Undertheorized

Louis Menand has an essay on Paul de Man, occasioned by the new de Man biography, in the March 24th issue of The New Yorker. It's a juicy overview of de Man's career that manages to disentangle the unsavory life from the literary and theoretical movements in which de Man participated; it's also a useful corrective to the dismissive and eye-rolling ways "literary theory" gets caricatured by journalists and nonspecialists.

Here are the article's first two paragraphs:

The idea that there is literature, and then there is something that professors do with literature called "theory," is a little strange. To think about literature is to think theoretically. If you believe that literature is different from other kinds of writing. . . if you have ideas about what's relevant and what isn't for understanding it. . . and you have standards for judging whether it's great or not so great ([e.g.] a pleasing style or a displeasing politics), then you have a theory of literature. You can't make much sense of it without one.

It's the job of people in literature departments to think about these questions, to debate them, and to disseminate their views. This is not arid academicism. . . . [It's] part of an inquiry into the role of art in human life, the effort to figure out why we make this stuff, what it means, and why we care so much about it. If this is not the most important thing in the world to understand, it is certainly not the least.

I've blogged about this before, but my own training in literary theory was pretty close to nonexistent. I did not take a theory course in college or grad school, and though I was assigned a small amount of theory among the secondary readings in a few of my graduate seminars, we barely discussed them. Theorists must have come up in class discussion from time to time, but no one held forth about Butler this or Foucault that. I had the nagging sense that I should know theory better, but it was like never having studied statistics: faintly embarrassing and probably something I should correct, but not anything I needed on a daily basis.

(When asked, I described my own theoretical approach as "close-reading, I guess" or "historicist, but not really New Historicist." I knew those weren't good answers, but when you work on religious prose, no one expects a better one.)

A couple of years after getting my Ph.D., I got serious about teaching myself theory. I read a lot over the course of several years, from general introductions and readers to articles and maybe a dozen book-length works. I wasn't prepared for what I discovered. First, my mind was blown. Like, daily. And I couldn't figure out how anything this urgent and interesting had gotten a reputation for irrelevance and impenetrability.

But second, and almost as surprisingly, I realized that I. . . kinda knew this stuff already. I was using much of it in my work. I hadn't had a name for what I was doing and I couldn't talk about it in detail or trace its conceptual lineage, but my methods and assumptions about how texts work (and the relationship between texts and their authors or between texts and their historical periods) were indebted to a number of very specific figures and movements. Presumably, this is because my own teachers were so deeply steeped in theory that they just hadn't bothered to talk about it.

On the one hand, it was a great relief to realize that "theory" wasn't some mysterious or alien field of knowledge. But I was pissed that no one had made explicit to me that what we'd been doing in the classroom all those years wasn't just reading stuff and talking about it more or less as people had done since the beginning of time. As Menand says, any way of reading a text that isn't totally naive--indeed, the very criteria for deciding which texts are worth reading in the first place--involves a theory of literature. And all such approaches have a history, and are indebted to their time and place and the values of their age.

I'm still not a particularly "theoretical" scholar, if by that you mean someone who can talk at length about the influence of this dude or that on her work. I would be reluctant to teach an intro theory course. But I teach bits and pieces of theory in many of my classes--and you'd better believe that I let my students know that the ways we think about and value works of art aren't any more static or timeless than the ways we think about or value human beings or the ways we organize our societies.

Pop-cultural flotsam

Mark Edmundson's meandering mess of an essay at the Chronicle has attracted a lot of ridicule in the corners where I hang out on the internet, and it is indeed a doozy. Though I'm often impatient with Edmundson's take on the humanities--both his fuzzy celebration of their value and his dour certainty that they're doomed--I respect him as a writer and have usually felt that his heart is in the right place: he values the humanities; I value the humanities; and the fact that he has a national audience probably helps all of us.

But this. . . well, even before I got to the really outrageous part, I was embarrassed for him. It's a self-indulgent and not entirely coherent account of Edmundson's time at Yale and how alienated he felt from both the tweedy profs with their sherry and the undergraduates he regarded as an undifferentiated mass of Skull & Bonesmen headed straight for Wall Street and/or the C.I.A. Edmundson was different--what with his black leather jacket--and so felt some initial sympathy with the rise of theory, which seemed sexy and young and opposed to all that fusty establishmentarianism. But! Over the years he came to see the nothing and the nihilism at the core of theory, and his essay concludes with the sorrowful realization that the tweedy fuddy-duddies had it right all along. But alas, the fuddy-duddies are all dead, and now "[f]ew professors in my field, literature, believe that they can distinguish rigorously between pop-culture flotsam and the works of Milton. Few of them know how to mount an argument that values Wyatt's poetry over a video game."

Um. Say what?

That last quotation is the portion of the essay that has received the most scorn, and rightfully so. Some of Edmundson's defenders claim he's merely being hyperbolic, and though I'm not convinced that he is--wild claims of this sort have been a staple of conservative critiques of the academy* for decades--whether Edmundson literally means that there are legions of literature professors who can't discriminate between the value of Paradise Lost and a video game or whether he means merely that they can't mount a coherent argument for the value of any canonical author, he's wrong.

