Reading by Example in Literature and Theory Doctoral Thesis Department of Comparative Literature Brown University May 2011

PhD Candidate : Denise Laura Davis

Dissertation Advisor : Ellen Rooney, Department of Modern Culture and Media; English Reader : Pierre Saint-Amand, Department of French Studies; Comparative Literature Reader : Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Department of Comparative Literature; Italian Studies

 Copyright 2011 by Denise Laura Davis

This dissertation by Denise Laura Davis is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date______Ellen Rooney, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Pierre Saint-Amand, Reader

Date______Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Dean of the Graduate School

iii Denise Laura Davis Date of Birth: September 21, 1964 Place of Birth: California, USA CURRICULUM VITAE

Degrees PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown University, May 2011 MA in Comparative Literature at Brown University, May 1997 BA with Honors in Political Theory, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1990

Editorial Positions Managing Editor, differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 2001–present Assistant Editor, differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 1999–2001

Academic Appointments Visiting Instructor, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Connecticut College, Fall 2009; Fall 2007 Visiting Instructor, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brown University, Fall and Spring 2009–10; Spring 2009; Spring 2008 Teaching Fellow, Gender Studies, Brown University, Spring 2006 Visiting Instructor, Department of French Studies, Wheaton College, Fall 2005 Visiting Instructor, Department of French, Wellesley College, 1998–1999 French Instructor, Brown Learning Community, Summer 1998; Spring 2005 Teaching Assistant, Department of French Studies, Brown University, Fall 1996 Teaching Assistant, Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University, Spring 1997; 1995–96; 1993–94 Lectrice, Faculté de Langues, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France, 1994–95

Translations “On the ‘Spiritual Automaton’: Space and Time in Modern Cinema in Gilles Deleuze” by Réda Bensmaïa. Deleuze and Space. Ed. Ian Buchanon and Gregg Lambert. Edinburgh UP, 2005. “From the Nation-State to the Transnational World: On the Meaning and Usefulness of Diaspora as a Concept” by Dominique Schnapper. Diaspora 8.3 (1999). “Postcolonial Nations: Political or Poetic Allegories?” by Réda Bensmaïa. Dissident Algeria. Spec. issue of Research in African Literatures 30:3 (1999). “Plato, the Mirror of the World, and the Book” by Claude Imbert. Diogenes 178 (1997). “Heuristic Mysteries--Invention, Language, Chance” by Béatrice Durand-Sendrail. Diogenes 178 (1997).

Conference Papers Northeast American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference, Dec. 13, 1997 “Marianne’s Intuition: Reflections on Taste” Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, Apr. 21, 1996 “Jacob’s Ladder: Social Mobility in Eighteenth Century France”

iv Invited Lectures Program in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at Brown University, Feb. 24, 1998 “Taste without Appetite: Producing Good Consumers in Early-Eighteenth- Century France and England”

Related Work Experience Assistant Editor. Women’s Studies on the Edge. Ed. Joan Wallach Scott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Proofreader and Index Compiler. Exemplarity and Mediocrity. By Paul Fleming. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Proofreader and Index Compiler. Housing Problems. By Susan Bernstein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Advisor, Feminist Theory Papers, Christine Dunlap Farnham Archives, John Hay Library, Brown University, 2003–present Community Director, Office of Student Life, Brown University, 1998–99 Instructor, The Institute for Reading Development, San Francisco, CA, 1992

Honors, Scholarships, and Fellowships Pembroke Seminar, Graduate Fellowship, Brown University, 1998–99 Manning Research Fellowship at Brown University, 1997–98 Mellon Dissertation Seminar in Literature and History, Participation with stipend, Summer 1997 Bryn Mawr College, Institut d’études françaises d’Avignon, Scholarship, Summer 1993 Dean’s Fellowship at Brown University, 1992–93 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, 1992 Phi Beta Kappa

