Harold Bloom and Hillis Miller on the Demise of Literary Studies

Harold Bloom (1928-2021) and Hillis Miller (1930-2019) are of the same intellectual generation. They were colleagues at Yale for a few years in the 1970s and were even associated together as members of the "gang of four" deconstructivists. Bloom, however, went his own way and came to reject Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, and Semioticians as belonging to what he came to call the School of Resentment.

Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, 1994, p. 519:

I do not believe that literary studies as such have a future, but this does not mean that literary criticism will die. As a branch of literature, criticism will survive, but probably not in our teaching institutions. The study of Western literature will also continue, but on the much more modest scale of our current Classics de­partments. What are now called "Departments of English" will be renamed departments of "Cultural Studies" where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens. Major, once-elitist universities and colleges will still offer a few courses in Shakespeare, Milton, and their peers, but these will be taught by departments of three or four scholars, equivalent to teachers of ancient Greek and Latin. This development hardly need be deplored; only a few handfuls of students now enter Yale with an authentic passion for reading. You cannot teach someone to love great poetry if they come to you without such love. How can you teach solitude? Real reading is a lonely activity and does not teach anyone to become a better citizen. Perhaps the ages of reading–Aristocratic, Democratic, Chaotic–now reach termi­nus, and the reborn Theocratic era will be almost wholly an oral and visual culture.

J. Hillis Miller, My Fifty Years in the Profession, ADE Bulletin, No. 133, 2003, p. 65:

In the fifty years since I joined the Johns Hopkins English department, we have gradually, and now with increasing rapidity, moved out of the print age into the age of electronic media. Radio, cinema, television, DVDs, MP3 music, and the Internet now play more and more the role literature once played as the chief interpellator of citizens’ ethos and values. During’s literary subjectivity is becoming rarer and rarer among our citizens. They go to movies or watch television. That is what makes them what they are, not reading Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Dickens or Henry James, much less Donne or Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery. I am sure hundreds or thousands of people have seen TV versions of novels by Austen, Dickens, or James for every person who has read the books. One reason that university administrators have stood by and allowed English departments to dismantle themselves is that they, no doubt unconsciously, feel that it does not matter so much any longer what these departments do.

From the other direction, the changes I have named in English departments—the New Criticism; the rise of theory; the development of cultural studies, global English studies, film studies, studies of popular culture, and so on—can be seen as spontaneous attempts to find again the social utility that is being lost for the study of canonical works of English literature.

GOAT Literary Critics: Part 3.2, Derrida deconstructs the signs while Lévi-Strauss tracks the system of myth

In the previous post, René Girard prepares the way for the French invasion, I discussed René Girard and introduced the 1966 structuralism symposium at Johns Hopkins. In this post I want to discuss Claude Lévi-Strauss, the guiding spirit of that symposium. and Jacques Derrida, the enfant terrible who upended things. As the most prominent proponent of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss was invited to the symposium, but was unable to attended. Derrida had not been invited, but was brought in as a last-minute replacement for anthropologist Luc de Heusch, who was unable to attend. Derrida then proceeded to deconstruct, his own coinage, structuralism. While it was clear to the attendees that Derrida’s paper was deeply significant, it took a while for the significance to reveal itself. Structuralism was over, to be replaced by post-structuralism, deconstruction, as we will see in the next segment, a host of thousands.

Note: Early in GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? tyler Cowen informs us that he writes as a fan. He concludes that admission in this way (p. 14): “I’m going to start with Friedman, precisely because he irritates more people than do some of those other names. I met him twice, and you are going to hear about that too.” I take that as his way of acknowledging that he has skin in the game. While I don’t think of myself as a fan of any of these thinkers – though perhaps Lévi-Strauss, just a little – I do have skin in this game. I’ve added a brief appendix, Skin in the game, listing three publications as evidence.

Jacques Derrida: Différence and deconstruction

I want to ease into Derrida by starting with a passage from an interview J. Hillis Miller gave to Jeffrey Williams. Miller got his degree from Harvard in 1952, which, with its commitment to literary history, was very traditional, and had not yet found its way to the New Criticism of Brooks & Warren and others. He was a professor of English at Johns Hopkins at the time of the 1966 structuralism symposium where he met both Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. A couple of years later he joined them at Yale where, along with Geoffrey Hartman, they constituted the so-called “Gang of Four” or the “Hermeneutic Mafia” in the American academy.

The interview appeared in minnesota review (71-71, 2009: 25-46). The passage of interest begins with a reference referencing Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye (whom we’ve seen before):

I learned a lot from myth criticism [referring to Northrup Frye], especially the way little details in a Shakespeare play can link up to indicate an “underthought” of reference to some myth or other. It was something I had learned in a different way from Burke. Burke came to Harvard when I was a graduate student and gave a lecture about indexing. What he was talking about was how you read. I had never heard anybody talk about this. He said what you do is notice things that recur in the text, though perhaps in some unostentatious way. If something appears four or five times in the same text, you think it's probably important. That leads you on a kind of hermeneutical circle: you ask questions, you come back to the text and get some answers, and you go around, and pretty soon you may have a reading.

An example of that would be the color red in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. You say, “There sure are a lot of red things in the novel.” You see the red inside Tess’s mouth at some point, and the red sign that she sees painted on a barn. It says, “Thou shalt not commit [adultery],” as she has done, or, strictly speaking, fornication. Then you say, “Hmm, what do you do with all these red things?” That leads you back to the text. I learned that from Burke, but also from myth criticism. I got a lot from Frye’s critical work, too. Frye, like Burke, pays attention to details of the text that recur...

That’s a lesson in method, about noticing patterns in texts. That’s critical to the close reading enjoyed by the New Critics. Without those patterns you have nothing around which to build an interpretation.

Now Derrida:

Derrida is, among other things, a very great literary critic—essays on Shakespeare, on Blanchot's récits, on Joyce, and many others, even remarks on Proust in a seminar. Derrida is a literary critic of very great distinction.

Why? Because he noticed patterns. Referring to a passage in Remembrance of Things Past:

What Derrida did that I never would have thought of was to notice that the whole passage is based on words in pris: apprendre, comprendre, prendre. Those words are perfectly translatable, but lose their play on pris—I understood: j'ai compris. Derrida noticed these words and their recurrence in a way that helps you to understand the way the passage is put together and the meaning it has. Derrida was a genius in doing that sort of reading. That's why Derrida for me is even more important for his way of reading than for his invention of big concepts like différance.

That’s a very telling remark, but it makes sense coming from a literary critic.

As for Derrida’s big concepts, I’m going to stick to his most famous essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” from the 1966 structuralism symposium, which is one of the few pieces by Derrida that I have studied closely, albeit some years ago. Consider this passage (from p. 256 in the conference proceedings):

In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute archè. The theme of this decentering could be followed throughout the “Overture” to his last book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall simply remark on a few key points.

1) From the very start, Lévi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he employs in the book as the “reference-myth” does not merit this name and this treatment. The name is specious and the use of the myth improper.

What does he mean? The Raw and the Cooked is the first volume in Lévi-Strauss’s four-volume study of Latin American myth. Once the throat-clearing preliminaries are over, he begins by designating one particular myth as the reference myth. He analyzes that myth, then introduces another, and another, and another, through a couple hundred myths, analyzing them in relation to one another. Derrida’s point is that the so-called reference point seems to be an arbitrary choice and not privileged beyond the fact that it’s where we start. It has no characteristics to justify that status. On the next page (257) Derrida will note: “There is no unity or absolute source of the myth.... Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center.”

