One of the unique difficulties in reading the reign of New Criticism over the seventeenth century, as we have done in ENG 415, is the conflict between aesthetic practice and political context. Through the semester we have attempted to dissolve the aesthetic pretenses of a (implicitly) decontextualized, apolitical, bourgeois way of reading poetry into a radically complex ideological enterprise. Instead of focusing solely upon the critical debate of, for example, the English 1920's, we determined the paradigmatic shift from research to criticism by analyzing its relation to an object, the seventeenth century. While I applaud this program, a few immediate snags are apparent. For if we attempt to deconstruct New Criticism by "breaking-apart" its canon-formation and valuation of certain 17th century poets, we perform the analogue to a study of ammunition which reads only the wounds bullets make in their victims. I would suggest now that a precise study of a constructive arena--that is, the armament itself, the production of an aestheticist politic--might have focused our (415's) attention on the ultimate task at hand: to unveil "literature" as a categorical function, not a truth. Thus, what follows below is not an essay, but a program for study, formulated as both a research-oriented and a discursive exercise, pedagogically informed but mostly concerned with historical contextualization. I propose that a group of students study the political context of New Criticism by way of a four-week (albeit overly intense) mini-seminar in Nationhood, Modernism and early 20th century Aestheticism. A number of specific enterprises will be drawn out, not as a map but as a trajectory for further study and discussion. Under each section certain symptomatic examples, or points of dis-ease in a re-politicized context, will provide students/faculty with "typically problematic" moments upon which students can formulate their research. I will also provide a detailed bibliographic map to cartographize the library in terms of this debate. The map is meant, again, to provoke research because, frankly, I don't know where such rudder-less boat will dock, in the end.
The Semester Overview The number of participants, for these purposes, will be divided into two to four shifting groups who will rotate in a variety of research areas, week by week, and present their findings to the seminar at large. Because I have envisioned this enterprise with a paper as the telos-in-mind, all seminar members will not be required to engage every research area themselves, but will have to attempt a comprehensive accumulation of findings for the collective. The desire to divide the class, send them on their autonomous ways, and then reconvene for debate entered into my seminar-planning after I considered how specialization/separation was itself an institutional context for New Criticism's rise. Research-based philological scholarship, pre-WWI, came under much professional attack for the "balkanized," to use current slang, status of university studies (Graff examines a number of MLA incidents over "communication"). It is with this context in mind that I propose that the seminar work out issues in separate research groups and that these groups then force a contestation of findings, to problematize the idea that "context" is a limited selection of discrete, localized "extra-texts." Our smaller research sections will be forced to recognize the inadequacy of their findings and by so doing, recognize that context is never just an artifact. By re-engaging the political cogs of New Criticism's genesis I hope to unveil a set of complex ideological assumptions that are not necessarily an agenda. My hope is not simply to show how Modernist aesthetics could lead of fascist sympathy, or how the Fugitives were flag-waving confederates and then to scoff at both; rather I would like to consider "the paradigm," following Hugh Grady's reading in The Modernist Shakespeare, as an intricate set of transformative practices, contexts, ideologies, and interpretations. My goal is to raise questions and to promote fields of study. Thus, rather than attempting to suture the gap between, say Modernism and Post-Modernism, or Old Historicism and New Criticism, I propose that we gather together paradigmatic instances of the shift, symptomatic movements played out in newspapers, textbooks, journals, and editorials. I would like us to search for the Nation in a discourse that does not explicitly call for that attention. I would like to read Aestheticism in the context of war and contending nations, and not as an overly intellectualized enterprise of scholars and writers. I would like to contrast England and American and their status as Anglo inter-national allies. What did national identity have to do with New Criticism? How do we read the English/American Aestheticist alliance both against modernization and against nationhood? Is this a justifiable enterprise?
These are the questions I will pose below.