Most professors know how to argue for the worth of whichever texts are canonical within their particular area of expertise, and most do so explicitly or implicitly one semester after the other. One reason is that we tend to be hired within traditionally-defined subfields ("Victorian Novel," "Modernist Poetry") and tend to be expected to teach bread-and-butter genre or period surveys. This means we do a lot of thinking about what our students need to know and what it would be irresponsible to leave out; we also--and especially if we happen to teach any subject that isn't immediately appealing to students--tend to think about how to make the case for those texts. Believe me: even at the most elite schools, students do not arrive convinced of their need to study Chaucer or Milton.

At less-elite institutions this is doubly true. (I've had students who assume "British Literature"--all of it!--is strange and foreign and totally distinct from any American literature ever.) At RU, Shakespeare is a required course, but I still consider it my job to make the case, actively and every day, for why Shakespeare is worth reading. I do not assume it. Canonical works only remain canonical because new generations of readers continue to fall in love with them and continue to believe in their worth; if your only argument for Shakespeare's canonicity is "because generations have said so," or even, "because I love him," you've lost. And lemme tell you: if I couldn't make the case for Milton, my classes would get cancelled. I only get to teach Milton because I sell him, hard, to students who have frequently never heard of him.

But I want to move away from the question of whether professors still recognize a canon and toward an interrogation of what we're doing when we dismiss some works as "pop cultural flotsam." I'm not sure what Edmundson intended to include in this category, and his vagueness is probably strategic. But as someone who works on an earlier period, I've long noticed that conservative critics who inveigh against the teaching of pop culture, ephemera, women and minority writers (and so on) do not take quite the same position when it comes to very minor writers who happen to be part of the establishment. So, early modern ballads, sermons, and the works of fifth-rate playwrights are so interesting and so worthwhile and even an important work of recovery (because: OUR HERITAGE!), but Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish--nevermind Toni Morrison, August Wilson or The Sopranos--aren't important enough or central enough to the culture.

Now, I'm not claiming that this is how Edmundson feels--I don't know his opinions about any of those works or writers--but I'm uncomfortable with any sweeping dismissal of popular culture. The fact is that virtually all serious scholars work on noncanonical texts at least some of the time (I wrote almost an entire book about 'em!), but not all noncanonical texts get sneered at as "flotsam." I can tell you that I've never once had anyone assert the triviality of the material I work on: it's old enough and aligned enough with traditional sources of power (the court, the church) that it reads as serious and important. But I'm not sure it's intrinsically any more or less valuable, as a subject for analysis, than 1950s sit-coms. Part of the question is what one does with the texts in question.

Some uncanonical texts are useful primarily for contextual or historical information (to see the evolution of a particular writer's works; to study the conventions of a genre; to understand the period's attitude toward gender, money, science, religion), but many are aesthetically interesting in their own right to a greater or lesser degree. I teach very few of the noncanonical texts I work on, but I'll assign the occasional sermon or excerpt from an ars moriendi manual, just as some of my colleagues show the occasional clip from a sit-com or bring in a series of midcentury advertisements.

The formal and interpretative skills that scholars bring to Shakespeare or Faulkner can be applied to any aesthetic object, however low or high, serious or pop-cultural, but only the best will keep yielding new meanings. Some of our t.v. shows (and, who knows? maybe even video games) will last or will be rediscovered by future scholars. Some of our "serious" novels and films will not. In the meanwhile, we study and we teach what seems most meaningful, most illuminating, most worthy. Most the time, those are canonical or critically-acclaimed texts. But real humanists know when and how to attend to the flotsam and ephemera.


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*H/t Phoebe, who has anatomized the conservative critique of academia in this post and later ones.

Literary poseurs, junior division

Sunday's Times featured another installment in their ongoing series, "parenting strategies of the anxious and overeducated," but one in which I took a greater-than-average interest. "A Library of Classics, Edited for the Teething Set," describes the apparent publishing-world trend of converting classic works of literature--Moby-Dick, Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, and Les Miserables are some of the titles mentioned--into those chunky, brightly-colored, eight-or-ten-page board books intended for preverbal children. The thinking seems to be that if you're the kind of parent eager to bestow every possible cognitive and cultural advantage on your child (by exposing her to classical music in the womb, teaching her a second language from birth), then surely you wouldn't want to omit Great Literature!

None of the regular ol' board books I've encountered in my friends' homes has much of a plot, but apparently neither do the "classic" works described in the article (which is just as well, since that the stories Tolstoy and Hugo tell aren't the most toddler-friendly). Instead, they seem to feature the simple images and terse, vocabulary-building sentences typical of the genre. The Moby-Dick book sounds like it's mostly a collection of pictures of whales and ships and some nautical terms.

Several of the people quoted in the article express skepticism about the project, but ultimately shrug their shoulders: the books do no harm, so if parents want to spend a bunch of extra money and flatter themselves that they're exposing their children to High Culture--well, whatever. They're still reading to their children and spending time with them.

