Revenge of the Aesthetic "ss1.01"

NOTES

I would like to thank the following people for their help with this book: William Murphy of the University of Minnesota Press, Linda Norton and Jean McAneny of the University of California Press, Damion Searls, and Annelise Zamula. I would also particularly like to thank Professors Helen Regueiro Elam and Emory Elliott for their careful reading of the manuscript and their helpful suggestions.

1. See, for example, René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949); Walter Jackson Bate, Criticism: The Major Texts (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1952); Wellek's A History of Modern Criticism, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–92); Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956); W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957); Hazard Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).

2. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

3. Among many works by these authors see J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) and The Linguistic Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) and Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); and Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

4. Michel Foucault, "Intervista a Michel Foucault," Microfiseca del Potere (Turin, 1977); the English text appears in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), quotation from 114.

5. In "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864), Arnold defined the "rule" for culture as "disinterestedness," i.e., "keeping aloof from what is called ‘the practical view of things’… by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas." Later in the same essay, Arnold adds that "the critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere, if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treatment of things, which may perhaps one day make its benefits felt even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence irresistible manner." (These citations are from Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato, 588, 591, my emphasis.) While

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Arnold's critics have been too quick to dismiss such codicils to his general emphasis on disinterestedness as entirely gratuitous and unconvincing, the vague, tentative phrasing in which Arnold couches the possibility of a social effect for culture here certainly begs such a response, especially as those claims have been echoed in theoretical traditions influenced by Arnold. See, for example, the conclusion to Cleanth Brooks's 1949 essay "Irony as a Principle of Structure," where after insisting at length that the language of the poem systematically severs its referential connection to the world and ironically undoes any truth-claims it might contain, Brooks concludes that "(One of the ‘uses’ of poetry, I should agree, is to make us better citizens.) But poetry is not the eloquent rendition of the citizen's creed. It is not even the accurate rendition of his creed. Poetry must carry us beyond the abstract creed into the very matrix out of which, and from which, our creeds are abstracted" (in Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato, 1048). This ambivalence toward the relation between culture and society characterizes a wide range of literary criticism in the United States and remains influential today, though not without challenge. Recently, John Rowe has criticized such attempts to claim an indirect political effect for the autonomy of culture as part of "the Emersonian tradition of ‘aesthetic dissent' [that] has defined itself as distinct from those political movements through which historical progress has been achieved in America" (At Emerson's Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature [New York: Columbia University Press, 1997], ix).

6. For a brief introduction to the major figures associated with the Frankfurt School and an analysis of its sources in critical Marxism, see Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), especially 185–224 on the issue of culture and materialism. Of the authors associated with this early group, Theodor Adorno was most influential for the development of an aesthetics out of this tradition; see particularly his Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), and Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Among the British Marxists most influential in the development of a politicized historical analysis, Raymond Williams is certainly foremost, but in the 1970s and 1980s the mode of discourse analysis associated with the Birmingham School was particularly influential; see also the attempt to link certain aspects of poststructural analysis with traditional methods of materialist critique in Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977). In the wake of early poststructuralism, French Marxism split radically into at least two major camps, one clinging to affiliations with the Communist party and an already antique empirical materialism, and another that undertook a re-reading of Marx along poststructural lines. Louis Althusser was by far the most significant of this latter group, but see Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: F. Maspero, 1966) for a systematic literary critique developed from this perspective.

7. For an example of such an attack, see John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

8. This apocalyptic tone can be found in Ellis, but see also Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), and Dinesh

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D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Random House, 1991).

9. Perhaps the best example of this shift toward a monolithic model of symbolic determination can be found in the career of Foucault himself. His early work Histoire de la folie à l'age classique; folie et déraison (Paris: Plon, 1961) dealt extensively with the literature of madness (as well as madness itself) as a point of philosophical resistance to the regime of Reason, but the notion of the episteme developed in Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) and the model of disciplinary society introduced in Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) portrayed historical ages as monolithic systems entirely dominated by a single discourse and a continuous network of institutional practices. Foucault continued to insist on the possible viability of local, temporary points of resistance to these hegemonic systems, but that insistence was not always convincing and has been attacked for its pessimistic concession to the intractable nature of power and oppression in modern society as a whole.

10. Roland Barthes, "De l'oeuvre au texte," Revue d'Esthetique 3 (1971); the English text appears as "From Work to Text" in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979). Further citations will be made parenthetically in the text.

11. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 39.

12. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9, 35.

13. In Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 140.

14. See Jameson, Political Unconscious,chapter 6, and Bhabha, Location of Culture, 147–55.

15. Abdul R. Jan-Mohamed and David Lloyd, eds., The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

16. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," originally published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1936), translated by Harry Zohn in Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). For the remarks on fascism, see 231–42.

17. Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 258.

18. Murray Krieger, Words about Words about Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Text (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 6, 15.

19. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "On the Principles of Genial Criticism Concerning the Fine Arts" (1814), in Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato, 464.

20. MacLeish's line is from "Ars Poetica" (1926); Brooks's remark is from "The Heresy of Paraphrase," in The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947) and in Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato, 1040.

21. William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 261, ll. 91–111.