A brief note on description in literary criticism [Heather Love]

In 2010 Heather Love published an essay that got a fair amount of buzz, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn” (New Literary History, 41, No. 2, 371-391). After discussion the role of description in the sociology of Erving Goffman and Bruno Latour, Love examines at Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but NOT to describe features of Morrison’s text. Rather, she’s interested in Morrison’s use of description IN her text. If Latour describes the phenomena that interest him, why doesn't Love do the same? Why does she displace her descriptive desire into Morrison's text?

I think the answer is simple: She’s treating Morrison’s text like she treats a text by Latour or Goffman. I find that both puzzling and not at all puzzling. I found it puzzling because, as someone who is very much interested in describing literary texts, patterns in words, I was disappointed that Love displayed no interest in that at all. She chose Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a case study and what did she do? She examined Morrison’s use of description, which is what she did with Goffman and Latour, but is quite different from describing patterns in Morrison’s text.

Thus she says (p. 384):

One of the few critics to recognize the significance of the documentary impulse in Morrison’s work is Stanley Crouch, who published a scathing review of Beloved upon its publication. In the midst of a general attack on what he sees as Morrison’s sentimentality, Crouch singles out her gift for realist description. He writes, “Morrison is best at clear, simple description, and occasionally she can give an account of the casualties of war and slavery that is free of false lyricism or stylized stoicism.” Although Crouch concedes that Morrison can portray some of the costs of “war and slavery,” he mostly praises her descriptions of quotidian events in everyday life—he cites a passage approvingly where Sethe makes biscuits. I want to follow up on his suggestion—mostly ignored by later critics—that Morrison’s primary gift is one of neutral, detailed description. However, I argue that, instead of merely providing a background for the events of the novel, Morrison’s descriptions are central to her representation of “war and slavery.” I look specifically at Morrison’s first account of Beloved’s murder; in this scene, Morrison lets the camera roll, recording circumstances and actions with minimal intervention.

She then sets out to do it and produces what is, for all practical purposes, a “close reading” of a standard and familiar kind.

In her practice Goffman, Latour, and Morrison are all in pretty much the same business, using texts to describe the (human) world. The fact that Goffman and Latour wrote non-fiction while Morrison wrote fiction, that difference is elided in Love's method. It is all but invisible. Just as the texts of Goffman and Latour are not of interest in themselves, but treated simply as a means of access to the world, so Morrison’s text is not of interest in itself. It is a means of access, and what interests her is the world it gives access to. Oh sure, Love knows full well that Beloved is a work of fiction – all critics know they’re dealing in works of fiction and theorize it endlessly – but she treats it as a frame and all but forgets about it once she comes to examine the picture.

That seems the all be inevitable in a disciplinary arc that came to construe theory, not as an instrument to examine literature, but as a means of using “Marxism and psychoanalysis, structuralism and poststructuralism, and semiotics and deconstruction” (p. 372) as instruments through which they use literary texts in an investigation of the world. In a deep and fundamental sense, the language of literature has been erased, pushed from awareness, forgotten, all by critics who claim sophisticated awareness of language.

When will critics learn that meaning is not language. And you cannot understanding language and its mechanisms through meaning alone. But first, you must learn how to describe language, to describe texts. How do we do that? What are the proper terms?

Begin by admitting ignorance and move on from there.

Is Description [FINALLY!] Coming of Age in Literary Criticism? [AT LONG FREAKIN’ LAST!]

Description, of course, has been kicking around for awhile. It’s part of a critical quartet articulated by Monroe Beardsley in the 1950s: description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. Stanley Fish took it to task in Is There a Text in This Class? where he castigates Steven Booth for asserting that he was but describing Shakespeare’s sonnets (p. 353):

The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all. The claim, however, is an impossible one since in order “simply to present” the text, one must at the very least describe it ... and description can occur only within a stipulative understanding of what there is to be described, an understanding that will produce the object of its attention.

And that’s where things have pretty much rested until recently.

In 2010 Heather Love published an essay that got a fair amount of buzz, Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn (New Literary History, 41, No. 2, 371-391). After citing Bruno Latour on the importance of description, Love takes a look at Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but NOT to describe features of Morrison’s text. Rather, she’s interested in Morrison’s use of description IN her text. If Latour describes the phenomena that interest him, why doesn't Love do the same? Why does she displace her descriptive desire into Morrison's text?

