Jonathan Culler on Literary Criticism at Harvard in the 1960s and Other Things

One of my interests here at New Savanna is the emergence of interpretation as the centerpiece of academic literary criticism. To that end I’ve quoted J. Hillis Miller on how primitive things were at Harvard when he did his graduate work there in mid-century: “None of these people, including Douglas Bush, really had any idea about how to talk about a poem, in my opinion.” Well, things were pretty crude in the early to mid-1960s, when Jonathan Culler his undergraduate work there and Miller was at Hopkins.

Here’s what Culler says about the early days:

I started at Harvard in 1962, so it was ’61-62 that I was in England. At Harvard I was majoring in history and literature, and I had a tutor my freshman year because I had sophomore standing. He was a grad student named Ricardo Quinones who turned out to be a Renaissance scholar, and he assigned exercises in which we were supposed to compare two critical treatments of a single poem and identify the arguments, which I found very interesting. That was the way I really got into New Criticism. It was a moment when New Criticism at Harvard was something a little bit dangerous, a little racy. Reuben Brower’s course, “Hum 6,” attracted the most ambitious students and was clearly an enclave at odds with the general ethos of the Harvard English department, with people like Walter Jackson Bate and others, who did much more intellectual history. Brower’s ethos was very serious, close attention to the text, not talking about biography, not talking about authors. He had a small group of very smart graduate students and assistant professors who worked with him and taught with him, people like Richard Poirier, Anne Ferry and David Kalstone.

So I worked with those people throughout my time at Harvard. Anne Ferry was my tutor one year, and David Kalstone was director of my honors thesis, so I was very much in the New Critical line of work. I took several courses with Anne Ferry and one year had weekly tutorials with her, and the New Critical reading did feel like a carrot that was slightly out of reach. I could never feel confident that what I did for Anne Ferry would get an A. I always knew there was going to be something crucial that I had missed. She would always find something that I had failed to grasp or some matter of tone that I had gotten wrong.

But by the end of my time at Harvard I came to feel that I knew how to do this sort of criticism.

But then my senior year Joseph Frank, the Dostoyevsky scholar from Princeton, came to Harvard as a visiting professor. He taught a graduate seminar on trends in contemporary criticism, which I managed to get into. That was the first course I had that was explicitly focused on criticism itself as a topic. They didn’t have things like that at Harvard in those days. We read Auerbach—it was mostly Continental—and Spitzer and Sartre, and some phenomenological criticism, Poulet, and we ended up at Hillis Miller’s Disappearance of God or Poets of Reality. That was what got me interested in thinking of this not just as a matter of method, but as a real subject that one could study and where there were trends. And for the first time I realized that there were philosophical implications and underpinnings and different sorts of criticism. So that’s what led me to go on to work on that kind of topic in graduate school.

That’s from a 2007 interview he gave to Jeffrey Williams, then editor of the minnesota review (now defunct). He goes on to talk about studying in England, which was much more gentile, and less professionalized, than American academia: “Even publication for many was thought of as vulgar. [...] But there was the notion, in the days when I was there, of literary studies as a kind of gentlemanly pursuit, and you chatted.”

He goes on to talk of Structuralist Poetics (1975), a rewrite of his dissertation. The chronology is interesting. He was teaching at Oxford from 74 to 77, but spent the fall of 77 at Yale: “I was getting all kinds of invitations to travel around the country and talk about ‘What is structuralism?’ That’s what people were interested in.” So we have the Hopkins structuralism conference in the fall of 1966, where Derrida brings down the house with his critique of Lévi-Strauss, and yet structuralism remains current through the 1970s.

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.

The Critic's Will to Meaning over the Resistance of the Text

I take as my point of reference the line that Geoffrey Hartman drew between critical reading, on the one hand, and technical structuralism and linguistics, on the other. Of course, I’m referring to the title essay of The Fate of Reading (1975). He’s not the only one to draw such a line. It was obvious enough to all. Thus Jonathan Culler also drew it in Structuralist Poetics (1975) when he asserted that linguistics is not hermeneutic.

But Hartman gave that line a valence that Culler did not. Hartman said that criticism should not, could not, go there. Why? Because “reading” – by which of course Hartman mean hermeneutic analysis and writing conflated with plain old reading – is supposed to bring the critic closer to the text while those disciplines on the other side of that line only position the text farther away.

In what sense closer? Certainly not physically. But in what metaphorical sense? What is this (metaphorical) space in which the text is there, the critic is here, and we can somehow measure the distance between them?

I don’t know, nor, I suspect, does anyone else. But I suggest that if the critic really wants to get closer to the text, why not abandon the activity of constructing a critical commentary? Why not just read the text itself?

Hartman has a reply – that he’s interesting in a more substantial kind of reading – but let’s set that aside. I’m going in a different direction. It seems to me that it is the existence of such things as linguistics and technical structuralism that allows Hartman to assert that the purpose of interpretive analysis (aka hermeneutics, aka reading) is to get closer to the text. He needs them in his metaphorical space as a foil against which he can make the claim that “reading” brings you closer to the text. Without those disciplines “out there” his own philosophically and psychoanalytically informed practice is vulnerable to the criticism that it is based on unnecessary and even scientistic conceptual apparatus.

Note that “distance” is the only criticism that Hartman has of those disciplines. He doesn’t say that they lead to false conclusions, that they posit illusory phenomenon, only that they don’t bring one closer to the text. What kind of objection is that? What’s so important about this metaphorical closeness, whose importance is unquestioned?

Digital Criticism Comes of Age, a Post at 3QD

I’ve got a new post at 3 Quarks Daily: The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age.

