begins to see movement behind the wallpaper: There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder – I begin to think – I wish John would take me away from here!
The reader encounters here a first-person narrator who acts as a speaking, thinking, and feeling subject. Unlike Kafka’s narrator, Gilman’s narrator is very involved – as is demonstrated by the use of exclamation marks and hyphens, along with truncated sentences that are placed one after the other staccato style, rather than integrated into a coherent paragraph. Where Kafka has the story told by an anonymous, but all-knowing reporter, Gilman’s reader is addressed by a highly involved (and apparently, greatly agitated) person who is also the subject of the story. As the narrative progresses, the reader increasingly gets the feeling that they are dealing with someone who is mentally disturbed and having trouble seeing the world around her for what it is. Narratologists have mapped out such variation in several different ways. By and large their typologies of narrative modes converge on the issue of the narrator’s (1) visibility; (2) involvement in the story; and (3) reliability. Below is a summary of some key findings:
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1. Visibility. Analysis of narrative modes begins with the question: What sort of information is given, if any, about the narrator as an acting, feeling, evaluating subject? Does s/he maintain an implicit presence behind the scenes (like the director of a film), or does s/he feature, as a person with implicit or explicit character traits? In this regard, the Austrian narratologist Franz Karl Stanzel (b.1923) made an important distinction between authorial narrators, only implicitly present in the narrative and in principle omniscient (all-knowing), and personalised narrators, about whom we do get at least some information. The difference is often a matter of degree rather than of kind, and sometimes there may be shifts and apparent inconsistencies within the same narrative. Kafka’s ‘The Judgement’ clearly uses an authorial narrator who exercises omniscience. In the excerpt quoted earlier from Austen’s Emma, the narrator is authorial too, though a little more visible in the sense that she regularly passes judgement and directly criticises the characters on the basis of particular standards of behaviour. We feel the presence of an ironically narrating subject, even though we know nothing more about that narrator, who never uses the word ‘I,’ as a person. This shows that, even within the category of authorial narrators, the distance that narrators maintain towards the story they tell can vary. 2. Involvement. Narrators may also be positioned at a greater or lesser distance from the story world. If the narrator is personalised rather than authorial, we can ask whether they also participate in the action being narrated or not. Do they speak from a position outside of the world of the story, or are they a character within it? Or, in Gérard Genette’s terms, is the narrator heterodiegetic (Greek: heteros = different; diegesis = story) or homodiegetic (Greek: homos = the same)? First-person narrators, who indicate their presence through the use of the word ‘I,’ may be more or less distant from the story world and the actions narrated. Among firstperson narrators, we can distinguish between witness narrators (who recount things they have themselves only experienced as observers) and autodiegetic narrators (who recount their own experiences). A well-known example of a witness narrator can be found in Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851) by Herman Melville (1819-1891). It is narrated in the first person by a sailor who has been witness to the epic struggle between the ship’s captain and a mysterious white whale, and it starts as follows: Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
Although we know the narrator’s name and learn occasional things about his life on board the ship, he is not the main subject of the story: his role
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is more that of reporter or witness to the lives of others. In contrast, the narrator of in The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner [...] Written by Himself by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) is an autodiegetic narrator who tells in the first person the story of his own life as the survivor of a shipwreck. Although Crusoe is an autodiegetic narrator, he is not an autobiographical one since the term autobiography strictly speaking applies only to non-fictional first-person narratives.
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3. Reliability. Narrators of fictional narratives, as discussed earlier, are not held to the same standards of truth and trustworthiness as narrators of non-fiction. This means, among other things, that writers of fiction may purposefully create narrators who come across as unreliable: this too is all part of the game of make-believe. The more involved the narrator is in the story, the greater the chance that their insights cannot be trusted. Gilman’s mentally disturbed narrator embodies this principle. The concept of ‘reliability’ can be extended from the question of truth to that of moral authority. A famous example of a morally unreliable narrator can be found in the controversial novel Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov: it is told in the first person by a middle-aged man called Humbert Humbert who describes, with great lyricism, his love and lust for a schoolgirl. Although initially captivated by Humbert’s language, readers gradually begin to understand that the narrative concerns the sexual abuse of a minor and that the narrator’s moral compass is not reliable. Writers and directors have regularly used the power of art in this way to generate empathy for characters who are morally ambivalent, if not downright reprehensible. A more recent case in point is the novel American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis (b.1964), written from the perspective of a serial killer; or the novel The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes; 2006) by Jonathan Littell (b.1967), written in the first person from the perspective of an ss officer actively involved in the Holocaust. Such books present their readers with an ethical dilemma: Do I want to ‘keep such bad company’ by reading on? Do I want to enter into the thoughts and feelings of a protagonist who is morally contemptible? It is little wonder that such stories trigger public debate. So far, we have proceeded as though there is just one narrator per narrative, but of course this is not always the case. For example, the epistolary novel – one of the major genres of the eighteenth century – uses the letters exchanged between characters to build up a story of romance and intrigue, as in Dangerous Liaisons (Les Liaisons dangereuses; 1782), by Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803). Other works use frame narratives, whereby one story is embedded in another. A well-known example can be found The Decameron (Decameron; 1349-1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio
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(1313-1375), in which a group of young aristocrats flee the city to escape the plague and pass the time by telling each other stories. Frame narratives may also nest narratives within other narratives in a recursive way, creating what is called a mise en abyme effect. In Dutch this is called the Droste effect, after the Droste cocoa packaging that depicts a nun holding a package of Droste cocoa, which shows a nun holding a package of Droste cocoa, and so forth (see Figure 5.6). This is the foundation of A Thousand and One Nights: a primary narrator tells the story of Scheherazade, who tells the story of a fisherman who tells the story of the Wazir who tells a number of stories about Sindbad, and so on and so forth, with ever new variations on the theme of escaping death by telling another story. 4 3 2 1 narrator
Figure 5.5: Frame narratives.
metafiction postmodernism
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Figure 5.6: Jan (Johannes) Musset, Droste Cacao (1903). © 2019 Droste B.V. Vaassen.
Although overlapping narrative levels creates complexity, it does not necessarily create confusion. Despite the mise en abyme effect, it is usually clear enough which narrator is speaking so that no ambiguity arises. However, writers can also play a complex game with frame narratives, so that readers no longer know on what level they are situated in relation to the story world. This is exemplified in the text box below, which considers the connection between unstable narrative situations and metafiction (meta = after or beyond): a reflection within a story on the fictional status of the story itself, which is often seen as characteristic of postmodernism.
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Being rabbit and duck As reader you can look at every narrative in two ways: as a story to become immersed in and as an artefact made to create certain meanings and affects. In this regard, narratives can be compared to the image below which depicts, depending on which way you look at it, either a rabbit or a duck, but never both together.
Figure 5.7: Joseph Jastrow, Duck/Rabbit in Norma V. Scheidemann, Experiments in General Psychology (1939).
Nevertheless, some writers have done their best to keep both rabbit and duck within the same frame. Take Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) and his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) about the experiences of American pows in World War II. The protagonist is a man called Billy Pilgrim and at a certain point he gets an attack of diarrhoea. In the course of the passage describing this attack, the hitherto invisible narrator suddenly manifests himself both as a character in the story and as the author of the novel: An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, ‘There they go, there they go.’ He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.
The transition from ‘An American’ to ‘that was me,’ from an omniscient and impersonal heterodiegetic narrator to a homodiegetic one, breaks through the make-believe and draws attention to the actual writing of the book and its autobiographical basis. By suddenly shifting the position of the narrator in relation to the story, Vonnegut keeps us readers on our toes. The metafictional shattering of the make-believe is a popular device among contemporary authors. A filmic equivalent occurs when a director brings the camera itself onto the screen, as happens, for example, at the beginning of Contempt (Le mépris; 1963), directed by Jean-Luc Godard (b.1930). Metafictional devices like Vonnegut’s make readers stop and think about the relation between fiction and reality, and between the story being told and the author behind it.
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5.5.2
anachrony
narrative rhythm
Playing with time
One of the big benefits of language as a medium for stories – compared, for example, with the stage – is that it offers ample opportunity for dealing creatively with the passing of time and and how time is experienced. Genette has usefully distinguished between ‘narrative time’ (relating to the narration) and ‘story time’ (relating to the events depicted). He uses the term anachrony to describe deviations that occur between narrative time and story time, and shows how writers experiment with (1) duration, (2) frequency and (3) sequencing. 1. Duration. Narrative time and story time do not always coincide: a given event can be narrated with extreme brevity or at great length, using just a single word or many sentences. Narrators create their own narrative rhythm by dwelling longer on particular moments (slowing down time) and then dealing very summarily with others (speeding up time). In films, something similar can be achieved using slow motion or fast motion, but generally speaking every scene in a film lasts as long as the action being presented (though the director can skip certain moments in the editing process). In the novel, speeding up and slowing down time is so common that we are often not even aware of the elasticity of language. Playing with time allows the narrator to emphasise certain moments so they receive greater attention than others. Only in the case of dialogue can a one-toone relationship between narrative time and story time be approximated since the characters’ words are repeated verbatim. This point can be again illustrated with reference to Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case.’ The protagonist first meets his future lover at a concert which lasts several hours. That momentous evening is described at length, with no less than eight lines of narrative devoted to detailing the change that takes place in Mrs Sinico’s gaze when their eyes first meet. In contrast, just one short sentence is later used to cover many years: ‘Four years passed.’Where Joyce used brevity to indicate the onset of undramatic routine, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård (b.1968) has become famous for his minute observations of the everyday in his My Struggle (Min Kamp; 2009-2011), where the extensive account of single moments, none of them more important than the other, dominates the narrative. 2. Frequency. As the phrase ‘four years passed’ indicates, it is very easy in language to compress time and action into a single development. Repetition within such a development can be specifically captured using the iterative mode of narration, a technique which combines various actions into a single description: ‘He went often to her little cottage outside Dublin; often they spent their evenings alone’. This sets up the idea of a routine
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with a minimum of effort (a film director would have to find a workaround: the same action could be repeated at least once or accompanied by a voice-over evoking the routine). 3. Sequencing. Storytellers not only play with the difference between the duration of the story and the duration of its telling, they also play with the order in which it is told. Where witnesses giving testimony in court are encouraged to stay as close as possible to the chronological sequence of events and to describe one event after the other, literary stories, in contrast, often jump back and forth in time. Since Antiquity it has been common practice – and according to influential thinkers like Horace, even obligatory – for an epic poem to start in medias res (literally ‘in the middle of things’): the storyteller starts somewhere halfway through the sequence of events, only later revealing what came before. Detective stories almost always start after the murder, in medias res. Experiments with sequencing can help trigger curiosity by presenting readers with a mystery to figure out. Sequencing can also generate huge gaps or leaps in time – flashforwards and flashbacks, often prompted by a character thinking back – which also create suspense. The above discussion shows that temporality in novels can be very complex. Writers can highlight the importance of certain moments and minimise that of others; they sum up routines and make huge leaps back and forth in time. In short: they manipulate the passage of time in order to enhance the significance of particular moments and periods in their characters’ lives.
5.5.3
Focalisation
An influential study by Lisa Zunshine (b.1968), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), has shown how narratives have long been instrumental in helping people to understand the motives and emotions of others.‘Mind-reading’ is a key component of the modern novel in particular, both for characters trying to understand one another and for readers who imagine what it is like to be someone else. Narratives are tools for creating intersubjectivity: readers and viewers are being trained every day to observe the thoughts of other people and to witness their emotions. This kind of mind-reading is made possible – as we will see below – by a continuously evolving repertoire of narrative techniques. One of the central questions in narratology concerns the way narrators play with perspective. The term focalisation is used to refer to the relationship, established in the narrative, between the story world and the centre of consciousness from which it is apprehended. A related term is‘point of view,’ but for our purposes this term is too limited in scope because restricted
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focaliser
to the literal act of seeing. ‘Focalisation’ covers a much broader process of seeing, responding, assessing, and interpreting. The corresponding term focaliser refers to the subjectivity (centre of consciousness) through whom events are filtered. In principle, the narrator is also the primary focaliser in the sense that he/she controls the readers’ access to the story. But narrators of fictional stories also have the ability to virtually inhabit other subjectivities and see the world through their eyes. At those moments, a division of tasks takes place between the narrator (the one putting things into words) and the focaliser (the subjectivity or centre of consciousness from which the world of the story is experienced). In Flaubert’s portrait of Emma Bovary, for example, we saw that the anonymous narrator reports the story from the perspective of Charles, Emma’s future husband: ‘Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny, delicate at the tips, more polished than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped.’ The true appearance of Emma’s nails will never be known to readers because they are only described once and this description is filtered through the perspective of the character Charles, who becomes the focaliser at this point in the narrative. This strategy of ‘seeing through the eyes’ of characters, rather than narration from an omniscient point of view, is typical of the modern novel. A similar technique also features in cinema (the use of the so-called ‘subjective camera’) where observations can likewise be filtered through a specific subject position in the story. The omniscient narrator, as we have seen, can in principle see into closed rooms, and into the hearts and minds of characters. Characters, on the other hand, cannot be all-knowing. In stories that seek to be realistic, they cannot have direct access to the subjective world of others. To be believable, characters always have a limited view of others and can at most act as observers of their fellow human beings. Only in the case of science fiction and other forms of fantasy, where the laws of physics may work differently, can characters have access to the consciousness of others. Novelists, however, play creatively with these restrictions by triggering shifts in the centre of consciousness whereby the focalisation shifts from the narrator to one of the characters, and back again. Consider the following example from ‘A Disappointment’ (‘Een ontgoocheling’; 1921), a short story by Flemish writer Willem Elsschot (1882-1960): De Keizer was sigarenfabrikant. Veel geld verdiende hij niet want hij werkte slechts met enkele menschen, had te weinig kapitaal en maakte geen reclame zoodat hij niet vooruit kwam in de wereld. De Keizer was a cigar manufacturer. He didn’t make much money, as he worked with just a few people, didn’t have enough capital and didn’t advertise, so he never got ahead in the world.
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Here, we have a narrator-focaliser: the same subject observes De Keizer’s life (focalises) and describes these observations (narrates). This heterodiegetic narrator is in principle all-knowing, but the knowledge presented here is limited in this particular passage to what would be knowable by ‘ordinary’ observers in the world of the story. On the other hand, during sleep, when she had no control of her thoughts, her situation appeared in its ugly nakedness.
In this excerpt from Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1873-1877), we are dealing with an omniscient narrator-focaliser who has unrestricted access to the character’s experience of the world and to their thoughts. Anna’s dreams are presented as an ‘ugly’ reality, but these are clearly the words of the narrator and not of Anna herself.
Function
Who
narrate (putting the story into words)
narrator*
Figure 5.8: Focalisation. Position
focalise (experience storyworld)
narrator
omniscient
character
observer
* This refers initially to the primary narrator; the same structure repeats itself in frame stories.
In the next example, from the same episode in Anna Karenina, the narrator expands on the idea that Anna’s sleep is disturbed in the form of a dream sequence where the focalisation shifts from the narrator to the character herself: Aleksef Aleksandrovitch kissed her hands, and said, weeping, ‘How happy we are now!’ Aleksei Vronsky, also, was there, and he was her husband. She was amazed that she had ever believed such a thing impossible; and she laughed as she explained to them that this was far simpler, that both would henceforth be satisfied and happy.
Where Anna’s dream was first described from the perspective of the allknowing narrator-focaliser as an ‘ugly’ reality, now we are presented with
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her experience of the dream in which she imagines becoming happy with her lover. Although the third-person form is maintained in the narrator, the focalisation has shifted to the character who momentarily becomes the centre of consciousness. It can be said that Anna at that point is the character-focaliser. ‘At that point’ is a key phrase here. It is important to realise that while focalisation may sometimes be fixed, it very often shifts in subtle ways. This can be further illustrated by the following passage from Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case’: One evening he found himself sitting beside two ladies in the Rotunda. [...] The lady who sat next to him looked round at the deserted house once or twice and then said: – What a pity there is such a poor house tonight! [...] He took the remark as an invitation to talk. He was surprised that she seemed so little awkward. While they talked he tried to fix her permanently in his memory. When he learned that the young girl beside her was her daughter he judged her to be a year or so younger than himself. Her face, which must have been handsome, had remained intelligent. It was an oval face with strongly marked features. The eyes were very dark blue and steady. Their gaze began with a defiant note, but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility.
In this account of the first meeting between the future lovers, we see a complex set of transitions between different narrator-focalisations and character-focalisations. ● In the first four lines (‘One evening’ up to ‘tonight!’), the dominant vision is that of a narrator-focaliser playing the role of an observer. ● In the following five lines (‘He took the remark [...] younger than himself ’) the narrator-focaliser uses their omniscience to tell us about the thoughts playing through Mr Duffy’s head (in a non-fictional context this would not have been observable to anyone else). In the final six lines (‘Her face [...] great sensibility’) the focalisation shifts to Mr Duffy so that we see Mrs Sinico through his consciousness. This example from Joyce shows not only that focalisation shifts, but also that it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint when exactly this occurs since writers often build in transitional or ‘handover’ points. In the sentence ‘Her face, which must have been handsome, had remained intelligent’ the centre of consciousness could either be the omniscient narrator or Mr Duffy as he sums up qualities of the woman sitting next to him. We can speak in this case of a brief moment of double focalisation in which narrator and character together form the centre of consciousness (this
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is then followed by a passage that seems dominated by the character’s perspective). While it is important to be able to identify shifts in focalisation, the aim of narrative analysis is not to slap a label onto every piece of text. Instead, it is to identify the combination of devices that writers use to give us virtual access to the consciousness of characters. The alternation of narrator and character focalisation, or combinations of the two, helps to draw readers gradually into the minds of characters. The transitions are usually carefully executed so that storytellers can create the illusion (it can never be more than an illusion) that readers are able to virtually think and feel along with the characters. The most extreme expression of this method is probably the interior monologue, a technique that became extremely popular among modernist writers. In the interior monologue, readers have apparently direct access to a character’s stream of consciousness. This happens, for example, in the final scene of Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses (1922), when Molly Bloom is lying in bed, losing herself in erotic reminiscence. The reader is invited to share this intimate moment:
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and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
In order to give the illusion of a stream of consciousness, Joyce shifts to the first-person form while also abandoning punctuation and syntax. It is as if Molly were alone with her erotic thoughts (in practice, of course, these have been imagined by a male author). Focalisation demonstrates how fiction provides an experimental space for the observation of psychological processes. Not surprisingly, psychologists often use works of literature to illustrate thought processes (for example, Searching for Memory (1996) by Daniel Schacter (b.1952) engages with Proust). As we have also seen above, stories give readers an opportunity to identify with the consciousness of others. For this reason, some theorists have argued that stories play a fundamental role in our ethical education. They help us develop our empathetic abilities further – our ability to exercise our imagination so as relate to the world as others see it. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum (b.1947) has gone so far as to claim that fiction has an important role in shaping world citizens who can see beyond the limits of their own worldview. Nussbaum may be too optimistic in her overall claims for literature, but it is clear that storytellers do promote intersubjectivity and empathy by using a combination of imagination and narrative techniques.
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5.5.4
heteroglossia
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Multiple voices
Alongside other features, characters are often given a recognisable way of speaking, complete with favourite words, favourite expressions, and a preference for particular topics. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) elevated this type of characterisation to an art form: the peripheral characters in his novels can often be easily recognised by their favourite expressions. The amiable but poverty-stricken Mr Micawber in David Copperfield (1850) is renowned for his boundless optimism and his constantly intoned expression of hope: ‘Something will turn up.’ (A more recent example would be J.R.R. Tolkien’s character Gollum, who lisps the word ‘precious’ time and again, in The Lord of the Rings and its adaptation to film.) A particular way of speaking can characterise not only individuals, however, but also the group to which they belong. A dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat, who has completely internalised the bureaucratic worldview, speaks as an individual while also using the language of bureaucracy. Again, Dickens provides a good example of this in Hard Times (1854): the aptly named schoolteacher Mr Gradgrind, who firmly believes in the then dominant Utilitarian school of thought, keeps using the word ‘facts’ as a sort of mantra. According to Russian linguist and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), the novel as a genre is characterised precisely by its capacity to accommodate multiple voices. Although a novel is usually written by a single author, the deployment of multiple characters means that different ‘voices’ – both those of individuals and of groups – are present throughout the work. This makes it, in Bakhtin’s view, fundamentally heteroglossic (literally: multi-tongued). ‘Voice’ here is defined as the worldview – a way of looking, including expectations and norms – underlying a particular use of language; in other words, to recall our discussion in Chapter 3, the discourse characteristic of the group to which the character (consciously or unconsciously) belongs. Novels are sites par excellence for the interaction between different discourses and their underlying worldviews. These are given expression through characters speaking for themselves or, alternatively, becoming focalisers. For Bakhtin, this multiplicity of voices makes the novel the genre most fitting to democratic cultures: it provides a free zone where the various discourses active in society at any given time are brought into conversation with one another. Bakhtin’s theory of the novel thus offers an interesting point of departure for connecting narrative techniques to broader social and cultural developments. The more basic question to consider here, however, is: How are the typical linguistic expressions of different characters incorporated into narratives? And how does this relate to our earlier discussion of focalisation? In order to answer these questions, it is important to distinguish
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between narrator text (the words produced by the narrator) and character text (the words imagined as having been produced, in speech or writing, by characters). As in focalisation, there can be combinations and subtle transitions between narrator and character text. Indeed, a shift in linguistic register or style can be one of the tools narrators use to mark a shift in focalisation:
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1 The narrator is the only one who speaks in: a) Diegetic summary: The reader learns only that a character said something at a certain moment without knowing anything about what was said: ‘While they talked he tried to fix her permanently in his memory.’ b) Indirect speech: The reader learns the topic of the character’s conversation, but in the narrator’s words: ‘He told her that for some time he had assisted at the meetings of an Irish Socialist Party.’ 2 The characters speak by themselves in: c) Direct speech: The reader is given the character’s text verbatim; the words used are usually shown between inverted commas. Novels and stories frequently include verbatim accounts of dialogue between characters. A striking example can be found in Madame Bovary. Flaubert sets one of the romantic encounters between Emma and Rodolphe against the background of an agricultural festival, and then alternates Emma’s expressions of love with the very down-to-earth statements emanating from the farmers’ award ceremony: Savez-vous que je vous accompagnerais? ‘Soixante et dix francs!’ Cent fois même, j’ai voulu partir, et je vous ai suivie, je suis resté ‘Fumiers.’ Comme je resterais ce soir, demain, les autres jours, toute ma vie! ‘A M. Caron, d’Argeuil, une médaille d’or!’ ‘Did I know I would be escorting you?’ ‘Seventy francs!’ ‘A hundred times I wanted to leave, and I followed you, I stayed.’ ‘Manures!’ ‘And I shall stay this evening, to-morrow and the day after, all my life!’ ‘To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!’
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Anticipating the montage techniques of film directors, Flaubert contrasts the discourse of romantic love with that of the economy and agriculture. The result is a clash of voices that ironically reveals the chasm between the world of romance and the material world, to which Emma will ultimately fall victim.
3 The narrator speaks at the same time as a character in: d) Free indirect speech: In this case, the character’s text and the narrator’s text are mixed, but in such a way that features of each are still visible. Characteristics of the narrator’s text (for example, the past tense and references to the character in the third person) occur in combination with characteristics of the character’s text (for example, the present tense, first person forms, references to the ‘here and now’ of the action and other indications of direct involvement, such as exclamation marks and question marks). Consider this example from Joyce: ‘He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame?’ Free indirect speech has proven to be an important tool in creating the illusion that the reader can join in a character’s thought processes and outlook. Precisely because free indirect speech takes place at the intersection of narrator and character text, it helps effect a transition from narrator-focalisation to character-focalisation. When Flaubert’s Emma looks at herself in the mirror after her first taste of extramarital love, we read: ‘At last, she was to know the pleasures of love, that fever of happiness she had despaired of. She was entering something marvellous’ (‘Elle allait donc posséder enfin ces joies de l’amour, cette fièvre du Bonheur dont elle avait désespére’). Something of Emma’s own voice can be heard in the word ‘at last’ alongside the words of the narrator. Free indirect discourse is a relatively recent innovation and was only first used extensively in Madame Bovary. It made a very realistic impression on contemporary readers, so much so that some (male) readers resisted the idea that they should enter into the thoughts of a woman committing adultery. It may seem almost inconceivable today, but Flaubert’s novel was seen at the time as an attack on ‘public morality’ and its author was prosecuted. The public prosecutor accused Flaubert of having given his female protagonist too much ‘freedom’ and having failed to satisfactorily rein in Madame Bovary’s adulterous thoughts. The prosecutor was concerned less by Emma’s adultery than by the author’s failure to condemn her for it. In contrast to more traditional narrators who spoke from a position of moral authority, Flaubert’s narrator had not overtly passed judgement on Emma’s thoughts and left readers to make up their own mind.
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This incident is a good example of how the representation of experiences in a story can be a way of experimenting with new perspectives and subject positions. Flaubert’s innovation was later taken up by many modernist writers. The emergence of free indirect speech as a storytelling device can be seen in relation to the rise of psychology as a discipline and a general democratisation of culture, in which the voices of characters were considered as weighty as that of the author. Where Austen’s narrators often do not hesitate to make moral judgements about characters, albeit couched in irony, readers of modern literature increasingly have to draw their own conclusions. This again shows how the art of storytelling is inextricably bound up with broader cultural and social developments.
5.6
Identity and identification: Gender
This chapter has emphasised technical and formal aspects of narratives, with particular attention to classical narratology. The purpose was to show how the reality effect of narrative comes from the literary artistry and the changing repertoire of narrative techniques available to the writer. This chapter has also shown that narratives are an important source of insight into emotions and thought processes, the difference between good and evil, power structures and the nature of authority, just to mention some of the themes touched on in our examples. The chapter has also shown how narratives allow us as readers to develop our powers of empathy and our ethical awareness by experimenting with, and giving us access to, a wide range of subject positions and multiple centres of consciousness. We have seen that authors have to be inventive in using narrative techniques if they are to express new subject positions and convey these to readers, meaning that literary scholars are continuously challenged to identify new variations as they emerge. Underlying many of our examples has been the issue of gender relations, and how narrative helps both to sustain and to challenge gender hierarchies. To round up the present chapter, therefore, we will offer a brief example of how narrative analysis can be useful in studying gender and how it is culturally constructed. As we have seen, fiction has the power to create believable characters with whom readers can at the very least empathise within the story world. Do fictions also influence how we see ourselves in the world and our role as (gendered) subjects? This was certainly the case with the fictional Emma Bovary: she organised her life in accordance with models of behaviour she learned from novels. Unlike the heroines of the romantic novels she adored, however, she does not live happily ever after. On the contrary: reading
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aroused in her a longing for love, beauty, riches, and eternal happiness that did not match her material circumstances, and eventually lead to her suicide. This fictional example illustrates both the enchantment of stories and their power to mislead us, diminishing our insight into how the world really works and how we can best navigate it. As Flaubert thus shows with great irony: some stories – like his own novel – make us think, while others can be misleading (though the fact that his criticism is directed specifically at women’s approach to reading may indicate his own bias). The challenge for cultural criticism is to identify where narratives open up new perspectives and where the worldview they express is limited by the historically determined discourses of a certain social class, ethnic group, or gender. Since the 1970s, more and more attention has been devoted to the way narratives generate models for how people see and conduct their own lives. Key to feminist criticism* is the idea that gender is not biologically determined but the outcome of how people identify with and enact particular role models. Female or male identity is not fixed at birth by biology, but culturally produced by dominant discourses about gender roles as people learn what it is expected of a woman or man by observing the behaviour of others and discovering the gender-specific roles open to them. According to feminist theorist Judith Butler (b.1956), gender entails performativity, whereby ‘performative’ means both ‘acting out’ and ‘having an effect.’ Anyone ‘playing’ the role of a woman or a man in accordance with convention is performatively reaffirming the image and helping to spread and validate the model. Anyone behaving differently is seen as abnormal (or ‘queer’). The very fact that some people are able to act differently, however, eventually leads to a shift in standards of normality, and even to the creation of new categories that transcend the binary opposition of man/woman. The recent emergence of ‘transgender’ as the name for a possible identity is due to repeated challenges in many different areas – including the arts – to traditional gender models. The performative theory of identity has cast new light on the power of narrative in the reproduction, dissemination, but also subversion of the models that underlie gendered behaviour. Teresa de Lauretis (b.1938), for example, has argued that the dominance of stories and films in which the male gaze is prevalent has led to a chronic schizophrenia in women, who have constantly had to identify with the perspective of the male protagonist (the ‘prince,’ who is actively looking for the object, the ‘princess,’ who need do nothing other than wait for him). The long-standing predominance of men in public life and the cultural world has meant that women’s perspectives have been under-represented and their voices less often heard. In her extended essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf argued that it was time for
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women to be given – and for women to seize – the opportunity to speak for themselves. In the almost one hundred years since the publication of Woolf ’s now classic essay, a lot has changed in terms of the recognition of female authors (though, as Chapter 2 showed, the list of Nobel Prize winners tempers optimism). Thanks to the growing presence of women writers in the literary field there have also been more opportunities for women and men to experience the world virtually from a woman’s perspective. To take just one example among thousands: the novel Mother to Mother (1998) by South African writer Sindiwe Magona (b.1943) takes the form of a letter from a South African woman to the American mother of a victim of violence in Cape Town. Since the central voice and perspective are those of a woman, and the implied reader is also a woman, the novel represents an inversion of the dilemma posed by De Lauretis: in this case, it is men who are invited to adopt a female gaze. As more and more of such voices are heard, we can expect new subject positions to emerge (see heteropatriarchal value systems, Chapter 6). As we will see in Chapter 10, the interplay between narrative techniques and identity formation is not only relevant to the cultural construction of gender roles. It applies to all kinds of relationships between dominant and subordinate groups, including those between people in Europe and people in the global south. The point to be retained here is that creative writers help bring new perspectives and subject positions into the public arena. Cultural criticism helps to identify and interpret these new perspectives but also to make visible the blind spots they also inevitably carry with them. Culture and society develop in tandem. New narrative perspectives contribute to the formation of fresh ideas about social relations. And vice versa: changes in society and the material world call for new voices and perspectives if they are to be understood. Cultural-historical research has shown that stories, on the one hand, reflect dominant worldviews and, on the other hand, are a fertile breeding ground for the imagination of alternatives. In this context, cultural historian Nancy Armstrong (b.1938) argues that the novel has played a key role in Western culture since the eighteenth century in developing and disseminating a particular concept of happiness: the belief that fulfillment for women is principally a matter of personal development within the private sphere. Such deeply rooted ideas about the ‘good life’ have also been slowly changing with the imaginative work of new generations of novelists. But new identities and subject positions emerge only gradually, as will become clear in our discussion of novels about climate change in Chapter 9.
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5.7
In conclusion: When is a life completed?
In this chapter, we have introduced a toolkit for analysing narratives and the stories they carry. We have looked at the structures that underlie stories and at techniques used in individual narratives to introduce characters and let the action unfold. Finally, we showed how it is possible to play with different perspectives and worldviews within a narrative and how over time new techniques have been developed to enable focalisation through characters. Thanks to the storyteller’s art, readers can see into the minds of (fictional) others and share in their feelings and ambitions. Finally, we have shown how narrative forms and themes interact with changing ideas about gender. Narrative analysis provides insight into storytelling as an art, and the way in which similar narrative structures can be applied in new situations. The more precise the analytical tools, the better one can identify the narrative style of particular authors and distinguish the innovative from the more conventional elements of their work. Combined with a cultural critical perspective, narrative analysis can help show how certain stories challenge established ideas and expectations while others serve to reinforce them. Stories of all kinds are an important source of social cohesion: they give people insight into the lives and experience of others – in court cases, in journalism, in medicine, in social life, and, of course, in the arts. A key question remains how fictional stories relate to ‘real’ lives or, rather, the stories we tell about our own lives as they unfold. In How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (1999), Paul John Eakin (b.1938) shows how our personal identities hinge on the stories we tell about ourselves and these are in part inspired by the narratives we have read or seen (in this sense, we are all like Emma Bovary and Don Quixote). People are continuously trying to turn their life experiences into a story (of failure or success, happiness or unhappiness). The question of ‘how our lives become stories’ also has broader implications. In the last couple of years, for example, public discussion about euthanasia in the Netherlands has shifted to the question if assistance in self-chosen death may legally be extended beyond those who are incurably ill to people who consider their life to have been completed (in Dutch: voltooid). Besides the ethical dimensions of this debate, the idea of a ‘completed’ life also has a narratological dimension since it suggests that there is a certain beginning-middleend model that can be applied as the norm in ascertaining whether or not a particular life is complete. In this chapter, we have concentrated on narratological approaches to fictional works and how they experiment with ideas of happiness and pathways to it. But as this reference to the issue of euthanasia indicates,
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narratology can also be applied in a wide range of contexts outside of literary genres as such, that is, to any situation where individuals try to make sense of their lives by telling stories about them. In the final chapter of this handbook we will return to the link between narrative and identity with specific reference to collective stories about a common past.
Further reading Mieke Bal, ed., Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary Studies, 3 vols, London: Routledge, 2004. David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Jeff Smith. Film Art: An Introduction, 11th ed., New York: McGraw Hill, 2016. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, Routledge Encylopedia of Narrative Theory, London: Routledge, 2005. The Living Handbook of Narratology. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/. Shlomith Rimmon-Renan, Narrative Fiction: An Introduction, London: Methuen, 1983 (or later editions). Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006.
Notes 1 2
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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
http://sps.columbia.edu/narrative-medicine (accessed July 2019) The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights, 3 vols, trans. Ursula Lyons and Malcolm Lyons, London: Penguin, 2008. For further information see David Damrosch, ed., The Longman Anthology of World Literature, vol. 5, London: Longman, 2004, pp. 592-593. For information on film adaptations of novels or plays, search for authors IMDb (Internet Movie Database), https://www.imdb.com. This discussion of transmedial storytelling is based on Henry Jenkins, ‘Transmedia Storytelling 101,’ Confessions of an Aca-fan, http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html (accessed May 2019). Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press, 2006. Marie-Laure Ryan, ed., Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann [1913], Paris: Gallimard, 1954, p. 10. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 2 vols, London: Chatto and Windus, 1995, vol. 1, p. 2. Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke HaHaHa, London: Secker and Warburg, 1993, p. 21. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, hat zwei Türen, aus einer kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus, Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2008; translation A.R.
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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30
31 32 33 34 35 36
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Marcel Proust, ‘Sur la lecture,’ introduction to John Ruskin, Le sésame et le lys, Paris: Mercure de France, 1906, pp. 23-24; translation A.R. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Stefan Hertmans, Oorlog en terpentijn: Roman, Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2014, p.11. Stefan Hertmans, War and Turpentine: A Novel, New York: Vintage, 2017, p. 1. Jorge Luis Borges, Prosa completa, vol. 2, Barcelona: Bruguera, 1985, p. 155. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel,’ trans. James E. Irby, https://libraryofbabel.info/libraryofbabel.html (accessed August 2018). Jane Austen, Emma [1816], London: Collector’s Library, 2003, p. 9. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Moeurs de province [1857], Paris: Gallimard, 1972, pp. 38-39. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary [1857], trans. Geoffrey Wall, London: Penguin, 1992, p.11 James Joyce, ‘A Painful Case’ [1914], Dubliners, London: Penguin, 2000, p. 103. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel [1927], London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, New York: Modern Library, 1954, p. 233. Anton Chekhov, cited in Ilia Gurlyand, ‘Reminiscences of A.P. Chekhov,’ Teatr i iskusstvo 28 (11 July 1904), p. 521, http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/ quotations_by_ib.html (accessed June 2019). Boris Tomashevsky, ‘Thematics,’ in L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis, Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, 61-95, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 78-87. The model presented here is a simplified version of the model that Greimas develops in his Sémantique structurale, Paris: Larousse, 1966. See also Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975; Mieke Bal, ed., Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary Studies, 3 vols, London: Routledge, 2004, vol. 1, pp. 57-131. Quoted in Paul T. MacCartney, “American Nationalism and U.S. Foreign Policy from September 11 to the Iraq War,” Political Science Quarterly 116.3 (2004): 399423, p. 399. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Stith Thompson, Motif-index of Folk-literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-books and Local Legends, 6 vols, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955-1958. Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Franz Kafka, Das Urteil und andere Erzählungen, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1970, p. 7. Franz Kafka, ‘The Judgement,’ trans. Eulenspargel, https://web.usd475.org/ school/jchs/staff/artley/SiteAssets/SitePages/Home/The20Judgment.pdf (accessed August 2019). Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”(1892) available at www. gutenberg.org (accessed June 2019). F.K. Stanzel, Theorie des Erzählens [1979], 2 vols, Stuttgart: UTB, 2008. Translated as A Theory of Narrative, trans. Charlotte Goedsche, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Gérard Genette, Figures III, Paris: Seuil, 1972, chs 1-3. Translated as Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
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37
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 3. 38 This image was originally made in 1892 for the Fliegende Blätter magazine and was subsequently made famous through its use by psychologist Joseph Jastrow and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ RabbitE28093duck_illusion (accessed June 2019). 39 Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, London: Panther, 1972, p. 86. 40 Genette, chapters 1-3. 41 Joyce, Dubliners, p. 109 42 Ibid. 43 Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2006. 44 See also Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, ‘Focalisation,’ in Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 71-85, London: Methuen, 1983; Susan Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Fiction, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981; Mieke Bal, ‘Narration and Focalisation,’ in Bal, ed., Narrative Theory, vol. 1, pp. 263-295. 45 Willem Elsschot, Een ontgoocheling, Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak, 2001, p. 7, translation Alana Gillespie. 46 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina [1873-1877], trans. Nathan Haskell Dole,https://archive.org/stream/annakareninatols00tolsiala/annakareninatols00tolsiala_djvu. txt (accessed August 2019). 47 Joyce, Dubliners¸ p. 105-6. 48 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Walter Gabler et al., London: Bodley Head, 1984, p. 644. 49 Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, New York: Basic, 1996. 50 Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010; Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 51 M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Heteroglossia in the Novel,’ in Simon Dentith, ed., Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader, 195-224, London: Routledge, 1995. 52 The terminology used here to describe the representation of language expressions are derived from Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, pp. 106-116. 53 Joyce, Dubliners, p. 105. 54 Ibid, p. 106. 55 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1972, p. 000. 56 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1992, p. 119. 57 Joyce, Dubliners, p. 112. 58 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1992, p. 131; Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1972, p. 000. 59 See Dominick LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. 60 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge, 1990. 61 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. 62 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, London: Hogarth Press, 1935. 63 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 64 John Paul Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.
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6 READERS, READING KIENE BRILLENBURG WURTH
This chapter focuses on readers and on reading. It first zooms in on the history of reading in relation to the emergence of alphabetic writing, paper, the printing press and book technologies. It then introduces new approaches, developed in literary studies from the 1960s onward, to the study of readers’ responses to literary texts across time, and what the act of reading entails. It ends by discussing more recent, cognitive and sociological approaches to reading. Thus, this chapter shows how the field of comparative literary studies has extended from texts to the users of texts, their agency, and how they negotiate meaning. . . . . . . .
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Introduction A short history of reading I: Writing to print A short history of reading II: Print and beyond How texts engage their readers (with Harald Hendrix) Reception studies (with Harald Hendrix) Cognitive and sociological studies of reading In conclusion: The agency of readers
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207
Introduction
In Chapter 3, we saw how in the 1960s the ‘death of the author’ in literary theory witnessed the birth of the reader as a central point of concern. To us, contemporary scholars and readers, the idea of a reader bringing a text to life is entirely natural. We live in an age of user participation: of self-publishing and open access, fan fictions, YouTube platforms and podcasts. We live in the age of the ‘amateur’ (from Latin amare ‘love’ and amator ‘lover’): an age that facilitates the partaking of audiences in the making of art, literature, movies, and music. As students and lovers of literature, moreover, we come from a relatively recent tradition (starting in the 1950s and 1960s) that has given ample space to readers in the life of literary texts. From this time onward, more and more space, freedom, and prominence would be given to that reader in the process of actualising a text. Works like Hopscotch (Rayuela; 1963) by Julio Cortázar illustrates the point. Rayuela can be read in different ways: in linear fashion from Chapter 1 to Chapter 56 or by jumping back and forth (‘hopscotching’) through all of its 155 chapters. Readers can follow a set of instructions provided in the novel to navigate their way. Thus, the path chosen by a single reader determines the ‘outcome’ or realisation of the novel in that reading. Even more generous, The Unfortunates (1969) by B.S. Johnson (1933-1973) grants the reader complete freedom in creating the order of the work and, thus, in the unfolding of events. Espen Aarseth (b.1965) has termed such texts ergodic: texts through which the reader has to actively navigate a way in order to generate a story or a storyline. However, reading has not always been what it is today, in the age of user participation. It has a history. In comparative literary studies we must take stock of this history: of how reading has evolved over time, and of the factors that helped to shape literature as an art of letters in the first place. We must also take stock of the differences in reading practices between social classes and cultural groups and how these differences can be researched. Since the 1960s new methods have been developed to study how people read in the past and how they read today. How does the brain work in the act of reading, in making sense of texts? What does reading mean to people, and what does it do to them? What kinds of reading strategies do people use, and to what extent are such strategies socially, culturally, and historically conditioned? To address these issues and answer these questions, this chapter is organised as follows. Firstly, it maps the broad outlines of a history of reading in Europe, from the invention of Greek alphabetic script to the present, paying particular attention to the technologies used for literary production: writing and print. Secondly, it shows how research in the history of reading, and the methodologies used, have developed in the last
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decades. Mapping the history of reading is part of a larger movement in literary studies that gained momentum in the latter half of the twentieth century. As of the 1960s and 1970s in particular, reader-oriented theories, approaches and methodologies have been developed in comparative literary studies. Currents in reader-response* and reception studies* are discussed in this context. These studies have shifted attention away from the study of texts in themselves to the study of readers and the act of reading. These acts can be observed in the traces that readers leave in letters, diaries, newspapers, or reviews. In this reader-oriented paradigm, literary texts are no longer just seen as artefacts but as works in progress. They change ‘colour’ (i.e. meaning) over time and in different reading communities and are used for different purposes – from embodying a shared past to giving shape to the individual lives of people. Thus, this chapter shows how literary studies has grown into a field that not only deals with texts and contexts but also with readers, what they do, how they bring texts to life, and how texts model and imagine them. As such, the present chapter is closely connected to the chapters in this book that deal with professional reading. Professional reading came into its own in the nineteenth century, when literacy increased significantly, educational systems started to include readings of the classics, and hermeneutics* and literary criticism – located between journalism and academia – became part of literary scholarly training.
6.2
A short history of reading I: Writing to print
When we talk about ‘literature’ we talk about an art of letters. The word literature comes from the Latin litera/littera meaning ‘alphabetic letter.’ We often take this for granted in literary studies: that the term ‘literature’ revolves around written or printed matter. This prejudice is reflected in literary curricula all over the Western world which focus on print literature; even originally oral works such as the Odyssey, the Iliad or Beowulf are read in and as printed matter. Contemporary oral works in the world at large have mainly become the province of anthropology rather than of literary studies. Our idea of literary storytelling is therefore conditioned by writing and print – it is the unspoken norm – even while we are aware of the oral roots of storytelling and its specific modes of composition (see Chapter 3). Indeed, as Albert Lord illustrated long ago, there is a very strong oral residue in Western literature. As he writes: There is a tendency for us in the European tradition to forget how extensive and how basic our literary heritage from the world of orality has been, and there is a corresponding tendency to believe that the world of literacy
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invented some of the characteristics of literature, which in reality originated in oral literature. [...] The world of orality gave us anaphora, the use of the same word at the beginning of each series of lines, epiphora, the use of the same word at the end of each of a series of lines, alliteration, assonance, rhyme, both internal, medial, and final, and the sense of balanced structure as typified by parallelisms in sentences and other forms of parataxis. In short, our poetics is derived from the world of orality.
What we now call literariness (Chapter 2) and crafted, poetic language (Chapter 4) was once – in oral literature – simply a practical way of remembering and communicating. But ‘once’ is so long ago and far away that we cannot even begin to conceive what that kind of literary communication may have been like. Having evolved into an art of letters over time, literature has inevitably also become an art of reading. This and the next section offer a short history of reading in Europe. We show how reading changed over the centuries with new technologies and materials for writing (such as papyrus, parchment, paper) and printing (such as moveable type in metal, rather than wood, which occasioned the print revolution in the fifteenth century), and changing institutions (libraries, monasteries, universities). The writing that we use in Western Europe stems from Greek alphabetic script, which in turn was an adaptation of Phoenician script. It began to be used around 800 bce (although the exact origins of Greek alphabetic script have remained unknown until this day). According to some classicists, such as Barry Powell (b.1942), Greek alphabetic script may have been developed to notate Homeric verse. As he argues, the Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician script so as to accommodate the complex metre used in Homeric verse: dactylic hexameter. Still, this theory is highly contested, and other explanations have been offered. What can, however, be said is that we will never know what it was like to listen to a bard telling stories in ancient Greek: what it was like to be listeners and viewers rather than readers, before alphabetic script changed our processing of stories. We only have the trace of these stories in writing and can only approach them as literate users. Our horizon is framed by alphabetic script. When Greek alphabetic writing made its appearance, it did not immediately become a common information and storage medium. Oral discourse long continued to be used as an efficient means for disseminating knowledge and stories, and for providing entertainment. It should be realised that 3,000 years ago, alphabetic writing was still done on clay, stone, and wood – not the easiest and fastest way to communicate. Apparently, a new medium technology not only triggers but also requires cultural as well as material changes: materials that need to be introduced to facilitate the new medium technology. Papyrus – already used in Egypt as of 2600 bce to record histories, poems, music, trade or legal texts in
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Oral traditions of Judaism3 It is tempting to think of oral and written cultures in a linear way, the latter replacing and eclipsing the former. However, in many cultures and traditions the two intersect – even though this often also means that oral modes are subsumed within written texts. Judaism offers an interesting example. The Talmud is the comprehensive written version of the Jewish oral law. It is one of Judaism’s central works and an important subject of Jewish study. The Talmud consists of two parts: the Mishnah, an authoritative collection of Jewish oral traditions, and the Gemara, the subsequent record of the rabbinic discussions on it. The Hebrew word Mishnah can be translated as ‘that which is memorized by rote,’ a memorisation technique based on repetition. Eventually these texts were set down in writing. The compilation of the Mishnah in its final form around 200 ce, is associated with Rabbi Judah the Patriarch ( Jehudah Ha-Nasi, 135-217) who redacted the compendium of oral traditions. The Mishnah divides the body of Jewish law into six general sections, known in Hebrew as sedarim (orders): 1. Zera’im (Seeds) contains laws on agriculture, especially to tithes and other portions that must be set aside from produce for religious use. 2. Mo’ed (Times) contains laws on the festival calendar, including the Sabbath and annual holidays. 3. Nashim (Women) is about family law, regarding topics like marriage and divorce. 4. Nezikin (Damages) is about the civil and criminal laws. 5. Kodashim (Holy Things) is about sacrificing and the laws of the Temple, priesthood and the dietary laws. 6. Toharot (Purities) regards the laws of ritual purity and impurity. According to Jewish tradition, Moses did not only receive the Torah, the written law, from God on Mount Sinai, he was also given an explanation of what it meant. Tradition also says that this Oral Torah was passed down orally in an unbroken chain from generation to generation until its contents were finally written down. As a famous verse from the Mishnah puts it: ‘Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua; and Joshua to the Elders; the Elders to the Prophets; and the Prophets to the Men of the Great Synagogue’ (Pirkei Avot 1:1).
hieroglyphics, and introduced in Greece in the sixth century bce – parchment (100 bce), and paper (imported from China by the Arabs in Spain in the eleventh century) all helped to occasion turning points in this long process of cultural change. The way we read now – from (e-)books, in private – seems a long way from how the ancients read. In the early years of alphabetic script, the Greeks did not read from pages in a book. They read from scrolls. Initially they in
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fact read in a pattern that made the eye trace the hand of the writer: from left to right, right to left, left to right, right to left from the top to the bottom of a scroll. The characters were aligned accordingly, sometimes inverted. As Christian Vandendorpe (b.1943) has suggested, such patterns symbolise the linearity and the memory of orality in written texts: In oral culture, listeners were following the sounds of the bard, one word after the next, like a thread. The early written scrolls likewise directed readers from one word to the next, without interruption, without spacing between the words, making them plough through it in the pattern of a boustrephodon (bidirectional writing, as this kind of writing is still known today, literally: ‘like ox-turning’ from the ancient Greek boustrophedon). These scrolls were written all in capitals, by enslaved scribes. Readers of the scrolls held them in both hands, so that no notes could be taken during reading.
Figure 6.1 : Musa reading a volumen (scroll), at the left an open chest. Attic red-figure lekythos, ca. 435-425 bce. From Boeotia. By Klügmann Painter – Jastrow (2006).
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When bidirectional writing was replaced by unidirectional writing, such writing often continued to be carried out in an unbroken string without word spacing, punctuation, diacritics, or distinguishing between upperand lower-case letters: scriptio continua. ReadinginAntiquitywasthusratherdifferentfromwhatitistoday. Or was it entirely? Since the late nineteenth century, historians, classicists, and media theorists have claimed that reading in ancient Greece and Rome was done aloud. Silent reading, the way we read today, would have been an oddity until well into the Middle Ages, some even claim until the seventeenth century. However, evidence produced in the 1960s and later in the 1990s has suggested otherwise. While it is true that oral culture was not erased with the introduction of alphabetic script – so that reading will also have been a social, shared, that is to say, an oral event: spoken aloud – we now know that in Antiquity people probably read both aloud and in silence, just like modern reading (unless one was in the habit of only being read to by one’s slave, as was often the case in ancient Rome for the reasonably well-off ).
St Augustine, parsing and the practice of reading Often, when historians of reading claim that reading silently must have been an oddity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages they cite this passage from the Confessions (397-400 ce) by St Augustine (354-430 ce), about Ambrosius (ca. 340-397), the bishop of Milan, and how St Augustine was struck by how Ambrosius read: When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out the meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest. Often when I was present – for he did not close his door to anyone and it was customary to come in unannounced – I have seen him reading silently, never in fact otherwise. I would sit for a long time in silence, not daring to disturb someone so deep in thought, and then go on my way. I asked myself why he read in this way. Was it that he did not wish to be interrupted in those rare moments he found to refresh his mind and rest from the tumult of others’ affairs? Or perhaps he was worried that he would have to explain obscurities in the text to some eager listener, or discuss other difficult problems? For he would thereby lose time and be prevented from reading as much as he had planned. But the preservation of his voice, which easily became hoarse, may well have been the true cause of his silent reading.
This passage has long fed, and continues to feed, the idea that Ambrosius invented silent reading. Historians have interpreted St Augustine’s reaction to Ambrosius as bewilderment: ‘What is this man doing, why does he read in this way? Reading is done aloud!’
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Perhaps, however, Augustine was merely bewildered by Ambrosius’manners. As historians have shown, it happens to be the case that silent reading was already mentioned as a (common) practice in Antiquity. Still, the idea that reading was done out loud, and that silent reading must have been a rarity until the earlier modern age, has persisted. This idea was reinforced by a theory put forward to explain the development of parsing – that is to say, the leaving of spaces in between words – in Western script. As we have seen, writing in classical Greek and Latin was continuous. Critics therefore surmised that continuous writing must have reflected speech, more specifically: the continuity of speech. As such, they supposed, writing was intended to be read aloud. Others, however, have concluded that continuous script precisely required silent reading ahead. The debate is as yet undetermined, and the earliest known instances of word spacing – in the seventh-century writings of monks in Ireland – are still open to different interpretations. Some historians claim that these monks used word spacing because they were not familiar with Latin. Others suggest that such spacing was intended to give indications to the reader: this is where you pause, this is where you continue. As such, as an indication to do something, to read or to pause, spacing in medieval texts shows us how writing became less and less tied to the idea of a speaker: how it came to be seen as a text, a unit existing on its own, travelling beyond the bounds of a speaker and his or her intentions.
Perhaps, then, there is also some continuity between us, modern readers, and the first readers of alphabetic script in Western culture – apart from the materials and scripts they used. This material continued to change over the following centuries, and so would our reading habits. Papyrus eventually gave way to parchment and vellum, parchment would be replaced by paper, scrolls would evolve into the codex – pages folded and bound into a book – in classical Rome and the early Christian era. Handwritten texts existed alongside printed books from the fifteenth century onwards, but by the time of mass-produced print in the eighteenth century the print format had become the dominant one. While these material changes clearly affected reading habits, it could take a while before transformations occurred. For instance, in classical Rome the codex emerged in the first century bce. But new ways of engaging with texts unfolded only in the second and third centuries ce. By that time the early Christians were using the codex to secretly carry the Gospels with them. Folded, the codex was easier to carry unnoticed than a scroll and thus helped Christians to spread their word at a time when they were still members of an underground sect. The advantage of the codex over the scroll was that it was handy, sturdy, economic, and (like today’s mobile phones) small enough to carry in the hand. One could
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leaf and skim through it, take notes while reading, write on both sides, erase what had been written, and, moreover, protect what had been written with the covers of the codex (made from wax or wood). According to Vandendorpe, the biggest change the codex represented to readers was the invention of the page, with its front (recto) and back (verso): ‘[I]t was the page that made it possible for text to break away from the continuity and linearity of the scroll and allowed it to be much more easily manipulated.’ With this invention, text would become for its users an entity in itself to be designed and distributed, not an immediate reflection of speech. Page layout also enabled the combination of words and images. Indeed, in the print age it would become more and more evident that readable text was going to be conceived of in terms of visual rather than aural design.
6.3
A short history of reading II: Print and beyond
In Western Europe, the print age took off when, around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1400-1468) started using metal moveable type for printing. His technology – already long in use in Asia and possibly also already used in other parts of Europe – spread rapidly. Its first offspring was a Bible printed in 1452-1455 in Mainz: the Gutenberg Bible. This Bible opened the European Gutenberg galaxy: the universe of the printed book.
Figure 6.2: Gutenberg Bible (Pelplin copy), vol. 1 Pelplin Diocesan Museum, Pelplin, Poland.
