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Literary Criticism and Aesthetic Education

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Literary Criticism and Aesthetic Education Useful Works: Literary Criticism and Aesthetic Education Samuel Joseph North Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 ©2013 Samuel Joseph North All rights reserved ABSTRACT Useful Works: Literary Criticism and Aesthetic Education Samuel Joseph North This dissertation identifies the scholarly historicist/contextualist paradigm on the basis of which most work in the discipline of English Literature now proceeds, and proposes a critical and materialist paradigm as an alternative. The first two chapters offer a new reading of the history of the discipline of English Literature. Chapter one traces the early history of the discipline from the 1920s through to the mid twentieth century, focussing on the project of literary criticism, as distinct from the project of literary scholarship. It demonstrates that literary criticism’s characteristic methodologies of “close reading” and “practical criticism” were initially created as the tools of a broader project of aesthetic education, where the category of the aesthetic was being rethought in instrumental or incipiently materialist terms. This model of criticism was then turned to quite different purposes by later critics, who were committed to an idealist account of the aesthetic. Chapter two traces the history of the discipline from the late 1970s to the present, identifying a “scholarly turn” that transformed it from a discipline housing both the project of literary criticism and the project of literary scholarship, into a discipline that housed the project of literary scholarship alone. On the basis of this history, the dissertation goes on to argue for the development of a new project of literary criticism, understood as the close engagement with literary texts for the purposes of cultivating readers’ aesthetic sensibilities. The third and fourth chapters begin to lay the foundation for such a project. Chapter three attempts to provide criticism with both a new philosophical basis in a materialist account of the aesthetic, and a new way to conceptualise its institutional site as a site of radical, rather than liberal, education. Chapter four attempts to provide criticism with the first elements of a methodology of reading by way of a case study of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). The dissertation thus has four elements: in chapters one and two, a historical element; in chapter three, philosophical and institutional elements; and in chapter four, a methodological element. Taken together, these provide at least the few first sketches of a foundation on which a project of materialist aesthetic criticism might seek to establish itself today. Table of Contents Introduction 1 - 35 General Introduction to Chapters One and Two 36 - 37 Chapter One: From Richards to New Criticism 38 - 67 Chapter Two: From Williams to the Present 68 - 120 Chapter Three: Useful Works, Useful Work – Aesthetics, Education, Criticism 121 - 177 Chapter Four: Mrs Dalloway and Political Feeling 178 - 226 Bibliography 227 - 232 i Acknowledgements My dissertation advisors Sarah Cole, Nicholas Dames, and Erik Gray have been extraordinarily kind, generous, and trusting. I cannot thank them enough. Warm thanks also to Jennifer Davis, Anne Diebel, Matthew Hart, Jessica Fenn, Darragh Martin, Sarah Minsloff, Sherally Munshi, Bruce Robbins, Lytton Smith, Gayatri Spivak, and Kate Stanley. Janice, Samuel, Blainey, and Samuel Ingemar. Gaurav, of course. Special thanks to Adam Alexander, Jason Alexander, David Backer, Winter Casuccio, Aleksandra Perisic, and Jason Wozniak. My thinking is no longer separable from theirs. Thanks most of all to Katja Lindskog, for just about everything. ii For Katja iii 1 Introduction I Very few people, it seems to me, start reading a novel by Virginia Woolf with the primary aim of learning more about British cultural life in the 1920s. Most of those who do are scholars. What non-specialist readers are looking for in literature is rather less easy to define: perhaps the best we can do at the outset is to say that they are looking for something to go on with; something that will help them live their lives. Few resources now exist within the disciplines of literary study that can help us to respond to this observation. A whole range of mid-twentieth century critical practices that tried to put literature into contact with these kinds of vague and capacious terms, the central example perhaps being F.R. Leavis’ neo-Arnoldian “criticism of life,” now operate within the discipline only in residual, discredited, and nostalgic forms. In their place, today’s most influential methodologies for literary study are all, in their various ways, historicist/contextualist, not only in the broad and welcome sense that they see literature in other than transcendental, universalising, ahistorical terms, but also in the rather more specialised sense that they treat literary texts chiefly as opportunities for producing