V21 Summer 2017

Discussion Notes

Storify!

Day 1

• ideal vs material, holding them in tension in writing
  • "meeting in a time of ideal and material depletion"
• their chair offered medievalist/victorianist symposium at some point -- follow up
• V21: spontaneous formation of collectives
• Jesse Rosenthal, Good Form - l/u

Woloch & Gaskell

• writerliness of Gaskell: these 4 chapters
  • political life: how writing and political action feels
• parabola of action and inaction (Orwell) like the tension btwn narrative voice and Margaret's voice being in tension
• the explicit political action of MH jumping in front of Thornton
• political writing as art - Orwell - Gaskell?
  • is MH's gesture an allegory for writing? A writerly act?
• union: marriage and politics
• ending strange aesthetically, economically, politically
  • like Jane Eyre?
• layering of aesthetic, practice, society (Williams) in MH's gesture
• is N & S hard to talk about cos it's an explicitly political novel (like Orwell)?
• CLP reads it as a love novel, not that labor/social stuff is epiphenomenal but that it's secondary: the marriage plot does work (CLP)
  • Susan Orleans - Orchids - l/u
• "there's only so many ways you can build a novel" (Jesse)
• critique at time of facticity of women's writing in C19
• representation of working class that really works is really sparse - but why do we have a sense that it works? Not just where are they in Orwell or Gaskell: where are they in our writing and thinking at all?
• Orwell: ethical ideation and writerly propulsion
• Orwell's "poetics"? (Woloch)
  • cultural dynamics apart from linearity (CLP) - what people are looking for
  • Hillis Miller defines poetics as "understanding figurative language"
• different forms do different things (Woloch's "instrumental" formalism)
  • CLP's surf movie with love plot vs surf doc - "I need the football player!" - why do we need the football player? What work does he do? What work does the Thornton/Margaret marriage plot do?
    • cognitive narrative theory - why do we like novels? They work the way our mind works, therefore we need the football player to individuate him. Is the need for that individuating presence to generate narrative interest b/c we've read other novels and we're familiar with certain types of narrative possibility, or is it because it's how our minds work? Informaiton processing as critical part of novel reading: weighing different characteristics against each other - Susan Zunschein (Theory of Mind and Novel)
      • Natalie Philips: Austen and cognitive theory
• "Victorian poetry doesn't let you forget you're reading poetry, it's always showing off" - Gaskell isn't trying to remind you of form - in that way like Orwell
  • Trollope was the window pane writer (Hawthorne said so!), not Gaskell, in the period (Katherine) - using working class language to make it familiar to middle class, autoethnography (Buzard)
• hard now to demonstrate critical innovation by pointing to the unconscious - Woloch actually pointing out how hard surface reading is to do in a sophisticated way with Orwell - JLT pointing out the methodological implications of his argument (tho he doesn't speak to the surface people in this section)
• we don't talk about the conditions under which a critical essay was written - under Reagan, under Clinton, under trump
  • Woloch kind of demonstrates his consciousness forming in the Reagan years with 53: Orwell "radically skeptical of any final, stable, or permanent expression of political belief" - sounds a lot like deconstruction to me
• "it's not necessarily the most avowedly political writing that is the most politically effective" (JOT) - a case for reading novels this way, so this is part of the work the marriage plot is doing: getting you to engage with politics using that
  • sometimes being less explicit might be more effective
    • cli-fi: political but "not electorally political" (Adichie's Americanah is the latter)