Week One:
Setting up the False Opposite:
Nation vs. the Well-Wrought Urn
I would like to begin the seminar's first trajectory with a theoretic Week One devoted to a general conceptualization the Nation and the Poem, side by side. The hope is that by contrasting theories on nationalism against those of aestheticism, the seminar will be able to see where the dialectic fails to remain separate, where the two collapse in upon themselves, creating thereby a confrontation between the seminar participants. I'd like to propose some basic texts to get the group thinking, but I recognize that this first "ground-establishing" week is the most difficult to predict or to plan for, since students enter with a variety of understandings of some key terms: "humanist," 'modernist," and "romantic." I have tried to collect a number of introductory texts that I feel are up to the task, but that "feeling" is rather dubious, I must admit.
1) The overview.
Recent work in history, post-colonial, and cultural studies has focused on the ideological, semiological, and discursive functions that permit the formation of a large-scale community of "citizens" subjected beneath a political superstructure. Of interest to Benedict Anderson, whose Imagined Communities is a seminal work on the rise of nationalist practice, is citizens" participation in national war: why are so many people now willing to die for an abstract entity? By reading the Nation as a construct similar to gender/class/sexuality--that is as a categorical function of "material" practices (i.e. familial or social roles, labor, capital distribution, heterosexuality) that constitute a truth in place of the differentiation of the Other--we understand political boundaries as formulations, exclusions and inclusions, written arbitrarily on the surface of the inarticulate land. Crucial to Nation-formation are "the cultural roots," or the "cosmology" that Anderson historicizes over the 19th and 20th centuries. What cultural and philosophical understandings permit the nation to form?
Anderson theorizes the Nation as an imagined space, a territory with a collective identity envisioned by its participants through a set of discursive practices. In order to understand themselves as a unique collective, citizens must recognize their place in space and time as a simultaneity, occurring as repetition over terrain. Therefore, once Person X realizes that there is a Person Y whom she has never met but who is living the "same" life as she, the imagination of the community begins. Certainly there exist complex strategies that represent this simultaneity, and Anderson focuses on the newspaper and the novel whose narratives suggest a temporality consistent with the nation's genesis. In short, Anderson theorizes the nation as a re-presentation within a "homogenous, empty time," and which re-figures space as the site of a "deep, horizontal comradeship." The depth and emptiness of this cosmology is clearly connected to the new re-production practices of industrial society, the widespread dissemination and distribution of newspapers and other print commodities. Following modernization, it is the failure of religion that Anderson views as the primary contextual focal point for the rise of the nation and of nationalism.
It is from precisely this juncture that I would like to begin. New Critical practice and Modernist poetics have been oft considered as allies in the fight against de-humanizing industrial practices and the failure of religion. Indeed Terry Eagleton, in his overview Literary Theory: An Introduction, understands New Critical interpretations as a direct result of a "spiritual crisis in modern civilization"(32). Gerald Graff agrees that New Criticism is "a form of knowledge that could save the world from science and industrialism" (128). I invoke such generalized comments to infer that the rise of aestheticist critical practice is generally assumed to be a response to the same kinds of affective identifications that permitted the formation of the modern nation.
But the Modernist Poem takes a different route. Consider the notion that New Criticism views poetry as a discrete, self-contained form, a spatial enterprise containing both the terms of its interpretations and the structure of its meaning. The Poem is, in effect, out of time, decontextualized, permanent, infinite yet fixed; it is, say Eagleton, a "spatial figure rather than a temporal process"(48). The Nation, as we have seen, purports to be the opposite: to revel and to perform as the dehumanized reproduction of its subjects, to understand them only through a sense of time, to dominate and "subjectivizate" space, and to remove the possibility of direct sensory experience (of the Nation, that is). Thus Anderson remarks that imagined community is represented as such precisely because it is formed in groups of people who do not know each other.
Thus the Nation and the modernist Poem seem to be at odds with each other. The latter serves as an indignant refusal, a stand against alienation and mechanical reproduction, a utopian presence, a return to the lost ideals of a natural society determined by myth, not chaos. While the former, the Nation, is itself a product and manifestation of modernization, and serves to promote its causes (through war) and compete with other nations for economic power. Indeed the fights by reproduction and dehumanization, by large-scale war and the dissemination of its soldiers, and serves as a metonymic replacement for the lost church and forgotten mythologies. How, then, to reconcile these positions?