knowledge about the cultural contexts in which they were written and read. Recent efforts to break new ground – “New Formalism”; “Surface Reading”; “Distant Reading” – have been, in this sense, repetitions of the same.1 In contrast to the non-specialist reader, the majority of today’s literary scholarship is most interested in Woolf for what she can teach us about her time and place. One 1 For new formalism, see for example Marjorie Levenson, "What is New Formalism,” PMLA, vol.122, no. 2 March 2007, pp.557-569; and Caroline Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Towards a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48 (Summer 2006): 625-57. For surface reading, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations Vol. 108, No. 1 (Fall 2009): 1-21. For distant reading, see the papers collected in Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). 2 might then say that Jameson’s slogan “always historicize” is the horizon beyond which the disciplines of literary study have so far been unable to see. It has certainly been a very useful slogan. Many of the advances made by the discipline in the 1980s and 1990s were made by those acting in its spirit, if not always directly under its banner – the paradigmatic advance being the movement from those mid-century critical practices that treated works of literature as repositories of timeless and universal human values, to our contemporary scholarly practices that treat texts, in the broadest sense of “texts,” as deeply embedded in particular histories. Yet it has seldom been noted that our period’s governing injunction to historicise is by no means a unitary one, and has in fact concealed within itself two rather different demands, neither of which is logically necessary to the other. On the one hand, it has called on us to demonstrate the historical and cultural contingency of categories elsewhere taken as timeless, essential, or universal; yet on the other hand it has called on us simply to write cultural history. The two projects are quite distinct, and neither is implied in the other: just as one can, if one likes, write history from a universalist standpoint, one can also critique essentialisms without having to act as a historian. Jameson’s slogan – from The Political Unconscious (1981) – comes to us from a turning-point in the history of literary studies: the point at which our own historicist / contextualist paradigm began to assume its present dominance.2 We can see something of the complexion of this moment by observing Perry Anderson in 1982, opening his first Wellek Library Lecture at U.C. Irvine.3 Not without a certain performance of archaism, Anderson begins by looking back to Leavis, reminding his audience that: literary criticism, whether ‘practical’ or ‘theoretical,’ is typically just that, criticism – its irrepressibly evaluative impulse spontaneously tending to transgress the frontiers of the text 2 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Durham: Duke UP, 1981). 3 Later published as Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983). 3 towards the associated life beyond it Social theory as such paradoxically lacks a comparable discriminatory charge built into it. (9, emphasis in original) Here at, or perhaps just after, the inception of the new historicist/contextualist paradigm, it was still just possible for Anderson to speak in the old way, as if it were generally understood that “criticism” was something distinct from and even opposed to “social theory,” and that the former was primarily a matter of forming judgments about the relative aesthetic merits of literary works – judgments that would then be taken to have some bearing on the rest of “life.” This was, I think, about the last moment in the history of the discipline when one could speak in these kinds of terms and hope to be widely understood. Over the next thirty years, the terms “criticism” and “social theory” would both be absorbed into a single project of historicist/contextualist analysis, making them all but interchangeable. Today “literary critics” read texts in order to understand and theorise the social. The specific sense of “criticism” that Anderson relies on here has been lost. But at that moment the two categories were still so clearly distinct from one another that it was possible for Terry Eagleton to outline a provocative strategy for turning “criticism” into “social theory,” or as he put it, “cultural analysis.” In 1983 Eagleton wrote that: Such a strategy obviously has far-reaching institutional implications. It would mean, for example, that departments of literature as we presently know them in higher education would cease to exist… Whatever would in the long term replace such departments… would centrally involve education in the various theories and methods of cultural analysis…. The genteel amateurism which regards criticism as some spontaneous sixth sense has not only thrown many students of literature into understandable confusion for many decades, but serves to consolidate the authority of those in power.
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