V21 Summer 2017

Discussion Notes

• 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 - l/u

Williams, Marxism and Literature

• base/superstructure: sum of relations of production --> superstructure, which is scaffolded on the base
  • superstructure: institutions
  • forms of consciousness which express class view
  • political and cultural practices: where awareness of economic conflict gets fought out
• 79: "according to the materialist conception of history the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life" - Engels
• why isn't book history more explicitly Marxist? In terms of intellectual genealogy and ideological politics it is but in explicit political terms it isn't
• determination: settling bounds, limits, exertion of pressures
  • not opposed to direct agency: "we make our history ourselves, but in the first place under very definitive assumptions and conditions" (Engels)
• 85: objectivities passage - fill in
• 87: society quote - good to relate to Gaskell N and S
• productive forces: any and all of the means of the production and reproduction of real life
  • qt on 93
• mediation vs reflection
  • mediation is in the object itself
• hegemony
  • state relations (classical) -- class relations (Marxism) - Gramsci: complex interlocking pol/soc/cultural forces based on distribution of power: dominance and subordination
  • beyond ideology: "not only the conscious system of ideas/beliefs, but the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant meanings/values"
  • hegemony is "the whole body of practices and expectations...on shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world" & ff. on 110
  • Gramsci's solution: an alternative hegemony
• "grasp[ing] the hegemonic in its active and formative but also transformative processes" - unpack?
  • where cultural processes, e.g., works of art, actually do authentically break with hegemony - but what does that look like?
• 128 qt
  • think through the arg of "Structures of Feeling"
• 136: "now capitalist economic activity and cultural production are inseperable" -- they weren't in the C19, scale shifted earlier...
• implications of 137-8 direct for print culture studies
  • sociology of culture -> add study of forms (what does that entail here?)
• qt about forms on 190: unpack?
• 191 rehabilitating New Criticism formalism and updating its project

Woloch, Or Orwell

• fill in notes from ntbk