Overview of the Literature of Transformation
Week 10: 6 June. Overview of The Literature of Transformation: The Modern
Discussion of the course in preparation for the final exam Spring 2001
I. The course in a narrative nutshell: From Paradise Lost to Arcadia with a detour through The Waste Land-- our chronological reading list.
Milton’s epic poem (1674) is a milestone in English Literature because of its intention to present a total account of human history and spiritual destiny: a unified theory of everything, so to speak.
Our spring course began with the literature written almost 250 years later, in the context the First World War. To some extent, the text we ended with, Arcadia, is the story of what happened to intellectual life during those 250 intervening years: science replaced theology as a way of explaining the relationship of humanity with nature; and women were admitted to the circle of explainers.
But the texts we began with were poised in a perspective of what had been lost and what had been liberated during the transformation of culture from the pre-Modern era to the Modern era.
We began with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) and The Waste Land (1922),the great poem of Modernism that serves like Milton’s epic as a cultural milestone and contains in its title an ironic allusion to Paradise Lost.
The project of Modernism in literature was to devise modes for representing the fragmentation of Western Culture during the 19-20thC. As the structuring binaries collapsed and multiple perspectives emerged, ironic self-consciousness regarding representational modes became a defining characteristic. “Postmodern” is the term applied to this outlook: culture itself is viewed as multiple, and all meta-theory viewed with skepticism—there cannot be a unified theory of everything. In Postmodern art, this insight itself is expressed both thematically and formally: the postmodern artifact is formally playful, self-ironizing, and schizoid.
Quite possibly, the most important of the “structuring binaries” that had given Western Culture its stability was the idea of the two sexes and different and complementary: males dominant, females subject to their dominance, as in the divinely-ordained relationship that prevailed between Adam and Eve in Paradise. (Milton: “He for God only, she for God in him”). I tracked the project of modernism largely through this theme: following the way masculine identity struggled to redefine itself in the context an increasing democratization of culture, that brought race, class and sex into focus as cultural rather than natural categories of difference.
So the first “transformation” in our course was the break in the idea of the human subject that took place during your spring break:
TRANSFORMATION #1 // from universal (male) subject to fragmented subject
Weeks 2 & 3.The split narrator of “Prufrock,” 1917; the fragmented narrator of The Waste Land, 1922, seek are but unable to reinstate a coherent masculine vision in the post-war world
Weeks 3 & 4. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents: provides a summary of point of view of white male hegemony: civilization through sublimation is the work of the male; the female is his cultural as well as biological complement.
TRANSFORMATION #2 redefining Otherness as opposite
Weeks 3 & 4. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1928, critiques the point of view of white male hegemony; proposes an ideal of androgyny
Week 5. Woolf, To the Lighthouse : Lily Briscoe achieves a gynocentric representation that balances the phallocentric
TRANSFORMATION #3 redefining Otherness as difference
Week 6. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God: Janie evolves a mode of self-representation within a changing frame of communities and roles, before returning home to narrate a coherent story
Week 7. Poetry of Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes: the breakdown of the ideal of complementarily between the sexes discloses irreconcilable difference
TRANSFORMATION #4 Postmodern positions: culture as parallel universes of discourse: a “theory of everything” is impossible
Week 8. Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts (1976): the project of ironic self-construction. The goal of “translation” replaces the goal of representation; “I” am (unrepresentably) Different from the signifiers by which I am known, including the signifiers of gender, race and class; and what I receive from the past I renew by passing it through my contemporary subjectivy and transform by repositioning it in a work of “song.”
Week 9. Stoppard, Arcadia: the project of ironic re-construction. Knowledge is situated in discourse: all history is interpretation; and even the project of mathematics arrives at recognition that there can be no unified theory of everything
The Woman Warrior and Arcadia round off the narrative of the course by redefining the faith of Paradise Lost—that meaning-making is the fundamentally human activity; that “it’s wanting to know that makes us matter”: we continue to bite and chew on the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and we are assisted by the power of discourse to hold knowledge in reusable containers.
II. What is literary about literature?
A second principle of organization in the course was provided by the question What is literary about literature? My nutshell answer to this question has been: thinking in tropes.
In your final exam, you will be revisiting some of the master tropes that organized each of these works of literature. Let me turn to some of my examples:
Ovid’s “Apollo & Daphne” as a “master trope” for the relationship of subject & object in literature; and its recreation in Modernist works we read:
A. APOLLO as a trope for masculine entitlement, which can be realized only through sublimation; and Freud is his theorist
1. Prototype of the Narrator of The Waste Land?
“Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you”
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
2. Prototype of Mr. Ramsay?
3. Prototype of the narrator of Birthday Letters
4. Prototype of the hermit [Septimus] in Arcadia?
B. DAPHNE as a trope of the woman formerly silenced by male dominance, now acquiring cultural presence through cultural receptivity to her powers of sublimation (the displacement and substitution of her subjectivity into tropes: the “voice”)
1. In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe seeks a counter-image to the Madonna-and-Child: the idealized representation of the female nurturer. (Contra Freud: “Women represent the interests of the family and of sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable….”
2. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, through the successful achievement of sexual self-knowledge and social autonomy that eprmits Janie to construct a narrative of her life
3. In Plath's poem “Ariel” and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, the appropriation of the trope of the Amazon, a militant female symbolism from the literary past in both European and Asian culture
4. In Arcadia, the realized characters of the female pupil and the female scholar as creative subjectivities
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Overview