I suggest a dialectical approach for week One.
This week will promote what I have above inferred is a specious dialectic-- Nation vs. the Modernist Poem--which I hope will eventually deconstruct to show how aestheticist practice is indeed nationalist.
Week One:
Proposed Work:
I. Group one: nationhood and modernization, time over space.
The first small section of the larger group would report on the stakes of modernization and how Anderson's concept of the nation may be a response to:
1) mass re-production-- commodification .
3) dehumanization or alienation of the individual.
4) the nature of time as simultaneous and participatory.
5) the breaking of "the unitary."
6) loss of religion.
Without considering aesthetic responses, I would like this section to provide an account of Modernity, working with these 5 "symptoms" as stereotypes and assumptions. What are the socio-cultural conditions (the predicates) for a conception of the Modern? How is Nation figured in Modernity?
Bibliography on Modernization:
(N.B. A distinction lies between Modernity and the aesthetic response of the Modernist; be cautious not to confuse socio-political practices and their literary manifestations/reactions.)
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans Harry *Zohn. New York: Scribner's, 1969. In particular, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Production."
Berman, Marshall. All that Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Schuster, 1982.
Hugh Grady often cites Berman in his (see below) conception of the dynamics at work, both socially and professionally (in literary studies), in the modernization of England.
Chefdor, Monique, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel, eds. Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1986. ¥Cronin, Anthony. A Question of Modernity. London: Secker and Warburg, 1966.
¥Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
¥Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.
¥Faulkner, Peter. Modernism. London: Methuen, 1977.
¥Grady, Hugh. The Modernist Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. The first two sections of both chapters 1 and 2 provide an understanding of the difference between Modernization and Modernism, and seek to spell out, through Habermas especially, some of Modernizations "dynamics." Focuses on class issues and Marxism.
¥Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. ¥Kampf, Louis. On Modernism: The Prospects for Literature and Freedom. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1967.
¥Perloff, Marjorie. "Modernist Studies." Redrawing the Boundaries. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: MLA, 1991. ¥Quinones, Ricardo J. Mapping Literary Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.
Although the first three chapters outline and discuss with literary focus some of the concerns of the modernist aesthetic, the chapter on "The Family, the Machine and the Paradox of Time" could be of great use to a student working out some of the difficulties in understand the conceptual change in temporality for Benedict Anderson.
Requests for seminar participants:
1) This bibliography is clearly lacking works that discuss the relation of Nationalism to mass production, high capitalism, and other common concerns of the Modernist project. Bibliographic information from other disciplines (history, in particular) would be appreciated.
2) Note also that those texts which read Modernity in order for background into a study of PostModernity will obviously have a radically "distant" view. I have tried to include texts from pre-1970 to show how Modernity was conceived by and for its contemporaries, but other texts "within" the period are needed.
II. Group Two: aestheticism and the Modernist Poem, space over time.
Again, Week One is meant to provide a bibliographic background for Weeks Two, Three and Four which are, frankly, more interesting. Group two participants should consider the following "principles" of New Criticism as a framework through which to read:
1) Text as object: a fixed entity bearing no relation to its conditions of production and consumption.
2) Unity --- Disassociation of Sensibility
3) Tradition
4) Ambiguity and Paradox
5) Emotion and Experience over Meaning.
To rephrase the agenda: the idea in this section is to theorize a Modernist conception of a poem in tandem with a theorization of the Nation within Modernity. I anticipate that the tandem analyses will offer little in actual correspondence between a political, socio-economic entity and a literary representation. There will emerge, however, two antithetical shapes with relations to ideologies and spatial/temporal concepts. Both forms will demand certain "cosmological" presuppositions, understandings that permit the form to unify in the first place. I hope that both groups in Week One will try and divide (much like Hassan's list of Modernist and Postmodernist "traits") the Nation and the Poem along the crease of formalist and ideological principles, listing node by node the individual attributes of each.