Courses Taught Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies (Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brown University) Advanced Feminist Theory (Gender and Women’s Studies, Connecticut College) Transnational Feminist Theory (Gender and Women’s Studies, Connecticut College) Advanced Feminist Theory: Feminism and Poststructuralism (Gender Studies, Brown University) Introductory French (Wheaton College) Advanced Conversation in French--Le mot juste (Brown Learning Community) Intermediate French (Wellesley College) Various courses at the Université de Bourgogne (including American Civilization 1980–1990, French to English translation, composition in English) Intermediate French (Brown Learning Community)

Teaching Assistance Visionary Fictions (Professor Edward Ahearn, Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University) Beginners’ French (Directed by Professor Gretchen Schultz, Department of French Studies, Brown University)

v Uncanny Tales (Professor Susan Bernstein, Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University) Introduction to the Theory of Literature (Professors Karen Newman and Susan Bernstein, Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University) Dramatic Comedy (Professor Karen Newman, Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University) Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner (Professor Arnold Weinstein, Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University)

Languages French Some knowledge of German

Research Interests Aesthetic and Literary Theory Contemporary Feminist and Cultural Theory French and English Literature

References Ellen Rooney, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Professor of English, Brown University; Editor, differences Mab Segrest, Fuller-Matthai Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, Connecticut College Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Interim Director of the Pembroke Center, Brown University Elizabeth Weed, Cofounding editor, differences

vi

Acknowledgments

Thank you, first, to Ellen Rooney, to whom I cannot possibly express my gratitude. You handled my superego with a matter-of-fact compassion that enabled me to get back on track time and again. There is no way in the world I would have written these pages without your guidance and patience. To Pierre Saint-Amand, for staying on board with good humor and a willingness to take me at my word when I said, over and over, that I planned to finish my thesis, and to Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, for agreeing to serve as a reader so late in the game, for your rousing pep talks, and for making me laugh at the most improbable times. To the Department of Comparative Literature, especially Ed Ahearn, Susan Bernstein, Karen Newman, and Arnold Weinstein, for giving me the chance. To my very esteemed colleagues at the Pembroke Center, Christy Law Blanchard, Donna Goodnow, Martha Hamblett, Kay Warren, and Debbie Weinstein.

Thank you to my dazzling daughter, Sophie Tesson, who has lived with “mama’s discutation” literally her whole life. I am so very grateful for your understanding and am in awe of your exemplary good judgment.

Thank you to Emmanuel Tesson, who never seemed to doubt and whose steadfast support and willingness to help buttressed me when I needed it most. To Elizabeth Weed, colleague, mentor, and dear friend, who has stepped in for me in many hours of need, teaching, editing, and grandmothering: you have gone far beyond the call of duty, friendship, and family. To Jim Nellis, who has kept the kettle aboil these past months, tending and encouraging me with love and gentleness. To Susan Bernstein, interlocuteuse extraordinaire, who always knew just what to say to nudge me toward reasonableness, thank you for your wisdom and the friendship that means so much to me. To Matthew Munich, who has understood the spectre of failure I have lived with for so unbelievably long, thank you for keeping the faith. To Ana Carmen Martínez-Ortiz Carcheri, student, editor, companion, friend, thank you again and again for having my back. To my mother, Arlene Davis, for showing me what it means to overcome, and my father, Cal Davis, who has never failed to stand behind me and support me in whatever ways you could. To Fred Jodry, for reminding me that patterns, colors, textures, sounds, smells, and good food are necessary correlatives to words on paper, words on-screen, words typed sometimes one screaming letter at a time. To Roderick Michener, from the very, very beginning; Jennifer Eyl for your delightful camaraderie; Kate Horning, for never failing to show up; Alisa Hartz, bff. To Kate Josephson, insightful and unwavering; Marianne Goldsmith, who steered me out of a trench in 1993; John Seery, teacher, mentor, mensch; and Boswell, whose oblivious and faithful companionship during some very long nights reminded me that the life of the mind is not the be-all end- all (“Where’s the ball?!”).

