EN264: Explorations in Critical Theory, 2016-17

Second Assessed Essay Questions (2,500 or 5,000 words)

Due on 2nd May 2017 (Tuesday, Week 2, Term 3)

Please consult the Department website for guidance on essay submission and citations:

(ERASMUS students should follow their own deadlines)

Answer ONE of the following questions, or develop your own question in consultation with me.

  1. ‘[T]his is what quantitative methods have to offer to the historian of literature: a reversal of the hierarchy between the exception and the series, where the latter becomes – as it is – the true protagonist of cultural life. A history of literature as history of norms, then: a less innovative, much “flatter” configuration than the one we are used to; repetitive, slow – boring, even. But this is exactly what most of life is like, and instead of redeeming literature from its prosaic features we should learn to recognize them and understand what they mean. Just as most science is “normal” science – which “does not aim at novelties… and, when successful, finds none” – so most literature is normal literature: “mopping up operations”, as Kuhn would say: “an attempt to force [literature] into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies”’ (Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, 150). What does Moretti gain – and what does he lose – in his desire to model literary studies after ‘science’?
  1. ‘Problems contradictions paradoxes failures defects unfit breeding ground cross-purposes half-baked… [W]ell, this is how the market influences questions of form. In the case of the less powerful literatures (which means: almost all literatures, inside and outside Europe) – in the case of these less powerful cultures, the success of the Anglo-French model on the international market implies an endless series of compromise formations; and fragile, unstable formations: impossible programs, failures, and all the rest. It is, again, the “development of underdevelopment” within the literary field: where dependence appears – unfortunately – as the decisive force of cultural life. And one day, who knows, a literary criticism finally transformed into a comparative historical morphology may be able to rise to the challenge of this state of affairs, and recognize in the geographical variation and dispersal of forms the power of the center over an enormous periphery’ (Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, 194-5). Moretti notes that his ‘diffusionist’ model of literary history tends to present a history of top/down domination. ‘Development of underdevelopment’: this, he says, ‘is not a nice image, of course’ (191). But it is a necessary image, because ‘when you study the market, this is what you find’. The argument is plausible, obviously: but can you see any ways in which – empirically and/or theoretically – it might be challenged? (See also Q3, below, of which this question is a variant.)
  1. Kristal’s objection: ‘I am arguing… in favour of a view of world literature… in which the West does not have a monopoly over the creation of forms that count; in which themes and forms can move in several directions – from the centre to the periphery, from the periphery to the centre, from one periphery to another, while some original forms of consequence may not move much at all’.

Moretti’s response: ‘Yes, forms can move in several directions. But do they? This is the point, and a theory of literary history should reflect on the constraints on their movements, and the reasons behind them. What I know about European novels, for instance, suggests that hardly any forms “of consequence” don’t move at all; that movement from one periphery to another (without passing through the centre) is almost unheard of; that movement from the periphery to the centre is less rare, but still quite unusual, while that from the centre to the periphery is by far the most frequent. Do these facts imply that the West has “a monopoly over the creation of the forms that count”? Of course not. Cultures from the centre have more resources to pour into innovation (literary and otherwise), and are thus more likely to produce it: but a monopoly over creation is a theological attribute, not an historical judgment’ (Moretti, ‘More Conjectures’, 75-6). Discuss. (See also Q2, above, of which this question is a variant.)