In the subsequent discussion Derrida will remark in response to Jean Hypolite (p. 267):

How to define structure? Structure should be centered. But this center can be either thought, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play” . . . and which receives—and this is what we call history—a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds [signifiés] finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.

And there we have it, some of the themes with which Derrida will “deconstruct” wide swathes of the existing intellectual order in the human sciences (les Sciences de l’Homme).

Derrida also offered a method of reading, so-called deconstruction, which involves reading a text against itself in a way that is best learned through practice rather than by formula. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a reasonable article about it:

To deconstruct is to take a text apart along the structural “fault lines” created by the ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations or contradictions that make the text possible. For example, in “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida deconstructs Socrates’ criticism of the written word, arguing that it not only suffers from internal inconsistencies because of the analogy Socrates himself makes between memory and writing, but also stands in stark contrast to the fact that his ideas come to us only through the written word he disparaged (D 61-171). The double movement here is one of tracing this tension in Plato’s text, and in the traditional reading of that text, while at the same time acknowledging the fundamental ways in which our understanding of the world is dependent on Socrates’ attitude toward the written word.

Between his deconstructive method and his general themes – decentering the subject, the instability and free play of signs, no totalizing views – Derrida opened up the conceptual space for what would come to be called Theory, with a capital “T.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss: Structuralism, Language, and Mind

La Pensée Sauvage

Before Derrida, however, there was the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the intellectual movement he came to exemplify, structuralism. Lévi-Strauss’s early essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” was an important reference point in the structuralist movement. He published it in the American Journal of Folklore in 1955, two years after Watson and Crick published the double-helix model of DNA in Nature, a year before the Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence, and two years before Frye published Anatomy of Criticism and Chomsky published Syntactic Structures. He chose the Oedipus myth as his paradigmatic example for the pragmatic reasons that it is well-known and so required no introductory apparatus. The best-known version of the myth is in the tragedy by Sophocles and, while Lévi-Strauss did not use that text, or any other specific text for that matter, that convenient circumstance brought Lévi-Strauss’s argument within the purview of the literary.

As an example, consider this diagram from that 1955 essay (p. 440):

Lévi-Strauss argued that the trickster myths of North America are structured by a diminishing series of terms, starting with the stark opposition of Life and Death, and then proceeding through mediating terms (Agriculture, Hunting, Warfare) to a point where the original opposition has become minimized in the mediating position that Carrion-eating animals occupy between Herbivorous animals (on the Life side) and Beasts of prey (on the Death side).

The fact is, however, that the specifics of that demonstration, and of his further myth analysis, had little impact on literary criticism. What got through was his extensive use of binary opposition as an analytic tool, which is hardly exclusive to either linguistics, anthropology, or structuralism, and a certain conceptual ambience he brought to this work. Literary critics were not interested in how Lévi-Strauss analyzed myths; rather, they were interested in his various gnomic remarks about that project, which as his assertion that his analysis of the myths is also a retelling of them.

Let us consider Eugenio Donato’s 1975 review of all four volumes of Mythologiques in Diacritics (vol. 5, no. 3, p. 2): “Lévi-Strauss and the Protocols of Distance.” He tells us that “what follows, then, is not an attempt to describe or evaluate Lévi-Strauss’ contributions to specific areas as much as to question some of the implicit or stated assumptions which Lévi-Strauss himself relates to the ultimate significance of his work.” He goes on to assert, sounding a Derridian theme, that “despite Lévi-Strauss’ repeated protestations to the contrary, the anthropologist is not completely absent from his enterprise.” That is to say, just as the hapless literary critics cannot separate themselves from the texts they interpret – giving the lie to Northrop Frye’s assertion of the “scientific” nature of the critical enterprise – so the anthropologist is hopelessly enmeshed in the societies he would interrogate and interpret.

Before moving on, though, let’s pause for a moment and think about the fact that Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist. As such he had done field work in the Amazon. He knew, from that experience – relatively meager though it may have been by classic British standards – how those myths were embedded in the lives of the people who told them. The animals mentioned in those myths were animals that were important in the lives of the people who held those myths. The geographical references in those myths were to the land where those people lived. The personal kinship relationships among the mythic characters reflect those in the people who tell and listen to these stories. Lévi-Strauss points these things out in his discussions of the myths. Thus those myths are not disembodied stories, though it is easy to read them that way. They are vehicles for abstract conceptualization of the physical and social world. They reveal the minds of the people who tell them, if only indirectly.

With that in mind let us move ahead some forty years to an essay that Alan Liu published in 2013, “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities”, PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423). By digital humanities Liu means the use of computers in analyzing historical and literary texts, a practice that had matured considerably since the 1970s, when Donato was writing. Liu observes (pp. 418-419):

It is not accidental, I can now reveal, that at the beginning of this essay I alluded to Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology. Structuralism is a midpoint on the long modern path toward understanding the world as system (e.g., as modes of production; Weberian bureaucracy; Saussurean language; mass, media, and corporate society; neoliberalism; and so on) that has forced the progressive side of the humanities to split off from earlier humanities of the human spirit (Geist) and human self to adopt a worldview in which, as Hayles says, “large-scale multicausal events are caused by confluences that include a multitude of forces . . . many of which are nonhuman.” This is the backdrop against which we can see how the meaning problem in the digital humanities registers today’s general crisis of the meaningfulness of the humanities. The general crisis is that humanistic meaning, with its residual yearnings for spirit, humanity, and self—or, as we now say, identity and subjectivity—must compete in the world system with social, economic, science-engineering, workplace, and popular-culture knowledges that do not necessarily value meaning or, even more threatening, value meaning but frame it systemically in ways that alienate or co-opt humanistic meaning.

Liu’s passage picks up on themes from Derrida and other post-structuralist thinkers. The human subject is gone, replaced by a vast crossroads of impersonal systems.

None more impersonal than the computer, which is lurking in the background. Remember, Lévi-Strauss wrote his seminal essay on myth at roughly the same time a group of computer scientists hatched artificial intelligence at Dartmouth. Two decades later a computer scientist and computational linguist from the University of Wisconsin, Sheldon Kline, journeyed to Paris to develop a computer model based in part on Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth, Modelling Propp and Lévi-Strauss in a Meta-symbolic Simulation System (1974). There, in the small, is a system of signs without a subject. At roughly the same time, the semiotician, Umberto Eco, proposed something he called “Model Q” in his A Theory of Semiotics (1976). The “Q” stands for Quillian, Ross Quillian, a computer scientist who had proposed an early semantic network model, “Semantic Memory,” in a collection edited by Marvin Minsky in 1968, Semantic Information Processing.

To J. Hillis Miller, 2019: On the State of Literary Criticism

A new working paper, title above, abstract, table of contents, and introduction below. Download at:

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/40466672/To_J._Hillis_Miller_2019_On_the_State_of_Literary_Criticism

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Abstract: J. Hillis Miller is one of the premier literary critics in the American academy over the last half-century. He is a first-generation deconstructive critic. I studied with him in the 1960s at Johns Hopkins and then went a different way, toward cognitive science. This working paper consists three documents: 1) A letter to the editor (of PMLA) responding to Miller’s 1986 President’s address, 2) a long open letter from 2015 in which I discuss structuralism, cognitive science, and computational criticism, and 3) a chronology sketching out parallel developments in literary theory and cognitive science from the 1950s through the end of the century.

