Comments on: Black and White

By: Anderson

Anderson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Wonderful item—the Sokal hoax of identity studies?—, but isn’t the on-point Borges reference “Pierre Menard,” where the same text means two different things depending on whether it’s by Cervantes or Menard?

Henry’s suggestion for a new subset of literary studies is a fine one. I suggest we call it “paraphilology.” Look for my upcoming dissertation on how to read Steppenwolf as if it had been written by Dorothy Parker.

By: Henry

Henry — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Yes – I had intended to reference Pierre Menard too (the bit where a passage is either banal or sublime, depending on whether Menard or Cervantes wrote it) but forgot to.

By: ben wolfson

ben wolfson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Arthur Danto proposes similar exercises for paintings in The Abuse of Beauty; among them identical exhibitions called (something like) “Beauty” and “Disgust” depending on which end of the museum you enter.

By: pierre

pierre — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Why, yes.

By: cultrev

cultrev — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

What we’re dealing with here, in a sense, is the split in literary studies between historicist and aethetic approaches. It’s historically interesting to find a black author working at a period and in a way that one wouldn’t expect. The aesthetics, including racialized aesthetics, yes, run on their own, out of touch with the race of the author. Both white and black authors can reiterate or subvert racial/aesthetic norms…

But this overtone of “ah ha! identity studies has been Sokalled!” is dumb, doesn’t get what literary studies are all about on the historicist side. No one said that the novel was great – just that it is historically significant that it was written. OK - so this turns out to be wrong. Just a fact checking error that ramified, not some sign of the decadent absurdity or methodological handicap of the field…

Once again, I just don’t get the under the surface anger about this sort of thing. If a historian of pre-revolutionary France worked on some sort of document, anthologized it, developed an argument out of it – and it was later revealed that the document was a forgery, you wouldn’t be indicting the field of history as a whole. You’d just call the researcher sloppy… Certainly wouldn’t merit blogospheric high-fives and Sokal references…

By: Anderson

Anderson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

No “surface anger” here, but I don’t think it’s necessarily “dumb” to be amused by the event.

N.b. that the “aesthetic” reading, whether or not the author is “reiterating or subverting racial norms,” is itself “historically” grounded on facts about the author. If we discovered that D.W. Griffin was black, we would have a different “aesthetic” take on Birth of a Nation.

My old complaint is that a “historical” reading of a text needs to happen in a department of “history,” not in a department of literature. But this complaint is premised on the idea that a unique subject of literary studies exists, whereas in fact English departments specialize in everything except their own subject matter (Paul de Man, “Return to Philology”).

(De Man may’ve been right that it’s in the nature of literature to be “about everything but its own subject matter”; at least, he convinced me, and here I am, out of the academy. “Would that more of his readers followed suit,” someone is thinking ….)

By: Anderson

Anderson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Hm … “Griffith” and “under the surface.” Man, my 5-month-old has got to start sleeping through the night …

By: pierre

pierre — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…

Incidentally, a very similar process is responsible for how the personality of the Christian god came to be understood as it is today …

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always thought that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a lot more entertaining and interesting when you realise that it’s a story told from the point of view of a young woman who is a serious paranoid schizophrenic, a habitual LSD user and a serial killer. It’s much darker and more psychologically complex.

By: Jeremiah J.

Jeremiah J. — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think that we should be embarassed by the bare fact that a writer becomes less interesting when we revise our understanding of her historical and cultural context. It’s not as if great or important literature deservesits status only because of the isolated, performance of the author, whatever that means (as if we were talking about high jumpers). It really matters if you discover that mathematical writings which were thought to have been the product of a 4th century Greek mind turn out to be the calculus homework of a 21st century high school student.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” has also become significantly less danceable pop music of late. Admittedly, this is only partly because we’ve discovered he’s not black, but there you go.

By: Hogan

Hogan — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Spoken like someone who never saw the Normal Again episode.

By: Anderson

Anderson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” has also become significantly less danceable pop music of late. Admittedly, this is only partly because we’ve discovered he’s not black, but there you go.

LOL, dsquared!

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

“It really matters if you discover that mathematical writings which were thought to have been the product of a 4th century Greek mind turn out to be the calculus homework of a 21st century high school student.”
Now that would be interesting. Much feminist Romanticism work, which I know a bit, seems rather condescending to me in the crap that is treated seriously. By all means let excellence be celebrated instead, in literature programs. Austen for instance is for the ages, as is Mary Shelley.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I agree that this highlights the character of historicist literary criticism, but I also don’t think it does so in a way that is necessarily about the shortcomings of that mode of criticism.

The point about historicist criticism is really that it takes literary works largely as a form of documentary evidence about the past. It’s distinguished from history proper in several subtle ways: historicist criticism is generally more interested in the aesthetic qualities of the “document” and the abiding historical interest on the table tends to be past identities, consciousness, subjectivity.

So yes, who someone was tends to make a historicist read their work differently. This is a bit true for anyone who isn’t intensely hostile to the intentional fallacy. The common or public understanding of literary criticism certainly takes an avid interest in the character and biography of authors. Wouldn’t it change anyone’s understanding of Jonathan Swift if you found out that he was actually an English-speaking Chinese diplomat living secretly in London?

I think you can suggest that this reveals some shortcomings to historicism, that it has a kind of threadbare functionalism in the way it reads and looks for texts, but this isn’t a “Sokal moment”.