Yet more notes about the state of literary criticism, with an eye toward a somewhat different conceptual ontology

Yes, I know, I’ve been over this ground many times before, nor will this (ever) be the last. In particular, I’m thinking of this as following my recent post, Innovation, stagnation, and the construction of ideas and conceptual systems (Nov. 18, 2018). The field is obviously stagnant and that post is about the necessity for new conceptual foundations in the face of such stagnation. Literary criticism is in need of new conceptual foundations.

The lay of the current land

Since World War II interpretation has been the central activity of academic literary criticism and so-called close reading has been the method. The basic assumptions run something like this:

• Literary texts have hidden meanings.
• Those meanings are to be construed as assertions about the world.
• Depending on one’s preferences those assertions may be assertions about facts or expressions of value (critique).
• Again depending on conceptual preferences these meanings may be construed as being wholly ‘internal’ to the text (formalism) or as being dependent upon historical context (historicism).

Critical theory arose in the late 1960s and 1970s as a set of rubrics under which to construe those facts or critiques. New historicist methods simply ask the critic to place those assertions in historical context while the various identity based methods provide specific rubrics governing these assertions.

While the cognitive and evolutionary critical movements of the 1990s set themselves in opposition to ‘theory’, they nonetheless operate under the same general set of motivating assumptions. They simply offer different terms in which to couch statements about the factual implications of literary texts. The same holds for Rita Felski’s critique of critique.

It’s not clear to me what the neo-descriptivists are up to, mainly because they seem to spend more time theorizing description that actually doing it. While they recognize a distinction between description and interpretation it is not clear to me that they are interested in actually describing texts as opposed to describing, you know, the world (that happens to be represented in texts).

And then we have digital/computational criticism, ‘distant reading’, whatever you call it. As far as I can tell they pretty much accept those same basic assumptions, but they just want to do something else. Yes, that something else embodies a different and more specialized conception of language from the one operative in standard criticism, but they don’t quite focus on it. Rather, they treat it as a complex apparatus that’s ‘bolted onto the side’ of the standard critical approach.

And so we have the problem of ‘meaning’ vs. ‘distant reading’. The standard critic notices all the strange apparatus and doesn’t know what to make of it, but suspects that there’s something deeply wrong there. The digital critic recognizes that it is just different, and it is because it is JUST different, it is no threat. Why not? Because, you know, it’s just bolted onto the side.

How do we think of language?

Getting back to fundamentals, the standard view of criticism is committed a the commonsense view of language centered on the common sense notion of the word. The central thing about words is that they have meanings and its those meanings the critic is interested in. Yes, the words can taken over into a specialized conceptual domain and be analyzed into a signifier and a signfied, but that’s at best a secondary notion. When Geoffrey Hartman observes “modern ‘rithmatics’—semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism—are not the solution” (The Fate of Reading, p. 272), he is rejecting a specialized conception of language. He is, in effect, rejecting the concept of “NaCl” in favor of that of “salt” [1].

And that, I suspect, is why the kind of descriptive activity that is some obvious and straightforward to me appears to be at best awkward and secondary to ordinary literary critics. It isn’t centered on, focused on, meaning. That is to say, it doesn’t take the common sense notion of a word at face value. Rather, I am operating in a world, using a conceptual ontology, where the distinction between signifier and signified is central, not peripheral. When I am describing formal features of texts, I am focusing, not on the order of signifieds, but on the order of signifiers.

What interests literary critics about signifiers is that they can bear multiple meanings, hence the interest in complexity and ambiguity (cf. Empson). What interests me about signifiers is that they can be ordered and that order then ‘drives’ our reception and construal of signifieds. It represents, dare I say it? a Copernican shift in conceptual and analytic perspective. They look at words and are interested in meaning; I look at signs and am interested in formal arrangements of signifiers.

We’re operating in different conceptual worlds, different ways of construing the same phenomena.

Reference

[1] See this post, Ontology in Perception and Thought, New Savanna, September 27, 2014, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/05/ontology-in-perception-and-thought.html. For a more complete discussion, see William Benzon, Ontology of Common Sense, Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, Philosophia Verlag, 1991, pp. 159-161, https://www.academia.edu/28723042/Ontology_of_Common_Sense.