Contents

J. Hillis Miller, at Johns Hopkins and beyond 3
Response to the President’s Address, 1986: On the Demise of Deconstruction 4
Paths Not Taken: An Open Letter to J. Hillis Miller 5
A Fork in the Road 5
Heart of Darkness 6
Apocalypse Now 8
Myth and Form 9
Literary Culture and History 10
The Land Before Us 14
Appendix: A Parallel Chronology of Literary Theory and Cognitive Science 15
 
J. Hillis Miller, at Johns Hopkins and beyond

In my first semester at Johns Hopkins I took a course on the modern British novel. It was taught by J. Hillis Miller. I can’t say that I remember much about him, after all, 1966 was awhile ago. I do remember that the course was taught in one of those amphitheater style lecture halls, a rather old one. And I remember three of the texts we read: E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (a revelation), Henry James, The Ambassadors (a snore), Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (???) – there must have been a half dozen more, but I don’t recall what they were.

I remember a bit more about the graduate seminar I audited in the fall of 1969. By that time, of course, I’d become acclimated to literary criticism at Hopkins, having taken courses with D. C. Allen, Don Howard, and Earl Wasserman in English and a handful of courses with Dick Macksey in the Humanities Center. This was three years after the infamous 1966 structuralism conference and things were hoppin’. The course was the Victorian novel. I specifically remember reading Trollop (The Last Chronicle of Barset) and Dickens (Bleak House). I also remember the graduate students asking him about going to the MLA convention. Miller offered some dismissive remarks about the intellectual proceedings but suggested the “meatmeet market” aspect had some value (for them). Given that Hopkins was in the vanguard of work in critical theory Miller’s attitude was natural.

A decade-and-a-half later, 1986, Miller was giving the annual Presidential Address at the MLA convention: “The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base.” Over the course of a decade and a half Miller had gone from the outskirts of the profession to the apex, from being an outsider storming the ramparts to commanding the heights and noting that the revolution, alas, seems to have disintegrated.

His theme was the eclipse of deconstruction in favor of a turn toward “toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context.” I don’t recall whether or not I attended the MLA convention that year – I would have been job hunting – but I didn’t hear the address. I did read it, though, when it was published in PMLA.

By that time I was effectively out of the profession. I had been unable to make it through/over structuralism to deconstruction. Back in the early 1970s that was of little significance. Structuralism didn’t know that it was dead and Prof. Miller was happy to write a letter of recommendation for me based on my master’s thesis, which was a structuralist analysis of “Kubla Khan”. That letter, and a couple of others (certainly one from Dick Macksey), took me to the English Department at SUNY Buffalo. There I went over the river and through the woods to the Linguistics Department where I went from structuralism to computational linguistics under the tutelage of David Hays.

That was, and is, an intellectually plausible move. But professionally, my goose was cooked, though it took a few years for me to figure that out. The intellectual openness that had characterized the 1960s and 1970s was gone and the profession was shrink-wrapping itself around “history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context,” to repeat Miller’s phrase.

I was a bit surprised hear him assert that deconstruction was waning; (faux?) deconstruction seemed to be all over the place. If it was on the way out, though, that was fine by me. I wrote a letter to PMLA in which I offered a generational-succession account of deconstruction’s demise. That letter is reproduced below.

The idea is simple. Critics of Miller’s generation had to work to earn their rebellion from mid-century critical routines. Subsequent generations simply learned rebellion from that initial generation, though they may have donned different hats or masks to assert their difference/différance. But the thrill was gone, hence deconstruction’s demise.

And so it goes. Miller went his way and I went mine. He’s retired and I’m still scrounging about in the hinterlands and conducting the occasional guerilla raid on the folk in that gritty city on the hill.

Back in 2015 I decided to address at open letter to Miller. I’d done this several times before (and since). While some people have replied to such open letters (Steven Pinker, Willard McCarty) and that is certainly welcome, it isn’t necessary. That isn’t why I undertake the exercise, which is fundamentally a rhetorical device for thinking things through in a fairly specific way.

The open litter affords me a particular audience. It’s much easier to address an audience with known interests than to address the General and Undefined Other. While I don’t know Miller’s criticism in any detail, I have read several recent pieces and a couple of interviews where he talks about the profession in general historical terms. I have a sense of the intellectual milieu. That, plus resonance from ancient days at Hopkins, was enough for me. Addressing this letter to Miller was a way for me to think about my work in relation to (what I perceived to be some of) his interests/that milieu.

I open the letter, Paths Not Taken – which I’ve reproduced below, by recalling my structuralist account of “Kubla Khan”, and obseving that the profession had gone one way, while I had gone another. Then I reprise my recent work on Heart of Darkness, a text Miller knows well (and had written about more than once), which was in some way reminiscent of my work on “Kubla Khan” over 40 years ago. From there I move to Apocalypse Now, which, after all, had been based on Heart of Darkness. That’s not the only reason I chose that work. Miller has several times mentioned that he thinks the profession has to address itself to other media, that the literary no longer has the status it had in the mid twentieth century. Thus it made sense for me to write about a film, one with literary resonance. From there I wander back into classic structuralist territory, Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglass, and come out of into computational criticism. I look at Matt Jockers’s Macroanalysis, charts and all (after all, did not Lévi-Strauss use charts?) and manage to close on Edward Said (believe it or not).

Toto Prof. Miller, we’re not in Kansas Baltimore/New Haven/Irvine anymore.

But that’s where there document ends, figuratively speaking.

As I noted up top I took many courses with Dick Macksey when I was at Hopkins. For each author we studied he’d hand out a chronology of important events. I conclude this working paper with a brief chronology showing the parallel course of the cognitive sciences and literary theory. The chronology begins in the 1950s – Chomsky, Frye, and Sputnik in 1957 – and ends at the turn of the millennium. Miller’s Presidential address to the MLA runs parallel with a panel discussion, “The Dark Ages of AI”, held at the 1984 meeting of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

Paths Not Taken and the Land Before Us: An Open Letter to J. Hillis Miller

From three years ago (Jan 2015).

I’ve been thinking about writing a guide to my work in literary and cultural criticism, but there’s so much of it that that has seemed to be no simple task. I could list the pieces, but what use is that? And in any event, you can find that on my most recent CV. But I’ve decided to take a step in that direction by addressing an open letter to one of my teachers back at Johns Hopkins, J. Hillis Miller.

That gives me a fairly specific audience. It’s much easier to address a specific audience, with known interests, than to address the General and Undefined Other. I certainly don’t know Miller’s criticism in any detail, but I’ve read several recent pieces and interviews where he talks about the profession in general historical terms. That, plus resonance from ancient days at Hopkins, is enough for me.

For those of you in literary studies, J. Hillis Miller needs no introduction. He is one of the premier English language critics of the last half-century. For those in other disciplines, Miller’s career started at a time when interpreting texts was just becoming accepted in academic literary criticism and he became central in the use of philosophy, broadly understood, in that undertaking.