With humility and unending sorrow, I dedicate these pages to the memory of Dicle Koğacioğlu and Renata Čumusová

vii

Table of Contents

Reading by Example in Literature and Theory

Signature Page iii

Curriculum Vitae iv

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction Telling Examples 1

Chapter One Antigone, for Example 23

Chapter Two Sexual Difference: 90 Lawless Examples or Unexemplifiable Law?

Chapter Three A Case for What? Human Rights between the 131 Universal and the Particular

Conclusion Theorizing by Example: 163 The Queer Example of Everything (and Nothing)

Bibliography 173

viii INTRODUCTION: TELLING EXAMPLES

“But perhaps the example trifles with the essence.” --Derrida, Glas

Example 1: A sixteenth-century writer produces a treatise on poetics advising

would-be writers to study the classics in order to learn the rules of the masters and

emulate their arts; readers are similarly exhorted to judge works based on criteria

deduced from past productions deemed masterworks. Example 2: A psychoanalyst works

with a patient, listening to the way the patient recounts her history and describes her

states, to the words she chooses to relate her dreams, watching her gestures, her

expressions, her various modes of communicating, both conscious and unconscious. The

analyst gathers and selects from the myriad of symptoms and constructs a case study, part

narrative, part commentary, to offer up a diagnosis. Example 3: A human rights activist

working on behalf of battered women in Palestine tells the story of a woman she met in the course of her work. She recounts details of injuries, selects and highlights moments in the woman’s experience, to construct of this woman’s horror a narrative designed to expose a problem and appeal to her interlocutors to care and intervene. Example 4: A series of scholars reads a play, each one offering a reading to make a larger point about the law, about ethics, about kinship, or about language. The play comes to stand in for a

1 host of meanings, each interpretation making a claim for the primacy of its hermeneutic

approach. Example 5: A feminist theorist posits that there are only two ways to be a

subject, either as a man or as a woman, and that no one is exempt from this either/or

structure. Another responds by pointing out that many people do not fit into this binary,

arguing on that basis that the relation between sex and subjectivity should be reconceived

in terms not circumscribed by two. Each of these examples illustrates how various

producers of knowledge--the early modern writer, the psychoanalyst, the human rights

activist, the literary scholar, and the feminist theorist--use examples to make larger

points. Without the detailed narrative offered as example, the concept or argument it is

harnessed to demonstrate remains abstract or inapprehensible.

How does theorizing employ the example? When one argues or posits a legal,

moral, or philosophical point, what resort to concrete instantiations emerges? Can a text, any text, be interpreted without conferring on it the status of an example? If the act of literary interpretation is to draw meaning from textual signs, is it possible to perform such an operation without calling the text into the service of formulating a broader,

presumably transferable principle, a principle the example merely instantiates? In such

an operation, is the singularity of the text reduced to a particularity, one particular

instance of a larger generalizable pattern?

According to the OED, an example is “a typical instance; a fact, incident,

quotation, etc., that illustrates, or forms a particular case of, a general principle, rule, state

of things.” If the example is typical and therefore serializable, the exemplar, by contrast,

is defined as “a person or thing which serves as a model for imitation,” that is, “the 2 model, pattern, or original after which something is made; an archetype whether real or ideal.” The exemplar, then, is understood to be paradigmatic and would seem to contain within it some legislative potential. If the status of the exemplar implies necessity, insofar as it appears to embody the very principle it exemplifies, the exemplum, as defined by the OED, would be the denigrated form of the example, one that is dependent and substitutable, indicated by the plurality of its first definition, as exempla: “illustrative stories intended for insertion in sermons [ . . .] in other words, the exemplum was a story which had no independent value.” Current usage often collapses the distinctions among these three definitions, so that the example can suggest the illustration of a general rule; a model or paradigm; or a concretizing and perhaps ornamental supplement, a “mere” rhetorical device.

