Interpretation and Judgement in Literary Criticism

Nicholas Dames & John Plotz discuss Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study with the book’s author, John Guillory, over at Public Books. This bit, at the beginning, caught my attention:

Nicholas Dames (ND): I’d love to pick up a dyad in the last chapter of the book: between interpretation and judgment. Regarding the professional prestige or importance of interpretation, you say “we [scholars] do not like to acknowledge…that literary artifacts do not need to be interpreted.” Can you say more about that distinction between interpretation and judgment? Or interpretation and understanding?

John Guillory (JG): Interpretation is a relation to texts that we can consider to be very old. In fact, aboriginal. We’re always engaged with texts and particularly complex texts with an effort to understand them. That often requires a complicated procedure. It comes to be known as interpretation.

Interpretation has its own history, but criticism in its origins was not a procedure of interpretation. It was, from its beginnings in the 17th century, all about judgment. And it was only in the 20th century that judgment and interpretation came to converge in a practice, which was the practice of “New Criticism” in the US and “Practical Criticism” in England.

ND: That discarding of judgment, though, John, it feels to me—this is coming out of your analysis, but also just my sense of having been in the profession a while—never quite complete. So judgment becomes the shadow activity or the secret of the discipline. I’m wondering if … You do think, I assume, that there are costs to this, to the severance from judgment?

JG: Yes. I do think that there are costs. There have been costs for us. One of the costs—a number of people are pointing this out now, because we’re in a renaissance of judgment in the discipline. It’s becoming an activity, again, that people are trying to perform and also to make sophisticated.

But the cost of it, we’ve come to realize, is that interpretation is something that isn’t obviously necessary for most readers of literature, as also for consumers of the other arts. It isn’t the case that people encounter novels and plays and poems and feel the need, after those encounters, after those engagements, to say what they think they mean. Literary critics, who started out as principally the ones who showed you how to judge, have gone off in this other direction and become interpreters. They’ve been cut off as a result from the mass readership of literature.

YES! Interpretation is an acquired taste, as it were. It isn’t necessary for the enjoyment of literature. So what is it good for, anyhow? That’s an interesting question, well beyond the scope of this brief note.

John Plotz (JP): This might be a distinction without a difference. Is your understanding that scholars are still implicitly practicing judgment, but only with this super-added layer of interpretation upon it? Or that they’ve literally discarded the judgment?

JG: What I wanted to show was that by the later 1960s, judgment was returning in the mode of, not the criticism of the literary work, but the criticism of society—interpreting literary works in order to arrive at a judgment of society.

What happened was what I call the “reassertion of criticism,” but the reassertion of criticism with this different end, with this different purpose. Some of that judgment redounded back on literary works, so that it was possible for a number of scholars to judge the literary works themselves as morally and politically objectionable. That’s presented us with this perennial problem of, when we do talk about literary works in the context of the criticism of society, what do we want to say about the value of literary works themselves in that context?

Is the value of the literary work its capacity to disclose aspects of society that need to be judged adversely? Or is the value of the literary work its transcendence of those conditions in society that need to be pointed out, condemned, and ultimately be averted?

ND: The way you present it in your book, it’s as if this question of judgment and its place becomes also tied into a social psychology of what a literature professor is. Is it that we repress judgment?

JG: Reviewers have never lost this capacity to make judgments of contemporary work. Of course, that’s what criticism was originally. In the 18th century, when people were writing criticism, they were writing criticism about contemporary work. The assumption always was that if it was ancient, it was good. The problem that we have is that it’s very difficult for us to distinguish between what we do when we judge that, because it’s something that we’re wanting to do more and more of.

And it’s behind that lateral movement of those who were trained in literary study in the academy out into the internet, where the activity mixes some aspects of scholarship with aspects of reviewing.

I don’t think that a paradigm has especially gelled yet, but I do think that’s an interesting new phenomenon. Because prior to this, these two things have just pulled apart. Reviewing is where judgment takes place, and it’s with reference to contemporary work. Scholarship is where interpretation takes place, and it can be contemporary and also historical, but it doesn’t necessarily involve judgment of the work itself. Rather, it involves judgment in the transferred sense of judgment of society, the critique of society. That’s where we went.