An example:
Nation New Criticism
Homogenous, empty time Poetic Tradition
Citizens Authors
Propaganda Paradox
Clarity Ambiguity
Imagined Inspired
Participation Feeling
Newspaper Canon
Declarations of War Intentional Fallacy
Taxation Criticism
Students will be expected to add to the list freely and de-list some of my examples. The pedagogical criteria for this exercise is the formal juxtaposition of two distinct set of representational activities, the nation and the poem, and the attempt (even if specious) of keeping the two apart.
Bibliography for New Criticism, Aestheticism, and the Modernist Poem: shortened version. General/Primary Sources for New Critical Thought:
Bently, Eric. "This is the New Criticism." Kenyon Review. 8 (1946), 672-4.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. London: Denis Dibson, 1968.
----------------------. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.
Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1959.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. The first chapter on "The rise of English" gives an excellent historical overview.
Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1964. "The Metaphysical Poets" and "Tradition and the Individual Talent" will be crucial for our analysis of the political context of New Critical formation below.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London, 1930.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. London: Methuen, 1983.
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. London, 1948
Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement. London: Routledge, 1929.
Tate, Allen. Collected Essays. Denver: Swallow, 1959.
Twelve Southerners. I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980.
Ransom, John Crowe Ransom. The New Criticism. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941.
Wimsatt, W.K. and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1957.
Week Two:
The "Region" of New Criticism: the Anglo-American Alliance and its Political Context
Several historians of literary critical theory have studied the cultural climate of New Criticism's rise in the post-WWI era, including John Fekete, Mark Jancovich, Frank Lentricchia, and Chris Baldick, whose work consistently displays the varied and heterogeneous nature of New Criticism. The practice has, indeed, been too often assumed to be a dogmatic, monocular discourse, entirely removed of political content and ideological import, and too often has the current state of New Critical reading (that is, its institutionalized form in American academia) been understood as an acceptably descriptive state of its historical conception. Mark Jancovich, in The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism, argues that the New Criticism was a too diversely formed critical discourse to be attributed a political agenda or ideology. Instead, Jancovich understands the early period of the American Fugitives, in particular, as an "informal" group of loosely affiliated poets and intellectuals who did not have a determined socio-political goal. This is not to infer, however, that New Critics were not socio-political.
To equate an aestheticist discourse with apoliticism, devoid of "cultural content," is to understand a paradigm outside the very turbulent context of the early 20th century. When we criticize Aestheticism from the interpretive situation of late postmodernism, there is a tendency to homogenize New Criticism as a discourse itself outside of context. Although New Criticism may call for close readings (with[in] text) or an "interior" hermeneutics, the formulation of the interpretive strategy and its community is a radically political affair. Interestingly, Jancovich compares criticisms that Post-Structuralists and Russian Formalist discourses are either nihilistic or politically irresponsible with debates aimed at the American Fugitives. It is his attempt to re-figure the stereotype of New Critical apoliticism that has influenced this Week Two.
Following these theorists, I would suggest that any attempt to re-contextualize the political content of New Critical practice should not read only those established texts that have indoctrinated the discourse into the academy. In the final three weeks of this seminar, I propose that we focus upon the "primary" texts of the debate--manifestos, letters, editorials, journals, textbooks--in order to understand how certain of New Criticism's attributes (a list of which I hope has been made after Week One) were developed against political pressures to do otherwise. That is, how is New Criticism a reactionary/revolutionary practice? What did Aestheticism mean in the context of the first world war?