More recently Sharon Marcus discusses description, interpretation, explanation, and evaluation in the course of analyzing Auerbach’s method in Mimesis in Modern Language Quarterly. She notes (p. 298):

For the past several decades, the most celebrated literary critics have tended to value interpretation, connotation, and the figurative over description, denotation, and the literal, arguing that the latter set of terms names operations that are impossible to carry out. Literary critics often rally around the preferred terms by casting them as methodological underdogs in need of defense against an allegedly dominant empiricist positivism that no longer prevails even in the sciences.

She goes on to show the Auerbach makes frequent use of description while distinguishing it from interpretation (308) and to argue that we value Auerbach because of his use of description (309).

And now Marcus has conspired with Heather Love and Stephen Best to edit an issue of Representations (Summer 2016) devoted to description. What next?

representations

Summer 2016 • Number 135

SPECIAL ISSUE: Description Across Disciplines

Edited by Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best

SHARON MARCUS, HEATHER LOVE, AND STEPHEN BEST – 
Building a Better Description, page 1

LIZA JOHNSON – 

Observable Behavior 1–10, page 22

KATHLEEN STEWART
 – 
The Point of Precision, page 31

LORRAINE DASTON – 

Cloud Physiognomy, page 45

JOANNA STALNAKER – 
Description and 
the Nonhuman View of Nature, page 72


GEORGINA KLEEGE – Audio Description Described: Current Standards, Future Innovations, Larger Implications, page 89

CANNON SCHMITT – 
Interpret or Describe? page 102

JILL MORAWSKI – 

Description in the Psychological Sciences, page 119

MICHAEL FRIED – 
No Problem, page 140

Attridge and Staten 1: What is Minimal Reading?

A professor of mine from graduate school, Charlie Altieri, just suggest I might like:

Dereck Attridge and Henry Staten, The Craft of Poetry: Dialogues on Minimal Interpretation, Routledge 2015.

I’ve ordered it and plan, provisionally at least, to blog my way through it. The first chapter, however, was published online in 2008:

Dereck Attridge and Henry Staten, “Reading for the Obvious: A Conversation”, World Picture 2, Autumn 2008, http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_2/Attridge_Staten.html

So I don’t have to wait for the book to arrive before I begin commentary.

I figure this first chapter is good for two blog posts. In this first one I’ll comment on observations they’ve made about what they’re calling “minimal reading”. In the second post I’ll extend some of the observations they’ve made about their example text, William Blake’s, The Sick Rose.

I apologize ahead of time if my comments seem a bit picky. I have a great deal of sympathy for minimal reading as its austerity brings it close to my own hobbyhorse, the description of form. But there is a difference in emphasis and, ultimately I suspect, direction. I want to bring that out.

The article seems to be an actual dialogue, undertaken through email. Thus I will be indicating who said what by using their initials. Occasionally there is an ellipsis in their text, indicated in the usual way. In those cases where I introduce an ellipsis into a quoted passage I’ll indicated that by enclosing the ellipsis dots by angle brackets, thus: […].

It’s Not About The Critic’s Ingenuity

Late in the dialogue Henry Staten observes:

[…] I’ve found that most good poems (including The Waste Land, as Eliot himself belatedly realized) don’t need a great deal of the associational icing that we literary critics bring to them. Their power can be reconstituted from the ground up, out of the common language and common experience, together with a quite minimal and general cultural literacy.

To that I would add that the profession has come to regard that “associational icing” as comfortably ensconced in the Great Big Always-Already, as though people have been interpreting literary texts since the dawn of time and that such interpretation is an inherent aspect of literary culture. I’ve quoted a few passages illustrating that assumption in a recent post, Literary Criticism and Spiritual Crisis (?) [1]. The assumption, of course, is wrong. Interpretation only became common practice after WWII and even then there was a battle over it. Thus you have J. Hillis Miller giving an interview where he says his teachers at Harvard in the early 1950s couldn’t give a decent reading of a poem [2].

Now let’s go to the beginning of the article, with Derek Attridge writing to Staten:

As you know, I’ve been trying for a while to articulate an understanding of the literary critic’s task which rests on a notion of responsibility, derived in large part from Derrida and Levinas, or, more accurately, Derrida’s recasting of Levinas’s thought, one aspect of which is an emphasis on the importance of what I’ve called variously a “literal” or “weak” reading. That is to say, I’ve become increasingly troubled by the effects of the enormous power inherent in the techniques of literary criticism at our disposal today […] The result of this rich set of critical resources is that any literary work, whether or not it is a significant achievement in the history of literature, and whether or not it evokes a strong response in the critic, can be accorded a lengthy commentary claiming importance for it. What is worse, the most basic norms of careful reading are sometimes ignored in the rush to say what is ingenious or different. (The model of the critical institution whereby the critic feels obliged to claim that his or her interpretation trumps all previous interpretations is clearly part of the problem here, and beyond this the institutional pressure to accumulate publications or move up the ladder.) We may be teaching our students to write clever interpretations without teaching them how to read...