FWIW, that's what I'm during with my current writing about Jerry Seinfeld's Unfrosted. I've already offered some judgement. I'm in the process of doing a bit of interpretation to justify that judgement.

There’s much more at the link.

H/t 3QD.

GOAT Literary Critics: Part 2, A discipline is founded (sorta’): Brooks & Warren, Northrop Frye, and S. T. Coleridge

I sent the first post in this series – which, BTW, now has its own tag: GOATLiC (GOAT Literary Critic) – to Tyler Cowen, and he got back with a brief response: “Samuel Johnson?” That unsettled me. I hadn’t even thought of Johnson and neither had the Chatster. What’s worse, though I’ve certainly heard of Johnson, knew about his dictionary and his poetry and that he’d done other stuff, I’d read none of it. I thought about it, took a brief look at his Wikipedia entry, and replied to Tyler: “doesn’t compute.”

As things turned out, that first post became Part 1a in the context of GOAT Literary Critics: Part 1b, Lit Crit Compared to Economics; Aristotle, No. In that post I distinguished between literary culture as a whole and literary criticism as an intellectual discipline, suggesting that the discipline only became possible in the wake of conceptual advances that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries and were brought into focus by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. People have been commenting on literature for as long as literature has existed, but only some of that commentary belongs in the intellectual discipline called literary criticism. Johnson – his poetry and criticism alike – belongs in that larger literary culture but not in the intellectual discipline.

My object in this post is to say a bit about how and why we have the modern institutional discipline of literary criticism. For that we must first turn to Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry (1939), which is not a book of criticism at all. It’s a collection of poems with annotations and exercises intended for use in undergraduate classes. A fourth edition came out in 1976, 37 years later. That cleared the ground for the modern discipline. Then we’re going to look at Northrop Fry’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957, same year as Syntactic Structures and Sputnik), which fenced the land in and tented it over. Then we move back in time to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who established the literary mind as a worthy subject of the deepest kind of intellectual inquiry.

Brooks & Warren: The New Criticism

The study of vernacular literature came late to the academy. If you went to college or university in the 18th and 19th century you could study the Classics, in the original Greek and Latin, but not English language literature. Perhaps a bit here and there, but not until late in the 19th century; but more likely the 20th century. The story is complicated, but in order to make any headway at all I’m simply going to bracket those complications and set them aside. If you’re curious, I suggest that you start with excellent review-essay that Michael Bérubé wrote about Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (2022) by John Guillory.

The current academic discipline centers on the act of interpretation: What do these texts mean? That question is such an obvious one that it may be hard to imagine that it is only after World War II – at least in America, if not in England (another one of those pesky complications) – that interpretation became the sun around which the discipline orbited. Prior to that the academic discipline was mostly about philology and literary history. Those disciplines had their great figures, and they deserve consideration for a place in the More Inclusive GOATLiC Hall of Fame, but I’ll let someone else argue the cases for them.

Before considering Brooks & Warrant, the duo, Let’s take quick looks at them separately. Robert Penn Warren is one of the most decorated people in American letters, having won two Pulitzer’s for poetry and one for fiction, making him the only one to win both Pulitzers. Moreover, his prize-winning novel, All the King’s Men, was a best seller that has been twice made into a movie and once into an opera. He also wrote a variety of nonfiction, including critical essays and books. In 2005 U. S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in his honor (16 years after his death in 1989). Cleanth Brooks is primarily an academic literary critic. The Well Wrought Urn is the best-known of his dozen or so books of criticism. He was one of most important expounders of close-reading. While Warren’s public honors over shadow Brooks’s, both men might be plausible individual candidates for the GOATLiC list. But I think the case for the duo is more interesting and perhaps even stronger as well.

