Literary Criticism: The Politics of Criticism
Session Coordinator:
Kimberly A. Nance
Department of Foreign
Languages 4300,
“What Is Anarchist Literary Criticism?”
The recent revival of academic interest in the anarchist tradition has drawn
new attention to a.) the influence of the anarchist
movement on avant-garde modernisms (e.g., Pound's poetry, Picasso's collages)
and b.) the way that the figure of "the anarchist"
functions in certain narratives (e.g., Conrad's The Secret Agent, Norris'
The Octopus). However, this discussion has all but entirely omitted
any consideration of the possible contributions of anarchism to literary criticism.
From Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Du Principe de l'art
et de sa destination sociale,
1865) to David Graeber (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2002),
anarchists have elaborated a distinct body of theory concerning literary meaning
and critical methodology. This presentation will outline some of this
theoretical and critical corpus, comparing and contrasting it with varieties
of feminist, marxist, and
poststructuralist literary criticism.
Jesse Cohn
jcohn@pnc.edu
“The Politics of Reception Study”
Since formal methods came to dominate Anglo-American literary study in the 1940s, interpretation has been its central activity. Interpretation became, as Stanley Fish says, the only game in town not only for scholarly publications and college or university English classes but also for secondary or public school classes, since acting out a story as well as explicating a texts lines can count as interpretation. In the twenty-first century, when formal methods are no longer obligatory, interpretation may examine the author's intention, the reader's reactions, the text's figures, structure, or rhetoric, as well as the sexuality, gender, race, or nationality of the author, reader, or text. This vast explosion of interpretive methods has generated anxiety among traditional scholars, who fear that it means anarchy, relativism, solipsism, and cultural decline. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Gerald Graff, Walter Ben Michaels, and many others assume that literature loses its meaning if what Alvin Kernin terms the "writer's word craft" or the text's "inherent meaning" no longer guarantees the validity of an interpretation. Reception study emphasizes the close connection between the meaning of literature and its significance for readers, whereas traditional critics restrict interpretation to accounts of the writers craft or the texts inherent import and dismiss its significance or meaning to the reader.
Philip Goldstein
pgold@UDel.edu
[abstract to be added]
Keith Alan Sprouse
ksprouse@hsc.edu
“Kenneth Burke and Georges Bataille: Politics or Criticism?”
Burke and Bataille, while contemporaries, came from differing intellectual and social backgrounds; influential on their writing and intellectual development were Nietzsche's analysis of culture, Freud's psychological studies, and the development of anthropological discourse. More significantly, both Burke and Bataille established intellectual ties to the broader public, while holding positions outside the academy. Bataille's primary function was to re-imagine materialism, partly as a response to WW I. The development of an intellectual community, one that often centered on politics, as a movement outside the academy, was crucial for both writers. I will argue politics and criticism are inexorably bound within the texts of Burke and Bataille. The paper will touch upon several juxtapositions: aesthetics as a foundation for criticism, Marx and the concept of economic excess, fascism, surrealism, Hegel, materialist philosophy, idealism, representations of death, as well as the notion of the "sacred" in societies. In "Revolutionary Symbolism in America," Burke notes, "[W]hen considering how people have cooperated, in either conservative or revolutionary movements of the past, we find that there is always some unifying principle about which their attachments as a group are polarized" (87). Ultimately, the study of motivation became the central focus for Burke its applicability is equally valid for either politics or criticism.
Kara Cahill
U of Missouri-Columbia
chaucerian@gmail.com