Williams

• civilization as process in progress -- a failure in those terms
• philosophy of life and activity - Williams's vitalist Marxism
• dominant, residual, emergent -- go back and read
  • how does the dominant/hegemonic culture take control of the new? The emergent is radically new
• we know we are still living under capitalism because we only have the "six types of plots"
• any romantic theorist you name will have some investment in uniqueness of expression
• from medium to social practice - 158 - crit of new criticism siloing the work of art from its production - medium as form of social organization - "form can be so fuzzy because we've removed it from the flow that mediums are supposed to have, art is suspended rather than the vehicle of flow" (Molly)
  • "not good at reading contexts as themselves formal," i.e. history -- Woloch is good at this, the form of equality vs. inequality
    • One Vs Many - Eliot dramatizing competing pull of democracy vs inequality - misalignment between story and discourse as played out in rel btwn characters - Peter Brooks - Dickens - Wegg
  • physicalizing the medium: "the properties of 'the medium' were abstracted as if they defined the practice, rather than being its means"
• "The New Criticism was pedagogical gold"
• Williams isn't closing off new critical readings
  • he was where the new formalists are now in 1978
• Stuart Hall -- l/u - postcolonialism
• Read Felski.
• "uneasy communities" -- l/u
• "History repeating" - Anna K - l/u
• really go back to dominant residual emergent essay
  • like complex adaptive systems, AI, second order phenomena

Day 2

• Bleak Liberalism - Amanda Anderson - tell Sarah (from Katherine)
• "imagining myself as you gives me an entry into this fictional world" - why identification is, actually, of course, impt
• "we have not been as good at talking about mediation as we could be": the shorthand "Jane Eyre says" for "The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte says..."
  • strand of characterological study that's about "characters aren't human" but still about characters - "Rise of Fictionality" (Gallagher - but she still talks about character)
  • Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go - about literary character in a fundamental way
• Victorian Babylon - l/u
  • "Art historians aren't any better at understanding mediation than English" - Anna
• Williams: we've gotten confused about what "media" means: it's supposed to be transmission but it's become a suspension
• form(s): physical and literary, disambiguating between the two (can we? is "genre" what we want for "literary form")
• form and mediation inextricable for Hensley
  • his def: "form marks, for me, the capacity of literary ensembles to set ideas into motion in ways particular to their suite of affordances - ways that, by definition other modes of presentation cannot" (18)
• choice: how much does form become interpretable because it's made, because it's the result of decisions,
  • but the physical mediation is the result of decisions too - how the form design of the Electric and International Telegraph Company evolves and structures thought, its evolution as an enabling constraint
• affordances/form - we're not producing readings, not assigning intentionality, instead we're apprehending a kind of saturation of legalistic violence, of war, that floods a whole cultural/literary landscape: whether it's voluntary or choice is beside the point because it's saturated with that
  • Said 53 - "scarcely any dissent...the empire must be maintained" - resistance is unthinkable(?), nothing is outside it - they aren't deciding to be racist it's that nothing is outside that (Orientalism), not letting them off the hook but different than saying "they had a choice and made the racist one"
    • worth being skeptical - Kipling really was more racist than other people - back to Williams' hegemony that doesn't preclude individual agency
• H 23: "The reading I am offering seeks neither to uncover an obscured historical violence nor to ascribe that unmasking to the image itself. I am suggesting instead that the photograph should be seen to transform those very spatial (and ethical) figures of reading into its subject, turning "unmasking" itself into a conceptual problem"
  • ethics of care, curatorial (to care)
  • the residual still flows through the emergent: close reading still flows through symptomatic reading - we're still doing close reading, it just doesn't get talked about in the same way...but it still gets shut down at NAVSA conferences
• surface reading: let's talk about what lit can do rather than showing what it's doing without meaning to
  • difference between Jameson's reading of Lord Jim and Cannon Schmitt's -- the antagonistic relationship to the text that's in the Jamesonian type symptomatic, paranoid reading
• look up Nathan's work on "curatorial reading"
• imminent critique: object doing work of critic
  • tension between this and his celebration of literary criticism itself?
• "reclamation of the obvious" (CLP's flip description of Deirdre Lynch's reclamation of enjoyment)
• problem with affordances of form (Levine): form is the shape, but not getting into the messiness of "this seminar is a form" but it doesn't get into the affordances of concrete, you can only make certain things
  • this is an affordance (!) of material studies
• 30 "concretizing the metaphors that structure..." - what does this mean?
  • can you only read an object in its own terms? Jameson doesn't tell you how to read necessarily
• cultural object inside and outside history - different perspectives
  • what Henlsey is trying to do the tension btwn an object as historical and as lifted into a different line of sight; our responsibility of recognizing the flow between them, as a medium, a conduit that speaks in 2 different temporalities - we can't know what it meant in that moment but we kind of have to (Molly)
    • the agency of the work of art as a conduit, as opposed to an isolated thing
• the productivity of empire, not just that it's repulsive but that it generates aesthetically pleasing objects like Haggard and Kipling
  • it's easy to be disgusted with empire (and important), but working through the attraction to imperial texts
• asking what a text did is a valuable question, but asking what it does and what it continues to do is important too - "don't give up on a better past"
• Ricoeur - meaning is richer and cumulative than origins - read more

