Getting Concrete with your Abstract: messy metonymy

On November 3, 2019November 2, 2019 By Professor MeehanIn Professor MeehanLeave a comment

My messy but productive path toward an abstract that became A Liberal Education in Late Emerson: Readings in the Rhetoric of Mind (2019)

X	Y	Z
Emerson/James/Whitman	Emerson’s rhetoric (late work)	Emerson/liberal education
Emerson’s rhetoric	Emerson/liberal edu	Emerson/James
Emerson/liberal edu	Emerson’s rhetoric	Emerson/James
Emerson/liberal (and transformation)	Emerson/James	Emerson’s rhetoric
Emerson/James	Emerson (and James)/liberal edu	Emerson’s rhetoric
Emerson’s rhetoric [5/21/17]	Emerson/James/Whitman/	Emerson/liberal

[5/17]I am working on Emerson’s rhetoric of metonymy [the late rhetorical emerson] to learn more about Emerson’s rhetorical relation to Whitman/James/Eliot so that my readers can better understand/care about Emerson’s engagement with liberal education.

Abstract (from publishers website):

Recent scholarship has inspired growing interest in the later work of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and a recognition that the conventional view of an aging Emerson, distant from public matters and limited by declining mental powers, needs rethinking. Sean Meehan’s book reclaims three important but critically neglected aspects of the late Emerson’s “mind”: first, his engagement with rhetoric, conceived as the organizing power of mind and, unconventionally, characterized by the trope “metonymy”; second, his public engagement with the ideals of liberal education and debates in higher education reform early in the period (1860-1910) that saw the emergence of the modern university; and third, his intellectual relation to significant figures from this age of educational transformation: Walt Whitman, William James, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Harvard’s first African American PhD. Meehan argues that the late Emerson educates through the “rhetorical liberal arts,” and he thereby rethinks Emerson’s influence as rhetorical lessons in the traditional pedagogy and classical curriculum of the liberal arts college. Emerson’s rhetoric of mind informs and complicates these lessons since the classical ideal of a general education in the common bonds of knowledge counters the emerging American university and its specialization of thought within isolated departments.

Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality: bodies that matter

On October 20, 2019October 20, 2019 By Professor MeehanIn Professor MeehanLeave a comment

Where, when, how, why, and in what forms do we experience gender and sexuality in life? In literature and culture–in other words, as readers/writers/scholars in English? Much as we discussed recently with postcolonial criticism and its overlapping interest in issues of race, I propose that we interrogate how various concepts and keywords from feminist criticism, gender and sexuality studies, and queer theory speak to our experiences with literature and culture.

For a possible application this week, I turn our attention to the writer Shelley Jackson. Her work brings to mind several concepts and issues that intersect with the reading this week, perhaps most prominently the idea of “ecriture feminine” from Cixous and French feminism: a writing that is “fluidly organized and freely associative” and and “resists partriarchal modes of thinking and writing” (Tyson 96).

Jackson engages with this and other critical theories while also performing it in her hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, her imaginative rewriting and extension of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Unfortunately, you need special software to “run” this computer-based novel (and my copy is out of date). To get a sense of how hypertext reads, take a look at Jackson’s essay/memoir “My Body”–this one you can read since it is on the web. And here is Jackson writing about hypertext and Patchwork Girl, in a critical essay “Stitch Bitch.” Notice how she describes hypertext as a “feminine” writing:

Bad writing is all flesh, and dirty flesh at that: clogged with a build-up of clutter and crud, knick-knacks and fripperies encrusted on every surface, a kind of gluey scum gathering in the chinks. Hypertext is everything that for centuries has been damned by its association with the feminine (which has also, by the way, been damned by its association with it, in a bizarre mutual proof without any fixed term). It’s dispersed, languorous, flaunting its charms all over the courtyard. Like flaccid beauties in a harem, you might say, if you wanted to inspire a rigorous distaste for it. Hypertext then, is what literature has edited out: the feminine. (That is not to say that only women can produce it. Women have no more natural gift for the feminine than men do.)

Another text by Shelley Jackson extends her interest in the intersectionality of writing and gender and the body in some remarkably vivid ways. Check out “Skin: A Mortal Work of Art,” a text published on the bodies of 2095 volunteers.

Jackson’s work as a contemporary writer and performance artist might be something to pursue for further research, perhaps an SCE project. But even if we don’t want to study a contemporary writer thoroughly engaged in the issues and actual texts of feminist and gender theory (she quotes Derrida, Cixous, and others in Patchwork Girl), how might concepts from those theories apply to other texts and authors elsewhere in our study of English, even works that might not seem to be particularly relevant for thinking about gender and sexuality. As we discussed last week, at the very least, we can seek out our necessary “counter-discourse.” And in the process, we might discover that a work in question is more gendered or queer than we first assumed.