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It should be noted that the printing press might never have become the efficient technology it did become, had it not been for alphabetic script with its limited number of signs: twenty-six as opposed to, say, 1,000 in hieroglyphics. Gutenberg used Latin script as it had evolved out of Greek alphabetic script from the seventh century bce onward and would become known as ‘the alphabet’ in Western Europe. On top of its limited number of signs, the advantage of alphabetic script was that it offered a potentially unlimited number of words to be made out of these signs – like a code. Prior to print, between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, the introduction of a table of contents, index, headers and footers, and paragraph breaks to the codex had – together with word spacing –already increased ‘pausing’ and oversight in the process of reading. At that time, reading was no longer conceived of as an echo of hearing. Creating control and oversight for readers by means of page design and indicators such as page numbering became more and more prominent in the print age. Thus, page numbering enabled readers to ‘better control the duration and pace of their reading and facilitated the discussion of texts by making it possible for readers of the same edition to refer to the same passage.’They could read more freely and skip some parts of a text if they liked, or easily return to them by means of these numbers, the table of contents, or the index. In this way, Vandendorpe has shown, texts became, from the fifteeenth century onwards, spaces to visit and read through from different entry points and with various aids for their readers. That is to say, ‘the text was no longer a linear thread that was unreeled, but a surface whose content could be perceived from various perspectives.’ Text, Vandendorpe concludes, had become tabular: a type of text designed to facilitate visual oversight and allow for multiple entry points through chapter titles, margin summaries, headers, footers, or page number. Such aids facilitated a new relation between readers and texts; they allowed them to ‘consider the text in the same way they look at a painting or a tableau.’ If print books opened a speedier spread of knowledge, the page allowed knowledge to be processed in a meaningful way – and dissociated writing from speech in the process. However, not only technical but also institutional changes affected the position and role of readers in the course of the life story of page, book, manuscript, and print. Scholars like Roger Chartier (b.1945) have explained how the opening of the first universities (Córdoba in the tenth century in the golden age of the Caliphate, which became the then most celebrated cultural and academic centre in the world, Bologna in 1088, Cambridge in 1209, Salamanca in 1218, Oxford in 1214) and their libraries must have occasioned a turning point in the dissemination of knowledge through reading. Before the twelfth century in medieval Christian Europe, books were stored and read in monasteries where they were often
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Figure 6.3: An instance of tabular text. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, Madrid, 1632.
manuscript
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kept locked in cabinets. The first European university libraries, established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – though notably earlier in Córdoba – offered more open access to books. Given that universities were often established by secular authorities, historians have shown, their emergence increased the number of readers and extended readership to secular professions such as the law. Yet, literacy in early modern Europe was still very low, and the same goes for the number of book owners – it was very expensive to buy books before and during the early ages of printing. With the advent of print, a readership that was separate from authorship came into being. In the time of the medieval handwritten manuscript the roles of writers and readers had been potentially interchangeable. Anyone who could read and write might copy a text (plagiarise it, to use a modern term) and thus turn into a ‘writer’. Moreover, when professional copyists or interested readers copied texts, they often changed them so that no version was exactly the same. All this was to change with the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century. Texts would become increasingly fixed and so would the demarcation line between authors and readers. The definition of a print book therefore differs from that of a manuscript: the former refers to the ‘serial production of multiple copies of text by means of moveable type’. This is a modular system with metal instead of woodblocks. The latter refers to handwritten texts or documents that were likewise copied (and often adapted) in handwriting by scribes or copyists. The printing press fixed texts but thus also enabled the acquisition of books at a cheaper price. They were, after all, serially produced. This
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is one of the reasons why (privileged) people could read more often in private since they could afford to build up their own domestic libraries. Reading alone, as we do today, is thus tied to certain historical developments. The cheaper books and the higher literacy rates became, the more reading took shape as solitary reading. At the same time, historians of the book argue, solitary reading may have emerged in tandem with the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The private relation between (the word of ) God and the individual that this religion advocated opened up private readings of the Bible, with the meaning of biblical texts unfolding as people revisited them. Historians of reading agree that such private readings helped to establish a culture of individualism as it would take shape in eighteenth-century Europe, by then largely epitomised in the culture of the novel. Macroanalysis (the study of reading conditions seen across a broad geographic, cultural, and temporal spectrum) as well as microanalysis (the study of [reading] data within more limited and situated contexts) has shown that the reading of novels (alongside works in natural history and travel writing) became more and more common in Europe during the latter half of the eighteenth century. That such novel reading would become the norm as solitary reading in the course of the nineteenth century was due, on the one hand, to the increase in literacy in Europe and, on the other, to the industrialisation of the printing press and the production of cheap book paper between 1800 and 1850. Thus, books became cheaper, and hence more accessible to different readers in the course of the nineteenth century. Against the backdrop of industrialisation, economy, and education, five aspects of literary reading in nineteenth-century Europe have been commonly discerned in histories of reading (and in book history*): ● Literary reading expanded into new demographic groups as literacy increased. ● Reading became a mode of entertainment that provided intense emotional experiences and psychological insight (a trend that had already started in the later eighteenth century). Escapism became a crucial aspect of reading fiction that depicted life as it could be lived. ● As print became cheaper, readers started to consume more, and a greater variety of, fictional works. ● For all these reasons, critics (and parents) in the nineteenth century often eyed reading with suspicion – just as film, tv, comics, video games, and YouTube have been eyed with suspicion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As it was done alone, too much reading was considered unhealthy, addictive, antisocial and uncontrollable: no one knew what went on in the mind of the reader and what the effects would be in the long run.
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Reading as a profession (in tandem with the rise of hermeneutics,* see Chapter 7) came into being: the profession of the literary critic who reviews and interprets in periodicals, newspapers, and books to elucidate texts. This professional reader was the ultimate consequence of the split between author and reader that was created with the introduction of the printing press.
How do we know all this? Because in the latter half of the twentieth century scholars in literary studies and social as well as cultural history started to study the literary field (see Chapter 2) where literary texts are introduced onto the market, circulated, bought, criticised and consumed. These scholars collected data on reading practices by studying (for instance): ● Literacy rates in early modern and modern Europe. ● The catalogues of book fairs and the administration of publishing houses to ascertain how many and what kind of books were sold in which countries during which periods. ● The archives of authors: on one hand, letters that readers wrote to authors (in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries) on how they had read, or were rereading, their work and what it (had) meant to them, and, on the other, reflections of authors on their readers. ● Literary fandom and literary celebrity culture in the early modern and modern age (this includes the erection of writers’ houses as museums or places of pilgrimage for their readers and critics). ● The emerging and evolving role of the literary critic as a professional reader in magazines and newspapers in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The methods these scholars used were often quantitative rather than qualitative alone and the focus they opted for was beyond the literary text itself. Their work has enabled insights into the evolution of reading that are situated and specific. In a retrospective essay on the work done on readers and reading since the 1980s, when Robert Darnton (b.1939) proposed to develop a history of reading, Roger Chartier shows that patterns in the development of reading can only be uncovered in a consideration of the materiality of book, print, and page technologies as well as of the materiality of sociocultural conditions in a given period. This is how, he writes, we have come to discover that: Eighteenth-century novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse (1761) took hold of their readers, captivated them, governed their thoughts and actions. It was read and reread, quoted, and recited. The reader was invaded by the text and
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through identification with the heroes of the story he began to decipher his own life in the mirror of fiction. This particularly intense [...] form of reading engaged the entire sensibility of readers, male and female alike, who could not restrain their emotion or tears.
Such sensibility, then, was developed at a certain point in history, and with the availability of certain genres of literature. The genre of the sentimental novel (which Chartier refers to) is a case in point. Such genres came into being as print began to evolve into a mass medium in the later eighteenth century. Today, we are easily led to think of this engaged mode of reading as one that has always been attached to Literature with a capital L. In the twentieth century, when mass media like the cinema and, later, tv, video, and YouTube evolved into competing vehicles of storytelling, concerns were often raised about the ‘end’ or ‘decline’ of such intense, literary reading. But these concerns are by no means new: they were raised in the eighteenth century with regard to the newspaper, in the nineteenth century with regard to cheap print (‘pulp’) editions like ‘penny dreadfuls’ and even with the idea of fiction as such (see Chapter 2). They were, in fact, already raised in the sixteenth century with regard to the introduction of the printing press. Such concerns resurged in the twentieth century with, for instance, the introduction of the paperback in the 1930s in Europe and the US, comics in the 1950s, or the iPad and e-reader in the 2000s. Binary oppositions between ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’ reading, or between ‘focused’ and ‘distracted’ reading are typically invoked by those making the case for (what is perceived to be) literary tradition and against the new media technologies providing so called cheap(er) forms of consumption. A more informed view of reading and its histories dispels these arguments: reading has never been cast in stone, nor has reading been the only mode of processing stories and verse in history. We should therefore not be surprised that other such modes have evolved alongside reading: gaming, YouTubing, Netflixing, and so on. Indeed, the digital revolution may have shaken the cultural dominance of the book, and brought distraction through information overload, but it has also brought the reader to the centre of storytelling and story processing. The genre of fan fiction illustrates the point. This genre shows how readers have become active, co-creating agents in the life of literary texts as they reproduce, rewrite and elaborate on characters and/or events from the universe of a work of fiction they admire. FanFiction.Net, Fictionpress, and Amazon’s Kindle Worlds provide such shared spaces of creativity. In a way, these reader-writers recall the readers of manuscripts in the Middle Ages who copied the book they had read in handwriting. In the modern age, fan fiction originates with the so-called fanzines (selfmade magazines on the topic of an admired piece of fiction, comic, series,
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gaps
or movie that are distributed by mail and at conventions) created on the basis of the tv series Star Trek (1966-1969) in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1990s and 2000s, the internet enhanced the interconnection between fans as it facilitated discussion and creation forums. Though fan fiction covers elements of the story world of any work of fiction – novelistic, cinematic, comic or series based – its most famous instances are those covering the Harry Potter novels (1997-2007), Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) by E.L. James (b.1963) and its 2015 cinematic adaptation by director Sam Taylor-Johnson (b.1967). At the same time, digital technologies have enabled new ways of researching readers and reading. Distant reading, discussed in Chapter 1, exemplifies the ways in which the digital has enriched the field of reader research. However, investigating reading processes and how texts engage their readers has a long history – and a broad reach. In 1931, the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden (1893-1970) stated in The Literary Work of Art (Das literarische Kunstwerk; 1931) that written texts are always necessarily incomplete. Words, we have also seen in Chapter 2, operate in a way as to be suggestive rather than fulfilling, leaving gaps [Leerstelle] for the reader to fill in: the unwritten part of texts to be created by its readers. Indeed, Ingarden speculated, readers co-create texts as they process them. Characters, scenes, and locations are actively imagined by readers as words create indistinct images in the mind. The idea of textual gaps extended into theories claiming that texts only come to life once a reader breathes life into them, and also that the behaviour of such readers, how they respond to texts, and how their minds process texts, should be studied. This resulted in different approaches and methodologies. One of these approaches has been discussed above: the sociocultural history of reading.* In the following sections, we broaden our view to readerresponse criticism, reception studies as well as sociological* and cognitive* studies of reading as developed from the 1960s and 1970s onwards in Europe and the us.
6.4
How texts engage their readers (with Harald Hendrix)
Reader-oriented criticism was partly designed in response to the New Criticism* that had been developed in the first half of the twentieth century. As we have seen before, this school of criticism had advocated a critical practice that was focussed exclusively on individual texts and how they were constructed – not on historical contexts, not on authorial intentions, and certainly not on the subjective responses of a reader. All this shifted in the 1960s and 1970s with the turn towards readers. Roughly
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speaking, reader-oriented criticisms and reader research in literary studies have been respectively oriented towards: ● The ways in which reading and readers have evolved historically (as outlined in 6.2 and 6.3). ● The ways in which literary texts position readers rhetorically (and how to resist these positions). ● Reception studies, that is, how literary texts have circulated in society and have thus extended their life-span. ● Cognitive approaches that explain how the mind works in processes of literary reading. ● Sociological approaches to reading that consider the behaviour of readers. The first branch of criticism to be discussed in this section focuses on the reader in the text: how texts position and address readers rhetorically, and how they imply or presuppose readers. This is the field of reader-response criticism. Reception studies will be discussed in section 6.5, while cognitive and sociological approaches follow in section 6.6. Reader-response is a much more theoretical, text-oriented approach than the readerly histories outlined above. A founding critic in this field is Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007) and his work The Implied Reader (Der implizite Leser; 1972). The question raised in this work is how readers are always already present in literary texts – sometimes without the actual reader engaging with such a text even being aware of it. Readers and the roles they play can be presumed – and they can be staged in various ways. They can be manipulated or addressed as actual (you as a reader, which is any reader) or as imaginary (characters, or invoked presences that do not figure as named characters) constructs. Referred to as readers in the text, readers can thus be made explicit in a text or remain implicit as devices and rhetorical structures directing the reader in more or less ingenious ways. Explicit readers in the text are directly addressed readers. Sometimes such readers are characters, as they typically are in epistolary novels, like Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos:
implied reader
readers in the text
explicit readers in the text
Tenez, ma belle amie, tant que vous vous partagez entre plusieurs, je n’ai pas la moindre jalousie; je ne vois alors dans vos amants que les successeurs d’Alexandre, incapables de conserver entre eux tout cet empire où je régnais seul. Mais que vous vous donniez entièrement à un d’eux! qu’il existe un autre homme assez heureux que moi! je ne le souffrirai pas: n’espérez pas que je le souffre. Ou reprenez-moi, ou au moins prenez-en un autre; et ne trahissez pas, par un caprice exclusif, l’amitié inviolable que nous nous sommes jurée.
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Come, my fair friend, as long as you share yourself among several, I am not in the least jealous; I simply see your lovers as the successors of Alexander; incapable of holding among them that Empire where I reigned alone. But that you should give yourself entirely to one of them! That there should exist another as happy as I! I will not endure it; do not think that I will endure it! Either take me back or at least take someone else as well; and do not let any exclusive caprice betray the inviolable friendship we have sworn to each other.
However, readers in the text that are addressed explicitly can also figure as an unnamed and un-answering presence – as they do in lyrical poetry. Consider Sonnet 42 (1609) by William Shakespeare: Sonnet 42 That thou hast her, it is not all my grief, and yet it may be said I loved her dearly, that she hath thee is of my wailing chief, a loss in love that touches me more nearly. Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye: thou dost love her because you know’st I love her, and for my sake even so does she abuse me, suffering my friend for my sake to approve her. If I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain, and losing her, my friend hath found that loss; both find each other, and I lose both twain, and both for my sake lay on me this cross. But here’s the joy, my friend and I are one, sweet flattery, then she loves but me alone.
The ‘thou’ addressed draws us into the text: though we are not addressed, as actual readers, the ‘thou’ somehow appeals to us. Yet, this ‘thou’ is an implicit character in the poem. It is a friend who is with the lover that the speaker would like to be with – and through whom he merges with that lover. In contrast to these fictional readers in the text, there are historical readers explicitly addressed in texts. These readers can be patrons or historical figures to whom a text is dedicated. The dedication to all sorts of celebrated and powerful people in Wild Fire (2007) by Nelson Demille (b.1943) comically illustrates an old literary tradition: There is a new trend among authors to thank every famous people for inspiration, non-existent assistance, and/or some casual reference to the author’s work. Authors do this to pump themselves up. So, on the off
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chance that this is helpful, I wish to thank the following people: the Emperor of Japan and the Queen of England for promoting literacy; William S. Cohen, former secretary of defense, for dropping me a note saying he liked my books, as did his boss, Bill Clinton; Bruce Willis, who called me one day and said, ‘Hey, you’re a good writer’; Albert Einstein, who inspired me to write about nuclear weapons; General George Armstrong Custer, whose brashness at the Little Bighorn taught me a lesson on judgement; Mikhail Gorbachev, whose courageous actions indirectly led to my books being translated into Russian; Don DeLillo and Joan Didion, whose books are always before and after mine on bookshelves, and whose names always appear before and after mine in almanacs and many lists of American writers – thanks for being there, guys; Julius Caesar, for showing the world that illiterate barbarians can be beaten; Paris Hilton, whose family hotel chain carries my books in their gift shops; and last but not least, Albert ii, King of the Belgians, who once waved to me in Brussels as the Royal Procession moved from the Palace to the Parliament Building, screwing up traffic for half an hour, thereby forcing me to kill time by thinking of a great plot to dethrone the King of the Belgians. There are many more people I could thank, but time, space, and modesty compel me to stop here.
In the first millennium bce, epics in oral culture typically opened with an invocation to (one or more of ) the nine muses in mythology: goddesses who are invoked. Such invocations are formulaic in nature and typically take the shape of a question to which an answer is expected, with the answer coming in the form of a catalogue. Such invocations – which in Homeric epic occur also in critical points in the action – are an early example of directly addressed ‘readers.’ Demille’s dedication quoted above functions as a distant remnant of the ancient invocation to the muses. Just as Greek poets invoked goddesses, Demille enumerates the rich, smart, and powerful. Dedications to patrons in early modern and modern literature likewise are an instance of historical readers (as in Demille’s example: readers who exist or have existed as historical persons). However, an explicitly addressed reader can also be any reader – us, actual readers of a novel or poem. ‘Reader, I married him,’ narrator Jane famously informs us towards the end in Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855): she talks to us directly, she makes our presence explicit. To compare, Cervantes’ Don Quixote illustrates the practice of readerly instructions common in early modern storytelling:
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Deocupado lector, sin juramento me podrás creer que quisiera que este libro, como hijo del entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más Gallardo y más discreto que pudiera imaginarse. THOU mayst believe me, gentle reader, without swearing, that I could willingly desire this book (as a child of my understanding) to be the most beautiful, gallant, and discreet that might possibly be imagined.
implied reader
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Such instructions reveal how readers can be played upon and directed – as they, of course, always are in more and less detectable ways. We just not always realise it, as the instructions come more veiled and craftily. Feminist criticism* and postcolonial criticism* has, for that matter, researched the ways in which we – as readers – are often appealed to or called for in predefined positions (for instance, as white middle-class women) and how we are manipulated by structures in the text and its implicit assumptions. This is why Wolfang Iser has called such structures and assumptions the implied reader. An implied reader is not a historical person, or any actual reader engaging with a text. It refers to the role of the reader as presumed by a text, with the reader being an abstract construct that can be adduced from the strategies deployed in the text in order to engage and direct the reader. Such a construct comes with all the cultural norms, values, judgements, and attitudes necessary to process a text adequately – or to be carried away by it. The implied reader can be a powerful force in a reader’s experience of a text. Tropes (as discussed in Chapter 4) like dramatic irony are examples of an implied reader. Here, the reader (and the narrator or a focalising character) may know more than one or more of the characters in a story, so that tension can be built – and the reader becomes apprehensive. Psycho (1960), with Norman Bates looking at his victim through a peep hole, by Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is a case in point. The implied reader thus illustrates how texts play with readers’ expectations. These expectations can be textual, in the manner of dramatic irony, but also cultural or literary-historical. The implied reader is, for instance, present in the expectations aroused by genres (epic, lyric, gothic) (compare the text box on Lyric in Chapter 4). As we already saw in Chapter 2, every genre has its different characteristics, and with these characteristics come different modes of reading and sense-making – we observed the same in Shakespeare’s sonnet as an instance of lyric. We are supposed to know that the ‘thou’ is to be understood as an implied character. In this respect, texts need readers: they follow explicit and implicit instructions, and fill the gaps (Leerstelle) to bring a text to life. However, in the reading process, an implied reader need not be alldetermining. Readers can resist the structures and directions that ma-
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nipulate them through a text – as Judith Fetterley (b.1938) has shown in The Resisting Reader (1978). She argues that female readers of American fiction have been compelled to identify with what she called a universal (white) maleness. As we have also seen in Chapter 5, such readers have been ‘immasculated’ through the rhetorical structures we now identify as the implied reader. New, feminist modes of reading and criticism were developed to render explicit what such novels still unconsciously broadcasted, so to speak, about masculinity and femininity. Feminist research thus uncovered gender as a communicative process in the study of reading: what implied readers communicate to us in terms of gender identity; how they make us identify with normative positions and conceptions of masculinity and femininity in Western culture. Yet, as Fetterley and other feminist critics have shown in their studies, readers also take the space to negotiate or resist the meanings and positions mediated through implied readers. Indeed, reading experiences are hard to control as readers bring their own preconceptions, associations, and mental schemata (mental structures or frameworks that help to process and organise information) to texts. As we will see later in this chapter, how readers process a text, and what they take or remember from it, is conditioned by these schemata considerably more than the text itself. Research into actual readers – real readers, of flesh and blood, whose responses to literary texts cannot be completely controlled – has been somewhat controversial in comparative literary studies. Do we focus on literary texts and how to uncover their meanings, or on how readers process such texts; on which literary works and genres were created in certain historical periods or on who read such works and how they were circulated in society? Do we even need to choose? The critic Jonathan Culler (b.1944) once posited that the implied or, in his terms, ideal reader is as far as literary criticism should go in reader-oriented criticism: ‘The question is not what actual readers happen to do but what an ideal reader must know implicitly in order to read and interpret works in ways which we consider acceptable, in accordance with the institutions of literature.’ However, as we will see in the next section, other critics saw the need to work beyond the book and the text in order to deepen our understanding of literature in society. New methods were proposed, often evolving out of existing domains such as hermeneutics* and aesthetics, to research the ways in which texts have been read and appreciated: what role they have played in society. Through these methods, we have come to appreciate literature also as process rather than only as object.
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6.5
productive reception
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Reception Studies (with Harald Hendrix)
In 1967, Hans-Robert Jauss (1921-1997) wrote a manifesto entitled ‘Literary history as a provocation of literary studies’ (‘Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft’). In this manifesto, he suggested a turn towards the reader in the rewriting of literary history. Jauss started from the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) who, as we will see in Chapter 7, had developed a relational model of literary meaning. That is to say, Gadamer had proposed that the meaning of texts always surfaces as a negotiation between texts and readers. Texts and readers are bound by a particular time (period) and a particular place (culture): both are situated and limited but also enriched by that situatedness. What fascinated Jauss in this theory was the consequence that texts are never the same to different readers. If meaning arises out of the encounter between readers and texts, rather than out of an essence of the text itself, such meaning must alter with every encounter. Jauss then used Gadamer’s theory to explore the contrasts between the responses of contemporary readers to a given text and that of subsequent readers. This approach is different from Iser’s in that it uses literature as a barometer to explore changes in reception over time of the same work. Jauss was not interested in how texts are likely to engage readers, but in how groups of readers engaged with such texts in different historical periods. This historical method has set the terms for what is now called literary reception studies: scholarship on the ways in which (groups of ) readers have received or processed and made sense of literary texts. Jauss himself still referred to it as reception aesthetics, since his research zoomed in on readers’ enjoyment of literary texts, and how such enjoyment co-determined the reception of these texts. In the 1980s reception aesthetics would be replaced by the more general term ‘reception studies’ to indicate a more inclusive approach to literary readers, the kinds of texts they process (canonical and popular), and their responses to these texts. Such responses may be found in letters to authors, diary entries, recorded conversations, and published reviews, as we have also already seen in the methods used in the socio-cultural history of reading. However, reader responses can also be more creative or (re)productive: think of literary rewritings, adaptations (on stage, in films, in music or musicals), fan fictions or translations. This is why reception studies is also engaged with productive reception: the way in which readers, as authors, (re)make the texts they have read in productive or creative responses. Women’s and feminist rewritings of literary classics and myths have been of special interest to the study of productive reception in recent years. These works offer a criticism of such myths in
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Reception beyond literature: Media audience studies After Jauss had developed his outline of reception aesthetics, Stuart Hall (1932-2014) published a work on audience reception of mass media in Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse (1973) as a result of his research with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Basically, his point was that the meaning of mass media ‘texts’ – ranging from commercials and sitcoms to films and songs – is not simply encoded to be faithfully and precisely decoded by an audience. The audience is not a passive consumer but an active participant in and co-producer of such texts. The meanings of such texts vary with the different cultural backgrounds of audiences. This is why Hall’s publication called for more research into such audiences – it became one of the foundations of the field that is now called media or media audience studies. What his theory shares with Jauss is the basic hypothesis that audiences recreate texts in their processing of them through the frameworks, experiences, and projections that they bring to such texts. The text as a thing in itself is unreachable: audiences decode it within the bounds of these frameworks.
the retelling of them: Who was sidelined? Why? The Children of Jocasta (2017) by Natalie Haynes (b.1974) retells the Oedipus myth by zooming in on two obscured female characters in Sophocles’ rendering of it: Jocasta (Oedipus’ mother and wife) and Ismene (the youngest daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta). As readers, we re-experience the famous myth through their eyes and become engaged with their perspective. In Everything Under (2018), Daisy Johnson (b.1990) likewise gives pride of place to Jocasta in her version of Oedipus Rex. Jocasta becomes Sarah, who abandons her daughter Gretel (just as in King Oedipus baby Oedipus is left on the mountain for the wolves). The character of Oedipus is rewritten as Margot/Marcus, a gender fluid girl who identifies as a boy, and carries a horrible secret. Recasting the old myth, Everything Under addresses the figure of the mother and reimagines her as a character beyond her traditional, appointed role: she is not a ‘good,’ empathic, self-sacrificing figure – quite the opposite. These rewritings of old myths through contemporary tales, peopled by characters that take on atypical gender roles, may help to unveil and even subvert traditional heteropatriarchal value systems: systems that value heterosexuality over other forms of sexuality (lgbtq) and that forge gender roles of men as strong, courageous, and smart and women as weak, caring, and naïve.
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How a movie ‘reads’ a poem: Sophie’s Choice and Emily Dickinson’s ‘Ample make this Bed’ Productive reception is a form of intertextuality in that it covers the way in which literary works reread and reinterpret each other. Through such rereading, stories are kept alive: they are told again and again, in different ways and from different vantage points (just as in oral times stories were told again and again in different configurations by the bards). Productive reception can extend to other media like cinema. This text box focuses on Emily Dickinson’s famous poem number 829, ‘Ample make this Bed’ (written in ca. 1864, published posthumously in 1914), and how it was presented in the movie Sophie’s Choice (1982) by Alan J. Pakula (1928-1988). How did the movie process the poem and how did this adaptation affect the meanings attached to Dickinson’s poem? We already briefly discussed poem 829 in Chapter 4: Ample make this bed – Make this bed with awe – In it wait till Judgment break Excellent and fair. Be its mattress straight – Be its pillow round – Let no sunrise’ yellow noise Interrupt this ground. Millions of viewers who watched Sophie’s Choice – adapted from the novel (1979) by William Styron (1925-2006) – were made familiar with this poem in the 1980s. The movie, like the novel, revolves around a young writer from the American South, Stingo (Peter MacNicol), who in 1947 enters a boarding house in Brooklyn and there befriends a couple: Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline) and Sophie Zawistowska (Meryl Streep). As Stingo – and the viewer – is drawn into their lives he learns that Nathan is not quite the Harvard graduate he purports to be and that Sophie carries a horrible secret: a concentration camp survivor, she eventually tells Stingo how she had to choose between her daughter and her son upon entering the camp. Stingo tries to save her from Nathan, who turns out to be a domineering schizophrenic, but Sophie stays with Nathan and commits suicide with him. Emily Dickinson ‘enters’ the movie when Sophie first meets Nathan in the library, shyly asking for a copy of Dickinson’s poetry. They will read her poem 829 together in bed. At the end of the movie, Stingo reads it aloud again after discovering their joint suicide. It is likewise quoted at the end of Styron’s novel. (In a memoir of her father, Styron’s daughter recounts how ‘Ample make this Bed’ was read aloud at Styron’s own funeral in 2006.) The poem thus makes the story come full circle. Viewers take it to
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function in the manner of fate: in the movie, it announces what will happen inevitably – from bed to grave, from sleep to death. In turn, through its reception in Sophie’s Choice, the theme of suicide has been firmly attached to Dickinson’s poem. Is this attachment justified? The first stanza of the poem is about preparing a comfortable bed and to wait in it until ‘Judgment’ breaks, presumably being the Day of Judgement from the Bible. The impossible choice between her two children that Sophie faced in the concentration camp, and her eventual suicide, strongly colours ‘Judgment’ in this first stanza of the poem: it foregrounds a sense of guilt and a day of reckoning to deal with that sense of guilt. Indeed, Sophie’s Choice thematises the inevitability associated with Judgement Day: Sophie cannot escape the past. This not only concerns the moment in the concentration camp, but also her subsequent failure to escape the domineering ghost of her father in fatally choosing Nathan as her lover. The second stanza of Dickinson’s poem shows how the bed is to be made: a straight mattress, a round pillow, curtains closed, one would imagine, so that no sunlight can interrupt the waiting. Is this, then, a bed rendered as a preparation for death, the bed in which Sophie and Nathan die? The movie strongly suggests such an interpretation through Stingo’s prayer-like reading of ‘Ample make this Bed’ when Sophie and Nathan have died. However, the textual surface of the poem is so rich and playful that it also pulls in another direction: opposite from where the movie takes us. ‘Ample’ (from the Latin amplus) in the first stanza means plentiful, abundant, copious. Somehow, this does not sit well with a grave. Ample instead calls forth warmth and generosity: it calls forth life, as life deeply connotes plenitude and energy (for a more comprehensive analysis of the ambivalence of ‘Ample’ and its mirroring relation to ‘Awe,’ or the chiasmic relation of line 1 to line 2 in stanza 1, see Chapter 4). ‘Excellent,’ with its connotation of brilliance, likewise suggests vibrancy. Significantly, then, what had alerted us to death in the poem at once alerts us to a force of generation, of life overflowing. Here it is interesting and indeed crucial to note that Dickinson was a pantheist so that such a slippery crossing between life and death becomes meaningful within the reception of her work: life and death are entangled. Seen in this light, the waiting, the round pillow, and the straight mattress might just as well connote pleasurable anticipation of a sexual encounter. Sophie’s Choice reflects and repeats this ambiguity between life and death when it pictures the two lovers in bed, Nathan reading Dickinson to Sophie before the camera pans away to leave them alone in the darkness of the night. Thus, we may conclude, Sophie’s Choice offers a creative interpretation of poem 829 that upholds its undecidability – its unresolved hovering between life and death. Nevertheless, the prayer-like reading of the poem at the death of the two lovers has secured the prominence of death: it is as if their bed had always been a grave, a site prepared for a joint suicide.
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Since the 1980s, reception studies has become a booming field that explores translations, adaptations, and audience responses to literary classics in historical contexts, and also traces the effects of literature on readers’ lives or even on historical events. Reception also has widened its focus to popular genres and the popular reception of literary classics in worlds beyond the book (mass media, monuments, museums, writer’s houses). This kind of literary reception advocates an expansive idea of literary heritage: How have authors and their works left their imprint on cultural life in the course of time – from playful adaptations in the cinema, the radio, or the theatre to statues, street and park names, festivals, museums and commemorations? The social life of texts and of reading, scholars in reception studies claim, can be mapped and measured through the intensity with which such texts have been remembered in different media platforms and in their materialisation in the public sphere.
literary tourism
Literary afterlives: Reception studies and cultural memory The Afterlives of Walter Scott (2012) by Ann Rigney (b.1957) highlights the multimediated nature of what she calls literary afterlife: how texts live on in the wake of their publication in different media and objects in cultural life. She maps the rich reception of the works of Walter Scott imprinted in the names of streets and steamboats, in jousting tournaments inspired by Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and in the intense regeneration of Scott’s novels in different media platforms. Reception studies here reaches not only beyond traditional textual criticism, but also beyond readers’ research to the overall configuration of shared or cultural memory (see Chapter 9). Literary afterlife and the shaping of cultural memory is also a prominent theme in the study of literary tourism: cultural tourism activities inspired by a literary creation, a literary author, or the literary heritage of a destination. As Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory (2008) by Harald Hendrix (b.1958) has shown, literary tourism explores the crafting of literary heritage. It studies how readers act and behave in response to the books they have read (and loved) and the authors they admire: how do writers’ houses stimulate the imaginative engagement as readers, including fellow writers, turn into pilgrims seeking to recapture the life of a writer? Such writers’ houses have been crafted into places of conservation and creation at once: as foundations or institutes, they preserve the space of a writer but often also accommodate new writers at work. The house of Norman Mailer (1923-2007) in Provincetown, Cape Cod, is a case in point. As a foundation, it moved to New York City – where Mailer also lived – and is now known as the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, serving educational purposes and hosting writers. In preserving the afterlife of writers and their work, such foundations thus also generate a new life: the life of a literary community in the present.
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Since the 1990s, reception research has also moved beyond official literary culture: the culture of marketed authors, publishing houses, and book shops. This research concerns fan fiction and fan communities as discussed above but also ethnographic research into the crafting and reading of self-made and published work like personal zines or perzines. Research in this field examines zine culture as a special community of life writing (all writing, fictional or factional, about one’s own or someone else’s life) and reading. Such communities somewhat resemble communities of writers and readers before copyright laws came into effect in the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States (see Chapter 3). As a doit-yourself practice, zine writing occurs at the margins of ‘official’ literary culture, while zine distribution extends beyond the reach of publishing houses and regulated book markets. Perzines are sold on street corners, at conventions, distributed through mail or sold in special book shops. They allow for a more fluid relation between writers and readers: their respective positions are less strictly demarcated, as was the case centuries ago in manuscript culture. In summary, reception studies has evolved from studies of the aesthetics of reception over time, to historical studies of literary communities, behaviour and identities, and of the multimediated nature of literary heritage, thereby unravelling the social life of texts within and beyond the literary field.
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Cognitive and sociological studies of reading
In the 1980s, some literary scholars felt dissatisfied with the results yielded so far by reception studies. Reception studies could not always fully answer questions like: How do people read in general, and why? How precisely do people generate meaning? What are the benefits of literary reading? How does such reading contribute to the development of creative thinking? Moreover, these scholars felt that many literary theories tended to accept as axiomatic what are in fact questions in need of empirical research. Axiomatic means that one presupposes something as typical – What is literary reading? – without having researched its empirical underpinnings. These scholars regarded Iser’s notion of the implied reader as an instance of such axiomatic thinking. They regarded the American theorist Stanley Fish (b.1938) and his notion of interpretive communities with equal suspicion. The concept of interpretive communities holds that different readers belonging to different communities may bring different, subjective meanings to texts. However, precisely because they are part of such a community there will also be certain (linguistic) boundaries
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(enabling certain linguistic competencies) within which meanings will be shaped more or less normatively. Meaning is therefore never entirely subjective or individual, but forged by a reader’s presence within a (linguistic) community. While this theory may be convincing in itself, on the basis of logic and argumentation, some scholars wished to investigate if such theories would also hold in the messier context of empirical realities. It remains to be seen if the methods used by empirical scholars provide the answers they themselves have been looking for, but they maintain that technologies like fMRI and instruments like surveys and interviews of readers get us closer than theoretical speculation.
Reading the romance Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984, 1991) by Janice Radway (b.1949) illustrates an inclusive approach to literary reading: one that looks beyond the divide between so called Literature and literature. Radway zoomed in on responses of female readers to the popular romance genre. Combining reader-response criticism with methods from anthropology (ethnography), Radway explained how these readers created meanings that resonated personally with them. In the process, she also explained why the genre of the romance – dismissed by male critics since the eighteenth century and feminist critics in the twentieth century – had been so successful (and it continues to be successful up to this day). Using empirical methods like interviews to collect her data, Radway was able to debunk popular myths about readers of romance and also indicated a way of doing literary studies beyond the book. Her work has been foundational for more recent contributions to the field like Reading beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture (2013) by DeNel Rehberg Sedo and Danielle Fuller. This work investigates mass campaigns that have been launched as well as channels that have been used to increase the reading of fiction. That is to say, it studies the reading industry and its strategies, rather than the experiences and strategies of readers themselves.
cognitive reader research
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The empirical study of literature is interested in processes and behaviour – processes and behaviour beyond the book: concerning readers, but also institutions (ranging from newspapers and their critics to publishing houses) within the literary field. Generally, two currents can be differentiated in the empirical approach to literature. The first current is cognitive and investigates processes in the minds and brains of individual readers, writers, and critics (processes of sense making, creating, judging). Cognitive reader research* approaches literary texts as particular instances of the
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functions of the human mind in general, and as opportunities for studying these functions and reveal more about them. Cognitive scientists use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods (see Chapter 1). They use experiments in psychological labs, surveys, big data collections that can be processed by means of statistics, in combination with qualitative methods like the processing, analysing, and interpreting of intensive interviews, documents and conversations. In this way, the empirical study of literature aims to enhance the verifiability and falsifiability of research in the humanities. In the age of distant reading, empirical approaches to literature have again gained new relevance. At the same time, brain research in the cognitive sciences has given a new impetus to the question how we create, process, and read stories and poems, as well as how literature affects the mind. In the 1980s critics like Siegfried Schmidt (b.1940) and Robert Beaugrande (1946-2008) already advocated such a cognitive approach, with scholars like David Miall (b.1947) following suit. Cognitive studies of reading are typically focused on the role of mental schemata (see above) in processing texts. What do we bring to texts that is already formatted in the brain? By way of quantitative research, cognitive approaches to literary reading have been able to substantiate what theorists like Gadamer, Iser, and Jauss already intuited and posited as a theory long ago: that texts never show the same face to different readers. The difficulty in researching literary reading from a cognitive perspective is how to control the testing of it. Normally, cognitive scientists manipulate texts so that they can control an experiment in order to maximise its general applicability. What to do with a literary text that was carefully and purposefully designed? Can it be tampered with? In cognitive studies of reading scientists have adapted literary texts in order to ascertain answers to questions like: When do readers consider a text ‘literary’? What kind of visual images does the mind form during reading, and which are the cognitive styles that different readers adopt for image-making? Are functions of the mind in everyday linguistic communication also active in literary communication? The answer to this latter question is that all functions of the mind – from mental coding to short- and long-term memory – active in everyday linguistic communication are operative in more or less identical fashion in literary communication. This answer also suggests that literary creativity is not an exceptional ‘state’ but a specific instance of how the mind works in general. Cognitive research into creativity corroborates this hypothesis: the mind at work in everyday perception and interpretation is not fundamentally different from the mind at work in a specific creative act. Such a creative act refers to literary reading as much as literary writing. As we have seen, and as cognitive studies have affirmed, the mind in reading is actively ‘writing’ the unwritten parts of texts.
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extended mind
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Cognitive studies of literature are not confined to reading. They also focus on how literary texts can help us further understand mental processes – of creativity and imagination, empathy, communication and interpretation – or on how concepts and insights from cognitive theory can expand our understanding of literature. An important insight generated by cognitive theory in the last decades is the concept of the extended mind. Theorists like Andy Clark (b.1957) have postulated that the human mind evolves and operates in constant interaction with the body and the surrounding world, and to such an extent that it serves little purpose to demarcate mind and body, mind and outer stimuli, mind and the social world. This theory creates a bridge between cognitive studies of reading and the second current to be considered as part of empirical approaches to literature here: the sociological approach. Following Clark, social structures are likely to inform and shape the mental schemata involved in the reading process: these schemata, from his perspective, cannot be studied in isolation from the social world as the mind extends to that world. Differently put, cognitive and sociological studies of reading will inevitably (and ideally) overlap. If the science of cognition covers the study of all kinds of mental information processing (perceptual, conceptual, emotional, mnemonic, imaginative, interpretive, creative), the science of sociology covers the study of society, societal groups and relations as well as human behaviour. Accordingly, the sociological current in empirical approaches to literature investigates the readerly modes of behaviour of groups of people that can be differentiated with respect to sociological variables such as age, income, gender, and level of education. It also focuses on the role of institutions: the policies and strategies of publishing houses or the state with respect to the production and/or promotion of cultural artefacts like books. The work of Pierre Bourdieu – including his field theory (Chapter 2) – has been foundational for this current in the empirical study of literature. Sociological approaches to reading can be diachronic. We have glossed these historical approaches in sections 6.2, 6.3, and 6.5 of this chapter. Sociological approaches can also be synchronic: research in the present to gain knowledge of how different social groups read. Both approaches use methods from the social sciences to investigate how the practice of reading is embedded within larger, sociocultural settings, conventions, and institutions. How do the latter co-condition the former? Synchronic research, however, uses other tools than diachronic sociological reader research. It deploys surveys, questionnaires, participant observations, and open interviews to assess how readers deal with texts. It has shown that people from different classes bring different expectations to literary texts, while reading strategies and judgements also vary with different gender identities. Such reader research has ranged from exploring how children process literature
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over the years; how family situations influence literary tastes and preferences; how social milieus shape literary learning, to how fantasy literature spins off into role-playing games and how readers thus morph into playerparticipants. Questions concerning the impact of technological tools has grown more and more significant for sociological reader research. What is the impact of algorithms on our choice of literary works as we browse and search online? Which age groups predominantly continue to read literature in the digital age, and which age groups mostly use other media for the consumption of stories? At the same time, globalisation has triggered the development of new frameworks for and theories of the consumption of literature – a consumption which has become significantly transnational (compare world literature, Chapter 2). Reader research accordingly zooms in on the question how literature is now increasingly circulating across the globe in translation, thus reaching other kinds of readers and critics than the traditional, national frame once presumed. For instance, Wendy Griswold (b.1946), who has done pioneering work in the sociology of literary reading, has shown in her Regionalism and the Reading Class (2008) how globalisation has not smothered distinctive local culture but precisely invigorated regional differences through mobile reading elites.
Reading in groups Research into how readers read in groups can be ethnographic: a mode of cultural observation and exploration from the social sciences where the researcher participates in the perspective of the subject of research. An example of such research is the project ‘Reading in Prison’ by Patricia Canning (b.1972) As she recounts in a reflection on her project written for this chapter: [In 2013] I established a unique reading group with female prisoners of Hydebank Wood prison in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The group was a mixture of reading aloud, participant contribution, and debate on interpretation and meaning. The project consisted of weekly, 90-minute, reading groups with between three and ten female prisoners. As facilitator of the group, I read each literary text aloud, stopping often to hear contributions from the women. The readings triggered conversations, debates, and discussions (and many questions). [...] The literary material was rich and varied and derived from a range of historical periods, stylistic approaches and genres. [...] [Through the reading sessions with this group, I have found that] [t]here is something very calming about reading aloud together. It focuses the mind, the agitation, the energy wasted on anger, and directs it to something as simple as listening. [...] Almost without exception, the women were very receptive to the sessions, which was reflected in their feedback; one group member regarded them as ‘the
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best part of my week.’ As a result of their participation in the project, some of the women were inspired to write their own stories. One particular group member was so moved at the way the literature resonated with her own life that she found a story to be of ‘real proper help’ to her in dealing with her own complex history. [...] Another prisoner, Margaret (not her real name), after giving an incredibly intuitive reading of a difficult poem, ‘Beyond the Bend in the Road’ (1914), by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), said, ‘I can’t believe that those thoughts were actually mine! All this time, I was convinced that I only had deep and profound thoughts like that because of drugs. But they were mine all this time!’ The group offered purposeful activity, meaningful discussion, critical thinking, and confidence. It helped develop empathy, build community, and generate a hunger for knowing. Often, the literature offered a way of saying, of knowing we are not alone. Sometimes, it was enough if it just did that.
This project not only effectively remedied a perceived ‘lack of meaningful activity’ and ‘challenge’ in the prison, but could also serve as a fruitful basis to research reading in groups empirically. In 2011, other scholars demonstrated how such research might take shape. In their investigation, they have focused on group reading and meaning making in book clubs – a phenomenon which has gained increasing popularity in recent years. The methodology was outlined as follows: We contribute an approach in which the intersection of social structure, individual readings, and interactive group processes all may enter into readers’ interpretations of a novel. Our investigation focuses on a set of book clubs for which we collected data on group members’ pre- and post-discussion evaluations of a specific book, and the interpersonal influence networks that were formed during the groups’ discussions. We analyze these data with a multilevel model of individuals nested in groups, which allows us to address the effects of structure and group dynamics on cultural reception in a single analytic framework.
By adopting this multifaceted approach (taking heed at once of the social structure, individual readings, and interactive group processes affecting readers’ interpretations), the team of researchers was able to unravel the mysteries of group dynamics in cultural reception. That is to say, they were able to ascertain how cultural meanings are in fact negotiated within such dynamics.
The sociology of reading is a vibrant, interdisciplinary field that can help substantiate (or disprove) theories that have been formative in the study of literature. Interdisciplinary methods developed to do research on literary reading in reading groups (book clubs, classrooms, mass reading events) carried out in order to assess how people read in their natural environments, are proving very fruitful in ascertaining the agency of readers and how they negotiate meanings in society.
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In conclusion: The agency of readers
In this chapter, we have started with the beginnings of alphabetic script and ended with reader research in the present. Along the way, we have seen that literary reading has changed over the centuries as new materials and technologies for writing were introduced, and as institutional changes occurred. Such change happened gradually, since the old ways of engaging with stories and poems lingered on as new ways of doing things were already emerging (oral and literature culture, manuscript and print culture). We have here investigated the different ways of researching the history of literary reading, as this discipline has evolved since the 1980s. Our account has remained necessarily incomplete: reading is so central to modern cultures that its history is hard to compress into an introductory chapter. From the history of reading, we have moved to the history of reader research in literary studies. Such research started to take shape in the 1960s and 1970s, with reader-response criticism and reception aesthetics. Over the years, reception aesthetics fanned out into reception studies, which in its turn tuned in with the sociocultural history of literary reading. Nowadays, literary reception studies typically also expands to multimedia platforms and objects in cultural life as receptacles and residues of literary texts. Finally, we have considered cognitive and sociological reader research, the latter overlapping with the history of literary reading and reception studies in its investigations of how groups of readers have processed literary texts over time. Like cognitive reader research, sociological approaches to reading in the present break new ground in unravelling the agency of the reader – the reader who was made the central focus of literary theory more than five decades ago. In the next chapter we encounter this reader again, but now as concerns the function of the reader as critic and interpreter: as professional reader.
Further reading Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Book?’ Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65-83. James F. English,‘Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature after “the Sociology of Literature,”’ New Literary History 41.2 (2010), pp. v-xxiii. Margaret H. Freeman, ‘Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Literary Studies: State of the Art in Cognitive Poetics,’ in Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 1175-1202. Dannielle Fuller and DeNel Reberg Sebo, Reading beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture, London: Routledge, 2013.
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Wendy Griswold, Regionalism and the Reading Class, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Nicole Howard, The Book: The Life Story of a Technology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Ronald N. Jacobs, Philip Smith and Jeffrey C. Alexander, eds, Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. James L Machor and Philip Goldstein, Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, 2000. Lisa Zunshine, ed., Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5
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Albert Bates Lord, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 31, https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/6193. albert-bates-lord-epic-singers-and-oral-tradition. Barry Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. This insert was written by Céline ’t Hart, a specialist in Hebrew literature and culture. Christian Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library, trans. Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009, p. 28. This writing was used in classical Greek and classical Latin. Classical Greek did use word dividers, while Latin did use interpunct in monuments. See M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 1992; Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. The basis for the theory, built on ancient and medieval texts about reading, was laid down by the German scholar Eduard Norden in 1898 in Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI Jahrhundert v.Chr. bis in die Zeit der Renaissance and Josef Balogh’s ‘Voces paginarum: Beiträge zur Geschichte des lauten Lesens und Schreibens,’ Philologus 82 (1927): 84-109, 202-240. Marshall McLuhan famously disseminated this view in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. In 1968, Bernard Knox contested this theory by offering evidence of the contrary: reading was (also) done in silence in Antiquity (‘Silent Reading in Antiquity,’ Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 9 (1968): 421-435). In 1997, A.K. Gavrilov again offered textual evidence that reading was done in silence in Antiquity (‘Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity,’ Classical Quarterly 47 (1997): 56-73). For this, see Sandra R. Joshel, The Material Life of Roman Slaves, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. St Augustine, Confessions 6.3.6 This is, however, not to say that codices were only used by the Christians, or that they had a decisive role in the spread of the codex. Codices were, for instance, used as notebooks in classical Rome. Also, the Christians appeared to have used the codex not only to carry their Gospels around secretly, but to mark a break with the Jewish Bible written in scrolls. See Christian Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009, p. 29.
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Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext, p. 29. See also his ‘The Page’: https:// ntmrs-skc.itercommunity.org/tracing-movement-ideas/page-past-future-booksknowledge-christian-vandendorpe/. Before metal, woodblocks were used for printing. Metal moveable type had already been used in Korea in the thirteenth century, while printing paper books with a porcelain press had been in use in China in the eleventh century. Western European printing was thus certainly not the first technology of moveable type in the history of print. Vandendorpe, From Papyrus to Hypertext, pp. 32-33. Ibid., p. 34. Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995; Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006, pp. 15-17. Littau, Theories of Reading, p. 16. Chartier, Forms and Meanings, p. 20. Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G Cochrane, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 182. For a nice overview and explanation of moveable type and its history, including possible forerunners of Gutenberg in Holland, consult th Graphic Design History website: http://www.designhistory.org/Type_milestones_pages/Gutenberg.html. Littau, Theories of Reading, pp. 18-19; Matei Calinescu, Rereading, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. For more on this, see Robert Darnton,‘First Steps Toward a History of Reading,’ Australian Journal of French Studies 23.1 (1986): 5-30, p. 9, Littau, Theories of Reading, 19. Roger Chartier, ‘From Texts to Readers: Literary Criticism, Sociology of Practice and Cultural History’ Estudios Históricos 30.62 (2017), http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-21862017000300741. Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Laurent Versini, Paris: Gallimard, 1979, pp. 36-37. The English translation is from: Pierre Ambrose François Choderlos de Laclos, Les liaisons dangereuses, trans. Richard Aldington, London and New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 37. William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 42,’ in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Gwynne Blakemore Evans, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974, p. 1757. Nelson Demille, Wild Fire, New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes, 1998, p. 9. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975, pp. 123-124. Emily Dickinson, 892 [‘Ample Make This Bed’] in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1960, p. 402. William Styron, Sophie’s Choice, New York: Random House, 1979. Alexandra Styron, ‘Reading My Father’ in The New York Times, April 19, 2011, at https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/books/excerpt-reading-my-father-alexandra-styron.html This is an excerpt from Styron’s Reading My Father, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. A full analysis of the cultural reception of ‘Ample Make this Bed’ is beyond the scope of this example. Dickinson, after all, is the most studied American poet of all time. For a study of the reception of Dickinson’s work, see for instance Domhnall Mitchell and Maria Stuart, The International Reception of Emily Dickinson, London: Bloomsbury, 2009, or Fred White, Approaching Emily Dickinson. Critical Currents and Crosscurrents since 1960, New York: Camden House, 2008. White also considers Dickinson’s artistic reception. See for this, Anna Poletti, Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008. For this, see R. Richards, ed., Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature: Psychological, Social, and Spiritual Perspectives, Washington, DC: American
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Psychological Association, 2007; Mark Runco and Ruth Richards, eds, Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health, Greenwich: Greenwood, 1997. 34 See Lisa Zunshine, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 35 Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind,’ Analysis 58.1 (1998): 7-19. 36 See, for instance, Ed Fried, What Do Algorithms Want? Imagination in the Age of Computing, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. 37 C. Clayton Childress and Noah E. Friedkin, ‘Cultural Reception and Production: The Social Construction of Meaning in Book Clubs,’ American Sociological Review 77.1 (2012): 45-68. 38 Ibid., 46. 39 Ibid., 66-67. 40 For an overview of these new and alternative methods, see Sara Whiteley and Patricia Canning, ‘Reader Response Criticism in Stylistics,’ Language and Literature 26.2 (2017): 71-87.
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7 MEANING AND INTERPRETATION KIENE BRILLENBURG WURTH
In Chapter 1, we discussed close reading. Here, we consider it as an attentive, critical, and creative reading and analysis of a text that uncovers patterns and details so as to open up new and underlying meanings of that text. Interpreting texts on the basis of close reading is the most common and important method in literary studies. Strategies of reading developed in postcolonial, feminist, new media, or new historicist approaches are still to a certain extent rooted in close reading, but also in the science of interpretation called hermeneutics.* This chapter is about the production of meaning in literary texts. What a literary text means depends on the questions we pose to it as readers, and how the text relates to us: what it asks from us to engage with it meaningfully. Literary meaning, then, is not fixed and stable. It shifts with the frames we use for interpretation: with the different faces a text shows to different readers in different settings and periods. While interpretations can therefore never be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – that is to say, while interpretation is not about finding the right answer – they can be nevertheless more, or less, informed and convincing and can thus have more, or less, significance. In Chapter 1, we have already identified interpretation as a key method in the humanities. In this chapter, we distinguish and explain different strategies and procedures for interpreting texts. We offer standpoints from hermeneutics, semiology,* and deconstruction* to introduce the reader to methods of interpretation that have become central to the field of literary studies in the twentieth century. We apply and demonstrate these methods in various literary interpretations presented throughout the chapter. . . . . . .
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Introduction: Interpretation and meaning-making The work of interpretation: Allegoresis and hermeneutics Dialogic hermeneutics Signs and signification: A semiological perspective Word, after word, after word: Différance and deconstruction In conclusion: The range of interpretation
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Introduction: Interpretation and meaning-making
Looking for meaningful patterns, and giving meaning, is what literary studies shares with philosophy, theology, historiography, and politics – as well as with our everyday lives. Looking for meaning is looking for connections, relations, differences, and recurrences. We all do it, every day, on different levels, consciously and subconsciously, perceptually and cognitively. On a minimally cognitive level we already give meaning to the world around us by shaping our ‘raw’ perceptions into an image or a sequence. Filtering the manifold of impressions around us and processing these impressions into experiences is an act of meaning-making in itself: such impressions thus become meaningful. We then render these experiences comprehensive by comparing or connecting them to other experiences. This is how they are placed within a certain order and perspective. Indeed, as we will see in this chapter, we can only live and understand the world around us within the bounds of such a perspective or framework. However, giving meaning to everyday life is more than making sense of our impressions. We make sense of our lives in more complex ways through the stories we create about ourselves and the world around us (compare Chapter 5 on narratology*). We search for meaning when we go through painful or trying experiences. In times of crisis we like to believe that suffering, fear, uncertainty, or depression, will be meaningful: that we will come out better, stronger. Sometimes, however, in the case of war, genocide, famine, or natural disasters, the horror can be so huge and incomprehensible that every attempt at meaning-making seems inadequate (we discuss such instances in Chapter 9). Meaning not only matters in our personal but also in our shared, social lives. We live with meanings that we take for granted and depend on in our encounters with others. Social classes or groups have certain codes, and knowing these codes allows us to make sense of behaviour. Knowing these codes, and hence knowing how to interpret (and mimic) behaviour allows us to be part of a group. Such codes pertain to language as well as clothes, attitudes as well as appearances. Cultures, indeed, differ from each other because of the different meanings that they give to appearances, behaviour, or objects. A dress may look the same but mean something subtly different in different cultures. Meanings thus vary across cultures but also across time, ranging from word meanings to the changing cultural connotations of concepts like ‘primitive,’ ‘feminine,’ or ‘masculine.’ What was considered ‘primitive’ in colonial societies is now seen as a racism reflecting on those regarding others as primitive. Meaning can thus be individual and collective, but also culturally as well as historically contingent. This chapter taps into the dynamic between individual and
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collective meaning-making in the interpretation of texts. It gives an overview of theories on and approaches to the interpretation of texts which are also applicable to visual and auditory media. To start with, section 7.2 covers hermeneutics (the systematic reflection on problems relating to textual interpretation) from a historical perspective. Hermeneutics has a long lineage – it is as old as the art of mathematics – and in this section we start with a brief overview of some important discoveries and developments from Antiquity to the nineteenth century. Then, in section 7.3 we proceed to the twentieth century, to the contributions made by philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. In section 7.4, we focus on semiology as it was developed by Ferdinand de Saussure and further developed by Roland Barthes in his literary and cultural criticism. In section 7.5, we move to deconstruction ( Jacques Derrida) and the reading strategies deconstruction has enabled in more recent currents of literary criticism. As we will see, different schools of interpretation and critical reading exist side by side in literary studies.
7.2
exegesis allegoresis
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The work of interpretation: Allegoresis and hermeneutics
The Greek god Hermes was, among others, the messenger of the gods. With his famous flying shoes, he traveled between the gods and mortals: he transmitted the words of the gods to those on earth. (It should be noted that Hermes was not entirely dependable as a messenger, because he also spread lies. Indeed, deceitfulness was part of Hermes’ other roles: he was the god of trade as well as of rhetoric.) Mainly because of his mythological role as envoy of the gods, and the escort of dead souls to the underworld, his name became attached to the interpretation of stories. As we will see, for the Greeks, and later for the Church fathers, interpretation meant uncovering the hidden, spiritual meaning of valued or sacred stories and texts. As a mediator between the world that we can see and know, and a world of gods inaccessible to us, Hermes was therefore a name well chosen to represent the art of interpretation. As such an art, hermeneutics goes back thousands of years and has had different applications, ranging from the interpretation of dreams, oracles (think of King Oedipus – discussed in Chapter 4 – and the oracle of Delphi), the stars, and myths, to the law, the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, and other holy books. The interpretation of literature leads back at least to the exegesis (the explication of texts) of the epics ascribed to Homer in Greek Antiquity. From around 600 bce, the Greeks used allegoresis as a method to give meaning to Homeric verse – and thus to give meaning to the world around them. Allegoresis contains the term ‘allegory’ and refers
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to uncovering a hidden meaning of words or passages: something has been said, but something different is implied; a figural or spiritual meaning that transcends the word or passage that has been given literally. Thus, allegory is a mode of textual production where a text (usually a narrative) is used as a vehicle to convey something else, while allegoresis is a mode of textual understanding starting from the assumption that a word or passage can be traced beyond itself to a ‘higher’ meaning. The traditional task of the interpreter in allegoresis has therefore been since long – from Classical Antiquity through to the Renaissance – to mediate the space between vehicle (the literal word) and meaning.
