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Literary Reality: Rhetoricizing Literature and English Studies

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Literary Reality: Rhetoricizing Literature and English Studies LITERARY REALITY: RHETORICIZING LITERATURE AND ENGLISH STUDIES By Erin Williams Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Dr. James Hartman ________________________________ Dr. Giselle Anatol ________________________________ Dr. Philip Barnard ________________________________ Dr. Frank Farmer ________________________________ Dr. Dave Tell Date Defended: 15 April 2011 ii The Dissertation Committee for Erin Williams certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: LITERARY REALITY: RHETORICIZING LITERATURE AND ENGLISH STUDIES ________________________________ Chairperson Dr. James Hartman Date approved: 26 April 2011 iii Abstract Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and John Bender and David E. Wellbery‘s description of rhetoricality, I offer a reconceptualization of literature as a conceptual metaphorization of the experience of the cognitive concept of LIFE. I demonstrate the value of such a rhetoricized reconceptualization of literature and literary study by applying them to four American autobiographies written after 1970: Bill Clinton‘s My Life, James Frey‘s A Million Little Pieces, Audre Lorde‘s Zami, and Walter Dean Myers‘ Autobiography of my Dead Brother. I also speculate about what a rhetoricized English studies in contemporary American higher education – one that sees (what Pierre Bourdieu describes as) heteronomy rather than autonomy as its primary organizing principle – might entail. iv Acknowledgements I am indebted to the following individuals for their unflagging support of me and this project: Eva and Leland Maxwell, for my inspiration; Juanita and James Williams, for showing me what WORK really means; Marsha, Emmit, and Erica Williams, for putting up with me; Joseph Braun, for the past year; Drs. Amy J. Devitt and Frank Farmer, for their leadership, guidance, direction, support, and good cheer, among other equally important things; Drs. Giselle Anatol and Philip Barnard, for helping me find the ways to say what I wanted to say; Dr. Sonya Lancaster, for her mentorship and encouragement; and Josh Edler, Danny Witzofsky, Lennelle Gilpin, Darian Wigfall, Sarah and Dustin Crowley, and my other St. Louis and Kansas City friends, for supporting me even in my absence. I am also indebted to the collegiality and support of my students, my fellow graduate students, and the graduate faculty in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. It has been my honor to be the final dissertation student of my director and mentor, Dr. James Hartman. He has been like an oracle in his foresight, like Solomon in his wisdom, a sphinx in couching revelations in wordplay, and a Zen master in weathering all my crises with calm and laughter. Dr. Hartman has been the ideal mentor and friend for a young scholar trying to find her way in the world. Because words cannot express the thanks and appreciation that I wish to convey to him, this dissertation must metonymize them instead. v Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ......................................................................................................................................... 4 Part 1 – False Autonomy and the Rhetoricization of English Studies ........................................ 4 1.1 The Literary Field, Literary Studies, and False Autonomy .................................................. 4 1.1.1 ―Fields‖ of Human Action and Interaction .................................................................... 8 1.1.2 The Field of Cultural Production ................................................................................... 9 1.1.3 Structural Transformations of the French Aesthetic and Literary Fields .................... 13 1.2 Aesthetics and the False Autonomy of English (Literary) Studies ..................................... 19 1.2.1 A Brief Genealogy of the Autonomization of English ―Literature‖ ............................ 20 1.2.2 English in the Modern University ................................................................................ 24 1.2.3 The Creation of the Subfield of English Literary Studies ............................................ 28 1.2.4 Implications of Specialization and Autonomization for English Departments ........... 34 1.3 Rhetoricality and the Rhetoricization of English Studies ................................................... 39 1.4 A Return to Rhetoric via Rhetoricality ............................................................................... 47 Part 2: Case Studies in Field Troubles ...................................................................................... 52 1.5 The Spellings Report and the MLA‘s Retort ...................................................................... 52 1.6 Residual Autonomy in the Disciplinary Rejection of Cultural Studies .............................. 55 1.7 Rhetoricality, a New Resolution ......................................................................................... 59 Chapter 2 – The Metaphor of Literature (or Literature as a Metaphoric Process) ....................... 60 2.1 A Brief History of Metaphor Theory .................................................................................. 66 2.1.1 Aristotle‘s Theory of Metaphor and Its Problematic Semantics .................................. 66 2.1.2 Interanimation and Interaction Theories of Metaphor ................................................. 75 2.1.3 Ricoeur‘s Tension Theory............................................................................................ 82 2.2 The Contemporary Moment: Conceptual Metaphor Theory .............................................. 85 2.3 Literature as a Metaphor for LIFE ...................................................................................... 91 2.3.1 A Theory of the Literary Metaphor Process ................................................................ 91 2.3.2 Variations on a Theory of Literature as a Metaphoric Process .................................... 97 2.3.3 Interdisciplinarity, Rhetoricality, and an Improved Theory of Literature ................. 101 Chapter 3 – Truth, Concepts, and Autobiography ...................................................................... 106 3.1 Lyndon B. Johnson and the Fallacy of Literary Non-Reality ........................................... 107 3.2 Categories and/of Experiential Reality ............................................................................. 109 3.2.1 The Insufficiencies of Objectivist Accounts of Truth ................................................ 109 3.2.2 Truth, Reality, and Experience .................................................................................. 112 3.2.3 Metaphor and Experiential Reality ............................................................................ 116 3.3 Literary Reality ................................................................................................................. 119 3.3.1 Interaction between LIFE and STORY ...................................................................... 119 3.3.2 The Metaphoric Nature of Literary Comprehension ................................................. 122 3.4 Autobiographical Experiences of LIFE ............................................................................ 127 3.4.1 Autobiographical Prototype Effects ........................................................................... 127 3.4.2 Reading Autobiography as a Metaphorization of LIFE ............................................. 131 3.4.3 A Brief Genealogy of Post-1970 American Autobiography...................................... 133 3.4.4 Case Study One: Bill Clinton‘s Contemporary Paragon of Autobiography .............. 136 3.4.5 Case Study Two: The Opposing Paragon: James Frey‘s A Million Little Pieces ...... 142 vi 3.4.6 Case Study Three: Disidentification in Audre Lorde‘s Zami .................................... 147 3.4.7 Case Study Four: Fictionalized and Marginalized, for Children: Walter Dean Myers‘ Autobiography of My Dead Brother ................................................................................... 152 3.5 The Rhetoricality of Literary Metaphorization of LIFE ................................................... 157 Chapter 4 – Rhetoricality in Today‘s Literary and English Studies ........................................... 159 4.1 A Rhetorician‘s Perspective .............................................................................................. 159 4.2 Rhetoricizing Literature and Literary Studies................................................................... 164 4.2.1 Residual Conceptualizations of Literature ................................................................. 164 4.2.2 Rhetoricized Conceptualizations of Literature .......................................................... 166 4.2.3 Locating Rhetoricization in Literary Studies ............................................................. 171 4.3 Rhetoricizing English Studies ........................................................................................... 183 4.3.1 Locating Rhetoricization in English Studies.............................................................. 183 4.4 Rhetoricality as an Answer to Present and Future Questions ..........................................
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