Textual Practice

TEXTUAL PRACTICE VOLUME 3 NUMBER 2 SUMMER 1989 Cambridgg Myth, Truth and Literature Towards a True Post-Modernism COLIN FALCK This book is a theoretical study which aims to prove the superfluousness of literary theory. Colin Falck argues that a 'paradigm-shift' is now reqUired which will replace 'structuralist' and 'post-structuralist' literary theory and will re-establish the validity of such old-fashioned 'Romantic' notions as intuition, inspiration and imagination. £25.00 net 0 521 36256 3 204 pp. Collected Essays Volume 3: The Novel of Religious Controversy Q. D. LEAVIS Edited by G. SINGH This third volume of Q. D. Leavis's essays brings together pieces on hitherto unexplored aspects of Victorian literature. Most of these are preViously unpublished and there are essays and reviews which originally appeared in Scrutiny. Mrs Leavis approaches her subject from a literary historical and sociological point of view. £30.00 net 0 521 26703 X 356 pp. Shakespeare Survey 41 Shakespearian Stages and Staging (with an index to Surveys 31-40) Edited by STANLEY WELLS This latest edition of the Shakespeare Survey examines the staging of many of the plays or individual scenes, from contemporary productions to the present. It also looks at performances in London and Stratford in 1986-7. £30.00 net 0 521 36071 4 320 pp. The Origins of Modern Critical Thought German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel Edited by DAVID SIMPSON This is the most comprehensive anthology in English of the major texts of German literary and aesthetic theory between Lessing and Hegel. The texts are crucial not only to the Romantic period itself, but also as the source of modern literary theory. £30.00 net He 0 521 35004 2 458 pp. £10.95 net Pb 0 521 35902 3 UCambridge :.: University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU Contents Articles Towards cultural history—in theory and practice 159 CATHERINE BELSEY Spatial history 173 PAUL CARTER AND DAVID MALOUF Putting Ireland on the map 183 MARY HAMER Futurism, gender, and theories of postmodernity 201 PETER NICHOLLS Sexual agency in Manet’s Olympia 219 LISA MOORE Racked on the tyrant’s bed 231 SCOTT WILSON Reviews Reda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect 249 STEVEN RENDALL Richard Harland, Superstructuralism 259 PAUL HAMILTON Stein Haugom Olsen, The End of Literary Theory 263 K.M.NEWTON Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (eds), Music and Society 269 ALAN DURANT Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society Robert Moynihan, A Recent Imagining 275 STEPHEN BYGRAVE Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes Seppo Sajama and 279 Matti Kamppinen, A Historical Introduction to Phenomenology EDMOND WRIGHT iv Peter Brooker, Bertolt Brecht 283 ELIZABETH WRIGHT Robert Sullivan, Christopher Caudwell 285 DAVID AMIGONI David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland 289 WILLY MALEY Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke, and 297 Paddy Roe, Reading the Country Robert Sandford and Mel Buschert, Panoramas of the Canadian Rockies IAN WHITEHOUSE Towards cultural history—in theory and practice CATHERINE BELSEY I Is there a place for English in a postmodern world? Does an academy where twentieth- century textual practice breaks down the nineteenthcentury boundaries between disciplines offer English departments any worthwhile job to do? Can we still seriously set out to teach our students literature? I start from the assumption that English as it has traditionally been understood, as the study of great literary works by great authors, has no useful part to play in a pedagogy committed to a politics of change. In the course of the 1980s the institution of English has been firmly stripped of its mask of polite neutrality by Peter Widdowson, Chris Baldick, Terry Eagleton and Terence Hawkes, among others.1 As their analyses reveal, the conservatism of traditional English lies primarily in two main areas: first, its promotion of the author-subject as the individual origin of meaning, insight, and truth; and second, its claim that this truth is universal, transcultural and ahistorical. In this way, English affirms as natural and inevitable both the individualism and the world picture of a specific western culture, and within that culture the perspective of a specific class and a specific sex. In other words, a discipline that purports to be outside politics in practice reproduces a very specific political position. But I start equally from the assumption that there is no special political or pedagogical merit in severing all ties with the texts the institution of English has done its best to make its own. It would be ironic if a theory of difference left us unable to differentiate between Bradley’s Othello and Leavis’s, and between these Othellos and all the others we might produce for quite other purposes. It would be still more ironic if by a kind of political ultra-leftism we abandoned Othello and the entire institution— with all its (precisely institutional) power— and handed it back without a struggle to those for whom a politics of change is more of a threat than a promise. The works that the institution of English has done everything to appropriate are there to be reclaimed and reappropriated, and there is no reason why this should not be done from within the institution. The texts are available to be reread as the material for a history of meanings and values and practices in their radical discontinuity. In this way new work might be expected to come from the English department itself, and not just from somewhere else called, say, Cultural Studies. My project for English, therefore, is not to abandon it but to move it—towards cultural history. 