* * * * *

Dear Prof. Miller:

I’ve been mulling over the wonderful profile of Earl Wasserman that was recently published in the Hopkins Magazine. That got me thinking about the state of the profession, the transit from then to now, and where are we going anyhow? Wasserman, of course, was your colleague and he was my teacher. As it was the "structuralist moment" that ultimately captured my imagination, Wasserman was not so central as Dick Macksey, but he was still very important to me, in part through the exemplary force of his intellectual engagement. I also audited one of your graduate courses (as I recall, Carol Jacobs was a student in that course). I believe you even wrote a graduate school recommendation for me.

The profession used the structuralist moment to go in one direction and I used it to go in a rather different one. On the chance that you might be curious about where I’ve ended up I thought I would write you a letter. FWIW (an abbreviation for a phrase that titled one of the great protest songs of the 60s, “For What It’s Worth”) the open letter is a form I find congenial, having addressed letters to Steven Pinker, Alan Liu, and Willard McCarty.

A Fork in the Road

For the profession the structuralist moment rather quickly gave way to deconstruction, post-structuralism, cultural studies, and various identity-based criticisms, all of which somehow became snarled in a ball that became “Theory.” For me, however, structuralism gave way to cognitive science and that’s what I grafted to literary study at SUNY Buffalo. That English department was as wondrous in its own way as the Hopkins department was in a somewhat different way. One of the small wonders is that it granted me a degree despite the fact that no one in the department was deeply involved with cognitive science (I got that in the Linguistics Department, from a polymath named David Hays).

The profession, alas, was not ready for cognitive science at that time. By the time the profession began coming around to it in the mid-1990s I had come to believe that I had misjudged the significance of cognitive science. As important and interesting as those theories and models were (and still are) I decided that cognitive science had a different message, one that echoes an older one, a Wassermanian message: stick to the text.

It was the text of “Kubla Khan” that sent me to cognitive science in the first place and now cognitive science has sent me back, not simply to “Kubla Khan,” but to any and all texts. They all need to be looked at closely, not necessarily in a New Critical or a phenomenological, or a narratological, or a deconstructive way, but closely, more closely than ever before. I’m told that the kids these days call it surface reading.

Though I’ve been publishing in the formal literature off and on, perhaps your best route into what I’ve discovered would be through a series of informal working papers I’ve recently put online. I’ve spent quite a bit of time blogging over the past several years and, in particular, have specialized in “long-form” posts, posts running 2000 words or more. When I’ve accumulated a set of such posts on one topic I combine them into a single document and then make it available online for downloading.

Such working papers are more coherent than private notes, but not so polished as formal papers. The scholarly apparatus–references, discussions of other work–is a bit thin. And they’re a bit repetitious, for which I will not apologize as skipping over things is easy enough to do.

I’ve selected five working papers:

1. Heart of Darkness: Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis on Several Scales (2011, 48 pp.): https://www.academia.edu/8132174/Heart_of_Darkness_Qualitative_and_Quantitative_Analysis_on_Several_Scales
2. Apocalypse Now: Working Papers (2011, 51 pp.): https://www.academia.edu/7866632/Myth_From_Lévi-Strauss_and_Douglas_to_Conrad_and_Coppola
3. Myth: From Lévi-Strauss and Douglas to Conrad and Coppola (2013, 12 pp.): https://www.academia.edu/7866632/Myth_From_Lévi-Strauss_and_Douglas_to_Conrad_and_Coppola
4. Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology (2014, 59 pp): https://www.academia.edu/8529105/Ring_Composition_Some_Notes_on_a_Particular_Literary_Morphology
5. Reading Macroanalysis: Notes on the Evolution of Nineteenth Century Anglo-American Literary Culture (2014, 100 pp.): https://www.academia.edu/8183111/Reading_Macroanalysis_Notes_on_the_Evolution_of_Nineteenth_Century_Anglo-American_Literary_Culture

You are of course free to examine them in any order, but there is a reason for that particular order. I start with a set of posts on important text that I know you have written about, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Apocalypse Now is a rather different text in a different medium, but nonetheless intimately related with Heart of Darkness as Coppola kept a copy of Heart with him while shooting his film. Those two working papers each in its way harkens back to my structuralist roots, which come to the fore in the next two working papers. The fourth one (on ring composition) also discusses some poems: Dylan Thomas, “Author’s Prologue”, Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”, and Williams, “To a Solitary Disciple”.

The last working paper, and the longest by far, heads out into conceptual territory which I assume, perhaps mistakenly so, will be strange to you, the “distant reading” division of the so-called digital humanities. One of the things I do in that paper, however, is use Matthew Jockers’ large-scale analysis of a corpus of 3300 19th century English-language novels to make a case for the autonomy of the aesthetic realm. That is to say, I use (someone else’s) computational analysis to make a case for human freedom.

I don’t know what your thoughts are on the use of computers in literary study, but I do know that there are many who believe that they are a harbinger of the Apocalypse, which is what an earlier generation of critics thought about deconstruction and the rest. The sky didn’t fall then and it’s not falling now. But there are accommodations to be made, and they are not always easily accomplished.

Heart of Darkness

In some of your remarks about your career you talk about the importance of accidents. Well, I decided to read Heart of Darkness as a consequence of having immersed myself in Apocalypse Now, which we’ll get to in a bit. Once I’d been working on Heart of Darkness for a while I more or less stumbled into making this chart:

Each bar in the chart represents one paragraph in the text (the electronic version available from Project Gutenberg). The bars take the paragraphs in order from first to last, left to right. The length of a bar is proportional to the length of a paragraph. While the lengths vary wildly, there seems to be a shape to the distribution, which I’ve indicated by those red lines.

Is that shape real? If so, what is its significance and how did it come about? Did Conrad intend the text to be that way? Old questions, no?

I didn’t arrive at those questions and that chart through any prior interest in paragraph length. I got there because I’d become interested in one extraordinary paragraph. Until this particular paragraph Kurtz was little more than an enigma attached to a name. This paragraph gives us his history and some of his thoughts about the future. But that’s not what attracted me to it. What attracted me is that the paragraph contains proleptic elements, the only one in the text to do so. At this point in the narrative we’ve not yet arrived at Kurtz’s compound, but that paragraph contains hints of what we’re going to find there. So I was on the trail of a difference between story and plot: Russian Formalism, narratology.

Moreover, this paragraph is framed in an extraordinary way. Just before Marlow speaks this paragraph he tells us that his helmsman got speared and dropped bleeding to the deck. Just after this paragraph Marlow tells us of pushing the dead man off the deck and into the Congo. So Conrad inserts Kurtz’s story into the moments when the helmsman bleeds out on the deck.

What an extraordinary thing to do.

Well, as I was examining that paragraph, I couldn’t help but notice how very long it was. It seemed that it was the longest in the text by far. Since I had a digital text I decided, on a whim, to use MSWord’s count function to count the number words in each paragraph. It was tedious and took awhile – though not even remotely comparable to the tedium of constructing a concordance using 3 by 5 cards – but it was easy enough to do.

Once I’d done it I ran off that chart to see the results. Sure enough, that extraordinary paragraph was the longest one in the text, and by a considerable margin That’s it, at the peak of the pyramid. It was just over 1500 words long while the next two longest paragraphs weren’t even 1200 words long.