Dutt

• Dutt family lost caste when they converted to Christianity
• an interesting instance of a super high level of cultural hybridity: distant memories of childhood Hinduism
• she's in conversation with C19 European ballad tradition
• when empire creates wider global networks critics impose their own critical concepts on texts for which that is anachronistic or outright long; but when she writes in the sonnet form she's doing something quite different from that
• "native clime" - casuarinas and baboons - but super-Wordsworthian: visionary and "local pride", so therefore even more Wordsworthian
• "the easiness of the imperially-complicit Dutt reading" (JOT), easier than "look at what she's doing with Wordsworthian form, what it's like to be doubly exiled"
  • and does it need to be resistant, either? Only complicit or resistant is reductive; Dutt is of value *and* not resistant to imperial forces
  • the antagonistic relationship to the text: is this extending empire, which antagonized Dutt and people like her?
  • "what is made available by Dutt's choice of this form, given that people who have read Cowper and Wordsworth would understand it as a gesture performing specific work?" Hensley's reading practice might be more open to all of this than the "imperially-complicit" reading
• part of the point of the poem is that we don't have the symbolic register of the casuarina tree (vs. roses, yew trees)
• "C19 readers knew them some plants, we don't so much"

Reading Notes

Hensley, Forms of Empire

Moved here

Williams, Marxism and Literature

Moved here

Woloch, Or Orwell

• prologue: situating "theory" in the political moment of the 1980s
• xiv: Brennan argues that theory did not merely compensate for but (again: unconsciously) helped facilitate the rise of the New Right, by rejecting the specificity of politics as a legitimate category.
  • Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, 2006
• 3: Such overt political "intent" [in Orwell's declaration for democratic socialism] challenges an ingrained reflex of contemporary response, in which the taproot of critical energy consists in opening a text's internal contradictions and complexity to a sense of history that the writing bears witness to but does not intentionally grasp... In the strongest sense, we could say that criticism is born at the precise moment when the text's intentional politics (or political affiliation) ends.
• 53: Orwell frequently returns to the risk...that the reader might take literary representation too literally, take the representation of the world, in brief, for the world itself.
• 54: Insofar as their is such a massive elision - a mimetic "hole," in most fiction, that engulfs the bulk of the British population -- the risks of literary representation run very high indeed. In this process, the novel, as a literary form that is intrinsically connected to the project of social representation, risks knitting together a coherent, but fundamentally deceptive, world - one organized around the principle of exclusion.
• 57: Writing -- necessarily the expression of interior thought -- is at once a means of self-actualization (to "live one's own life to the end") and an activity almost fatally entangled with larger, external currents of inequality.... No writer -- no matter how noble, wise, or energetic -- can opt completely out of this system. Orwell is not claiming, however, that writing can't be noble, wise, or energetic but only that these qualities will never be transcendent of the condition of writing -- and often, on the contrary, writing will be most ignoble, foolish, or lazy when it is too confident of avoiding this condition.
  • his materialist perspective