The movement Brooks & Warren championed was known as the New Criticism, a term that’s with us even today. The means by which they advanced this movement was, first of all, a reader, Understanding Poetry, first published in 1939. That first edition is 680 pages long, including table of contents and index. Most of those pages are given over to the poems themselves. After a short list of acknowledgements the book opens with “Letter to the Teacher”:

This book has been conceived on the assumption that if poetry is worth teaching at all it is worth teaching as poetry. The temptation to make a substitute for the poem as the object of study is usually overpowering. The substitutes are various, but the most common ones are:

1. Paraphrase of logical and narrative content,
2. Study of biographical and historical material.
3. Inspirational and didactic interpretation.

Of course, paraphrase may be necessary as a preliminary step in the reading of a poem, and a study of the biographical and historical background may do much to clarify interpretation; but these things should be considered as means and not as ends.

That second point is aimed directly at the existing academic discipline, which was based on literary history and on philology. The justification was a doctrine called formalism, which held that, by virtue of their form, literary texts carried their meaning(s) within themselves, free of biographical and historical context. The paragraph continues:

And though one may consider a poem as an instance of historical or ethical documentation, the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains finally the object for study. Moreover, even if the interest us in the poem as a historical or ethical document, there is a prior consideration: one must grasp the poem as a literary construct before it can offer any real illumination of a document.

The innovation of Understanding Poetry was simply to present the texts to students so they could learn to grapple and conjure with them as just that, literary constructs. Nothing more, nothing less, the texts themselves. THAT’s the innovation. It’s so transparent that one hardly notices it as such. I assume that a significant portion of Brooks’ methodological and theoretical writing was a defense and elaboration of the idea of the text AS literary construct, an act of mind in and of itself. Much of the academic discipline of literary criticism has been puzzling over the issue ever since.

This doctrine and the attendant New Critical practice became particularly important after World War II, when college enrollments ballooned with soldiers going to college on the G.I. Bill and with a more general increase in enrollments. What are we going to teach these students, and how? A literary criticism based on history and philology required you to wade through a lot of secondary material before you arrive at the texts themselves. It’s one thing to ask that of professionals, not to mention graduate students, but it’s unreasonable to put freshmen and sophomores through all that. If, however, the meaning of literary texts resides within the texts themselves, then you don’t need the apparatus. You can go directly to the texts.

As a result, we now live in a world where anyone with a college education can talk about the meaning of texts, texts of all kinds including movies, TV, advertising and whatever else is floating about, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which it has become. It is also a world in which meaning has become the focus of academic literary criticism, which it hadn‘t been beforehand. Now that ordinary readers can trade in meanings, some are prone to be disgruntled when they hear that the academics are trading in meanings they can’t understand. And so, among other things, we have the annual sport of the New York Times poking fun at the titles of papers offered at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association.

When one reads a book or a poem, one participates in literary culture. Reading book reviews in the daily newspaper or articles on literary topics in The New Yorker, that’s another way of participating in literary culture. But, for better or worse, those secondary activities are not intellectually comparable to engaging in the secondary activity academic literary criticism. [Secondary in relation to reading literary texts themselves.] Similarly, we all engage in economic activity of various kinds. We may also read news articles on economic topics in the daily newspaper, not to mention more sophisticated venues such as The Economist and The New Yorker (here I’m thinking, for example, of the work of Ken Auletta, who wrote Three Blind Mice, a book about the three major TV networks of the previous century). But engaging in economic activity is no more doing economics than engaging in literary activity is doing academic literary criticism.

Moreover, the fact that the economist Tyler Cowen can casually offer one-two-and-three-line “Straussian readings” of various texts by the handful at his blog may owe at least at much, if not more, to Brooks & Warren than to Leo Strauss himself (a philosopher, not an economist). That such readings – few of which seem tethered to the specific doctrines promulgated by Strauss – can be intelligibly offered on a blog read by thousands of people, few of whom are professional academics of any kind, piggybacks on the reading practice advocated and promulgated by Brooks and Warren. The reading practice they furthered through Understanding Poetry, and a later companion, Understanding Fiction, thus has echoes far beyond literary criticism.