Given what’s actually said in that paragraph and its immediate context, I find it hard to believe that its length was an accident. I also find it hard to believe that Conrad was counting words. However, I have no trouble at all believing that he wanted to create some suspense by dropping the helmsman to the deck and then leaving him there while going on a grand digression. Laurence Sterne did that sort of thing some years earlier.

In that chart, it seems to me, we’re looking at the trace of a mental act, a trace we don’t know how to explain. It’s also a trace we don’t know how to convert into meaning through any of the usual conceptual tools. Maybe we need some new tools? Perhaps a different set of questions?

FWIW, I reported that chart to Mark Liberman at Language Log, a group log of linguists, because I wanted to see if linguists had done any work on paragraph length. He went to work on Nostromo and The Golden Bowl, a rather different text by one of Conrad's contemporaries, and reported the results in a post, Markov's Heart of Darkness.  This occasioned a fair bit of discussion about paragraphing.  I found it interesting and concluded, provisionally, that no one knew much about paragraphing.

In one section of that working paper I write a commentary on that paragraph. I quote the paragraph in full and insert observations into the text. I’m not looking for anything deep in those observations. I just note what’s there and establish links to other parts of the text.

Marlow’s tale of his trip up the Congo is, of course, embedded in a frame tale, set on the deck of a yacht in the Thames. If we think of that one very long and very strongly marked paragraph as a tale within the tale, that gives us a tale (Kurtz’s history in that paragraph), within a tale (Marlow’s trip), within a tale (the frame story). On that basis I argue that Heart of Darkness exhibits a loose version of ring-form composition, a topic that made its way into PMLA in 1976, where I noted it and set it aside, and that occupied the late Mary Douglas during the last decade or so of her career. I’d begun corresponding with her after she’d blurbed my book on music (Beethoven’s Anvil) and she asked me whether I had any idea of how the brain would do that. That set me on the trail of ring-composition, but I’ll get to that later.

There’s a good deal more in that working paper–a bit of Latour, some attachment theory (which I learned from Mary Ainsworth at Hopkins), a discussion of Achebe in relation to Ike Turner and Sam Phillips, psychohistory, and whatever else–but I won’t try to summarize it here. Let’s just say it’s an eclectic mix and leave it at that.

Consult the text, the varieties of criticism: remarks from a dialogue between J. Hillis Miller and Zhang Jiang

Zhang Jiang and J. Hillis Miller, Exchange of Letters About Literary Theory Between Zhang Jiang and J. Hillis Miller, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 53, No. 3, 2016, pp. 567-610.

J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emeritus at the University of California at Irvine. Zhang Jiang holds a PhD and is currently professor of literary studies and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The exchange was initiated by Jiang and is interesting throughout. Except for the very last passage, however, I am quoting from Miller as it is his views that interest me. In his first letter Jiang explained how Miller’s work is being received in China. Miller responds (p. 573):

The “various textbooks on my ideas in China” much overstress the presumed negative side of so-called deconstruction. Your sentences say more or less what the public media in the United States and Europe say about so-called deconstruction, which is a complex and by no means unified entity. A little citation from Derrida or de Man or myself or any of hundreds of other scholars, for example Andrzej Warminski or Gayatri Spivak or Barbara Johnson, would be helpful in characterizing deconstruction. Perhaps the Chinese textbooks you mention do make abundant citation. If I am or ever was a “deconstructionist” (which I never was if that means agreeing with the definitions you give from Chinese textbooks), I nevertheless never rejected reason, nor doubted truth (though I see it as often complex and even contradictory when it is a question of the truth of a given literary work), nor would I think of denying all previous criticism, which is often first-rate and helps me greatly in my own readings. I want to do my own readings with an open mind, however, no doubt with help from previous critics, for example without assuming that because Middlemarch is manifestly a good work it is going necessarily to be “unified.” Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. That remains to be seen and shown in a scrupulous “reading.” I can’t tell without reading the text carefully myself and without making citations that support what I say. I think others should do the same. [...] My procedures are “scientific” or a transposition of the scientific methodology I learned when I was for two years a physics major in my first years in undergraduate school at Oberlin College. I want proof for what I say about a given work, and in the case of literary study that means citations from the work, citations that, at least as I read them (I hope correctly), support what I say about the work. “Always go back to the text” is my motto.

Rhetorical readings vs. deconstructive readings (p. 575):

I should these days much prefer to call what I try to do not “deconstructive readings” (because the word deconstruction” is so often presumed to mean what your textbooks or what mass media in the United States say it means), but “rhetorical readings.” I mean by that, special attention to the implications of figurative language, including irony, in any text I am trying to read, teach, or write about.

“Deconstruction” is one of those many terms, such as “algorithm,” that started as a term of art within some intellectual enterprise and then devolved in meaning as it was borrowed from the original context and put to other uses.

The Demise of Deconstruction

Sometime back in 1969 or 1970 I was auditing a graduate seminar taught by J. Hillis Miller, who was still at Johns Hopkins. Somehow the Modern Language Association (the primary professional organization for academic literary critics in the USA) came up and Miller was less than enthusiastic about it, offering some dismissive remarks about the “meet market” aspect of the annual convention. At this time Hopkins was in the vanguard of work in critical theory – you may recall it hosted the (in)famous structuralism conference in 1966 – and Miller’s attitude was natural.

A decade-and-a-half later, 1986, Miller was giving the annual Presidential Address at the MLA convention: “The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base.” His theme was the eclipse of deconstruction in favor of a turn toward “toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context.” I don’t recall whether or not I attended the convention that year – I would have been job hunting – but I didn’t hear the address. I did read it though when it was published in PMLA in 1987.

I was a bit surprised to hear the deconstruction was waning, not so much because it seemed a bit soon, but because it seemed to be all over the place. But if it was on the way out, that was fine by me. I wrote a letter to PMLA in which I offered a generational-succession account of deconstruction’s demise and the letter was published. I reproduce it below: On J. Hillis Miller’s MLA Presidential Address 1986. PMLA. Vol. 103, No. 1, Jan. 1988, p. 57. As for Miller, he has long since reconciled himself to the discipline’s accommodation of other interests while noting that the term “deconstruction” has become somewhat degraded in popular usage (see my various posts on Miller).

* * * * *

To the Editor:

I was fascinated by J. Hillis Miller’s “Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base” (102 [1987]: 281-91). Miller suggests that “the resistance to theory” is one factor in the “almost universal turn away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such” (283). I want to suggest another factor, one rooted in the very nature of the process by which ideas spread from their originators to others.

Let us consider deconstruction. Much of its rhetorical force comes from its immediate intellectual tension with the Western metaphysics it criticizes. First-generation deconstructionists, such as Miller, reached intellectual maturity fully within Western metaphysics. For Miller and his peers, deconstruction is thus something they arrived at after other philosophical commitments, such as phenomenology, fell apart. For these critics deconstruction has the strength and necessity that comes from the struggle they endured to create it.

The situation is quite different for those of us who first encountered deconstruction in graduate, or undergraduate, school. For us deconstruction has been just one intellectual option among others. When we learned deconstruction we of course learned of the crisis in Western metaphysics. For them, the crisis has been and is an immediate fact of their intellectual experience. For us, our knowledge of the crisis is, in Platonic fashion, but a copy of the original crisis.