I open with Moretti – natch – then to Willard McCarty’s 2013 Busa Award Lecture, where he talks of embracing the computer as Other. I end with Said on his belief in an autonomous aesthetic realm, despite the difficulties of conceptualizing how it could possibly work. The thrust of the article, though, is whether or not we can actually get this venture moving, really moving. What are the chances of really embracing the Other?

Though I made my peace with the computer years ago, and so am biased, I don’t know the answer to that question. But I’ve made some progress in figuring out what that question entails and that form the bulk of my essay.

The issue is one that’s been with academic literary study since the early 20th Century. In the 1920s the matter was stated most succinctly by Archibald MacLeish, that poems should not mean but be. In that late 1950s we find ourselves in the “Polemical Introduction” to Northrup Frye’s well-known 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.

The issue came home to me in a rejection letter for my first essay on “Kubla Khan” – which ended up going into Language and Style in 1985 – where the reviewer complained that the essay “ought to argue with itself, to put into question some of the patterns it establishes-or better, perhaps to let the poem talk back.”

What does he mean, “let the poem talk back”? I know very well that the statement isn’t meant to be taken literally. But what’s the non-literal version of the statement? Under what circumstances could a poem do something like talk back?

Under face-to-face performance circumstances. To be sure, the poem doesn’t talk, but the poet does. The poet recites the poem, the teller spins the tale, the audience reacts with silence, groans, laughter, remarks, and the poet replies. There the poet/story-teller and audience share the same physical and discursive space and so CAN interact in real time. But criticism really isn’t like that, no matter how much this or that critic wishes otherwise.

From Frye to the Buffisstas, with a glance at hermeneutics along the way

This is another post from Ye Olde Valve, my second as I recall. I was still in my audition period, strutting my stuff so the Valvists could see whether they'd let me join their ranks. It appeared in early December of 2005.

Beyond Hermeneutics?

While Culler’s 1975 Structuralist Poetics was obviously influenced by structualism and semiotics, it was also influenced by Chomskyian linguistics. Thus the book’s first chapter is entitled “The Linguistic Foundation.” It ends with the assertion: “Linguistics is not hermeneutic. It does not discover what a sequence means or produce a new interpretation of it but tries to determine the nature of the system underlying the event” (p. 31). I think that Culler is correct, even if we allow for a linguistics with a robust semantics. It’s not clear that we have such a linguistics, but considerable work has been done on it since Culler wrote his book.

But, as the book was being published, structuralism was giving way to deconstruction and other post-structuralist methods. From my point of view, that is to say, in view of my particular intellectual interests, that was a choice in favor of continued hermeneutics and against the prospect of a non-hermenutic study of literature. That last is what I’ve been up to.

But it’s one thing to say that “linguistics is not hermeneutic,” it’s quite something else to understand what that means, what it entails as an intellectual practice. That’s not what I’m trying to do right here and now. Here and now I want to look at hermeneutics, perhaps so the space of a non-hermeneutic criticsm can emerge through opposition.

Frye, Hartman, and the Buffistas

Just what is the relationship between critic and text? What is the relationship between the critic’s commentary on the text and the text itself? What are we trying to achieve through criticism?

And so forth.

Seven Sacred Words: An Open Letter to Steven Pinker

Back in 2007 Pinker was touring to promote The Stuff of Thought. I heard him at a Barnes and Noble in Manhattan and, as I explain below, decided to elaborate some of his remarks into an account of why we tell stories. I put that account into a letter and added some remarks on the recent history of literary criticism (starting with the 1966 structuralism conference at Johns Hopkins) with a view to helping him understand why it wasn't the work of willful fugitives from rationality. I then posted the letter to The Valve and sent Pinker a link. He responded with a brief note, and gave me permission to publish it, which I did. Note that he expresses despair at the fate of interdisciplinary work in the university. I wonder if he's changed his mind on the score?

I'm now republshing both my original letter and Pinker's reply.

Last Friday I went to hear Steven Pinker speak about his new book, The Stuff of Thought. On the way home I began thinking about that talk and about his recent essay-review of The Literary Animal (PDF). In that review he expressed deep skepticism about various suggestions that have been made about how and why the arts are biologically adaptive. He pointed out that such an account “can't be a kind of psychology; it must be a kind of engineering - an attempt to lay down the design specs of a system that can accomplish a goal (specifically, a subgoal of reproduction) in a particular world (specifically, the ancestral environment)” (170). It seemed to me that his talk contained the seeds of just such an account of literature, though he doesn't appear to have had that in mind.

I decided to write him a note and email it to him. As I began to think about it, however, the note, like Topsy, just grew and grew. I then decided it made more sense to publish it as an open letter. Here's a downloadable version, with several new attachments: An Open Letter to Steven Pinker: The Importance of Stories and the Nature of Literary Criticism.

* * * * *

Dear Steven,

First, I'd like to reiterate how much I enjoyed your talk at Barnes and Noble last Friday. I must confess, however, that I suspect that you wrote The Stuff of Thought primarily so you had good reason to tour around saying George Carlin's seven words - and their many variants and synonyms - in public places surrounded by mixed company.

More seriously, as I was riding the subway home, I began to think that, between the cuss-words portion of your talk and the last, on language and social relations, you had the seeds of an account of why we tell stories. Not just any stories, however, but only those particular stories one finds in the literary and sacred traditions of all cultures. The purpose of those stories is to create mutual knowledge of fundamental matters that are otherwise difficult to talk about, either because they are taboo - as in the excretory, sexual, and sacred things you talked about - or because they are difficult to verbalize under any circumstances. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself, as that's not how my thinking began.

I began by wondering whether or not a story told in a public setting - similar to your talk, for example - constitutes shared knowledge or mutual knowledge. It is certainly shared knowledge, as everyone present now knows the story. But does that make it mutual in your sense? As I understand it, where knowledge is held mutually among people, not only is the knowledge shared but, additionally, everyone knows that everyone else knows.