Performing Literariness: Literature in the Event
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PERFORMING LITERARINESS: LITERATURE IN THE EVENT IN SOUTH AFRICA AND THE UNITED STATES by MAX JAMES ANTHONY RAYNEARD A DISSERTATION Presented to the Comparative Literature Program and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2011 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Max James Anthony Rayneard Title: Performing Literariness: Literature in the Event in South Africa and the United States This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Comparative Literature Program by: Linda Kintz Chairperson Suzanne Clark Member Michael Hames-Garcia Member John Schmor Outside Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research and Innovation/Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded September 2011 ii © 2011 Max James Anthony Rayneard iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Max James Anthony Rayneard Doctor of Philosophy Comparative Literature Program September 2011 Title: Performing Literariness: Literature in the Event in South Africa and the United States Approved: _______________________________________________ Linda Kintz In this dissertation “literariness” is defined not merely as a quality of form by which texts are evaluated as literary, but as an immanent and critical sensibility by which reading, writing, speaking, learning, and teaching subjects within the literary humanities engage language in its immediate aesthetic (and thus also historical and ethical) aspect. This reorientation seeks to address the literary academy’s overwhelming archival focus, which risks eliding literary endeavor as an embodied undertaking that inevitably reflects the historical contingency of its enactment. Literary endeavor in higher education is thus understood as a performance by which subjects enact not only the effect of literary texts upon themselves but also the contingencies of their socio-economic, national, cultural, and personal contexts. Subjects’ responses to literature are seen as implicit identity claims that, inevitably constituted of biases, can be evaluated through the lens of post- positivist realism in terms of their ethical and pragmatic usefulness. Framing this reoriented literariness in terms of its enactment in higher education literature classrooms, this dissertation addresses its pedagogical, methodological, and personal implications. The events of the South African Truth and Reconciliation iv Commission (TRC) and the literature arising from it serve as a pivotal case study. The TRC Hearings, publically broadcast and pervasive in the national discourse of the time, enacted a scenario in which South Africans confronted the implications for personal and national identities of apartheid’s racial abuses. The dissertation demonstrates through close reading and anecdotal evidence how J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull formally reactivate this scenario in the subject in the event of reading, while surveys of critical responses to these texts show how readers often resisted the texts’ destabilizing effects. A critical account of the process that resulted in Telling, Eugene – a stage production in which U.S. military veterans tell their stories to their civilian communities – analyzes the idea of literariness in the U.S. and assesses its potential for socially engaged literary praxis. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Max James Anthony Rayneard GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, 2011, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2002, Rhodes University Bachelor of Arts (Honours), English, 2000, Rhodes University Bachelor of Arts, English and Philosophy, 1999. Rhodes University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Post-apartheid South African Literature African Literature Performance Studies Postcolonialism Literary Pedagogy U.S. Militarism PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2006-2011. Lecturer, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2002-2004. GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Beall Doctoral Research Fellowship, University of Oregon, Summer 2010 Beall Foundation Research Scholarship, University of Oregon, Fall 2008 Fulbright Scholarship, 2004-2006 Kendall Bursary, Rhodes University, 1999 PUBLICATIONS: Rayneard, Max. “‘Let Me Tell You the Story of How:’ U.S. Military Veterans, Performing Memory, and the Telling Project” Theatre Annual: A Journal of Performance Studies. 64, (2011): Pending. vi Rayneard, Max and Wei, Jonathan. “from Telling,” The Iowa Review 38. 3 (Winter 2008/2009): 171-193. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest love and thanks go to my family, John, Miep, Claire, and Lieke. Your absence has been my greatest sacrifice. Thank you, Elisabet. I love you. Gratitude goes to Professor Linda Kintz, my advisor, without whose sage counsel, sympathetic ear, and endless patience, I would not have completed this dissertation. Thank you, also, Professor John Schmor, for your wise work on Telling, Eugene: my right shoulder and I are grateful. To the other two members of my committee, Professors Suzanne Clark and Michael Hames-Garcia, thank you. I may have been largely absent from your offices, but your voices rang as clearly as I wrote as they did in your inspirational classrooms. To Jonathan Wei, thank you for inviting me to be a part of Telling, Eugene and Telling, Portland OR. It has been one of the honors of my life. More to come. Thank you, also, to all the other participants – U.S. Military veterans and their family members – for entrusting me with your stories. Many thanks must go the University of Oregon Program of Comparative Literature faculty, especially Professor Lisa Freinkel, for providing a nurturing intellectual home. Cynthia Stockwell, let’s go birding together in upstate NY. To my fellow graduate students and colleagues, thank you for all the beers, and proof-reads, and laughs. And thank you for resisting the urge to roll your eyes as I ranted abrasively. To my students, you taught me. This dissertation was supported in part by a Fulbright Scholarship. viii To Peter Pompelmoes, de Gentrijders van Overloon, and the other two Peer Gynts. You will always be home to me. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS LITERARINESS? ............................................. 1 II. BETWEEN BRICOLEURS AND BATTERED BODIES: LESSONS FROM THE SOUTH AFRICAN TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION.................................................................................................... 33 Plurality, Singularity, and Criticism ........................................................... 33 “New South African-ness”.......................................................................... 42 The Report................................................................................................... 46 The Hearings............................................................................................... 51 Between the Hearings and The Report........................................................ 55 III. THE SERPENT’S TONGUE: LETTERED SOLIPSISM AND DISGRACE..... 61 IV. IN DEFENSE OF LITERARINESS: COUNTRY OF MY SKULL AND WHAT THE ACADEMICS SAY ....................................................................... 94 An Addendum: Subsequent Language........................................................ 130 V. “I’M STILL ME”: U.S. MILITARY VETERANS, PERFORMING MEMORY, AND THE TELLING PROJECT .................................................... 147 The Problem................................................................................................ 149 The Process ................................................................................................. 154 The Genre.................................................................................................... 158 The Performance......................................................................................... 167 The Afterwords ........................................................................................... 172 VI. CONCLUSION: RISKING LITERARINESS IN THE CLASSROOM .............. 181 REFERENCES CITED ............................................................................................... 202 x CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS LITERARINESS? In this dissertation, I undertake a defense of literary scholarship in higher education. I do so because I believe that literature and literary studies changes people in useful ways. It challenges them to engage the complicated networks with which they live with deeper insight and in more ethically self-reflexive ways. The conviction that literary scholarship “betters” its practitioners is, of course, neither unusual among literary scholars, nor historically un-contentious. It is implicit to the nineteenth century beginnings of the formal discipline in both the Commonwealth and U.S. Empires. In Professing Literature, Gerald Graff describes this as the uncomfortable “union of Arnoldian Humanism and scientific research which gave birth to academic literary studies” (Graff 3). Summarily, Arnold’s Humanism claimed benevolent secularism (even as Arnold deploys evangelical religion as an analogical model), and sought to spread “perfection” or “sweetness and light” through the best that had been thought and written in English culture. Culture was Arnold’s prescription