I suppose that's the right take on the matter, but I roll my eyes a little harder than the author of the article. Because you know what? If you care so much about great literature, you could just read bits of Melville or Austen to your child. They're beautiful writers, well worth reading aloud. And if any special reading you do with your kid at eighteen months is capable of having an unusual impact on her eventual aesthetic sensibility or verbal facility, it's exposing her to complex syntax, unusual diction, and a variety of sentence rhythms.*

Moreover, if you expect your child someday to be a reader--or a lover of classical music, or speaker of foreign languages, or whatever else you're shooting for--your best bet is to do those things yourself. Really and truly, and not because you think it will give her an edge in Ivy League admissions. Do them because you already like them, or because you want to try them out to see if you like them. Now's the time for you to learn more about classical music: buy real albums, not Baby Mozart. Now's the time to start learning a foreign language, rather than just outsourcing the task to the au pair. And if you urgently want your kid to read the classics, well, you could start by reading some poetry aloud to her. Or some passages from Faulkner, or the King James Bible, or whatever you find appealing.

(It's ridiculous, by the way, that the only reading aloud most adults do is to their kids. If you're a reader, read aloud now and then, to yourself or your spouse or a friend.)

So, no: there's no harm in these board books; if I had a kid and someone gave me one, I'm sure I'd think it was adorable. It's not inconceivable that I might buy one for a friend. Just don't fool yourself that it's doing anything more for your child than any other board book--or that it's any kind of evidence of your literary taste or sophistication.



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N.B. I'm not saying that parents should be reading the classics aloud to their 18-month-olds; I'm just saying it's a more plausible route to the kind of advantage the parents featured in the article seem to be looking for.

Those interested in metonymy must explain why metonymy is required

Speaking of veterans, this just in:

The Department of Defense is now funding the study of metaphors. The full description is here (h/t G-Fav), but in brief, the DoD is interested in "exploit[ing] the use of metaphorical language to gain insights into underlying cultural beliefs"; i.e., to figure out what it means when a particular nation or political faction uses one kind of metaphor rather than another. Is life a journey, or a playscript?

The report includes this sweetly wonky explanation of what metaphors are:

Metaphors have been known since Aristotle (Poetics) as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (e.g., The world is a stage). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reflect cultural beliefs.

Metaphors shape how people think about complex topics and can influence beliefs...Metaphors are associated with affect; affect influences behavior. This association has been confirmed through neuro-science experiments.

(There's also a great description of metonymy, and later the stern warning, "Metonymy will be in addition to metaphors. Those interested in metonymy must explain why metonymy is required.")

The project's goal is to "automat[e] the discovery, framing and categorization of linguistic metaphors in large amounts of textual data in multiple languages"--in other words, to push a whole lotta text through a whole lotta computers--but since I'm skeptical that figurative language conforms to any pattern that can be modeled, I see huge potential here for us: when the computerized model fails, the Defense Department will be forced to hire a platoon of humanities PhDs.

Win-win!

Et in arcadia ego

When I heard that Tom Stoppard's Arcadia was getting a Broadway revival, I was puzzled. I'd seen it in New York the first time! Wasn't it too soon to be in revival? Some quick math revealed that it had been sixteen years since the original Broadway production--and after I got over how ancient that made me feel, I set about finding a pair of half-price tickets and booking a trip to the city.

In anticipation of that trip, last weekend I re-read the play. It's probably been a decade since I last read it, but I still have the same dog-eared copy that I bought in 1995, on the walk back uptown from Lincoln Center after the Saturday matinée. It was summer, and I was twenty, and the play had hit me with the force that things do when you're twenty.

A lot of things had been happening that summer and would continue to happen over the next year, things that I'd categorize, generally, as an attempt to figure out who I might be as an adult and how I wanted to live in the world. It was the first summer that I hadn't spent living in my parents' house and doing temp work; instead, I'd stayed in Alma Mater City to intern at the university press and was subletting a tiny, sweltering apartment. Since none of my friends were around, I spent my evenings and weekends writing lots of letters and reading lots of books: Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis and Oscar Wilde, as well as Madame Bovary in French (my French wasn't really up to it, but my sublessor was a French grad student, and her bookshelves were irresistible). I also resumed going to church, which I hadn't done for some years.

HK spent that summer interning in the silver department at Christie's, and she had lucked into a house-sitting gig on 103rd and West End. As I recall, she was making $75 a week and paying a few hundred dollars a month for the run of somebody's mother's rambling two-bedroom, so she ate a lot of rice and watched a lot of free t.v. But the place had A/C and was lined with books and ugly original artwork--the mother in question being a professor at Hunter or City College--and as west coasters and financial aid kids, we were fascinated by the place and the life that it hinted at.

I visited HK there several times. Mostly, we ate at diners and walked around the city to save money on subway fare. But we figured we had to see something on Broadway, something literary, maybe Hamlet? Ralph Fiennes was playing the lead! Alas, Hamlet was sold out. But I knew Stoppard from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and whatever blurb I'd read about Arcadia sounded promising. Also, Robert Sean Leonard was in it.

We didn't really know what to expect, and while I can't speak to the specifics of HK's reaction, I remember us as both being a little stunned: by how good it was, and by what it was. Arcadia seemed to resonate with everything that was going on in my world and in my head. A semester of Milton followed by a summer reading a bunch of Anglo-Catholic writers meant that I'd been boring all my correspondents with letters in which I meditated on fate and free will, and I was captivated by the play's treatment of time and the irrecoverabilty of the past; my copy of the play bears tidy marginal brackets and double scores next to otherwise unremarkable passages about the unidirectionality of time ("everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly, until there's no time left. That's what time means").