From God and the Jewish people to love poetry: Song of Solomon Apart from Homeric allegoresis, allegorical logic was used in Jewish and, later, Christian exegeses. Such logic presupposed a divine meaning in sacred texts or – as in rabbinic interpretation (called the midrash, see for this Chapter 6) – held that such meaning could be distilled from the relations between different sacred texts. While Christian exegetes would base themselves on the method of Homeric allegoresis (the common form of interpretation in the classical world) they nevertheless tended to discard the Greek epics as texts valuable for interpretation. Therefore, with the expansion of Christianity, allegoresis as a method was exclusively systematised for biblical texts. Sometimes, however, interpreting these holy texts proved complicated. Certain passages seemed incomprehensible and even inappropriate to their interpreters. The following passage from Song of Solomon (Shir Hashirim, Song of Songs or‘the best song,’ Solomon’s ultimate song), 2:3, offers a classic example: As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.(kjv)
There is an erotic charge to this passage in which a young woman sings the pleasures of a masculine body through the image of the apple tree. (Note that the Hebrew tapuach is taken to mean apricot rather than apple by some commentators, or quince, citron, or orange.) Early interpreters of the Song of Solomon may have been uncomfortable with this charge. They took the seemingly sensual text as the carrier (one could say: the cover) of another, spiritual meaning. As Barry Dov Walfish (b.1952) has argued, ‘probably sometime in the late Second Temple period, it [Song of Solomon] began to acquire an allegorical meaning, as it invited comparison with other passages in the Prophets which described the relationship between God and the Jewish People in terms of marriage and infidelity.’ Only in the Middle Ages did interpreters begin to recognise the Song as a book without obvious religious content (God is indeed never mentioned). This recognition changed the frames of interpretation of the book and passage: it was now also considered in a secular light – for example, as love poetry.
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etymology
The idea that texts have an underlying meaning to be uncovered by means of meticulous interpretive work is as old as the way to Ithaca. Not every text, however, was considered eligible for such work. Homeric verse, the written and oral Torah, the Bible: only those texts that were seen as the basis of a shared culture and/or of exclusive religious value – canonical texts – deserved the allegorical method. Such allegoric interpretations could sometimes seem puzzling and strange. Interpreters would hit on other meanings than a text appeared to allow for at first sight. The confusion was due to the fact that they used the science of etymology, as interpreters did not take current meanings of words in texts for granted. They took a long-term view and developed methods to retrace the origin of words and their changing meanings throughout history. These older meanings were taken as the starting point of interpretative work. Etymology and allegoresis were therefore often used in tandem. Today, etymology is still a common part of interpretation, while poets themselves have often liked to toy with the archaic meanings of words in textual surfaces. John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667) is a case in point. Milton’s creative use of words originating in Anglo-Saxon, Romance languages, ancient Greek, and Latin (the ancestral languages of English) made him an object of scorn for critics like Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) and, much later, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). Milton himself, however, justifiably saw that words have histories and that they carry these histories with them in presentday language – even, or especially, when we are not aware of them.
Etymology and the interpretation of historical texts In historically oriented text criticism or philology, scholars investigate how texts can be dated, which version is the authentic one, and how the meanings of the words in a text can be historically contextualised. This is especially important when encountering elements of meanings that no longer fit the way we look at the world or that have otherwise become incomprehensible to us. Here, we offer an example of such a case from medieval literature. The Middle Dutch text Lancelot (created around 1280 and notated around 1320 in the Lancelot Compilation) describes a scene in which Lancelot is poisoned. It is a very hot day, and Lancelot is boiling in his armour so he drinks abundantly from a cool well that he encounters on the way. Bystanders see how he immediately falls into a faint while two snakes emerge from the well. They presume the snakes must have poisoned the well. Meanwhile, a lady has fallen in love with the handsome knight. In a meadow close to the well she starts looking for medicinal herbs. She finds them and grinds them down with the knob of Lancelot’s sword. She adds a counterpoison and mixes everything into a
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drink that she administers to him. The whole point of the treatment is that Lancelot will start sweating badly underneath a stack of blankets and thus rid himself of the poison. The next day, the lady can proudly tell her brother that the knight will be up and running within a week or two. How did this story make sense to people in the Middle Ages? A medieval manuscript kept in the library of Middelburg in the province of Zeeland (number 6353) in the Netherlands contains a number of recipes for antidotes to snake poisoning. The manuscript is difficult to read but describes what to do when someone has digested poison: take the herb centaury, triturate it and give the juice to the patient. This compares nicely to what the lady in the Lancelot story did. Jacob van Maerlant (ca. 1230-ca. 1296) also reported in his Flowers of Nature (Der naturen bloeme, ca. 1280) that centaury makes one sweat profusely. Could it be that the lady had found ‘centaury’ and used it to cure Lancelot? We will never know for sure, because the text only uses the Dutch word crude (‘herb’) while the French source text uses the general term herbes. However, this information about the medical uses of centaury does make Lancelot’s healing more understandable and even feasible. We now see why the lady does what she does and why the story tells what it tells.
The ancient Greeks, the rabbis, and early Christians were well aware that textual meaning never existed as such, like an unchanging core contained within itself. Instead, the meaning of a text needed to be seen in relation to other texts. At the same time, the meaning of words in a text was not just to be traced etymologically to older meanings. Such meaning should also be considered in the context of the text as a whole. Only in the interaction between parts and whole – words and passages, passages and text, text and words, words and their multiple, older meanings, texts and other texts – could an interpreter do justice to allegorical meaning. Thus, St. Augustine, known for his Confessions, stated in De doctrina Christiana (396-397 and 427 ce) that obscure passages in the Bible were to be interpreted in the context of ‘the spirit of the Bible as a whole.’ Only then could their allegorical meaning be assessed. Later, in modern hermeneutics such negotiating between parts and whole would be known as the hermeneutic circle: a cycle interpreters need to go through to fully ascertain the meaning of a text. In the nineteenth century, German philosophers Friedrich Ast (17781841) and (in response to Ast) Friedrich Schleiermacher (1764-1834) defined the hermeneutic circle as follows: interpretation is a process that involves reading the parts of a text in the light of the text as a whole, and the text as a whole in the light of its different parts. Meaning is the provisional outcome of a reciprocal process: interpreters move in spirals
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divination
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from details (words and passages) to an assumed overarching idea, and in turn adjust the meaning of that principle or idea to the interpretation of the details. Ast developed the idea of a hermeneutic circle to uncover a general, spiritual meaning in classical texts for the benefit of the present: What could be gleaned and learned in the present from the distant past? His method was aimed at literary texts from Antiquity that together might reveal something about a Greek Geist (which would translate as a combination of spirit, spiritual guide, and inner form). The classical allegorical method is still present here. For nineteenth-century hermeneutics did not just aim for a ‘dry’ explication of words or grammatical analyses. Yes, its method was philological – retrieving the original meaning of words, comparing, analysing grammatical rules – and to that extent concerned with textual minutiae and grammatical analyses. But hermeneutics was also about something bigger: about catching the spirit of the age and unravelling the spirit and genius of individual classical authors. Schleiermacher, not Ast, would later be identified as the founding father of modern hermeneutics in the humanities. Schleiermacher deliberated on a theory of interpretation that was designed for biblical explication but also seemed suitable for literary texts and their individual authors. Schleiermacher’s method was philological – see above and Chapter 1 – but it was also ‘psychological.’ Psychological for Schleiermacher meant little more than a meticulous process of divination that deduced insights from empirical material (texts, words, style) on the basis of a preliminary hypothesis. Divination here is tantamount to an insight into what is hidden: an informed intuition or feeling. For a long time, divination was a central component of hermeneutics: delving into the veiled intentions of authors long dead. As Schleiermacher put it, by ‘leading the interpreter to transform himself, so to speak, into the author, the divinatory method seeks to gain an immediate comprehension of the author as individual.’ To this end, the interpreter had to be thoroughly familiar with the world of the author: with his or her life and the times and culture s/he lived in, what s/he had read and been inspired by. The interpreter thus related to the author as an individual might relate to an individual: s/he could uncover the possibility of a common ground between past and present. At once explication and divination, interpretation for Schleiermacher therefore contained two components: ● A comparative, philological side that traced the meaning of words, the rules for their usage, and their changing meaning over time ● A distinctive, psychological side which required the interpreter to take an educated and informed guess into the experiential world of the author to assess the particular usage and meaning of words in a specific text
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These two aspects of interpretive work together sustained the dynamic of the hermeneutic circle: the interaction between parts and whole, individuality and universality, the rules of the game of language and how these rules were applied and bent in literature.
Preparing a performance Hermeneutics, we have just seen, has a philological and a psychological component: it traces the original meaning and usage of words, and it tries to uncover the intentions of an author long dead. In the following, we present a sample interpretation integrating these two components. To illustrate the broad range and relevance of hermeneutics in the humanities, we focus on a piece of nineteenth-century music. This example will show that hermeneutics is not just relevant in academic but also in artistic work: it helps us to develop strategies for a performance, and make the best rendering possible. In applying Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic method to music, however, we will not be concerned with the original meaning and usage of words, but with the meaning and usage of musical notes and the versions of a score. A professional pianist is preparing a performance of Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 3 by Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849):
Figure 7.1: Frédéric Chopin, Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 3 (1882).
The pianist knows that the performance will be judged on grounds of creativity but also on details concerning technical and historical accuracy. Observing such details easily distinguishes professional from amateur players. These details typically concern: ● Interpretive indications in the score ● Performative and interpretive practices handed down from one student/teacher to another ● (Historical and stylistic) conventions of the genre As Schleiermacher indicated, intuition – the divination of the experiential world of the author (in this case, the composer) – is only made possible through the meticulous work
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of explication. Here, explication will centre on this set of three aspects: indications in the score, performative and interpretive practices, and conventions of the genre: 1. Interpretive indications in the score. A pianist interprets the score with regards to tempo, dynamics (loud and soft, playing from soft to loud – called a crescendo – or loud to soft – a decrescendo), ornamentation, accents, and other important indications. This score indicates allegretto, which means: light, graceful, and moderately fast. To make sure these are the indications Chopin noted, a historically accurate score is necessary: the interpreter would want a copy of the original score. In this case, the Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 3, is known to have first been published in 1833 – shortly after Chopin arrived in Paris – as one of three Nocturnes Opus 9. It came out in tandem with three Nocturnes Opus 15. The first editions appeared with M. Schlesinger in French, Kistner in German, and Wessel & Co. in English. It may well be that these three editions differ amongst each other. But what is more important, and complicating: we know from accounts of Chopin’s students that during lessons the composer would insert new ornamentations or improvements and fingerings in the scores of his students. So what would now be the original score? Apparently, Chopin himself approached his work pedagogically as an ongoing process rather than an entity fixed in print. Knowing this, the original score may have been created multiple times with minor variations, whenever Chopin found it necessary. This in itself is important information: it tells us something about the central significance of sound, listening, and improvisation to Chopin as a player and composer. However, this information also complicates the requirement of historical accuracy: the interpreter might now be at a loss which score to consider – the first publication, or, say, one of the scores of Chopin’s pupils. What to do? Supposing annotated scores of the Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 3, that were used by Chopin’s pupils would have been kept and stored in musical archives, the interpreter could now start comparing these different scores. Luckily, Chopin’s famous student and editor Karol Mikuli (18211897) did the work of comparison and provided editions that integrated the input Chopin gave to his students. These editions (1871, Kistner) would form the basis for the twentieth-century Dover publications. The musical performance is therefore ideally based on this publication. 2. Performative and interpretive practices. Does the interpreter know enough on the basis of Mikuli’s edited score? For a stunning and convincing performance, the interpreter might need a little more information. Chopin was a dedicated and innovative teacher and player. Interestingly, the legacy of his teaching and playing was preserved in hand-me-down fashion. Thus Mikuli, who also was Chopin’s teaching assistant, became the teacher of Moriz Rosenthal (1862-1946). Among Rosenthal’s students were the mother of Mieczyslaw Horzsowski (1892-1993), the widely recorded Polish-American pianist, and the American scholar-pianist Charles Rosen (1927-2012), who has written extensively about Chopin in The Romantic Generation. Writings and recordings by these students will inform the interpretation. There is, however,
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a complication here. Firstly, historical sources contradict each other, based as they are on records of students, listeners, and players who have each listened to Chopin the teacher and the player in their own way. Secondly, the lineage from Chopin, Mikuli, Rosenthal, and Rosen to the present is long and includes many changes to the piano as an instrument, in performance practices and acoustics, the interpretation of musical indications, and ...the listener! This long lineage complicates the possibility of a common ground between past and present. Our performer will therefore do well to also consult the discography of the Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 3, and listen to other renderings of it – descending from other pedagogical lineages – as a ground for comparison. 3. Conventions of the genre. Thirdly, the interpreter would have to study the genre of the Nocturne and its conventions, and how Chopin treats them stylistically. As is well known, Chopin derived the Nocturne from the Irish composer John Field (17821837), who is said to have invented it as a stand-alone musical form. A detailed comparative study of the nocturnes by Field and Chopin generates historical and stylistic insights. This information helps the interpreter to assess the weight and inventiveness of the Nocturne, and to develop an interpretation that pays heed to the deviations as well as conventions of its genre. The interpreter now knows more than enough to start playing, and to give her own imaginative rendering of the Nocturne. For as Chopin’s students knew, there was nothing the composer despised more than a performer simply and arduously copying his own playing. Every new interpretation would therefore ideally reveal something new, or unheard of, in and about his music.
Nineteenth-century hermeneutics was typically focused on the singular: on specific works, written by specific authors in a particular historical context, and how these works generated meaning. A focus on the singular entails an academic attitude that is concerned not with the application of general rules to generate definite answers but with opening up pathways to meaning. Schleiermacher emphasised that every interpretation, being focused on a particular instance, and interpreted in a specific historical situation, produces meaning only approximately through the hermeneutic circle. Interpreters can, however, become ever better and more exhaustive at what they do, reaching more insight and understanding. This is, indeed, the task of the interpreter: to work through the hermeneutic circle again and again so as to do more and more justice to the text(s) at hand. Schleiermacher’s emphasis on approximation thus did not signal a facile attitude but rather an awareness that there is still always work to be done. Hermeneutic practice is potentially never-ending. Not coincidentally, such a conclusion fits the Romantic era (see Chapter 4, Romantic irony).
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Ink blotting, fragments, and infinity Philosophers, artists and composers of the Romantic era became fascinated with fragments: with ideas, objects, or images that seemed unfinished, broken, suggestive and in that sense infinite, giving the imagination free reign. Philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), for instance, wrote in the late 1750s that in ‘unfinished sketches or drawing, I have often seen something which pleased me beyond the best finishing [...] because the imagination is entertained with the promise of something more.’ Knowingly or unknowingly, the painter Alexander Cozens (1717-1786) illustrated Burke’s point. In his New Method for Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785) he taught his students an unusual technique known as ink blotting to capture scenes from nature as raw material. Instead of copying such scenes meticulously, Cozens advocated an instantaneous technique. First, the student was to conceive of a general subject in the imagination. Then, s/he had to dab a mixture of water and ink on a piece of paper with a camel’s hair brush – in all sorts of directions. The student started from that first gesture, working it into a landscape composition. Something suggestive or indeterminate would remain in that composition: a reminder that the forms of nature are open, not closed and delineated.
Figure 7.2: Alexander Cozens, from New Method for Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785). © Tate, London 2019.
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In eighteenth-century aesthetics, the idea of suggestiveness and the fragment gained increasing popularity because artists and philosophers became fascinated with the creative power of the imagination (as Burke wrote: the imagination entertained ‘with the promise of something more’). Eventually, in Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century, the fragmentary became a symbol of the infinite: of potentially infinite meaning. As the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) put it in his ‘Defence of Poetry’ (1821), his famous essay on the meaning of poetry in the world: ‘All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.’ What is infinite can continue to grow forever, as it is never completed. Thus, the meaning of a good poem can never be entirely revealed, since such a poem has the potential to be inexhaustible semantically. Its meaning is not fixed, but overflows: generation after generation can be inspired by it and open up new dimensions to it, as new insights and relations can be established. Shelley here describes literary meaning in terms of divine affluence: it is boundless and cannot be contained. To the extent that Schleiermacher wants to open up pathways of meaning, and sees these pathways to be necessarily provisional, hermeneutics connects to Shelley’s Romantic idea of literary meaning as infinite potentiality. Indeed, we can also connect this notion of infinite potentiality to the concept of différance to be discussed later in this chapter. This concept, we will see, revolves around the infinite deferral of fixed or ‘definite’ meaning.
Nineteenth-century hermeneutics, with its focus on thorough historical contextualisation on the one hand, and divination, on the other, would fork into two different directions in the twentieth century. One direction is called objective hermeneutics.* It was developed by theorists like E.D. Hirsch (b.1928) in the 1960s to provide scientifically and historically informed validations for interpretation. Hirsch defended the possibility of establishing meanings intended by an author on objective grounds. As he believed, ‘the aim of the discipline must be to reach a consensus, on the basis of what is known, that correct understanding has probably been achieved. The issue is not whether certainty is accessible to the interpreter but whether the author’s intended meaning is accessible to him.’ Authorial intent is then retained as a norm for valid interpretation, although authors may not always be conscious of the (full scope of the) meanings their texts generate or of the influences to which they have been exposed. Some authors are quite open about their blind spots in writing, about the meanings and influences that are somehow ‘there’ in their texts without them having consciously ‘put’ them there. An amusing instance is given by the Italian author and semiotician Umberto Eco (1932-2016): ‘I have read critical analyses [of my novel The Name of the Rose] in which the interpreter discovered influences that I didn’t think of when I was
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writing but that I had certainly read in my youth; clearly, I had been unconsciously influenced by them.’ For some modern theorists, it follows that interpretation therefore entails more than retrieving meaning(s) an author once conveyed: it entails developing an understanding that even exceeds the author’s self-understanding through grammatical, psychological, and historical research. Hirsch, however, stuck to the idea that an author’s meaning is reproducible: as s/he had intended it. Therefore, he upheld a distinction between meaning and significance in interpretation. Based on the German concepts Sinn and Bedeutung, he defined meaning as a fixed and identifiable core, while significance he considered fluid and changeable over time, created in the eyes of different readers. Many critics have, however, argued that a hard and fast distinction between the two phenomena is untenable. The second direction that nineteenth-century hermeneutics took was towards rethinking the conditions of possibility of interpretation. It was not the intention of the author, but the position of the interpreter in relation to the text which became the prime focus of a twentieth-century hermeneutics that can be traced to philosophers Edmund Husserl (18591938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and Heidegger’s student HansGeorg Gadamer. In the next section, Gadamer’s dialogic hermeneutics* will be discussed in detail. In contrast to Hirsch, Gadamer took the path of interaction: meaning was the outcome of a negotiation or dialogue between a text and its reader. In conclusion, it can be stated that: ● Interpreting songs, poems, stories, and written texts has a legacy of over 3,000 years. ● Interpretation was first practiced as a form of allegorical logic in Homeric times: a (spiritual) meaning beyond the physical presence of words was to be unravelled. The idea of spiritual meaning also became particularly important in rabbinic and biblical interpretation. ● Interpretation evolved into text explication over the centuries, an activity that involved tracing the historical, and possibly original, meanings of words (etymology), the relation between such meanings and the text as a whole, as well as between texts. ● (Literary) meaning thus came to be seen as the provisional outcome of the constant interaction between parts and whole. ● Such reciprocity came to be known as the hermeneutic circle in nineteenth-century hermeneutics (in elaboration of theories from the eighteenth century and earlier). ● The hermeneutic circle was not only used to understand the spirit or genius of an author but also the spirit of historical periods. ● However, this was such a daunting and complex task that the hermeneutic circle could only yield meaning by approximation.
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Hermeneutics branched off in different directions in the twentieth century: an objective branch that claimed meaning was permanent and identifiable in the text and, as we will see in the following section, a dialogic branch that claimed meaning was dynamic.
7.3
Dialogic hermeneutics
In the late nineteenth century, Wilhelm Dilthey (already encountered in Chapter 1) extended hermeneutics to the entire field of history and historical understanding. In the twentieth century, hermeneutics extended its reach even further. Gadamer, as a student of Heidegger, claimed that interpretation was to be understood not just as an academic activity but a ‘mode of being of human life itself.’ That is to say, Gadamer believed that the kind of understanding propagated by hermeneutics in the nineteenth century was an act or happening that we perform every day, time and again, in the lives that we lead and the experiences that we have. We project meanings onto people, behaviour, and events just as we project meaning onto texts. However, we have to learn that these projected meanings may be false, that people or events may resist such meanings, and that we may therefore need to revise our position, accepting the alterity or difference (Andersheit) of these people or events. Ideally, texts are approached in a similar way: in the manner of a dialogue rather than a monologue issuing from the interpreter’s perspective. As Gadamer puts it: ‘a person trying to understand a text must be prepared to be told something by the text. That is why a hermeneutically trained person must, from the outset, be sensitive and receptive to the text’s alterity or difference (Andersheit).’ Interpreters pose questions to texts, thus already staging their meanings, but texts also pose questions to their readers. For instance, they ask readers to pause and reflect on a word that may have meant something entirely different centuries ago, or to consider their historical context that may be distinct from the interpreter’s point of reference. Negotiating the space between these questions to reach a common understanding is the task of the interpreter. Hermeneutics in Gadamer ’s work Truth and Method (1960) is dialogic in its pursuit of a common understanding: it revolves around questions and responses, and what the dynamic between them can bring about. In this dialogic perspective, ‘recovering’ a meaning somehow intact in a historical text is problematic. The text addresses itself to an interpreter who no longer has access to the time in which the text was written. S/he inevitably has a different outlook on the world, and a different frame of reference. Between the interpreter and the text there is thus an invisible wall built up of cultural-historical values, traditions,
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horizon
fusion of horizons
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knowledge, and conventions. These, for Gadamer, make up the kind of prejudgements that condition the way we relate to the world. We are not always aware of them, but they are nevertheless there: the presuppositions, postures, and experiences formed within a culture, shaping our perceptions and ideas. Prejudgements (Vorurteile), it should be stressed, enable us to make sense of the world, and that is a good thing. Prejudgements should thus be seen as a necessary prestructuring that facilitates perception, feeling, reading, and understanding. Gadamer’s central point, however, was that a good interpreter knows that s/he has these prejudgements and is constantly open to adjusting them. This keeps conversations going. To summarise: because we live within a certain cultural-historical tradition, we can never stand apart from that tradition so as to study it with a neutral mind. But we can try. Thus, caught in the horizon of our own time and culture we may never be able to escape the prejudgements and projections that have shaped our perceptual and cognitive dealings with the world or the insights we have gained and the values we uphold. This is why interpreters from different times and cultures inevitably project varying meanings onto the same text: they make sense of the text from within their own horizons. Differences in interpretation thus also tell us something about the outlook of different historical periods. Nevertheless, Gadamer believed that the task of interpreters was to be open to shifting one’s horizon by scrutinising one’s own position. They could do this by consulting historical sources, comparing different readings of the text under scrutiny, or considering its impact on contemporary readers. In the process, they could discover that despite a text’s strangeness, there was also something familiar about it that allowed us to connect to it. For Gadamer, the space of hermeneutics is between strangeness and familiarity: in the negotiation between what is other and what is one’s own. He also refers to the outcome of this negotiation as the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung): the anticipation of meaning on the part of interpreters (conditioned by their horizon) fuses with the historical horizon of the text that speaks back to them. The interpreter tries to participate in that other outlook. This does not mean that he or she is recapturing an original meaning. It does mean that text and interpreter share a point of view. From that sharing, interpreters gain novel insights that trigger a transformation of their expectations. To do hermeneutic work is thus to openly admit to having expectations and prejudgements by outlining one’s interpretive perspective: one’s particular take on a text. The interpreter explicitly mentions the frame or vantage point from which he or she assigns meaning to a text. This could be a philosophical, historical, or psychological frame. In this way,
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interpreters acknowledge from the outset that meaning cannot be retrieved objectively but is always framed within a specific perspective or outlook. At the same time, they show just as openly how that frame can be tested through critical self-reflection and meticulous textual and historical research. Thus, in the example presented in the text box above, the interpreter of Chopin’s Nocturne, Opus 9, No. 3, could become aware of her current perspective as a perspective in the first place by delving into the point of view of Chopin’s students and contemporary listeners and critics. She could see how the score had changed along the way, which indications Chopin had given to his students, and the conditions of the instrument (a Pleyel piano) Chopin had used to teach and perform. For her present-day performance she could choose a nineteenth-century Pleyel grand piano to acknowledge her place in the tradition, thus framing her performance as a historical performance. However, by placing that instrument in a modern concert hall she also recognises the alterity of the past: acoustics and listening practices have changed so much that the sound of the past cannot be recaptured. Her historical performance is at the same time a contemporary performance. We now reach the following conclusions to this section. Dialogic hermeneutics: ● Starts from a fundamental difference between the present and the past, between the position of the interpreter and the position of the literary text. ● Specifies this difference as the horizon of the interpreter, the history of interpretations through which the interpreter will have acknowledged herself with a text, and the anticipations of meaning she will have with respect to that text. ● But recognises the historical specificity of the text and the points of view it can offer the interpreter through a fusion of horizons: a meeting space between the interpreter’s situation and the text that can alter, adjust, or even improve the outlook of that interpreter. ● Nevertheless holds that any fundamental difference between the interpreter and the text always obliges the interpreter to initiate a dialogue that invites her to share the point of view of another – on the basis of meticulous research and through critical self-awareness or the questioning of one’s own expectations. ● Obliges interpreters to openly formulate their position and expectations by explicitly laying out the interpretive frames that define their critical vantage point, so that readers can see and understand where their questions, and answers, are coming from.
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7.4
signifier signified
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Signs and signification: A semiological perspective
As we have seen in the preceding sections, hermeneutics has been traditionally directed towards negotiation and communication: between gods and mortals, present and past, authors and readers, texts and interpreters. However, in the course of the twentieth century a different approach to reading and signification was developed with a different starting point: structuralism* and, in its wake, poststructuralism.* In Chapter 3, we saw how in the 1960s texts were no longer considered the expression of a unique, creative spirit. This view was developed within the framework of a French structuralism advocated by Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. In their view texts were seen as nodes in a network of other texts and sign systems, their meaning generated within this network, not by an outside agent (the author). Indeed, we have seen, literary texts were regarded as functions of a linguistic system (compare langue and parole in Chapter 3). What were the consequences of these new perspectives for the interpretation of literary texts? Was the term ‘interpretation’ even still applicable? Which strategies of critical reading were developed through these perspectives? In this and the following section we try to answer these questions, without, however, creating the impression that these strategies of reading superseded hermeneutics. Instead, they were developed alongside hermeneutic traditions and sometimes even fused with them. This section focuses on signs and how signs signify, i.e. produce meaning. The study of signs, we saw in Chapter 3, is called semiotics.* Like hermeneutics, semiotics dates back to Antiquity. It lies beyond the scope and aim of this chapter to give a full overview of the study of signs. Instead, this section is confined to semiology* (the study of signs and meanings) as developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, already discussed in Chapter 3. This section also shows how Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes have critically elaborated on this semiology. It formed the starting point for reading strategies that no longer included the figure of the author-as-anchor in the interpretive conversation. A brief overview of Saussure’s theory is presented here: 1. What does a sign consist of? A sign, according to Saussure, consists of two components: a medium or signifier and a concept or signified. For instance, the symbol ♥ is the medium (the signifier) of the concept ‘love’ (the signified). We can communicate the idea ‘love’ through the symbol ♥. This example shows that a signifier is something we can perceive (a heart-shaped image), while the signified is an idea or a mental concept (the abstract idea of ‘love’). The idea ‘love’ can, however, also be communicated through the word /love/, which we can hear (when
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spoken) or see (when written). This perceptible part of a word Saussure calls a sound-image. The signified is the idea ‘love’ connected to the sound-image /love/. The two aspects of the sign, we have observed in Chapter 3, are inextricably intertwined as the one calls forth the other. 2. How does a sign function? Signification occurs when a sound-image (any sound-image) is connected to a concept. As we have seen in Chapter 3, there is an originally arbitrary but ultimately codified relation between signifier and signified. Sound-images are therefore potentially empty before being connected to a concept: in principle, any sound can be connected to a concept. (This is very easy to recognise in metaphors: any vehicle can be coupled to a subject.) In principle anything could become the signifier of something else, as long as a sound-image is related to a concept in a specific context. 3. How is the identity of signs construed? The relation between signifiers and the concepts they signify is conditioned by linguistic and cultural conventions, as we saw in Chapter 3. Still, this does not fully explain how precisely the identity of signs is determined. Yes, the fact that we use the signifier /dog/ for an animal with four legs that can bark, rather than /horse/, is a matter of conventions. This still does not explain, however, how the word image ‘dog’ becomes meaningful as a sign in contrast to ‘horse.’ A simple but surprising answer to this question was provided by the poststructuralist theory developed in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie; 1967). In a rereading of Saussure’s semiology, and with a little help from the American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), Derrida proposed a different perspective on what determines a sign. He claimed that the identity of signs was determined by the relations and differences between signifiers. Consider, for instance, the following sound-images: /bench/, /trench/, /wrench/. Apparently, it is merely the difference in sound that distinguishes the three signifiers. These signifiers (sound-images) are inextricably linked to concepts: they are two sides of the same coin. This means that a change in the signifier inevitably brings about changes in the concept. When someone says ‘and a wrench was used to mend a bench in the trench,’ one knows on the basis of the specific sound-images that in the first instance it concerns a tool, in the second something to sit on, and in the third an excavation in the ground that was typically part of wwi battlefields. Seen in this light, the difference between sound-images (the shift from /w/ to /b/ to /t/) enables different signifieds. These differences appear arbitrary, but they – and not the signifieds – determine the meaning
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of a sign. This new take on how signs worked was illustrative of Derrida’s idea that difference, not identity, is fundamental in meaning-making.
denotation connotation
Considered in this differential light, signification works on the basis of signs (that operate on the basis of codes and conventions) and through a system of differences where signifiers are all-determining. Meaning in Derrida’s view is determined by the relations and differences between signifiers, not by the concepts to which these signifiers are attached. While Derrida reworked Saussure’s semiology to interrogate the philosophical notion of identity, Barthes elaborated on Saussure’s idea of signs and signifieds to make sense of phenomena in everyday life. To this extent, he further developed the (allegorical) idea that signs operate on roughly two levels in the process of signification: the level of denotation and of connotation. The first concerns a literal or normative level of signification, the second a hidden, secondary, social-cultural association with a word, object, or image. Denotation therefore refers to things or images as they occur (for instance, water as a fluid substance) while connotation refers to the hidden value or meaning related to things as they occur (for instance, water as a religious symbol of purification and rebirth). In his Mythologies (1957), Barthes explained that on the level of connotation it may thus happen that signs, in a new context of signification, in turn become signifiers to which a concept is attached. This is a second level of signification.A French poster with a glass of red wine did not just refer to a glass filled with red wine, according to Barthes, but (on the level of connotation) to a French identity that was construed in close connection to the idea of ‘wine’ as a national product. Many commercials involve powerful connotative elements. Images of products (like coffee or detergents) obtain an extra level of signification through the emotions or ideas related to them. These attachments confirm that signs always respond to the context in which they appear and from which they derive their value. We explain this second level in more detail below, in respect to Barthes’ unique application of the denotation/connotation pair to the workings of both verbal and nonverbal signs. In conclusion, it can be stated that: ● According to Saussure, a sign is the sum of a sound-image (signifier) and a concept (signified), and: ● The relation between signifier and signified in a sign is conventional, so that the relation between signs and things is not ‘naturally’ motivated: signs form a system in itself.
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According to Derrida, the signifier materialises the signified: signs are determined by differences between signifiers, not primarily by concepts attached to these signifiers. According to Barthes, signs starts functioning in a specific context as signifiers of new concepts, so that a distinction can be made on the level of signification between denotation and connotation.
Denotation and connotation: Golden retrievers and British chic The sign ‘golden retriever’ consists of the signifier /golden retriever/ and the signified of a yellow or golden, longhair dog with four legs and brown eyes. Golden Retrievers are generally kind and enthusiastic, and used as hunting dogs for retrieving shot game. The identification of the sign with such a dog is signification on the level of denotation. On the level of connotation, however, we can do more. Since the 1980s and 1990s, the Golden Retriever started to function as a sign of cultural distinction in the Netherlands: the dog came to signify ideas like ‘chic’ and ‘sporty,’ connected to people with Burberry trench coats and expensive cars who liked to wander around on hockey fields, golf courses, or better still, on hunting grounds. In this way, they tried to mimic an idea of presumed ‘British chic’ imported to the Netherlands through images, films, and tv shows. Within this context, the sign ‘Golden Retriever’ received an extra level of signification: this sign in turn became the signifier that – in tandem with the concept ‘British chic’ – functioned as a secondary or derived sign. The meaning of this second sign is like a hidden meaning unveiled by (what Barthes calls) the mythologist or cultural analyst who is able to uncover ruling codes (both visible and invisible) in a period or culture.
Signifier
Concept
Denotative sign Connotative sign
Connotative signified
Diagram 7.1: Denotation and connotation.
Connotative sign
Golden Retriever (1)
Yellow-retriever-gun dog
Golden Retriever (1) + Yellow-retriever-gun dog Golden Retriever (2)
‘British’ chic
Golden Retriever (2) + ‘British’ chic
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In the 1960s and 1970s, these poststructuralist insights were used to critically interrogate philosophical and literary texts. These interrogations will be the topic of the next section.
7.5
semantic undecidability différance
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Word, after word, after word: Différance and deconstruction
In Derrida’s reworking of Saussure, we have seen, difference is elemental. This insight has had a significant impact on the practice of literary interpretation. To recall Derrida, meaning is produced through the difference between signifiers in their immediate, discursive context (a book, a chapter, a section, a sentence, part of a sentence in which words are placed together). This insight renders meaning very unstable. The meaning of words cannot be determined because such meaning skips and changes with their context of appearance. This is called semantic undecidability. Derrida captured the mobility of signification in the concept of différance: the difference between signifiers, of which signification is the effect, and the constant deferral of meaning in language because of this fundamental difference. Why such deferral? As language users, Derrida claimed, we can never really move beyond the surface structure of language, of words. The reason for this is that the meaning of words can only be expressed and understood through other words. Take the dictionary: one looks for the meaning of a word, and all one finds is other words (sound-images). A word can only be designated by other words, and these in turn by means of yet other words: word after word after word after word. One can never get past the horizon of signifiers. They refer only to each other in an endless chain. This means one thus never reaches the concept (the signified, signified) ‘in itself ’: signification is the signifier; or, in Derrida’s words, ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (‘there is no outside-text’). What does this endless deferral mean for literary analysis? A text for Derrida is something dynamic, in flux: meanings are not locked or stacked inside it, waiting to be uncovered, but shift with the immediate context of appearance of words in that text (other words, and the many different (older) meanings attached to them, sentences, paragraphs), with the presence of intertexts, or with a reader working on the text. Derrida was interested in writing: the written text conceived as something independent from speech or thought, playing out meanings rather than such meanings being attached to an author ‘before’ the text. Privileging writing is typical of poststructuralism.* In Chapter 3 we already saw that Barthes developed a comparable position, privileging the text, not the author, and working from the question how texts produce meaning in practice rather than what authors might have wanted them to mean.
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Derrida’s insights into the dynamics of meaning as differential initiated new interpretive strategies in the 1970s. Such strategies presented themselves not as interpretations in the hermeneutic sense, but as interventions of the reader in the differential system of a text. Three aspects of these reading strategies now known as deconstruction will be enumerated here (in random order). Since these aspects are highly abstract, we have provided an example for each of them to illustrate the point. 1. Because differences between signifiers generate different signifieds, critics starting from Derrida’s theories no longer look for meanings ‘behind’ a text. Instead, they focus on the effect of shifts in sounds, or sonic associations (alliteration), word games, and other aspects relating to the materiality of the signifier: the material surface of a text, not a presence outside of it.
Derridean approaches to William Wordsworth’s Lucy poems: Material shifts in meaning This example illustrates the ways in which American deconstructive criticism (see deconstruction*) sought to depart from previous schools of criticism in their treatment of literary meaning. The example revolves around a poem by William Wordsworth that has been approached by these previous schools and deconstructive critics respectively. The latter precisely focus on the material surface of the text, rather than on historical contexts or authorial intentions. In 1799, Wordsworth wrote five poems known as the Lucy Poems. One of them is entitled ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’: A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.
In twentieth-century American literary criticism, this poem has been interpreted in different ways. Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994), a proponent of New Criticism,* zoomed in on what he saw as a horrible image of death, a loved one’s lack of motion. This image
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appeared without reconciliation: ‘[Lucy] is caught helplessly into the empty whirl of the earth which measures and makes time. She is touched by and held by earthly time in its most powerful and horrible image.’ On the other hand, F.W. Bateson (1901-1978) emphasised a sense of comfort emanating from the final image of the poem: The final impression the poem leaves is not of two contrasting moods, but of a single mood mounting to a climax in the pantheistic magnificence of the last two lines. [...] Lucy is actually more alive now that she is dead, because she is now a part of the life of Nature, and not just a human ‘thing.’
E.D. Hirsch – who discussed both interpretations in Validity in Interpretation – asserted that Cleanth Brooks had not taken Wordsworth’s views on nature in the years 1798-1800 into account to validate his interpretation. Had he done so, he would never have been able to hit on the idea of a horrible image of inertness or lifelessness (allegedly captured in the last lines ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees’). Wordsworth, after all, was a pantheist at the time. He considered nature a living, selfperpetuating, and self-invigorating organism; a principle from which all life springs and to which all life returns. Seen in this light, it is a comfort – rather than a horror – for an individual life to be taken up and become part of this all-powerful drive. Hirsch therefore considered Bateson’s interpretation more convincing: he had followed the hermeneutic lead, whereas Cleanth Brooks had only considered the text itself and the images it presented. In the 1970s and 1980s, Yale University became the centre of the so-called Yale Deconstructionists: a group of literary scholars who transformed established practices of interpretation with the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man (1919-1983). As part of this group, Geoffrey Hartman (1929-2016) approached ‘A Slumber’ as writing, focusing on its textual surface. Thus, he detected a number of funerary motives (i.e. motives relating to death and funerals) in the poem. The adjective ‘diurnal’ could be decomposed in ‘die’ and ‘urn,’ while ‘course’ alliterally suggested corpse. Moreover, the fact that the deceased was tossed and turned with the movements of the earth suggested an image of gravitation that includes the word grave. According to a similar logic, the reader might detect another word not explicitly present in the text but intimated nonetheless in ‘fears,’‘years,’ and ‘hears’: tears. We here witness a fluctuating dynamic of alliterative relations between words in praesentia (words mentioned in the text) and in absentia (words implied through alliteration). Hartman used different standards for interpretation. Unlike the New Critics, he did not want to reduce the text to a logical, coherent whole, but to do justice to the (poetic) fact that meanings in Wordsworth’s poem were constantly dispersing and fanning out through unforeseen and apparently chance-like alliterative associations. It could then be concluded in a Gadamerian hermeneutic vein that Hartman’s intervention would become all the more convincing through an explication of his ‘interpretive stance.’ Like Gadamer, but from a different vantage point, Hartman tried to do justice to the alterity of Wordsworth’s poem. However, while Gadamer’s idea of alterity mainly concerns a
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cultural-historical distance, Hartman was concerned with the rich, irreducible alterity of poetic language – how such language cannot be reduced to a stable core of meaning but continues to ‘work’ in the way that wood continues to work in apparently finished products. Alterity is, thus, uncontainability.
2. Because critics, inspired by Derrida’s philosophy of language, no longer started from meaning as a fixed core, they were especially attentive to the ways in which a text contradicted its apparent meaning. The idea was to show that a text contained something like a subconscious that negated or undid what that text appeared to be saying. Such undoings manifested themselves accidentally in textual ‘slips’ on the level of dialogue, but also on the treatment of figural language. Because of this emphasis on textual self-contradiction, critics liked to focus on marginal aspects and apparently contingent details of a text (as Hartman does in the above example).
How texts contradict themselves: Catherine Belsey on Sherlock Holmes This example illustrates the ways in which critics have teased out the ‘subconscious’ of a text: how it (also) says what it does not want to say, or does not say what it wants to say. The example zooms in on Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) and his typically nineteenth-century faith in science and reasoning, and how this faith materialises in his famous creation: the detective Sherlock Holmes. The critic Catherine Belsey (b.1940) analysed one of the Sherlock Holmes stories – ‘The Dancing Men’ from The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904) – and found that one silent character undermined the apparent point of the story to explain all aspects of a mystery by rational means. Many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century detective stories feature the ineluctable power of reason and hard science. The character Hercule Poirot created by Agatha Christie (1890-1976) celebrates ‘the little grey cells,’ while Conan Doyle’s protagonist Sherlock Holmes can solve the most complicated mysteries and murders through the infallible ways of logical deduction and scientific method (‘Elementary, my dear Watson’). What he reveals, he has deduced step by step from apparently insignificant details. Typically, he leaves nothing to chance, and no room for the supernatural or the improbable. Indeed, the Sherlock Holmes stories continue a long tradition in English literature of the explained supernatural – of perfectly reasonable explanations for apparently inexplicable, mysterious happenings or phenomena – that started in the eighteenth century
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with Gothic novelists like Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), the author of the quintessential Gothic romance, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). More or less in line with this historical tradition, the purpose of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Catherine Belsey has argued, is to dispel magic, uncertainty, and obscurity. Notably, both Holmes and his friend Watson are men of science: Watson is a doctor, Holmes a master of logical deduction who time and again displays his virtuosity in reasoning. Yet, Belsey shows, in so far as they aim for complete transparency by explaining away all kinds of mysteries, the Sherlock Holmes stories destabilise themselves in an interesting way. This is occasioned by the marginal and problematic treatment of female characters in the stories. These characters are not only typified by a certain clichéd air of mystery, but also by silence. Usually, they know ‘something’ but cannot speak of it, because they either disappear for the greater part of a story, are declared insane, or lose consciousness. Losing consciousness happens to Mrs. Elsie Cubitt in ‘The Mystery of the Dancing Men.’ The riddle that Holmes needs to solve here is a written correspondence between Elsie and her ex-boyfriend, the latter a convicted criminal who seems to form a threat to her present marriage. The correspondence consists of a secret language of ‘dancing men.’ When Holmes arrives in the Cubitt residence, Elsie has lost consciousness so that he himself will have to decipher the secret code. Of course, he succeeds but in spite of this the story never completely reveals the precise nature of the relation between Elsie and her former lover. Different explanations contradict each other – but Elsie does not speak. This creates a remarkable situation. On the one hand, Elsie’s silence is important for the course of the plot since her silence grants Holmes a key role to play (deciphering the code). On the other, however, her silence undermines the aim of the Sherlock Holmes stories to dispel all traces of mystery, uncertainty, and obscurity. Elsie’s relation to her ex-boyfriend remains an inconclusive history within the frame narration of the dancing men. In this way, Belsey concludes, the Sherlock Holmes story questions its own scientific ambition to explain the phenomenal world in all its facets and dimensions: it unwittingly reveals the limits of the alleged supremacy of the scientific method it propagates.
3. Literary scholars starting from the idea of meaning as an effect of difference, did not interpret a text with the purpose of unveiling its coherence or unity of meaning. On the contrary, they sought to show that such unity is a fiction, and that such unity is typically built on an illusion. To prove their point, critics unveiled the explicit or implicit dichotomies (i.e. simplified, untenable distinctions) in a text that create an easy order or coherence: good versus evil, true versus false, masculine versus feminine. Such dichotomies are created to short-circuit undecidabilities in a text. It is not just in texts but also in everyday life and in different aspects of our cultures that we try to make reality understandable by means of such
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dichotomies or binary oppositions. These are sets of two terms posed in diametrical opposition (such as self and other, beautiful and ugly, white and black, light and dark). The first term in the opposition is privileged over the other; it seems as if the first term is the standard. Making this privilege explicit, so that the standard no longer seems as ‘natural’ or ‘given,’ is part of the critical analysis of binary oppositions. Such oppositions typically enable decisions: self or other, beautiful or ugly, white or black, alive or dead, west or east, developed or primitive. They also make us think in black and white, and less in a grey zone: it is either the one or the other, never both the one and the other. It is important to realise, firstly, that the two elements of binary oppositions are always defined in a contrastive relation to each other. In Western culture the ‘feminine’ exists as the ‘feminine’ in opposition to ‘masculine’ and all values attached to it. Secondly, such oppositions are not in any way ‘given’ but are always construed within cultural-historical codes and conventions. Chapter 10 will further elaborate on the question of binary oppositions. Here it suffices to state that the reading strategy called deconstruction involves the critical scrutiny of binary oppositions in order to show how semantic undecidability tends to be covered up in literary texts. Unveiling binary oppositions became especially pertinent in feminist and postcolonial criticism* in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Deconstructing binary oppositions in The Picture of Dorian Gray In the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by the Irish author Oscar Wilde (18541900), the protagonist Dorian Gray remains forever young and beautiful after Basil Hallward has captured his portrait in a painting. As Dorian’s life progresses, and he commits more and more evil deeds, the signs of ageing and immorality become visible only in the painting, not in the character Dorian. His appearance remains young and innocent. But the more Dorian sinks into deceit and crime, the more appalling his painting becomes. The relation between Dorian and his painting thus appears to materialise an internal opposition between ‘good’ and ‘evil’: between innocence and the burden of a bad conscience that has, in this instance, been outwardly projected onto the painting. The African writer Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) has, for that matter, suggested that the relation between Dorian and the painting can be seen as a metaphor for the relation between Self (Western, coloniser) and Other (Eastern, colonised) in imperialist discourses (see Chapter 10). Africa, as Achebe succinctly puts it, is to Europe what the painting is to Dorian. Everything that Europe does not want to be or see in itself, it projects onto Africa in order to split it off from that self though a dynamic of binary oppositions. It should be noted that in The Picture of Dorian Gray the binary opposition between good and evil is, in a way, already deconstructed. Dorian and his painting do not stand to
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each other as good stands to evil: Dorian appears good, but acts morally reprehensively, while the painting appears evil, but in fact only carries the burden of Dorian’s conscience – of all the acts Dorian has committed. Thus, the novella shows that a trace of evil is already present in good, and a trace of good in evil. The two cannot be seen apart from each other, as the one is defined in relation to the other. Here, the deconstructive critic merely needs to highlight what Wilde has already offered to us: that good and evil, youth and decrepitude, are always already inscribed in each other.
Now that we have investigated three aspects of the work of deconstructive criticism, and accompanying examples, we can propose the following definition. Deconstruction is a critical reading ‘against the grain’ that questions a stable core of meaning in literary texts, as well as the possibility of an anchor of meaning outside of these texts, explores how accidental and marginal dimensions of a text contradict its apparent meaning or messages, and scrutinises binary opposites creating coherence and a rigid either/or order. Its aim is to subvert all kinds of notions that apparently have dominated Western culture for centuries, especially the notion of presence: the notion that things are given rather than in flux. To summarise this entire section, it can be stated that the critical reading (or more precisely: textual interventions) inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida: ● Starts from the idea that the difference between signifiers logically precedes their identity. ● Claims that meaning does not depend on an extra-textual agent, but is an effect of the differences between signifiers and the immediate, discursive context in which such signifiers appear (in relation to other signifiers or sound-images). ● Asserts that meaning therefore has an unstable ground: it is uncontainable and undecidable. ● Epitomises this undecidability in Derrida’s elaboration of the concept of différance (difference and deferral at once) which not only refers to the difference between signifiers but also to the impossibility of reaching beyond labyrinths of signifiers (words lead to words). ● Focuses interpretive work on the material surface of the text: alliterative associations, grammatical structures, word play. ● Pays special attention to the way in which a text contradicts itself in its marginal and accidental aspects. ● Uncovers coherence as a deceptive unity through the unravelling of binary oppositions bringing to a false stop the unending play of signifiers.
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Deconstruction and posthumanist criticism The kind of media-theoretically informed criticism inspired by the work of Friedrich Kittler (Chapter 4), now called posthermeneutic criticism, has likewise integrated critical insights of difference and practices of deconstruction. Central to posthermeneutic criticism is its deconstruction of the presumed opposition between the human and the non-human; between the agency of humans and the agency of media and media machines, or between humans and animals. As for the contrast between humans and machines, Kittler and later critics like N. Katherine Hayles, John Durham Peters (b.1958), or Jussi Parikka (b.1976) have focused on the agency of such machines and how this agency informs the human, rather than the human being at the centre and the machine on the side. Literary interpretation in such posthumanist criticism typically focuses on the posthuman; on technologically mediated afterstages of the human, on the end of its conception in terms of sameness, autonomy, and mastery (mastery over self, nature, and others) and on the ways in which machines are now changing, and even replacing, authorship and readership. As a concept, the posthuman has been just as central and instrumental to the field of animal studies* where the humanities reach beyond their traditional interpretive limits and become entangled with other disciplines. From anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) and biologist Frans de Waal (b.1948) to philosopher Peter Singer (b.1946) and other critics in the humanities such as Erica Fudge (b.1968), new and different perspectives on the idea of the human, and what has been conveniently contrasted to it, have been developed that are now changing the entire field of the humanities and the interpretive practices it has reared.
Since the 1960s, deconstruction has become fully integrated in gender studies,* ecocriticism,* postcolonial criticism,* and cultural studies.* As we will see in Chapters 9 and 10, Derrida’s apparently free word games have been placed in a less abstract, cultural-historical perspective. Criticism of the idea of the Orient and Orientalism, we will indicate, is a case in point, as is historical research into the conceptualisation of the idea of the ‘Other’ in its differential contrast to the idea of ‘self ’ – and the very real consequences of such representations.
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In conclusion: The range of interpretation
The work of interpretation is foundational to culture: from oral to digital times people have tried to make sense of stories, prophecies, poems, and gospels. Making sense of the world around us and of the signs we engage with is part of our everyday existence: we do it all the time. Yet, as we have seen, interpretation is also a distinct, academic practice. Interpretation rests
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on research, historical and/or theoretical, on close and careful reading, on analysis, on informed argumentation so as to state one’s case as convincingly as possible, and on a certain inventiveness or creativity to make meaningful connections between different themes, periods, art forms, genres, or writers. The different currents of interpretation we have treated here (hermeneutics, dialogic hermeneutics, deconstruction) have, in the past, at times seemed incompatible. Deconstruction, for instance, refuses some of the presumptions of hermeneutics, such as the presence of the author as an anchor of meaning, while dialogic hermeneutics rejects the tendency to predetermination in the work of deconstruction. In its less convincing moments, deconstruction knows what it is looking for (binary oppositions, the textual subconscious, the material surface of texts) before the text has had a chance to pose a question to the reader. In other respects, hermeneutics – especially dialogic hermeneutics – and deconstruction are remarkably alike in what they tease out of texts. Both practices start from an idea of literary meaning as infinite potentiality, even though Derrida interprets this potentiality in a subtly different way (as a semantic undecidability, in the textual surface) from Gadamer (as emerging out of the encounter between reader and text). Still, it is no coincidence that Derrida and Gadamer depart from the same philosopher: Martin Heidegger. As we have tried to cover centuries of interpretive schools and practices in this chapter, this coverage has remained necessarily incomplete. However, our book incorporates other important critical and analytical approaches to literature – ranging from postcolonial criticism,* the sociology of literary production, reception studies,* to memory studies* – in its other chapters.
Further reading Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2002. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, Paris: Minuit, 1967. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer & Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed., New York: Cross, 2003. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen et al, ed., Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis, London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, London: Routledge, 1989.
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Notes 1
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For this, see Aaron Pelttari, The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014; Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds, The Literary Guide to the Bible, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1987. Solomon 2:3, King James Version of the Bible, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Song-of-Solomon-Chapter-2/ (accessed July 2019). Barry Dov Walfish, ‘Song of Songs: The Emergence of Peshat Imagination,’ in The Torah: A Historical and Contextual Approach, https://thetorah.com/song-ofsongs-the-emergence-of-peshat-interpretation/, n.d., n.p. (accessed July 2019). For a quantitative analysis of the uses of etymology in John Milton, see Jonathan Reeve,‘A Macro-Etymological Analysis of Milton’s Paradise Lost,’ July 2016, http:// jonreeve.com/2016/07/paradise-lost-macroetymology/ (accessed July 2019). This example was created by Frank Brandsma and based on his article, ‘Van venine af te done,’ in W.P. Gerritsen, Annelies van Gijsen and Orlanda S.H. Lie, eds, Een school spierinkjes: Kleine opstellen over Middelnederlandse artes-literatuur, Hilversum: Verloren, 1991, pp. 24-27. For this, see Hans van Stralen, Denken over duiden, Antwerpen, Apeldoorn: Garant, 2012, pp. 35-54, 42-46. Ibid., p. 45, translation K.B.W. Ibid., pp. 35-54, 42-46. R.W. Palmer, Hermeneutics, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969. F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977, p. 150. See also Alister McGrath and Darren C. Marks, eds, The Blackwell Companion to Protestantism, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. For this, see J. Cuthbert Hadden, Chopin, London: J.M. Dent, 1903, https://archive.org/details/chopin1903hadd; Edith J. Hipkins, How Chopin Played: From Contemporary Impressions Collected from the Diaries and Notebooks of the Late A.J. Hipkins, London: Dent, 1937; Thomas Higgins, Chopin Interpretation: A Study of Performance Directions in Selected Autographs and Other Sources, PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1966; Walter Robert,‘Chopin’s Tempo Rubato in Theory and Practice,’ Piano Quarterly 113 (1981): 42-44; Jeanne Holland, ‘Chopin the Teacher,’ Journal of the American Liszt Society 17 (1985): 39-48; Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by His Pupils, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; William Simalek, Frédéric Chopin: A Guide to Research, New York: Garland, 2000. Frédéric Chopin, Nocturnes and Polonaises: The Mikuli Edition, New York: Dover Publications, 2007. Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995; Mark Mitchell and Allan Evans, eds, Moriz Rosenthal in Words and Music: A Legacy of the Nineteenth Century, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. For a discography of the Nocturne opus 9, no 3, see https://www.allmusic.com/composition/nocturne-for-piano-no-3-in-b-major-op-9-3-ct110-mc0002426467 (accessed July 2019). For more on the historical backgrounds of hermeneutics, consider C. Mantzavinos, ‘Hermeneutics,’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016), https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/ (accessed July 2019). Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [1757], Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, p. 77. Alexander Cozens, ‘New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape’ [1785], in Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, L’art de la tache: Introduction à la Nouvelle méthode d’Alexander Cozens, 467-484, Montélimar: Editions du Limon, 1990. Charles Cramer, however, has warned against an all too easy connection between Cozens’ ink blotting technique and romantic principles of indeterminacy and the fragmentary. See Charles Cramer, ‘Alexander Cozens’ New Method: The Blot and General Nature,’ Art Bulletin 79.1 (1997): 112-129.
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Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled “The Four Ages of Poetry,”’ in Vincent B. Leitch, gen. ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 699-717, New York: W.W. Norton, 2001, p. 710. E.D. Hirsch Jr, Validity in Interpretation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Ibid., p. 13 (original emphasis). Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 54. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2ndrev. ed., New York: Crossroad, 1989, p. 257. Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 295. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris: Seuil, 1957. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, pp. 229-230. Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 78-79. Umberto Eco, De grenzen van de interpretatie, trans. Yond Boeke, Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1993, p. 107, translation K.B.W. Catherine Belsey, ‘Deconstructing the Text’ [1980], in Critical Practice, 103-124, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 113-116. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa” [1975] in The Massachusetts Review, 57:1, 2016, pp. 14-27.