Understanding Poetry rested on the assumption that interpretive reading requires little beyond will, curiosity, and a few modest pointers. No special learning required. If that is so, then is any special learning required of those who use Understanding Poetry as a vehicle for teaching inquiring young minds the craft of reading? One of the faculty, Bill Sylvester, at SUNY Buffalo where I got my degree, was fond of saying that “interpretations were invariant under transformations of sophistication.” What’s the source of that sophistication?

The profession has spent the last 75 years developing answer upon answer and still more answers to that question as schools of literary theory and method have dashed madly after one another like lemmings to the sea. Whatever the particular critical lens, it is always used to reveal a close reading. In the ideal case, when the reading is ever so close, it disappears, leaving only the text.

I digress.

Northrop Frye: How can we have literary criticism?

Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic who first gained notice through a book about Blake and who published on a wide range of topics in English literature, but also the Bible. But he is best-known for The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Despite the title, the Anatomy reads as much if not more like an anatomy of literature than of criticism. In that he had the audacity to see the study of literature as a (unified) whole. To be sure, the literature he surveyed is almost exclusively Western (though there is a mention of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana), but still, that’s quite a lot to take-in at one gulp. As far as I know, no one else has attempted it, save perhaps Harold Bloom.

A brief note on the history of academic literary criticism

John Guillory writes about his recent book, Professing Criticism, in The Chronical of Higher Education (Feb. 13, 2023), ‘We Cannot All Be Edward Said.’ He is responding to a review by Bruce Robbins. He positions his response thus:

The source of our disagreement is the place of “criticism” (or “critique”) in professional literary study. Let me begin with two premises I think we both accept:

1. The criticism of society is a legitimate practice. (This is stated frequently in the book.)

2. The professional study of literature is a legitimate practice. (This too is stated frequently, and reiterated emphatically in the last section of the conclusion.)

My argument puts these two premises into relation by rejecting the identity of literary study with the criticism of society. However, if the relation between literary study and the criticism of society is not one of identity, neither is it one of mutual exclusion. A misunderstanding on this point will reduce my argument to the notion that I want politics to be wrung out of literary study, like dirty water from a sponge. Some readers will probably insist on this misunderstanding, no matter how often it’s contradicted in the pages of my book. Is it possible to assert a distinction between literary criticism and the criticism of society without implying their mutual exclusion?

If that’s what interests you, then this post is not for you, as that argument, however interesting it may or may not be, is not what got my attention.

What got my attention are some brief remarks about the history of academic literary criticism. Continuing on from the previous paragraph:

My strategy is to approach this question historically. I point out that literary study and criticism have two different histories. Literary study takes many forms dating from antiquity (rhetoric, philology, belles-lettres), culminating in the early 20th century as a professionalized university discipline: the study of the history of literature. This discipline employed the same archival research methods found in the adjacent discipline of history. Criticism, on the other hand, is a genre of writing that began in the early modern period as a new mode of self-authorized judgment. Criticism was first addressed to literary works, but it later developed into the judgment or “critique” of society itself. Criticism was institutionalized in the new organs of journalism that established the public sphere of early modernity; importantly, it required no academic credentials.

As a self-authorized discourse of the periodical domain, criticism continues into the present day, though as a smaller enterprise relative to the size and complexity of our mass-mediated public sphere. In the interwar period of the 20th century, the two histories I describe converged. Criticism became “professionalized” as a practice in the university, at first opposed to literary study in its scholarly form. Only then did it develop its own disciplinary practice, which we know today as a version of “interpretation.” The unstable coexistence of literary history and literary criticism in departments of literature was stabilized when these two discourses were fused in what I call the “postwar settlement,” the form of our discipline that unites period specialization (scholarship) with the interpretive essay (criticism).

The postwar settlement unraveled in the 1960s (not that it was ever really secure), resulting in the reassertion of criticism. The New Critics, we recall, succeeded in professionalizing criticism ultimately by sacrificing the criticism of society to techniques of interpretation that competed successfully with the research protocols of the scholars. Their early (largely reactionary) attempt to equate literary criticism with the criticism of society disappeared with the postwar settlement. The Newer Critics after the 1960s achieved what the old New Critics could not: the professionalization of the criticism of society. Criticism in this sense was henceforth to be the charge of professional literary critics; they, after all, could claim “criticism” as the name of their discipline.