Perhaps the best explanation for the play's effect on me was that it managed simultaneously to validate my prior obsessions and stimulate what felt like new ones. It seemed to confirm my entire recent life: this was why I was an English major! This was why we studied the Western Canon: to get the jokes and to understand the references. The fact that I understood the play's ongoing debate between rationalism and romanticism as a historical and aesthetic one, not just a matter of temperament--that felt tremendous to me.

I also believed that the play showed me what academics actually did, and why one might want to do it. It wasn't just reading books; it was trying to understand and recover the past, knowing in advance that even success could only be partial. As the writer Hannah Jarvis says late in the play, trying to reconcile Valentine the scientist with Bernard the humanist:

Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife....Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.

For my money, that's still one of the two best passages in the play, and it captures (possibly it originated) my own emotional response to the scholarly enterprise.

Finally, there's the fact that Arcadia was the first professional production of a contemporary play that I'd seen. It's not an especially experimental play, but I was dazzled by the final scene, where the characters from 1812 and the characters from the present are all onstage together, each set of actors ignoring the other set as they enact two different but overlapping scenes. Whatever plays I had seen up until that point, this one was my first real intimation that theatre operates differently from film, and I wanted to know and see more.

In short, the play interpellated me as at least a quasi-intellectual and a quasi-academic (it wasn't the only thing that did it, but in retrospect it seems the neatest symbol of a larger process). I wasn't sure that I wanted to be a Hannah or Bernard or Valentine, but I definitely wanted to be the kind of person who lived in a city and read books and went to the theatre--the kind of person who bantered wittily and aggressively, who knew stuff about stuff.

I also, apparently, wanted to be the kind of person who owned a pet turtle: I bought one later that summer and endeavored to keep him in my dorm room for the next year and a half. It didn't end well. Et in arcadia ego, indeed.

The familiar, the unfamiliar, and the not-unfamiliar-enough

This past semester was the fourth time I've taught all of Dunne's Songs and Sonnets, so it's no longer a fluke: my students don't love Dunne's love poetry. They find him, it seems, cheesy and sexist, like some overeducated fast-talking dude in a bar who's charming in small doses but who grows increasingly wearisome as the drinks peter out.

Now, Dunne is those things. But so convinced have I been that my students would be dazzled by his poetry and seduced by his personae, that I keep thinking it's a bold move to assign an article about his misogyny, to point out some of the really disturbing undercurrents in his verse.

Dude, my students don't need that. They're not sold on that dashing-rake stuff to begin with.

By contrast, and rather to my surprise, my grad students this past semester loved Dunne's religious works--and not just the poems, but the Devotions, the sermons, and some excerpts from his controversial prose. They found his depictions of God, and the afterlife, and the relationship between the soul and the body endlessly complicated and fascinating.

The explanation, I think, is that Early Modern religiosity is strange and unfamiliar to my students, but love lyrics and gambits to get women into bed aren't. The idea of a Christianity that's rich and intellectual, challenging and playful, is either totally unlike the Christianity they've encountered before (in the case of the irreligious and the atheists) or a fuller and more beautiful expression of ideas they share or would like to share (in the case of the students of faith).

And as someone who works on religion and literature, I'm delighted by this second response. But I'm bothered by the first one, in part because it seems predicated on a disinterest in or inability to historicize, or to make fine distinctions between then and now. No one is saying that Dunne's misogyny doesn't exist, or that it's model for how to pick up chicks today. But can we talk about it in its actual context? Or as a particular response to the Petrarchan tradition? Or, hell: just in formal terms?

Or maybe I'm just surprised, or have taken it too much as an article of faith that everyone finds Dunne irresistible. For most of the twentieth century, Dunne was central to how we understood and how we taught poetry--the perfect New Critical example of everything that poetry was and should be. Maybe that wheel has turned.

What can be coaxed out of the surfeit of language

My graduate class this semester is centered on the writer whose name I'll render here as John Dunne. Although we're not focused on him or on poetry exclusively, at least 75% of our primary texts are in verse, and non-narrative verse to boot. This has presented some pedagogical challenges.

Over the years (probably in part because my own undergraduate education in poetry was so patchy, not to say piss-poor) I've become somewhat of a poetry evangelist. I teach scansion and metrics in all my literature courses, and have developed lesson plans, handouts, and short assignments to give undergraduates a basic tool-kit for talking about and understanding formal verse. Still, I'd never before taught a course that was primarily non-narrative poetry, and I definitely hadn't taught such a course to graduate students. When I teach lyric poetry in an undergraduate class, I assign a bunch of poems but often spend most of each class period working through just one or two, modeling how we analyze and make meaning out of verse. But did I really want to spend a graduate seminar doing that kind of close reading? Every week?

The answer, kinda, is "yes."

I've assigned a lot of secondary readings, of course, many of them focused on larger issues to do with Early Modern reading practices, editorial theory, and history of the book, so we're not just close-reading poems. But it turns out, first, that my M.A. students don't necessarily have any more experience or innate comfort with poetry than my undergrads, and, second, that it's hard to talk about poetry in general terms without first getting down into the nitty gritty of the verse.

