Paracanonic Activities

PARACANONIC ACTIVITIES: A PRAGMATICS AND A POETICS by DONATO FRANÇOIS WILLIAM MANCINI BA, University of Victoria (History in Art), 1999 MA, Simon Fraser University (English Literature), 2008 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2016 © Donato François William Mancini, 2016 Abstract Overview: This dissertation proposes that certain texts, positioned para-canonically at ambiguous thresholds of valuation, insistently infract on what Roland Barthes would term the “mythologies” of literary canons. While functioning as paracanonic, texts are anti-emblems of privileged aesthetic certainty, metonymic of the wide range of exclusions (literary and historical) that are the actual social cost of canonic value. Rooted in Dialogism (the Marxist “philosophy of language” of the Bakhtin circle) and materialist assumptions about literary value as a contingent social process and function, Paracanonic Activities draws extensively on findings in current linguistics research centred on of the production, reception and interpretation of speech. This area of empirical inquiry extends, substantiates, and often vindicates, concepts that remain notional in Dialogism; together they provide productive means (concepts and concrete findings) for a fresh investigation into the conditions of literary discourse and the social production of aesthetic value. Method, Outline and Primary Texts: Chapter One: Introduction revisits canon debates since the 1960s, to trace the contour of canon mythology. It then brings forward a pair of contrasting paracanonic case-histories – William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Aimé Césaire’s Soleil cou coupé – to inventory some of the necessary-but-insufficient conditions (including social- historical contexts and textual features) that contribute to a text’s positioning as paracanonic. Each substantive chapter applies a frame crucial to both Dialogism and the linguistics of interaction, in order to sift a wide range of intertextually related texts for discourse-effects that are signatures of paracanonic acti vity. Chapter Two, “Anti-languages,” is a dual-language paracanonic case-history of François Villon, traced through literary responses to his core work, and to the attributed poems composed in criminal argot – themselves paracanonic to Villon. Chapter Three, “Ambivalence and Reported Speech,” reads through Titus Andronicus, Ovid, Kathy Acker and Antonin Artaud. Chapter Four, “Unhappy Laughter,” reads through Petronius Arbiter’s Satyrica, C.R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, H.P. Lovecraft’s “In the Walls of Eryx” and Aimé Césaire’s verse-drama Et les chiens se taisaient. Contribution: Paracanonicity, as a value-function, has been attested in various terms before, yet remains otherwise undescribed in its specificity as an “indivisible remainder” of all processes of canon-formation. ii Preface This dissertation is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Donato Mancini. iii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................................... ii Preface ......................................................................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Myth Canon and Its Afterimage ...................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: The Paracanonic Case History of François Villon, Poète et Argotier ………………………………. 51 CHAPTER 3: (Hot) Ambivalence and Reported Speech …..................................................................................... 123 CHAPTER 4: A Pragmatics of Unhappy Laughter .................................................................................................. 176 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................................................. 243 Works Cited: Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................ 243 Works Cited: Chapter 2: François Villon ................................................................................................... 252 Works Cited: Chapter 3: (Hot) Ambivalence ............................................................................................. 259 Works Cited: Chapter 4: Unhappy Laughter .............................................................................................. 265 iv Acknowledegments Books are written by communities. No thesis would be possible without the support of many, many people. My supervisory committee, Dr. Janet Giltrow, Dr. Glenn Deer and Dr. Jeff Derksen, have been unfailingly supportive, providing expert critical guidance along with massive intellectual generosity. Everything is political, and this has meant everything to me. Dr. Janet Giltrow has been an extraordinary mentor – though I have felt treated, undeservedly, more as a colleague than an apprentice. I look forward to much more conversation, collaboration and friendship in the future. Poetry comrades, for our shared paragnosis: Andrea Actis, Ted Byrne, Louis Cabri, Jeff Derksen, Roger Farr, Colin Fulton, Andreas Kahre, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Robert Mittenthal, Jospeh Mosconi, Colin Smith, Gabriel Saloman, Jordan Scott, Steven Tong, Aaron Vidaver, Maged Zaher. Thanks also, for similar reasons, to my fellow members of Dr. Punk: Dan Adleman, Scott Inniss, Derek Woods. Dr. Larissa Lai’s help was indispensable through the admissions and qualifying processes. The Department of English at the University of British Columbia provided excellent material support. Equally, I appreciate the latitude granted me by the Department to take on a risky, difficult project. I must also acknowledge the material support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Without the ample time afforded by SSHRC support, I could not have contemplated writing such a research-intensive thesis. I hope that SSHRC will long continue to support graduate students in the humanities with the same generosity. Without time, no amount of determination, talent or skill is adequate. Many more people deserve my thanks. I have only named a few here. Please know that I am immeasurably grateful. I do listen, and I try to hear. And, humbly, to my friends: I’m nothing without you. v Chapter 1: Introduction: Myth Canon and its Afterimage (Long) Sunset Over the Literary Field Is it not late in the day to be writing about canons and canonicity? Have the reading, writing and study of literature not shifted, massively, into a phase that could be historically distinguished as post-canonic? Over ten years ago, Alan Wald already proposed that it had long been “time to move more positively toward the reconstitution of new [canonic] methods, not to continue primarily to bury the old” (292). Yet, if Raymond Williams could write even earlier, in 1977, that “it is relatively difficult to see ‘literature’ as a concept,” (Marxism 45) it is arguably no easier to see it in 2016. Here Williams was setting the scene for cultural studies. Today, the interdisciplinarity of cultural studies has dropped away, while the category of literature has once again strengthened. In spite of the accelerated vanishing, since the 1960s, of untroubled belief in a unified, stable, permanent and universally valid literary canon, the social practices and institutions and texts that together constitute “literature” can still only be seen against, or through, an ideological afterimage of such a canon. For too long, participants in the literary field have been compelled to look toward the same bright point on the horizon. Canonic time – which Jed Rasula characterises as the “historical durée of the museum” (22) – passes slowly. What Jane Tomkins wrote in 1985 remains predominantly true: “the idea of the classic is virtually inseparable from the idea of literature itself” (5). Questions of canons and canonicity remain pertinent today because the bundle of social practices that assemble as “literature” remain oriented towards a conceptual horizon in which the dominant (although dimmed) ideological landmark is an imago of a literary canon1. 1 These claims may appear overdrawn, but consider the evidence that could be compiled from discourse generated in those spheres of activity where an idealised concept of literature is nourished and maintained. At the sites of such 1 The principles of canonicity can appear to operate at peak efficiency in mainstream cases like the centrality of William Shakespeare, but the best illustrations of its force may in fact be with authors whose canonic status is less established. Among these, the most revealing instances are where there has been a sharp upward shift in an author’s reputation, and further evidence that said author has been set on a trajectory towards canonicity. With this in view, I turn to briefly consider the reception history

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