We will begin through the focus of one problematic. The rise of New Criticism is generally localized in the American South, with figures like Ransom and Brooks, and is coupled with Modernist poets who were, importantly, American expatriates. As the overseas re-presentation of American critical enterprise, the francophilic Englishman T.S. Eliot served not only as a poetic icon for aestheticist modernism, but also participated in the interpretive network. Eliot's work as a critic and the English component of modernist critical practice allied with the American Fugitive/Agrarian movement as a tandem co-project whose affiliations we should not take for granted. Is it unusual that critical practice be allied in a period of national alliance between these same countries? It is also this era which saw the rise of "English" studies as a canonized project of literary traditions and "informal" study (close reading of texts). Can we read these developments as nationalist? How does the promotion of "English" concerns (see "The Metaphysical Tradition") compare with the regionalism of the Fugitives?
I will suggest again that the class divide into three sections, the first to provide a general framework to rethink New Criticism's socio-cultural role as a formalist practice; the second, to study the regional concerns of the Fugitives/Agrarians, and the third to focus on the particularly English quotient of the New Critical rise.
All three groups should consider these symptomatic moments:
A) In The Fugitive Group, Louise Cowan quotes Allan Tate on tradition and America:
Perhaps T.S. Eliot has already pointed the way for this and the next generation. But there are and will be many still faithful to an older, if not more authentic, tradition; for the old modes are not yet sapped. However, the Moderns have arrived, and their claim is by no means specious. The Fugitive doesn't attempt arbitration; it is humble; besides, it has other fish to fry. but what tradition can the American honestly accept? (83)
Although Tate is here focusing on aesthetic form, a case could be made around the terms of the aesthetic debate. Clearly a dialogue between "traditionalists" in American and the Modernist Eliot (American?) concerns more that poetic form. What do we infer from these terms? from the recourse to nationality? is Tate's "the American" a northern or southern American?
B) John Ransom was well-known for his regionalist view on the American South and its connection to "european" influences and tradition. Consider the following quote of Ransom's in The Critical Twilight:
How can the Southern Communities, the chief instance of the stationary European principle of culture in America, be reinforced in their ancient integrity as centers of resistance to an all-but-devouring industrialism?(69)
How did the Fugitives conceive of "Europe"? Did this conception change during periods of war? Was the Ransom's "Europe" restricted to a certain set of European communities or was it as all-embracing as its title purports? I hope that students will be searching for these moments in readings from the bibliography below.
Week Two: Proposed Work
I. Group One: The Cultural Politics of New Criticism--
Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848-1932. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.
Bleich, David. Subjective Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
Brooks, Cleanth. Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1939.
Cain, William. The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature and Reform in English Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.
------------------. F.O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
Fekete, John. The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978
II. Group Two: The Fugitive and Agrarian Component
Please consult Jancovich's The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism for a complete list of bibliographic entries on the editorial work and essays of the Fugitives.
Bove, Paul. "Agriculture and Academe: America's Southern Question." boundary 2 14:3, 169-95.
Bradbury, John M. The Fugitives: A Critical Account. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1958.
---------------------. Renaissance in the South. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1963.
Conkin, Paul K. The Southern Agrarians. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1988.
Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 1959.
Grantham, Dewey. The Regional Imagination: The South and Recent american History. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1977.
Havard, William C. "The Politics of I'll Take My Stand." Sewanee Review. 16 (1980) pp 757-75.
------------------------- and Walter Sullivan. A Band of Prophets: the Vanderbilt Agrarians After Fifty Years. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982.
Karanikas, Alexander. The Tillers of Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1966.
Key, V.O. Southern Politics in State and Nation. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984.
Rubin, Louis D. The Wary Fugitives. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1978.
Singal, Daniel Joseph. The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South: 1919-1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1982.
Tate, Alan and Herbert Agar, eds. Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936.
III. Group Three: Criticism from England (See bibliography from "The Moment of 'Scrutiny' for more entries, especially newspaper reviews and editorials.) Bradbury, Malcolm. The Social Context of Modern English Literature. Oxford, 1971.
Casey, John. The Language of Criticism. London, 1959.
Leavis, F.R. Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. Cambridge, 1930.
-------------. The Great Tradition. London, 1948.
-------------. The Common Pursuit. London, 1952.
-------------. The Living Principle. London, 1975.