For example, we could return to Emerson’s “American Scholar” and give more thought to his gendering of the scholar, ‘Man Thinking.” What are the implications? What questions and problems regarding this passage do the critical theories of gender and sexuality help us identify? Are there gendered or queer or, as Halberstam puts it, “trans*” readings of the passage we could or should consider?

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, — present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites. Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student’s behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only true master? But the old oracle said, `All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one.’ In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.

My subtitle echoes the title of an important theoretical work in gender and sexuality studies by the philosopher Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”

Tyson refers to some cultures that do not have a male/female gender binary. Here is discussion of a photographer exploring that with regard to Tahitian culture.

Texts Without Contexts

On August 31, 2019August 31, 2019 By Professor MeehanIn Professor MeehanLeave a comment

Is there a text in this class? That’s a famous line (and title) from reader-response literary theory, coming later in the semester. For the first two weeks of our exploration of critical theory, the answer to that question is decidedly: “yes, there is only text in this class.” Beginning with the New Criticism, one of the oldest of the critical/literary theories we will study, and then continuing into structuralism and deconstruction, scholars and critical readers focus thoroughly and rigorously and entirely on texts. Although those texts are produced by authors who live in various historical contexts and bodies, and are read by readers who also live in various and different historical contexts and bodies, New Critics, structuralists, and deconstructionists will exclude those other contexts and focus on (a refrain) “the text itself.”

You and I, as English majors, are particularly familiar with this commitment to the text from New Criticism. Its primary strategy, still with us, is close reading. We have been trained to focus on what’s in front of us, the language and its complexities, recognizing that literary texts, and maybe any text at all, if they are worth our attention and interpretation, are highly connotative, not merely denotative. Such texts say what they mean, but they don’t necessarily mean what they say. That’s where the critic comes in.

As we make our way through the various critical theories and strategies, I will continually ask you to consider the uses and limits of each approach. Another phrasing I would use, borrowed from media and design studies: what are the affordances and constraints of the theory? What does it allow us to do and understand and see (theory comes from a Greek word related to vision)? What does it keep us from doing and seeing? This is where critical theory and rhetoric meet up. The rhetorician Kenneth Burke characterized rhetoric as the understanding that “every way of seeing is a way of not seeing.” I think Spivak has this in mind with her understanding of the “double bind.”

And so, with the New Criticism, close reading, close, careful, thoughtful attention to the text and the complexities that attend language and its symbolic uses (“language as symbolic action,” another phrase from Burke)–this legacy of close reading remains a rich and useful legacy of the tradition. We will continue it. Think, for a moment, about your encounters with close reading in the classroom, or in your scholarship. What have you done with this fundamental strategy of literary and textual interpretation? What did it enable you to do?

But also, think for a moment about being limited only to the text and its close reading. Have you had that experience as well? I am thinking of the student who brings into discussion of a text an idea not directly evident in the text, or maybe deliberately brought from outside the text. Something like: that image reminds me of X, where X might be something historical, or personal, or biographical. In the tradition of New Criticism, that student’s contribution would be knocked down by the teacher as “heretical” because it is external to the text. These are the terms used in the critical tradition: “The Intentional Fallacy,” “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” and “the extinction of personality” (Eliot).

Are these, in your view, legitimate and necessary constraints? Should we only focus on the text in our interpretation–and exclude, for example, what the text might mean to us (a kind of paraphrase), or what we think it meant to the author (intention), or where the text comes from (context)? These are matters for further interrogation and application this week as you begin your first “Further Reading.”

One insight to consider. New Criticism was particularly effective with poetry. This made it highly useful in the college classroom, where a poem could be approached within one class period and (perhaps) brought to resolution. This is a key to New Criticism: all the complexities and paradoxes and ironies and tensions so crucial to literary language–what makes it worth interpreting–must be resolved in the end if the work is to be literary art. We will be testing this out with a famous poem about art, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

But does every poem necessarily resolve its contradictions and tensions? Does a poem need to be art in order to be a poem? And, what about reaching beyond poetry? You might begin to test out the limits of New Criticism by applying it to a novel. What about other kinds of texts and uses of language that Spivak and Emerson have in mind: speeches, film, the “philosophy of the street”? Should New Critical perspectives and interpretive strategies also be of use to us beyond the classroom?

Slowly Reading Spivak, Thinking of Emerson

On August 28, 2019August 29, 2019 By Professor MeehanIn Professor MeehanLeave a comment

We will return to Gayatri Spivak later in the semester when we explore postcolonial criticism and theory. She is a leading figure from that school of critical theory. But in reading “Thinking about the Humanities,” we listen in on more general views she has about what it means to be a reader, to be a scholar in the humanities, regardless of the critical methods and theories one develops and uses to do that work. We hear an argument for the relevance of the humanities positioned against the presumption that they–and we English majors–are no longer relevant. (“English? Humanities? What are you going to do with that?”)