Last week, for example, in our three-hour class we spent at least two hours working through just two poems, an elegy and a satire. With long poems especially, I sometimes refer to this process as a "forced march": we take a few lines at a time, lingering to talk about this image, that rhyme, or untangle a particularly knotty bit of syntax. It's slow and deliberate, and with undergraduates I sometimes worry that I'm losing or boring them. But this particular class was lovely. I hadn't picked out the poems myself--I'd had my students choose them--so I didn't have a lesson plan, and it felt like a process of discovery for me as much as for them. I freely confessed when I didn't understand what a given part was doing, and then made them work it out, explaining how a particular metaphor or grammatical construction was really operating, or what the possibilities were and how each one changed the meaning of the whole.

Part of what I'm trying to do, of course, is convey why I love this material, and the ways in which real scholarship is at least as playful as it is earnest. So when I start to get punchy at 8.30 at night, or feel a tangent coming on, I don't always stop myself. At one point, upon realizing that a student was trying--overly-delicately--to suggest that a particular metaphor referred to sexual intercourse, I exclaimed, "Oh! You mean the word 'sheathe'? You think he means, like, penis-in-vagina sheathing? No, for once, it's just soul-in-body sheathing." [Looking around the room.] Hey! You guys all know that, right? That 'vagina' means 'sheath'?" Later, I somehow wound up suggesting that Ovid, Jonson and Dunne were good candidates for the game fuck-marry-kill (and then had to explain that game, when it turned out only one of my students knew what I was talking about and was laughing too hard to do it for me.)

Now, if talking about penises and vaginas and the fuckability of long-dead poets is what I'm remembered for, maybe they should take my Ph.D. away from me right now. But I like to think that I'm operating, in however impoverished a way, in the tradition of my betters. Among the many tributes to the late Frank Kermode in the London Review of Books, my favorite was that written by his former student, Jacqueline Rose. Here's the part that I've been thinking of as I teach Dunne:

What is it about a literary work that enables it to persist over time? Most obviously perhaps, the "classic" in [Kermode's] definition was a text whose plurality of meaning. . . kept it alive. It is because no reader can exhaust the meaning of such a text, because any one reading cannot but select and forget. . . that it will continuously be reinvented. A classic is a work that is "patient of reinterpretation". . . . [A] work. . . survive[s] by means of what [can] be coaxed out of the surfeit of its language.

If cracking bawdy jokes leads one of my students to coax something more out of a poem than she would have otherwise, then I defend the practice utterly.

Dr. Phil is not licensed to diagnose works of literature

Oh, the platitudinous conservatism of students!

I'm in the midst of a huge pile of Shakespeare essays, and no matter how many good ones I get, the less-than-good ones sap my will to live. I'm particularly bothered by the smug censoriousness that so many weaker essays traffic in--essays that not only treat fictional characters as if they were real people (whose actions it's the student's job to sit in judgment of), but subject them to the tiresome language of pop psychology and self-esteemism:

Brutus? He's too easily swayed by other people. Boy needs to stand up for himself! Ophelia? Such a pushover! If she wasn't going to tell Hamlet how she really felt, she has no one to blame but herself. Juliet? She's not in love! No one falls in love that fast! It's obviously just about sex, and if she had listened to her parents no one would have died.

I've written about one aspect of this problem before--the seeming refusal to understand works of art as works of art; if the play wants Romeo and Juliet to die, no minor character (nurse, friar, sassy gay friend) could have saved them. But this prim, easy moralizing is frustrating for different reasons.

Doubling forward, doubling back

About a year ago, dhawhee wrote a post on her favorite trope (in her case, zeugma). As I’ve been bushwhacking my way through the draft of an as-yet rather terrible essay on some new material, I’ve started noticing all over again what appears to be, if not necessarily my favorite trope, then certainly one I use with insane frequency: hendiadys.

I first encountered this term just a few years ago, in Frank Kermode's chapter on Hamlet in Shakespeare's Language--but when I did I realized immediately that it was a defining feature not only of most of the works I wrote my dissertation on, but also of my own writing. Literally "one from two," hendiadys refers to a pair of words linked by "and" that expresses a single meaning neither word alone conveys.* Some of these we use every day, unthinkingly, to the point that they're clichés: "house and home," "law and order," "doom and gloom." Ideally, though, they're less common, more evocative, and even surprising pairs.

I'd like to claim that I use hendiadys consciously (and of course evocatively!), but I notice it most when when I'm drafting--when I let myself just write, just in order to get words on the page and without turning on the editorial function. When I do that, I write in pairs unthinkingly and almost compulsively.

Here are two sentences I just added to the essay I'm working on:

In this passage, [Thing A] is characterized by its fragmentation and imperfection. Unlike [Thing B], which appears functional and whole while being divorced from any authentic source of motion or meaning, [Thing A]'s brokenness is a sign of its legitimacy.

Fragmentation and imperfection; functional and whole; motion or meaning--and actually there's another, ghost pair, "legitimacy and truth," which I rejected a split second before typing it.

So what the hell is that all about? Now, it may simply be that I believe in the buddy system when it comes to word usage (why settle for just one when two are available?), but since I don't tend to verbal excess or floweriness in other ways, I think my use of hendiadys is at least partly a process of refinement: of figuring out whatever it is that I really mean and how to say it.