  1. ‘Readers, not professors, make canons: academic decisions are mere echoes of a process that unfolds fundamentally outside the school: reluctant rubber-stamping, not much more. Conan Doyle is a perfect case in point: sociallysupercanonical right away, but academically canonical only a hundred years later. And the same happened to Cervantes, Defoe, Austen, Balzac, Tolstoy…’ (Moretti, ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’, 209). Do you think that Moretti is right, that ‘readers, not professors, make canons’? Might this be true in some literary sub-fields but not in others (e.g., poetry)? How is ‘consecration’ achieved in literature generally?
  1. ‘[T]he trouble with close reading (in all of its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. This may have become an unconscious and invisible premise by now, but it is an iron one nevertheless: you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. And if you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature will do so: it would be absurd if it didn’t!) close reading will not do it. It’s not designed to do it, it’s designed to do the opposite. At bottom, it’s a theological exercise – very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously – whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance… is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this “poverty” that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This is why less is actually more’ (Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’). Discuss.
  1. ‘Let me now add a few words on that term ‘compromise’ – by which I mean something a little different from what Jameson had in mind in his introduction to Karatani. For him, the relationship is fundamentally a binary one: ‘the abstract formal patterns of Western novel construction’ and ‘the raw material of Japanese social existence’: form and content basically. For me, it’s more of a triangle: foreign form, local material – and local form. Simplifying somewhat: foreign plot, local characters, and then local narrative voice, and it’s precisely in this third dimension that these novels seem to be most unstable…’ (Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’). Discuss, using literary examples if you can think of any.
  1. ‘The tree describes the passage from unity to diversity: one tree, with many branches: from Indo-European, to dozens of different languages. The wave is the opposite: it observes uniformity engulfing an initial diversity: Hollywood films conquering one market after another (or English swallowing language after language). Trees need geographical discontinuity in order to branch off from each other (languages must first be separated in space, just like animal species); waves dislike barriers, and thrive on geographical continuity (from the viewpoint of a wave, the ideal world is a pond). Trees and branches are what nation-states cling to; waves are what markets do… And as world culture oscillates between the two mechanisms, its products are inevitably composite ones. Compromises, as in Jameson’s law. That’s why the law works: because it intuitively captures the intersection of the two mechanisms. Think of the modern novel: certainly a wave… but a wave that runs into the branches of local traditions, and is always significantly transformed by them’ (Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’). Tree? Or Wave? Or both?
  1. ‘“Theories are nets”, wrote Novalis, “and only he who casts will catch”. Yes, theories are nets, and we should evaluate them, not as ends in themselves, but for how they concretely change the way we work: for how they allow us to enlarge the literary field, and re-design it in a better way, replacing the old, useless distinctions (high and low; canon and archive; this or that national literature…) with new temporal, spatial, and morphological distinctions’ (Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, 91). Is there any common ground between Moretti’s and Bourdieu’s idea of ‘literary field’?
  1. What is the status of the category of ‘the universal’ in Bourdieu’s thought?
  1. ‘From a certain point of view, the literary field... is a field like all the others... it involves power – the power to publish or to refuse publication, for instance; it involves capital – the capital of the established author which can be partly transferred into the account of a young and still unknown author by a highly positive review or a preface; one can observe here, as in other fields, power relations, strategies, interests, etc. But there is not a single one of the characteristics designated by these concepts which does not assume in the literary field a specific and altogether irreducible function. For example, if it is true that the literary field is, like every field, the locus of power relationships (and of struggles aiming to transform or maintain them), the fact remains that the power relations which are imposed on all the agents entering the field – and which weigh with a particular brutality on the new entrants – assume a special form: they are, indeed, based on a very particular form of capital, which is both the instrument and the object of competitive struggles within the field, that is, symbolic capital as a capital of recognition or consecration, institutionalized or not, that the different agents or institutions have been able to accumulate in the course of previous struggles, at the cost of specific activities and specific strategies’ (‘The intellectual field: a world apart’, p. 141). Discuss the specificity of ‘symbolic capital’ as Bourdieu theorises it.
  1. Write an essay introducing, and expounding on the meaning and significance of, some of Bourdieu’s major concepts: examples would include field, capital (economic, political, cultural), recognition and consecration, power (domination and subordination), violence and symbolic violence, competition, practice, positions and position-takings, habitus, trajectory, hierarchisation, etc.
  1. ‘The subject of science is part of the object of science; he has a place within it. It is not possible to understand practice without having mastered – through theoretical analysis – the effects of the relation to practice that is inscribed in the social conditions of every theoretical analysis of practice’ (‘How Can “Free Floating Intellectuals” Be Set Free?’ Sociology in Question, p. 42.). What does Bourdieu mean by the statement, ‘The subject of science is part of the object of science’? Elsewhere (in The Rules of Art, 207) he speaks of the need ‘to objectify the subject of objectification’. Why does he insist on this point?
  1. ‘[T]he genesis of an artistic field or a literary field is the progressive emergence of an economic world reversed, in which the positive sanctions of the market are indifferent or even negative. The bestseller is not automatically recognized as a legitimate work, and commercial success may even mean condemnation… This vision of art (which is losing ground today as fields of cultural production lose their autonomy) was invented gradually, with the idea of the pure artist having no other objective an art itself, indifferent to the sanctions of the market, to official recognition, to success, as a quite particular social world was instituted, a small island in an ocean of interest, in which economic failure could be associated with a form of success, or, in any case, not appear as an irreparable failure’ (‘The Economy of Symbolic Goods’, Practical Reason, pp. 109-10). Discuss and evaluate Bourdieu’s postulation of the field of cultural production as the ‘economic world reversed’.
  1. ‘The habitus is not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes’ (Bourdieu, Distinction, 170).

