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On the Matter of Violence in Postmodern American Literature

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On the Matter of Violence in Postmodern American Literature Brutal Narratives, Savage Figures: On the Matter of Violence in Postmodern American Literature and Literary Criticism Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie (Dr. phil.) der Philosophischen Fakultät der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf Vorgelegt von Martin Wallerius aus Düsseldorf Düsseldorf, April 2009 — D61 — Tag der mündlichen Prüfung 13.7.2009 Gutachter der Dissertation Prof. Dr. Herwig Friedl Prof. Dr. Therese Seidel PREFACE In the introductory chapter of his monumental The Structure of Evolution­ ary Theory, Stephen Jay Gould ponders Darwin’s famous statement from the concluding chapter of his On the Origin of Species that “this whole volume is one long argument” without explicitly stating for what. From many possible answers, Gould prefers to regard Darwin’s “long argument” as an attempt to establish a specific methodological and theoretical approach (Darwin 459; Gould 12). In the process of sketching the scope and boundaries of this thesis, the question of the curious “long argument” became part of the general design. Besides the inquiry into the topic of violence in postmodern litera­ ture and literary criticism as such, this thesis tries to make a point for a methodological and theoretical approach that is postmodern and thematic at the same time, and that draws equally from literary and critical texts that belong to the same period: an approach intended to make elements, struc­ tures, and processes visible that connect literary texts of a given period with that period’s critical discourse, and to show how these shared charac­ teristics relate to their own rhetorical modes and to their reception in the public discourse. Until the late 1990s, thematic criticism and postmodern criticism gen­ erally would not mix. Thematic critics claimed that postmodernists—or poststructuralists or deconstructionists—were hostile to thematics on the grounds that any discussion of “theme” was suspect because of a theme’s inherent “unifying” and therefore “logocentric” quality (e. g., Rimmon- Kenan, “What Is Theme and How Do We Get at It?” 16-17). Notions like “text” or “discourse” were considered strictly formal and allegedly ne­ glected the creative activity that shapes literary works (e. g., Bremont and ii Pavel, “The End of an Anathema” 182). Thematics, in contrast, “argues forcefully against the decentering of social and moral issues rampant in current textual criticism” and causes a “refocus on the continuities and consistencies of human pursuits“ (Ziolkowksi, Thematics Reconsidered 2). Equally strongly argues Philipp Wolf in “Why Themes Matter: Literary Knowledge and the Thematic Example of Money”: All I want to argue is that the differential and infinite opening up of the text as well as the stark assertion that ‘all readings are necessarily misreadings’ (see Culler, 1982:178) [...] not only proves a rather insufficient legitimization for thematic studies, it is inimical to its very idea. (344) Thematics, on the other hand, has “nearly disappeared from the indexes of the Modern Language Association” (Sollors, “Thematics Today” 219). This might account for the discourse’s more agitated parts, mechanisms not particular to thematics but intrinsic to power structures in the academy as such. By the end of the 1990s, though, thematics had returned to the indexes, and some steps toward reconciliation had been undertaken. Sollors, e. g., makes a case for thematics in “Thematics Today” by arguing that its practice, contrary to general belief, “may be more widespread than ever” in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, ideological criticism, and New Historicism, but “has become undeclared thematology, as the inves­ tigation of themes tends to travel under different colors” (219). But this comes at a price. As J. Hillis Miller points out in “The Disputed Ground,” there is a possibility that the “reinstatement of thematic and mimetic read­ ings of literature” rather supports an ideological narrative that combines the return to history with the reinstatement of “traditional ideas about per­ sonal identity, agency, and responsibility”—in the course of which decon­ struction or poststructuralism again would have to be “denigrated” as an alleged adversary (82). iii Similar to Sollors’s argument about undeclared thematics, Gerald Prince in “Notes on the Categories ‘Topos’ and ‘Disnarrated’” also sees thematics principally involved in poststructuralist thinking: Similarly, the post-structuralists—who tried to undermine the very principles of unity and stability presupposed, perhaps, by any rhetoric, any poetics, any thematics—were themselves aware of their incapacity to escape the traps of semiotic coherence and equilibrium. Besides, their endeavor involved not so much the destruction or transcendence of meanings, ideas, concepts as their reinscription through deconstruction or critique; and, more often than not, the reinscription became