I agree with the spirit, but I’ve got some problems with specific details. It’s not clear to me just what kind of restriction Staten has in mind when he, quite correctly, points out that we’re got the tools to write commentary on any literary work regardless of cultural significance or personal resonance. In my pose as a Martian, which I asserted in my recent open letter to Charlie Altieri [3], everything human is foreign to me and thus I do not assign a priori privilege to any set of texts, artifacts, or practices, though I recognize that earthlings make such distinctions and I have examined so-called canonical texts, some with considerable care.

The Rise of Surface Reading

Jeffrey Williams in The Chronicle of Higher Education (5 Jan, 2015), midway through the article:

"Reading" as we know it has a relatively short history. Before 1950, literary commentary was more likely to be appreciative than was detailed analysis. Midcentury critics developed a method of "close reading," paying attention to the details of literary works, especially poetry: As biologists studied cells under a microscope, scholars of literature examined literary language, particularly its images and metaphors. With the advent of theory, literary scholars continued that close attention, but reading became more allegorical, finding encoded meanings in texts. In the theory years, you were what your reading was—Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, queer. It was an era of manifestoes more than mere commentary.

But that's now slipping into the past, and "surface" reading is coming in fashion. Williams dates the change with a 2009 issue of Representations edited by Sharon Marcus and Steven Best. the surface reading they espouse

is a big tent, and the special issue includes essays on the history of the book, a field that focuses on the creation, production, and use of books; renewed attention to basics like literary language and form; sociological description of institutions that mediate literature, like writing programs or book awards; and identifying patterns reflected in literature, like female friendship. They also note that surface reading speaks for those trained in the 1980s and after (Marcus and Best were born in the mid-1960s, so are post-boomers), who are familiar with theory, study noncanonical as well as canonical texts, and might consult anthropological or political theory alongside literature. They don’t dismiss symptomatic reading but state that "now we do things a bit differently than they did back then."

And then she have Moretti:

Moretti, a professor in the humanities and founder of the Literary Lab at Stanford University, pointed out that we study only a minuscule sampling of literary texts from a relatively narrow part of the world. He proposed a "distant" perspective, which initially meant tracking the birth and trajectory of the novel around the world. Since then, his work has drawn on quantitative methods, and the term "distant reading" has come to designate the general drift toward Big Data and "machine reading."

Williams works his way to a conclusion by noting that political criticism was not simply a product of the 60s, but is in fact deeply embedded in criticism.

Indeed, the embrace of politics in academic criticism stems not from the 1960s but the 1930s. In "Thoughts on Being Bibliographed" (1944), Edmund Wilson, often taken as an exemplar of the public intellectual, recalled that after magazines dried up during the Great Depression, critics migrated from journalism to campuses, resulting in "the curious phenomenon—which would have been quite inconceivable in my college days—of young men teaching English or French at the most venerable schools and universities at the same time that they hold radical political opinions and write for ‘advanced’ magazines."

"That created a tension in academic literary studies," he continues, a tension that had been resolved in favor of criticism by the mid-1950s. Are we now witnessing another swing of the pendulum with a new generation of scholars? He doesn't know, though he hopes that criticism won't be thrown entirely under the bus.

I don't know either. But I have a somewhat different view of the current state of intellectual affairs. Surface reading, by all means, but, from what I've seen, the surface readers have a thing or two to learn about literary surfaces, and the distant readers have their own schooling to attend to.

I've got quite a bit to say on this general topic, much of it collected under the headings reading and description, though not everything under those headings is relevant. It seems that things are in flux, and aren't going to settle down any time soon. It's going to take an intellectual generation for this to shake out.

H/t 3QD.

Addendum 1.8.15: This passage is worth noting for its implications:

Perhaps the key difference is politics. Symptomatic reading, usually associated with the sixties’ generation, often assumes that it performs "politics by other means." Best and Marcus point out that such a stance makes the critic a kind of glamorous hero who does work "more akin to activism and labor than to leisure." They propose "a sense of political realism about the revolutionary capacities of both texts and critics."

 It's seems to me that the brittleness and shrillness of symptomatic reading at it's worst stems from the fact the critic really does want to do politics by others means, but at the same time doesn't really believe that literary criticism is an effective political vehicle. Alas, the revolution will not be brought about by earnest literary criticism. So the critic writes in despair of ever being able to effect change. The only thing to hold on to is the critical word, so it's held on to with the desperation of a marooned sailor reaching for the hallucinated sail on the horizon.