Thus deconstruction can never be as compelling to us as it is to its originators. Our intellectual world is, by virtue of their effort, significantly different from theirs. Within this difference, many of us see deconstruction primarily as a great leveler. The distinction between the world and its representations retreats behind an infinite repression of signs. All texts become vessels for containing contradictions in Western metaphysics. Just as all cats appear gray in the dark, so all texts appear the same under deconstruction.

In short, to those young enough to be removed from the immediate crisis, the boring sameness of deconstruction’s results can easily become more compelling than its logical rigor or its sense of intellectual urgency. The social process of creating and disseminating knowledge moves inevitably toward routinization. Ideas that taxed the full powers of the best thinkers of one generation become the routine intellectual property of ordinary thinkers in succeeding generations. Deconstruction is so tied to the passing moment of its intellectual necessity that its forces weakens as its accomplishments become routine. That, as much as resistence to theory, is why younger critics have turned from language-centered theory, such as deconstruction.

I am not entirely happy with this situation. I think that we really are in trouble, that we need to establish new intellectual frameworks. But I am not at all sure that deconstruction has succeeded in doing much more than turning our deep intellectual problems into a rhetorical device called “the crisis in Western metaphysics.” The move “toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context” may well be theoretically naïve; it may even spring, in part, from “the resistance to theory.” But I don’t think that deconstruction’s repeated encapsulation of intellectual crisis is rich enough to overcome that resistance.

William Benzon

Troy, New York

* * * * *

You can download the letter at my Academia.edu site.

For the Historical Record: Cog Sci and Lit Theory, A Chronology

Another reprint from The Valve, though slightly revised. I'm bumping this to the top of the queue in view of this interesting post in which Scott Enderle meditates on loose conjunctions between perceptrons, post-structuralist thought, and data mining.

Back in the ancient days of the Theory's Empire event at The Valve I contributed a comment paralleling the rise of Theory with that of cognitive science. That parallel seems - at least to me - of general interest. So I decided to dig it out from that conversation and present it here, in lightly edited form. The parallel I present does not reflect extensive scholarship on my part, no digging in the historical archives, etc. Rather, it is an off-the-top-of-my-head sketch of the multifaceted intellectual milieu in which I have lived much of my intellectual life.

I take 1957 as a basic reference point. That's when Northrop Frye published his Anatomy and that's when Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures. 1957 is also when the Russians launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to circle the globe. The Cold War was in full swing at that time and Sputnik triggered off a deep wave of tech anxiety and tech envy in America. One consequence was more federal money going into the university system and a move to get more high school students into college. So we see an expansion of college and university enrollments through the 60s and an expansion of the professorate to accommodate. Cognitive science (especially its AI side) and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Theory rode in on this wave. By the time the federal money began contracting in the early 70s an initial generation of cognitivists and Theorists was becoming tenured in, and others were in the graduate school and junior faculty pipe-line. Of course, the colleges and universities couldn't simply halt the expansion once the money began to dry up. These things have inertia.

We may take cognitive science for granted now, but the fact is that there are precious few cognitive science departments. There are some, but mostly we've got interdisciplinary programs pulling faculty from various departments. These programs grant PhDs by proxy; you get your degree in a traditional department but are entitled to wear a cog sci gold seal on your forehead. As Jerry Fodor remarked somewhere (I forget where) in the last year or three, most cognitive psychologists don't practice cognitive science. They do something else, something that most likely was in place before cognitive science came on the scene.

Some Notes on Ethical Criticism, with Commentary on J. Hillis Miller and Charlie Altieri

Most of my work in literary studies, whether focused on the analysis of texts or on theory and method, has been concerned with achieving objective knowledge. It has long been clear to me that that excludes much of what literary critics do. Moreover it seems to me that many critics are motivated to study literature precisely because they seek a kind of knowledge that is not, in principle, objective.

What, then, of this other knowledge and this other quest? Is it simply to be discarded as, well, um, err, superstition or some such, comparable to astrology or alchemy? I think not.

For one thing, while my work has come to focus on the possibility of objective knowledge, that is not what I was after when I first became interested in literary study as an undergraduate. Nor, for that matter, does it exhaust my interest in literary study. That Other, whatever it is, still draws me. It’s just not the center of my attention.

That Other I will call ethical criticism, while the search for objective knowledge of literary phenomena, that I am calling naturalist criticism. I’ve thought a great deal about naturalist criticism and have well articulated thoughts about it. My thinking about ethical criticism is more primitive.

The Interpretive Matrix

While interpretation has been the name of the critical game for the last half century or more, it seems to me that the work done under the aegis of interpretation sometimes leans toward naturalist criticism and is at other times ethical in force. I think that, going forward, the profession has to distinguish the two. That is to say, I regard interpretation (as it was taught to me) as the matrix from which both naturalist and ethical criticism are emerging.

Just as the distinction between the color blue and the color green is not a sharp one, so the distinction between naturalist and ethical criticism is not sharp. Yet, even as there are colors that could be green or blue, there are also colors that are unambiguously one or the other. So, I suspect, it is with literary investigations. Some will be clearly either naturalist or ethical in kind, but some will partake of both. These distinctions will have to worked out in practice.

In the post that follows I begin by offering a few words in definition of ethical criticism. Then I offer light commentary on two articles by somewhat different critics, Charles Altieri and J. Hillis Miller. I have chosen these two because 1) they ARE different; 2) I have studied with both of them. The second qualification is, in a sense, irrelevant, a matter of mere personal history. But there are so very many critics I could have chosen that the personal connection is something I can invoke in making this choice. Though I’ve not seen either man in decades, I nonetheless have a sense of the mind beyond the words. I conclude by considering the necessity of ethical criticism in this, the 21st Century, CE.

Why ‘Ethical’?

When I talk of ethical criticism I don’t mean it in the narrow sense of moralizing, though I have no reason to exclude that either. I’m thinking of it in the sense of ethos, a way of life. Ethical criticism is concerned with how we live, now and in the future.

Ethical criticism necessarily encompasses aesthetics. Put a bit crudely, it is ethics when lived out in the world, it is aesthetics when expressed in a text. Our response to a text is a matter of aesthetics, but the projection of that response onto the world engages ethics.

As one touchstone text I offer this passage from J. Hillis Miller ([1] p. 63):

We need to make every effort to defend, in changed circumstances, the tradition that makes the humanities in the university the place especially charged with the combination of Bildung and Wissenschaft, ethical education and pure knowledge.

J. Hillis Miller on the Profession: “Literature is … made out of words”

Another working paper. Title above, information below.

Download fron Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/15230852/J._Hillis_Miller_on_the_Profession_Literature_is_made_out_of_words_

* * * * *

Abstract: In three recent pieces, one article and two interviews, J. Hilis Miller looks back over the five decades of his career, affirms the continuing importance of ethical education in literary studies, but also the need to literary studies to change as other media take the role that writing once played. Critics must find patterns in texts and explicate them.

