©2010 Eui Young Kim ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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©2010 Eui Young Kim ALL RIGHTS RESERVED EXTENDED ESSAYS: THE ESSAYISTIC SPIRIT IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE by EUI YOUNG KIM A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English written under the direction of Marianne DeKoven and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2010 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Extended Essays: The Essayistic Spirit in Contemporary American Literature by EUI YOUNG KIM Dissertation Director: Marianne DeKoven This dissertation theorizes the crucial role of the essay in contemporary American literary experimentalism. A genre of transitivity, the essay resists the ideals of totalization and closure. While this has historically relegated the essay to the margins of literature, it has also made it amenable to extensions and creative re-workings during the latter half of the twentieth century. Central to its resurgence is the way it invites generic exchanges and mixes of heterogeneous elements that put pressure on discursive boundaries between knowledge and art, art and criticism, the literary and the non-literary. The essay incites the active testing of limits. Within the national context of the United States, the extended essays by marginal writers critique enlightenment concepts of the nation-state sustained by closed orders of identity and signification. I focus on five writers who articulate the formal concerns of essayism and the ethical concerns of heterogeneity. Chapter One explores James Baldwin’s use of breaks and cuts that merges the critical form of the essay with African diasporic expressive practices. Chapter Two examines the hybrid texts by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Gloria Anzaldúa written from the margins of the nation and embodying the difficulties of cultural and linguistic intersections. In Chapter Three, I ii discuss the innovative serial prose work by Nathaniel Mackey through which he upholds improvisation as one of the oldest and newest strategies of living with heterogeneity. Chapter Four considers Susan Howe’s aesthetics of the archive that experiments with new ways of reading and writing history, allowing the poet-essayist to pursue the nonconformist strain in American literature. Each text seeks to extend expressivity while reaffirming the new world possibilities. I argue that the essay and essayistic strategies assist these writers’ search for greater openness in form and spirit. iii Acknowledgements My journey down the academic road has been supported by the teachers who saw my potential before I did, believed in me when I could not. I thank the professors at Seoul National University, especially Chulwon Cho, Sangjun Jeong, Seong-Kon Kim, Jongsook Lee, Eun Kyung Min, and Gwanghyun Shynne, for their guidance and example. At Rutgers, I met teachers whose generosity in class and outside opened new spaces. I would like to express my gratitude to Emily Bartels, Harriet Davidson, Richard Dienst, Brad Evans, Elizabeth Grosz, Myra Jehlen, and Cheryl Wall for their graduate seminars and mentoring sessions that shaped my thinking in ways that I am only beginning to find out. I have had the extraordinary fortune of meeting a dissertation committee deeply interested and involved in the development of my project. My readers Brent Edwards, David Eng, and Carter Mathes have offered thoughtful commentary and critiques that were crucial to the way I eventually pulled together the (all too) many interests and questions I started out with. This dissertation would have been a different and a lesser work without them. Words cannot express the gratitude I feel for my advisor Marianne DeKoven whose unflagging enthusiasm for my writing has sustained me throughout the writing process. Her openness gave me the license to venture into an unconventional field; her intellectual rigor ensured that I did not stray too far or for too long. I gratefully acknowledge the institutional and financial support I received during my time at Rutgers. Kwanjeong Educational Foundation funded the first three years of my doctoral study, allowing me to focus exclusively on coursework and reading. A iv fellowship from the Graduate School during my fourth year enabled me to engage in extensive research for this dissertation. I am also indebted to fellow graduate students who read and commented on my work at various stages. I learned from the participants of the Spring 2007 writing seminar, both from their comments and from their own writing. I will always remember very fondly the dissertation workgroup I shared with Sonali Barua, Liz Bredlau, and Anantha Sudhakar. The meetings may have failed to make me write faster, but they held much therapeutic power. I wish to extend thanks to my colleagues who offered chats over coffee or phone: Ja Yun Choi, Pei-Ling Hu, Mi-jung