In the above example, for instance, I'm still not sure whether what I'm talking about is motion or meaning. . . or some third and entirely different idea; that pair would definitely go in a revision. Similarly, I pre-rejected "legitimacy and truth" because, although the two terms don't express the same idea, they're too close in sense and not really interesting as a unit anyway. When I generate that kind of pair, it's clearly just a placeholder: two words that are different approximations of what I think I'm trying to say. On the other hand, pairings like "fragmentation and imperfection" or "functional and whole" do useful work, conveying ideas that no single term can express.

So partly it's that I don't like to commit--I'd rather generate possibilities than foreclose them--but it's also about what sounds right in my head: pairs and trios of words and terms and clauses just make rhythmic sense to me in ways I can't explain.**


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*Technically, hendiadys has a more narrow meaning, referring to pairs in which one noun is clearly subordinate to the other and could be converted into an adjective modifying it--but this broader usage is approved by at least some of my reference books, so I'm going with it.

**Before writing this post I was unaware that there is also such a thing as hendiatris, which involves three words that express a single meaning. But you'd better believe I employ that, too.

For the poetophobes or poeto-poseurs

David Orr has an excellent review in today's Times of Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, a book apparently intended to demystify poetry for the layperson by introducing him to some of the basics of meter and form.

At some point I'll have to check out Fry's book to see if it might be appropriate for use in my sophomore-level "introduction to the English major" class, but I'm photocopying the first half of Orr's review, immediately, to give to my Brit Lit students as we start working on lyric verse next week.

Here's an excerpt:

The difficulty of teaching poetry to a lay audience can be summarized by a single, diabolical name: Robin Williams. Williams, as you may recall, played the free-thinking English teacher John Keating in the 1989 movie "Dead Poets Society," a film that established once and for all the connection between learning about poems and killing yourself while wearing a silly hat. In the movie’s first depiction of poetical pedagogy, Williams as Keating instructs his students to open their textbook--a dry, dully diagrammatic primer by "Dr. J. Evans-Pritchard"--and then, with the insouciant panache of Lord Byron (or possibly Patch Adams) tells them to rip out the introduction! Yes! Riiiip! "Armies of academics going forward, measuring poetry," cries the righteous Keating, "No, we will not have that here!" Instead, the class is told to embrace a philosophy of carpe diem, and sic transit J. Evans-Pritchard. Significantly, however, while Keating subsequently teaches his students how to stand on their desks, how to kick a soccer ball with gusto and how to free-associate lamely about Walt Whitman, he’s never shown actually teaching them anything about the basics of form--basics they’d need in order to appreciate half the writers he’s recommending.

[. . . .]

While it’s true that some aspects of poetry transcend the nuts and bolts of technique, it’s equally true that many more do not. Consequently, only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack; usually, the response is closer to "What?" or "Eh" or at best "Hm." This doesn’t mean that other reactions aren’t possible; but such reactions generally come from learning what exactly is going on. And you don’t learn what’s going on by kicking a soccer ball and shouting a quote from Shelley. You learn what’s going on by reading carefully, questioning your own assumptions and sticking with things even when you’re confused or nervous. Then you can kick the soccer ball.

Damn straight.

Reading for Pleasure Wednesday: A Meme!

Ph.D. Me tagged me for this one ages ago--which isn't to say that my answers are any more interesting now than they would have been then--but until I finish the two novels I'm currently reading and have some new fun books to write about, this is all I've got for you.

The Book Meme

1. One book that changed your life?
I'm not sure that any single book actually has changed my life--or maybe it's that a lot of books have changed my life, but only in tiny and incremental ways. But if I had to pick one author who had a serious impact on my life as a reader, it would be T. S. Eliot. Now, I actually kind of hate Eliot (for his politics, his prejudices, and for what that little punk-ass had to say about Milton), but he was my first exposure to "difficult" literature. Although we read virtually no poetry in my high school, we did read "Prufrock," and I totally loved it; I remember being particularly proud of myself for getting the references to Hamlet and John the Baptist.

Right after reading "Prufrock" in class, I went out and bought a copy of Eliot's complete poems and tried to read The Waste Land. Oh, I tried. I even checked out a copy of the Twayne's guide to the poem. I didn't succeed in really understanding very much of it, but I worked at it, and I got some inkling of what it was that literary professionals DO, and of the rewards that close analysis can bring.

2. One book you have read more than once?
Aside from the ones that I re-read for professional reasons? My favorite may be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which I've read at least six times.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?
There are a lot of books that I'd be perfectly happy to read over and over again, but I'd want something relatively lengthy, something that I enjoyed reading and reciting aloud--hell, let's just say Paradise Lost.

4. One book that made you laugh?
Just about every book I like makes me laugh, even those that are decidely unfunny (you may take this as evidence of my callousness or my fine sense of the absurd, as you wish). But I'm almost incapacitated with laughter every time I read Evelyn Waugh, especially Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and Handful of Dust. I reread each of those regularly.

5. One book that made you cry?
As above. Many books make me cry, even those that aren't particularly sad. I remember absolutely bawling at the epilogue to Middlemarch.