‘As a system of practice-generating schemes which expresses systematically the necessity and freedom inherent in its class condition and the difference constituting that position, the habitus apprehends differences between conditions, which it grasps in the form of differences between classified, classifying practices (products of other habitus), in accordance with principles of differentiation which, being themselves the product of these differences, are objectively attuned to them and therefore tend to perceive them as natural’ (Bourdieu, Distinction, 172).

Do you understand what Bourdieu means by habitus? Explain.

  1. ‘Th[e]… intellectualist theory of artistic perception directly contradicts the experience of the art-lovers closest to the legitimate definition; acquisition of legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the acquisition. The “eye” is a product of history reproduced by education… The “pure” gaze is a historical invention linked to the emergence of an autonomous field of artistic production, that is, a field capable of imposing its own norms on both the production and the consumption of its products. An art which, like all Post-Impressionist painting, is the product of an artistic intention which asserts the primacy of the mode of representation over the object of representation demands categorically an attention to form which previous art only demanded conditionally’ (Bourdieu, Distinction, 3). Discuss the implications of Bourdieu’s argument for the notion of artistic (or literary, etc.) value.
  1. ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ (Bourdieu, Distinction, 6). Discuss.
  1. ‘If it is true, as I have endeavoured to establish, that, first, the dominant class constitutes a relatively autonomous space whose structure is defined by the distribution of economic and cultural capital among its members, each class fraction being characterized by a certain configuration of this distribution to which there corresponds a certain life-style, through the mediation of the habitus: that, second, the distribution of these two types of capital among the fractions is symmetrically and inversely structured; and that, third, the different inherited asset structures, together with social trajectory, commend the habitus and the systematic choices it produces in all areas of practice, of which the choices commonly regarded as aesthetic are one dimension – then these structures should be found in the space of life-styles, i.e., in the different systems of properties in which the different systems of dispositions express themselves’ (Bourdieu, Distinction, 260). Some of Bourdieu’s critics have accused him of reductionism. Where do you stand on this matter?
  1. ‘[T]he fields of cultural production occupy a dominated position, temporally, within the field of power. As liberated as they may be from external constraints and demands, they are traversed by the necessity of the fields which encompass them: the need for profit, whether economic or political. It follows that they are at any one time the site of a struggle between two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle, which favours those who dominate the field economically and politically (for example, “bourgeois art”), and the autonomous principle (for example, “art for art’s sake”), which leads its most radical defenders to make of temporal failure a sign of election and of success a sign of compromise with the times... The degree of autonomy of a field of cultural production is revealed to the extent that the principle of external hierarchization there is subordinated to the principle of internal hierarchization: the greater the autonomy, the more the symbolic relationship of forces is favourable to producers who are the most independent of demand, and the more the break tends to be noticeable between the two poles of the field, that is, between the subfield of restricted production, where producers have only other producers for clients (who are also their direct competitors), and the subfield of large-scale production, which finds itself symbolically excluded and discredited’ (Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 216-7). Write an essay on the systematicity (or interlinked quality) of the key concepts in this passage: e.g., autonomy, heteronomy, hierarchisation, field and subfield, degree specific consecration, symbolic power, etc.
  1. ‘It would be easy to show… that Kleenex tissues, which have to be used delicately, with a little sniff from the tip of the nose, are to the big cotton handkerchief, which is blown into sharply and loudly, with the eyes closed and the nose held tightly, as repressed laughter is to a belly laugh, with wrinkled nose, wide-open mouth and deep breathing (“doubled up with laughter”), as if to amplify to the utmost an experience which will not suffer containment, not least because it has to be shared, and therefore clearly manifested for the benefit of others’ (Bourdieu, Distinction, 191-2).