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8 BETWEEN ELITE AND MASS CULTURE KIENE BRILLENBURG WURTH
This chapter looks critically at the presumed distinction between ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ culture. Since the 1970s and 1980s, this distinction has been perceived as problematic, because it excluded certain writers, artists, and genres from educational programmes and literary canons. We will explore how the distinction was created, and why it was maintained. We will then show how the opposition between ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ culture has been reconsidered in the last four decades from a sociological, cultural-historical, and critical perspective. These reconsiderations have created awareness about the canons that we use in our curricula and courses, the choices that we make in constructing such canons, and the reasons behind these choices. . . . . . . .
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Introduction: Canons and canon debates Mass culture and artistic culture Symbolic capital and cultural elitism Folk culture and elite culture intertwined Canon-makers and canon-breakers There is art in mass media In conclusion: Power to the users
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Introduction: Canons and canon debates
Gaston Franssen (b.1977) has eloquently described the literary canon as ‘a story of history’ (see also Chapters 2 and 11). That story is never free of value judgements. Literary canons are the reflection of a culture’s values: what we consider beautiful, important, and necessary. But who is this ‘we’? To take one example: on the website describing their canon project, the Royal Academy for Dutch Language and Literature and the Flemish Fund for the Arts and Letters explain that a literary canon makes clear ‘which texts are considered essential literature in the Dutch language by the literary field in Flanders. It is an instrument for the educational sector, the government, the publishing field and the broad reading public.’ The canon presented on this site extends from the twelfth century to the 1980s, and includes a wide variety of material, including songbooks, chivalric romances, an encyclopaedia of natural history, plays, poems, and novels. The number of women represented in this canon is conspicuously small. Why? Have there been fewer female than male writers, or have male critics consistently disregarded female writers and the genres they have used and created? The same goes for Caribbean, Surinam, African, and Middle Eastern authors, all of whom are also part of literature in Dutch – but not according to this canon. The same, for that matter, can be said of the controversial German literary canon (Der Kanon, 2002) proposed by the famous critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920-2013). In this canon women have a very marginal position as do contemporary German-Turkish writers, such as Emine Sevgi Özdamar, or GermanArab writers. Perhaps, some critics prefer to see their own standards, tastes, and upbringing reflected in the canons they make when they say that canons are necessary as landmarks in a European literary history dating back 3000 years. Yet, they forget that this history was also shaped by developments outside Europe, by centuries of migration, and by technologies and knowledge learned and gained from, for instance, Arabic culture in Spain (notably in 10th-century Córdoba), or Chinese modes of paper making. In the 1980s and 1990s fierce debates were raging on the canon in Europe and the US: the canon wars. Some critics, we have also seen in Chapter 2, defended a closed literary canon as it had been prescribed in secondary and higher education for decades, others urged a reconsideration. What were the blind spots in that canon? Why the dominance of works by white heterosexual, dead males – and why the absence of many female, African, African-American, Asian, or native American writers? Thanks to these debates, literary critics, scholars in cultural studies as well as politicians, have become increasingly aware that a canon is not a gold standard representing a stable heritage. It is a herit-
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age that changes, grows and moves and expands with the times (see also Chapter 10 and 11). Ideally, this revised understanding should lead to more inclusive curricula in the teaching of history and literature. In Chapter 2, we linked literature to the question of value and identified some of the conditions that texts in Western culture typically have to meet in order to be recognised as Literature ‘with a capital L’, that is, worthy of reproduction as part of the canon. Literature ‘with a capital L’ is understood to include texts of a certain quality in possession of specific characteristics: they may play with the medium of language in a creative way, or have staying power for some other reason. However, as we also found in Chapter 2, the influence of cultural authorities on canon formation is not to be underestimated. Frequently, it is not only formal or thematic aspects of a novel or poem that determine its literariness. Value judgements are rarely made from a neutral and objective place. They are formed within a web of standards, conventions, judgments, and interests (personal or professional) that are gender-, time-, race- and culture-specific. Accordingly, the issue that we wish to raise here is: What are the sociocultural factors conditioning canon formation and the related distinction between ‘elite’ or Literary and ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ in literary culture and culture at large? Is the distinction between ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ culture an ‘either-or,’ or do the two cultures in fact intersect?
8.2
Mass culture and artistic culture
To answer these questions, we will first look at a long-standing distinction between elite or artistic and mass culture made in critical theory* by the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-1969). Critical theory* is a combination of sociological and philosophical perspectives intended to dig behind the surface of modern capitalist society to reveal its cultural power dynamics, and to improve these societies with comprehensive analyses. The term ‘critical theory’ was first used in 1937 by philosopher Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). It emerged from the so called ‘Frankfurt School’ (named for the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), which was founded in Frankfurt) developed by Mark Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Max Weber (1864-1920) in the late 1920s-1930s. As one of the proponents of the Frankfurt School, Adorno had an immense faith in art: in the power of art to keep people alive, to reinvigorate their minds, to educate their senses, and feed their critical stance towards society. Yet he saw a looming threat to the culture of art in the twentieth century – a threat he had witnessed himself in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. This was the threat of the manipulative powers
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of mass media like radio and cinema under dictatorship: these media can indoctrinate the masses, manipulate a polarised information environment, and further incite violence, racism, and antisemitism. When he fled Nazi Germany and ended up in California during World War ii, Adorno observed the controlling force of mass media once more, in a non-totalitarian state. He observed the power of the Hollywood film industry and of mass media advertising – and he saw a parallel with how the masses were fed and pushed to accept certain ideas uncritically. What was to remain of autonomous thinking? It is against the backdrop of this question that we here consider Adorno’s ideas on artistic culture (a culture of works of art that represent an existing reality critically, by opposing it through experimentation) and its contrast to mass culture (the totality of products of culture that are reduced to reproducible goods by standardisation and mass consumption). In Adorno’s view, mass culture uses mass media (film, television, newspapers, radio) to mould the feelings of audiences, impress certain sentiments, ideas, and meanings upon them, or simply induce them to make certain purchases. He saw mass media as a tool of the invisible powers that be (fascist dictators on one extreme, capitalist democrats on the other) bent on manipulating the public and keeping them distracted. Some critics still feel the same about the power of mass media today: they keep us from reflecting consciously on ourselves and the world. Art, for Adorno, provided a way out of the bombardment of messages and images by mass media. It could help people to open up and see through these images by showing them a new perspective or a fresh way of looking and thinking. Crucially, Adorno believed that ‘mass culture’ was not a culture of the masses, but a culture imposed on the masses. For this reason, he preferred to speak of a culture industry that standardises, homogenises, and strives to stamp out every irregularity so as to manipulate and drown the masses. To put it more plainly, mass culture in critical theory is not the culture that arises from the needs and desires of the masses; instead, Adorno claimed, mass media pre-digest and create those needs and desires. This pre-digested culture is the product of the culture industry. What we buy or own, how we want to look, and what we want to become, what our impulses are: all these things are formed (at least in part) by the content and messaging that we are force-fed virtually every day through mass media. As Adorno saw it, in the culture industry, the individual is nothing more than a willing victim of invisible masters. In fact, people here no longer exist as individuals, but only as passive consumers helplessly acting on impulses that are aroused via images (mostly clichés) in films and advertising.
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Figure 8.1: American film actress, television host, and later consumer advocate Betty Furness (1916-1994) stands beside an open Westinghouse refrigerator in a fake kitchen set during an advertising break in the episode ‘A Man’s World’ of the cbs anthology series ‘Studio One,’ which she hosted, October 1, 1956. A television camera is visible at right of frame.
According to Adorno, the culture industry tends to absorb everything into the consumption networks that it itself creates. Not even art, he observed, is safe from attempts to capture the mass market. The way in which the work of Vincent van Gogh has, by now, been completely commodified through the logic of the culture industry is a case in point. When art succumbs to the culture industry, Adorno argued, it turns into predictable amusement: its creative, experimental, and unpredictable qualities disappear.
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Easy listening and experimental music To many non-initiated listeners, the music composed by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) appears painful and incomprehensible. His so-called twelve-tone compositions do not agree with habitual musical tastes. They require some effort as they lack familiar melodies holding the music together. We experience difficulties grasping them. To Adorno, its quality of estrangement (Chapter 2) is the special quality of Schoenberg’s music. This music wakes us out of our daily slumbers as it presents us with something different, something to work on. It shocks our senses, it makes us think. The question now arises: Is this music difficult or strange in itself or in the context of the omnipresence of ‘easy listening’ in mass culture? Would Schoenberg’s music also be jarring to our ears if we were accustomed to a greater range of possibilities? Adorno believed that it may well be the equalising forces of mass culture that render this music uneasy, not the music itself. We have become too much accustomed to a repetition or reiteration of the same.
How does the culture industry manage to absorb art? What are its strategies of appropriation? To begin with, Adorno claimed, the culture industry uses technologies reaching a great number of people: This is what makes them mass media. But technology also serves another purpose: It enables mass reproduction. Arguably, mass reproduction already became possible with the invention of the printing press. With the development of steam engines in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this possibility became a reality – not only for the printing press but in all kinds of manufacturing, from cotton spinning factories to steel mills. Where once production and reproduction were in balance, the scales began to tilt with the industrial revolution. Finally, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, production gradually shifted to serve reproduction, in order to reach the largest possible number of people at the minimum possible cost. With the advent of mass media like film, television, and the music industry, Adorno claimed, culture as a whole (and art in particular) became subject to this law of reproduction. It was in danger of becoming commodified: a consumer product continually made and remade based on a single model and adjusted to the prefabricated desires of the consumer (commodification: the reduction of cultural products to technologically (re)producible goods). Stories presented in movies, for instance, would offer endless variations on a similar plot, or on stock characters. Such movies offered nothing unexpected or strange for the viewer to encounter. Reproduction, after all, means repetition of the same. Thus, for Adorno, the culture industry operated by continually reworking existing story structures, types, and conventions in a way that made its viewers,
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listeners, and readers as comfortable as possible. The new and the different require effort; repetition is easy. It plays to a childlike need for more of the same – what is recognisable – and for what is easily digestible. The consequence of this strategy of repetition is standardisation (making cultural products and meaning monolithic and infinitely repeatable, both on the production side and the consumption side). The products offered to the masses by the culture industry, Adorno held, have a fixed and repeatable form, even if some differences in content might suggest otherwise.
Standardisation Standardisation allows for an endless repetition of the same. The endless variations on the genre of Western in Hollywood cinema provides a good example. The plot of the Western, in which a lone hero (who also always ends up alone) saves a community from the clutches of a bad guy and then rides off into the seemingly endless horizon of the prairie, has been rehashed and replayed in countless films, even in those that at first glance do not seem to be Westerns at all. One of the most renowned films of the 1940s, Casablanca (1942), by director Michael Curtiz, (1886-1962), is an example of a Western in disguise, as are the films in the Star Wars franchise by George Lucas. When a formula works, it is reused endlessly, even in genres or story formats that do not appear to have anything in common with the formula. By contrast, more recent Western movies, such as Lucky (dir. John Carroll Lynch [b.1963], 2017), critically question and indeed shatter the formula by presenting a less rosy picture: the hero is old, smokes, and comes shuffling through a dusty desert town with death on his heels. Following Adorno’s view, what can we conclude from this? That Lucky is not part of the culture industry because it departs from the formula, while Casablanca and Star Wars are? It is hard to follow Adorno through to the end here. Like Lucky, Casablanca and Star Wars have their own, distinct artistic qualities. They show exactly what it means to also negotiate and tamper with the images and formulas offered by the culture industry.
As a side effect of standardisation, Adorno claimed, everything falling outside the reach of the culture industry (avant-garde art, experimental prose or music, as we saw in the text box above) becomes ‘difficult’ to digest (compare defamiliarisation and estrangement in Chapter 2). It de-automatises perception. The presumed difficulty of experimental art, the things that make it less ‘accessible,’ bestow a specific function on artistic culture. For Adorno, artistic culture was in fact everything that the culture industry was not: original, critical, inventive, challenging. It was redemptive: its role was to rouse the masses from their lethargy. Critical
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content alone was not enough to do this. Didactic art, such as found in explicitly political art, could be just as mind-numbing as the product of the culture industry. It did not generally push the audience towards independent thought since it was, after all, instructive. What was necessary, Adorno claimed, was an experimental form that could not be digested automatically. Only this turns art into truly critical art, which challenges and educates the senses. Adorno’s distinction between artistic culture and the culture industry can be presented as follows: Culture Industry Mass media Industrial production Mass reproduction Repetition Habituation Standardisation Commercial function Passive consumption Economic principle Trivial
Artistic culture Traditional media Individual production Authority of the original Defamiliarisation De-automatisation Innovation Critical/aesthetic function Active reception Independent of economic principle Canonical
These binary oppositions raise many questions. Are these two cultures really diametrically opposed, or do elements of the one bleed into the other? What is ‘trivial’ without ‘canonical,’ ‘innovative’ without ‘standardised,’ and vice versa? Can the one even be conceptualised without the other? Are repetition, standardisation, and habituation really only characteristics of the culture industry? Can one in fact say that because it is driven by an economic principle, the culture industry cannot have a critical and/or aesthetic function? And by the same token, is it true that artistic culture operates independently of economic principles? In the following sections, we address these questions and put the distinction between ‘high’ art and mass culture to the test. We begin with the last question: Is artistic culture autonomous, or not?
8.3
Symbolic capital and cultural elitism
The roots of the word ‘economy’ go back to the Greek for ‘household management.’ In this chapter we use the term ‘economic’ to denote a system of material exchange: The exchange of goods for money and vice versa. As we have seen in the previous section, artistic culture appears to have nothing to do with this system of material exchange. Instead, it seems to
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be located in a space removed from mass-mediated culture, assuming an autonomous, critical position. But is canonised art not just as much an investment as shares, real estate, or any other financial interest? The value of certain works of art is determined, at least in part, by their market value? When we look at a work by Louise Bourgeois or a Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) in a museum, is our admiration for the painting really only a response to the form and content of the work itself, or does the idea of its monetary value also play a role? Is not the high value of canonised works of art partly determined by the fact that they have become financially unattainable? This means that an established name in artistic or elite culture can symbolise not only status and erudition, but also great piles of cash. In this section we will see that capital formation of another and very special kind also plays a significant role in artistic culture. In his 1979 work Distinction (La distinction), Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated that capital refers not only to financial gain, but also to other forms of profit. Capital accretion is not just about material gain; nonmaterial benefits can also be accrued – for example, the accrual of knowledge that can later be used to earn a profit, whether financial or intellectual (or both). This nonmaterial capital formation defines artistic culture on both sides (production and reception). Bourdieu called it symbolic capital: a form of power or profit that denies being economic capital because on the surface it lacks a profit motivation. The value of symbolic capital is the seeming absence of profit motivation: writing a bestseller rarely leads to cultural recognition though cultural recognition can itself lead to higher sales figures. Getting a favourable review from an important critic accrues symbolic capital – it means building a name in artistic culture. Such capital is a rare commodity: something many people want to have; it is worth a lot. This capital is not about the money that this name can attract, but more about the building of a reputation (compare Chapter 2, on the production of prestige). Symbolic capital is perhaps more exclusive than economic capital. According to Bourdieu, authors depend for their symbolic capital on the people who have power in the literary arena: a competitive system of connections and institutions (the literary ‘world’) made and perpetuated by laws and rules (generally unwritten) and the mechanisms of power. Entry to this world, Bourdieu claimed, is something akin to becoming a member of an exclusive club. In this case, the publisher plays the role of a prestigious club member who (together with other cultural authorities, such as literary critics) takes the new member under his wing, ensuring that he receives an enthusiastic welcome and that his name will ultimately be revered or consecrated (consecration: the valorisation of the artist’s name). Cultural recognition thus depends on skilful symbolic ‘banking’:
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publishers invest in a name (an artist) that they have launched and established, and critics either confirm this value or try to undermine it. Their opinions often set significant economic effects into motion (in the form of literary prizes, for example), while readers also enhance the value of the author’s name by buying their work (material value) and reading it (symbolic value). According to Bourdieu, the name of the publisher also becomes a form of symbolic capital in this process. Publishers have a reputation to keep up, and they do this by selecting writers who either already have symbolic capital or have the potential to acquire it. Authors who are published by ‘high art’ publishers are not going to be of interest to publishers that only publish bestsellers. Many exclusive publishers rely on ‘longterm bestsellers’ to survive – these are, or at least used to be for some time, the canonised, virtually sacred texts, like Dante, Shakespeare, and names of a similar stature, which can count on steady sales figures thanks to the long-term educational market. Every year, huge numbers of these works fly off the shelves of academic bookstores thanks to the captive market of university students. (Though today, in the digital age, it is unclear if this situation is sustainable: many read their texts online.) These works stand in contrast to ‘short-term bestsellers,’ which are popular for a while until they inevitably yield to the next breakout bestselling author. With longterm bestsellers, symbolic capital has been successfully transformed into economic capital. On the reception side, symbolic capital accumulation also plays an important role in elite culture: in people’s capacity to appreciate avantgarde art or literature. Bourdieu sees this capacity for appreciation as an acquired skill that is dependent on social class, upbringing, and teaching. He calls this capacity a form of symbolic capital that is accumulated by personal background and/or by personal investments in learning to read and to appreciate art and music. Acquiring the social skill to appreciate avant-garde art is linked to a phenomenon that Bourdieu calls distinction (the marking of a sociocultural difference). According to Bourdieu, since not everyone is able to enjoy experimental writing, abstract painting or atonal music, the capacity to do so helps people distinguish themselves from the masses. Those who want to ‘move up in the world’ seek cultural status and money, by immersing themselves in science, art, and literature, so as to gain access to an elite community that shares a defined set of standards, values, knowledge, and preferences which distinguishes them from the masses. On a critical note, it should be added here that some people – undoubtedly because of their highly educated tastes – are looking for challenges in their experiences of art because mainstream art genuinely bores them. Nonetheless, such boredom is, in the eyes of Bourdieu, a sign of distinction.
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The appreciation of ‘artsy’ books, paintings, or musical works is therefore anything but an innocent endeavour. It is dependent on cultural codes, rules, and critical, educated attitudes. Bourdieu categorises these critical attitudes under the label of habitus: the frameworks and structures that determine individual ways of thinking and acting. The habitus coalesces into a system of attitudes that are at some point learned, but subsequently feel ‘natural.’ Compare it to having learned to play piano as a child; at a certain point, you no longer have to think about the notes you are seeing on the sheet music or the movements that your fingers and hands are making. They do it by themselves. In society, Bourdieu claims, habitus plays a major role: your language use, the tone of your voice, your intonation, how you move within certain social groups – all these things are learned, however natural they may appear. Taste is also something that is learned and acquired. Which books you read, how you look at paintings, how you listen to music: these are all predetermined by the knowledge and attitudes you have acquired from your sociocultural background. Taste can thus be seen as a social skill that is leveraged as a means of marking out one’s difference from the masses. Good taste might well be called the intellectual version of old money: you inherit it from your sociocultural background and you use it (consciously or unconsciously) to create distinction. Taste, then, is a sign of ‘class.’ It expresses itself primarily, Bourdieu argued, in the capacity to look at a work of art without interest, dissociated from any use value or purpose. In aesthetic theory, this capacity has always been considered critical to resisting the inexorable advance of commerce and ‘usefulness’ or ‘purposiveness’. Art must be given a place of sanctuary in society. It must be free and considered freely, without an immediate use-value. The experience of art, the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in the Kritik der Urteilskraft can be typified as purposive without a purpose (Chapter 2). In the experience of art, we do not want or need to learn anything: we can consider things in themselves. Hence, they appear without a purpose, and this freedom serves to make us aware of ourselves in a very special way. Bourdieu, however, maintains that in reality such an experience makes us aware as members of a privileged social class. The pure, disinterested perspective that art requires in aesthetic theories represents a detachment from the real world of our day-to-day lives, in which utility and efficiency reign supreme and in which certain needs must be satisfied. For Bourdieu, this perspective is a luxury reserved for a happy few. It is a perspective of social privilege, in that it assumes no material need whatsoever. As such, it is a perspective that embodies the cultural capital that tries to deny its economic basis: a sign of cultural snobbery.
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In summary, seen from a sociological perspective, the binary opposition between elite and mass culture is untenable for two reasons. Firstly, we have seen that elite culture is defined both on the production and the reception side by symbolic capital. Although these forms of capital can never be entirely traced back to economic capital, we can see them as remoulded derivatives. Derivatives, because these are still investments with a profit motive; remoulded, because they are not about financial investments and financial gain, but about symbolic returns, which either deny or obscure their relation to economic capital. These returns are taste, intellectual knowledge, knowledge of art, cultural refinement, reputations – things that belong to the domain of artistic culture defined by its presumed autonomy vis-à-vis financial interests. Secondly, it appears that from the receiving end, too, artistic culture is deeply connected to social class and privilege. Enjoying art and exhibiting good taste is not just a goal in itself. It is a sign of social distinction, which is also used as such (whether deliberately or unconsciously) in sociocultural interactions. Good taste is cultivated in looking, reading, or listening and/or handed down as a sort of birth-right in a person’s upbringing. It is a marker of difference in class and status – and it can yield something (such as recognition, reputation, interest, or prestige). In other words, the distinction between ‘high’ art and mass culture is ultimately a class distinction disguised as a matter of quality.
8.4
Folk culture and elite culture intertwined
We have now considered two perspectives on the value of art in society. The first, represented by Adorno, creates a distinction between art and mass culture because art must, somehow, save us from mass culture. Art is special, and should tap its defamiliarising potential to the full to awaken us from our slumbers in a numbing mass-mediated society. Moreover, because of this defamiliarising potential, ‘high’ art requires a privileged place in secondary and higher education. We must study it thoroughly so as to train our minds and senses, to make us think and imagine for ourselves. By contrast, Bourdieu deconstructs the privileged position of art as being the privilege of certain social classes, their acquired tastes and symbolic capital. His position suggests that we should be more inclusive in our curricula and canons, and not just focus on ‘high’ art. As research and mass art has shown in recent decades, this is a valid suggestion. It is, moreover, corroborated by a longer-term view on the perceived distinction between ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ culture. In this section we offer a brief glimpse of such a longer-term view, arguing that definitions of what is ‘art’ and what is ‘mass’ culture, what is canonical and not,
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are not cast in stone, but are dynamic: they change over time. What is the history of mass culture, and how can that history help us to get present situations into perspective? Entertainment for the masses in the period before the Industrial Revolution was an entirely different matter than the culture industry evoked by Adorno. In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, for example, folk culture was the embodiment of ‘low’ culture – not in the sense of a culture imposed on the masses, but a popular culture that arose from the people. This is the culture of the people, organised by the people, not a standardised culture to which the people are – allegedly – mindlessly subjected. Critics like Roland Barthes extolled the virtues of typical ‘folk expressions’ like carnival or wrestling in his Mythologies, but had little good to say about the products of the culture industry. For many critics, including Adorno, folk culture had something authentic and auratic about it that the culture industry lacked, even though the former is often understood to be the precursor of the latter. However, in the Middle Ages, the term ‘folk’ had just as much of a negative connotation as the term ‘culture industry’ in the twentieth century. Peter Dinzelbacher (b.1948) writes that authors from the higher social stratum used terms to refer to the lower strata that ‘always entail[ed] a connotation of inferiority’: populus minutus, populus minor, populus vulgaris, vulgus, vulgares, plebs, minores, pauperes, etc. As such, folk culture embodied a ‘subordinate segment of society.’ Interpreted as a sociocultural category, high culture in this context referred to the ecclesiastical or clerical culture: the culture of the monks and the church elite, the literate culture whose language was Latin. Interestingly, however, this is the culture that comes closest to Adorno’s description of the culture industry, rather than folk culture: here is an ideological apparatus that strives to drive out deviant groups (in this case, the folkloristic and ‘heathen’) in the interests of advancing Christian culture as the cultural norm. Throughout the medieval period in Western Europe, folk culture, with its lore-based oral tradition, and clerical culture, with its scholarly tradition, had been entwined in a dynamic of dialogue and conflict, of interplay and interaction. Ecclesiastical culture had to adopt style figures, images, motifs and conventions from oral, folkloristic traditions to reach, and convert, the ordinary people. As a result, many elements from that tradition were subsumed in ‘official’ culture. Gradually, folk culture, with its so-called ‘heathen’ practices and superstitions, was eradicated and replaced by Christian practices and symbols. Original elements of folk culture only survived in folk festivals. For this reason, as a residue of a larger culture, folk festivals (of which carnival is the best-known) often took on subversive dimensions. Grant-
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ed, as Dinzelbacher argues, it would be a mistake to see carnival simply in terms of counterculture because the clerical elite typically participated. That being said, carnival did include parodic anti-ecclesiastical moments during which normal hierarchies were reversed (with varying degrees of absurdity); for a while, people could change identities by donning costumes and masks, so that dominant social rules, laws, and customs could be ridiculed. This suspension and reversal of norms and roles that were more or less oppressive, gave the medieval and early modern carnival precisely the critical value we now associate with ‘high’ artistic culture.
Carnival and Rabelais; the ‘lowly’ in the ‘lofty’ As the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin observed in his influential study of the history of carnival, comic or carnivalesque elements from popular entertainment have had a huge impact on literature since the late Middle Ages. The Lives of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (Gargantua et Pantagruel; 1532-1564), written by François Rabelais (14941553), offers a case in point. It translates the carnivalesque into literature by integrating elements of the grotesque, the abject, and the bodily: all things banned by the official or high culture as unspeakable. Here we see how motifs from folk culture serve as a source of inspiration for ‘high’ literary culture. From the sixteenth century on, these motifs were wielded against the ‘civilisation offensives’ in an effort to curb the excesses of the folk festivals. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that Garguanta et Pantagruel ‘must be understood not as the naïve self-expression of an unregenerate popular spirit,’ but as a reflection of the fact that the carnivalesque was being threatened ‘in its very existence’ by ‘the sense of a literary, social, and religious world hardening in its commitment to order, discipline, and decorum.’ The way in which, in the case of the carnivalesque, folk culture penetrated and inspired literary culture is remarkable, but not unique. Often, changes and innovations in artistic or ‘high’ culture are dictated by motifs and elements from folk culture – even if that was not, and still is not, always openly admitted. The music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) is a case in point, as it often adopts melodies from contemporary, popular tunes. The same can be observed of literature in the Romantic period (when folk narrative forms were in vogue), the period of nineteenth-century realism (which aimed to represent contemporary reality as ‘realistically’ as possible while often drawing on the form of the serial novel, a commercial invention of the nineteenth century), and of modernism (which derives many of its innovative elements from the editing techniques of the mass media of film and jazz.) In short, the ‘lowly’ has always informed the ‘lofty’ – and, indeed, often made for artistic innovation (see further Chapter 9).
realism
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This brief look into medieval and early modern practices of folk culture has shown that the latter carries with it qualities of (what Adorno considered to be) artistic culture, while the official or elite culture carries with it some qualities associated with the culture industry. The categories in the distinction are thus historically unstable. Does this make Adorno’s theory less convincing? It is a question hard to answer as the medieval situation differs so fundamentally from the modern one. Folk culture is not the same as mass culture (it lacks, of course, the modern elements of mass media, commodification, and standardisation). Still, our historical exploration does teach us one thing: the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures is historically fluid and subject to change. We can also detect this fluidity in the changing status of genres, individual works, or entire art forms in Western literary and cultural canons. For instance, the sentimental novel (which became popular in the late eighteenth century) was marked as ‘high’ culture until well into the nineteenth century, but by the twentieth century this genre had been ‘banished’ to the realm of ‘popular’ culture. The genre of the novel, as we have already seen in Chapter 3, itself went from being dismissed as popular literature in the eighteenth century to becoming the dominant genre of ‘official’ literary culture by the nineteenth century. This demonstrates that ‘high’ and ‘low,’ ‘elite’ and ‘mass’ culture, are dynamic categories defined in a cultural-historical context by the codes and conventions operative in a given society.
Opera from high/low, to high, to high/low In many Hollywood movies, opera is portrayed as high culture par excellence. When a character needs to be introduced as a cultured individual, the word ‘opera’ suffices – not even a specific opera, but simply opera in general. And yet, for a long time, opera was not considered high culture. Until the eighteenth century, ‘the people’ stood, drinking, eating, cursing, and sometimes even fighting in the Parisian opera, hardly listening to what happened on stage, while in the early nineteenth century the genre still was an accessible kind of popular entertainment. In America, this changed around 1825. Certain groups from the social elite tried to extract opera from popular entertainment and differentiate it from low culture. Opera disappeared from the theatre and was confined to separate opera houses. Certain etiquette rules and dress codes were also imposed: One had to come in evening clothes and sit still, listening quietly. Moreover, (new) conventions dictated that only foreign, European operas were worth hearing and seeing. This made it almost impossible for the ‘ordinary folk’ to attend the opera. Tickets became suddenly much more expensive and many could not afford the dress code, while the language (and length) of foreign operas was incomprehensible and insufferable for
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most. Yet, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century, and according to some not until the 1930s, that the ‘elitisation’ of the opera was completed. Opera, then, is not ‘high art’ per se, but has been consciously made into ‘high art’ by the social elites wishing to distinguish themselves (see ‘distinction’). By the end of the twentieth century, this process would again be partially reversed. Precisely thanks to mass media, the great number of books with titles such as Bluff Your Way into Opera or Opera for Dummies, and spectacles at sport events, returned opera to ‘the people.’ Indeed, the Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007) scored a hit during the World Cup in 1990 with ‘Nessun Dorma’ from the opera Turandot (1926) by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924). For the cultural elite, this was the beginning of the end. They barely dared to listen to this song anymore out of fear that people would think their taste was derived from the official bbc World Cup theme. The opera-going cultural elite spoke with equal disdain of Pavarotti’s performance in Hyde Park in 1991: the vast scale of the event was reminiscent of a pop concert. It lacked exclusivity. Partly due to these developments, it would seem that opera is back where it once was: a genre consumed both by ‘the people’ and the cultural elite – the former on football fields, television, or in the park, the latter in the expensive exclusivity of the opera house. However, this also marks the upholding of a distinction: the exorbitant prices to be paid at opera houses around the world continue to shut out the masses.
Genres and even art forms can swing on a pendulum from ‘high’ to ‘low,’ seemingly at random, over time. This observation leads us to the next section, which examines the processes responsible for literary canon formation. Who is in, who is out, which genres count, which do not? Can judgements about literary quality be arrived at impartially, or do they have a hidden political agenda? What is the status of the literary canon, and how do we deal with it in education?
8.5
Canon-makers and canon-breakers
Until the 1960s-1970s, very few voices questioned the legitimacy of literary canons. Then, perhaps ignited by the social protest movements of the time, people started to realise that canon-making was not only determined by literary qualities but also governed by political and sociocultural mechanisms as well. Questions were raised about the validity of literary canons. Whose cultural heritage did such canons represent? Could they at all serve as a standard for shared cultural knowledge? Or should they be seen as archives of exclusion: records of how ‘Others’ have been excluded from Western ‘high’ culture?
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exclusionary mechanism
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These questions were part of fierce canon debates, already flagged in Chapter 2, that reached a crescendo in the 1980s and then quieted down again in the 2000s. It was a debate played out among literary scholars between, broadly speaking, a ‘progressive’ or ‘inclusive,’ and a ‘conservative’ or ‘exclusive’ side. The more progressive or inclusive critics argued that the list of important literary works we use in schools and universities has consistently excluded women, minorities, and other groups of authors (such as those from the global south and formerly colonised countries, see Chapter 10). Canon formation for them has been an exclusionary mechanism (a process that makes it impossible for marginal groups to break through into the dominant or legitimate culture). Though their individual positions vary considerably, critics of this kind include Elaine Showalter (b.1941), Mieke Bal (b.1946), or Martha Nussbaum, each of whom – with different strategies – seeks to open a space for the excluded in the Western literary canon. By contrast, critics like Harold Bloom or E.D. Hirsch were not ready to accept radical changes to the canon. For these intellectuals, the canon was a more or less closed collection of texts that contains ‘our’ cultural heritage (where ‘we’ are mostly white and male and ‘our’ heritage consists of books that men currently between the age of 50 and 95 once studied at school and in university). Bloom and Hirsch were afraid that what they called the ‘cultural relativism’ of the progressives threatened cultural scholarship. If common standards were to be swept away and people no longer knew what they should read, then the opportunity to share cultural knowledge would be severely diminished. Today, their conservative vision is hardly taken seriously anymore. Given the dynamics at work in the literary and cultural arenas, a closed canon would have little chance of survival; nor would it have any serious claim to validity. No literary canon anywhere can be seen independently of the social rules and structures that, in the past, made it possible for some social groups to participate in artistic culture – and excluded others. Only consider the many female nineteenth-century authors who took a male pseudonym in order to be published at all. Women were also prohibited from becoming composers or directors. Moreover, it was impossible for women to practice as professionals in certain genres of painting, such as history painting; they were encouraged to concentrate on still life and the decorative arts. But because the traditional canon of visual art recognised ‘high’ genres like history painting but not the ‘popular’ genres like decorative painting, women were excluded from the canon by definition. Or, decorative painting was not considered part of the canon because it was practised by women.
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Anxieties of obsolescence In recent decades, sociocultural and technological developments have eroded the assumed distinction between ‘tasteful’ and ‘tasteless’ entertainment, literary refinement and visual distraction. In The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (2006), Kathleen Fitzpatrick (b.1967) provides an account of how American authors like Thomas Pynchon (b.1937), Don DeLillo (b.1936), and Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) have blamed television for the extinction of a flourishing literary culture. But aren’t they drawing more on myth than reality? Did a large reading public ever exist before the advent of new media? Fitzpatrick argues convincingly that the fear of new media expressed by these authors was actually about race, class, and gender; in effect about the end of white male dominance.
It is interesting to consider the changing standards used for canon formation during the last decades. As we have seen in Chapter 2, cultures still want to make canons to celebrate the best they have, while literary programmes continue to offer their students lists of ‘great works.’ However, we no longer compile these lists as unthinkingly and narrowly as we used to. We are more inclusive as we have become more aware of other literary modes, traditions, and forms than the European ones, and as we have become more critically aware of the artificiality of European literary tastes and traditions in our globalised world. This trend towards inclusivity is reflected in the anthologies produced for students of literature in the last five decades. Looking at these anthologies, we see some significant shifts. The us offers a fascinating case study, as this nation brings together different cultures in one geographical area. The wide variety of these cultures has only started to enrich the American literary canon as of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, until well into the 1970s, the idea of American literature was essentially built on Anglo-centric anthologies. As David Levin (b.1924) wrote in the introduction to his 1978 anthology America in Literature: By American literature we mean literature written in English by people who came to settle in the territory that eventually became the United States of America. We exclude English Canadian literature; the ‘Relations’ written in French by Jesuit missionaries, even those written among the Iroquois on what became United States soil; and the writings of Spanish missionaries.
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While claiming to represent a shared cultural heritage, Levin’s anthology cheerfully – but shockingly – excludes everything but the British culture of New England (eastern United States), and British literary genres from the American canon. Here, it is the ‘official’ culture of the dominant group that determines which literature, genres, and cultures are relevant and how the national literature of the country should be defined. This situation began to change in the late 1980s with the publication of the Harper American Literature in 1987, which included texts by Columbus and works of other early American authors who were not part of the English tradition (even though that tradition still dominated this anthology). It was only in 1990, with the publication of the Heath Anthology of American Literature, that ossified traditions really began to break up. Rather than seeking to present a select group of authors, the compilers of the Heath anthology aimed to give a sampling of the broadest possible spectrum of the cultures that together make up ‘America.’ This was an indication that ideas of an American national identity were changing. For the compilers of the Heath Anthology, and to a lesser degree those of Harper, this identity was no longer defined by the culture of New England. The more recent Longman Anthology discussed in Chapter 2 aspires towards yet another kind of inclusivity: the full, comparative grasp of world literature, rather than American literature alone. The compilers of the Heath Anthology and other representatives of the progressive camp in the canon debate have often been accused of wishing to turn the canon into a kind of parliamentary democracy where everyone is represented. How can you go from there to establishing a standard for ‘literary excellence’? We now know the evident counterquestion: Whose standard? That standard is not given. If the canon debate in recent decades has revealed anything, it is that canonical literature is defined on the basis of a number of factors, and that literary quality is just one of them. Still it is hard to envision a curriculum in schools and universities without the familiar canonised works. Clearly, the idea of a prescriptive canon is outdated – but the implications for curricula and a sense of community to which the existence of a canon is inextricably bound, are still being debated. Nowadays, teachers and professors are mostly pragmatic in working with literary canons. They inform their students that the canon they work with is always a limited selection, and inform them about the criteria used for including some authors, and excluding others. In this way, their students are aware that ‘the list’ they read from is not cast in stone and, most of all, not of universal value.
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There is art in mass media
In section 2, we saw that critics like Adorno reduced the culture industry to passive consumption and brainwashing. One might ask, however, whether the culture industry is (still) as dangerous and mind-numbing as Adorno believed it was. Could Adorno’s distinction be outdated, or even flawed? Could it be that mass culture not merely manipulates helpless consumers but also generates critical perspectives on the world? We address this question in this section and reconsider the binary opposition between artistic culture and the culture industry. We do so with the help of a critic who has engaged with mass media after Adorno: John Fiske (b.1939). In his social analysis of mass culture and mass media, Theodor Adorno started from a top-down Marxist model of ideology (for this, see Chapter 9 and Chapter 10). However, as we have seen earlier in this book, another concept proposed by the philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) has in the meantime corrected the top-down model which Adorno still applied: hegemony. By means of this concept, Gramsci was able to explain that ‘the masses’ are not just a passive sponge absorbing everything mass media dish out; instead, their consent needs to be won over and over again if certain ideas are to be taken up and perpetuated. As such, the concept of ‘hegemony’ assumes the interaction between a ‘top-down’ movement (from the masters to the masses) and a ‘bottom-up’ movement (from the masses to the masters). The implication for cultural criticism is that meaning not only flows from top to bottom, but also in the opposite direction (as we already saw in Chapter 6 in our discussion of Fetterley’s ‘resisting reader’). Audiences assign meanings to characters or storylines in films, television series, and ‘throwaway’ novels that often counter or contradict mass mediated indoctrination. Perhaps, the masses are more unconventional, critical, and creative than Adorno thought they were. They attach their own meanings to the products of the culture. Fiske took these insights from Gramsci to research viewers’ responses to mass media in the 1980s. One case study focused on the movie Flashdance (dir. Adrian Lyne [b.1941], 1983). The movie is about Alex, a young and ambitious dancer who marries Nick, the owner of the steel mill where Alex works as a welder during the day. Alex’s marriage to Nick is symptomatic of accepted, normative gender roles in the entertainment industry. It is part of a conventional, oft-repeated storyline where the girl ‘gets’ the man. However, young female viewers nevertheless embraced Alex as the embodiment of independence and self-sufficiency. Fiske argued that the character of Alex took on an oppositional meaning. Though the plot assigned her a conventional role, viewers thought differently. They did not passively accept the message presented to them by the entertainment industry.
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Fiske’s research also indicated something else. Meanings that viewers assign to characters, stories, and events in movies and tv series correspond to their respective, sociocultural positions. Fiske call this ‘negotiated reading’: Viewers, readers, and listeners shift the meanings the culture industry appears to offer, and adapt them as needed to their own position and viewpoints. In this way, they ‘negotiate’ between the ideas circulating in the culture industry and their own, often critical visions of the world. Resisting the established order is possible, by using the forms and images the culture industry itself offers. These forms and images can be made to fit a critical view of the world. Thus, in Fiske’s model, the critical import comes not simply from outside mass media: within the culture industry, a dynamic and creative process of resistance is at work, eating away at the culture industry and its dominant meanings. If we accept this model, Adorno’s binary distinction between artistic culture and the culture industry no longer holds. There is a middle ground where the two intersect.
Andy Warhol and Madonna In the 1960s, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) started to paint iconic, mass-produced American objects and icons: Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, dollar bills, celebrities like Elvis Presley (1935-1977) and Marilyn Monroe (an instance of pop art: A current in visual art that depicts popular stars and brands). His works were produced and replicated in his studio, The Factory, in New York. Warhol took his objects from mass culture, and mimicked the modes of (re)production of mass culture. Still, his art became an object of serious inquiry, and of high value. Thus, it openly and playfully challenged the distinction between ‘high art’ and ‘mass consumption.’ Warhol deployed mass culture in his art to, precisely, raise the question what art is: Is it fundamentally different from mass culture, or do we need it (as Adorno maintained) to wake us up, take our distance from mass culture, and consider our position in society? The same question is triggered by the work of stars in the entertainment industry that displays just as many facets of ‘high’ art as ‘high’ art itself. For instance, at the height of her popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, Madonna (b.1958) created evershifting personae that made people ponder on questions of identity: Is identity an essence, or a performance; is it cast in stone or in flux? Why do we restrict gender roles so rigidly? There is something artificial about such restrictions. Raising these questions, Madonna’s work had a critical potential. Her songs and video clips, moreover, were often ambiguous and open to different interpretations – an aspect typically attributed to Literature with a capital L. Of course, Madonna also materialized a brand that could only have been created within the entertainment industry. However, the
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creative way in which this brand was reinvented time and again, and the ingenuous mix of styles Madonna used in her songs and clips, triggered critics to wonder in the 1990s: Why do we teach Shakespeare to literature majors, but not Madonna? Should we not be more open to the creative potential of the present and of the mass media that generate new forms of art? Indeed, had Shakespeare in his own times not been a mere source of entertainment too – had he not become a hallowed author only much later? The establishment of mass media- and communication studies in the 1980s has only reinforced the inclusion of mass entertainment works in university curricula.
8.7
In conclusion: Power to the users
In this chapter we have discussed the distinction between elite and mass culture. Glossing critical theory, sociological theories, historical perspectives, and empirical approaches in media research, we have seen that binary oppositions between elite and popular culture are constantly under pressure from the complexity of reality, and also continuously challenged by groups seeking symbolic capital (inclusion in the canon). They are also under pressure from the agency of audiences. We have seen that such audiences actively negotiate the meanings and ideas offered by the entertainment industry, rather than passively absorbing them – just as actively as users of high art are presumed to regulate their responses. Audiences creatively resist, oppose, or adjust what they are presented with, depending on their own sociocultural position. It is this role of the user-viewer that has been central to further, empirical research into the effects of mass media. With respect to the literary canon, it can be suggested that new mass media like the digital have opened up pathways to readers to easily move beyond canons of the past. A whole world of literature is now available to these readers, while media platforms like YouTube highlight the works of authors perhaps once marginalised or excluded from Western canons. Thus, the mass media once condemned by Adorno now also invigorate literary culture as artistic culture. In Bring on the Books for Everybody, as we saw in Chapter 2, Collins argues that literary culture has changed and expanded into a culture of popular media over the course of the past decades. No longer restricted to a single medium (the book), literary culture has been liberated by a phenomenon we already encountered in Chapter 5: convergence culture. In this culture, novels are adapted for film, shared and discussed on online forums, while canonical stories are taken up and continued, as we have seen in Chapter 6, in fan fiction; meanwhile, the internet has become a new medium
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for experimental poetry. With all these developments, it is unrealistic to go on thinking of ‘high’ literature as restricted to the frame of print. Moreover, as Collins points out, electronic media have helped to blur the lines of social distinction. Thanks to Oprah’s book club, Amazon’s algorithms (however directive and controlling they are), Goodreads, and so on, ‘high’ literature has become increasingly accessible to a broader audience. What more could one wish for?
Further reading Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, London: Routledge, 2001. Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedeman, parts 3, 8, and 10, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981, 1972, 1976. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular Culture, New York: The New Press, 1998. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, second ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Anxieties of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, London: Sage, 1997.
Notes 1 2 3
4 5 6
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Gaston Franssen, ‘Van spiegels en vensters: de retorica van de canon,’Van spiegels en vensters: de literaire canon in Nederland, red. Lizet Duyvendak en Saskia Pieterse, Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, pp. 97-112. http://literairecanon.be/, translation K.B.W. (accessed July 2019). See Theodor Adorno’s essays ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’ [1981], pp. 61-97, ‘The Culture Industry Reconsidered’ [1975], pp. 98-106, and ‘How to Look at Television’ [1954], pp. 158-177, all in J.M. Bernstein, ed., The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London: Routledge, 2001. See for this, Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 19301980, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods’ [1980], in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson, 74-111, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Het onderzoek van de middeleeuwse volkscultuur: Een schets van de huidige problematiek,’ Volkskundig Bulletin 12.2 (1986): 265-282,
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p. 272, quoted in Steven Dhondt, ‘More paganorum: Vroegmiddeleeuwse perceptie van heidense volkscultuur’ (2001), http://www.ethesis.net/more_paganorum/more_paganorum_inhoud.htm (accessed July 2019). See also Peter Dinzelbacher and Hans-Dieter Mück, eds, Volkskultur des europäischen Spätmittelalters, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1987. Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture, p. xviii, quoted in Dhondt, ‘More paganorum.’ Ibid., pp. 2-3. Jacques le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age: Temps, travail et culture en Occident: 18 essais, Paris: Gallimard, 1977, p. 229, quoted in Dhondt, ‘More paganorum.’ Dinzelbacher, ‘Het onderzoek van de middeleeuwse volkscultuur,’ pp. 273-276, quoted in Dhondt, ‘More paganorum.’ Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, London: Routledge, 2007, p. 89-90. This text box is derived from John Storey, ‘The Social Life of Opera,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.1 (2003): 5-35. Representative of this position in the Netherlands is, for example, Ernst van Alphen and Maaike Meijer, eds, De canon onder vuur: Nederlandse literatuur tegendraads gelezen, Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1991. Representative of this is, for example, Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Anxieties of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006. David Levin, America in Literature, Vol. 1, Part One: The First Two Centuries: 1630-1820, New York: Wiley, 1978, p. 3. Donald McQuade et al., eds, The Harper American Literature, 3rd ed., New York: Longman, 1998; Paul Lauter et al., eds, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Hannah Bosma and Patricia Pisters, Madonna: De vele gezichten van een popster (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1999), pp. 11-31 and pp. 48-69.
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9 IMAGINATION IN A CHANGING WORLD ANN RIGNEY
Literature is written and read in a changing world. Both in terms of content and of style, people today write and read differently than people a generation or a century ago. This chapter offers an introduction to contextual approaches to literature: that is, approaches that link the style and content of particular works to the changing world in which they are produced. It begins by explaining the concept of ‘cultural context’ and by describing the motor behind cultural change. It then goes on to address the question: Does literature merely reflect transformations in the world, or does literature itself have the power to change the world by changing the way we look at it? It ends by illustrating some of the answers to this question through a discussion of literature’s relation to environmentalism: How has literature reflected but also helped to shape ideas about the relationship between people and the natural environment? . .
. . . .
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Introduction: A happy househusband Texts and cultural context .. Culture and cultural borders .. How cultures become different How literature keeps changing, and why Can literature change the world? Case study: Ecocriticism In conclusion: A tool for thought
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Introduction: A happy househusband
The novel Prey (2002), by popular novelist Michael Crichton (1942-2008) begins as follows: Things never turn out the way you think they will. I never intended to become a househusband. Stay-at-home husband. Full-time dad, whatever you want to call it – there is no good term for it. But that’s what I had become in the last six months. Now I was in Crate & Barrel in downtown San Jose, picking up some extra glasses, and while I was there I noticed they had a good selection of placemats. We needed more placemats; the woven oval ones that Julia had bought a year ago were getting pretty worn, and the weave was encrusted with baby food. The trouble was, they were woven, so you couldn’t wash them. So I stopped at the display to see if they had any placemats that might be good, and I found some pale blue ones that were nice, and I got some white napkins. And then some yellow placemats caught my eye, because they looked really bright and appealing, so I got those too. They didn’t have six on the shelf, and I thought we’d better have six, so I asked the salesgirl to look in the back and see if they had more. While she was gone I put the placemat on the table, and put a white dish on it, and then I put a yellow napkin next to it. The setting looked very cheerful, and I began to think maybe I should get eight instead of six. That was when my cell phone rang.
Imagine a reader from 1820 or one from 2120 reading this passage. It is obvious that many of the details, characteristic of early-twenty-first-century shopping culture, will not make much sense to people in other ages. The idea of a ‘cell phone’ would be science fiction to someone in 1820 whereas it will probably be a charming reference to ‘olden times’ for people a hundred years from now. In the future, the phenomenon of the ‘househusband’ doing the shopping may have become so common as to be unremarkable, but it certainly would have seemed weird to readers two hundred years ago. Not just because of the gender roles, but also because department stores had not yet come into existence (they started popping up only in the second half of the nineteenth century); nor had factory-produced consumer items, meaning that the character’s consumerism (he starts out to buy glasses and then gets the idea of buying first six and then eight placemats, even if he does not seem to need them) would have been very hard to understand. This small example illustrates how literature reflects the world in which it was written, both its material circumstances and the things that are taken for granted by writers and readers. If literature reflects the circumstances of its production, however, it is also true that creative writers are continuously trying to imagine and to
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worldliness
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describe situations which are not (yet) part of their world. Imagination is the power to think beyond the self-evident and bring nonexistent things into the realm of the imaginable for others. Writers achieve this expansion of current horizons by situating their stories in the past (as in historical novels) or in an imagined future (as in speculative fiction or science fiction), or simply because they offer (in line with what we said earlier about the defamiliarising power of the arts) an unfamiliar perspective on a timeless issue such as the nature of justice or the good life. This chapter examines the paradox that literature carries traces of the circumstances in which it was written, at the same time as it reflects on its world from a distance and imagines alternatives. It will show how literature helps shape the way people look at their world – its past, present, and futures. Questions about the relation between the worlds depicted in literature and the actual world in which texts are written and read typify contextualist approaches to literature. Contextualist means here an interest in the relationship between literature as an aesthetic phenomenon and the changing contexts in which it is written. In Chapter 1 we described literature as having a historical dimension and literary studies as having a ‘moving target’ rather than an unchanging object of research. In this chapter we will show how literary scholars have explained why that target moves and how culture changes.
9.2
Texts and cultural context
9.2.1
Culture and cultural borders
In his influential work The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Edward Said (1935-2003) encouraged literary scholars to become aware of the worldliness of texts. By ‘worldliness’ he meant the fact that literature always carries the traces of the place and time in which it was written. It is always historically and geographically located (as a postcolonial critic, Said was particularly interested in whether a writer had a Western perspective or one from the global south; see Chapter 10). While imaginative writers think outside of the box, their writing will inevitably still have some blind spots that are related to their historical and geographical location: there are things they will take for granted and things they overlook, even as they engage critically with some of the ideas and ideals that dominate their world. To study a text from the perspective of its worldliness, then, is to identify the things to which it is blind as well as its potential to break through old habits of thought and patterns of identification. In advocating a ‘worldly’ approach to literature, Said was challenging the commonly held idea that literature can somehow be understood in isolation
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from the context (the ‘world’) in which it was written and read. Since the 1980s, contextualism has become a dominant approach in literary studies and linked to various branches of cultural criticism. Including postcolonial criticism* to which Said himself contributed so much (and which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 10). The concept of ‘world’ embedded in the term ‘worldliness’ encompasses the material (the physical environment and the things we make of it), the social (how people relate to each other and form communities), and the cultural (how we represent and make sense of the material and the social). Our focus in what follows will be on the cultural, but our aim is to show how the cultural, the social, and the material interact and evolve in tandem with each other. In Chapter 1, we offered a broad definition of culture as the production and reproduction of meaning using various media (language, text, image, performance, objects, etc.) and its impact on human behaviour. Culture is what allows people to give meaning to their world, coordinate their activities, and share a sense of community. Culture in this sense usually supposes a common language like English or Chinese. But it involves above all speaking ‘the same language’ in the sense of sharing common assumptions, values, rituals, and a common history. Culture also includes the hegemonic discourses that at any given time dominate public life and shape social behaviour. Culture, defined in this broad way, underpins the formation of imagined communities: the sense of belonging together. At the same time, the experience of ‘speaking the same language’ also has a downside: it feeds into a division between ‘us’ and ‘others.’
The Tower of Babel How to explain the extraordinary diversity of languages and cultures across the globe? This question was already posed in the story of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament Book of Genesis (Genesis 11:1-9). According to Genesis, mankind started out with one single language. This gave people an extraordinary capacity to work together and even the ambition to rival God’s power. In order to prove this point, they undertook to build a mighty tower that would reach to the heavens. God, however, crushed this ambition and broke up the tower. In doing so, he condemned mankind to speaking different languages and to dispersing themselves into different groups across the globe. As the story of Babel shows, people have long been aware of cultural and linguistic differences. However, they have interpreted these differences in changing ways. Put simply: until late in the eighteenth century, European thinkers recognised cultural differences but did not consider them so important since they trusted that the shared legacy
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of Greco-Roman culture brought everybody (read: Europeans) together in a common civilisation whose values were presumed universal. The ‘vernacular’ cultures of different areas in Europe (‘vernacular’ is derived from the Latin vernaculus, meaning ‘domestic’ or ‘native’) were long considered to belong to ‘low’ culture in contrast to the ‘high’ culture of the classical tradition. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (17441803) was one of the first to argue that cultural diversity was not simply an unfortunate fact of life, but something valuable and interesting in its own right. He saw the human world as divided into distinct groups, each with its own culture and ‘spirit.’ Although Herder acknowledged the existence of non-European cultures, his primary focus was on the differences between the Classics and the vernacular languages that defined different ethnic groups across Europe. He believed that these vernacular cultures should be liberated from their subordination to the Classics and be judged according to different standards. Herder’s defence of the value of vernacular languages and cultures marked the beginning of nationalism in Europe, a way of thinking that became dominant in the nineteenth century and is still important today, although it is also being challenged. According to nationalism, the world consists of different groups each with their own culture, and this cultural distinctiveness provides the basis for their political right to self-determination (more on this in Chapter 11).
Figure 9.1: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (1563). © 2019 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
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Identifying cultural differences and mapping how they are distributed across time and space is one of the key tasks of cultural studies. In public debates people often invoke ‘British,’ ‘European,’ or ‘Islamic’ culture as if these were discrete entities with sharply defined borders. In fact, cultural borders are never easy to establish with any precision since they pertain to so many different aspects of life. The borders of a state are in principle clear-cut: being on one side rather than another of the border between Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, means being subject to one government and legal system rather than another. Cultural borders are much fuzzier. There are, for instance, both similarities and differences between the Netherlands and Belgium in terms of language, manners, and customs, and within each of these countries there are regional, ethnic, and class variations too. Similarly, there are continuities and differences between England and Ireland and, by the same token, between the British Isles and the United States. For this reason, according to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, we should not think of cultural borders in terms of radical difference. Instead they should be seen as a series of thresholds marking a gradual decrease in mutual comprehension and of our ability to coordinate behaviour, because of an accumulation of differences in values, manners, and customs. Cultural borders and their mutability have taken on a new importance in recent years in the face of increasing migration (the movement of people carrying their own languages and cultures) and advanced globalisation (the movement of information, goods, and services across the world, including cultural products such as film and music). As a result, cultures are growing ever more entangled, with more occasions for crossovers between them that call for new tools of analysis. The concept of transculturality was first coined by the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) in 1941, and it has recently been further developed by Monica Juneja (b.1955) among others. Transculturality opens up a perspective on culture that rejects the idea that the life-worlds of particular groups are bounded, internally cohesive, and linguistically homogenous spheres. It emphasises instead how ideas, values, and stories enter into conversation with each other as people and cultural products move across the world; and how, in this the process, cultural borders are renegotiated and the thresholds of mutual understanding relocated. As a result, people are brought to rethink the relation between ‘self ’ and ‘other.’ This is not easy (and as we will see in Chapter 10, it is caught up in power relations). But there is no doubt that it does occur and that cultures are continuously evolving and borrowing from each other. Studying the ways in which literature helps to mediate between different ‘languages’ has been a long-term focus in comparative literary studies, particularly in the field of postcolonial criticism.*
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At first sight it might seem that transculturality is a recent phenomenon, but cultural history shows that it has long been ongoing. One of the few constants in culture is that it is continuously changing, even if only in small ways. This happens through contacts between people – in minor, but also in the longer term, major ways. Modern English is the outcome of the mixing up of Old French and Anglo-Saxon following the Norman Conquest of 1066, for example, while contemporary Dutch and French also include a growing number of English words. The fact that the influence of English or Arabic in Europe today also generates resistance on the part of those who feel that their identity is being threatened by foreign cultures shows that change does not always occur easily. In this section we have established that culture is a dynamic phenomenon; and indicated how transculturality is one of the motors behind the transformation of cultures. In the next section we will discuss how transformation occurs through exchanges between the arts and other cultural practices.