6. One book you wish had been written?
Uh, maybe my own? (Anyone want to finish it for me?)

7. One book you wish had never been written?
I've already been beaten to the punch with the Da Vinci Code, Mein Kampf, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion--can I get all metaphorical here and say that I wish no one had ever written the book of George W. Bush? Or at least that it had been hastily erased?

8. One book you are currently reading?
I'm re-reading Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, after seeing the John Huston film adaptation. (Expect a RfP post in the near future.)

9. One book you have been meaning to read?
The book I'm most embarrassed not to have read--and that I really want to read!--is Moby Dick. I've started it three times, but I have this enormous copy, see, that's difficult to lug around. . .

10. Now tag 5 people.
I'm bad at keeping track of who's done memes and who hasn't (and this one is aging rapidly), so if you want to do this one, consider yourself tagged!

Oh, let us weep for the sad state of literary studies

I often enjoy the pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton's columns for The Chronicle even when I don't agree with them, but his latest strikes me as deeply and profoundly wrong--and I don't think it's because I had an atypical graduate school experience.

Benton's column discusses the things that inspire students to major in English and then to go to graduate school, and he contrasts those early motivators with the "reality" of graduate school. Now, no one would disagree that the undergraduate experience is very different from that of the graduate student, and many of us might admit to a certain feeling of loss: after all, as an undergraduate, one's reading and writing are enfolded (at least for many students) into the idyllic and leisurely life that is college. And as Benton rightly notes, students rarely become English majors due to parental pressure or because they have a set career path in mind; generally, they do it because they like to read, and they take the classes they take because they seem fun. As an undergraduate, then, almost everything is exploratory and almost everything is new, and any anxieties about the Real World exist in a category separate from one's classes.

In graduate school, however, career anxieties and personal anxieties are almost entirely entwined with one's work: do I actually know how to write? Do I have anything interesting to say? Am I ever going to get a job? Am I any good at this stuff (which is to say, in the graduate student mind, am I any good, period). That to me is the chief and most meaningful difference between the undergraduate and graduate study of English. Yes, it's quite true that the graduate student has to learn a number of new skills and master a larger body of knowledge, but the real difference is that what had once been essentially a pleasant and low-stakes pastime becomes a career, with all the pressures and expectations--and, let's face it, bullshit--that any career entails.

But this is not what Benton talks about. For Benton there's a more important difference between college and graduate school, and it's one he that he illustrates by listing the answers he received when he asked his English majors why they study literature. He got the usual responses: an early love of reading; the pleasure of getting lost in alternate worlds; a "love for the free play of ideas"; a quasi-spiritual sense of meaningfulness; attraction to the "cultural aura" of the bohemian artist; a "desire for wisdom."

"It surprised me," Benton reports, "that none of my students mentioned a commitment to social justice or to some specific political ideology as a motive. Nearly all of them would have skewed to the left on most of the usual subjects." In fact, Benton is so surprised that he even asks his students why they didn't identify political or social reasons as motivators: "[O]ne said, 'If I wanted to be a politician, I'd major in political science. If I wanted to be a social worker, I'd major in sociology.'"

Huh, I thought when I read this. Why is Benton surprised that his students aren't majoring in English because of their political commitments? Why is he even asking this question? It seems awfully leading. . . . Oh, right. It's supposed to be a leading question, because only by asking it is Benton able to comment with due sorrow on the sad, sad state of graduate education, which sucks all the truth and beauty out of the simple, pure study of lit-rah-chure that his students enjoy in their prelapsarian groves of academe.

Sorrowfully, then, he continues:

It makes me sad to think how little those motives will be acknowledged if they go on to graduate school.

They will probably go for the wrong reasons: to continue their experience as undergraduates. They are romantics who must suddenly become realpolitikers. Maybe that's why most drop out before they complete their doctorates. Those who stay have political commitments (and probably come from undergraduate programs where those commitments are encouraged early), or they develop them as graduate students, or they feign or exaggerate them to get through.

[. . . . ]

The problem is you can't get to where I am now without going through a decade or more of immersion in a highly politicized and anti-literary academic culture. You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place.

This may reflect Benton's experience, and if so, I'm sorry to hear it, but it bears no relation to my own reality. (FWIW, I know where Benton went to graduate school, and although I don't know a great deal about the specific culture of that program--either now or when Benton went through it--his grad program and my grad program are major competitors, so it's probably safe to assume that there are some broad similarities between the two.)

Yes, academics in the humanities tend to be liberal, but while some of them are radically so, most are not--and relatively few, in any case, bring their political commitments to bear on their scholarship. And yes, there are idiots in the academy, and careerists, and people who rely upon incomprehensible jargon and other scholars' theories and who have never had an independent idea in their lives.

But most the people I know who profess English love it. LOVE IT, in the geekiest and most sincere of ways, and have never really lost whatever it was that made them the kind of kids who stayed up under the covers all night with a book and a flashlight. They're savvy and professional and hard-hitting scholars, but they still have that childish feeling of delight and wonder at the things they read and teach.

This is true whether or not they have political commitments to their research, although Benton appears to assume that merely having these commitments--or indeed a specific theoretical orientation--is what prevents one from loving literature. Now, I myself am completely unchurched when it comes to theory (never been taught it, never been expected to know it), and it would be pretty hard for my political beliefs to have much bearing on my scholarship even if I wanted them to, but I can't imagine objecting to the simple fact that some people have political commitments that are entwined with their scholarship.