Contents

Introduction: “Literature is made of words”

J. Hillis Miller: Bildung and Wissenschaft

The Early Years

Kids These Days

How to Notice Things in Texts

J. Hillis Miller on Burke and Derrida

Scott Eric Kaufman on Freud

Neural Weather (Slight Return)

Escape from Flat Earth: J. Hillis Miller and the evolution of a critic’s mind

Flat Earth

J. Hillis Miller: English Lit as Postcolonial Artifact

Critical Escape Velocity

Strangeness

Introduction: “Literature is made of words”

During my first semester at Johns Hopkins I took a course on the British Novel. I liked to read, loved it, and I had to have some literature to satisfy distribution requirements. So, the British Novel? Why not? It was probably the modern novel, which meant the first half of the 20th Century. Anyhow, that’s how I came to study with J. Hillis Miller in the fall of 1965, a year before the French landed in the (in)famous structuralism conference.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say I was a rube from the country. I wasn’t. I was from the suburbs. Nor was I exactly a rube. But I’d never heard anything like whatever it was that Miller was saying in those lectures. The Secret Agent, A Passage to India – those are the only two books I’m sure were in that course, there must have been others, obviously, but I don’t remember what they were.

That was my introduction to the art of literary interpretation. The year before my high school English teacher had, after class one day, asked me what I thought some poem – Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” perhaps? – meant. Mean, what do you mean what does the poem mean? – I rather doubt that I said that, but it’s what I was thinking. The question baffled me.

And now, at Hopkins, I was listening to lectures given by scholars who weren’t baffled by that question. It’s not that they KNEW what poems and novels meant, or even that they knew what the question meant, all the way through; but they could sure spin interesting and compelling interpretations, “readings” they called them.

It took me several years of learning from such men – they were all men at Hopkins back in those days – before I was comfortable with the process, before I could think for myself rather than be in thrall to the last lecture I’d heard on a text, or the last article. When I went off to Buffalo to get my Ph.D. I had a master’s thesis in hand in which “Kubla Khan” and I had burned through much of what those men had taught me. Even as deconstructive criticism was emerging from the ashes of phenomenology and structuralism I was moving toward the cognitive sciences.

Thus, though J. Hillis Miller had been an important teacher, I’ve never read much of his criticism. It simply hasn’t been relevant to my own pursuits. But I’ve never been dismissive of deconstruction in the way many cognitive literary critics, not to mention the literary Darwinists, have been. It’s not simply that I’d been taught by these men and I knew them to be men of good will, to be sane and not at all frivolous. It’s that I also knew them to be right on one fundamental matter. The meaning of literary texts REALLY is indeterminate, though I prefer the term “elastic.”

Escape from Flat Earth: J. Hillis Miller and the evolution of a critic’s mind

I am, of course, speaking metaphorically, when I talk of a flat Earth, and, for that matter, when I talk of escape as well. By flat Earth I mean a set of default assumptions. In this case, the assumptions about the study of English literature in America that were in place at the beginning of J. Hillis Miller’s career.

As many of you know, Miller is one of the most eminent literary critics in the American academy and played a major role in the development of deconstructive and post-structuralism criticism. But that’s not where he started, obviously. When he started, interpretive criticism was relatively rare in academia, and didn’t exist at Harvard, where he did his graduate work. But let’s set that aside.

What interests me now is simply that there were assumptions in place. As Miller states in this passage from a 2003 article in the ADE Bulletin, “My Fifty Years in the Profession” (PDF):

The discipline of English studies was certainly well in place when I entered graduate school in 1948 and when I began full-time teaching in 1952. In those days we knew what we were doing. All sorts of disciplinary rules, boundaries, and taken-for-granted assumptions were firmly in place. We knew what the canon was, what were the main periods of English literary history, and what constituted good scholarship in the field.... In those days “we” were mostly men, all men in the English department at Hopkins, and all the works we studied, with some exceptions, were by men. American literature was pretty marginal. It all made perfect sense.

Whatever those assumptions were, that’s what I’m calling flat earth.

Flat Earth

As for the flat Earth, no doubt that’s how I thought of the earth when I was a child, if I thought about such things at all. I mean, why would I think otherwise? And if there was no reason to think otherwise, then why would I bother to note that the Earth appeared to be flat? The Earth was just the world around me and it was what it was.

At some point, though, I learned that the Earth was round. I don’t remember just when, or how, or what I learned at the same time. No doubt I learned in some time in primary school. But for all I know, I may have learned it first at home. I know at some point we had a globe, but just when we got it, I don’t know.

My point, though, is that it didn’t make much sense to think of the possibility of a flat Earth until I learned that, no, the Earth wasn’t flat. It was round. Then, of course, someone had to explain how it was that the Earth appeared to be flat through it really wasn’t. I figure that explanation would have gotten nowhere if I hadn’t been willing to take it on authority. Because it simply wouldn’t have made sense according to any scheme I was capable to conjuring up at the time.

The Wikipedia entry on Flat Earth tells me that various ancient peoples believed the Earth to be flat under a domed firmament. Some of these peoples further believed the Earth to be floating in an ocean, while others had no such belief. How could they have believed otherwise?

It took a good deal of deliberate observation and analysis to think otherwise. I have little knowledge of how some thinkers began to believe the Earth was round. But the idea seems to have originated with the ancient Greeks and spread from there. And it seems to me that it is only in that context, when another idea about the Earth was in play, that the notion of the Earth as “flat” had any “bite” and, by that time, of course it was on the way out.

J. Hillis Miller on the future of the profession

From a recent interview in the Australian Humanities Review (2014):

A spectacular example of this sort of thing is the State University at Albany where an administrator closed Jewish studies, French, German, and Russian studies. He just closed them arbitrarily because he had the power to do that and wanted to use the money otherwise. My advice to Albany—not to any of you, it’s your own business what you do—would have been to tell the English Department at Albany to take this as an opportunity to sit around together and concoct a new programme which would not be called the English Department but something like ‘Teaching How to Read Media’ or ‘Understanding Media’. This new department would include Film Studies and also include all those other language programs, so students could read literature and theory in the original. You’ve got to know German to read Heidegger or Adorno properly, French to read Derrida or Baudrillard. So rescue the languages as part of this programme! I don’t know whether it would work. You could at least try. You could say, ‘We’re teaching students essential skills in how to live in this world of new media. We’re teaching them how to read television ads and political ads and not to be so bamboozled so easily by the lies they tell’. Television ads have a complex rhetoric, which I have begun to study. At Lancaster I gave one example. In the United States NBC Television News shows every night over and over again from night to night an ad sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute. The speaker on the screen is not an oil tycoon, the people who are making billions. It’s a very charming young woman. She comes out on the screen, accompanied by brilliant graphics, and says ‘I have good news for you. We have enough oil and gas, especially if we accelerate fracking (which is the extraction of gas from shale), to last for another 100 years. We’ll produce millions of jobs. This is the solution’. What she doesn’t say of course is that fracking will accelerate climate change and pollute the ground water where fracking is done. There soon won’t be any New York City left, not to speak of my house in Deer Isle Maine, or most of Florida. So, it’s a lie, the ad is a lie, a gross lie. But it’s very persuasive. The speaker is a woman, an attractive woman, persuasive, a very good actress. The argument is not made by the actual people who are doing this fracking. Sometimes such ads show bearded intellectual-looking engineers doing some of the talking. They too are part of our ideology of the good guys.

Patterns: Hillis Miller on Burke and Derrida

J. Hillis Miller on Kenneth Burke:

Burke came to Harvard when I was a graduate student and gave a lecture about indexing. What he was talking about was how you read. I had never heard anybody talk about this. He said what you do is notice things that recur in the text, though perhaps in some unostentatious way. If something appears four or five times in the same text, you think it's probably important. That leads you on a kind of hermeneutical circle: you ask questions, you come back to the text and get some answers, and you go around, and pretty soon you may have a reading.