9.2.2
How cultures become different
A useful starting point for this discussion is the work of Stephen Greenblatt, associated with the critical school of New Historicism.* This school became very important in the field of (especially English) literary studies in the 1990s, and has promoted a contextualist approach to literature that studies it in relation to other cultural practices and forms of knowledge. As Greenblatt argued, we should look at culture as having two aspects. On the one hand, culture works as a system of ‘constraints’: it offers inherited models for how men and women are expected to pattern their lives and their relations. On the other hand, it is also characterised by ‘mobility’: these models are continuously adapted as they are communicated across different media and practices. In what Greenblatt calls the ‘ceaseless, resourceful work of culture,’ models for living ‘are moved, disguised, translated, transformed, adapted, and reimagined.’ The challenge for the cultural critic is to explain how such models come into being but also how they gradually change as they are reproduced and adapted in different circumstances. In the course of minor variations, the border between what is imaginable and what is unimaginable in a society is gradually renegotiated. In the previous section we have seen how encounters between people with different cultural backgrounds, both real encounters and virtual ones, are an important motor behind such renegotiations. Greenblatt himself was specifically interested in how stories, ideas, and attitudes circulate across different practices and disciplines within a given society (the arts, philosophy, law, history, theology, economics). An idea or a story may first appear in a travelogue or newspaper, and then be picked up in
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a philosophical or historical work, or in a movie or novel. Improvisation and experimentation in each of these disciplines, and especially in the arts, help to produce variation: ‘Something happens to objects, beliefs, and practices when they are represented, reimagined, and performed in literary texts.’ To take one of the examples discussed by Greenblatt: Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest (1610-1611), presents the story of a group of Europeans who were shipwrecked on an island inhabited by a magician, his beautiful daughter, and a monster called Caliban, the son of a witch and the devil. There are many fantastic and poetic elements in the play that have literary precedents. But The Tempest also reworked nonfictional narratives about the trials and tribulations of early colonists, and the reports they sent back to England about their unsettling encounters with the indigenous peoples of North America and the Caribbean. The magician’s attempts to control the island can be seen as a fictional counterpart to the colonists’ violent drive to take control of the Americas. As Greenblatt shows, Shakespeare’s poetic play was thus deeply embedded in the material and symbolic practices of its own time. It was helping the public to respond to – colloquially: to get its head around – the challenge posed by New World discoveries to existing ideas about the natural order of things: What was possible, what was normal and indeed, what did it mean to be ‘human’ in this expanded world? (In the four centuries since Caliban first appeared on stage, he has been continuously reinterpreted in the light of changing images of Europe’s ‘Other.’) Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (1601) offers another example of the interplay between fiction and other discursive practices, in this case, from the sphere of religion rather than colonialism. The play opens with the uncanny appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, whom Hamlet suspects was murdered by his uncle. Using evidence from other writings in this period, Greenblatt shows how the figure of the ghost was itself deeply entangled with contemporary concerns. The Protestant Reformation in the century preceding Hamlet had involved officially abandoning the belief in purgatory. Purgatory (so vividly depicted in Dante’s fourteenth-century Purgatorio) had traditionally been imagined by Christians as a sort of ‘waiting room’ to Paradise; people who had died with minor sins (presumably the bulk of the population) were not condemned to eternal damnation in Hell, but could sit out a ‘sentence’ in Purgatory before being admitted to Heaven, a sentence that could be shortened if family and friends would pray for them or pay for prayers on their behalf. As of the 1560s (two generations before Hamlet) the new Protestant theology abandoned the idea of praying for the souls in Purgatory. To nonbelievers nowadays this shift in theological thinking might seem like hair-splitting on the part of a clerical elite, but within the religious context of the Renaissance, the abolition of Purgatory as an imagined in-between place had actual consequences in
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the real world: it left ordinary people powerless to help their dead relatives and with the problem of where to picture their souls now that Purgatory was no longer an option. According to Greenblatt, the ghost of Hamlet’s father gave expression to these continuing anxieties. As such it was not just a piece of theatre, but was also part of the broader cultural dynamic in which models for living were, to recall Greenblatt’s words, being slowly ‘moved, disguised, translated, transformed, adapted, and reimagined.’ The anxieties that the young Hamlet feels as a result of the encounter with his father’s ghost reflect a larger cultural anxiety specific to the world of Renaissance England. Shakespeare’s play did not offer solutions to the problem, but rather helped to articulate it in the form of a fictional play. The New Historicist approach to literature included an important methodological innovation: an awareness of the importance of studying literary works in conjunction with other cultural products in circulation at the time of writing. In the case of works from earlier periods, this entails historical research in archives to identify the significant non-fictional texts that were in circulation within other domains of activity at that time. Just as creative writers recycle and rework discourses from other domains, they in turn feed back into these other domains by offering new perspectives on the world. As we will see later in this chapter in the section on ‘Ecocriticism,’ Greenblatt’s insights regarding the Renaissance can also be transferred to the interplay between literature and other domains nowadays.
A deadly piece of theatre Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) is reported to have said that: ‘If I had been king, [Beaumarchais] would have gone to prison. [...] The Marriage of Figaro is already a piece of the revolution’ (‘c’est déjà la Révolution en action’). Napoleon was not the only one to consider the play to have been revolutionary: Georges Danton (b.1759, a leading revolutionary until he fell to the guillotine in 1794) had already remarked in 1784 that Beaumarchais’ drama had ‘killed’ the aristocracy. It was a symbolic execution, to be sure, and not a real one. But how could a piece of theatre be a dress rehearsal for the revolution which put an end to the Ancien Régime and heralded the age of democracy in Europe? How in this case did theatre play into the domain of politics? Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799) was already the celebrated author of various plays, including The Barber of Seville (Le Barbier de Séville; 1775), when he got the idea of writing a new play called The Marriage of Figaro (Le Mariage de Figaro; 1778), now best known in Mozart’s opera version as Le nozze di Figaro (1786). This was about the ancient droit de seigneur or ius primae noctis: one of the feudal ‘rights’ of the nobility which meant that when a subordinate got married, the overlord could claim the first
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night with his new bride. In Beaumarchais’ story the desires of the aristocrat are thwarted by a clever machination on the part of the bride who manages to escape. The result was a highly entertaining comedy in the tradition of the Italian comédie bouffe that also offered pointed criticism of aristocratic privilege. No wonder then that King Louis xvi (1754-1793) did his best to suppress the comedy. He had the power to do this because all publications and all theatrical productions in France were subject at that time to royal censorship (one of the reasons why so many French writers ended up publishing their work in the Netherlands and Switzerland). The king managed to suppress The Marriage of Figaro for the best part of three years. But because Beaumarchais managed to organise private performances, more and more people heard about the play and started to demand its publication. Finally, the king gave way to public opinion (a sign of weakness that was a prelude to his dramatic loss of power in 1789) and The Marriage of Figaro was finally performed in 1784 in the Comédie Française (the official theatre of the time). Ironically, the public was largely made up of enthusiastic fans from the aristocracy, many of whom would meet their fate on the guillotine in the years that followed. Because the feudal system was symbolically undermined in the comic plot of the play it became all the easier to attack it in reality. For this reason, Beaumarchais’ play would later be seen as a prelude to the revolution that exploded in the summer of 1789.
9.3
How literature keeps changing, and why
In the previous section, we saw something of the ‘worldliness’ of literature, and showed how it is embedded in a culture that changes in tandem with material and social circumstances. That people write about different things in response to contextual change seems logical. But why do they also develop new techniques and genres in order to write about those new themes? This section will consider more specifically how and why literature as literature changes. There are continuities as well as differences between Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro, Waiting for Godot (1953) by Samuel Beckett, and Asylum Monologues (Die Asyl-Monologe; 2013), directed by Michael Ruf (b.1976), a form of ‘documentary theatre’ which figures asylum seekers telling their own stories on stage to German audiences. While they are all plays and are performed in theatres, the role of theatre has changed: a hugely important cultural institution at the time of Beaumarchais, theatre in the age of YouTube and smart phones has acquired a different social status. The art of playwriting has also changed: the enthusiastic public who watched the first performance of The Marriage of Figaro in 1784, a comedy with a clear beginning, middle and end, would probably have thrown rotten tomatoes at Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which, as mentioned in Chapter 5,
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periodisation
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depicts two tramps who do nothing, go nowhere and wait for two long acts for a Godot who never comes. So is it possible to disengage the dynamics of literary change from the broader cultural context in which it is imbedded? Is there such a thing as a literary history? For a long time, literary scholars certainly thought so. The question ‘how to write a literary history’ has not been the topic of much theorisation in recent times, but the practice is still very much alive. Many introductory courses in literary studies are organised around distinct periods and look for the particular characteristics of that period in terms of subject matter, genre, techniques, and relationships to other media. There are fashions in literature as well as in music and clothing, and tracing those fashions across space and time remains one of the most fascinating parts of the study of culture. Nowadays we are familiar with the phenomenon of texts going viral: all of a sudden, thanks to social media, huge numbers of people end up watching, reading, or listening to the same thing. Although things moved more slowly in earlier times, tastes and techniques could also go viral in the predigital age. It is one of the most striking aspects of the early nineteenth century, for example, that so many writers across Europe, in the period that has come to be known as Romanticism, started to thematise individual and collective freedom, while also turning to the historical novel, the gothic novel, and the folktale as favourite genres. Individual and collective freedom as a thematic focus makes sense in light of the growing dominance of democratic ideals. But why turn to these particular genres to treat those new themes? And how do we explain the fact that writers and artists, even as they produce singular works, also behave collectively in ways that are characteristic of their particular period? Periodisation is a key methodological principle in the study of artistic innovation and how it spreads. By ‘periodisation’ is meant the grouping of cultural products according to the time in which they were produced. The concept of period – as in Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernism and Postmodernism, and so on – helps to identify new trends and the persistence of older patterns. To call the period between 1790 and 1840 the period of ‘Romanticism’ or the period between 1960 and 2000 the period of ‘Postmodernism’ is not to claim a similarity between everything written anywhere across the world within those time frames. A period should be seen as a heuristic device (‘heuristic’ is derived from the Greek heuriskein, meaning to ‘find’) that helps us to find patterns in vast amounts of information. Just as critics apply the hermeneutic circle as a method for interpreting individual texts so too does the literary historian work from the whole (the idea of a period in a particular area) to the part (individual works), and back again in order to gradually identify the most important innovations in themes, genres, and writing styles characteristic of a given time in a particular part of the world.
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Figure 9.2: Waiting for Godot, text by Samuel Beckett, staging by Otomar Krejca. Avignon Festival, 1978.
Fiction or fake news? The fact that ideas circulate across different media and practices can be illustrated by the growth of interest in metafiction, already briefly introduced in Chapter 5 as a playful reflection on the constructed character of a given piece of fiction. Metafiction became a signature feature of so-called postmodernism. In this period Italo Calvino, for example, wrote a story called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore; 1979) which is about a reader trying to read a book called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Such metafictional works can be seen not just as playful puzzles for the reader but also as part of a serious discussion about the nature of truth and fiction in the modern age that transcends the field of literature as such and extends into philosophy, the visual arts, and films. One can think here of the already mentioned Matrix (1999), but also The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir [b.1944], 1998), both of which present complex worlds where the border between the fictional and the real has become blurred. It can be argued that postmodernism in literature and the other arts anticipated on what has now become a growing sense that the power of the media and of advertising has ended up making it difficult in daily life to distinguish between the real (based on a truth claim), the fictional (based on a knowing suspension of disbelief ) and the fraudulent (based on the misleading presentation of something as true whereas in fact it is invented). Crucially, this blurring of the boundaries between the real, the fictional, and the fraudulent has by now deeply affected political life. Since the election of Donald Trump (b.1946) as president of the United States in 2016, the terms ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ have become all too familiar in English. They exemplify the pervasive presence of misinformation, lies, and contradictions that has come to affect public life in the age of Twitter and other social media. In light of these developments, the meta-
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fictions of postmodernist writers like Calvino have retrospectively become resources for critical reflection on the boundary between make-believe and fraud. One way or another, the border between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ has been widely thematised in different areas of life over the last decades with a frequency that is remarkable compared to the preoccupations of people a hundred years ago. At the same time, we have to recognise that this common theme is approached in different ways depending on the practice involved: journalists, for example, try to offer a counterweight to mendacious reports circulating on social media, while artists try to step back and reflect more generally on the nature of truth and representation. The interplay between these different activities illustrates Greenblatt’s principle of ‘the circulation of social energy’: ideas circulate across different artistic practices, academic disciplines, journalism, and the arena of politics, and are transformed in the process.
We have now established that literature responds to changes in the lifeworld as well as anticipating on them. This leads to the question of the role of formal innovations in these responses. Why and how do forms and genres of writing change? These questions have not been at the forefront of recent scholarship, but they were a central concern of earlier generations of scholars, most notably the Russian formalists* and their successors in Czech structuralism.* In an influential article called ‘Literary Evolution’ (1927), Yury Tynyanov (1894-1943) claimed that the principle of defamiliarisation gave an internal dynamic to literature and, more generally, to the arts. The argument ran as follows: 1. If defamiliarisation is key to the aesthetic, then new works of art have to differ in some way from their predecessors or else they will fall flat; 2. successful works will inspire others to imitate them; 3. if successful works are copied too often, however, the copies will start appearing formulaic and no longer have a defamiliarising effect; 4. as a result, literary production (and art more generally) goes in waves, alternating between innovation, normalisation, and then innovation again. Perspectives and devices that were once striking and surprising lose their power if they become formulaic – though they may regain that power for later generations of readers. This alternation between innovation and normalisation can be illustrated by reference to the Petrarchan sonnet mentioned already in Chapter 3 as having become a very popular form for writing love poetry in the early Renaissance; at a certain point, however, the model became so overused that it provoked people into using it in an ironic way. Mock Petrarchan sonnets became something of a fashion in their own right, exempli-
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fied most famously in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. This love poem (for it turns out to be one in the end) begins by flaunting the conventions of a love poem in downplaying the beauties of his lover: ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red.’ Or to take a more recent example from popular culture: having troubled female detectives as their protagonists used to make Scandinavian thrillers like the Danish television series The Killing (created by S. Sveistrup [b.1968], 2007-2012) stand out as ‘different.’ But by now the model has been emulated so often that it has become formulaic and hence less able to surprise. In short: artistic innovation has a built-in obsolescence which limits the number of times a new device can be repeated to the same effect. Art by its very nature continuously evolves, according to the formalists, driven by an internal motor that alternates between innovation and normalisation, the unpredictable and the formulaic. Now that we have explained why literature continuously changes if only in small ways, the next question arises: is innovation simply the unpredictable outcome of artistic creativity or can it too be explained in some way by the context in which it occurs? It is certainly the case that the particular form artistic creativity takes cannot be predicted – as we have mentioned several times in this book, creative writers come up with forms and stories for which there are no models or obvious precedents. As the formalists pointed out, however, innovation consists in large part of recycling, repurposing, and reassembling earlier forms, materials, and themes. There is a continuous feedback loop from the present to cultural products and practices from earlier times (and, as new historicists like Greenblatt, from the literary to other domains). In order to explain how this feedback loop worked, Tynyanov posited the existence of a literary system: a sort of virtual economy within which, at any given moment, certain writers, texts, and genres are more valued than others and people look to them for inspiration, while others are less valued. This system was conceived of as consisting of a centre (where highly valued works and models were located) and a periphery (where marginalised genres and works were located). They were marginalised because they had become overused and hence overly familiar as models, or because they are ‘so far out there’ in their radical newness that few people can (as yet) make sense of them, or because they belong to genres that have traditionally not been seen as typically literary (diaries, for example). As the cycle of innovation and normalisation continues, things gradually move from the centre out to the periphery, and vice versa: peripheral models are recycled and repurposed in order to create new forms of defamiliarisation. This is what happened during Romanticism: writers like E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), author of such tales as The Sandman (Der Sandmann; 1816-1817) and The Mines of Falun (Die Bergwerke zu Falun; 1819), looked for inspiration in popular
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Figure 9.3: Literature as a dynamic system.
folktales (at the time, a non-literary genre) and adapted the oral model of storytelling about fantastic beliefs to produce innovative literary narratives that had the added value of apparently being deeply rooted in the national culture. A more extensive illustration of the dynamics of literary evolution is given in the text box ‘Historical Fiction: In, out, in.’
1. Centre: texts and genres that are most highly appreciated at a certain moment. 2. Transit zone: texts and genres travel to and from centre and periphery. 3. Periphery: through the periphery, marginalised texts and popular genres, as well as nonliterary genres and other media enter the system.
Tynyanov’s idea that artistic innovation involves in large part the recycling and repurposing of existing forms and genres, including work in other media, is still generally accepted. As we saw in Chapter 4, experimentation in other (audiovisual) media offers a very important source of renewal for literature in today’s multimedial landscape. What is less accepted nowadays is the formalists’ understanding of the literary system in terms of a single centre (located in Europe and the us) surrounded by margins. Scholars nowadays prefer the less hierarchical and more global model of a network with multiple nodes and cross-currents. This was most notably formulated in The World Republic of Letters (La République mondiale des Lettres; 1999) by Pascale Casanova (1959-2018), which argued that scholars should not assume the existence of one single literary system, but instead factor the idea of multiple centres and hence multiple peripheries into their work. Her concern was less with the production of innovative work, than with the power differential which plays into reception and the limited recognition of the literary qualities of work coming from cultures perceived to be ‘minor’ (Chapter 10 shows how this is also
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a theme in postcolonial criticism*). Casanova’s challenge to the idea of a single literary system does not contradict Tynyanov’s claim that innovation is based on recycling, but it does complicate it: where the formalists never questioned whether literariness would be recognised as such, Casanova points to the filters that prevent some literary works from being recognised as having literary value and hence from being accepted into the international literary system, transcending single languages and countries, that constitutes what she calls ‘the world republic of letters.’
Historical fiction: In, out, in In order to understand the dynamics behind the evolution of literature, it is worth looking at the genre of the historical novel, that is, novels which combine fictionality (the freedom to invent) with references to known events and situations from the past. This hybrid genre is considered to have been launched by the work of the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott and his bestselling novel Waverley (1814) about the Scottish resistance to English rule in the eighteenth century. The extraordinary success of Scott’s work both at home and abroad ((Waverley Waverley was followed by more than 20 other bestselling novels, which were translated across Europe and the Middle East) led to its emulation by other writers across Europe who took Waverley as a model for writing about history. Scott had found a winning formula in the innovative combination of history writing (a prestigious literary genre at the time) and romance (a low prestige but very popular narrative form). The success of Scott’s combination of existing genres into a new hybrid form can be explained in part by reference to the broader cultural context. On the one hand, modernisation was generating an awareness of change and hence the desire to reconnect imaginatively with a by-now disappearing past; on the other hand, the new genre made it possible for people across Europe to give voice to hitherto marginalised histories at a time of democratic awakening and growing nationalism. The result was a dramatic reorientation of novel writing towards the hybrid genre of historical fiction; within the space of fifteen years, the historical novel grew to dominate literary production (an estimated 40 of all novels published in France in 1830 were historical novels). By 1840, however, the tide had turned. Novels concerned with contemporary social circumstances (the so-called realist novel, associated with Honoré de Balzac [1799-1850] and Charles Dickens, among others) displaced the historical novel from the centre of the European literary system; and in the course of the next decades, the historical novel migrated to the margins of literary production; that is, it lost status and became both a children’s genre and, once again, associated with ‘romances’ for women. By 1880, the historical novel was no longer at the centre of literary innovation, and it remained in the margins until well after World War ii ii. In the 1970s, however, we can note a new wave of interest in the genre albeit with new elements. On the one hand, new historical novels started appearing in which novel-
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ists not only presented stories set in the past, but also added metafictional elements so that readers were continuously made aware of the constructedness of all histories. The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa; 1980) by Umberto Eco belong to this renaissance and to the creative transformation of historical fiction into one of the dominant genres within postmodernism. In a parallel development, writers seeking to offer a response to the horrors of the two world wars revived the genre of historical fiction, adding to it a new emphasis on the subjective experiences of war that had been largely absent in the nineteenth-century models. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), already mentioned in Chapter 5 as an example of metafiction, can also be understood within this framework. In short: literature evolves through the emergence of new themes thrown up by the life-world in combination with new techniques of representation, and a constant recycling and repurposing of models from earlier periods.
So far we have established that literature evolves (1) in response to new conditions in the life-world that throw up new themes; and (2) a dynamic that is specific to literary production itself (the alternation between innovation and normalisation; the importance of the recycling and repurposing of old forms in the creation of new genres). The final issue to be addressed is the role of social transformations in the demand for new literary forms. This question has been addressed in particular in relation to the development of the novel (which has already been mentioned in Chapter 2). In a book called The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt (19171999) argued more than 50 years ago that there was a link between the first emergence of the novel and the growing power, economic and political, of the middle classes from the seventeenth century onwards. The consolidation of the novel as a highly valued literary genre in the nineteenth century can then be seen as a reflection of the consolidation of the political position of the middle classes in the democratic regimes of the modern period. The appearance of a new class of readers, alongside the aristocratic elite that had hitherto dominated the literary scene, meant a demand for new stories with which that class could identify: adventures, but not necessarily those of the knights and courtiers that had enchanted earlier generations of aristocratic readers. As a result, the chivalric hero of Orlando Furioso (1516), a late epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto (14741533), gradually gave way to more down-to-earth characters like those in Clarissa (1748) by Samuel Richardson. Like many works of the period, this took the form of an epistolary novel; that is, a narrative told through letters, in this case, ones written by a young lady from a nouveau-riche family trying to defend her virtue against the advances of a predatory
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aristocrat. In contrast to epic poetry which already enjoyed high prestige and a long history, narratives in prose, and in this case ones that recycled the everyday form of the letter, provided the basis of a new literary form tailored to the tastes of a new public. More recent histories of the novel, most notably the multivolume The Novel (2006-2007) edited by Franco Moretti, have challenged the Eurocentrism of Watt’s history. But the basic principle remains unchallenged: that the emergence of new social groups and their cultural empowerment creates the demand for alternative forms of art that speak to their interests, and that this should be included as one of the driving forces behind cultural change.
9.4
Can literature change the world?
Can literature change the world? Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the most important British Romantic poets and a political radical, certainly thought so when he claimed that: ‘[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ Writers were ‘legislators’ in the sense that they formulated the unwritten laws of human society (that is, the norms, values, and ideas of which culture is made). Although their authority was not officially acknowledged, Shelley claimed, they were more powerful than actual parliaments and arguably even more legitimate. This was a huge claim on the part of the poet. And it is no coincidence that it was made in the Romantic period when the power of the individual imagination to freely shape the world had become important in response to the new challenge of translating democratic principles into political practice in the aftermath of the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-1795). Do creative writers actually have the power that Shelley (and many other writers) claimed? As we saw in Chapter 2, literature is not about solving everyday, practical problems and, in that sense, it has no social power. Nevertheless, people ascribe power to literature and the other arts. Indeed, censorship is an offshoot of this, for why go to the trouble to ban books if they are indeed ‘merely’ for pleasure and hence harmless? The idea that artists may form a threat to the ‘public order’ has had a long history going back at least to Plato’s Republic where the philosopher banished poets from his ideal state: he viewed literature as a source of illusions rather than of knowledge. In the very act of condemning it, however, he too acknowledged its power to influence how people saw the world; or, more precisely in Plato’s view, to distract them from seeing it as it really was. Many writers, past and present, have themselves been politically engaged, attempting to hold up a mirror to their own society and offer a
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critique of the present and a view of alternatives. The example of Shelley, as a political radical from the Romantic period, has already been mentioned. More recent examples would include the Portuguese writer José Saramago, a member of the Portuguese Communist Party as well as a Nobel Prize winner (1998) and international human rights activist, who wrote works challenging the status quo in Portugal and ran into trouble with the Portuguese church authorities; Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk (b.1952), also a Nobel Prize winner (2006), whose criticism of the Turkish state for its violence against the Kurdish minority saw him brought to court; the Indian writer Salman Rushdie (b.1947) whose novel The Satanic Verses (1988) earned him serious death threats for its allegedly blasphemous treatment of Islamic beliefs; the Nigerian playwright, novelist, non-fiction writer, and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995), whose non-violent provocations of the Nigerian government led ultimately to his execution on trumped-up charges. Not all writers are as mired in controversy as these ones, nor are all writers actively committed to particular causes. Nevertheless, a significant number of writers do fit into this category and explicitly see it as part of their task to be public intellectuals, or moral ‘legislators of the world’ to recall Shelley’s phrase. The existence of an organisation like pen (founded in 1921), whose members actively work to defend the right to free speech across the world and support writers who have run afoul of governments, is evidence of a deep entanglement between imaginative writing and politics. Not for nothing, perhaps, L’imagination au pouvoir (Power to the imagination) was one of the slogans of the 1968 student movement in Paris. Apparently, there is something in the arts, and specifically in some literary practices, that puts them on a collision course with the powers that be. While democratic regimes are in principle open to critique – free speech is an integral part of an open society – illiberal regimes react with censorship and, sometimes, with imprisonment. Not surprisingly, theorists have made many attempts, ever since Plato, to come up with a general theory about the relationship between literature and politics. Generalisation has proven difficult in view of the huge variety of genres and approaches that have characterised literature across the ages and across the world. While some writers actively work to change society (the so-called ‘engaged’ writers), others have different priorities. This makes it difficult to come up with a single model to describe the various ways in which literariness and politics go together. What follows, therefore, is a selection of the key issues that have been debated. To a large extent, theories about the role of literature in politics have been inspired by the nineteenth-century philosopher Karl Marx (18181883). Marx’s big contribution was to highlight the material basis of social relations and cultural life (for this reason his work has been characterised
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as a form of materialism). He argued that modern societies were controlled by an economic system that depended on structural inequality. This unjust system was held in place by ‘ideology,’ a system of beliefs that made inequality seem ‘natural’ and justified. Marx used the concept of ideology to mean ‘false ideas or consciousness about the true state of affairs,’ the very concept of ‘false’ implying knowledge of the truth (which Marx believed his model of society captured). He provocatively claimed that the ‘higher’ things in life – like religion and the arts – were the source of ideology and, as such, were implicated in the perpetuation of social injustice. At the same time, however, he had to grapple with the paradox: if ‘false consciousness’ helps keep inequality in place, then a new consciousness is needed if social change is ever to happen; but where does this critical process begin except in cultural practices? Culture would seem to be the source of the disease, but also of the cure. In the course of the twentieth century different theorists have worked on this conundrum, asking: (1) How can people be so blind to their real conditions of existence? (2) How do people ever learn to ‘see through’ their own blindness? (3) What is the role of the arts in this process?
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Fiction as opium for the people Marx noted how people generally believed that culture, or what he called the superstructure of society (consisting of religion and the arts) operated independently of its material foundations. In fact, Marx argued, the cultural superstructure indirectly served the interests of the capitalist economy: at a time of rapid industrialisation in Europe, capitalism was driving an ever-bigger wedge between ‘owners’ and ‘workers,’ between those with the means to accumulate ever greater amounts of capital and those who were condemned to sell their labour to others. The cultural superstructure, he believed, was helping to legitimise this state of affairs by presenting certain conditions of life as ‘natural’ rather than man-made. Because people were led to believe that social inequality was inevitable, they failed to see how it could be overcome. In his Communist Manifesto (Das Kommunistische Manifest; 1848) Marx accordingly described organised religion as the ‘opium of the people’: religion provided exploited people with the comfort of knowing that they will be rewarded in heaven for their good behaviour and thereby diminished their reasons for struggling to change their material conditions here on earth. He had presented a similar argument in reviewing The Mysteries of Paris (Les mystères de Paris; 1842-1843), the bestselling novel by Eugène Sue (1804-1857) that first appeared in serial form in a newspaper and gained enormous attention. Sue’s novel had been praised by political reformers for its analysis of life among the poor people of Paris, and it was indeed one of the first to give a picture of life in the slums; in this sense, it was highly innovative. According to Marx, however, the novel was also indirectly supporting the status quo since it continued to de-
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pict religion as a force for the good and implied that many social problems would go away if people would behave themselves better. Despite its innovative depiction of Parisian lowlife, then, the novel ultimately stuck to the idea that prosperity and material comfort are not something that poor people can ever expect in this life, only in the next one. Marx showed provocatively that the arts, in feeding minds, are not elevated above the material world; instead, they are caught up in subtle ways with an unjust system in which power and prosperity are unequally divided between the haves and the have-nots.
Antonio Gramsci, whose work was briefly discussed in Chapter 8, added an extra dimension to Marx’s analysis of ideology. His idea of hegemony entailed that the dominance of a certain set of ideas (ideology) in society was dependent on people’s willingness to accept those ideas and internalise them as ‘normal.’ Hegemony involves the willing acceptance on the part of the disadvantaged of ideas, values, and norms which do not serve the common good, but rather the interests of already privileged groups; the arts and literature play a role in creating that willing acceptance. If we return to the example of the happy househusband in Crichton’s novel, we can get some sense of how cultural hegemony works through the pleasures of narrative. The thriller begins, as we saw, with a man in a department store. On the one hand, this scene serves merely to set up an image of quiet domesticity as a prelude to the thrilling adventures that will follow. On the other hand, its very banality serves to reinforce the ‘normality’ of spending time and money in a shop and thus indirectly helps to support consumerism as a lifestyle (which in turn, helps boost the sale of often unnecessary products). In being called upon to make sense of this scene as a prelude to the story, readers are also being asked to acquiesce to the normality of consumerism. This example brings us to a more general issue: the role played by the different aspects of literariness discussed in earlier chapters in reinforcing or in challenging received ideas about the world and people’s role in it. Our chapter on narrative ended with the claim that the novel historically played a key role in the development of modern ideas of romance and marriage, entailing the belief that women could find happiness by in effect becoming financially and legally dependent on men. It was also suggested, however, that writers have equally played a role in changing expectations about gender. In other words: literature can be an instrument in the naturalisation of inequality through the pleasures of reading; but in different hands and at different moments, it can also become an instrument with which to undermine the hegemony of such ideas. Theories about the relationship between literature and ideology have accordingly alternated between the fact that literature is (1) a source
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of ‘false consciousness’ and (2) a resource for thinking differently. Discussions of these two potentialities have by and large followed the basic opposition between mass-produced and artistic culture established by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and explained in Chapter 8. Literary works with a high status have in modern times been associated with the defamiliarising, the transgressive, and the unpredictable. In contrast, works in popular genres (such as thrillers) have often been associated with the perpetuation of the cultural hegemony. As Chapter 8 also showed, reality is more complex than this hierarchical opposition implies, since the fact of being popular does not preclude resistance on the part of writers and readers to received ideas. Suffice it here to note the difficulty of drawing a clear-cut distinction between ‘critical’ art (which helps to break through dominant ways of thinking) and uncritical art (which does not). In most cases we will find that we are dealing with a mixed bag. Even texts that compel readers to think ‘outside the box’ will later prove to have been limited by some of the blind spots typical for the time and place in which they were written. Authors who in some respects were ‘ahead of their time’ turn out to have been in other respects ‘of their time.’ Take Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596-1599), for example, which features a Jewish moneylender called Shylock, for whom some sympathy is demanded, most notably in a heartrending (and for the time, groundbreaking) speech in which he asks the audience to recognise his common humanity. However, the play is also saturated with anti-Semitic stereotypes that were long ‘taken for granted’ in European societies but that, in the wake of the Holocaust, now appear problematic. In recognition of such complexity, the theorist Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) once wrote that ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’ It is the task of the cultural critic, he implied, to disentangle the critical potential of artistic works from their blind spots, while also being aware of the latter. This brings us specifically to the question of how literature as literature helps in challenging received ideas and revealing new blind spots. There has long been a consensus among writers and critics that committed writing involves balancing between, on the one hand, presenting a new view of society and, on the other hand, generating the aesthetic pleasure that is a condition for the enchantment of its readers. If a work is perceived as too didactic or too schematic in the articulation of its political message, it will no longer be seen as ‘true’ art, but rather as propaganda and as such, as something to be resisted. If writers become too moralistic, monologic, or overly didactic in the promotion of their ideas, they will lose their readers. Literature works through pleasure; and, as we have shown in earlier chapters, it seduces rather than enforces, and sets people thinking instead of telling them what to think. Indeed, Adorno went so
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far as to argue in his essay ‘Commitment’ (‘Engagement’; 1964) that aesthetics will ultimately be more effective in changing people’s minds than the dogmatic presentation of a clear message. A more recent variation on this idea has been advanced by Jacques Rancière (b.1940) in his work on aesthetics and politics. Rancière argues that the political dimension of an artwork should not be located in its overt message. It is carried instead in the very details with which the world is depicted, and in the mate-
Caricature: When the king became a pear Satire has long been one of the most important literary genres in giving voice to political critique through clever mockery and irony. Important satirists include Horace and Jonathan Swift, whose ‘A Modest Proposal’ (already mentioned in Chapter 4) produced a scathing critique of British policies in Ireland in the form of an ostensibly sincere proposal to solve food shortages and overpopulation by eating babies. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the caricature of public figures has become the visual equivalent of written satire. Caricature involves the cartoonlike depiction of a person by exaggerating some characteristics at the cost of others. The French artist Honoré Daumier (1808-1879) became famous for his depiction of the constitutional monarch Louis-Philippe (1773-1850) who reigned from 1830 to 1848. Thanks to Daumier, he became known as the ‘Pear King’ (‘Le roi poire’). As can be seen in Figure 9.4, Daumier selected one feature of Figure 9.4: the king’s person, his pear-shaped head, and Honoré Daumier, Les Poires (1831). made this into his defining characteristic in a series of drawings that gradually transform the king into a piece of fruit: a visual metaphor of his uninspiring (vegetative) reign. In a similar way, cartoonists have been having a field day with Donald Trump’s signature mop of blond-yellow hair ever since he was elected us president in 2016. By now, the hair has come to stand for the president as a whole, and is used as the basis for multiple caricatures. Ridicule, mockery, satiric laughter: these are aesthetic weapons in social criticism and in the struggle for power. To set someone up as an object of laughter is already to diminish their authority.
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rial texture of people’s lives as they are observed through literature. The things that are virtually seen, heard, felt, or smelt by readers can give them a new understanding of life that breaks through their usual patterns of perception and hierarchies of importance. In this way, artistic practices work to relocate the borders of what is ‘thinkable’ and what is unthinkable in a society, what is perceptible and what is hidden. In short: it is difficult come up with any general theory about the power of literature that would cover all genres and cases. But there is consensus among theorists about one basic principle: that literature affects how people think about the world and does so with the tools of aesthetics rather than argument.
9.5
Case study: Ecocriticism
In this final section, we will illustrate how literature, using specifically aesthetic means, can offer a critical response to new societal issues. We will concentrate on environmentalism and climate change and how these have been depicted in literature. While climate change is one of the hottest topics of the present age, we have also become aware, by looking back at literary history, that writers have been thinking about humans’ relation to the environment for centuries. For this reason, we introduce the topic here with two passages, one of which was written two hundred years ago, the other less than two decades ago: There was a roaring in the wind all night; The rain came heavily and fell in floods; But now the sun is rising calm and bright; The birds are singing in the distant woods; Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods; The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters. – William Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence (1807) But here, in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days. In other places forests take centuries, even millennia, to regenerate; but mangroves can recolonise a denuded island in ten to fifteen years. Could it be the very rhythms of the earth were quickened here so that they unfolded at an accelerated pace? – Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (2004).
The passages quoted above are taken, on the one hand, from an English Romantic poem by William Wordsworth and, on the other, from a
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contemporary novel by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (b.1956). Together they illustrate how writers use words to evoke the physical world. Each in its own way actively contributes to world-making: the production through representations of the world we live in. The two examples evoke the natural world from perspectives that are in some ways idiosyncratic (particular to the individual writer), and in other ways representative for the period in which they were writing. Wordsworth evokes the freshness of a world after a storm when after ‘a roaring in the wind all night’ calm and harmony are restored, ‘and all the air is filled with the pleasant noise of waters.’ The regular use of the iambic pentameter reinforces the idea of orderliness. Ghosh’s novel focuses on the Sundarban islands in East Bengal which are subject to periodical flooding that destroys everything before it: no humans are mentioned in this passage and, as in the rest of the book, the environment is more powerful than the people trying to eke out a precarious existence in such conditions. The opening lines of the novel quoted above give a view of nature as a destructive as well as life-sustaining force that can change unpredictably within a short period. In the case of Wordsworth, in contrast, storms and floods are exceptional events, incidental disruptions of a fixed order that can be enjoyed by humans. Where Wordsworth views nature from the perspective of a human subject, Ghosh strives as much as possible to put the natural landscape centre stage. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness in society at large of environmental problems directly or indirectly linked to global warming, the destruction of ecosystems (such as the pollution produced by oil extraction in the Niger delta), the extraordinary acceleration of species extinction (dozens of species per day), and the dangers of flooding as a result of the melting icecaps, which are especially threatening to populations living below sea level (Bangladesh, the Seychelles, the Netherlands). It has taken a long time for people in the global north to start realising that we cannot keep up a consumerist lifestyle with impunity. We have been acting as if we were in charge, while actually being dependent on a natural environment that we have been unwittingly destroying. This destruction includes the use of mobile phones, which have a huge ecological cost in terms of the energy needed to store the millions of photos uploaded every day to ‘the cloud,’ not to mention the ecological and human cost to the global south of mining for the precious metals used in microchips. While people thought they were the centre of the universe (this was long the premise of humanities), the growing number of environmental problems prove that we have entered a posthuman age. By posthumanism is meant the realisation that human life is deeply entangled with that of other species, earth systems, and technologies, and that this calls for looking at the world in a way that transcends a merely human perspective. The growing urgency of these issues has given rise to the new
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field of environmental humanities,* including the specialism within literary studies known as ecocriticism.* Environmental humanities involves using expertise in history, philosophy, and cultural analysis in order to understand how ideas about the environment impact on the actions taken by individuals, corporations, and governments. Ecocriticism is a branch of cultural criticism that specifically looks at how environmental issues are represented in particular works and, more generally, at the role of literature and the arts in making climate change imaginable. How do representations of environmental destruction impact on our behaviour? What future scenarios are being generated through literature? Why did people fail for so long, and still fail, to see the implications of their own actions? Ecocriticism addresses these questions by looking at how literature and film have represented human-nature interactions. Like many of the writers they study, ecocritics are often themselves deeply engaged with finding ways to promote a greater awareness of environmental issues and the need for urgent action. Their particular form of cultural criticism has generated new knowledge about the ways in which creative writers have formulated imaginative responses to ongoing environmental destruction, in the process transposing to narratives some of the findings produced in other disciplines such as marine biology and climatology. Two strands of research within ecocriticism will be discussed here. The first strand involves studying the history of environmental writing. Contemporary concerns have fed into the critical awareness of how often writers in the past addressed the theme of human-nature relations. The tradition goes back at least to Virgil, whose Eclogues (44-38 bce) gave rise to a long tradition of writing in the mode of the pastoral (idealised representations of the countryside) and whose Georgics (29 bce) gave rise to a more minor, but also significant tradition of writing about agriculture and human-non-human interactions. In the Romantic period, depictions of human subjects in ‘unspoilt’ nature became an important concern (illustrated above by the lines from Wordsworth), and later fed into the modernist notion of the author as a lonesome genius who isolates himself from society. As Raymond Williams (1921-1988) showed in a very early example of ecocriticism called The Country and the City (1973), the Romantic preoccupation with nature was in fact a by-product of urbanisation and industrialisation. It was precisely because nature was ‘disappearing’ from the life-world of many writers and readers, that lyric poetry depicting nature became all the more popular – and, in the process, helped distract attention away from the problem of environmental change by giving the illusion of untouched nature. In surprising ways, then, romantic nature poetry could be said to have helped promote a ‘false consciousness’ in the sense of Marx even as it created a new appreciation of the natural world. Already in the Romantic period, writers like the
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American Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), author of Walden: or, Life in the Woods (1854), were already consciously trying to imagine alternative, more environmentally friendly lifestyles in ways that still resonate today. The second and by now more important line of inquiry has to do with contemporary depictions of climate change and environmental destruction. Recent years have seen the emergence of such new genres like cli-fi (speculative fiction about climate change) and petro-fiction (fiction about the consequences of our societies literally and metaphorically being fuelled by oil). Ghosh has also written about the shortcomings of existing literary models in representing the realities of living in those places in the global south where environmental destruction is greatest and people have to live with the threat of imminent disaster. In his essay The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), he reflects critically on the ways in which classical realist novels assumed a human-centred and Europecentred world that ignored wider environmental issues: these remained ‘unthinkable.’ Drawing on a different set of narrative traditions, the Nigerian writers Ben Okri (b.1959) in his Stars of the New Curfew (1988) and the aforementioned Ken Saro-Wiwa in A Forest of Flowers (1985) adapt indigenous traditions of storytelling in order to represent the destruction wrought on people and the environment by Western oil companies in collusion with local politicians. In his short story ‘What the Tapster Saw’ (1988), for example, Okri uses animal motifs from local legends to narrate the story of a palm oil farmer who, having died, has an almost psychedelic vision of the destruction being wrought both on the natural environment and on the indigenous way of life. As these cases and the work of Ghosh indicate, ecocriticism intersects with postcolonial criticism.* Whatever the geographical focus, environmental issues are particularly difficult to represent in the form of a story with which readers can identify. The problem lies in the sheer scale of the problem, as Timothy Clark (b.1958) has written in Ecocriticism on the Edge (2015), both in terms of space and of time. As regards space, climate change is planetary in scope, but present in unobservable micro-phenomena. As regards time, the temporal frame extends into the future but also so far into the past that it goes well beyond human history; indeed the concept of the Anthropocene has emerged to designate a new geological era marking the presence and impact of humans on the planet as part of a much longer continuum. Timothy Morton (b.1968) has described global warming as a hyperobject: something of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that it defeats traditional ideas about what a ‘thing’ is in the first place. It is something that is exceedingly difficult to imagine, let alone understand. How to make visible and concrete, for example, the fact that using a petrol-guzzling car in Europe is linked to the melting of an iceberg in Greenland? Or that using a mobile phone is helping to cause ecological
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Figure 9.5: studiokca, Skyscraper – The Bruges Whale, 2018.
devastation because of mining in Indonesia? Not only is the geographical scope a challenge, so too is the pace of change: the ‘slow violence’ of environmental destruction plays out over centuries and millennia, and does not lend itself easily to traditional models of storytelling, based on a beginning, middle, and resolution within a short span of time. Adopting a posthuman perspective calls for narratives in which humans are no longer the only actants, but other species and the planet itself. It calls for creative solutions to the problem of making tangible something as abstract as climate. The artwork Skyscraper depicted in Figure 9.5 takes the form of a whale made from five tons of plastic collected from the sea. It was installed in the centre of the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands for a six-month period in 2019 in a creative attempt to make environmental destruction tangible and visible in an eye-catching form in the centre of a bustling city. In linking social, cultural and biophysical processes, recent ecofiction has also sought to promote new forms of (transdisciplinary) thinking and living. In this context, Anglo-American writers have drawn on traditional narrative models such as the apocalypse and the genre of science fiction (hence the term ‘cli-fi’). The British writer J.G. Ballard, for example, was a pioneer in the writing of a more societally and ecologically critical form of science fiction, producing among other works a series of disaster novels – The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966) – which repurpose the genre of science fiction in order to depict the world after major environmental catastrophes have destroyed life as we know it. The public discussion is ongoing while writers continue to look for new ways to use language and narrative in order to ‘bring home’ to readers what is happening around them and to offer models for the future.
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Through studies of such experiments, ecocriticism has brought out both the achievements and limitations of writers in making the unthinkable ‘thinkable’ and in mobilising people into action.
9.6
In conclusion: A tool for thought
In this chapter we have offered a contextualist perspective on literature that shows how it can be studied as a creative response to changes in the world. We have shown how creative writing and other narrative arts can be studied as carriers of received ideas, but also for the way they offer new perspectives on the world and create the imaginative and affective conditions for people to start acting differently. We have illustrated these basic points with reference to ecocriticism. The same principles underlie other forms of cultural criticism, including postcolonial criticism* (see Chapter 10), gender criticism* (see Chapter 5), and the different varieties of posthumanist criticism* that have emerged alongside ecocriticism, focusing on the cultural representation of the interactions between the human and the non-human. What all these approaches have in common is their concern with the question how literature influences how we think, feel, and act in the world.
Further Reading Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Greg Garrard, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Stephen Greenblatt,‘Culture,’ in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds, Critical Terms in Literary Study, 225-232, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Tom Idema, Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism, London: Routledge, 2018.
Notes 1 2 3 4
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Michael Crichton, Prey, New York: Avon Books, 2002, pp. 5-6. Edward Said, World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’anthropologie structurale [1958], Paris: Plon, 1974. ‘Interview with Monica Juneja,’ Cluster of Excellence, Asia and Europe in a Global Context, Heidelberg University, 16 December 2013, http://www.asia-eu-
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rope.uni-heidelberg.de/en/newsevents/news/detail/m/interview-with-profmonica-juneja.html. Stephen Greenblatt et al., Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 4. See also Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Culture,’ in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds, Critical Terms in Literary Studies, 225-232, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Martial Law in the Land of Cockaigne,’ in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, 129-163, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Further information is in Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Le mariage de Figaro, ed. E.J. Arnould, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969, p. xxi. Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern, London: Routledge, 1995; Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, eds, International Postmodernism: Theory and Literary Practice, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1997. Yuri Tynyanov, ‘On Literary Evolution’ [1927], in L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, eds, Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, 66-77, Cambridge: mit Press, 1978. Tynyanov, ‘Evolution’ Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge, 1979. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm DeBevoise, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, New York: Random House, 2011. Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, 2 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006-2007. P.B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (1821); http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5428. https://pen-international.org/who-we-are/the-pen-charter. A helpful overview of Marxist literary theory can be found in Ann Jefferson and David Robey, eds, Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction, London: Batsford, 1982. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ [1940], in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, 255-266, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970, p. 258. This discussion of the tension between propaganda and aesthetic pleasure is partly based on Susan Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Theodor Adorno, ‘Engagement,’ in Theodor Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, 409430, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Literature,’ SubStance 103 (2004): 10-24. William Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence (1807), in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.H. Abrams et al, 4th edition, vol.2, p.206 Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2014, p.186. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Ben Okri, “What the Tapster Saw,” in Stars of the New Curfew, London: Vintage, 1989, pp.183-194. Timothy Clark, Ecocriticisim on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Robert Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
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10 LITERATURE AND POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM KIENE BRILLENBURG WURTH
In Chapter 9 we saw that literary texts have been instrumental in forging sociocultural realities: Novels, poems, songs and other texts engage in world-making, rather than passively reflecting realities. This chapter further elaborates on literature and world-making by zooming in on postcolonial literature and criticism. Its main aim is to explore the social life of literary texts in the context of colonialism and postcolonialism. How did literature contribute to the legitimisation of imperialist and colonialist ambitions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How in turn did it help to shape postcolonial worlds and identities in the twentieth century? These questions have been raised in the field of postcolonial criticism* during the past decades. While this chapter does not aim to offer an introduction to postcolonial criticism per se, it taps into some of its interrogations to investigate the relations between literature and historical realities. On one hand, we offer a set of tools to analyse imperialist subtexts in colonial literature. On the other, we show how postcolonial literature rewrites colonial pasts, including the literary legacy of such pasts. In doing so, we introduce a number of key concepts from postcolonial criticism and indicate how to use them. . . . . .
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Introduction: Spaces in the background Imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and decoloniality Colonial discourses and the question of power Strategies of postcolonial rewriting In conclusion: Texts and cultural identities
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Introduction: Spaces in the background
In part four of the young adult novel Joop ter Heul ( Joop and her Boy, 1925) by the Dutch author Cissy van Marxveldt (1889-1948), Joop’s husband Leo departs for Indonesia – or, as it was then called, the Dutch East Indies to mark the occupation by the Dutch. Leo van Dil is the director of a big Dutch bank, and needs to solve some problems in the Jakarta branch (then called Batavia by the Dutch colonisers). Indonesia does not play a prominent part in the novel. As readers, we are not with Leo but his wife Joop who – in accordance with early-twentieth-century gender roles – stays behind to take care of their baby boy, Hans. Still, as a space in the background, the marginal role of the colony does not make the presence of Indonesia any less significant. In fact, the self-evidence of Indonesia as such a presence enabling the luxury lifestyle of Joop and Leo is typical of the décor of Dutch young adult novels written in the 1920s and ’30s. Many of these novels feature a young woman married off to a planter, military, civil servant, or banker in Indonesia, or in the so-called West Indies. As in Joop ter Heul, Indonesia often figures as the endpoint of a story where the female protagonist will find her destiny: a geographic, cultural, and economic space that serves the Netherlands as a colonising power. Such apparently innocent, young adult fictions, then, cannot be seen apart from the Dutch colonial project. They affirm the status of Indonesia as a backyard to be exploited by the Dutch, or where the Dutch were destined to bring ‘culture’ and ‘enlightenment’ (as if there had been no culture and enlightenment before the arrival of a Western empire). Indeed, such novels often contributed to sustaining the colonial status quo; they represented it as entirely natural, self-evident, and even justified. Literary representation, we will discover here, can be a powerful tool in the normalization of violent political systems of oppression. As we have seen throughout this book, such representation is hardly a matter of passive reflection, a reflection of realities ‘as they are.’ On the contrary, the relation between literary texts and social realities is complex. Literary texts are not just impregnated with the cultural-historical contexts in which they have been written; they affect and can help to sustain – or, conversely, change – social realities. Differently put, more than imitating worlds, literary texts can help form and feed into realities that we take as given in unsuspected and ingenious ways. Propaganda offers an obvious example of texts created to shape social realities, where words and images are used to mould public opinion. However, literature that is not openly propagandist may be even more effective because it is not seen to influence the desires and thinking of the people. For instance, in literature of the colonial era, original cultures were typically described as ‘primitive’ or ‘backward.’ Such labels reflected
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only the judgements of Western colonisers, but many colonists were not even aware of their constant, unconscious projections. Many (though not all) could not see through these derogative labels. They thought they reflected reality and had no interest in thinking otherwise. Representing colonised cultures as inferior implicitly justified the process of colonisation. Literary texts would portray Western colonisers not as an occupying but as an elevating force, burdened with the task of enlightening indigenous people. This discourse (Chapter 3, 9) about colonialism being a ‘benevolent task’ became current especially in the nineteenth century. It helped to legitimise colonial rule: ‘we are here to help; it is our grand mission to bring culture into the wilderness.’ Tapping into this racist discourse, literary texts played their role in the construction of a colonial reality that, on the surface, seemed ‘natural.’ Postcolonial criticism, however, shows that this ‘reality’ was forged – and that the forgery can be taken apart in literary analysis. In this chapter, we provide the tools and concepts to perform such a critical analysis. We first explain how literary texts participated in the discourses of colonialism, how such texts were able to project certain ideas, convictions, or prejudices as realities. We then explain that these discourses were counteracted and criticised in postcolonial literature and criticism. A past was re-claimed, a new literary aesthetic was created that projected other realities.
10.2 Imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and decoloniality imperialism colonialism postcolonialism decoloniality
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Four concepts are key to this chapter: imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and decoloniality. We define them in the present section. Imperialism derives from the noun imperium (empire) and refers to the power structures and effects of a dominant force occupying and governing a remote territory. Think of the imperialist past of Great Britain, or the imperialist politics of the us in Asia, the Middle East, and South America, but also of ancient Rome or the Ottoman empire. Imperialism was only used in this sense towards the end of the nineteenth century – when European expansion in the world was at its height; a new concept, as historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) observes, for a new reality. Hobsbawm shows that until about 1914, the connotation of the term ‘imperialism’ had been a positive one. This radically changed afterwards, in part due to a work by Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919, also known as Red Rosa), The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Explanation of Imperialism (Die Akkumulation des Kapitals: Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erklärung des Imperialismus; 1913). Before 1914, politicians had proudly called themselves ‘imperialist.’ After that, the term became
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associated with injustice, usurpation, and Western self-enrichment. Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), for instance, saw imperialism as a phase in capitalism in which Western powers exploited their colonies economically. They needed resources and cheap labour, and these were abundantly present in African, South American, and Asian countries. Novels like Rubber (1931) by M.H. Székely-Lulofs (1899-1958) or Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) by Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004), evoke the consequences of these politics of exploitation: Rubber evokes the coolie system in Indonesia, and the degenerate, decadent culture of the Dutch, while Two Leaves and a Bud tells a story about exploitation in pre-independence India – a peasant trying to protect his daughter from a British soldier. Our second concept to be discussed here derives from imperialism: colonialism. When an imperialist force not only seeks to dominate a country economically, but also sends its people to live, work, and rule that country culturally and politically, imperialism evolves into colonialism. Differently put, in the case of colonisation, the occupier in fact settles in the dominated area. It will cultivate this area and meddle with its people, laws, and customs. Typically, such cultivation is based on inequality. The coloniser may appropriate the identity of the colonised as an inferior ‘Other’ that can be exploited and wiped out – witness the massacres in the Americas, the Moluccas or Aceh in Indonesia, and many other colonised areas. Western European countries (Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, the Dutch Republic) started colonising countries in the Americas, Africa, and Asia as of the sixteenth century. During the nineteenth century, trade posts in European colonies in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, evolved into a new regime that extended beyond plantations and missions to cities, schools, hospitals, and granted only limited autonomy. The development of colonial rule cannot be seen apart from a contemporary belief in progress: a belief in the limitless growth, potential, and development of Western culture. The ideal of civilisation (that is, of imposing Western standards of civilisation on other countries) became more and more important for the way in which the colonies were to be ruled. Violent occupation paradoxically went hand in hand with pacification, education, and cultural integration. Finally, in the twentieth century, after World War ii, decolonisation followed suit: the process of formerly colonised regions becoming independent of their European colonisers and emerging as new nation states. Decolonisation, though, did not terminate the power of the colonial project; it continued and continues to this day. This afterlife of colonialism in a decolonised world brings us to our third term: the postcolonial. At first sight, this concept seems to simply refer to a period after colonialism and decolonisation: postcolonialism. But, as we have just remarked, there has never been an ‘after’ of colonialism. Granted, independence has happened. Still, in terms of mili-
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tary and economic dominance, or labour and ecological exploitation, imperialist and colonial power relations have persisted in more and less concealed ways over the years. Has, for one, the climate crisis not affected vulnerable groups in area’s formerly colonised? Such questions have been raised by historians, economists, policy makers, and cultural critics when pondering the possibility of a postcolonial reality. Still, they mostly continue using the postcolonial as a concept to emphasize a contrast with colonialism. For instance, Robert Young (b.1950) in Postcolonialism (2001), traces the development of postcolonial theory to anti-slavery activists in the eighteenth century and anti-colonial campaigns in Spain. He shows the postcolonial to be at work within the colonial. Bill Ashcroft (b.1946), Gareth Griffiths (b.1943) and Helen Tiffin (b.1945) use the ‘postcolonial’ for a critical engagement with colonial situations in the past and the present. This means that literary texts written during colonialism and after can be termed ‘postcolonial.’ The critical engagement with the colonial is not restricted to a specific historical period ‘after’ colonialism. The postcolonial precisely questions the idea of an ‘after’ to the colonial. Other critics have favoured the concept of the decolonial to mark a critical engagement with the colonial. They see the process of decolonisation as a project within and alongside colonialism, challenging it and laying bare the false universal standards Western culture has imposed on the global south. With the concept of the decolonial, or decoloniality, critics like Walter Mignolo (b.1941) and Aníbal Quijano (1928-2018) have argued, the illusion of a transition from the colonial to an ‘after’ is dispelled. It refers to a continuous undoing of coloniality, in the present and the past, in theory and in critical as well as political practice. The concept of decoloniality has been important in studies of South America, where it also emerged as a form of resistance to Western domination. We have chosen to use the postcolonial rather than the decolonial to avoid confusion in this chapter, as the term ‘postcolonial’ has been used familiarly to demarcate the academic field of criticism. How has this field come into being? Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin have observed that the very idea of a postcolonial literary criticism emerged out of the incapacity of European and American literary studies to deal with the complexity of postcolonial literature. They show that Western literary theories (such as formalism) are always historically and culturally situated – local – but that this situatedness is somehow passed over in the transmission of these theories. They are presented as universally applicable, instead of emerging from a Western-biased standard. For instance, theories about literariness presented in Chapter 2 are premised on European models; the emphasis on defamiliarisation emerges from specific cultural values. Yet, for decades it was offered as a universal
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quality of literature. The problem with an implicitly Western model of literariness is that it tends to marginalise other literary traditions with different sets of conventions and cultural forms. For instance, the modern novel, and print-based forms of poetry, remain a powerful standard against which oral modes of communicating are covertly set, and critically evaluated.