another label for theming or thematization. (127) This assertion too has to be taken with a caveat since one has to allow for the possibility of “second-level” approaches in poststructuralist discourse where, as Jonathan Culler puts it in On Deconstruction, themes “that appear at both levels often have the same names, a fact which produces confusion” (206-08). The confusion arises because, on the one hand, a thematic approach investigates important “themes” that a text or a group of texts can be said to be “about”; these are what Culler and others would label “first-level” themes. For a poststructuralist approach, on the other hand, the theme to be investigated is often a theme related to how a text operates on a rhetorical level, how it interacts with readers, or how it is related to its modes of physical, social, or psychological production. This kind of theme, the “second-level” theme, is in turn investigated as to how it corresponds to first-level themes manifest in the text—but these themes as first-level themes are, by and large, much less visible than those usu­ ally investigated in the course of a thematic approach. And they are almost never the most important or even dominant themes in a given text: What may often appear to be an insistence of posing inappropriate questions and searching a work for themes that are not evident may be a shift to anoth­ er level of analysis where a theoretical discourse that makes claims about the fundamental organization of language and experience attempts to provide insights into the structure and meaning of texts, whatever their os­ tensible themes. (207-08) iv This, it should be noted, is often undertaken by beginning to investigate a text’s seemingly marginal theme in the first-level sense of “theme” which, if more dominant, would in principle also inform a thematic reading, and pro­ ceed from there to investigate it as a second-level theme as outlined above. Jacques Derrida’s investigation of “writing” as a minor (first-level) theme in philosophical texts and as a (second-level) theme pertaining to writing and the production of texts as such in Of Grammatology might serve as an example. This technique, often called a “reading from the mar­ gins,” and the investigation of the first- and second-level themes of a text or a group of texts and their mutual dependencies, counts among the tech­ niques that are part of the methodological approach of this thesis. To this, another constituent has been added, also intended to bring literary texts together with their period’s cultural environment: a “mixed cor­ pus,” consisting of literary and critical texts from the same period, to be investigated on an equal footing. Elevating critical texts to a level worthy of studies customarily reserved for literary texts is certainly not an idea first conceived by postmodern literary critics, but it has been more strongly pro­ moted in postmodern literary theory than in any other period before. Actu­ ally put into practice, though, has it been only sporadically and highly selectively; here, in contrast, it has been consistently applied throughout. How these critical texts are read in the course of this thesis follows, again, the same procedure of combining elements from thematic readings and postmodern critical theory as outlined above. Thus, this thesis investigates “violence” as a first-level theme in literary as well as critical postmodern texts, and as a second-level theme with regard to these texts’ rhetorical modes and the public discourse they engendered. In the course of this investigation, aspects related to violence will be highlighted that are not only consistently reproduced in each of v these domains, but actually seem to build upon and reinforce each other. While this approach seems tailor-made for postmodern texts, it should in principle, with different rules, be applicable to different literary periods as well, since other literary and critical writings that stem from the same period should also both display their common period’s zeitgeist. This, of course, is a hypothesis, and it can only be confirmed or refuted by probing different periods by way of a similar approach. But it can at least be stated that there is preliminary evidence that this approach would not work with “arbitrary” input, i. e., mixed input from different literary periods. This became evident while reading J. Hillis Miller’s early critical work before his “crossing the pass” into what he calls a new “direction of thinking” (The Form of Victorian Fiction vii). As it turned out, Miller’s early critical work was not applicable at all to the arguments of this thesis. What makes this especially remarkable is that Miller, in his early writings, reads many of the same writers and the same texts as in his later critical work, and even spe­ cifically explores violence in his writings on violence in Bleak House, vio­ lence and sadism in Wuthering Heights, violence and body fragments in Secret Agent, or violence and repetition in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.1 This finding has been felt to be of some importance.
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