Mason, H.A. "F.R. Leavis and Scrutiny." The Critic 1:2 (Autumn 1947).
Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of Scrutiny. London: NLB, 1979.
Mowat, Charles Lock. Britain Between the Wars: 1918-1940. London, 1969.
Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism. London, 1929.
------------- Principles of Literary Criticism. London, 1924.
Norris, Christopher. William Empson and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism. London, 1978.
Palmer, D,J. The Rise of English Studies. London, 1965.
Trilling, Lionel. "Dr. Leavis and the Moral Tradition." A Gathering of Fugitives. London, 1957.
Week Three:
Dissemination:
Pedagogical and Journalistic Practice
and New Criticism's Rise
As I have stated above, part of the difficulty in writing a history of literary criticism, or its political context, stems from its status as an institutionalized-form in the Academy today. Thus the prejudice of postmodernism cannot be but a vast hindrance to our enterprise, and it is with this hindrance in mind that I have selected my bibliography and proposed certain tasks. Week Three, however, attempts to work against that prejudice in another way, by looking at how the institutionalization itself may have been a nationalist practice.
We have shown (or imaginary students doing imagined work have shown) that New Criticism's aesthetic formalism had its roots in a challengingly diverse set of political circumstances. It has been my hope that the above bibliographical categories have pushed research in a direction which would insist that Aestheticism was for Eliot, Ransom, Richards, Leavis, Tate et al. born as a contending rhetoric, a revolutionary poetic, and an anti-academy discipline. I have also hoped that such a study would bring to the surface the ideological apparatus that has since been subsumed under the praxis of New Criticism, as it becomes not a theory of literature but THE pervasively-accepted, unquestioned mode of reading. The movement into acceptance and unquestionabilty is the movement of the Incorporation, the Institution, the Academy. New Criticism migrated from its marginal role as a radical poetics and Southern discourse into a multi-national dominant paradigm. This institutionalization has been very well documented in other scholarly work and it is not my desire to attempt to summarize it. But with regards to our enterprise, these questions arise:
1) How was the institutionalization of New Criticism written in nation space?
2) Did England and America have contending approaches to "New Criticism, inc."?
3) Can we read the institutionalization of aestheticist practice as a political oppression?
4) How does the university relate to the Nation?
It is at this point in the seminar that I would like to propose a revision of the concept of "nation" as an imagined space. Homi Bhahba's "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation" questions the homogeneity of a nation-space that is constituted solely by a notion of democratic "participation." Although his project concerns mainly post-colonial nation state, his revision of Benedict Anderson is worth following for our purposes. Instead of imagining the nation, Bhahba claims, we write it, as a narrative, and thereby rid it of any of its essentialist notions. Ultimately a post-structuralist, Bhahba determines the nation-space as a collection of "writings" which emit from both the center and the margins of the territory and thus constitute the nation as a Òsplit subject.Ó Those discourse which form our sense of the nation through the state structure and control make up the "pedagogical," a strategy for the collective in which the simultaneity and "homogenous, empty time" of Anderson write the nation as a single free space. But it is the writing "in the margins," the "counter-narratives" which interest Bhahba, for he sees in their liminal status a performative function, a subversion of the pedagogical form. It may be that BhahbaÕs view is itself utopian and uniformly theoretical (where is this performative discourse? does it actually affect the pedagogical? Is France a split subject?). For our purposes, the pedagogical function seems the more useful.
In "DissemiNation" the Pedagogical pole of the nation dialectic is linked with an accreting, progressive of time and space that could be compared with the Modernist notion of tradition. While the performative is repetitive and recursive, the Pedagogical teaches by establishing trajectories for nation hood through time, as a single space. How can we compare our studies of aestheticism vs. contextualization with the dialectic pedagogical and performative? Are there similarities?