Writing and contemporary African oral storytelling6 As a continent, Africa spawns a wide range of written and oral practices of poetry and storytelling. This text box focuses on oral storytelling, and on African writers remediating (Chapter 4) oral forms and formulas into print literature. Oral storytelling in Africa is a creative and vibrant practice that, on the one hand, feeds on traditions and on keeping these traditions alive and, on the other, evolves on the basis of an aesthetics of opposition: socially and politically conscious, versatile, innovative and experimental (Chapter 2). Oral traditions have been and still are vigorous in Africa, evolving alongside (and eventually also within) written culture and new media (for instance: Hip Hop). Written African culture was established long ago in Egypt, Ethiopia, Northern, and later in Western and Eastern Africa. Scripts like Ge’ez in Ethiopia probably date back to 500 bce, while interactions with the Arabs as of the seventh century ce in Northern Africa, the Sahel, and Western as well as Eastern Africa resulted in adapted Arabic scripts: the so called Ajami forms. Hausa, a Western African script from around 1600 is an example of Ajami. As of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through contacts with European Christians and colonists, Roman script was introduced. It is important to stress this history of written African culture here since colonial discourse has long claimed that writing was only introduced with the European settlers – and Africa only knew an oral tradition. African literature in print, therefore, is certainly not only the product of a postcolonial heritage. Today, orality continues to play a crucial role in African cultures. However, traveling epic poets such as the West African griots and griotes no longer have the status they used to have, while local languages and performance modes are often endangered and in need of revitalisation. Performances of these poets are not restricted to storytelling alone, or rather, storytelling involves music, dance and singing (embodied remembrance and performance), and a strong interaction with the audience (through singing, clapping, active listening and critical response). This is common to all oral performance. Poetic norms and conventions as well as topics vary greatly across different tribes and groups, though often they are likely to include the history of the tribe, old songs, riddles, jokes, and other aspects of cultural memory (Chapter 11). In the popular imagination, we associate oral culture with precisely this preserving of past stories and songs, handed down from generation to generation. However, leav-
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ing aside the creative changes and adaptions made to living, cultural memory, African orality also offers the opposite: individual poets and performers who invent their own style. For instance, the Nigerian Hausa griot Dan Maraya (1946-2015) – the orphan of Jos, as he was orphaned as an infant – composed his own music and critically focused on social issues in the present: on working conditions of drivers of minivans, or girls who are forced into marriage. Commenting on all kinds of social and political developments, his art was more topical, so to speak, than that it was engaged with keeping alive a shared past. Lastly, African writers have novelized (Chapter 4) oral traditions. For instance, the famous Kenyan author and critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (b.1938) has adapted gĩcandi – a dialogic poetry common to Gĩkũyũ oral literature – in his novel Caitaani Mĩtharabaini (1980). Translated as Devil on the Cross, this was his first novel in Gĩkũyũ, written during his one-year imprisonment in 1977, and inspired by the poem ‘The Five Bandits’ from Cry for the People (민족의 노래 민중의 노래; 1984) by the Korean poet Kim Chi Ha (b.1941). The narrator is a Gĩcandi performer who tells a tragic tale of contemporary Kenya, ravaged by Western capitalism and Kenyan dictatorship after its independence. Like Dan Maraya, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o uses the oral form to critically comment on the present – and thus call to shared action.
The postcolonial urges a critical self-awareness of our cultural outlook and assumptions. What postcolonial theory and criticism does is to call into question implied universalisms in cultural studies.* With a focus on diversity that encompasses all kinds of cultural positions and identities, including gender, postcolonial theorists and critics explore divergent value systems, aesthetics, cultural practices, and traditions that reach beyond Eurocentric values. More specifically, postcolonial critics investigate the cultural specificity of value systems and the practices and beliefs emerging out of them (an emphasis on cultural specificity clearly counters universalist approaches). Thus, they focus on literatures from the global south and the divergent notions of creativity and narration these literatures bring into practice. Postcolonial critics also turn their attention to literary texts from the colonial era that (unconsciously) expressed imperialist and/or colonialist ideologies – and hence helped to maintain or normalise violent domination and unjust power. The questions raised by postcolonial critics therefore extend into the investigation of worldly power relations and identity politics. In the next sections we show how these critics have treated colonial and postcolonial literature.
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10.3 Colonial discourses and the question of power We start our investigation with a concept encountered in Chapter 9: ideology. It refers to a process involving the penetration of norms, values, and convictions in society and the constitution of socio-cultural realities. What is at stake in this section is how such norms, values, and convictions were accepted as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ in colonial culture – and then came to control or regulate it. According to the French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990), an ideology is seldom an extra or option, something to choose for or against. He claims it is impossible to step back and release oneself from the ruling ideas and beliefs current in society. Althusser indeed considered ideology to be a condition of possibility of our knowledge and experience of the world. For him, it is the filter through which we perceive and understand this world – it dominates the way we think and behave. Seen in this light, the term ‘domination’ need not just refer to a political-economic dominion. The term can also apply to a domination of images and ideas; a colonisation through culture and ideology. As a form of cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism investigates how colonial literatures have (knowingly or not) affirmed and consolidated imperialist and colonialist ideologies and interests. What is or has been the role of literature in colonial power structures? How have literary texts fed and reinforced – but also countered and resisted – notions about indigenous cultures? These questions have been raised in works like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a work heavily indebted to Michel Foucault and his analysis of power, which investigates how power-relations perpetuate themselves in different cultural strata. Orientalism shows that the academic discipline of Middle Eastern studies has, since its emergence in the late eighteenth century, functioned as a discourse (Chapter 3, 8, 9): Western representations of ‘the East’ acted in the service of an imperialist ideology. (Said focussed on the Middle East and India but his theory also applies to Africa, South East Asia, as well as the Americas.) The image of ‘the Orient’ evoked in Western literature, art, and music during the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries, and its rendering in Western science formed a justification for the illegitimate Western domination of these areas. Studies, travelogues, novels, and paintings about ‘the Orient’ reinforced colonial rule. In fact, Said maintains that colonial rule, the basis of modernity, was legitimised in advance by orientalist representations of indigenous cultures. The central question in Orientalism therefore is: How has the West appropriated ‘the Orient’ in an economic, military, and cultural sense? That is to say, how did the West subject ‘the East’ to an image it had first
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created of it? How was this image realized? In posing these questions, Orientalism revolves around the relation between representation and domination: what are the reality effects of literary representations? To answer this question, it is necessary to pause and consider the term ‘representation’ more closely. Stuart Hall has defined representation as the way in which meaning is produced, shared, and negotiated between members of a culture through language, sounds, and images. This production and sharing can only take place through collective, cultural and conceptual maps: through common ideas and means of knowing and thinking. According to Hall, these three elements enable the connection between signs and signifieds, as we have discussed this in Chapters 3 and 7: a shared language, a shared conceptual map, and a shared set of codes, conventions, and convictions. Teasing out such maps, codes, conventions, and convictions in colonial discourses is an important project in postcolonial criticism. Interestingly, representation can also be understood in a specific, political sense: the sense of substitution in a representative democracy (a member of parliament represents a number of people and speaks for these people). Representation implies power. Substitution can occur voluntary, as in a representative democracy, but it can also take less democratic forms. People may be represented in an unsolicited way and be deprived of the power to speak for themselves. In the European colonies, original inhabitants were represented in such an unsolicited way in the language of the occupant. In many cases, this was also the language of public administration and the dominant culture: the language in which parliamentary bills were proposed, programmes were taught at school, newspapers, magazines and books were written. For the most part, original inhabitants did not have access to the coloniser’s language, so that they lacked the power to represent themselves in their own terms. Lacking such power, they were little more than an object of research (in anthropological research), representation (in art and literature), and description (in travelogues). As Said has observed, this strategy of exclusion (from the dominant language) and objectification (in science, art, and literature) created the impression that local inhabitants could not represent themselves – as if Western writers had to do it for them. Said calls this strategy cultural imperialism: occupying and appropriating a culture by means of literary, visual, and scientific representations that have reality effects that work through, or perpetuate themselves in, everyday life. Cultural imperialism in literary texts can be unpacked in different ways. Firstly, the critic can consider the role of narrators in a literary text: Who speaks, who has the power to speak, in colonial literature? By and large modern travelogues have deployed a Western narrator who explores, maps, and thus culturally subjugates ‘the East’: The West speaks for the East. A prototypical example is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel
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Defoe. As Said notes in Culture and Imperialism (1993), both in style and form Robinson Crusoe stands, in the tradition of ‘16th- and 17th-century journeys of discovery that formed the basis for the big colonial empires.’ This story of a Western individual who sails out into the world in search of adventure and ends up creating his own proto-capitalist society on an uninhabited island foreshadows imperialist and colonialist discourses. The narrator Crusoe controls the story. He has the power to speak, the power of the word, and thus the power to represent his new world. He teaches Friday English, but Crusoe’s voice is dominant. Friday has a servile, subordinate and derivative role – he is literally named by Crusoe – and cannot speak for himself in his own words. The roles of Crusoe and Friday are typical for the positioning of the Westerner and what was called the ‘native’ in Western literature and travel literature. The first is active, speaking, representing and the latter little more than an object, a dimension of the space that the Western traveller/narrator navigates and describes. This was still the case in later twentieth-century travelogues. Into the Heart of Borneo (1984) by Redmond O’Hanlon (b.1947) is a typical example, as is The Lost Tribe: A Search through the Jungles of Papua New Guinea (1997) by Edward Marriott (b.1966). Both sustain the myth of the Western hero in search of ‘primitive’ culture, taking harrowing risks in that search. Postcolonial critics have not only focused on practices of narration, but also considered the stereotypical roles of ‘Western’ and ‘native’ characters. Salman Rushdie has pointed out that the countless movies about apartheid in South Africa – including Cry, the Beloved Country (dir. Darrell Roodt [b.1963], 1995), and A World Apart (dir. Chris Menges [b.1941], 1988) – in the 1980s and 1990s would systematically focus on white protagonists. The stories of African heroes like Steve Biko were simply incorporated as a secondary line into the story of white African heroes like Donald Woods. A double injustice was thus done to the extent that white actors continued to play the lead in stories addressing the violence occasioned by the white minority in South Africa. More recent movies like Skin (2008) by the Dutch director Hanro Smitsman (b.1967) counter this common trend. The movie is based on a real story: the story of Sandra Laing, a woman with dark skin and kinky hair born in 1955 to apparently white parents. Without having been aware of it, her parents have mixed roots, and their daughter brings these roots to the surface. The movie shows how Laing’s parents fight to have her recognised as white in South Africa under apartheid. Ultimately, however, Sandra embraces her mixed roots and marries a black man. Through this family story, the movie unveils the artificiality of racial categories and separation, and the violence of racist oppression.
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Figure 10.1: Ca. 1956: A sign common in Johannesburg, South Africa, reading ‘Caution Beware Of Natives’. The sign shows how ‘the Other’ was created in the apartheid regime: through a slow violence of racist ideas, beliefs, and images – alongside physical violence and oppression – that consistently placed black Africans outside of a privileged, so called ‘civilised’ sphere by associating them with dangerous game or any other lurking threat. As the Other is a projection of properties the self does not wish to acknowledge, the potential violence here attributed to the Other originates with the oppressor.
Postcolonial critics have also analysed focalisation to illustrate the perpetuation of power and gender relations in colonial literature. We use the following fragment from the Dutch novel Goening-Djatti (1909) by Carry van Bruggen (1881-1932) as an example. Here, the Javanese mistress of an unmarried Dutchman is represented and focalised in a typically stigmatising manner: At home, he had a Javanese house keeper, a very young girl with a supple body and eyes like shining jets, but apart from her he knew others living in the kampongs – a little Perkara with a married coolie-wife from his own estate he also once had to bribe. But the Javanese woman was jealous and he could not get rid of her. She was beautiful and of a naïve perversity. He was addicted to her. She often indeed appalled him, such that he wanted to end it violently, but then afterwards he experienced more strongly than
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ever the poisonous influence of her strange, perverse sensuality that disarmed his will, enervated him, and, he feared, might in the end demoralise him.
The Javanese woman is focalised (Chapter 5) through the eyes of the Dutch bachelor (the question here is not who speaks but who sees and looks, and engages the reader to see and look accordingly). Represented through the bachelor’s perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, the Javanese woman is evoked as a presence of dangerous sensuality, the incorporation of a primitive erotic (a ‘naïve perversity’) that can ‘demoralise’ the Dutchman. (The attribution of such sensuality to a Javanese woman is typical of Orientalist modes of representation. Indeed, it was a tendency in nineteenth-century Western literature and art to relate sexuality in women – European or from the global south – to danger, death, and perversity.) Everything to do with sensuality is here, as it were, deposited in the Javanese woman. It is made other or strange, an alien poison from the East, rather than being part of the Dutchman as well. In this way, the Javanese woman is literally invested with attributes that remain safely distant from that Dutchman: he remains as ‘clean’ as the picture of Dorian Gray that we discussed in Chapter 7 (and we know this was only a semblance of cleanliness). In short, the bachelor is here projecting his desires and needs onto the Javanese woman – and thus he creates the image of ‘the Javanese’ or ‘native’ as a creature beyond rationality and civilisation. Through the instrument of focalisation, we see that the Javanese woman is made the Other of the Dutchman. She is everything he is not supposed to be, and must suppress, while he is represented as the ‘clean’ norm. This strategy of ‘othering’ (as a verb) original inhabitants is an integral part of colonial discourse at large (literary, scientific, or political) and that Said has called orientalism. Orientalism, as we have seen, refers to the construction of ‘the Orient’ as a social-cultural reality in Western thought systems, representations, and imaginaries. Such constructs can be seen as the ‘negative’ of a ‘positive’ of the then ruling Western powers. As Said argued, European culture sought to reinforce its power and identity precisely projecting onto ‘the Orient’ everything it did not desire to be. This is, indeed, how most people function in everyday reality. The more negatively we represent the other, the more positive we appear ourselves. In most cases, the negative traits we attribute to others are traits we cannot bear to recognise in ourselves. We literally make them other. In many literary and academic texts this ‘othering’ – consciously or unconsciously – is the result of a system of binary oppositions. As we saw in Chapter 7 binary oppositions come into play to make reality seem coherent and systematic: either/or. Such binaries consist of terms (white/ black, good/evil, self/other) that are defined in contrast to each other, the
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subaltern
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first functioning as the privileged term. Projection is all about imagining the privileged term for oneself and delegating the second to uncomfortable others. In colonial settings, without access to self-governance, language, education, administration, the law, and income in the case of slavery, the Other fell outside the power structures that conditioned the possibility of obtaining social and cultural agency. The existence of this ‘outside’ safeguarded the identity of the oppressor at the centre of these power structures. A key term by Marxist theorist Gramsci was adopted in postcolonial studies to analyse and counter the continuing processes and politics of such oppression and exclusion in the world: the subaltern. In Gramsci’s definition the subaltern referred to a person or groups of people oppressed by a ruling class that excluded them from the rights to sustenance and to participation in a culture and nation; the subaltern group is without rights and social agency, often without the basic means of survival (food, income, healthcare). In the 1980s, Gramsci’s concept was further developed and put to use in a postcolonial context in the Indian Subaltern Studies Group (or the Subaltern Studies Collective) by the historian Ranajit Guha (b.1923) and others. In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b.1942) developed the concept of the subaltern to address the problem that Western academic research into other cultures inevitably sustains an unequal and suspect power relation. Knowledge of the Other predictably entails a colonisation and usurpation of the Other, who is, as it were, cast away in the language of the oppressor. As we have seen above, in the example of the movies made about apartheid in the 1990s, if there is one language, one mode of representation emanating from one perspective that remains dominant in cultural and academic discourse, the injustice of oppression and systematic exclusion is reinforced. The question that Spivak therefore raises is: Can the subaltern speak? Do they have a discourse, a language, that does justice to their status? What if they speak in the language of the oppressor – would they then still be heard, or will they be silenced? The question of the subaltern thus is a question about what is un-representable in dominant discourses. It is a question that continues to haunt postcolonial and feminist as well as queer and ecocritical thinkers and activists. The analytical work of the critic of imperialist discourses as established and perpetuated in colonial literature thus consists for an important part of tracing and unveiling binary oppositions and projections that do violence to others. Often, such oppositions appear more or less self-evident. But exclusion and discrimination also work more subtly and shrewdly. The myth of the noble savage – prevalent since the later eighteenth century – is a typical example; this is the myth of the wise ‘savage’ presented
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in deceptively positive terms as being close to nature with a different and deeper knowledge than the white ‘cultured’ man. Native Americans have been portrayed in this way, where the Other is embraced as a source of wisdom to learn from, but nevertheless remains a shadow of the self. Besides looking at narration, characters, focalisation, and binary oppositions, postcolonial literary criticism also focuses on the representation and function of space in literature from the colonial period. That period saw the rise of the attraction of faraway, unknown, dangerous spaces. Exoticism refers to the Western fascination with and appropriation of everything that is strange, other, or unusual (whether it concerns things, people, or geographical spaces). In colonial discourses this exotic space often serves as a background to or setting for the development and discoveries of a Western subject. Thus, in the novella Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) the Congo, then a Belgian colony known for its extreme violence towards the native population, is the décor for the physical and spiritual journey of narrator Marlow into the heart of a geographic and human darkness. Marlow begins his story as follows:
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Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there. […] [T]here was one […] – the biggest, the most blank, so to speak – that I had a hankering after. True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over.
Colonial space – ‘dark’ Africa – is here represented as a blank space for Western adventurers, travellers, and dreamy boys to discover: a space to be filled in. Of course, the blank spaces on the map that Marlow mentions could only be blank in the eye of the Western beholder. Obviously, they had been peopled for centuries by Africans living in or passing through them. But Marlow does not realise this: he considers space only to be filled once it has been mapped by European explorers. We have not yet moved past this Eurocentric view, however critical Conrad already was of the colonial project and especially of the Belgian slave colony. Exotic spaces like the tropics continue to function in the Western imagination as a space to explore, discover, aid, and conquer (disease, danger, dread) – or merely as a space serving the colonial centre. We saw an example of this in our discussion of Joop ter Heul in the introduction
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to this chapter. There, the colonised space functioned as a silent presence in the background sustaining the lifestyle of the colonising culture. Readers and critics often do not pay much attention to such silent presences – we tend to take them for granted or gloss over them. In Culture and Imperialism, Said did take note of such presences, offering a telling example in the following fragment from Dombey and Son (1847-1848) by Charles Dickens: The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and the moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them: A.D. had no concern with Anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei – and Son.
On the face of it, this ironic passage shows Dombey’s self-confidence as he dreams of a future for his unborn child. According to Said we can interpret this passage from a different perspective. How did Dombey get to position himself at the centre of the world? Is this, as Raymond Williams suggested, because Dombey and Son was written in the 1840s when optimism reigned in Western Europe thanks to technological progress, and a new phase in human development was envisioned? Said believes there is more at stake. The self-confidence projected by Dombey – however ironically portrayed – unconsciously reveals the imperialist ideology that, already for a long time, had allowed Great Britain to think of itself as the centre of the world, its empire extending from that centre to the East and the West, with unlimited possibilities for trade and expansion. The novel is an implicit witness to the imperialism underlying personal worldviews, wealth and well-being in Western literature. For many Western critics, this imperialist subtext was a blind spot until the 1980s and 1990s. In this section, we have seen that Western European literary texts can be read and analysed as carriers of colonial discourse. We have seen how literature has contributed to the maintenance of a colonial status quo, and shown which tools literary critics can use to unravel the discursive strategies to maintain that status quo. However, this is not to say that Western European literature has always only worked oppressively in relation to the Other. Even if the problem of the unrepresentability of the subaltern remains essentially unsolvable, and though it is impossible to stand outside a ruling ideology or horizon of expectations, that horizon can be stretched by means of self-reflection and self-awareness. Changes,
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fissures, and rips, however small, in ruling ideologies often may occur because artists, composers, or authors have stood back to think differently about (the order of ) things.
10.4 Strategies of postcolonial rewriting As we have seen, the problem with imperialist and colonialist (or, for that matter, any ruling) discourses is that they had the power to pretend that their portrayal of the Other was true. Thus, Westerns Orientalists often claimed to be able to fathom ‘the nature’ of ‘the native,’ or ‘the essence’ of ‘the Orient’: a double construction veiled as a neutral definition based on an objective observation. Postcolonial critics view these kinds of constructions as a symptom of essentialism: the belief that it is possible to capture the essence or fundamental aspects of things, objects, people, or entire cultures, from an objective, neutral vantage point. (But as we have seen, even academic observations are embedded in cultural schemata from which we cannot escape.) Precisely such essentialism often prevented the Other from speaking back to the power centre that ruled and oppressed her or him, from saying: this is not who I am, or how I should be represented. However, literature sometimes opened a space to remedy this injustice. Writers from colonised or formerly colonised countries have – especially in the twentieth century – used this space to rewrite history as the colonists had presented it, to explore and re-imagine their own literary heritage, or to interrogate and recreate Western literary styles and traditions. In this section, we offer an inventory of these strategies of rewriting – literally, to write again; to retake and reshape creatively and critically (hi)stories, memories, or essentialist representations – in the context of postcolonial literature. What is postcolonial literature? Like the older, problematic term ‘Commonwealth literature’ (see text box below), the term ‘postcolonial literature’ raises a number of issues. Can literatures by so many different writers, with so many different backgrounds and literary traditions be collected under a single name? Hardly. Yet, all these literatures have something in common, in that they are all produced in cultures that have been confronted with European imperialism and colonial occupation. This is why we here define postcolonial literature as a literature that can be seen to emerge in the context of a colonial experience and that is produced in the period during and after that experience. During and after since, as we have seen, there has never been an end to colonialism. Thus, the postcolonial applies to texts ranging from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anti-slavery narratives to today’s migrant literatures and literatures critically relating to colonialist expansion in the global south.
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Commonwealth literature does not exist The countries belonging to the British Commonwealth are sovereign countries that once belonged to the British empire. Until the 1980s, the literature from these countries was called ‘Commonwealth literature,’ and this literature was studied in an interdiscipline called ‘Commonwealth studies.’ These studies can be seen as a first attempt to move beyond the narrow European canon in literature. In his essay ‘Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist’ (1983), Salman Rushdie writes about his experiences at a conference on Commonwealth literature. As a British-Indian writer, he had been invited with writers from Australia, the Caribbean, Africa, and Canada to read from their work and exchange thoughts. However, he failed to see any common or necessary ground between these different authors or the work they had produced. More problematically, writers not belonging to the Commonwealth, such as Pakistan, turned out to be ‘Commonwealth authors,’ while writers who did belong to the Commonwealth, such as Great Britain, were ‘authors.’ There was British literature, and literature from the rest of the world: self and other. Rushdie started to feel more and more uncomfortable with the term ‘Commonwealth literature.’ It seemed like a ghetto in which all literatures written by non-British writers in global versions of the British language had been dumped. A literary ghetto, he maintained, that only piqued the interest of Western European academics and critics in so far as it displayed or expressed ‘native,’ ‘authentic’ traditions. This, for Rushdie, was a form of exoticism reducing ‘non-Western’ literatures to folklore.
What are the strategies used in postcolonial literature to occupy a new position vis-à-vis the dominant culture – the (former) oppressor? Firstly, we see that postcolonial texts revisit and rewrite (neo)colonial history. Such rewritings offer a different perspective on a represented past. Take, for instance, the countless American series, movies, and books on the Vietnam war from the 1960s-1980s in which soldiers from the Vietcong were consistently othered, represented as the inhuman enemy, as an evil presence that cannot be erased. Until the 1990s, Western viewers and readers were accustomed to seeing the Vietcong as anonymous fighting machines: as Others without a name, a history, a perspective, a voice. In novels like The Sorrow of War (Nỗi buồn chiến tranh; 1990) by Bao Ninh (b.1952) or Novel without a Name (Tiểu thuyết vô đề; 1991) by Dương Thu Hương (b.1947), a different reality emerges. For years, Duong Thu Huong fought on the North Vietnamese side and survived the horrors as one of the few, which he recounts in Novel without a Name. Both novels focus on the suffering of North Vietnamese soldiers in the jungles and trenches, offering their side of history, allowing the reader to enter a different historical reality and acquire a new perspective. Postcolonial literature thus has a strongly defamiliarising potential of its own. It breaks open accustomed vantage points and versions of history.
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Reclaiming African history for children In Africa, with Avi and Kumbi (2019) by the South African historian Naledi Nomalanga Mkhize (b.1981) is a history book for children. It breaks with the legacy of European historiography by excluding white history altogether. In a globalised world where many children are reading (translated) Anglophone books by white authors, and used to their conventions, Mkhize created an all-African tale. In Africa zooms in on African queens, kings, thinkers, people, writers, and presidents, not on European explorers purportedly ‘discovering’ this or that unknown territory, untrodden path, or sublime waterfall. It is a necessary tale as it makes us aware of the narrow-mindedness of Western history and literary canons in secondary and higher education; we often continue to frame these canons from within a European centre. Why should we want to uphold such a centre – why not create and accept multiple centres? Did we, for that matter, not all originate from Africa, hundreds of thousands of years ago? In the light of this last question, In Africa is a history of and for us all.
Secondly, postcolonial texts may revisit and rewrite Western literary history: they often retake and remake Western novelistic characters, canonical stories, and genres. Thus, postcolonial literatures single out marginalised, muted, or demonised characters in colonial literature – or literature from the colonial era – and give them a new voice in a re-visitation of a canonical story. The text box below zooms in on Jean Rhys, productive reception (Chapter 6) of Bertha Mason: the Other of Jane Eyre.
Postcolonial rewriting: Bertha is Antoinette The novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys (1894-1979) rewrites the classic Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë that we have encountered earlier in this book. This is a rewriting from the perspective of the female character demonised and marginalised in Jane Eyre: Bertha Mason. Jane Eyre is about the girl Jane growing into the woman Jane Eyre and her eventual marriage to Mr Rochester. The problem is, however, that Mr Rochester is already married. Jane, however, does not know this. His first wife is Bertha Mason, a woman from the Caribbean who had gone to England with Rochester long ago. Bertha did not fare well. She apparently became insane – that is, in the perspective of the British characters narrating her fate – and was eventually locked away in the attic of the house of Mr Rochester. For Jane, as well as the reader, she is nothing more than a ghost in the background, a creepy secret that Rochester keeps. Towards the end of the story, she dies – and Rochester is free to marry Jane.
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In Jane Eyre Bertha has no voice and no story. According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak this is due to the imperialist subtext of the novel. The term ‘subtext’ here means that imperialist ideologies are not made explicit but are nonetheless present implicitly in Brontë’s novel; a racist ideology directs the fate of the characters (from the Caribbean and Western Europe), but the novel never becomes explicitly racist. The novel rather normalises such racism through the destinies it creates for Bertha and Jane respectively. Bertha is a creole (her cultural identity is in any case ambivalent, between ‘self ’ and ‘other,’ which precisely creates her problematic status within the dominant ideology that will only recognise self or other) and has no ‘human’ status in the novel. She is consequently represented as a wild beast, dangerous and unpredictable, that should remain behind bars. Jane is British, and she becomes the bride – the ultimate prize in Western heteropatriarchal value systems (Chapter 6). Written more than a century after Jane Eyre by a third-generation creole author who lived in the Dominican Republic until she was sixteen, but then received a very traditional British education, Wide Sargasso Sea gives Bertha a history, a face, and a human identity. The novel is mainly set in Jamaica, where Bertha spent her youth. Originally, she was called Antoinette but was renamed Bertha by Rochester (this recalls Crusoe’s renaming of Friday). She turns out not to be a monster, or ‘mad woman in the attic,’ but a tormented woman who lost her identity and thus ultimately lost herself. In so far as Antoinette/Bertha is the dark Other of Jane in Jane Eyre, Rhys has her speak for herself in Wide Sargasso Sea and emerge as a human being, as a subject with her own agency. As readers we see her side, hear her voice, and read her story.
Apart from Wide Sargasso Sea, which also writes back from William Shakespeare’s Othello (1604), famous rewritings are Foe (1986) by J.M. Coetzee, on the basis of Robinson Crusoe, A Bend in the River (1979) by V.S. Naipaul (1932-2018), on the basis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje (b.1943), which plays intertextually with Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). Such works shift cultural agency as speakers, characters, and regions once obscured move to the foreground. In these works, the transformative potential of intertextuality matters most; the intertextual play can alter rooted misconceptions and change our perspective of ourselves and the Other, and our shared histories. Revisiting literary history in postcolonial literature may also be a retake of literary forms and genres. A well-known example is Omeros (1990) by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott (1930-2017). With Omeros Walcott not only rewrites the Iliad (and the figure of Homer), but also the epic as a genre within a Caribbean context: Western conventions and Caribbean oral traditions here come together and merge
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into a new, composite form. Thus, there is no single hero or heroine in Omeros, as the narrative shifts between different characters. Because of this constant shifting, Walcott’s epic also lacks a linear narrative thread. It is rather an assemblage of stories, merging Caribbean locations with Classical themes, epic with autobiography and colonial history. In this work, the play with genres and intertextuality not only alerts us to how literature evolves out of prior texts, but also to the fact that new, composite forms of literature are needed to make sense of a pluralistic world. Rewriting and bending an existing genre could also be considered a form of mimicry, where a certain norm (European epic) is imitated (in a new Caribbean epic), but with a difference. The setting, form, and the contents have changed. The concept of mimicry was introduced by the critic Homi Bhabha (b.1949) and refers to the process whereby a colonised subject imitates the coloniser in such a way as to produce a critical distance. As a concept, mimicry originates in the field of biology, where it refers to the phenomenon of one species resembling or imitating another so as to increase its chances for survival. Thus, the drone (a male bee) escapes its enemies by resembling a worker bee who can sting with a vengeance. In postcolonial theory, the concept of mimicry is used to unpack a certain tension and ambivalence in the relation between colonising and colonised subjects, between self and Other. More specifically, it concerns the tension between high-flying ideals of the colonisers and their actual aims: they wanted to enlighten the colonised areas precisely by subjugating them and hence preventing them from developing and evolving. Put otherwise, colonised subjects were to be made ‘the same, but not quite’ as the coloniser; they were to remain subjugated, however educated they became. By way of illustration, consider this excerpt from ‘The importance of native institutions’ (Het belang van inheemse instellingen; 1900) by the Dutch socialist H.H. Kol (1852-1925) – to show how even, or precisely, well-meaning citizens bent on social reform were programmed by a colonial discourse:
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[...] it was neither natural nor just that the civilized from the West remained gathered in a limited space, suffocating in an ever-tighter mass, while half the world, with all the natural resources the earth contains, was lying waste because it was inhabited by primitive and ignorant people, scattered in different groups, masters of immeasurable spaces of the earth. [...] What [the native] is now, we were centuries ago; what we are he will become; because even the most backward races have proven to be susceptible to our civilization [...]. These colonies are like children in the family, they first raise our concern, but later give us joy and support. We can elevate the natives, bring them closer to us through our ideas, our education, through a benevolent custody, a supervision pervaded by the spirit of justice and fraternity.
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Kol here uses an imperialist argument – we need resources and space for our people to make the world a better place for them and ultimately for the people we conquer and ‘supervise’ – to claim the right of the ‘civilized’ European to exploit a foreign land. Kol has noble ideals; he wants to elevate the colonized people (which he elsewhere refers to as weak, troublesome children) to the level of the Western educated subject. They will be raised by the colonisers to become what they are now. Indeed, he argues, they are like our children whom we educate to, ultimately, perpetuate and support us. Yet, as Bhabha shows, this project could never be realised; the colonised could never become completely ‘civilised,’ completely Western. They were to be at best an incomplete imitation (mimicry) of the Western subject. Ironically, this incomplete imitation would terrify the colonisers. A ‘native’ dressed in a Western, tropical suit could easily become a parody of the Western subject – and more disconcertingly, unveil the artificiality of that subject as a ‘superior’ subject. At the same time, the imitation should not be too successful: this would render the difference between the imitation and the original imperceptible, whereas the colonial hierarchy was based precisely on that difference. As an ironic answer to these colonial ambivalences, postcolonial literature often toys with this notion of mimicry. The Impressionist (2002) by Hari Kunzru (b.1969), a postcolonial Bildungsroman, revolves around an Indian protagonist who seamlessly takes on a British identity. Pran Nath Razdan, the child of an English father and Indian mother, can make others believe what he wants to be, and this is how he – like the drone – manages to survive in a world of complex, colonial hierarchies. Passing off for white, he attends a prestigious boarding school and, later, Oxford University. In the end, however, participating in anthropological research in Africa (a project propagating white supremacy), the mimicry dissolves; Pran realizes he can never build his own identity. He is not ‘one’. As we have seen, postcolonial literatures are often engaged – though they certainly not always are and do not always need to be – in a complex relation to Western literature and literary techniques and forms. To remain with the example of Kunzru, The Impressionist rewrites the Dickensian novel and the Bildungsroman with a difference. Thus, it also practises mimicry on the level of form, its intertextual play reinforcing the performative nature of identity (Chapter 5) in colonial and postcolonial settings. Still, the relation to Western literary traditions remains problematic in postcolonial texts. Thus, for many postcolonial authors it has been difficult to decide whether to write in the language of the former oppressor or in their local language. As the psychiatrist, writer, philosopher, and activist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) observed long ago: ‘Every colonized people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created
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by the death and burial of its local originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.’ This language, in other words, is the means for erasing the local originality. How to respond to this language in a postcolonial setting? Above, we already saw that writers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o at some point in their career chose to use their local language to evoke social injustice. The colonisers had stolen resources, obliterated entire cultures – and were not to steal once more by assimilating the voices of African writers in their language. Other writers, however, thought differently. After centuries of colonisation, the language of the coloniser had also become part of colonial culture and the educated colonised. For some, this was reason enough to choose it for literary writing. Writing in English enabled Salman Rushdie to reach a world audience –but also to reshape the coloniser’s language and, thus, to creatively appropriate it and the literary tradition that it mediated. This, too, is a rewriting: retaking the medium of the coloniser. Still other writers refurbished the language of the (former) oppressor. They opted to write in a mixed language (pidgin or creole) that was developed during colonial occupation. As a mix of a European language and a language of the colonised, such creole languages were typically seen as inferior during the colonial era. For many postcolonial writers this was precisely a reason to use them. They served as a creative interrogation of the imperialist centre and a way to assert their difference from it. Such linguistic challenges and creative strategies indicate once more how important literary texts are to the construction of cultural identities. Within postcolonial theory, criticism and historiography a lot of attention has been paid to the design of cultural identity: the relation between self, time, language, and place. What can still come of that relation when one’s own culture, history, or language has been lost? How can a cultural identity then be forged? A term proposed by Spivak to think through these questions is displacement. Displacement refers to the obstacles in the formation of a cultural identity when the relation between self, time, language and place is disrupted. This happened, on the one hand, through the slave and coolie trade (Africans sold as slaves and shipped to America; Javanese ‘coolies’ shipped to Surinam to work as slaves on plantations) – a literal, geographic displacement. On the other hand, displacement has to do with the suppression of one’s own language and culture during colonial rule, or in the waves of migration that followed decolonisation. In postcolonial literature and art of the present, a creative twist is given to the problem of displacement. It may materialise as a creative mixing of forms and identities where cultural agency has been achieved in, for instance, literary writing. Critics use the concept of hybridity to analyse
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such mixing and its cultural consequences. Though the etymological and cultural heritage of the term is problematic to say the least, hybridity has been given a new meaning in contemporary postcolonial theory. As a concept, hybridity has a lot in common with the concepts of intermedium and intermediality (as discussed in Chapter 4). These concepts bore on the possibility of an in-between: a third space in between existing media or art forms. Hybridity also refers to an in-between space, but one explicitly referring to colonial and postcolonial settings: a mixture of Western and (post)colonial styles that can no longer be reduced to either, like Walcott’s Omeros or Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist. The literature of migrants and the diaspora – think of writers like Monica Ali (b.1967) – offers an instance of such mixtures: the construction of new cultural forms arising out of the colonial encounter, and travel, movement and dislocation in a globalising world (see also transculturality, Chapter 9).
Postcolonial aesthetics: Another take on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake This example zooms in on the South African dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo (b.1985) and her critical and innovative reworking of Western ballet classics. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) composed the music for the ballet Swan Lake, first choreographed by Julius Reisinger (1828-1892) in 1877 and then by Marius Petipa (1818-1910) and Lev Ivanov (1834-1901) in 1895. Other choreographies have followed over the centuries, the ballet quickly evolving into a classic. In the late twentieth century, alternative versions began to emerge, such as the 1955 comical version by Matthew Bourne (b.1960) that reworked the ballet within a gay framework (this undoubtedly also serves to underline Tschaikovsky’s homosexuality, and to uncover gay timelines in European and Russian history that, until today, are covered up in the construction of cultural canons). In 2010, Dada Masilo created her energetic and ironic version of the ballet (and we can identify both as productive reception, discussed in Chapter 6). Like Bourne, Masilo re-renders the male protagonist of the ballet (Siegfried) gay, but situates him in homophobic South Africa, mixes African dance (and dance music) with the Pepita-Ivanov choreography, and deconstructs the original opposition between the two female protagonists (Odette and Odile). Dancers of Masilo’s ballet are predominantly black, and portray new movements of ‘swann-ness’ through dance. Her reinterpretation of Swan Lake is an instance of the postcolonial aesthetic: the educating and opening of the human senses through a creative engagement with hallowed (and hollowed-out) Western classics, a retake of local cultural heritage, and a social critique of homophobia in South Africa. Dada Masilo’s vibrant and humorous rewriting suggests that the life of Western classics may only endure through such transcultural mixing in a globalising world; it gives them new relevance and meaning.
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Postcolonial rewriting, then, refers to: ● a re-visitation and -appropriation of colonial history; ● a retake of Western characters, stories, styles, or genres, ● which may involve the use of mimicry on different levels; ● the creative appropriation of the language of the colonizer, or ● the adoption of local indigenous languages as a critical literary tool, or ● the use of pidgins and creoles to mark a difference from canonical colonial traditions; ● hybrid modes that materialise the new cultural forms arising out of (post)colonial encounters. Intertextuality and productive reception are key to postcolonial rewriting to the extent that they have a transformative effect: of re-establishing the possibility of a cultural identity, of creating a new and different perspective on a shared past, or of opening up literary canons and traditions to a pluralistic world. At the same time, postcolonial rewriting does not cover the entire range of postcolonial literature. That literature may, precisely, explore indigenous modes of poetry and storytelling, such as those emanating from oral traditions, and/or mix these traditions with Western genres. These modes have, in the last decades, come more prominently into view in the field of world literature – or, as other critics prefer to call this field: the planetary domain of the literary. The canon of literary writing is continuously expanding in its adaptation to a planetary perspective with multiple cultural centres.
10.5 In conclusion: Texts and cultural identities In this chapter we have seen how literary texts help to forge social and cultural realities. They can inform such realities, and they can have powerful reality effects. They can help shape our view and ideas of people and of historical events. Thus, Western literary representations of colonised cultures have contributed to economic and military domination and ecological as well as human exploitation in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In turn, we have shown that postcolonial literatures have generated new representations in a local language, a European language, or a mixed form to counter the old, colonial reality effects. We have, to this end, reflected on strategies of rewriting or ‘writing back’ to the centre with respect to colonial and literary history, literary characters and genres, and the blending of forms. Finally, we have concluded that the idea of a dominant cultural centre will not hold; a multiplicity of centres has emerged in a planetary system.
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In this chapter, we have focused on colonial and postcolonial literatures as examples of world-making. World-making, however, can also be analysed in the context of stories about social classes and gender roles (as we have already seen in Chapter 5). Feminist criticism* has shown how not only imperialist but also patriarchal ideologies – often going hand in hand – have forged powerful cultural realities through literary texts. The relation between literature and reality is a complex one, as we have also seen in Chapter 9, and reaches further than the traditional concept of mimesis allows us to imagine.
Further reading Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Stuart Hall et al., eds, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, 2nd ed., London: Sage, 2013. Ato Quayson, The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, London: Verso, 2000. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Penguin Books, 1995. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds, Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Robert Young, Empire, Colony, Postcolony. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6
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The marriage ban was only lifted in the Netherlands East Indies in 1920. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, London: Abacus, 2000, p. 60. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, pp. 60-65. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2003. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, p. 11. This text box is derived from Mineke Schipper, Daniela Merolla & Inge Brinkman, Afrikaanse letterkunde: Tradities, genres, auteurs en ontwikkelingen, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019, pp. 127-133, 22-26.
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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
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Ibid., pp. 11-12. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient [1978], New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Frank Ankersmit, Political Representation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Ankersmit bases this idea of representation as substitution on E.H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London and New York: Phaidon, 1983. Said, Orientalism, p. 12. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p. 70. Redmond O’Hanlon, Into the Heart of Borneo, Edinburgh: Salamander, 1984. Edward Marriott, The Lost Tribe: A Search through the Jungles of Papua New Guinea, London: Picador, 1996. Salman Rushdie, ‘Nadine Gordimer,’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms 1981-1991, 187-195, London: Granta Books, 1992, p. 193. Carry van Bruggen, Goenong-Djatti, Amsterdam: Becht, 1909; quoted in Vilan van de Loo, ed., Het damescompartiment van de Indische letterkunde, http://www. damescompartiment.nl/wecb.htm (accessed February 2018). Said, Orientalism, p. 3. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1899], London: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 33. Quoted in Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 13. Ibid., pp. 13-14. Salman Rushdie, ‘Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist,’ in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms 1981-1991, 61-70, London: Granta Books, 1992, pp. 62-63. Ibid., p. 63 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 114-115, 120-125. Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,’ in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds, Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 2nd ed., 234-241, London: Edward Arnold, 1992, p. 234. H.H. van Kol, ‘Het belang van de inheemse instellingen’, in Marieke Blombergen ed., Koloniale inspiratie, pp. 78-86, Leiden: kitlv Uitgeverij, 2004, pp. 79, 85, translation K.B.W. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, Harmondsworth, uk: Penguin, 1967, p.18. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, p. 8.
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11 LITERATURE AND CULTURAL MEMORY ANN RIGNEY
In this chapter we continue with contextualist approaches to literature, with a specific focus on history and the making of collective stories. How does literature help to make sense of history? And how does it help produce collective identity through narratives about the past, present, and future of society? How does canonisation, which involves the interpretation of the literary past, also play into collective identity formation? We approach these questions using concepts and theories from the field of cultural memory studies:* the interdisciplinary study of how collective narratives come into being through processes of remembering and forgetting, and the interplay between different media and cultural practices. We show how narrative forms and techniques construct the meaning of events for individuals and groups, and how creative writers use their craft to challenge dominant narratives and bring ‘forgotten’ stories into circulation. Finally, we show that literature is not just a medium of memory, but also an object of remembrance. As a selection of valued texts, literature also constitutes a form of heritage that helps create the sense of a shared history and common identity. Refiguring the canon or rewriting canonical works means, therefore, revising memory and undoing forgetting so as to renegotiate the border between ‘us’ and ‘other.’ . Introduction: Literature in/and time . Cultural memory studies . Narrating events .. Experiential narration .. Traumatic realism . Remediation and the dynamics of cultural memory . Literature and ‘unforgetting’ . Canons and their contestation . In conclusion: Literature as mediator
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Introduction: Literature in/and time Is aicher in gaíth innocht fu-fúasna fairrge findfholt; ní ágor réimm mora minn dond láechraid lainn úa Lothlind Bitter is the wind tonight, It tosses the sea’s white tresses I do not fear the fierce warriors of Norway, Who only travel the quiet seas.
This anonymous poem written in Old Irish was composed sometime between 800 and 1000 ce. Like more recent works discussed in earlier chapters, this short poem carries traces of the time in which it was composed. To begin with: it is written in a form of Gaelic that is no longer accessible to speakers of modern Irish, not to mention people for whom that language is completely incomprehensible. (Luckily these evocative lines are available to modern publics in Ireland and elsewhere in the English translation quoted above, taken from the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing; 1991.) Moreover, the poem carries traces of its time in its invocation of the ‘fierce warriors of Norway,’ a reference to the marauding Vikings who frequently attacked and plundered settlements in medieval Ireland. Literary historians, using the methods of philology,* have concluded that this poem was probably written by a monk in one of the many monasteries that were the principal sites of learning in medieval Ireland when the vast majority of the population was still illiterate. The poem captures in just a few lines the monk’s precarity: because there is a storm raging outside, he can feel safe from attack. But only for this night; tomorrow will bring new fears and new insecurities. What makes this text so interesting for us here, is its complex relation to time. It is rooted in a distant past and (for most of our readers) a distant place. On the other hand, it can still be read today and work its magic in a precarious world, albeit now in translation, in book form, and in a very different cultural context. In Chapter 2 we defined literature in terms of its cultural durability. We now see how this durability gives a poem the power to bridge the distance between past and present, even as the reader is made keenly aware of the differences between them. The persistence of texts across time often yields problems in interpretation as the world and language have changed in the meantime. For this very reason, when old texts are read in new contexts they acquire new meanings that may cast light on contemporary experience. In short: literature mediates between the past and present just as it mediates between cultures (as we have seen in Chapters 9 and 10).
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In this chapter we will explore further the ways in which literature captures historical experience in words. We will then go on to consider how literary texts continue to have meaning as ‘heritage’ – and as sources of meaning-making in the contemporary world – outside of the context in which they were originally written. In doing so, we will be applying many of the theoretical perspectives and methods of analysis discussed in earlier chapters, and integrating them within the framework of cultural memory studies.
Figure 11.1: Texts in time.
context of production
- new editions - translations - adaptations
context of reception
time
11.2
memoir
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Cultural memory studies
Memory is the ‘presence of the past,’ as Richard Terdiman once defined it. Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of individual memory: it is the mental capacity to recall information, including autobiographical information about one’s own life, which is the key to personal identity. In an age when the terms ‘Alzheimer’s’, and ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ have become common currency, it is not surprising that there has been an enormous body of research into the nature of individual memory, its malleability, and the pathologies that affect it. Creative writing has long been a site for reflection on personal memory – most notably, Marcel Proust’s multivolume In Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu; 1913-1927), which is one long reflection on how individual memory works and how it deceives. The fact that autobiography and the memoir (personal recollections about events, usually with both a public and private dimension) have long been important literary genres illustrate the importance of the past to the understanding of present lives.
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Memory is not only an individual matter, however. Societies too have a capacity to recollect and to forget and, as in the case of individuals, this is linked to the shaping of identity. Groups define who they are, not just by their common values and norms, but also by the stories they tell about how they got to be where they are now. The memory of society, however, is not merely a case of individual memory written large. A society’s ability to remember is not neurologically based, but culturally based: in order for memory to be shared, some form of communication is needed. Research has shown that when individuals remember their own experience, they already shape their memory in terms of its communicability for others (anyone who has ever taken a holiday selfie to send to absent friends and family will recognise the mechanism). The intimate sphere of friends and family provides an important framework for the exchange of memories. The family in particular has been a crucial site for the transmission of intergenerational memory (often helped out by family photo albums and family reunions that elicit storytelling). In most cases, the exchange of memories does not go beyond the private sphere of the family and, through social media and faceto-face contacts, one’s personal networks. However, individual experience can also be translated into a more public form and start circulating in society with the help of print and other media technologies. This happens, for example, when someone writes a memoir or records a video testimony to be posted online. The genre of video testimony (in which someone recollects their own experience before the camera in order to bear witness to a past experience, often of violence) has become an extremely important genre since World War ii. In turn, individual memoirs and video testimonies may be integrated into a documentary such as Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann (1925-2018), which combines multiple individual testimonies into a larger story about the Holocaust. Printed memoirs, recorded testimonies, documentaries, social media: the use of media allows memory to move from the private to the public sphere, from the individual to the collective level. Once a personal memory is carried by a book (film, or YouTube clip), it becomes a mediator between different individuals and groups. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and If This Is a Man (Se questo è un uomo; 1947) by Primo Levi (19191987), to take just two famous examples of memoirs, offer personal recollections of extreme suffering, in the context of slavery and life in a concentration camp respectively. Their readers are given the possibility of virtually experiencing the writers’ suffering and incorporating it into their memory of the collective past. The concept of prosthetic memory, coined by way of analogy with bodily ‘prostheses,’ is useful here. It captures how narratives can implant in their readers or viewers, through the
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collective memory
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use of a media product like a book or film, the memory of things they have not directly experienced themselves but that have now become part of their world. The bigger the impact a memoir has, the more people will come to share the writer’s recollections and feel called upon to bear witness to the injustice recalled. In this way, Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz has become a common point of reference in evocations of the horrors of World War ii. In the last thirty years, the term ‘cultural memory’ has been developed to describe how narratives about the collective past are produced and disseminated across different media. Crucially, cultural memory is more than an accumulation of individual memories; it entails the gradual synthesis of individual memories into a limited number of narratives that are shared between people and collectively recognised as representing a common past. How this occurs is the focus of study in a new interdisciplinary field, at the intersection of literary and media studies, called cultural memory studies. This in turn is part of the larger field of memory studies,* an area of research involving scholars from both the social sciences and the humanities in an integrated study both of how individuals and how societies remember. Social scientists tend to use the term collective memory (first introduced by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs [1877-1945] in the 1920s), in order to highlight the social dimensions of their topic: the people, groups and institutions involved in making and contesting shared narratives that ‘roots’ particular groups in the past and gives them their identity. In contrast, literary and cultural scholars use the term cultural memory as their guiding concept (a term first introduced by the German scholar Jan Assmann [b.1938] in the 1990s). As the adjective ‘cultural’ implies, this concept highlights the cultural dimensions of memory-making. It opens up questions such as: Which media and cultural models are used to remember events in private and public settings? What genres are especially important? Which works in particular are picked up in other media and contexts, and why? How are these processes influenced by politics? Studies of the social and the cultural aspects of memory come together around the relationship between narratives about the past and social solidarity in the present. The working assumption is that memory is selective and works both as a mechanism of inclusion (in creating a ‘we’ group) and of exclusion (in ‘othering’ minorities and immigrants). This assumption also guides the following introduction to the role of literature in remembering and forgetting the collective past. In keeping with the interdisciplinary character of cultural memory studies, literature will not be treated as an isolated phenomenon but one that interacts with other cultural practices and discourses.
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Narrating events
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Experiential narration
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Since the 1970s, it has generally been accepted that events only make sense once they have been turned into a narrative by selecting, ordering, and describing occurrences in particular ways. As both narratologists and a number of important theorists of history have acknowledged, events do not ‘make sense’ in themselves as they happen; they acquire meaning as they are retrospectively reconstructed. This idea was formulated by Hayden White (1928-2018) in an influential book called Metahistory (1973) with reference to the ways in which professional historians make sense of their archival materials and rework them into narratives. White’s insight that events do not ‘naturally’ take the form of a story has been picked up and further developed within cultural memory studies. In the process, the focus shifted away from history writing as such to the wide range of cultural forms and practices through which the past is recollected in a public way: memoirs, novels, films, monuments, museum exhibitions, and websites. Creative writers and film-makers use many of the narrative techniques discussed in Chapter 5 to depict events of collective significance, often adding fictional elements into the mix. The result is a variety of hybrid forms, such as the historical novel and historical film which, on the one hand, claim to represent the past as it was and, on the other hand, enjoy a poetic license to depict that past using invented characters and situations. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the historical novel (and later, the historical film) has played a key role in producing cultural memory, often from a minority perspective. In Chapter 9, we already mentioned the historical novel as one of the most important genres of the nineteenth century that, after a period of marginalisation, has enjoyed a contemporary revival. In the process, it has morphed from the classical realist form of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Vojna i mir; 1869), for example, to Toni Morrison’s feminist-inflected Beloved (1987) about slavery, set in post-Civil War America and told from the perspective of its female characters. Like many other works of historical fiction, Morrison’s novel was based on a historically documented case – a newspaper article about ‘A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child’ (1856), that she used as a starting point for a book-length imaginative reconstruction of the mother’s life (changing the woman’s name from Margaret Garner to Sethe in the process). Thanks to Morrison’s novel, the story of a personal tragedy that might otherwise have been completely forgotten was brought again into circulation in an aesthetically and emotionally compelling way, and linked to the larger story of slavery in the United
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States and its terribly destructive impact on family relations. Morrison’s novel converted a newspaper item into a memorable story that challenged hegemonic views of us history. A similar point could be made about Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b.1977) which brought to a local and to an international public the harrowing struggles of the Igbo minority in Nigeria during the Biafran-Nigerian war (19671970). Tolstoy’s War and Peace, through the original novel, its translations, and its many film adaptations, promoted the memory of the Battle of Borodino (1812) between the Russian and the French armies. Historically speaking Borodino was not as major as the novelist made it out to be, but in Tolstoy’s hands the battle becomes a key moment in the, ultimately successful, national struggle of the Russians to defeat Napoleon. In different ways, the work of Tolstoy and Adichie exemplifies the power of creative writing to make historical events memorable, and the power of good storytelling to cross national, linguistic, and generational borders. Where does this power come from? Novelists and directors use their freedom to invent and to supplement historical documents with their imagination to give readers an ‘experiential’ mode of access to historical events. Historians tend towards an overview of general developments, where novelists tend to write from the embodied perspective of individuals, giving details of their perceptions, emotions, hopes, and disappointments. They make it possible for readers to become engaged cognitively and affectively with the trials and tribulations of other subjects, and to empathise or even to identify with their lives. Key moments in Tolstoy’s masterful depiction of the battle are focalised through the protagonist Pierre Bezukhov, a gauche intellectual who finds himself caught up in the fighting. In a more structural way, Morrison uses character focalisation to translate the injustice of slavery (her book is dedicated to the ‘sixty million and more’) into the physical and mental pain suffered by particular characters as they attempt to resist it. Experiential narration is a key element in the making of prosthetic memory. As a result, novelists and film directors have had an important role to play in bringing the past to life for the public at large. If people nowadays share a memory of World War i – the mud, the trenches, the horror – this is thanks to multiple works of historical fiction. Mention can be made here of All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues; 1929) by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), along with its multiple translations and its adaptations to film (1930) and to television (1979), or, more recently, of the Regeneration Trilogy (1991-1995) by Pat Barker (b.1943), which highlights the phenomenon of shell-shock, or Three-Day Road (2005) by Joseph Boyden (b.1966), which is written from the defamiliarising perspective of indigenous soldiers, members of the Oji-Cree tribe, fighting in the Canadian army in the trenches of Flanders.