As a concrete instantiation of an abstract principle, both exemplar and example are designed to make apprehensible through illustration what would otherwise remain elusive or unimaginable. Alexander Gelley offers a useful characterization of the two types of example by referring to Plato’s vertical, paradigmatic model and Aristotle’s horizontal, rhetorical conception of the paradigm. Plato’s paradigm (Gr. paradeigma] was taken up in Latin as the exemplar, a model or standard: “This sense of the exemplar-- as archetype deriving from a transcendent source--continues in later Platonism and medieval theology,” Gelley writes (1). Early modern aesthetics were similarly influenced by this notion of the exemplar, as evidenced by the many treatises exhorting writers, readers, and orators to study Classical rhetorical and poetic models and derive from them

3 rules and criteria by which to produce and judge rhetorical or artistic texts.1 On the other hand, Aristotle’s understanding of the example is, Gelley observes, less metaphysical and more rhetorical, working through induction. If Plato’s conception moves vertically from ideal to “primary exemplar down to multiple instantiations,” Aristotle’s conception moves laterally, from example to example: “Neither from part to whole or from whole to part but from part to part, like to like, when two things fall under the same genus but one is better known than the other” (Aristotle qtd. in Gelley, 1). Yet Aristotle’s part to part refers to a genus, which, though perhaps derived inductively, nonetheless presumably operates as the legislative concept deciding what “like” qualifies as like. As Gelley notes, a part is not a part of something if there is no whole to which to refer it:

“[E]xample, like citation, has no autonomous standing” (2). Conversely, although Plato’s ideal model or standard posits an ontological category against which to measure “mere” imitations, the category or rule remains in the ether of the imagination until it is applied to various specimens or cases. In both instances, there is a relationship of whole to parts, though they work in different directions, Plato typifying what Kant would call teleological causality and Aristotle describing Kant’s mechanical causality. Regardless of the direction, Gelley points out, “The tactic of exemplarity would seem to mingle the singular with the normative, to mark an instance as fated” (2). The instance becomes, as an example, a particular among particulars. “The example is a particular,” Gelley writes, adding, “But it is a particular kind of particular” (1). So what kind of particular is the

1 Boileau, Dryden, Horace, Longinus, Quintilian, and Scaliger are just a few advocates and practioners of imitatio.

4 example? As a part of a whole, Gelley asks, “is it, semiotically, sample or illustration?

Does it work by way of synecdoche (part for whole) or analogy (similitude)?” (3). The

status of the example as representation is at issue here, and as with all questions of

representation, we must ask how it works as a mode of communication, transmission, and

production.

To say of the example that it is illustrative is to suggest its concreteness, its

narrative or potentially narrative quality; to distinguish it from an incident is to say that it

is framed by a concept or principle, which will condition and direct the scope of possible

interpretations, marking it as “fated.” Although the incident is singular, the example is

understood to be a particular instance in a possible series of like instances--“for instance,”

is how we introduce the example. The example is, then, an instantiation of something.

Thus, to qualify as an example, an instance must be both an instantiation of something and one of several possible instantiations.2 But it does not follow that examples are

necessarily substitutable or transposable, or even equivalent. And they are even less so if

they are themselves narratives. The paradox of the example’s invariable exceptionality is

of primary concern to my study. An example is different from what it exemplifies, and it

is different from other examples that exemplify the same thing. Insofar as an example is

narrated, it is not simply a particular pointing to a universal; it cannot be wholly absorbed

by the concept it is invoked to illustrate or commensurable with that concept. As for

2 I am not so sure that this holds for the exemplar, and Gelley is right to ask: “Is the example merely one--a singular, a fruit of circumstance--or the One--a paradigm, a paragon?”

5 narrative, Gelley observes, it “illustrates by way of a different substance, an image or simulated enactment that is analogically related to a proposition or general truth” (3).

The problem is not “merely” formal. That is, to say that an end can be reached by

various means is not to say that the means are inconsequential. In fact, means may and

often do produce ends that are neither determined in advance nor bound by any necessity.

Means escape ends and we find ourselves in the unexpected. Means and ends become

confused. The example understood as a means, then, is not only in a dependent relation;

it is part of an interdependent operation, inflecting or even constituting what it is called

upon to represent. It produces its ends; and it can be an end in itself--which doesn’t

negate its dependence on the principle it exemplifies.

The critical problem central to my