That’s where things stood when I entered Johns Hopkins as a freshman in 1965. The profession had not quite reached the point of thinking about itself as a professionalized criticism of society, but it was inching its way in that direction. On the one hand, deconstruction would jettison any pretensions that the disciplines had to science-like objectivity; that’s what sunk Guillory’s “postwar settlement.” On the other hand, the cumulative effect of the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, feminism and others, created a climate in wide ranging criticism of society was/seemed called for and an audience interested in it.

However much those things may have interested me – they did, and still do – my interest in literature was of another kind. And so I gravitated toward cognitive science and computational linguistics.

And so forth.

Literary criticism is for just what exactly? On the occasion of his retirement, a boffin speaks.

Jennifer Schuessler, What Is Literary Criticism For?, NYTimes, Feb. 3, 2023. This is a consideration – not a review, exactly – of John Guillory's new book, Professing Criticism.

The humanities are in crisis, bla bla bla, including, perhaps most particularly, literary criticism, yada yada yada. [Actually, it's in the nature of the beast.] For the last half century, literary critics have acted like it's for changing the world. Guillory doesn't think so.

“Consider it a red alert, a cautionary tale, a fire bell in the night and an omen and admonition about how professionalization, specialization and bureaucratization can damage a field of study, even as it has benefited those with tenure,” Mintz wrote.

In an interview last month in a Brooklyn coffee shop, Guillory hardly seemed like an academic Paul Revere. Genial and slightly rumpled, he was also a far cry from stereotypical notions of the master critic, whether glowering in emo portraits à la Derrida or lobbing gleefully Zizekian outrage bombs.

Guillory’s style may be muted, but his message is blunt. He wants scholars to get real and acknowledge the field’s genuine strengths, which don’t necessarily lie in direct response to today’s political issues.

He got his degree at Yale in the mid-70s, when Yale was the home of deconstructive criticism. A thousand critical flowers bloomed throughout the land, "deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, semiotics and reader-response theory." His first book, Cultural Capital (1993), took on the infamous canon wars:

His argument questioned the premises shared by both sides. The canon, he argued, wasn’t an impregnable monument, but an imaginary construct that had always been contested. And the big question wasn’t which groups were excluded or included, but the university’s role in the unequal creation and transmission of “cultural capital.”

“It threw a really interesting wrench into the whole canon debate,” said Michael Bérubé, a professor of English at Penn State and a former president of the Modern Language Association. The book’s arguments and detached tone weren’t universally appreciated, he noted, including by those who saw Guillory as dismissive of marginalized groups’ desires to see themselves in the canon. But 30 years later, Bérubé said, “it looks like a much more foundational text.”

And now, "Guillory does not posit some lost golden age of literary criticism" in professing criticism. He notes:

In the long history of academic criticism, “professional reading defines itself over and against lay reading,” Guillory said. “I feel very strongly you have to have both things. But how do you make connections between the two?”

Indeed.

One of the crucial effects of higher education, according to Guillory, is the creation of “the professional profile” — the habits, attitudes, vocabulary and mores broadly shared by the professional-managerial class.

No matter what you study or where, he said, “you come out the other end and you belong to a college demographic, which is a real thing” — and an important component of the electorate.

Literary study “has a contribution to make” to that process, which happens “unintentionally and collectively in the university,” he said. But it can’t take most of the credit (or blame).

And?

But he also said the profession needs to face up to a broader reality: the declining cultural capital of literature in a wildly expanded media universe.

That's something the late J. Hillis Miller has noted – FWIW, he was on the faculty at Yale when Guillory was there.

Not that he sees only gloom and doom. He’s encouraged by the growing ranks of younger scholars who straddle the line between academia and journalism, via magazines like the The Point and The Drift.

Oh. 