More in this post from last year: How to Notice Things in Texts, or The Key to the Treasure Really Is the Treasure.

Negotiating the Manifold Nature of Literary Criticism

Once again, what is the (academic) discipline of literary criticism? It has, of course, changed a great deal over the last 100 years, though I don’t want to look quite that far back.

Let’s start with the present, with a comment by Franco Moretti in a recent interview with Laura Miller in Salon interview:

Literary history has two sides, I think. One is the normative side: deciding what is good and what is less good. The other is the explanatory side. It’s two very different modalities of thought, and I’ve always been inclined toward the explanatory. That’s what fires my mind. And in the study of the humanities, the normative modality has disappeared. It’s all explanatory now.

It’s that two-sidedness that’s so interesting to me. Moretti characterizes them as normative versus explanatory. There are other such characterizations. Whatever the sides, there, between them, that’s an interesting no-man’s land. I want to look at these matters through a hand-full of passages I’ve been pondering for some time.

Norms vs. Explanation

In the introduction to his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism Northrup Frye relegates the making of value judgments to the history of taste (p. 21):

Shakespeare, we say, was one of a group of English dramatists working around 1600, and also one of the great poets of the world. The first part of this is a statement of fact, the second a value-judgement so generally accepted as to pass for a statement of fact. But it is not a statement of fact. It remains a value judgement, and not a shred of systematic criticism can ever be attached to it.

The profession was happy to see in Frye’s statement a statement of its aims and desires, though of course, the journalistic reviewers of books and movies did not hesitate to make aesthetic and ethical judgements about the works they reviewed. And there are persistent calls to return value judgments to the fold.

Modes of Thought

I believe Moretti is right about norms and explanations requiring “two very different modalities of thought.” I even suspect brain-imaging studies would show different patterns of brain activity during these two modes.

The basic distinction, however, is between the reading of literary texts and the writing of criticism. Northrup Frye, again, makes this distinction in the introduction to his Anatomy of Criticism (pp. 27-28):

The reading of literature should, like prayer in the Gospels, step out of the talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of literature. Otherwise the reading will not be a genuine literary experience, but a mere reflection of critical conventions, memories, and prejudices. The presence of incommunicable experienced in center of criticism will always keep criticism as art, as long as the critic recognized that criticism comes out of it but cannot be built on it.

But Frye would not have penned those words if the distinction between reading and criticism was not already so problematic that it had to be asserted at some length.

How to Notice Things in Texts, or The Key to the Treasure Really Is the Treasure

Working, as I do, at some remove from the world of academic literary criticism, I don’t have a very sure sense of how things are, “boots on the ground” so to speak. A lot of grumbling about this and that – adjunctification, MOOCs, have we lost our intellectual way? to the barricades, comrades! – but I can’t really know.

One bit stream tells me that “close reading” is a lost critical art, or at least it’s dying. Another bit stream wants it back. I have no idea how to read those digital tea leaves, but I am sure that “close reading” (that wretched and misleading phrase) is important.

There are patterns in literary texts that betoken and betray deep operating patterns of the human mind. It is important that we learn to see them. I would argue that at this point in our ongoing collective conceptual development learning to spot the patterns is MORE important than how we account for them. The explanatory schemes we’ve come up with so far are rather shaky and must be replaced. With what, that’s not clear.

J. Hillis Miller on Burke and Derrida

In his minnesota review interview, J. Hillis Miller spoke of his intellectual debt to Kenneth Burke:

Burke was very important for me because of the notion that the work of literature is a way for the author (I wouldn't use this anymore) to attempt to work through a difficult or insoluble impasse or problem. So it's a symbolic action in the sense that it symbolically attempts to resolve some kind of aporia. This idea motivated my reading of Dickens. If someone said, "I don't want to read Derrida," I still would say, "Read Kenneth Burke."

Burke, for that epoch, was the best psychoanalytic critic in the United States, and also the best Marxist critic. The theory of symbolic action presupposes that the aporia that you're stuck with most likely has to do both with a family or a sexual situation, and with a social class impasse. It still seems to me that works for Dickens. It gives you a set of questions to ask.

Later on:

I learned a lot from myth criticism [referring to Northrup Frye], especially the way little details in a Shakespeare play can link up to indicate an "underthought" of reference to some myth or other. It was something I had learned in a different way from Burke. Burke came to Harvard when I was a graduate student and gave a lecture about indexing. What he was talking about was how you read. I had never heard anybody talk about this. He said what you do is notice things that recur in the text, though perhaps in some unostentatious way. If something appears four or five times in the same text, you think it's probably important. That leads you on a kind of hermeneutical circle: you ask questions, you come back to the text and get some answers, and you go around, and pretty soon you may have a reading.

There we have it, noticing patterns in texts. Or rather, noticing symptoms (as in symptomatic reading?) What’s “behind” them?

J. Hillis Miller on the Profession of Literary Criticism

J. Hillis Miller is now one of the Grand Old Men of literary criticsm. When I first saw him, lecturing on, among other texts, The Secret Agent and A Passage to India, in perhaps my very first college literature course, he wasn't old, but he seemed grand enough to me, not quite the proverbial country bumpkin, but close enough. That was a year before the French landed in Baltimore for the structuralist symposium and rummage sale of '66. None of us knew what the future would foist upon us.

We still don't. While I'm not about to predict the future, not in this post, I look back in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller, who once observed: "In scientific prognostication we have a condition analogous to a fact of archery – the further back you are able to draw your longbow, the further ahead you can shoot" (Critical Path, 1981, p. 229).

First I want to present, with commentary, some remarks Miller published in the ADE Bulletin in 2003. Then I want to present some passages, with little commentary, from an interview Miller gave more recently.

Hillis Miller, the Long View

I first published these remarks in The Valve in October, 2008.

I’ve been browsing the archives of the ADE Bulletin, which is full of articles on the nature and state of the profession, more articles than I care to read. I recommend “Days of Future Past," by Michael Bérubé (2002) and “The Situation of the Humanities; or, How English Departments (and Their Chairs) Can Survive into the Twenty-First Century," by Annette Kolodny (2005). But I’d like to quote some passages from J. Hillis Miller, “My Fifty Years in the Profession" (2003).

Why Miller? Well, he is a prominent and honored member of the profession. That is one thing.

There is a more personal reason: his lectures captivated me when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. He was a model of wit and erudition, the very essence of a humanities professor. But also, when he talks about Hopkins, I know what he’s talking about because I was there.

And that sense of connection is important to me as I ponder these issues, the nature of and future of the discipline. The questions are important, but also abstract and remote. As accustomed as I am to abstraction, it also makes me antsy. This business of evaluative criticism, for example. The people who urge it are very earnest; but their talk seems very abstract, quote remote from the fact of doing such criticism time and again. Right now, the evaluative practice that is most meaningful to me concerns my photographs: which ones are worth processing and posting online, and just how do I tweak this or that one? I have some notion of how to talk about such things - after all, I really do make such decisions and I do have terms in which I think about them. Compared the demands of that simple task a list of evaluative criteria strikes me as almost hopelessly remote.

Enough about my photos and judgments. Back to Hillis Miller. My other reason for singling out his essay is that he’s reflecting about his 50 years in the profession. And that’s what interests me.