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The fact that novels are translated and films subtitled indicates that they not only have the power to arouse interest in the lives of the people we consider our ancestors, but also in the lives of ‘others,’ groups with whom we do not traditionally identify and who often literally speak a different language. As we have seen from another perspective in Chapter 5, fiction creates the imaginative conditions for empathic involvement with the lives of ‘other’ people. In the case of fiction with an historical focus, this means also expanding the reader’s sense of the common past to include other actors and events. There is no guarantee, of course, that this cultural memory has a basis in documented history. Indeed, in the case of historical fiction, we can assume that a lot of what is depicted is the writer’s invention. The imaginative dimension of literature leaves novelists permanently open to challenges from historians on the grounds of inaccuracy, but at the same time, imagination seems to be the source of literature’s public appeal and long-term impact. From the point of view of literary studies, imagination is a defining feature. Can we then identify a particular role for literature, alongside other artistic practices, in the broader sociocultural dynamic in which collective narratives emerge and change?
Figure 11.2: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005), Berlin.
11.3.2
Traumatic realism
Scholars in memory studies agree that the devastating world wars and genocides of the twentieth century destroyed confidence in the progressive and coherent character of history. Terrible things had happened before, to be sure, including the transatlantic slave trade. But the sheer scale of the killing of civilians, and its industrial character, opened up a gap
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trauma
traumatic realism
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in the twentieth century between the world as it actually was (including the Holocaust, World War I, and so on) and the world as it had been imagined until then (governed by a moral order that all humans could ostensibly relate to). As the title of Levi’s If This Is a Man suggests, the Holocaust called into question the very nature of humanity and of the human. It also made people retrospectively aware that history has not been one long story of progress, but included more injustice and suffering than has hitherto been acknowledged. Within cultural memory studies, such insights have led to a widespread use of the concept of trauma. As this has been expounded by Cathy Caruth (b.1955) among others, trauma (literally: trauma = wound) is an extremely distressing experience (of sexual violence, combat, and so on) that, in its awfulness, challenges our understanding of the world and our place in it. It cannot be represented using traditional narrative models, which means that it also cannot be assigned a definitive meaning and place in memory. As a result, it continuously returns in the victim’s thoughts and reactions. The concept of trauma applies in the first instance to people’s states of mind (it was first developed in psychoanalysis and psychology). But it has been successfully transferred to the field of cultural production to account for the ways in which writers and other artists have looked for creative solutions to the problem of representing an ‘unimaginable’ world of hurt, events that are not only traumatic for individuals but affect entire societies. In the process, trauma theory has been extended beyond considerations of the Holocaust to the memory of other events, including the legacy of colonialism and ongoing human rights violations across the world. Indeed, claims have been made that modern life is structurally traumatic in the sense that it continuously defies our attempts to understand it (we have already seen something of this in our discussion of climate change as hyperobject in Chapter 9). Where earlier writers worked to represent a familiar world in a recognisable way (realism) or worked to defamiliarise a world that had become too self-evident, contemporary writers have to deal more and more with a world where the pace of change, growing complexity, and loss of moral certainties defies our ability to represent it in any straightforward way. The term traumatic realism has been used to describe creative responses to this new existential condition: the artistic attempts to make sense of a world that not only challenges our traditional views but seems beyond the very grasp of expression. Traumatic realism can be illustrated with reference to the memoir None of us Will Return (Aucun de nous ne reviendra; 1965) by Charlotte Delbo (1913-1985). Delbo had been sent as a political prisoner to Auschwitz in 1943 and, having survived more than a year of terrible deprivation, went on over the course of several decades to write down
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her memoirs. In the first volume (which she wrote soon after her return home but then left sitting for years in a desk) Delbo uses the unexpected form of a poem to evoke the indescribable moment of arriving in the death camp:
Et quand ils arrivent ils croient qu’ils sont arrivés en enfer possible. [...] Ils ne savent pas qu’à cette gare-là on n’arrive pas. Ils attendent le pire – ils n’attendent pas l’inconcevable.
And when they have gotten there they think they’ve arrived in Hell maybe [...] They do not know there is no arriving in this station. They expect the worst – not the unthinkable.
Where Tolstoy could imagine a world in which history took the form of a story with a happy end, Delbo cannot. Instead, she uses a whole range of literary techniques – shifting focalisation, alliteration, metaphors, a fragmented layout, an alternation between prose and poetry, fragmented sentences – to capture something of her experiences and that of her fellow inmates. The fact that she seems to oscillate between genres underscores the difficulty of capturing the meaning of the moment, but also the effort she is making to communicate with her readers. And she does succeed in capturing the experience up to a point, if only enough to give the reader a sense of its horror, but also a sense of the impossibility of really understanding it from the comfort of an armchair. The singularity of her text compels the reader to keep reading, and ensures that it remains in circulation as a memorable text in its own right. Textual analysis can be applied to such works in order to explain how they treat their topics, appeal to their readers, and thus ensure that the stories ‘stick’ in cultural memory by inviting reproduction in new editions, translations, and adaptations to other media and practices. For this reason, a highly literary narrative may end up having a bigger impact on the formation of cultural memory than an accumulation of personal testimonies. In Delbo’s case, this power to generate memorability is linked to her mastery of language and her ability to, literally, find words that make an incomprehensible experience in some way imaginable for others.
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11.4
memory sites
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Remediation and the dynamics of cultural memory
Traditionally, literary scholarship has focused on the close reading of single texts. Identifying the singularity of particular works, as we have just done with Delbo’s, is an important part of understanding why some works have the aesthetic power to become points of reference in society. But cultural memory studies has also provided literary scholars with an additional challenge: namely, that of identifying how literature interacts with other cultural practices such as film-making, museum curation, monument building, and memorial services in producing shared understandings of the common past. In this sense, the approach to literature from the perspective of cultural memory studies is in tune with the basic premise of this handbook: namely, that texts have cultural lives. Cultural memory is never carried by a single cultural artefact alone or even by a single medium. In line with the view of culture described in Chapter 9, cultural memory is also conceptualised in dynamic terms as the ongoing reproduction and transformation of stories as they are carried over into different texts and multiple media. Memories have to keep ‘on the move’ if they are not to be forgotten. As Astrid Erll (b.1972) and Ann Rigney in particular have argued, stories only gain traction in society at large when they are subsequently repeated in part or as a whole across different media platforms and in ever new material forms; in short, when they are not only mediated (brought into circulation using a particular medium), but also remediated. As a result, cultural memory becomes concentrated in memory sites (or what the French historian Pierre Nora [b.1931] called ‘lieux de mémoire’): these are particular events, locations, or persons (and often a combination of all of these) that have become the focus of intense remembrance in all sorts of different media and, as a result, have come to stand for an entire period or set of events. The story of Anne Frank (1929-1945), for example, was mediated in the first instance in her famous diary and then subsequently remediated multiple times in film, theatre, photography, and so on. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which is visited by thousands of people every year, was the original site of Anne’s imprisonment; since then it has arguably become yet another remediation of the book: visitors physically re-enact the memory of that diary in the form of a pilgrimage to the places it describes so intimately, as they pass one by one through the bookcase into the hiding place of the family. The cultural memory of Anne Frank is thus constituted, not by one single narrative, but by the migration of her story across many different media which both recall the original text and continuously adapt its meaning.
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The many faces of Anne Frank How did Anne Frank become a global icon of the Holocaust? The case of Anne Frank provides a good illustration of how cultural memory is selectively produced through remediation. It is thanks to her diary that Anne’s story has survived: without it there would be no ‘Anne Frank’ as a site of memory though, of course, there would still have been a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl who died from typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February 1945. Anne’s diary was first published in an edited version by her father in 1947, with many more editions following the first. These included a professionally edited ‘critical’ edition in 1986, which collated the different versions of the manuscript that Anne had left behind and rewritten with a view to publication; this was followed in 1996 by a purportedly even more complete and more definitive edition. Moreover, the diary was not only translated into seventy-three languages, but crucially for its international fame, it was remediated multiple times: as a Broadway play in 1955, as a film in East Germany (1958), in the United States (1959), in Yugoslavia (1959), in the Netherlands (1962), to mention just the earliest ones. And since the late 1950s the diary has continued to generate new remediations in the form of movies, but also in a travelling museum exhibition and the curation of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. It is through this massive investment in re-telling the story of Anne in new sensorial forms that her memory has stayed alive, even for those people who have never actually read the diary itself. As a result of all of these representations, Anne Frank became a global icon signifying not just the Holocaust but more generally, the figure of the innocent victim. Thanks to her status as a global site of memory, the figure of Anne Frank has also been used as a launching pad for criticism of Israel. This was notably the case when a graffiti appeared in Amsterdam which depicted Anne well-known head, but now wearing a keffiyeh, a marker of Palestinian identity.
Figure 11.3: Anne Frank wearing a keffiyah, street art by the artist known as T, Amsterdam, ca. 2007.
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The ethics of comparing the fate of the Jews under the Nazis to the mistreatment of the Palestinians at the hand of the Israeli state is subject to debate. But whatever position one takes, the very fact of combining Anne Frank and a keffiyeh to make a political point shows how cultural memory is not just a matter of preserving legacies about which there is agreement; it is also a site for debate about the past and the present, and about what has/is being forgotten. Cultural memory studies aims to capture these dynamics of canonisation and contestation.
plurimedial network
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Cultural memory studies locates literary works accordingly within the larger plurimedial network to which they belong: the concept of ‘plurimedial network’ was developed to describe the distributed character of cultural memory: it is the effect of the accumulated presence of related stories in different platforms. Looking in one direction we can see how literary works dealing with history are often remediated once they come into circulation (Beloved is a case in point). Looking in another direction, we can see that they are often themselves creative reworkings and remediations of earlier narratives (in Beloved, of a newspaper article along with more general documentation on nineteenth-century America). Works of historical fiction always have a strong intertextual component in the sense that they draw in part on information that is also available in other sources. They pick up, recycle, and integrate archival materials on related topics often ones that until now have been hidden from public purview. This can be illustrated by Austerlitz (2001), a novel by the GermanEnglish writer W.G. Sebald (1944-2001). It tells the story of a young Jewish child-refugee called Jacques Austerlitz who arrived by train in London on a so-called Kindertransport in 1938 or 1939. Unlike his parents he survived the genocide, but he grew up haunted by the trauma of separation from his home and mother even though he had no conscious recollection of these. Combining text and image in an estranging way, the novel depicts the gradual recovery of this repressed and painful memory. The story is told through a first-person witness-narrator (see Chapter 5), one of Austerlitz’s few friends who listens to his testimony as it gradually unfolds over the years. Austerlitz is a highly original and compelling book that quickly attained canonical status. As Sebald acknowledged in an interview, however, it was partly inspired by a 1991 bbc documentary on the Kindertransport. Around the same time there had also been several other documentaries on the same topic. These may not have been direct sources for Sebald, but
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they certainly contributed to the growing public interest in the child refugees. In addition to the bbc documentary, Austerlitz draws on many archival images and documents as well as printed works, including Theresienstadt 1941-1945 (1955) by H.G. Adler (1910-1988). Where some sources are silently woven into the texture of the novel or enter in the form of photographs (not all of which can be directly related to the text), other sources are explicitly evoked along with many references to actual locations and buildings. Imagination, history, and the material world are combined as Sebald ’s novel ‘plugs into’ stories already in circulation and reworks these into a compelling and memorable work. Since Austerlitz has now achieved canonical status it has also become a point of reference in public discussions in England about the Kindertransport and how that particular generation of refugees should be remembered. Until the end of the 1990s, the Kindertransport was remembered largely in the private sphere of families and individuals. Through the combined efforts of documentary makers, memoir writers, and an internationally acclaimed novelist, the topic came into public visibility, a process that culminated in 2006 with the erection of a monument to the children outside Liverpool Street Station (which also plays a big role in Sebald ’s novel). Although Austerlitz was originally written in German, moreover, it has now been translated into nineteen European languages as well as Japanese, with the potential to generate wider interest. This particular case shows how cultural memory is continuously evolving. How this occurs and the role of literature in its dynamics is the subject of the next section.
11.5
Literature and ‘unforgetting’
It would be impossible to put up a public monument to everyone who ever lived, not just because of a lack of space, but because having too many monuments would make them meaningless. Societies remember selectively and selectivity is a condition for meaning-making. This means that cultural memory and cultural amnesia are two sides of the same coin. Recent studies have shown that forgetting is as complex a phenomenon as remembering, and that it takes many forms. These range from the omission of what seems trivial, to the active suppression of traces of the past (for example, in totalitarian regimes), to the inability to admit the collective relevance of certain events because they threaten ‘our’ identity (for example, postcolonial stories of the transatlantic slave trade and its ongoing impact unsettle the belief in Europe as inventor and guardian of human rights). As a result of such
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processes, some persons and events are forgotten, while others are the subject of multiple representations. Their stories circulate in society and become hegemonic, while those of subalterns (see Chapter 10) are overlooked. As a result some groups have difficulty recognising the history of their ancestors in the dominant narratives and, linking this to their present marginalisation in society, advocate to have their voices heard. Recent studies have shown that literature (along with the other arts) has had an important role in the ‘unforgetting’ of marginalised experiences and in bringing hitherto neglected stories into public purview. Art is an important catalyst of cultural memory in the sense that it helps to bring new stories into circulation. Creative writing helps to break down dominant memories. It does so by broadening the framework in which the collective past is viewed, by inventing ways to present stories for which there are no traditional narrative models, and by supplementing documented history with imaginative reconstructions. Reflecting the colonial power relations described in Chapter 10, the participation of millions of African and Asian soldiers in the European armies inWorld War i, for example, was long overlooked, with commemorations focusing above all on white faces on the Western Front. After decades of neglect, this topic has recently attracted widespread interest among historians and among museum curators. But arguably the emergence of the ‘forgotten’ story of colonial troops as part of a postcolonial critique had been prepared over a longer period of time in novels and films, including Boyden’s Three-Day Road mentioned earlier, Black and White in Colour (dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud [b.1943], 1976), and Across the Black Waters (1939) by Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004). Most recently, The Head & The Load (2018), a theatrical installation by South African artist William Kentridge (b.1955), made for the centenary of World War i, became part of this ongoing attempt to bring the story of the colonial troops into visibility. The Head & The Load uses music, dance, film projections, mechanised sculptures, and shadow play to bring into the public spotlight the lives of the thousands of Black Africans who worked as carriers for the British and German armies. Kentridge avails himself of a wide range of theatrical traditions to make these Africans memorable for a transnational audience, and his high profile as an internationally renowned artist gives the artwork extra visibility in the global arena. Creativity is needed in turning as-yet-untold stories into communicable experience. Michael Rothberg (b.1966), building on his earlier work on traumatic realism, has developed an important theory regarding the emergence of new narratives into cultural memory. He showed how the memory of one group could provide a model for the making-memorable of the experiences of another, overlooked group. Focusing particularly on the 1950s and 1960s, when people were strug-
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gling to develop a new language to deal with recent European history, he demonstrated how writers and thinkers looked to the memory of slavery and colonialism for narrative models to describe the Holocaust; and how, conversely, the Holocaust later served as an approximate model for representing colonial violence. In this way, Rothberg claimed, cultural memory does not develop in a unilinear way (always with reference to the same groups and same experiences) but through a process of mutual cross-fertilisation that he calls multidirectionality. Crucially, this process also helps renegotiate the cultural boundary between ‘us’ and ‘the Other.’ The following example of multidirectionality can be found in Austerlitz. The novel opens by evoking the extraordinary railway station in Antwerp (which can still be visited today albeit in a renovated form) where the narrator first encounters Austerlitz. On the one hand, Antwerp station is merely a transit zone for passengers waiting for their trains and, within the structure of the story, it is merely the first of many stations to be evoked before Austerlitz finally recognises Liverpool Street station in London as the scene of his arrival on the Kindertransport. On the other hand, as Sebald describes it, the Antwerp railway station is a ‘fantastical building’ that indirectly tells the story of Belgian colonialism. The station’s outrageous size embodies Leopold ii’s wealth and ambition, its castellation the dream of unlimited possibilities; while the environs of the station, including the zoo, present materialised reminders of the colonial exploitation of people and other living creatures. At the entrance to the zoo, he notes a large statue of a young boy on a camel (still there today): ‘the verdigris-covered negro boy who, for a century now, has sat upon his dromedary on top of an oriel turret to the left of the station façade [is] a monument to the world of the animals and native peoples of the African continent, alone against the Flemish sky.’ (‘[der] völlig mit Grünspan überzogenen Negerknaben, der mit seinem Dromedar als ein Denkmal der afrikanischen Tier- und Eingeborenenwelt hoch droben auf einem Erkerturm zur Linken der Bahnhofsfassade seit einem Jahrhundert allein gegen den flandrischen Himmel steht.’) While the railway station and zoo have a direct role to play in the slow excavation of Austerlitz’s story, they also ensure that his story is continuously brought into relation with a larger history of displacement, inhumanity, and injustice that reaches back into earlier periods. The most important framework is that of the Holocaust but, as the passage quoted above indicates, the latter is also connected through the novel to the larger history of European colonialism and even to the history of cruelty to animals. The material traces of colonialism in the station become an indirect way of telling the story of the Holocaust, while the memory of the Holocaust also opens up a perspective
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on the inhumanity of colonialism. The narrative thus provides sightlines onto another story that could yet be told beyond the pages of Austerlitz. To sum up: literature plays a role alongside other cultural practices in the production of cultural memory, in the remembering and un-forgetting of history. These practices include artistic ones as well as scholarship and museum curation. The strategies of representation characteristic of the arts in general and literature in particular (our focus here) have a distinctive role to play in the larger dynamic whereby stories come into circulation. They help to articulate experiences that seem to defy recollection as a story either because of a lack of documentation or because they involve events that are not easily interpreted using traditional narrative models. Their aesthetic properties also tend to give them a greater public appeal and hence a greater long-term ‘sticking’ power than documentary works (whose value lies in the accuracy of their information) or first-person testimonies (whose value lies in their authenticity). Most importantly, creative writing adds memorability to events: it gives us a reason to remember them, and a shape and a form with which to think about their significance. Seen in this way, literature is not just a medium of memory, but also an important antidote to amnesia and a catalyst for bringing hitherto neglected groups into the picture. It is a valuable resource for critically reflecting on dominant narratives and what they exclude. A more complete survey of historical fiction would show that literature has regularly been a laboratory for new stories, allowing unfamiliar actors and types of experience to become a significant part of cultural memory. Imagination is needed in order to think outside the box, not only regarding the future, but also the past.
11.6
Canons and their contestation
So far cultural memory has been associated above all with the recollection of events, agents, and experiences. However, it can also be linked to the issue of canonisation, which we introduced in Chapter 2 and further developed in Chapters 8 and 10. We have seen how literary works are constantly subject to evaluation and that certain works are valued more than others, forming a ‘canon’ of important cultural artefacts. From the perspective of cultural memory studies, the literary canon can be compared to other forms of heritage, involving the preservation of highly valued material remains that are linked to collective identity. The curation of heritage has been described as a memory practice by theorist Jan Assmann: just as we interpret past events in order to understand where we came from, so too do we interpret the material legacies of the past as a way of
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defining who we are. Assmann refers in this regard to the set of ‘reusable text, images, and rituals [...] whose “cultivation” serves to stabilise and convey that society’s self-image.’ Like the Parthenon in Athens which forms a direct material connection back to the second century bce, so too can the Irish poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter provide a direct material connection to the past: the words are the same though their meaning has changed. Canonical works are considered by definition to have a ‘timeless’ value and, as such, to stand for a culture and identity that are experienced as unchanging. The Roman poet Horace boasted that his own work would outlive any monuments, since words were ‘more lasting than bronze’ (‘aere perennius’). As long as a text is part of a canon, it will be reread, recalled in intertextual references, and materially reproduced as a voice from another time. It will speak across generations as well as cultures. On this basis, one may predict that in the long-term Austerlitz will end up being a more prominent carrier of the memory of the Kindertransport to later generations than individual testimonies and memoirs, just as Tolstoy has become our window on the Napoleonic wars. Because canonical texts provide a collective point of reference, they are often subject to ongoing remediations – the case of Don Quixote discussed in Chapter 2 offers a good example. As we have seen in earlier chapters, they are also subject to rewriting, offering critical new voices a chance to mark out their difference from dominant narratives by appropriating and transforming one of the classics. This has proved to be a common strategy in postcolonial literatures, as we have seen in Chapter 10, including Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990). In appropriating Homer’s epic poetry and rewriting it in his own style, with reference to a different part of the world than the Mediterranean, Walcott was positioning himself in a literary tradition as a ‘new’ Homer, at the same time as he was also marking out his critical distance vis-à-vis a tradition that claimed ‘Homer’ as exclusively part of European heritage rather than of world heritage. The making of canons, like the memory of war, is linked to the question of power. The case of Walcott also brings to the fore the tension between literary canonisation within national frames and the proven capacity of literature and cultural memory to cross national borders and to appeal to ‘other’ cultural communities. This tension has been at work ever since nationalism became a dominant discourse across Europe in the course of the nineteenth century. Nationalism is the belief that (a) societies naturally fall into culturally homogeneous groups with a common language, culture, and history and (b) that it is both natural and desirable to have state borders and cultural borders coincide. This belief led to the creation of national canons of great writers alongside writers considered prototypically ‘European’ such as Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer.
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As Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) established in an important imagined study, nations are imagined communities. These are large-scale solicommunities darities that are not based on face-to-face communication but on the belief that one shares a culture, past, and future interests with certain people, but not with others. People may believe that ‘America,’ ‘the Netherlands,’ or ‘the Philippines’ exist as clearly defined entities with a long history, but in fact, Anderson argues, such entities exist only as ideas. To use his term, they are ‘imagined communities.’ Anderson’s theory of nationalism linked it to modernisation; more specifically, to the transition from traditional, small-scale communities where people exchanged stories and memories in person to modern social formations where the scale is so large that it is impossible to meet everyone in that ‘community’ face to face. Nationalism, as it emerged in the nineteenth century, was a way of forging a new sense of community – the sense of sharing a common past, present, and future – among large groups of people. This community must be ‘imagined’ since it cannot rely on face-to-face contact and depends instead on the sharing of information through the media. Nations are always imagined as bounded and while this means that they are mechanisms for creating solidarity through selective remembering and forgetting, they also provide a rationale for exclusion. Any attempt to create a homogenous nation-state ends up producing minorities who are deemed (or self-identify as) ‘outsiders’. In line with what was said earlier about cultural hegemony (see Chapter 8), national culture was often synonymous with the culture of the educated middle classes. As Joep Leerssen (b.1955) has shown in his monumental Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (2018), cultural elites worked hard throughout the nineteenth century to ‘cultivate’ a national memory: by promoting the use of the vernacular, local traditions and styles of architecture, and by advocating an awareness of the nation’s past, including the greatness of its writers and artists. In Chapters 9 and 10 we discussed the growing cultural entanglements in the world as a result of mass migration, decolonisation, and digital communications. It is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain the myth of culturally homogenous nations (though some nationalists try). As a result, cultural memory studies has recently untransnationalism dergone a turn towards transnationalism. This means adopting a transnational perspective that looks at the production of memories outside the framework of nation-states and considers the tensions between hegemonic national narratives and the new memories today’s transcultural entanglements are bringing into circulation. In early chapters we have seen how similar concerns have led to rethinkings and contestations of the literary canon in society and on the part of academics. It
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is unclear as yet how this trend will develop further, but it is already clear to scholars in comparative literary studies that literature has the capacity to transcend cultural borders and carry cultural memory to other groups. From the perspective of cultural memory studies, this means that the writing, reading, and study of literature is also an important site for critically rethinking the frameworks in which we think about memory and identity in a postcolonial world.
Making and breaking monuments Literary histories and anthologies can be ‘monumental.’ They are large and stable objects that carry a legacy about whose value there is a general consensus; they are symbolic of the rootedness of a particular cultural community in the past. Think, for example, of the Norton anthologies of literature: thousands of pages, printed on feather-thin paper, and hard-bound. From thinking about books as ‘monuments’ there is just one step to the actual monuments put up to writers and artists in public places. Whoever studies ‘the life of texts in society’ needs also to take into account the different ways in which literature is celebrated in street names, statues, and museums. Monuments to national poets and writers, almost all of them men, were an important outcome of cultural nationalism. They represent a form of productive reception whereby appreciation for a writer is translated into the statues found in the central squares of European cities and in the cities of European colonies, most of them erected in the late nineteenth century. Take the case of Luís de Camões (15241580), author of The Portuguese (Os Lusiadas; 1572), an epic poem in Renaissance style that recounted the voyages of discovery undertaken by the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. An enormous statue was erected to Camões in the centre of Lisbon in 1860, paid for by the citizens of Lisbon who were claiming, like so many other nations at this time, to have their own epic poet on a par with Homer. An estimated 25,000 people attended the unveiling. An additional statue was also erected to Camões in the Portuguese colony of Macau, so that the colonies were also symbolically integrated into the larger imagined community of Portuguese culture. Now that Macau has become independent, the significance of this statue has changed from being a celebration of colonial power to being a relic of a now powerless regime. In many other cases, colonial statues are being demolished. Although nineteenth-century statues to writers have lost their power to mobilise, they may sometimes be reinvested with significance in times of crisis. This is what happened to the statue to the poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), hailed as the national poet of the Poles whose works had inspired several uprisings against the domination of Russia. His statue in Krakow (erected in 1898) stood as a symbol of Polish resistance to foreign occupation. So strong was its symbolic power, that the Nazi occupiers went to
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the trouble of destroying the monument in 1940 (Figure 11.4). In 1946, as the Russians once more took control over Poland, Polish patriots retrieved the remains of the statue from a Hamburg scrapheap and painstakingly put it together again as a symbol of Polish resistance and right to self-determination.
Figure 11.4: Destruction of Adam Mickiewicz Monument in Krakow, Poland by Nazi forces on 17 August, 1940.
11.7
In conclusion: Literature as mediator
In this chapter we have introduced the interdisciplinary field of cultural memory studies. We have shown the role played by literary works in the larger dynamics whereby shared narratives are produced and reproduced. We have shown how writers make events memorable through the creative use of language and literary forms; how in the process, their work can play the role as catalyst of hitherto overlooked experiences; how these new narratives help to redefine collective identities and re-locate the borders between ‘us’ and the ‘other.’ In the final section, we have shown how literature also forms an object of remembrance in the production of canons and public expressions of appreciation for canonical writers. This too is part of the life of texts. As with other objects of memory, literary canons, being selective, are periodically contested and renegotiated. Taking all of this together, the chapter shows how the tools of narrative and textual analysis can be applied to questions that go far beyond the aesthetic realm. They touch on fundamental issues regarding collective identity in a world where the borders between ‘us’ and ‘others’ are regularly challenged, defended, and renegotiated.
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Further reading Stef Craps. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, eds. Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy, eds, The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
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Seamus Deane, ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols, Derry: Field Day, 1991, vol. 1, p. 47. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, New York: Basic, 1996. Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, eds, Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. On the importance of photographs to family memory, see especially Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. On the historical development of testimony as a genre, see, for example, Annette Wieviorka, ‘The Witness in History,’ Poetics Today 27.2 (2006): 385397. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Originally published in French in 1950. Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Originally published in German in 1992. For a general overview, see Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Ann Rigney, ‘The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds, Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008, pp. 345-353. See, for example, Hayden White,‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’ [1981], in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
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Representation, 1-25, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Astrid Erll, ‘Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory,’ in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds, Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, 389-398, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Charlotte Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1970, p.9. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. R.C. Lamont, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, p.3. For the dynamic approach to cultural memory see Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Astrid Erll, ‘Travelling Memory,’ Parallax 17 (2011): 4-18. Erll and Rigney, Mediation. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,’ Representations 26 (1989): 7-24. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler, eds, Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Michael Rothberg, ‘From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory.’ Criticism (2011) 53: 523-548. Astrid Erll, ‘From “District Six” to District 9 and Back: The Plurimedial Production of Travelling Schemata,’ in Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, eds, Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, 29-50, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, eds, W.G. Sebald: A Critical Companion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Lynne Sharon Schwartz, ed., The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010. Other documentaries on the refugee children include My Knees were Jumping (dir. M. Hacker, 1996), Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (dir. M.J. Harris, 2000), and The Children Who Cheated the Nazis (dir. S. Read, 2000), and Diane Samuels’ play Kindertransport (1993). Paul Connerton, ‘Seven Types of Forgetting,’ Memory Studies 1.1 (2008): 5971. The concept of memory catalyst is developed in Rigney, ‘The Dynamics of Remembrance.’ This case is more fully developed and documented in Ann Rigney, ‘The Remaking of Memory and the Agency of the Aesthetic’ (forthcoming). William Kentridge, The Head & The Load, https://www.tate.org.uk/whatson/tate-modern/performance/head-load (accessed July 2019). Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Munich: Carl Hanser, 2001, p.12. English translation: W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell, London: Penguin, 2001, p.4. Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,’ New German Critique 65 (1995): 125-133. On this tradition, see Astrid Erll, ‘Homer: A Relational Mnemohistory,’ Memory Studies 11.3 (2018): 274-286. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983.
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Joep Leerssen, ed., Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism, 2 vols, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56 (accessed July 2019). Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, eds, Commemorating Writers in NineteenthCentury Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever, London: Palgrave, 2014.
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GLOSSARY
Below is a list of the key concepts presented in this book. The number in brackets refers to the chapter where the concept is first introduced. Words printed in bold refer to related concepts or, in the case of words with an asterisk*, schools of thought. Where relevant, names within brackets refer to the theorist with whom the concept has been particularly associated.
Acoustic poetry [4] A form of poetry that displays sound as sound and foregrounds the phonetic dimension of human speech: poetry without words. concrete poetry; defamiliarisation; foregrounding; intermediality2; intermedium; poetic function Actantial model [5] [Algirdas Greimas] Model that shows how every story has the same underlying plot structure, consisting of six roles (actants) that in each case can be taken up by different, human or non-human, entities: the subject, the object, the opponent, the hel-per, the sender (power), and the receiver. figurative level (figuration) Actual reader [6] Real readers, of flesh and blood, whose
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responses to literary texts cannot be completely controlled. Their responses can, however, be researched through reception studies* and quantitative methods imported from psychology and sociology. historical reader; implied reader; productive reception Aesthetic experience [2] A detached form of pleasure related to the appreciation of artistry. aesthetics; artistic culture; defamiliarisation; distinction; habitus; literariness1+2 Aesthetics [2] [Greek: aisthètikos] In general terms, the art or study of sensory perception. Specifically, the branch of philosophy concerned with (the experience of ) beauty produced by artworks.
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aesthetic experience; aesthetics of identity; aesthetics of opposition; literariness1 Aesthetics of identity [3] [Yuri Lotman] The appreciation of literary texts based on the principle that authors should try to emulate accepted literary models as much as possible (especially before Romanticism). aesthetics of opposition; intertextuality Aesthetics of opposition [3] [Yuri Lotman] The appreciation of literary texts (especially from Romanticism onwards) based on the principle that authors should be original and transgressive of accepted norms. aesthetics of identity; intertextuality; productive reception Affect [2] The process whereby (sometimes undefined) feelings are physically triggered and influence our disposition towards the world and readiness to act in it. With regard to literature, affect refers to the ways in which texts provoke feelings. Allegoresis [7] Contains the term allegory and refers to unravelling the hidden meaning of words or passages in texts: something has been said, but something different – a figural or spiritual meaning – is implied that transcends the word or text that has been given. denotation/connotation; divination (hermeneutics*); etymology; metaphor; semiology*; sign; signified; signifier
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Alliteration [4] Also called ‘heard rhyme’: a rhyme created through matching consonants at the beginning of a word. assonance; consonance; rhyme Anachrony [5] [Gérard Genette] Term to describe deviations that occur between narrative time (i.e. sequence, duration, and frequency of narration) and story time or narrated time (i.e. sequence, duration, and frequency of the actions and occurrences depicted): – in medias res [Latin: in the middle of things] the technique whereby the narrative begins halfway through the sequence of events that make up the story, while the events that led up to this point are only revealed later; – flashback a jump into the past in the course of the narration; – flashforward a jump into the future in the course of the narration; – iterative narration where events or actions that happen multiple times in the narrative world are recounted only once; – singular narrative where all events and actions in the narrative world are recounted individually as much as possible; – acceleration long periods of time in the narrative world are recounted succinctly; – deceleration separate moments in the narrative world are recounted in minute detail. narrative, narrator Artistic culture [8] [Theodor Adorno] Texts and artworks that represent an existing reality critically, by means of defamiliarisation strategies in their mode of presentation: their form.
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convergence culture; critical theory*; culture industry; defamiliarisation; mass culture; popular culture Assonance [4] Vowel rhyme. alliteration; consonance; rhyme Author’s rights [3] (Inter)national legislation that covers the rights of authors and their publishers regarding the reproduction and exploitation of texts. Consists of: copyright (right to reproduction and exploitation of copy) and the ‘moral right’ of the author to be acknowledged as the creator of a text. Autobiography [5] Non-fiction genre that comprises stories in which the subject matter is the author’s own life. memoir; narrator; testimony; personal zine Binary opposition [7] [Or: dichotomy] A set of two terms posed in diametrical opposition to each other (e.g. Self/Other, beautiful/ugly, white/black, light/dark), typically in a certain power relation (e.g. good over evil, Self before Other, etc.) and bound together by the fact that the two elements of binary oppositions are always defined in a contrastive relation to each other (e.g. ‘feminine’ = ‘not masculine’). Critical analysis unveils the assumed superiority of one term over the other and exposes the constructedness of the opposition. deconstruction*; the Other; semantic undecidability
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Canon (the literary canon) [2] [Greek: kanōn = measuring line, rule] Term from classical Antiquity and ecclesiastical history, initially used to indicate the collection of scriptures that are officially part of the Bible. In current usage, ‘canon’ refers to a dynamic collection of texts (and other forms of cultural heritage) that are considered (most) valuable by cultural authorities and that can serve as a frame of reference for a shared culture. canonisation; consecration; heritage Canonisation [2] A process through which literary texts, based on artistic, political, and sociocultural conditions, become part of a referential frame for a shared culture. canon; consecration; heritage Characterisation [5] The image of a character as shaped by a narrator. Characterisation can occur through: – explicit characterisation, or ‘telling’ the image of a character is directly determined by the narrator through statements and descriptions; – implicit characterisation, or ‘showing’ the image of a character is determined indirectly through actions, statements, and impressions as experienced by other characters as well as (through the text) the reader. Character text [5] All utterances in a narrative that can be ascribed (as a whole or in part) to a character. Statements from narrators and characters can be combined as follows:
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– diegetic summary the reader only receives the narrator’s statement that a character said something; – indirect speech a character’s utterance is embedded in the narration, in the narrator’s words; – direct speech the reader receives the character’s text verbatim in the form of literally quoted speech; – free indirect speech the character’s text and the narrator’s text are mixed, but in such a way that features of each are still visible (e.g. time, person); the former is embedded in the latter without quotation. mimesis/diegesis; modernism; narrator text Chiasmus [4] [Greek: khīasmos = syntactic reversal] A combination of parallelism and inversion, or simply an inverted parallelism, through which corresponding words are opposed crosswise. defamiliarisation; literariness1; poetic function Classicism [3] Every artistic movement in which the art of classical Antiquity is taken as example; especially the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature inspired by the Classics. Romanticism Cli-fi [9] Short for climate fiction (like science fiction). Speculative fiction about climate change. ecocriticism*; ecofiction; petrofiction
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Close reading [1] Dominant method within literary studies that consists of an attentive analysis of a text that uncovers patterns and details so as to open up new meanings. allegoresis; distant reading; exegesis; method Codex [6] Pages folded and bound into a book. manuscript; print book Collective memory [11] [Maurice Halbwachs] Term used by sociologists involved in memory studies*, to highlight the social dimensions of memory: the people, groups and institutions involved in producing shared narratives that ‘roots’ particular groups in the past and gives them their identity. cultural identity; cultural memory; cultural memory studies*; prosthetic memory Colonialism [10] An (imperialist) force or state sets up colonies or settlements in another region, occupying that region politically, economically, and culturally for its own benefit. cultural imperialism; decoloniality; imperialism; postcolonialism Commodification [8] The reduction of cultural products into technologically (re)producible goods. Considered by members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory* to be one of the evils of the modern culture industry. culture industry; mass culture Comparative literature [1] Literary discipline that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a critical
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counterweight to the tendency to see national literatures as discrete entities cut off from each other. It studies literary phenomena from an intermedial and transnational perspective with a particular interest in the way literary works engage with questions of cultural difference or themselves cross cultural borders in the form of translation and adaptation. comparative method; transculturality; transnationalism Comparative method [1] A method in the humanities, specifically in the field of comparative literature, which systematically uses comparison (e.g. between texts, between periods, between media) in order to produce knowledge. comparative literature; method Complexity [2] [Latin: complexus = entwined, braided] The semantic (i.e. meaning) and formal (i.e. form) layeredness of a text. poetic function Concept [1] Key instrument in describing, classifying, and analysing phenomena and showing the similarities between them. discipline; discourse; method; theory Concrete poetry [4] Poetry focused on the visual aspects of language and writing; foregrounding the form of letters and their position as ‘things,’ ‘building blocks,’ or figures on the page. acoustic poetry; defamiliarisation; foregrounding; intermediality2; intermedium; poetic function
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Consecration [8] [Pierre Bourdieu] [literally: making sacred] The process of singling out certain pure artworks and artists as objects of esteem in contrast to the majority of other, ‘arbitrary’ artworks. This process generates symbolic capital and often occurs in retrospect. canonisation; heritage Consonance [4] Matching, rhyming consonants at the end or in the middle of a word. alliteration; assonance; rhyme Constructivism [1] Scientific-philosophical movement that poses that knowledge is a cultural-historical construction, produced through human effort rather than ‘found’ in the world. Contextualism/Contextualist [9] Approach to literature that is specifically interested in the relationship between literature as an aesthetic phenomenon and the changing socio-cultural contexts in which it is written. Convention (literary) [3] [Latin: convenire = to convene, agree] A traditional agreement between people. Specifically, literary conventions refer to the entirety of commonly accepted practices (explicitly stated or otherwise) relating to literary styles, forms, and genres. conventionality of language; intertextuality Conventionality of language [3] [Ferdinand de Saussure] Status of languages as socioculturally constructed products that function not according to laws of nature, but cultural traditions, conventions,
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and codes. This implies that the relationship between words and their meaning is not a given, but the product of convention. semiology*; sign; signified; signifier Convergence culture [5] [Henry Jenkins] A culture in which multiple forms of media converge or coalesce into various platforms to tell stories through several different media forms at the same time. culture industry; fan fiction; mass culture; multimediality; transmediality Culture The set of beliefs, practices, and tools (languages) for meaning-making shared by a particular group and making communication and coordination possible between its members. ideology; representation Cultural amnesia [11] The phenomenon whereby certain collective memories are, for some reason, overlooked, forgotten, marginalised, or suppressed. Cultural amnesia ranges from the active suppression of the traces of the past (for example, in totalitarian regimes) to the inability to admit the collective relevance of certain events because they threaten ‘our’ identity. cultural memory; memory studies* Cultural authorities [2] Persons and organisations (critics, judges, cultural institutions) that have the power to promote projects in the field, make them widely accepted, and vouch for their quality (though reviews, awards, blogs, posts, teaching). canon; canonisation; consecration; symbolic capital
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Cultural criticism [1] Critical writing that reflects on literature and other cultural products as the place where meaning is produced and distributed. contextualism; critical theory*; cultural studies* Cultural identity [10] The imagined relation between self, time, language, and place as crystallised into a narrative. colonialism; cultural memory; decoloniality; nationalism; postcolonialism; representation Cultural imperialism [10] [Edward Said] The literary, visual, and scientific representations used to stigmatise and appropriate a culture, subjecting it to the gaze of an imperialist power. colonialism; decoloniality; imperialism; the Other; representation Culture industry [8] [Theodor Adorno] See mass culture. Cultural memory [11] [ Jan Assmann] Term used by literary and cultural scholars involved in memory studies* to highlight the cultural dimensions of memory: how media and cultural models are used for acts of recollection in private and public settings. collective memory; cultural amnesia; memory studies*; prosthetic memory Death of the author [3] [Roland Barthes] Poststructuralist* claim that the reader should replace the author and his/her intentions as the point of reference in the reflection on texts and their meaning.
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Decoloniality [10] A concept used to unveil false universal standards Western culture has imposed on the global south and recover lost cultures, communities, and modes of knowledge. colonialism; critical theory*; cultural studies*; imperialism; the Other; postcolonialism; representation Defamiliarisation [2] [Russian: ostranenie = to make strange, unfamiliar] Key concept in Russian formalism* to explain the literariness1+2 of certain texts by reference to the de-automatisation experienced by a reader because expected patterns are broken. foregrounding; poetic function Denotation/connotation [7] [As used by Roland Barthes in Mythologies] Literal or normative level of signification; things or images as they occur/are hidden, secondary, social-cultural associations with a word, object, or image; the hidden value or meaning related to things as they occur. allegoresis; deconstruction*
ciations, professional journals) that lends it credibility and weight, and ensures its continuity. interdisciplinarity; philosophy of science Discourse [3] [Michel Foucault] Systems of knowledge, supported by institutions, that are inscribed in a specific vocabulary and that order, interpret, and make ‘known’ the world. As such, discourses structure (our perception of ) reality and exert power over us. concept; habitus; hegemony; ideology Displacement [10] [Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak] The obstacles in the formation of a cultural identity when the relation between self, time, language, and place is disrupted. cultural identity; cultural imperialism; mimicry; postcolonialism
Différance [7] [ Jacques Derrida] Concept that refers to the difference between signifiers, of which signification is the effect, and the constant deferral of meaning in language. deconstruction*; literariness1+2; semantic undecidability
Display text [2] [Marie-Louise Pratt] A text that is presented as having an intrinsic value due to the way it is written, the storyline, or the expression of specific norms and values. Display texts are circulated, reprinted, discussed, translated, and adapted to other media outside of the original context in which they were produced. aesthetics; literariness1; poetic function
Discipline [1] A group of researchers who share a common focus, methods, concepts, and theories. Established disciplines are usually accompanied by varying degrees of social organisation (teaching programmes, asso-
Distant reading [1] [Franco Moretti] Method of reading enabled by digitisation that consists of machine reading and the analysis of large databases (of texts). Popular within digital humanities*, it looks for similarities
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and patterns rather than singularities and exceptions. close reading; digital humanities*; method Distinction [8] [Pierre Bourdieu] The marking of a sociocultural difference through a judgement of taste about (consecrated) works of art, literature, music, photography, or film. consecration; taste (judgement of ) Divination (hermeneutics*) [7] [Friedrich Schleiermacher] An insight into what is hidden: a distinguished and meticulous process of intuiting that deduces insights from empirical material (texts, words, style) on the basis of a preliminary hypothesis. etymology; philology* Documentary [11] Non-fictional film that documents and interprets some aspect of history, society, culture, etc., usually with an educational aim. memoir; testimony Ecofiction [9] Fiction that takes the environment as one of its main themes, linking social, cultural, and biophysical processes and imagining alternative modes of thinking and living. ecocriticism* Ekphrasis [4] The verbal representation of a visual representation; a description. intermediality1+2; intertextuality; remediation; transmediality
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Electronic literature [3] ‘Digitally native’ literature produced within a digital environment and not easily translatable into print, if at all. convergence culture; intermediality1+2; multimediality; transmediality Empirical field [1] [Greek: empeiríā = experience] A set of observable phenomena that forms the object of study within a particular discipline. Enjambment [2] A poetic sentence that runs from one line into the next without punctuation, thus separating syntactically connected clauses. defamiliarisation; foregrounding; poetic function Epic poetry [4] Genre designation for long, narrative poems recounting important (historical) events and heroic characters, like the Odyssey or Iliad. lyric; narrative Epistolary novel [5] Literary genre, prominent in the eighteenth century, in which the exchange of letters between characters is used to narrate a story. heteroglossia; narrator; realism Ergodic literature [6] [Espen Aarseth] Texts that invite and require readers to actively navigate their way in order to generate a story or a storyline. Essentialism [10] The belief that being and identity is inherent and stable to things and persons. binary opposition; the Other
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Etymology [7] Science of retracing the origin of words and their changing meanings across time. allegoresis; divination (hermeneutics*); philology*; semiology*; sign; signified; signifier Exclusionary mechanism [8] Process that marginalises particular groups and makes it impossible for them to break through into the dominant culture. hegemony; ideology Exegesis [7] The explication of texts. allegoresis; close reading; divination (hermeneutics*) Exoticism [10] The Western fascination with and appropriation of everything that appears other or unusual as set against Western norms and values, whether it concerns things, people, or geographical spaces. cultural imperialism; Orientalism; the Other; representation Explicit readers in the text [6] Directly addressed readers. Sometimes such readers are characters, as they typically are in epistolary novels. extended mind [6] [Andy Clark] The human mind evolves and operates in a constant interaction with the body and the surrounding world, so much so that it serves little purpose to demarcate mind and body, mind and outer stimuli, or mind and the social world. Fan fiction [6] (Online) fiction written by admirers of a particular work of fiction (‘fans’) out of the
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desire to have a character (or any other particular feature of the story) live on, or to change something about the original narrative. convergence culture; fictionality; immersion; intertextuality; productive reception Fanzine [6] Self-made magazine on the topic of an admired piece of fiction, comic, series, or movie that is distributed through mail and at conventions. fan fiction; immersion; intertextuality; personal zine; productive reception Fictionality [2] An author’s freedom within certain genres to tell untruths on the understanding that readers are aware of this possibility and are willing to suspend their disbelief or to ‘make-believe.’ immersion; interactivity Field (literary) [2] [Pierre Bourdieu] A competitive system of relations and institutions generated and sustained by unwritten rules, laws, and uses, where different institutions or actors compete with each other to produce literary and commercial value. Each field is a place or ‘world’ where the established order and subordinates (and/ or newcomers) are entangled in a continual struggle for power. canonisation; consecration; cultural authorities Figurative level (figuration) [5] The specific characters, locations, and actions that are depicted in a narrative, as distinct from the underlying plot structure, which is generic. actantial model; narrative; plot
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Focalisation [5] [Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal] Term used to refer to the relationship, established in the narrative, between the story world and the centre of consciousness from which it is experienced. Narratives can shift between: – character focalisation events, scenes, or actions are apprehended by one of the characters; – narrator focalisation events, scenes, or actions in the story are apprehended by the narrator; – double focalisation events, scenes, or actions in the story appear to be apprehended by both character and narrator simultaneously or interchangeably. character text; free indirect speech; narrator text Focaliser [5] [Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal] The subject position or centre of consciousness from which a narrative world is experienced. The role of focaliser in experiencing the narrative world) is distinguished from the role of narrator (in depicting the narrative world). focalisation Foregrounding [4] [Czech structuralism*] The process whereby language presents itself as language and draws attention to itself, its own materiality, and its own oblique appearance. acoustic poetry; concrete poetry; defamiliarisation; poetic function Frame narrative [5] [Also: story within a story, mise en abyme, Droste effect] When a primary narrator lets a character tell a story
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within his/her own story, the primary narrative becomes a frame narrative. The story of the secondary narrator becomes an embedded story. metafiction; narrative modes; narrator Free verse [4] Poems with no set metre, rhyme scheme, or any other set structure, that often follow the rhythms of spoken language. Gaps [6] [Wolfgang Iser] [German: Leerstelle] Term used to refer to the fact that the meaning of texts is produced not just on the basis of the words on the page, but in the spaces between words and sentences which demand an active role on the part of the reader in ‘connecting the dots’ and drawing inferences: the unwritten part of texts to be created by the reader. Genre [2] [Latin: genus = type] Text form characterised by a recognisable combination of themes and formal features. climate fiction; epic poetry; epistolary novel; lyric Gesamtkunst [4] [Richard Wagner] Music drama that combines different kinds of art forms, such as architecture, visual art, music, poetry, and/or mime. Modern forms of Gesamtkunst are film and the musical. intermediality1; multimediality; transmediality Global south [10] Spaces and peoples negatively impacted by imperialism, colonialism, and capitalist
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globalisation predominantly located in the southern hemisphere. colonialism; decoloniality; imperialism; postcolonialism Graphic novel [5] Popular new narrative form that tells a book-length story by structurally combining and intertwining text and images. The graphic novel is best described as a cross between the comic book and the novel. intermediality1+2; Gesamtkunst; medium; multimediality; transmediality* Habitus [8] [Pierre Bourdieu] [Latin: habitus = appearance, habit] The frameworks and structures that determine individual ways of thinking and acting; these coalesce into a system of attitudes that are at some point learned, but after that feel ‘natural.’ discourse; horizon; ideology Hegemony [9] [Antonio Gramsci] The subtle ways in which the dominant classes produce, promote, and ensure the voluntary acceptance on the part of the masses of ideas, values, and norms which serve their interests rather than those of society as a whole. critical theory*; cultural imperialism; culture industry; ideology Heritage [11] Highly valued remains from the past that are linked to collective identity. Though closely linked to the term ‘memory,’ heritage has a much stronger link to material remains while memory is linked to the narratives we tell about the past. canon; canonisation; consecration; cultural memory
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Hermeneutic circle [7] Interpretive process that involves reading the parts of a text in the light of the text as a whole, and the text as a whole in the light of its different parts. allegoresis; close reading; divination (hermeneutics*); etymology; exegesis; philology* Heteroglossia [5] [Mikhail Bakhtin] [Greek: heteros = different; glossa = language] The occurrence of different discourses or ‘languages’ in a story (also: polyphony); characteristic for the novel as genre. discourse; focalisation; intertextuality Heteropatriarchal value systems [6] Systems that value heterosexuality over other forms of sexuality (lgbtq) and that forge prejudiced, artificial gender roles of men as strong, courageous, and smart and women as weak, caring, and naïve. Heuristic device [9] [Greek: heuriskein = to find] Device that helps us to find patterns (e.g. historical periods) in large amounts of information. Historical fiction [11] A subgenre of fiction (usually referring to novels, but more recently also to films) in which fictionality is combined with a focus on historical events; this yields a hybrid form in which real events and fiction are entangled. cultural memory; genre; heritage Historical reader [6] A reader who exists or has existed as a historical person and is addressed in texts. actual reader; implied reader
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Horizon [7] The inevitable limits and situatedness of individuals in their own gender role, time, place, value systems, class, and culture. – fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) a process occurring when the anticipation of meaning on the part of the interpreter (conditioned by a specific horizon) fuses with the historical horizon of the text that speaks back. hermeneutic circle ; hermeneutics* Humanities [1] Term used to indicate the cluster of disciplines concerned with (high quality) products of the human mind; as opposed to the natural (and applied) and social sciences. philosophy of science Hybridity [10] Racial, cultural, artistic or literary inbetween space in colonial and postcolonial settings. It is a mixture of Western and (post)colonial styles and identities that can no longer be reduced to either. colonialism; the Other; postcolonialism Hyperobject [9] [Timothy Morton] Something of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that it defeats traditional ideas about what a ‘thing’ is in the first place. Used e.g. with reference to climate change. It is something that is exceedingly difficult to imagine, let alone understand. ecocriticism*; posthumanism* Ideology [9] In a general sense, an ideology denotes a set of normative ideas and values. Specifi-
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cally [Karl Marx]: a system of beliefs that makes an unjust system seem ‘natural’ and justified; false ideas or consciousness about the true state of affairs. hegemony; representation Imagined communities [11] [Benedict Anderson] Large-scale forms of solidarity that are not based on face-to-face communication but on the belief that one shares a single culture and common interests with certain people, and not with others. nationalism Immersion [5] [Marie-Laure Ryan] When a reader/ listener/viewer forgets about the narrative’s constructedness and thus becomes engrossed in the story. fictionality; foregrounding; interactivity; metafiction Imperialism [10] The power structures and effects of a dominant force occupying and governing a remote territory beyond its national borders. colonialism; cultural imperialism; decoloniality; postcolonialism Implied reader [6] [Wolfgang Iser] The role of the reader as presumed by a text, with the reader being an abstract construct that can be adduced from the strategies deployed in the text in order to engage and direct the reader. gaps; reader-response criticism* Interactivity [5] [Marie-Laure Ryan] When a reader consciously interacts with a narrative as an aesthetic, cultural artefact, while still engaging in a willing suspension of disbelief or a game of make-believe.
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fictionality; foregrounding; immersion; metafiction Interdisciplinarity [1] Referring to a field of study across, between, or beyond existing disciplines, which creates opportunities for mutual influence and exchange through which new concepts and theories can be developed. Interdisciplinarity is also used in a narrower sense to refer to a (sub)field where one or more disciplines interact across disciplinary boundaries and form a new discipline or (sub)field (an interdiscipline). discipline; philosophy of science Interior monologue [5] Narrative technique through which the reader gains direct access to the associative stream of consciousness of a character through language that sheds traditional grammar and punctuation. character text; modernism Intermediality1 [4] In general terms: the network of relations and interactions between media. Gesamtkunst; intermediality2; medium; multimediality; remediation; transmediality Intermediality2 [4] [Dick Higgins, Henk Oosterling] [inter = between] In the narrow sense: space or movement between two or more media, generating a third form that cannot (yet) be properly determined. Gesamtkunst; intermediality1; intermedium; medium; multimediality; remediation; transmediality
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Intermedium [4] [Dick Higgins] An object, performance or event hovering in-between existing media. Gesamtkunst; intermediality1+2; medium; multimediality; remediation; transmediality Interpretive communities [6] [Stanley Fish] Meaning is never entirely personal or subjective, but forged by a reader’s presence within a (linguistic) community. horizon Intertextuality [3] [ Julia Kristeva] The complex ways in which a text is connected to other texts and derives its meaning from this relationship, absorbing the meaning and impact of earlier works in a continuous reworking of their legacy: every text is a node in a network of other texts. intermediality1+2 Inversion [4] A deviation from the normal word order by turning it around. chiasmus; defamiliarisation; parallelism; poetic function Irony [4] [Greek: eironeia = feigned or assumed ignorance] Trope that feeds on the observed difference between what is said and what is actually the case: between what someone says and what s/he means. Irony can be subdivided into: – dramatic irony a structural procedure that allows an audience and/or a character to learn/see more about the action than the (other) characters; – romantic irony the awareness of a structural impossibility or inability to
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represent; a creative awareness of the gap between artistic/verbal forms and ideas; – structural irony a sustained reversal of meaning, often through the use of an ignorant or unreliable narrator and/or character that (hyperbolically) tries to persuade the reader of something that the author signals to be incorrect; – verbal irony (as irony) saying the opposite of what one means; – visual irony visual trope that feeds on the perceived difference between what is shown and what is actually the case. defamiliarisation; metafiction; paradox Langue/parole [3] [Ferdinand de Saussure] Opposition central to semiology* between language as a system of conventions and codes (langue) and language as it is actually used in individual speech acts (parole). Literariness1 [2] In the general sense: the literary qualities of a text, that which makes a text literary. Literariness2 [2] [Russian: literaturnost] In the more specific sense: that which makes a text literary according to Russian formalism*: the degree in which a text causes defamiliarisation in a reader. foregrounding; poetic function Literary system [9] A virtual economy in which, at any given moment, certain writers, texts, and genres are more valued than others and people look to them for inspiration, while others are more peripheral.