He's now retired and has been reading Tristram Shandy:

“To be frank, I thought it was going to be boring,” he said of the novel, which consists almost entirely of digressions. “But it’s wonderful.”

That's nice. 

But, you know, it's not worth an article in The New York Freakin' Times.

Marking time: The SOTA in academic literary criticism

John Guillory and Jessica Swoboda, Legitimation Crisis: A conversation with John Guillory, The Point, May 31, 2022.

The opening:

Jessica Swoboda: How do critics create their own public?

John Guillory: The only way to understand the “public sphere” today is by doing some historical reconstruction. Because what we’re really talking about with the history of literary criticism is an enormous shift between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries away from a media world at the center of which were the genres of periodical publication. The critics who wrote in that media sphere wrote about literature, but they were not professionalized in the way academics in the twentieth century became. This meant that they could write about pretty much anything, and they did. They won their audiences by the quality and force of their writing rather than by virtue of professional credentials. At the same time, these periodicals also published works of literature, serialized novels and other forms of literary writing, so people got a lot of exposure to literature through these periodicals, which had very large audiences. The connection between literature and public-sphere criticism was very close.

Starting in the twentieth century, with a system of disciplines and highly specialized professionals, there is no longer a media system that can give literary scholars access to a wide audience, not even among readers of literature. There are only a few figures, like David Bromwich, who have successfully crossed over from literature to political commentary, thanks to the few “reviews” surviving in today’s print ecosystem. And so, even though we have access to the infinite virtual space of the internet, we continue to write for other scholars, for our students in graduate seminars and for some undergraduates who might be reading literary criticism, but we’re writing within a professional culture of communication. And the norms of that professional culture are determined in most respects by its institutional locus, the university. These venues limit the scope of communication in a way that the big journals and quarterlies of the nineteenth century did not.

Now what has happened in consequence of this fact, paradoxically, is that, as literary scholars have become more restricted to professional modes of communication, the measure of their autonomy has actually increased. The trade-off between autonomy and access to the public sphere is a subject that demands much more analysis than I can offer in this interview. I’m talking here about structural features of academic discourse. When scholars adhere to these limits, communicate in their own non-public language, the content of their writing is correspondingly less restricted.

The closing:

JS: How would you describe the current state of literary criticism?

JG: That’s actually my concern in the greater part of Professing Criticism. But let me give an abbreviated account. I think that what we have at the moment is a kind of “normal science” version of literary criticism—very little that is really paradigm-changing or transformative. And yet the scholarly standard is high, probably higher than when I was in graduate school. We have a significant number of really good books every year in literary criticism. But the problem for me is that there’s tremendous redundancy in argument. The quality of work isn’t really the issue. Neither is the quality of the minds at work. The issue is that the same argument is basically being applied to many different literary artifacts.

So there seems to be to be something slowing down in the discipline, resisting real innovation, despite the proliferation of new fields and subfields. I would even say that this proliferation is itself evidence of exhaustion, a fecundity that is topical but leaves the underlying structure of literary argument the same. When we look more closely at these new fields, at the arguments about individual works, the logic, the rhetorical strategies, seem identical.

In my book, I make a case for seeing 21st-century literary criticism as confronted with a “legitimation crisis.” But this crisis has more to do with our sense of the ultimate aims of criticism, which have been conceived so universally as political, than with the actual methods by which we approach works of literature. These methods are much less different from each other than we think they are. This is why, for me, it’s rather what scholars have to say about a moment in a novel or a poem that still has the capacity to surprise; at that scale, interesting things can still happen.

My sense is that the discipline is waiting for some theoretical or conceptual revolution that would open up new possibilities, that would make literary criticism look very different at a macro scale. I don’t know for sure what that would be, but I suspect that it would have to entail a resituating of literature both in the discipline and in the media system, a task that is almost too large to contemplate.

There is much of interest in-between.

On the question of what "would open up new possibilities," computational criticism is already doing that for collections of texts over long periods of time, decades and even centuries. Greater attention to form and description, as I've been arguing, would open up new possibilities at the level of individual texts and relationships among them.