Spivak, one could easily argue, has little to do with Emerson. And yet, her definition of the humanities and her emphasis, in particular, on “patience” and “the slow curricular process of the humanities” evokes, at least to my ears, concerns also echoed in Emerson’s “American Scholar.” You might recall that Emerson worries there about a culture too busy and too distracted for letters and he counsels in the end: “Patience,–patience.” Emerson writes of the scholar’s task of observation as “slow, unhonored, and unpaid,” while Spivak refers to the “untimely” aspect of humanistic study. I can’t help but also hear in Spivak’s concerns resonance with another essay I teach at the beginning of my English 101 course: “In Defense of Literacy” by Wendell Berry. Berry argues for a more traditional purpose and focus for English and literary study, one that would make it, as Berry knows, highly unfashionable in the specialized university. And Spivak’s notion of the “double bind” also brings to mind a famous phrase and concept from Emersons’ essay “Fate,” “double consciousness,” a phrase later made more famous by W.E.B. DuBois.

If we read and pursue humanistic scholarship, inspired by these two scholars, Spivak and Emerson, what should or might we do? What does Spivak add to Emerson’s notion of “creative reading”? How does her vision of slowly reading and studying extend Emerson’s? How does Spivak’s vision challenge or complicate it?

If you, today, were to begin the “slow curricular process” of a project, later to develop into your seminar project, or your SCE, or your dissertation or first published essay or book, what might that project do? And how would you do it?

One way I might apply Spivak’s thinking to my own area of scholarship and research (Emerson, 19th c. American literature and culture): take her concluding focus on globalization, and its contradictory, double-blind relation to the humanities, and apply back to Emerson. One could align Emerson, or certain readings of Emerson, with the sort of isolationist and solipsistic “American humanism” Spivak decries. I share her concerns with that pedagogical tradition. But as she notes, that tradition is also for her a double bind, more complicated and contradictory than we might think. And I think this can apply to Emerson’s place in that tradition. Emerson, also, is more global than we think. This is a point of interest in more recent Emerson scholarship. And, if you think about, it’s there already in “American Scholar.” Emerson urges the scholars away from the European muses, but note all his references and points of inspiration from the past are global, not parochial. That’s a contradiction, a double bind that’s worth further study in Emerson. Spivak, unbeknownst to her, and to Emerson, could help me do that. That’s how humanistic reading and critical thinking work.

On the Art of Creative Reading

On August 11, 2019August 16, 2019 By Professor MeehanIn Professor MeehanLeave a comment

The phrase in the title of this digital home for the Junior Seminar comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson. The action, “creative reading” is set in some sort of relation (is it also opposition?) to the phrase most people, certainly English majors, are more familiar with, “creative writing.” In his “American Scholar” address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837 (as it turns out, Henry David Thoreau’s graduating class), Emerson says the following:

One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakspeare [sic], only that least part, — only the authentic utterances of the oracle; — all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and Shakspeare’s.

Let’s begin to think about what “creative reading” could mean for us and what we will be doing in our Junior Seminar for English majors–we, scholars engaged in the critical study of literature. (A brief note on terminology: in Emerson’s day, “literature” included the study of what we now call English, as well as rhetoric, as well as philosophy, as well as the sciences. That’s an interest area in my scholarship; more later). We know what “creative writing” means and why we need to distinguish that act from what scholars do when they read Plato or Shakespeare. Or, I assume we know that, given the staying power of the phrase “creative writing.” However, I’m not sure that Emerson necessarily views “creative” the way we have come to understand the adjective. I get that sense from his attempt to define “creative reading” on the analogy of what he calls creative writing.

What’s the difference? What’s the relation or correlation between creative writing and reading? Whatever the answers are, I’d like to suggest that we will be exploring the relations and differences in this seminar. Our language, informed by our primary guide, Critical Theory Today, will be more recent than Emerson’s. But it will be similarly theoretical and critical. Indeed, Emerson argues against the assumption that theory or speculation is a bad thing. We will be using words to think about, reflect on, interrogate, and better understand how words are used in the books we read and the texts we study.

Let’s start with a kind of pre-test, before we know what we think and before we recognize the keywords and concepts you will have in hand by the end of the course and the culmination of your seminar project.

Question 1: How would you characterize Emerson’s critical approach to literature? What assumptions motivate his assertion of “creative reading”? What terms or critical methods (perhaps ones you have already encountered in your studies to this point) would you apply to Emerson, as similar as well as different from what he envisions for reading? In other words, how would you as a scholar (today) describe how Emerson conceived the work and character of the scholar?

Question 2: If we were to pursue a critical reading of the text that serves as the header image for our syllabus, the image of Marilyn Monroe reading Walt Whitman (a real image, as it happens; favorite authors included Whitman, Joyce, and Ellison), what could we do with it and what could we say about it? What critical/theoretical approaches might this text invite?

Consider another image which imagines Whitman reading Emily Dickinson. What kinds of critical and theoretical ideas do these images assume or embody? What does that question mean? Stay tuned.

walt