Jang, Beth Perry, Jiyoung Ryu, Nami Shin, Elliott Souder, and JaeEun Yoo. My friends kept me afloat while I wrote and deserve more than thanks. Baking Boo, Rebecca Frank, Sun Hyang Ha, Lisa Kleih, and Eunkyung Song offered company and commiseration as fellow aliens in this strange land. Mijoo Hyun has been a steadfast soul mate for over a decade. LeeSun Choi, whom I met the day I arrived at Rutgers, has since played the triple role of a friend, mentor, and sister. My family has been incredibly patient and supportive throughout the years. I hope something of my mother’s love for literature and my father’s intellectual curiosity has found expression in the following pages. I am forever grateful for their love and devotion. v Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi Introduction 1 Chapter One 22 James Baldwin’s Notes: The Essay, the Cut, and the Eruption of the Ethical Chapter Two 57 The Essayistic Spirit in the Borderlands: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands Chapter Three 108 An Extended Essay, An Impromptu Etude: Nathaniel Mackey’s Experimental Prose Chapter Four 151 “The Form, Often Called Formlessness”: The Essay and the Archive in Susan Howe’s The Birth-mark Bibliography 201 Curriculum Vitae 208 vi 1 Introduction The essay is a paradoxical genre. Its form is literary, which has caused some theorists to grant it the status of a fourth literary genre alongside poetry, drama, and the novel.1 Its content, on the other hand, assigns the genre to the realm of knowledge and exposition. Graham Good neatly summarizes the situation when he writes that the essay “usually goes unrecognized either as knowledge (because it is seen as too ‘artistic’) or as art (because it is ‘knowledgeable’ rather than creative’)” as a result of the discrepancy between form and content (15). Within literary studies, essays by major writers tend to be consulted as supplementary material that enriches our understanding of their views on aesthetic or social matters. Occasionally, individual essays are admitted into the literary canon by virtue of being well written. In either case, the lack of a unified theory of the essay has led to a critical neglect of the genre. As Claire de Obaldia points out, the most significant contributions to the study of the genre come from German theorists of the twentieth century (Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno), who established a link between the essay and the early German Romantic theory of the fragment. She also adds that “the most valuable German material on the essay—books and articles—dates back to the 1950s and the 1960s (and even to 1910 in the case of Lukács’s ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay’) and has never been revised since” (61). Indeed, the most significant contribution to follow is Obaldia’s own The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay, published in 1995.2 Utilizing her strong historical and linguistic expertise in all the 1 Robert Scholes and Carl Klaus in Elements of Literature. 2 The collection Essays on the Essay (1989) and Graham Good’s monograph The Observing Self (1988) precede Obaldia’s study by a few years but do not offer a theory of the genre in part because of the pressing need to reclaim the essay as a valid object of literary analysis. 2 major European literary traditions, Obaldia plots the trajectory of the essay from Montaigne to Borges. Her contribution to the field of essay studies is still in the process of being digested by the community of literary critics. The 2005 collection of articles by British and French scholars, The Modern Essay in French: Movement, Instability, Performance, is an interesting document from this perspective. The editors Charles Forsdick and Andy Stafford explicitly acknowledge Obaldia’s work as providing the condition for the collaborative, transnational effort to study the essay that the volume represents. The articles in the volume, however, incorporate Obaldia’s insights rather unevenly, giving the overall impression that her work is just beginning to be registered and debated in the study of the genre. The resurgence of interest in the essay is nevertheless promising. Literary studies may indeed be on the verge of finally catching up with the essay. One striking omission in the critical discussion conducted in The Essayistic Spirit and The Modern Essay in French is the under-representation of North American literature. This appears to be not so much the result of a deliberate dismissal as the result of a simple lack of interest. Peter France, whose contribution appears at the beginning of The Modern Essay in French, provides a comparative study of the British and French traditions of the essay. He concludes, “It might indeed be argued that while the British developed this humanistic invention to full generic status and then allowed it to decline, the essay has been triumphantly reinvented in the land and the language of Montaigne” (41).