Reading: Comprehension vs. Interpretation, a recent article in NLH [has the discipline become completely self-absorbed?]

Everyone knows perfectly well that interpretation is a kind of intellectual act that requires special training and practice. But the profession of academic literary criticism has long insisted using one term – “to read” – to cover both that special skill and the ordinary act of reading for comprehension thereby eliding the distinction between the two. I’ve long been bothered by that practice – and have blogged about it fairly often – and fear the profession does so in part to mystify its own activities. Here’s a recent article that ‘interrogates’ that distinction:

Elaine Auyoung, “What We Mean by Reading,” New Literary History, Volume 51, Number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 93-114.

Abstract: How do critics get from reading a literary text to producing “a reading” of it? This article considers major close readings of Jane Austen's Emma to bring out conventions that tacitly shape our discipline, such as privileging certain reading goals and domains of background knowledge over others, pursuing interpretive inferences that have significant explanatory power regardless of their probability, and valuing the discovery of new patterns for organizing textual information as an end in itself. Most notably, when we refer to what literary critics do as reading, we obscure how much their interpretations are shaped by unspoken conventions involved in the writing of literary criticism. Chief among these conventions is a taste for achieving coherence, which not only plays a role in the causal claims we make, but also gives rise to an underrecognized form of aesthetic pleasure.

Does this signal the emergence of a healthy awareness of disciplinary practice? We’ll see.

From the beginning (p. 93):

But even as popular attitudes toward reading contribute cultural capital to our professional labor, we have sought to establish a radical yet largely tacit discontinuity between our reading practices and those of nonspecialists, including members of other academic disciplines, who may think that they’re reading but can’t really read at all.

For instance, when John Guillory singles out interpretation as the particular reading skill that incoming college students lack, he asserts that in order to acquire this skill students need to undergo nothing short of “a conceptual break” with the practice of reading as comprehension. With this break, he continues, “reading begins anew. The text that was thought to be comprehended remains still to be understood.”

She goes on to observe (p. 94):

What’s more, the difficulty of talking about how one gets from reading to producing a reading impedes our efforts to identify methodological continuities and discontinuities between seemingly opposed critical approaches, such as reparative reading and paranoid reading.

That is, this practice gets in the way of understanding what we’re up to in various versions of specialized practice.

Auyoung aims to identify some of the implicit conventions involved in interpretive activity (pp. 94-95):

These conventions, which have not yet been subject to serious disciplinary reflection, include:

1) privileging certain reading goals and domains of background knowledge over others, in part because of longstanding beliefs about what (and who) has disciplinary value and prestige;
2) pursuing interpretive inferences that have significant explanatory power regardless of their probability, which in turn accounts for why our discipline has few methods for assessing the likelihood of these inferences and applies those methods inconsistently; and
3) valuing the discovery of new patterns for organizing textual information as an end in itself, even when we are unpersuaded by accompanying claims about why these new ordering principles are significant.

Most notably, when we refer to what literary critics do as reading, we obscure how much their interpretations are shaped by unspoken conventions involved in writing literary criticism. Chief among these conventions is an interest in achieving coherence. Far from capturing the messiness and multiplicity of their actual experiences of reading, critics construct coherent arguments by presenting an extremely limited selection of the inferences they have made during the reading process. (Even critics in search of incoherence or inconsistency within a text tend to present their findings in a consistent and coherent way.)

More specifically (p. 95):

Whereas Stanley Fish describes skilled reading as “a matter of knowing how to produce” meaning, I revisit the procedures of literary critics in a more systematic way, tracing the relationship between what readers bring to a text, what they do with the text, and what it seems to tell them. To do so, I will single out four components of reading that are fundamental both to comprehending a text and to making an interpretive claim about it:

1) pursuing specific reading goals,
 2) attending to certain parts of a text,
 3) relying on specific domains of background knowledge, and 4) making a variety of inferences.

To show how readers and critics arrive at different readings of a single text by pursuing different reading goals, attending to different parts of the text, and making inferences based on different domains of background knowledge, I will compare multiple approaches to Jane Austen’s Emma.