Certainly, there are people who are more interested in the politics than in the literature and who let their agendas ride their textual analyses--but most of the people I know who have definite theoretical orientations are superb thinkers who came to their particular framework because they found it to be illuminating and liberating. I blogged last summer about reading Judith Butler for the first time (as I then was) and about how astonished I was (coming to her, perhaps, with some of THB's prejudices) to find her work so moving and so obviously passionately felt. But then, that's what good scholars do: they translate their passions and their enthusiasms into commentary, criticism, and teaching. They love what they do, and they take literature seriously and they take literature personally.

That being said, not everyone who loves reading in a rapturous and full-throated way makes a good scholar, and there are scores of undergraduate English majors who should be steered away from grad school for this very reason. But to claim that the love itself is unfashionable or in some way a liability is simply absurd.

So I suggest this: since all Benton's evidence is anecdotal, and all mine is likewise anecdotal, let's do this officially: THB's peeps and my peeps. Right after school. By the swingsets. We'll settle this once and for all.

John Updike is no Renaissance Man

Speaking of books, I just came across John Updike's essay in the Sunday New York Times Book Review of two weeks ago, which the Review credits as an adaptation of an address Updike gave at last month's Book Expo in D.C. Appropriately enough for his venue, Updike celebrates the glories of the material book and expresses concern for its future--as well as for the future of booksellers. Although this isn't a novel subject, it's also not, you'd think, one that a bibliophile could find much to quarrel with.

Except. Except that much of Updike's essay is devoted to fretting over an article in last month's Times Magazine, written by Wired magazine writer Kevin Kelly, which enthuses about "Google's plan. . . to scan the contents of five major research libraries and make them searchable," thus making all the books in those libraries freely and openly accessible on the web.

What does Updike object to about this project? It's not the threat to booksellers, really, or even precisely the threat to authors, but rather the "anarchic nature" of the universal library that Google would create. Updike quotes Kelly to demonstrate how ghastly this future would be:

"Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. . . . These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or 'playlists,' as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual 'bookshelves' — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these 'bookshelves' will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages."

Huh, I thought. That sounds rather familiar. Rather Renaissance, even--commonplace books weren't searchable, of course, but they were full of random bibs and bobs of sentences and paragraphs, poems and passages, culled from a wide variety of sources: a clever epigram here; a dirty poem there; and bits of wisdom on all kinds of topics throughout. They were considered an important part of one's education and crucial to developing into a knowledgeable and well-spoken individual. (And of course, many writers today follow a similar practice of notebook-keeping.)

However, Updike doesn't see it that way. He continues:

This is, as I read it, a pretty grisly scenario. "Performances, access to the creator, personalization," whatever that is — does this not throw us back to the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value? Have not writers, since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution, imagined that they already were, in their written and printed texts, giving an "access to the creator" more pointed, more shapely, more loaded with aesthetic and informational value than an unmediated, unpolished personal conversation?

Uh, no. This does not "throw us back to the pre-literate societies," John. Like I said: consider the commonplace book. Or the miscellany. Or the personalized bound volumes that many early modern readers created, where they'd take a bunch of pamphlets or even entire books and have them bound together into one "personalized" volume. Some of these volumes, when we look at them today, make thematic sense--all their items are on one topic or in one genre (they may all be sermons, for example, or all pamphlets on ecclesiastical government)--but many of them reflect their authors' idiosyncratic, magpie tendencies in the same way that commonplace books do.

(I'm not even going to comment on the "since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution" part of that passage, which seems to suggest that authors only came to care about their works once they could be printed--because, you know, it's not like there were books before then, or anything--while at the same time showing no real understanding of how vexed the idea of "authorship" remained for quite a long while AFTER the advent of print.)

But the final paragraphs are the best part:

"When books are digitized," Kelly ominously promises, "reading becomes a community activity. . . . The universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book."

Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.

So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

Wasn't the Renaissance man, in fact, a man of snippets? And as long as you choose the right snippets (and cite your sources, dammit, for all the students out there), aren't you demonstrating your exquisite taste--and, in fact, the very personal identity that Updike is so het up over?

Yeah. In sum: shut up, John Updike.

4th of July weekend poetry blogging

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

-- e. e. cummings

Friday poetry blogging: Kurt Brown

I love this poem because it (unfortunately) captures my own attitude toward money perfectly. Given how much of the stuff has been flowing out of here lately, it seemed like the right time to post.


Money as Water

"Cash flow" "liquid assets" "pooling our resources"--
it's clear that money falls from heaven,
drops in pennies, nickels, dimes, to gather
in the small depressions of our hands.
It's clear how profit swells and streams of money
merge, how waves of money move
through nations, cause a "rippling effect"
and soon recede. How some people
drown, while others stay afloat and keep their heads
above the flood. How banks are "bailed out"
like wounded ships and panic follows,
bubbles burst, small investors find it hard
to breathe. It's clear how money
passes through out hands like water,
and our sources, once dried up, leave us
thirsting after more. How funds
diverted, often vanish, and those without a "safety net"
go "belly up." How all we have
goes down the drain, and we get soaked.