Consider also the term "pedagogical." It is no accident that Bhahba terms the dominant power source in writing the nation with a term usually associated with the teaching of children? Thus, I will make a move into Week Three's topic. How did the establishment of New Criticism in the academy and its dissemination through all education ranks (down through American high school) serve a national function? Did the aestheticism and lack of contextuality confer with a determinate period in American or English history (post-war isolationism, for example)? Where the pedagogical instruments of New Criticism ever expressly political (note that Brooks focused on the production of accessible texts for high school on up)? How did the establishment of journals serve to protect and consolidate (to teach) the New Critical perspective? And did these journals have a nationalist agenda (note the ÔmigrationÓ of the Fugitives to Northern universities)?
Week Three: Proposed Work This is the least structured of the weeks because I would like to list a series of possible site of nationalist rhetoric without knowing, in truth, whether it is there. Thus I would like to ask that the seminar group split up into three sections. The first will look through journals, study some of the literature written about those journals, and hunt for Nationalist rhetoric. The second will do the same for textbooks of the era and more recent anthologies like the Norton. The third will read through some educational histories and theorizations on the rise of ÒEnglishÓ as an aestheticist program in American and British Universities.
I. Group One: Textbooks, journals, etc.
The following is a complied list of possible reviews, journals and newspapers by country,
America:
The Fugitive
The Kenyon Review
The Southern Review
The Sewanee Review
England:
Arena
Calender of Modern Letters
Cambridge Journal
Colosseum
Criterion
The Critic
English In Schools
Humanitas
Left Review
New Writing
Folios of new Writing
New Statesman
Life and Letters
Politics and Letters
Times Literary Supplement
General bibliography on journals and reviews of the period.
Eliot, T.S. "The Idea of a Literary Review." Criterion 4:1 (Jan. 1926),
Hamilton, Ian. The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors. London, 1976.
Jansen, Marian. The Kenyon Review 1939-1970: A Critical History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990
Mulhern, Francis. The Moment of "Scrutiny." London: NLB, 1979.
Leavis, F.R. "'The Kenyon Review' and 'Scrutiny'." Scrutiny 14 (Dec 1946), 134-6.
II. Group Two: Textbooks
see appendix. In this appendix I will provide a xeroxed page from Oxford's The Literature of England as a symptomatic example of possibly nationalist anthologization of literary texts.
III. Group Three: the pedagogical.
Applebee, A.N. Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1974.
Bhahba, Homi. "DissemiNations: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation." ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1991
Bailyn, Bernard. Education in the Framing of American Society. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1960.
Freire, Pablo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: U of Chicago UP, 1987.
Hohendahl, Peter. The Institution of Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.
Karier, C. Shaping the American Educational State. New York: Free Press, 1975.
Tillyard, E.M.W. The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge. London, 1958.
Week Four:
What is left out?
In this last week I would like to pose my own problematic, not as a spur for discussion but rather as a mode upon which other problematics can be posed and researched. It has been of interest to me to notice in New Criticism attention to the interpretive "dialogue" between a Poem and its Reader that not once did a theorist the similarity between this aestheticist practice and the German tradition of hermeneutics. Although the German tradition did emphasize, in its later manifestation in Gadamer, a historical/contextualized perspective, the earlier hermeneutists like Schleiermacher and Dilthey had long proposed reading practices that mix formalism with subjective criticism.
Although many of the Modernist poets who allied themselves with New Criticism had "cosmopolitan" view of literary studies, the dominance of Anglo-American tradition in a discourse that did, occasionally, call our attention to "the European" mind should beg some questions of us. Does the apparent lack of attention toward German hermeneutics stem from the political context of "English's" rise to the Academy during the world wars? How did the acknowledgement of continental traditions affect the New Critic's institutionalization of aestheticist practice? In short, what are the national prejudices of English?
In the spirit of this question, I would like to end this mini-seminar by asking participants to bring to bear a *silence* (from the margins) in English Studies and to show how that marginalization has been performed on nationalist terms. Whether it be Japanese, Colonial, Continental, South American, Indian: how are other discourse left out of the English Studies program (which, of course, is not only about topics in the English language) because of national prejudice? Does this happen? If so, where?
Where? seems about as good a place as any to end.