Criticism After Theory from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf

175 Pages·2022·2.171 MB·English

by  Perry Meisel

Criticism After Theory from
Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf
The argument of this book is a simple one: that criticism after theory is a single
movement of thought defined by synthesis and continuity rather than by conflict
and change. The most influential figures in criticism since Saussure—Bakhtin,
Derrida, and Foucault—are wholly consistent with Saussure’s foundational Course
in General Linguistics (1916) no matter the traditions of complaint that have
followed in Saussure’s wake from Bakhtin forward. These complaints vitiate—
despite themselves and often hilariously so—the misconceptions that have made
cottage industries out of quarrels with Saussurean semiology that are based on
notions of Saussure that are incorrect. The materialist criticism dominant today
is actually dependent upon the legacy of a presumably formalist structuralism
rather than a step beyond it. New Historicism, postcolonialism, gender studies,
environmental criticism, archive studies, even shared and surface reading are, like
deconstruction, the by-products of Saussure’s structuralism, not its foils. Saussure’s
sign is sensory and concrete. Language and materiality are not distinct but one
and the same—history, society, the psychological subject, even the environment
are systems of signs, material archives read and reread by futures that produce
the past after the fact. Without Saussure, contemporary criticism would have no
identifiable or effective source. The book begins with chapters on Saussure and
Derrida, Bakhtin and Shakespeare, and Freud and Foucault followed by chapters
on Victorian and American fiction, D.H. Lawrence and modern poetry, Virginia
Woolf and Melanie Klein, and the historicist tropology of psychoanalysis. It
concludes with a coda in life writing on the author’s epileptic disability.
Perry Meisel, Professor of English at New York University for over 40 years until
his retirement in 2016, has written on literature, music, theory, psychoanalysis,
and culture since the 1970s. His articles have appeared in The New York Times
Book Review, The Village Voice, Partisan Review, The Nation, The Atlantic,
Raritan, October, and many other publications. He is the author of The Myth
of Popular Culture (Blackwell, 2010), The Literary Freud (Routledge, 2007),
The Cowboy and the Dandy (Oxford, 1999), The Myth of the Modern (Yale,
1987), The Absent Father (Yale, 1980), and Thomas Hardy (Yale, 1972). He
is the coeditor, with Haun Saussy, of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics
(Columbia, 2011), and coeditor, with Walter Kendrick, of Bloomsbury/Freud: The
Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–25 (Basic Books, 1985). He is also the
editor of Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1981). He received
his B.A. Summa cum laude from Yale in 1970. He also received his M.Phil. (1973)
and Ph.D. (1975) from Yale. He is the recipient of Yale’s Wrexham Prize and
Thomas G. Bergin Cup and research grants from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Spencer Foundation. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and
PEN and has been a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the
Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College.
Routledge New Textual Studies in Literature
Series Editors: Jane Potter, Bonnie Latimer and Kevin Killeen
The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley
Anna Mercer
Richard Polwhele and Romantic Culture
The Politics of Reaction and the Poetics of Place
Dafydd Moore
The Mini-Cycle
Allan Weiss
Criticism After Theory from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf
Perry Meisel
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www .routledge
.com /Routledge -New -Textual -Studies -in -Literature /book -series /NTSL
Criticism After Theory from
Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf
Perry Meisel
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Perry Meisel
The right of Perry Meisel to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-24423-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-24425-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-27852-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003278528
Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
A little formalism turns one away from History. A lot brings
one back to it.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957, 112)

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Durability of the Linguistic Metaphor 1
Textuality 1
Criticism after Theory 4
The Open Tradition 7
1 “The Word Within”: Egger, Saussure, Derrida 9
Egger and the Origins of “Interior Monologue” 9
Saussure and Derrida 11
Melisma 13
2 Bakhtin, Shakespeare, and the Novel 18
Bakhtin in Paris 18
A Dialogical Shakespeare 20
“The Death of Kings” 25
Lear and His Fool 29
Hamlet and Its Problems 32
3 Deferred Action from Freud to Foucault 40
The Wolf Man 40
“Chronologic Displacement” 43
Time and the Archive 49
4 Form and History from Dickens to Woolf 58
Specificity 58
Dickens en abyme 59
Influence and Anxiety in Victorian Studies 61
In Memoriam Virginia Woolf 66
The Return of the Dead 68
viii Contents
5 Henry James and the Body English 69
Realism and Romance 69
“The Common Forms” 72
“Belated” 77
6 Sinclair Lewis and the American Language 81
Politics and Literature 81
“The Art of Publicity” 85
“The Patchwork Quilt” 87
7 Black and Tan: DuBois, Faulkner, and The Joy Luck Club 89
Soul on Ice 89
Chiaroscuro 93
Amy Tan’s Orientalism 95
8 D.H. Lawrence: The Poem As Environment 102
The Romantic Context of Modern Poetry 102
Eliot, Pound, H.D. 104
D.H. Lawrence’s Revolution in Verse 106
“Green They Shone” 111
9 Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Klein 114
Woolf and Freud 114
Part-Objects in To the Lighthouse 116
Bloomsbury and British Psychoanalysis 120
10 The Feudal Unconscious: Capitalism and the Family
Romance 122
Rethinking History in Psychoanalysis 122
Two Languages in The Interpretation of Dreams 126
Feudalism and the Family Romance 128
“Constancy” and Capitalism 132
Freud, Marx, Keynes 135
Coda: The Challenge of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy 141
Works Cited 151
Index 160
Acknowledgments
A shorter version of Chapter 4, “Form and History from Dickens to Woolf,”
first appeared as “J. Hillis Miller’s All Souls’ Day: Formalism and Historicism
in Victorian and Modern Fiction Studies” in Reading Victorian Literature:
Essays in Honor of J. Hillis Miller, coedited by Julian Wolfreys and Monika
Szuba (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). A shorter version of
Chapter 8, “D.H. Lawrence: The Poem As Environment,” first appeared as
“‘Green They Shone’: The Poem As Environment” in D.H. Lawrence Review
(2018), 43: 1–2. A shorter version of Chapter 9, “Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Klein,”
first appeared as “Woolf and Freud: The Kleinian Turn” in Virginia Woolf
in Context, coedited by Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012). A shorter version of Chapter 10, “The
Feudal Unconscious: Capitalism and the Family Romance,” was originally
published under the same title in October 159 (Winter, 2017) by the MIT
Press. Grateful acknowledgment to all for permission to reprint. Thanks
also to Emily Jenne for preparation of the manuscript.