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consecration; canonisation; hegemony; field (literary) Literary tourism [6] Cultural tourism inspired by a literary creation, a literary author, or the literary associations of a particular location. actual reader; canon; cultural memory; reception studies* Lyric [4] Originally, (drinking) songs accompanied by a lyre. Nowadays usually short, nonnarrative poems that reflect a speaker’s inner state and which often address a (fictive) reader. epic poetry; genre; rhyme; rhythm Macroanalysis [6] [In reader research] The study of reading conditions seen across a broad geographic, cultural, and temporal spectrum. distant reading; microanalysis Manuscript [3] [Latin: manu scriptum = written by hand] – Writings dating from Antiquity or the Middle Ages; predecessor of the printed book; – Handwritten or typed work by an author, as opposed to a printed, published text. codex; print book Mass culture [8] [Theodor Adorno] [Also: culture industry] The totality of products of culture that are reduced to reproducible goods through standardisation and mass consumption. commodification; critical theory*
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Materialism [9] Philosophical tradition, influenced by Karl Marx, that highlights the material basis (i.e. wealth, industry, and commerce) of social relations and cultural life; more generally, cultural theories that emphasise the entanglement between humans and the material environment. Medium [3] [Latin: medius = middle, between, means] A channel or means through which something (a thought, story) is transmitted. A medium in this sense has three aspects: (1) a material aspect: the words, sounds and images that carry meaning; (2) a semiotic aspect: the conventions that allow meaning to be produced by the perception of these material carriers; (3) a social aspect: the use of (1) and (2) is, in the case of modern media, supported by an extensive organisation and distribution system (television, newspapers, internet) that connects people. intermediality1+2; multimediality; remediation; transmediality Memoir [11] A written account of personal experience that circulates in print. autobiography; testimony Memory site [10] [Pierre Nora] [also: lieu de mémoire] These are particular events, locations, or persons (and often a combination of all of these) that have become the focus of intense remembrance in all sorts of different media and, as a result, have come to stand for an entire period or set of events. cultural memory studies*
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Mental schemata [6] [Cognitive reader research*] Mental structures or frameworks that help readers to process and organise information. actual reader Metafiction [5] [Greek: meta = after, beyond] A reflection within a story on the fictional status of the story itself, often seen as characteristic of postmodernism. interactivity; irony Metaphor [4] [Greek: meta = after, beyond + phorein = to carry (over)] A trope that uses an image, word, or phrase (called the vehicle) to indicate something else (tenor). This generates an implicit comparison. defamiliarisation; irony; montage; poetic function Method [1] A specialised procedure to gather data and produce knowledge systematically. philosophy of science Metonymy [4] [Greek: metōnymia = change of name] A trope in which one word is juxtaposed with another word. A linked or related term is used for an object, concept, or person. metaphor; synecdoche; trope Metre [4] A sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables or (as in Romance languages) of numbers of syllables which have been ordered in such a way that fixed patterns or metrical feet become manifest. rhythm
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Microanalysis [6] The study of (reading) data within limited and situated contexts. macroanalysis Mimesis/diegesis [5] [Plato] Stories transmitted in the form of actions performed by actors whereby the audience has direct access to the narrative world (mimesis); characteristic of theatre. Stories transmitted by a narrator in which the audience only has indirect access to the narrative world (diegesis); characteristic of epic poetry. narratology*; narrator Mimicry [10] [Homi Bhabha] The process whereby a colonised subject imitates the coloniser in such a way as to produce a critical distance. cultural identity; hybridity; postcolonialism Modernism [4] – Period concept for various early-twentieth-century movements such as expressionism, futurism, cubism, and surrealism in art, music, film, photography, and/or literature; – Umbrella term for specific techniques and procedures in early-twentiethcentury literature that feature subjective, impressionistic narrators and focalisation techniques; fragmented forms and narratives (in montage and/or collage). periodisation; postmodernism Montage [4] Procedure in film and visual arts whereby an image is suggested by placing two or more images next to each other. Visual equivalent of metaphor. metaphor; modernism
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Motifs [5] Smallest units of information that can be differentiated in a narrative, concerning for example characters, actions, and places (key term in formalism*). narratology*; motivation Motivation [5] [Boris Tomashevsky] The functionality that all motifs in (well-made) stories have. Motivation is subdivided into: – aesthetic motivation motifs that contribute to the literariness2 of a story; – compositional motivation motifs that strengthen the logical coherence of a story; – realistic motivation motifs that contribute to the illusion of realness in a story. narratology*; motifs Multidirectionality [11] [Michael Rothberg] Concept developed to describe how the memory of one group can provide a model for the makingmemorable of the experiences of another, overlooked group. cultural memory studies* Multimediality [4] [Randall Packer and Ken Jordan] [Latin: multi = many, multiple] Process or situation in which multiple kinds of media are used in conjunction with each other, yet each retains its traditional function. Gesamtkunst; intermediality1; medium; remediation; transmediality Narrative [5] The representation through a medium of a succession of connected events usually relating to human experiences. Any narrative consists of two aspects: the represen-
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tation of the events (narrative) and the actions that form the subject matter of that representation (story). narrative modes; narratology*; narrator
– witness narrator narrator who recounts things they have themselves only experienced as observers. narrative frame; narratology*; narrator
Narrative research [5] Research method in social sciences that asks ‘ordinary’ people to tell their own stories, which are then analysed as a source of insight into dominant ideas and values. method
Narrator [5] The entity that reports on the actions of characters in a narrative world by means of a text. The role of narrator (responsible for the narrative) should be distinguished from that of focaliser. narrative modes; narratology*
Narrative modes [5] Narrators may be positioned in different ways in relation to the events and characters in the story. They differ in the extent of their visibility, involvement, and reliability and may be classified accordingly: – authorial narrator [Franz Karl Stanzel] narrator who is only implicitly present in the narrative and is all-knowing (omniscient), that is: in theory they know everything and have access to the subjective experience of all characters; – personalised narrator [Franz Karl Stanzel] narrator about whom the readers get some (indirect) information (thoughts, values, attitudes); – heterodiegetic narrator [Greek: heteros = different + diegesis = narrative] ‘external’ or ‘third-person’ narrator, narrator who is not part of the story world; – homodiegetic narrator [Greek: homos = same] ‘internal’ or ‘first-person’ narrator, a narrator who is part of the story world and may speak in the first person; – autodiegetic narrator [Greek: autos = self, own, diegesis = story] narrator who is a character in the story being told and recounts things they themselves have experienced;
Narrator text [5] Utterances in a narrative that can be ascribed to the narrator rather than a character. character text
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Nationalism [11] The belief that (a) societies naturally fall into culturally homogeneous groups with a common language, culture, and history and (b) that it is both natural and desirable to have state borders and cultural borders coincide. imagined communities; transculturality; transnationalism Novelisation [4] Process of becoming a novel; usually novels made on the basis of films. intermediality1+2; intertextuality; remediation; transmediality Orality [3] The use of voice (rather than writing) as a medium to transfer and reproduce a text (story, poem). medium; secondary orality
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Orientalism [10] [Edward Said] The construction of ‘the Orient’ as a social-cultural reality in Western thought systems, representations, and imaginaries. colonialism; cultural imperialism; discourse; imperialism; the Other; representation The Other [10] Anyone who is presented in a dominant discourse as strange or the opposite of the Self. The Self then functions as the norm, the Other as the deviancy: the first is valued positively, the latter negatively. binary opposition; colonialism; cultural imperialism; imperialism; Orientalism; representation Paradigm [1] [Thomas Kuhn] A particular theory which provides the framework for research within a discipline: it defines what aspect of the empirical domain is relevant, what the interesting questions are, which methods are appropriate, and what counts as proof. constructivism; philosophy of science Paradox [4] [Greek: paradoxos = against expectations] A trope that appears to be internally contradictory, but nevertheless has its own logic and is actually correct. irony; romantic irony Parallelism [4] A procedure involving the repetition of the beginning of a sentence, or the structure of that sentence: the successive use of identical rhythms, grammatical patterns of words, phrases, or sentences.
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chiasmus; defamiliarisation; foregrounding; inversion; poetic function Paratext [3] [Gérard Genette] [Greek: para = alongside, beyond] The entirety of meaningful elements that can accompany a text: the cover, the title page, the colophon, the blurbs, illustrations, images, footnotes, forewords, etc. book history* Pastoral [9] Literary mode that idealises the countryside and the ‘simple’ life. cli-fi; ecocriticism*; genre; petrofiction Performativity [5] [ J.J. Austin, Judith Butler] Concept originating in speech act theory and used to refer to the power of language, not just to describe the world, but also to have an effect in the world (such as promising, ordering, etc). It was further developed in gender studies*, denoting specifically how (male/female) gender identities are socioculturally determined rather than biologically. Performativity refers both to the performative and normative aspects of gender (‘acting out’ and ‘having an effect’). Periodisation [9] The grouping of cultural products according to the time in which they were produced and on the basis of perceived similarities between them. classicism; genre; modernism; philology*; postmodernism; romanticism
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Personal zine [6] Also known as a perzine. A hand-crafted and self-distributed magazine, often autobiographical in nature. autobiography; fanzine Petro-fiction [9] Fiction about the consequences of our societies literally and metaphorically being fuelled by oil. cli-fi; ecocriticism*; pastoral Philosophy of science [1] Branch of philosophy that is concerned with the nature of knowledge and how best to produce it. constructivism; discipline; method; theory Plot [5] [Aristotle] [Greek: mythos] A coherent series of events with a beginning, middle, and end; succession of events that are not only chronologically but also logically (causally) connected; the backbone of a story. actantial model; motifs; motivation; narratology* Plurimedial networks [11] [Astrid Erll] Concept to describe the distributed character of cultural memory: it is the effect of the accumulated presence of related stories across different media and platforms. convergence culture; cultural memory studies*; transmediality Poetic function [2] [Roman Jakobson] Self-referentiality of a text; its capacity to draw attention towards the ways in which it presents itself as a linguistic expression. Various texts can have a poetic function (such as
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advertisements), but in literary texts the poetic function is usually dominant. defamiliarisation; foregrounding Poetics [3] [Greek: poieō = to make] Study of the underlying principles and forms of literary texts in general and of poetry in particular; resulting often in handbooks that set out guidelines to be followed in achieving literary quality. aesthetics; genre; literariness1+2; narratology*; rhetoric Postcolonialism [10] The complex and critical engagement with colonial situations in the past and the present. colonialism; decoloniality; imperialism Postcolonial literature [10] A literature that can be seen to emerge in the context of, and in critical response to, a colonial experience and that is produced in the period during and after that experience. colonialism; decoloniality; imperialism; postcolonialism Posthuman [9] A concept relating to the idea that human life is deeply entangled with that of other species, earth systems, and technologies. ecocriticism*; posthumanism* Postmodernism [5] Cultural-historical term used to indicate the period ca. 1960 to ca. 2000 and the literary, cultural, and philosophical trends characteristic of this period. – literary postmodernism rewriting and radicalisation of modernism, character-
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ised by fragmentation and discontinuity, textual self-reference and metafiction. intertextuality; modernism Print book [6] Multiple copies of a text that are produced in a serial manner by means of moveable type. codex; manuscript Productive reception [6] The way in which readers, as authors, (re) make the texts they have read in productive or creative responses. actual reader; fan fiction; fanzine; intertextuality Prosody [4] The practice and theory of versification. metre; rhyme; rhythm Prosthetic memory [11] [Alison Landsberg] Concept that recognises how narratives can implant (like a prosthetic) in their readers or viewers, through the use of a media product like a book or film, the memory of things they have not directly experienced themselves but that have now become part of their world. cultural memory studies*; immersion Quantitative methods/qualitative methods [1] Methods that formulate problems and seek solutions in statistical data/methods that formulate problems and seek solutions based on the interpretation of particular cases. close reading; digital humanities*; humanities; method
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Readers in the text [6] Devices and rhetorical structures in the text directing and engaging the reader. gaps; historical reader; explicit readers Realism [8] – General term to indicate the effect of fictional narrative worlds that (due to the use of specific procedures) bear a strong resemblance to the ‘real’ or ‘actual’ world; – Nineteenth-century movement that strived to achieve a literature that represented (contemporary) sociopolitical and cultural reality as accurately or ‘realistically’ as possible. Reality effect [5] The effect of an author’s narrative skills; that which makes the world of the story conceivable, possible for the reader. realism Remediation [4] [ Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin] Continuous process whereby so-called ‘new’ media obtain their cultural significance by rewriting or renewing other,‘older’ media. Media are never entirely ‘new,’ but always an adaptation of existing media or media techniques. medium; intermediality1+2; intertextuality; multimediality; transmediality Representation [10] [Stuart Hall] The way in which art and (mass) media are used to produce and circulate meaning among members of a culture, and how these members share and negotiate such meaning. culture; cultural studies*; hegemony; ideology; Orientalism; the Other
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Rhetoric [4] Theory of eloquence; the art of using written, spoken, and visual language as a persuasive instrument, and the study of that art. defamiliarisation; foregrounding; poetics; poetic function; trope Rhyme [4] The repetition of sounds of related vowels or consonants. alliteration; assonance; consonance; defamiliarisation; poetic function Rhythm [4] [Greek: rhythmos = movement + containment] The more or less ordered repetition of visual, audible, and/or tangible patterns – loud and soft, accented and unaccented, up and down, light and dark, left and right. metre Romanticism [3] Term used to indicate the period ca. 1790 to ca. 1840, characterised in politics by revolutionary movements (esp. the French Revolution 1789-1795) and by the concomitant democratisation of society with its anti-hierarchical emphasis on rights and liberties of individuals and the importance of the nation; and in literature and the arts by the valorisation of creativity and individual imagination and a rejection of the rules of classicism in favour of the freedom of individual artists along with an interest in the non-rational or ‘dark’ dimensions of the human mind and models from folk culture. Secondary Orality [3] [Walter J. Ong] A new form of orality (in the form of podcasts and audiobooks, for
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example) where texts are available in oral form alongside their availability for reading in print or online. orality Semantic undecidability [7] [ Jacques Derrida] The idea that meaning is the consequence of tensions within (and around) a text rather than an integral part of it; the meaning of words cannot be determined because such meaning skips and changes with their context of appearance. différance Sign [7] [Ferdinand de Saussure] The production of meaning through the combination of a signifier (something perceptible) and a signified (mental image). semiology* Signified [7] [Ferdinand de Saussure] [French: le signifié] [also: meaning] The mental image produced by the use of a signifier. semiology*; sign; signifier Signifier [7] [Ferdinand de Saussure] [French: le signifiant] Material sound-image or other medium that functions as the carrier of meaning. semiology*; sign; signified Symbolic capital [8] [Pierre Bourdieu] A form of power or profit that denies being economic capital precisely because it seemingly lacks a profit motivation. Such capital can be accumulated both on the production and consumption side of the art world. The
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possession of this power yields monetary, but also non-monetary rewards in the sociocultural field (for example, through consecration). canon; canonisation; distinction; hegemony; literary system Symphonic poem [4] [Or: tone poem] Single-movement symphonic work based on (a character from) a poem. Music based on literary sources like this is also known as programme music. ekphrasis; intermediality1; transmediality Synecdoche [4] [Greek: synekdokhe = receiving together; synekdekhesthai = to supply a thought or a word] A trope for partial reference; a part is used for the whole (e.g. ‘the green’ for a piece of grassy land in the centre of a village). metaphor; metonymy; trope Tabular text [6] Text designed to facilitate visual oversight and allow for multiple entry points through chapter titles, margin summaries, headers, footers, or page numbers. paratext Taste (judgement of) [2] – [Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory] The capacity to experience beauty; – [Pierre Bourdieu] A social skill deployed to mark social difference. The ability to ‘see’ or ‘read’ and appreciate a work of art is bound up with the sociocultural context, education, and upbringing of the viewer/reader/listener. aesthetic experience; aesthetics
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Testimony [11] A (usually verbal) statement in which someone recollects their own experience (before a camera, a court, or simply an interlocutor) in order to bear witness to a past experience, often of violence: this has become an extremely important genre since World War ii. autobiography; documentary; memoir Text [3] [Latin: texere = weaving] Most commonly, a collection of words that are as such reproduced, interpreted, and captured in a material form (sound, (hand)writing). A text is a linguistic artefact (as words), a material object (as script, book, etc.) and an aesthetic object (as read). More recent (poststructuralist*) ideas of textuality emphasise the way in which every collection of words as described above exists in a network of intertextual relations with other texts, and as such has an open character. The phenomenon of hypertext has also created a new kind of text with an unlimited character. intertextuality; medium; paratext Theory [1] [Greek: theoria = contemplation] Abstract model used to illuminate, describe, and explain patterns in an empirical field. method; philosophy of science Transculturality [9] [Fernando Ortiz, Monica Juneja] A perspective that recognises the ever-changing and deeply entangled nature of culture, and strives to capture the changes that occur in the relations between people as ideas, values, and stories move across (and in the process, shift) cultural borders and
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compel people to rethink the relation between ‘Self ’ and ‘Other.’ the Other; transnationalism Transmediality [4] The ‘translation’ of a story, theme, or motif from one medium to another (e.g. a film adaptation of a book). intermediality1+2; intertextuality; medium; multimediality; novelisation; remediation Transnationalism [11] A perspective that recognises the imagined character of nations and the fact that cultural trends and practices, as well as cultural products, move across national borders and connect people in other ways than along national lines. cultural memory studies*; multidirectionality; transculturality Trauma (theory) [11] [Cathy Caruth] Trauma (literally: trauma = wound) is a distressing experience that defies our capacity to represent or understand it using our traditional models; because it defies representation, it cannot be assigned a definitive meaning and given a place in memory, so it continuously returns in our thoughts and reactions. cultural memory studies*; traumatic realism Traumatic realism [11] [Michael Rothberg] The artistic attempts to make sense of a (traumatic) world that not only challenges our traditional views, but seems beyond the very grasp of expression. realism; testimony; trauma theory
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Trope [4] [Greek: tropos = turn, direction] A replacement or substitute for ‘ordinary’ expression; a figure of speech. The basic tropes in Western culture are: irony, metaphor, paradox, metonymy, and synecdoche. Worldliness [9] [Edward Said] The fact that literature always carries the traces of the place and time in which it was written, demanding a critical effort to establish the things to which a particular text is blind as well as to identify its potential to break through old habits of thought. contextualism; representation; world-making World literature [2] [David Damrosch, Franco Moretti] [also: global literature] Developed as a critique of the Western canon, world literature stands for the attempt to develop a more expanded and inclusive canon of (literary) works from non-Western (i.e. non-dominant) traditions. canon; canonisation; cultural authorities; comparative literature World-making [9] [Donna Haraway] The (literary) act of producing the world we live in by representing the interaction between species. ‘Worlding’ refers to the cooperative and conflictual ways of ‘worldmaking’ in which different species, technologies and forms of knowledge interact. worldliness
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SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT IN LITERARY STUDIES The Life of Texts offers a thematic introduction to the study of literature and is organised around the key debates in literary studies that help us in understanding the social life of texts. We have not aimed at presenting a historical survey of the development of the discipline as such. Below we list the most important schools of thought, from past and present, which have been used as the basis for the present handbook. By ‘school of thought’ we mean a certain shared idea about the focus of research, and the concepts, methods, and theories that should be used in literary studies. In some cases, a school of thought is equivalent to a specialism; in other cases, the school of thought has entailed a redefinition of the entire field of literary studies. The schools discussed below have been placed in alphabetical order We have opted for an alphabetical rather than chronological order so as to show how literary studies has developed along multiple lines in the past decades. Like other academic disciplines, literary studies consists of various specialisations and, at any given time, these may be informed by a different idea of the field as a whole. Contemporary literary studies differs in important ways – in terms of focus, concepts, methods, and theories – from literary studies as it was practised fifty years ago. Literary studies is continuously changing, partially due to the influence of developments in other other academic disciplines. As a result, cross-connections appear quite regularly between schools within literary studies and those in other disciplines (see chapter 1 for more information). Most of the schools within literary studies are embedded in broader (cultural) scientific developments. In the brief descriptions below, we have identified, where relevant, the particular period in which a given school has been active. The emphasis is on recent schools but some more historical ones are also mentioned if they have continued to be influential in the present. Where relevant, we also mention the country or countries where the school in question is based or where it originated, and the key terms in the glossary associated with it.
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Adaptation Studies*
Book history*
The study of adaptation in a broad sense – the transitioning and reworking of a story, song, or poem from one medium or art form into another – has a long history. Word and Image as well as Word and Music studies have been part of literary studies since the 1950s, mainly focused on ekphrasis and intermediality. With the rise of film studies in the 1980s (growing out of English Studies in the Anglo-Saxon world), adaptation studies shifted focus to cinematic reworkings of literary classics, cinematic techniques in (modernist and postmodernist) novels (such as montage), and novelisation. In more recent times, adaptation studies have also been integrated into cultural memory studies* as the latter traces the (after)lives of literary texts in different media or in plurimedial networks. cultural memory; ekphrasis; intermediality1+2; intertextuality; montage; multimediality; productive reception; transmediality
The contemporary interest in book history and the history of publishing as well as the history of reading has grown into a full-fledged specialism. This innovation of philology* is closely connected to an increasing interest in ‘writing’ and ‘the book’ as media that can be compared to digital media and older new media like cinema. The interest in book history is also partially due to developments within literary sociology* and, more generally, the rise of media studies and the interest amongst cultural historians in communication technologies and digital humanities*. While book history and the history of publishing has gained new relevance in literary studies today, it actually dates back to the 1960s. author’s rights; codex; cultural authorities; (socio-)cultural history of reading*; manuscript; medium; orality; paratext; print book; sociology of reading*; tabular text
Cognitive reader research* Animal studies* Animal studies is a relatively recent field that concerns itself with the relation between human and non-human animals. This relation is studied from various perspectives (e.g. biology, sociology, and literature), which makes animal studies a very interdisciplinary field. Animal studies emerged in the 1970s and is still evolving and shaping itself at this moment. Key subjects within animal studies are the dichotomy between humans and non-human animals, the agency of nonhuman animals, and mankind’s perspective on animals. ecocriticism*; posthuman; posthumanism*; interdisciplinarity
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Cognitive reader research involves using responses to literature as a resource for studying the workings of the human mind. Scholars here use both quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as experimental ones to study the relation between mental schemata and people’s approaches to literary texts. Cognitive researchers have also become increasingly interested in the relations between literature, reading, and the impact of new, digital media. Also known as the empirical study of literature, this school has evolved since the early 1980s. In the 2010s, a second generation of researchers has gradually applied cognitive approaches to a growing range of literary phenomena, including
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poetics, narratology*, and neuroaesthetics (for example using fmri technology to study brain activity triggered by immersive reading) Compare: sociological studies of reading* aesthetics; aesthetic experience; quantitative methods; qualitative methods; mental schemata; stylistics*
Comparative Media Studies* Media studies is the general term for the scientific study of the modern (mass)media. The field is still developing both in the social sciences and the humanities. In the social sciences, the emphasis lies on the organisation of mass media in society and its effects on social reality. In the Humanities, the emphasis lies on the nature of the medium that is used and the new cultural forms that continue to emerge from the interaction between different media. The rise of media studies has created a new conceptual framework for studying text as a very old medium (compare book history*), but also as a medium that is constantly evolving in interaction with contemporary media technologies (compare cultural studies*). interactivity; intermediality; intermedium; multimediality; orality; remediation; transmediality
Critical code studies* Critical code studies is an upcoming field that, since the late 2010s, has been combining methods from digital humanities* with literary studies and cultural studies*. Critical code studies focuses on the cultural and artistic significance of computer code in addition to its functional significance. In lit-
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erary studies, it involves the critical analysis of digitally born literature. digital humanities*; critical theory*; cultural studies*
Critical theory* As developed in the late 1920s and 1930s by founding members of the Frankfurt School like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse: a combination of sociological and theoretical perspectives intended to look behind the surface of modern capitalist society so as to reveal the political manipulations at work in cultural forms, and in doing so, to improve these societies with comprehensive analyses. Sometimes referred to as Marxist hermeneutics. cultural studies*; decoloniality; hermeneutics*; critical code studies*
(Socio-)cultural history of reading* The socio-cultural history of reading focuses on the social, material, and technological factors that have enabled or contributed to the development of reading practices over time. Here the socio-cultural history of reading intersects with reception studies*. Since Robert Darnton advocated a history of reading in the early 1980s alongside book history* the field has grown rapidly. actual reader; book history*; literary sociology*; manuscript; print book; reception studies*
Cultural memory studies* Cultural memory studies is the branch of memory studies* that is concerned with
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the role of cultural forms and media in the production of common narratives about the past. It examines how narratives emerge and are reproduced and contested across different media. There has been a particular focus on the agency of the arts in helping societies to work through the legacy of violence. While memory production in national frameworks was studied in the first instance, increasingly scholars have adopted a transnational perspective so as to capture the transcultural entanglements of contemporary memory practices. historical fiction; memory sites; multidirectionality; prosthetic memory; testimony; transculturality; trauma (theory); adaptation studies*; narratology*
tion of the reader in the differential system of a text. Sometimes alluded to as radical hermeneutics. As a school in literary studies, deconstruction was inspired in the 1970s by the work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida. An American ‘branch’ of Derridean criticism was launched colloquially as the Yale school of deconstruction in the late 1970s. That school included Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, but was as much elaborating on the writings of the controversial scholar Paul de Man. As a loose collection of reading strategies, deconstruction also found its way into cultural studies*, gender studies*, research into intermediality and postcolonial criticism*. binary opposition; différance; hermeneutics*; the Other; semantic undecidability
Cultural studies* – In a narrow sense: interdisciplinary field developed in the 1950s-1970s at the ‘Birmingham School’ of Cultural Studies (led by thinkers such as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams); it aimed to study contemporary culture from a theoretical, political, and social perspective, specifically focusing on the relation between cultural forms and power. – In a more general sense: umbrella term for academic disciplines worldwide that study culture in the broadest sense of the word. critical theory*; cultural memory studies*; critical code studies; gender studies*; humanities; postcolonial criticism*
Deconstruction/Deconstructive criticism* While not limited to it, deconstruction here refers to a critical reading strategy (‘against the grain’) that assumes an active interven-
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Digital Humanities* Digital humanities is the umbrella term for the new issues and approaches that have come out of the digital revolution. The field is relatively recent and predominantly works with quantitative rather than qualitative methods. Profiting from the availability of digital corpora, it applies digital tools – techniques of distant reading – for large-scale text- and data-analysis. Close and critical reading methods are also part of digital humanities where the study of digitally born literary texts or the coding of literary texts is at stake. Clearly, digital humanities continues to evolve along with technological developments. close reading; critical code studies*; distant reading; quantitative methods; qualitative methods
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Ecocriticism* Current within environmental humanities, specifically within literary studies, which uses expertise in cultural analysis to understand how ideas about the environment are culturally produced and how they influence the actions taken by individuals, corporations, and governments. animal studies*; cli-fi; hyperobject; posthumanism*
Environmental Humanities* Interdisciplinary field within the Humanities that focuses on the interactions between humans and the natural world. ecocriticism*; animal studies*
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the formal characteristics of literature rather than on their cultural and historical context. The formalists developed a general view of art based on the theory of defamiliarisation. They traced the defamiliarising power of texts (and other art forms such as film) back to their formal characteristics (hence the name formalism). More specifically, they linked defamiliarisation to the way in which texts broke through their readers’ expectations by differing from earlier texts. Both the theory of defamiliarisation and many of the terms that formalists developed to describe the formal characteristics of stories and poetry are still used in contemporary research, especially narratology*. artistic culture; critical theory*; foregrounding; literary system; literariness; montage; poetic function; motifs; motivation; defamiliarisation
Feminist Criticism* Gender studies* Feminist criticism is a specialism within the broader field of gender studies*. The rise of feminist criticism in the 1960s was closely connected with women’s emancipation groups and has been focussed on the critical evaluation of the presentation of femininity and masculinity in literature. Contemporary feminist criticism is closely intertwined with postcolonial literary criticism* and cultural studies* because, like other forms of cultural criticism, it focuses on the Other and social diversity. the Other; binary opposition; différance
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary field that involves, amongst others, cultural criticism, sociology, and history. The main focus of gender studies is the construction of sexual and cultural identity in various forms of expression and how this identity is put into practice by being ‘performed.’ Subfields within gender studies are feminist criticism*, postcolonial criticism*, men’s studies and queer studies. interdisciplinarity; performativity
Hermeneutics* Formalism* Formalism is mainly associated with Russia and what now is the Czech Republic during the period 1915-1930. Formalists focussed on
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Here: The systematic reflection on all problems relating to the interpretation of texts as cultural forms, developed in eighteenthand nineteenth-century German idealist
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philosophy. Before the late eighteenth century, hermeneutics was mainly used as a method for the exegesis of sacred texts and can, as such, be traced to the Renaissance and beyond. In the course of the twentieth century, hermeneutics developed in different directions, two of which are especially relevant for literary studies: – Objective hermeneutics (developed by E. D. Hirsch in the 1960s) aimed to provide scientifically and historically informed validations for interpretation, and believed in the possibility of establishing meanings intended by an author on objective grounds; – Dialogic hermeneutics (developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer in the 1960s) starts from the assumption that meaning is an event arising out of the encounter between a text and its interpreter. Such an encounter is determined by the horizon of the interpreter, and the kinds of questions such a horizon will allow for, as well as the horizon of the text and the questions it asks to its readers. A proper understanding of texts emerges out of a merging of horizons. In the 1970s and 1980s Gadamer’s dialogic hermeneutics would create the fertile breeding ground for new directions in literary studies that were reader-oriented: reader-response criticism* and reception studies*. deconstruction*; hermeneutic circle; horizon; philology*
Literary sociology/sociology of reading* Literary sociology (and the sociology of reading) belongs to the broader field of sociology in which society and human behaviour within society are the central focus. Literary sociology studies the relation between literary works and the social context in which these works were created, evaluated, and
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reproduced with the help of cultural organisations. It often uses quantitative methods (regarding books sales for example) in order to understand the reception and dissemination of particular works. canonisation; cultural authorities; field; (socio-)cultural history of reading; symbolic capital
Memory studies* Memory studies is an interdisciplinary area of research that has emerged in different parts of the world since the 1980s. It brings together scholars in the field of culture, sociology, law, psychology, anthropology and heritage around a common concern with the ways in which individuals and societies remember (and forget) their common past. Cultural memory studies* is a specialism within this broader field. cultural amnesia; memory sites; multidirectionality; prosthetic memory; testimony; trauma (theory)
Narratology* Narratology is an interdisciplinary specialism that focuses on the analysis of stories from a variety of domains and in various media (text, image, film, hypertext). Contemporary narratology originated in formalism* and structuralism*and moved into international prominence from the 1970s onwards. Recent years have seen a broadening of the focus: where first-generation narratologists focussed on the composition of narratives and the structure of stories, contemporary narratologists (and others working in the field of narrative research) also study the relation between the subject matter of stories
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and the function these stories fulfil for audience groups and groups of readers. Many narratological insights have been integrated in other schools such as cognitive reader research*, cultural memory studies*, feminist criticism*, media studies*, and postcolonial literary criticism*. narrative; narrator; focalisation
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atically bringing literature and other forms of knowledge into dialogue with each other so as to make visible the dynamics whereby ideas about the world are continuously being formulated, appropriated, transformed, and contested in politically charged contexts. cultural criticism; discourse; hegemony
Philology* New Criticism* New Criticism is a formalist* school that was especially influential in the United States and Great Britain during the period 1930-1950. The central idea of New Criticism was that the main activity of a literary scholar should be to read individual texts in themselves and separately from their cultural-historic context. This so-called close reading was primarily meant to describe the aesthetic qualities of the work with a specific focus on complexity, ambiguity, irony, and the interplay between form and subject matter, especially in poetry. New Criticism as such no longer exists, but it has left its marks on many literary scholars, as can be seen in the use of close reading as a central method in literary studies. autonomy of a text; complexity; irony; paradox; close reading
New Historicism* A new method for doing literary history dating from the late 1980s; it emerged with specific reference to the study of the literature of Renaissance English and was later extended to the literature and culture of other periods. Spearheaded by Stephen Greenblatt, it involved interpreting literary texts in relation to their cultural context; it did so by system-
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The rise of philology as a discipline occurred in the Renaissance when annotations of classical texts became popular. Philology literally means “love of learning” and focuses on developing methods for determining the authenticity and meaning of historical texts, both literary and non-literary ones. Philology formed the basis of literary studies for a long time and is still important today as the New Philology (which studies texts in the context of historically existing manuscripts and of the manuscript and its historical usage), especially in fields such as Medieval Studies and Renaissance Studies. etymology; hermeneutics*; manuscript; print book; text
Postcolonial Criticism* An interdisciplinary field emerging in the 1980s and 1990s with seminal works like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Cultural Imperialism (1993) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988). Postcolonial criticism engages with colonial situations in the past and the continuing presence of colonialism in the world today. In literary studies, postcolonial criticism focuses on literature that has emerged in the context of, and in critical
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response to, a colonial experience. Decoloniality is also used as an analytical tool to study the effects of colonialism in a globalized world from a critical, socio-theoretical perspective. cultural studies*; cultural theory*; deconstruction*; gender studies*
Posthumanism/posthumanist criticism* A body of thought in philosophy and cultural theory based on the realisation that human life is deeply entangled with that of other species, earth systems, and technologies. animal studies*; ecocriticism*; environmental humanities*
of political and social-cultural meanings, so as to provide insight into the formation of discourses and binary oppositions. Poststructuralist ideas also significantly inform critiques of rigid distinctions between ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture (cultural studies*), the construction of gender relations (gender studies*), the representation of colonial and postcolonial experiences (postcolonial criticism*), the evolution of culture via ongoing exchanges between different texts and cultural practices (new historicism*), and more traditional ideas of authorship. binary oppositions; deconstruction*; différance; death of the author; postmodernism
Reader-response criticism* Poststructuralism/poststructuralist criticism* A philosophical movement that has greatly influenced various cultural-scientific disciplines in the past four decades. Poststructuralism is seen as a response to and a radicalisation of structuralism*. Whereas structuralists attempted to define underlying conventions and codes of various cultural expressions (see semiotics*), poststructuralists assume that these codes and conventions are continuously changing and therefore impossible to capture definitively. Behind this assumption lies a criticism of metaphysical thinking in terms of essences, binary oppositions, and solid foundations. Poststructuralists maintain that the meaning of (literary) texts is not set in stone outside of the text, but rather that it is a temporary effect of incontrollable, instable linguistic processes (see deconstruction). Poststructuralist cultural critics also apply this approach to the broader circulation
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Reader-response criticism is a text-oriented approach that focuses on the reader ‘in the text’, that is, how texts position and address readers rhetorically, and how they imply or presuppose their willingness to engage and interact. The main principle within reader-response criticism is that the role of future readers is always, one way or another, inscribed in a literary text. Reader-response criticism evolved in the 1980s, mainly inspired by the work of Wolfgang Iser, who was in turn elaborating on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s dialogic method of hermeneutics. cognitive reader research*; (socio-)cultural history of reading*; hermeneutics*; reception studies*
Reception studies* Originally triggered by the work of HansRobert Jauss in the 1970s, reception studies (originally: reception aesthetics) focuses on
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the ways in which (groups of ) actual readers have responded to and made sense of particular literary texts. From the late 1980s on, reception studies moved beyond the reception of canonical works to that of popular literature, adopting a more inclusive approach to readers, their responses, and the kinds of texts they engage with. Contemporary reception studies investigates how readers in the past and present rework or refashion literary texts in multiple forms and media networks. Here, reception studies connects with research into productive reception, including fan fiction and fanzines. More recently, reception studies has intersected with the study of cultural memory in so far as reception histories can be illustrative of how and why certain literary works are remembered and kept alive in different times and cultures. actual reader; cognitive reader research*; hermeneutics*; literary tourism; multimediality; reader-response criticism*
Semiotics* Semiotics (literally the study of signs) mainly developed itself as an interdisciplinary and cultural-scientific school during the period 1975-1990. The main aim of semiotics was to describe systematically the entirety of human culture in terms of the production of meaning through the exchange of signs. The term semiotics originated in the philosophy of the American C.S. Peirce and it was closely related to the term semiology* introduced by Saussure to designate a new ‘science of signs in society’. Semiotics no longer takes up a prominent place in contemporary literary studies, but it has left its mark on many recent developments (amongst others in cultural studies*).
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binary opposition; conventionality of language; connotation; denotation; langue/ parole; semiology*; sign; signifier; signified
Semiology* (Ferdinand de Saussure) The study of signs and their meanings. semiotics*; signifier; signified; binary opposition; conventionality of language; connotation; denotation; langue/parole; sign
Structuralism* Structuralism emerged initially in the work of Czech theorists like Jan Mukařovský and Felix Vodika who emphasised the underlying structures of texts and the literary system. It then came to fruition in France in the period 1950-1970 and later on became very influential on an international level as well. Structuralism involved thinkers of various disciplines, such as linguistics, literary studies, history, anthropology, and philosophy, and was closely related to semiotics*. The common goal within structuralism was to describe multiple aspects of human culture (such as fashion, stories, habits, politics, etc.) as a ‘language’ and a sign system. Using Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, structuralists attempted to map out the underlying rules and codes that allowed meaning to be (re)produced within a specific system or domain (such as fashion or stories). Structuralism was often seen as anti-humanist because it focused on thought systems and language systems, rather than on (special) language expressions of (special) individuals. Within literary studies, structuralism has mainly been of importance for the
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development of narratology*. Compare poststructuralism/poststructuralist criticism*. binary opposition; convention; conventionality of language; sign
Stylistics* Stylistics is a specialism within literary studies that concerns itself with the distinguishing characteristics of the language uses of individual authors. The aim is to determine
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individual stylistic characteristics via a thorough close textual analysis or, increasingly also, with the help of digital methods and text mining tools. Stylistics uses concepts from both modern linguistics and traditional rhetoric and poetics. Modern stylistics is heavily influenced by formalism* and New Criticism*. chiasmus; enjambment; inversion; literariness; metaphor; parallelism; poetics; poetic function; rhetoric; rhyme; rhythm; trope
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LIST OF IMAGES AND PERMISSIONS Cover: Wood, Adams, & Hopper At Home. American actors Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams listen to actress Natalie Wood as she reads out loud; Laurel Canyon, California 1956. Photo by Ralph Crane/The life Picture Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images. Reproduced with permission. Figure 1.3 The Long Room of the Old Library, Trinity College Dublin, built 1712-1732. Photograph Diliff. Own work, cc by-sa 4.0, commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?curid=42693401. Figure 1.4 Public library, Stuttgart, built 2011. Public domain, via pxhere.com/en/ photo/656610. Figure 2.1 Ruben Oppenheimer, Don Quichote en windmolens. nrc Handelsblad 30.08.04; © 2019 Ruben Oppenheimer. Reproduced with permission. Figure 2.3 Presidential Campaign 1952; Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, www. eisenhower.archives.gov/All_About_Ike/ Presidential/1952Campaign/1952_ Campaign.html. Public domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=1983926.
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Figure 2.4 Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses (1889). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1949 (49.30). Public domain. Figure 2.5 Bookstore: handcrafted labels, Photograph Ian Collins (2014), cc by-nd 2.0, www.flickr.com/ photos/3n/3534630251/. Figure 3.1 Gusle player Rasid Hasovic Sjenica Ethnographical Museum Belgrade. Photograph Orjen (2015), cc by-sa 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=42207768. Figure 3.2 Abraham’s sacrifice, manuscript from the 14th century, anon. Collection Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. Public domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=36009649. Figure 3.3 Excerpt from Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves, the Remastered full color edition; copyright Mark Z. Danielewski © 2000. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House llc. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.
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Figure 3.4 Jean-Jacques Sempé, ‘Je vous envie beaucoup’ (1984) in Quelques artistes et gens de lettres, Paris: Denoël, 1984. © 1984, by Sempé et Éditions Denoël. Reproduced with permission. Figure 4.1 Slide from DAK0TA, 2002/1999. © Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge, young-hae chang heavy industries. Reproduced with kind permission. Figure 4.2 M.C. Escher’s Cycle © 2019 The M.C. Escher Company b.v. – The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www. mcescher.com. Reproduced with permission. Figure 4.3 Margaret Bourke-White, Flood Victims (1937). Time Life Magazine, 1937; © 2019 Getty Images. Reproduced with permission. Figure 4.4 bddp&Fils Shopping (2004). Les Echos, 2004; © 2006 bddp&fils. All attempts have been made to contact the copyright holders. Figure 4.5 Nicolas Gengembre, Demain, dès l’aube (2002). © 2019 Nicolas Gengembre. Reproduced with kind permission. Figure 4.6 Hugo Bal, ‘Karawane ‘(1916). By User Albrecht Conz on de.wikipedia, Dada Almanach. Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1920, p. 53. Public domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=1016654. Figure 4.7 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Voici le cercueil...’ (calligramme), recueilli dans Poèmes retrouvés, in Œuvres poétiques. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Reproduced with kind permission. Figure 5.2 Gustave Doré. Illustration (1863) to Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote. Public domain, commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?curid=677898. Figure 5.3 Graphic Novel Excerpt from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Mar-
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jane Satrapi, translated by Anjali Singh, translation copyright © 2004 by Anjali Singh. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House llc. All rights reserved. Figure 5.6 Jan ( Johannes) Musset, Droste Cacao (1903). © 2019 Droste b.v. Vaassen. Reproduced with kind permission. Figure 5.7 Joseph Jastrow, Duck/Rabbit in Norma V. Scheidemann, Experiments in General Psychology, Chicago 1939, p. 67, fig. 21. Public domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=667017. Figure 6.1 Musa reading a volumen (scroll). Attic red-figure lekythos, ca. 435-425 bce. From Boeotia. By Klügmann Painter – Jastrow (2006). Public domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=668158. Figure 6.2 Gutenberg Bible (Pelplin copy), vol. 1 Pelplin Diocesan Museum, Pelplin, Poland. By Kpalion. Own work, cc by-sa 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=52227712. Figure 6.3 Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, Madrid, 1632. By Codex. Own work, cc by-sa 3.0, commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?curid=20680988. Figure 7.1 Frédéric Chopin, Nocturne Op 9, No 3, 1882, imslp.org/wiki/ Special:ImagefromIndex/00470. Public domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=6841772. Figure 7.2 From A New Method for Assisting the Invention in the Composition of Landscape, 37 [title not known], 1785, Alexander Cozens (1717-1786), © Tate, London 2019. Reproduced with permission. Figure 8.1. American film actress, television host, and later consumer advocate Betty
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Furness (1916 – 1994). Photo by cbs Photo Archive/Getty Images). Reproduced with permission. Figure 9.1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel (1563). © 2019 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Figure 9.2 Waiting for Godot, text by Samuel Beckett, staging by Otomar Krejca. Avignon Festival, 1978. Photograph by Fernand Michaud. Gallica Digital Library, available under the digital id btv1b10329630q. Public domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=61229680. Figure 9.4 Honoré Daumier, Les Poires, 1831. Gallica Digital Library; digital id btv1b8414738f. Public domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=4973632. Figure 9.5 studiokca. Skyscraper – The Bruges Whale, 2018. Photo © Robert
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Oostenbroek. Reproduced with kind permission. Figure 10.1 A sign in Johannesburg, South Africa reading ‘Caution Beware Of Natives’, ca. 1956. Photo Ejor/Getty Images. Reproduced with permission. Figure 11.2 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005), Berlin. Photograph by Mary-Grace Blaha Schexnayder. Own work, cc by-sa 3.0, commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?curid=21669297. Figure 11.3 Anne Frank wearing a keffiyah, street art by the artist known as T, Amsterdam, ca. 2007. Photograph Wasabi Lion, cc by 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69502182. Figure 11.4 Destruction of Adam Mickiewicz Monument in Krakow, Poland by Nazi forces on August 17, 1940. Photo provided by Muzeum Krakowa. Reproduced with kind permission.
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425
I
A
B
Aarne, Antti 179 Aarseth, Espen 207 Achebe, Chinua 267 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 368 Adler, H.G. 375 Adorno, Theodor 276, 323 Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke 178 Ali, Monica 356 Althusser, Louis 341 Anand, Mulk Raj 337, 376 Anderson, Benedict 380 Andrews, Jim 49, 150 Annaud, Jean-Jacques 376 Apollinaire, Guillaume 149 Ariosto, Ludovico 318 Aristotle 22, 53-56, 68, 97, 173 Armstrong, Nancy 197 Arnold, Matthew 33 Assmann, Jan 366, 378 Ast, Friedrich 247 Attridge, Derek 58, 62, 102, 125-127 Auerbach, Erich 56 Augustine, St 212-213 Augustine, St. 247 Austen, Jane 71, 100-101, 134, 169-170, 182, 195
Bakhtin, Mikhail 192, 287 Ballard, J.G. 178, 329 Ball, Hugo 148 Bal, Mieke 290 Balzac, Honoré de 317 Barker, Pat 368 Barthes, Roland 108, 258, 260-262, 286 Bateson, F.W. 264 Beaugrande, Robert 233 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de 310-311 Beckett, Samuel 177, 311 Belsey, Catherine 265-266 Benjamin, Walter 323 Bhabha, Homi 353 Blake, William 122 Blakey, Art 130 Bloem, J.C. 118 Bloom, Harold 71 Boccaccio, Giovanni 183 Bolter, Jay David 147 Borges, Jorge Luis 88, 100, 168 Botton, Alain de 59 Bourdieu, Pierre 67, 106, 282 Bourgeois, Louise 115, 282 Bourke-White, Margaret 137 Bourne, Matthew 356 Boyden, Joseph 368, 376
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Brel, Jacques 163 Brontë, Charlotte 223, 351 Brooks, Cleanth 263-264 Bruggen, Carry van 344 Burroughs, William 103 Butler, Judith 196
C Calvino, Italo 72, 313-314 Camões, Luís de 381 Campert, Remco 116-117 Campos, Augusto de 150 Campos, Haroldo de 150 Canning, Patricia 235 Caruth, Cathy 370 Casanova, Pascale 316-317 Cervantes, Miguel de 46, 54, 88, 100, 223 Chartier, Roger 215, 218-219 Chase, David 64 Chekhov, Anton 174 Christie, Agatha 265 Churchill, Winston 53, 73 Clark, Andy 234 Clark, Timothy 328 Coetzee, J.M. 27, 352 Coleridge, Samuel T. 55, 124 Collins, Suzanne 69 Conan Doyle, Arthur 265 Conrad, Joseph 347, 352 Cortázar, Julio 103, 207 Crichton, Michael 303, 322 Crusoe, Robinson 183 Culler, Jonathan 225
D Danielewski, Mark Z. 89, 99, 147 Dante 67, 69-70, 81, 99, 101, 283, 309, 379 Darnton, Robert 218 Daumier, Honoré 324 Defoe, Daniel 183, 343 Delbo, Charlotte 370-372 Deledda, Grazia 73
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DeLillo, Don 291 Demille, Nelson 223 Derrida, Jacques 58, 244, 258-265, 268-270 Dickens, Charles 192, 317, 348 Dickinson, Emily 71, 118, 228-229 Dilthey, Wilhelm 26, 32, 255 Döblin, Alfred 142 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 56 Douglass, Frederick 365 Doyle, Roddy 166 Duff, William 107 Dylan, Bob 73
E Eakin, Paul John 198 Eco, Umberto 253, 318 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 85 Eisenstein, Sergei 142-144 Eliot, George 71 Eliot, T.S. 246 Ellis, Bret Easton 183 Erll, Astrid 372 Escher, M.C. 131, 132
F Fanon, Frantz 354 Fetterley, Judith 225, 293 Fielding, Helen 100 Fielding, Henry 100 Fish, Stanley 231 Fiske, John 293 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen 291 Flaubert, Gustave 93-94, 170, 188, 193-196 Forster, E.M. 172 Foucault, Michel 21, 92, 341 Frank, Anne 372-374 Franzen, Jonathan 291 Fudge, Erica 269
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INDEX
G Gadamer, Hans-Georg 226, 233, 244, 254-256, 264, 270 Genette, Gérard 182, 186 Gengembre, Nicolas 145 Ghosh, Amitav 325-326, 328 Gilliam, Terry 163 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 181, 183 Godard, Jean-Luc 185 Gogol, Nikolai 99 Gordimer, Nadine 73 Gramsci, Antonio 293, 322 Greenblatt, Stephen 287, 308-310, 314 Greimas, Algirdas 175-176, 178 Griffith, D.W. 101 Grimm, Jacob 179 Grimm, Wilhelm 179 Griswold, Wendy 235 Grusin, Richard 147 Guha, Ranajit 346 Gunn, Thom 50
H Halbwachs, Maurice 366 Halleck, Fitz-Greene 81 Hall, Stuart 227, 342 Hartman, Geoffrey 264-265 Hayles, N. Katherine 103, 269 Haynes, Natalie 227 Heidegger, Martin 254-255, 270 Hemingway, Ernest 64 Hendrix, Harald 230 Henson, Jim 119 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 306 Hertmans, Stefan 168-169 Heuet, Stéphane 165 Hirsch, E.D. 253, 264 Hitchcock, Alfred 224 Hobsbawm, Eric 336 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 136, 315 Homer 68-70, 84, 209, 223, 244-246, 352, 379, 381 Horace 68, 187, 324, 379 Horkheimer, Max 276
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427
Hugo, Victor 145 Huizinga, Johan 64 Hương, Dương Thu 350 Husserl, Edmund 254
I Ingarden, Roman 220 Iser, Wolfang 224 Iser, Wolfgang 221, 226, 231, 233 Ivanov, Lev 356
J Jackson, Shelley 103 Jakobson, Roman 48-49, 51, 141 James, E.L. 220 Jarmusch, Jim 121 Jauss, Hans-Robert 226-227, 233 Jeanne-Claude 59 Jenkins, Henry 163 Johns, Adrian 85 Johnson, B.S. 207 Johnson, Daisy 227 Johnson, Mark 138 Johnson, Samuel 246 Joyce, James 94, 171, 186, 190-191, 194 Judah the Patriarch, Rabbi 210
K Kadare, Ismail 104 Kafka, Franz 180-182 Kandinsky, Wassily 150 Kant, Immanuel 33, 61 Kaufman, Charlie 141 Kearney, Richard 54 Keats, John 144 Kentridge, William 376 Kermode, Frank 177 Khayyam, Omar 99 Kim, Chi Ha 340 King, Stephen 67
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Kittler, Friedrich 151, 269 Knausgård, Karl Ove 186 Kristeva, Julia 99, 258 Kuhn, Thomas 22 Kuleshov, Lev 142 Kundera, Milan 86, 88 Kunzru, Hari 354, 356 Kurosawa, Akira 178
L Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de 183, 221 Lakoff, George 138 Lauretis, Teresa de 196-197 Leerssen, Joep 380 Levine, Caroline 116 Levi, Primo 365-366, 370 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 269, 307 Lincoln, Abraham 117 Littell, Jonathan 183 Lord, Albert 84-85, 208 Lotman, Yuri 96-97 Lucas, George 63 Luther, Martin 53, 172 Luxemburg, Rosa 336 Lyne, Adrian 293
Mesnardière, Jules de La 98 Miall, David 233 Mickiewicz, Adam 381 Mignolo, Walter 338 Milne, A.A. 125 Milton, John 128, 143, 246 Mkhize, Naledi Nomalanga 351 Modiano, Patrick 73 Monroe, Marilyn 60 Moretti, Franco 319 Morrison, Toni 367-368 Morton, Timothy 328 Mosjouskine, Ivan 142 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 287 Mukařovský, Jan 419 Multatuli 134 Murnau, F.W. 164
N Nabokov, Vladimir 61, 183 Naipaul, V.S. 352 Napoleon 310 Ninh, Bao 350 Nora, Pierre 372 Nussbaum, Martha 191, 290
M
O
Maalouf, Amin 99 Madden, Matt 179 Maerlant, Jacob van 247 Magona, Sindiwe 197 Mailer, Norman 230 Man, Paul de 264 Maraya, Dan 340 Marriott, Edward 343 Martin, George R.R. 46 Marx, Karl 320-322, 327 Masilo, Dada 356 McGough, Roger 82-83, 102 McLuhan, Marshall 83, 147 Melville, Herman 182 Menges, Chris 343
O’Hanlon, Redmond 343 O’Keeffe, Georgia 282 Okri, Ben 328 Ondaatje, Michael 352 Ong, Walter J. 84 Oosterhoff, Tonnus 103 Ortiz, Fernando 307 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi 102, 167, 275 Padgett, Ron 121
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P Pakula, Alan J. 228 Palliser, Charles 100
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INDEX
Pamuk, Orhan 320 Parikka, Jussi 269 Passos, John Dos 142 Pater, Walter 147 Peirce, Charles Sanders 259 Pessoa, Fernando 236 Peters, John Durham 269 Petipa, Marius 356 Petrarch, Francesco 95, 314 Picasso, Pablo 162 Pignatari, Décio 150 Plato 162, 180, 319-320 Poletti, Anna 239 Potter, Sally 128 Pound, Ezra 116, 129-130 Poundstone, William 150 Powell, Barry 209 Propp, Vladimir 175 Proust, Marcel 60, 67, 70, 165-167, 191, 364 Pynchon, Thomas 291
Q Quasimodo, Salvatore 73 Queneau, Raymond 179 Quijano, Aníbal 338 Quintilian 53
R Rabelais, François 287 Rachmaninoff, Sergej 60 Radcliffe, Ann 266 Radway, Janice 232 Rancière, Jacques 324 Reich-Ranicki, Marcel 275 Reisinger, Julius 356 Remarque, Erich Maria 368 Rembrandt 109 Rhys, Jean 351 Richardson, Samuel 100, 218, 318 Rigney, Ann 230, 372 Rilke, Rainer Maria 144 Rimbaud, Arthur 138
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429
Ronsard, Pierre de 95 Roodt, Darrell 343 Rothberg, Michael 376-377 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 218 Rowling, J.K. 53, 106 Ruf, Michael 311 Rushdie, Salman 320, 343, 355 Rushkoff, Douglas 177 Ryan, Marie-Laure 172
S Sacco, Joe 165 Said, Edward 304-305 Saramago, José 73, 320 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 320, 328 Satrapi, Marjane 165 Saussure, Ferdinand de 91, 95, 244, 258-260, 262 Schacter, Daniel 191 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 136 Schlegel, Friedrich 136 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 247 Schmidt, Siegfried 233 Schoenberg, Arnold 279 Scott, Walter 70, 81, 230, 317 Sebald, W.G. 374-375, 377 Shakespeare, William 67, 70, 81, 95-96, 102, 128, 222, 224, 283, 295, 309-310, 315, 323, 352, 379 Shelley, Mary 103 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 319, 320 Shklovsky, Viktor 56-59 Showalter, Elaine 290 Silva, Joaquín 124 Singer, Peter 269 Snow, C.P. 23-24 Socrates 133 Sonnenfeld, Barry 100 Sophocles 135 Spiegelman, Art 165 Spitteler, Carl 73 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 346, 352, 355 Staël, Madame de 65 Stanzel, Franz Karl 182
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Styron, William 228 Sue, Eugène 321 Sveistrup, S. 315 Swift, Jonathan 134, 324 Székely-Lulofs, M.H. 337
T Taylor-Woods, Sam 220 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 356 Terdiman, Richard 364 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa 340, 355 Thompson, Stith 179 Thoreau, Henry David 328 Tolkien, J.R.R. 63, 192 Tolstoy, Leo 57, 59, 189, 367-368, 371, 379 Tomashevsky, Boris 174 Trollope, Anthony 100 Trump, Donald 313, 324 Tynyanov, Yury 314-316
U
Voltaire 64 Vonnegut, Kurt 185, 318
W Waal, Frans de 269 Wachowski, Lana and Lily 163 Wagner, Richard 151 Walcott, Derek 352-353, 356, 379 Wallfish, Barry Dov 245 Ware, Chris 164 Watt, Ian 318-319 Weber, Max 276 Weir, Peter 313 White, Hayden 367 Wilde, Oscar 267-268 Wilder, Billy 60 Williams, Raymond 327, 348 Williams, William Carlos 119, 121 Wolf, Christa 99 Woolf, Virginia 71, 196 Wordsworth, William 95, 124, 136, 263-264, 325-327
Urfey, Thomas D’ 162
Y V Valerius, Adriaen 122 Vandendorpe, Christian 211, 214-215 Vico, Giambattista 25-26 Virgil 68, 99, 101, 327 Vodička, Felix 419
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Young, Edward 107 Young, Robert 338
Z Zunshine, Lisa 187
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