160 TOWARDS CULTURAL HISTORY—IN THEORY AND PRACTICE Much of the work of the institution has been, of course, a process of exclusion. The canon of great books by great authors has been important not only for what it affirms—the value and the coherence of admissible readings of those works it recognizes. As every feminist, for example, knows, its importance also lies in what it refuses. Dale Spender has recently unearthed nearly 600 novels from the century before Jane Austen, by a hundred women novelists who were taken seriously in their own period. As she points out, Ian Watt’s extremely influential book, The Rise of the Novel, takes no account of their existence. As far as the institution is concerned, the novel was invented by men. The Rise of the Novel is subtitled Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding.2 The relegation of certain authors, of particular texts and, above all, of specific textual practices helps to police the boundaries of truth. Texts which are most obviously difficult to recuperate, which most obviously challenge conservative assumptions about race, class, or gender, have been systematically marginalized as ‘flawed’, or banished from view (and in consequence from print) as inadequate, not literature. They are, of course, flawed and inadequate according to literary standards invoked precisely to marginalize them— standards which have denied their own relativity, and indeed the cultural and historical specificity of imposing ‘literary standards’ at all. The cultural history I should like to see us produce would refuse nothing. While of course any specific investigation would find a specific focus, both chronologically and textually, no moment, no epoch, no genre and no form of signifying practice would be excluded a priori from the field of enquiry. Cultural history would have no place for a canon, and no interest in ranking works in order of merit. Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of the reformer Tyndale, for instance, in his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, shows some of the advantages of linking literature with a manual of religious politics in the analysis of sixteenth-century subjectivity. Greenblatt treats The Obedience of a Christian Man not as background in the conventional way, but as text.3 Indeed, Louis Adrian Montrose, like Greenblatt an American New Historicist, identifies his own position in terms which closely resemble the project I am trying to define here. New Historicism is new, Montrose points out, ‘in its refusal of traditional distinctions between literature and history, between text and context; new in resisting a traditional opposition of the privileged individual— whether an author or a work—to a world “outside”’.4 In a rather different way, Jacqueline Rose’s book on Peter Pan also rejects traditional distinctions and oppositions. Rose brings together children’s fiction, the notion of the child and the history of sexuality in ways that throw into relief the limitations on our knowledge imposed by conventional value- judgments and conventional reading practices.5 With out wanting to deny the specificity of fiction, of genre and, indeed, of the individual text, cultural history would necessarily take all signifying practice as its domain. And that means that the remaining demarcation lines between disciplines would not survive the move. Signifying practice is not exclusively nor even primarily verbal. We need, for example, to align ourselves with art historians. I have invoked portraits in the analysis of changing meanings of gender relations.6 John Barrell and Norman Bryson have both in different ways demonstrated much more extensively the kind of work that becomes possible when writing and painting are brought into conjunction, without treating one as the background which explains the other.7 And perhaps more eccentrically, but only TEXTUAL PRACTICE 161 marginally so, the allocation of domestic space is replete with meanings for the cultural historian. The medieval move of the feast from the hall to the great chamber, which was also for sleeping in (or rather, to the great chambers, since the lady, if she was involved in the feast at all, was likely to dine in her own chamber),8 and the subsequent isolation of the family dining-room from the servants’ quarters, is as significant in charting the history of the meaning of the family as is the current vogue for open-plan living.

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