I’ve decided to skip her discussion of those approaches for the moment. I’ve not read the book and am thinking of reading it before reading her comments.

In her discussion Auyoung notes the importance of inference (110):

Inference making is the activity that makes reading such a ubiquitous metaphor for interpreting texts, people, palms, tea leaves, and other sign systems. Whereas lay readers make inferences about what the text of Emma tells them is happening in the story, literary critics make inferences about the relationship between certain passages in the novel and other texts and contexts, often with the aid of specialized background knowledge. The inferences they make typically have to do either with what Emma can tell us about something outside of itself or with what new contextual information can tell us about Emma. As I have noted, however, our discipline lacks a meta-discourse for assessing the inferences we make. A major next step in our methodological reflections would be to develop a systematic method for drawing sharper distinctions between inferences that seem likely, lovely, or both. To be sure, literary critics would be the first to differentiate the production of interpretive meaning from the pursuit of empirical truth. Yet our interpretations frequently include causal claims about how literary texts influence or are influenced by historical, cultural, and social conditions in the actual world.

From her concluding paragraph (p. 112):

Our unacknowledged investment in the personal experience of discovering forms of coherence at the scale of individual texts might even account for disciplinary resistance to interpretive methods that sideline this process. It is this personal experience of discovery that Roland Barthes has in mind when he refers to rereading a text as “play,” this form of aesthetic pleasure that leads Fish to justify his interpretive activity on the grounds that he enjoys it. What if we began to acknowledge and account for the cognitive processes and pleasures bound up with our methodological commitments? What if we began to examine the extent to which our taste for the loveliness of an explanation has a hand in shaping the causal claims we make? We would need to step back from writing about the new forms of coherence we have discovered in literary texts and learn more about the source of our desire to look for them in the first place.

It sounds like the major benefit of this inquiry is disciplinary self-knowledge. That’s all well and good, but it would nice if the discipline learned something that would make criticism valuable to those who do not themselves practice it. What knowledge do literary critics bring to the world?

That question was central to the methodological debates of the 1960s and 1970s. What kind of knowledge of the world does literary criticism produce and what is the justification for that knowledge? Literature was thought to embody truths about the world and the critic’s job was to identify, examine, and clarify those truths. Has the discipline become completely self-absorbed so that Auyoung seems to think its justification is to be found in the pleasure it provides to critics?

The literary canon wars of the 1990s

If this was true in the 90s, imagine how much truer it becomes with English major enrollments in free-fall.

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) October 9, 2020

The passage is from John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, U Chicago, 2013.

Star struck and broken down 3: The case of Paul de Man

Paul de Man was one of the most important "stars" in the firmament of literary Theory. He was born in Belgium in 1919 and immigrated to New York City in 1948. He became a first generation deconstuctionist in the late 1960s and went to Yale in 1970 where he became one of the so-called "Yale Mafia" of deconstructive critics (Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman were the other three). He died in 1983. In the late 80s, however, a cache of his wartime journalism was discovered, and some of the articles were anti-Semitic. The result was a scandal in the academy. Did this history undermine the validity of his later academic work?

The tweet below, brought to my attention by Amardeep Singh, refers to John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (2013), which I have not read. Note the second sentence: "That scandal reveals...the fact that the charismatic persona of the master theorist is the vehicle for the dissemination of theory; otherwise the status of deconstructive theory could not rise or fall with the reputation of its master." How many literary critics were "stars" in that sense? Is literary criticism, as a discipline, particularly vulnerable to this charisma, to use Guillory's term?

Hey-we-should-all-be-reading-Cultural-Capital-again-take-5343404359 pic.twitter.com/Ybd2mvWXoI

— Merve Emre (@mervatim) August 24, 2018

ADDENDUM (2.21.24): Harold Bloom certainly was a charismatic critical star. Would any variety of criticism fall is some intellectual scandal became attached to him comparable to what happened with de Man? I think not. What does that imply about his status within the academy?