Reading Resistance Value: Deconstructive Practice and the Politics of Literary Critical Encounters

209 Pages·1990·19.963 MB·English

by  Alan Kennedy (auth.)

READING RESISTANCE VALUE
Also by Alan Kennedy
THE PROTEAN SELF: Dramatic Action in Contemporary Fiction
MEANING AND SIGNS IN FICTION
Reading Resistance
Value
Deconstructive Practice and the Politics of
Literary Critical Encounters
ALAN KENNEDY
Professor of English and Chair of the English Department
Dalhousie University
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-20496-0 ISBN 978-1-349-20494-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20494-6
© Alan Kennedy 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-47410-5
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1990
ISBN 978-0-312-04094-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kennedy, Alan, 1939-
Reading resistance value: deconstructive practice and the politics of literary critical encout
ers/ Alan Kennedy.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-312-04094-9
I. Reader-response criticism. I. Title.
PN98.R38K4 1990
801'.95--dc20 89-29802
CIP
This is for the other
members of the gang:
Sanu and Ayus Aditya
To deprive the bourgeoisie not of its art but of its
concept of art, this is the precondition of a revolutionary
argument.
(unattributed quotation used by P. Macherey
in A Theory of Literary Production)
The we is not what resists; what resists is mind
proceeding towards itself.
Oean-Fran~ois Lyotard, 'Discussions, or Phrasing
"after Auschwitz"', 1986)
Contents
Preface ix
1 Reading as Resistance and Value 1
2 Undoing the Influence of Wordsworth on Robert Frost 19
3 Criticism of Value: Response to John Fekete 33
4 The Literal and the Law 49
5 Paul de Man: From Resistance to Value 63
6 Tristram Shandy and the Defensive Reading 91
7 One Hundred Years of Solitude: Resistance, Rebellion and
Reading 107
8 The Inversion of Form: Deconstructing 1984 129
9 Reading Culture and Anarchy 149
10 Deconstruction Meets the Departments of Eng. Lit. 170
Conclusion 191
Notes 192
Index 197
vii
Preface
While attempting to develop something like a theory of reading
practice, focusing on specific 'literary' (if deconstructive) readings
of individual 'works', I have been aware of the way that theory
has been rapidly developing in other areas. Clearly I am not going
to be master of all the discourses necessary to my task. I have tried
to put a number of themes together in deconstructive readings
that are not ignorant of social and political responsibilities. I take
this practice to be primarily resistant, and to be necessitated by
the ideological matrix of reader and writer. This deconstructive
resistance necessarily involves me in questions of form, aesthetics
and value.
On questions of value I make belated mention, in Chapter 3, of
the recent work of John Fekete. I have not been able to take in all
that has been happening in the area of ethics and value theory.
My own attempt to develop a resistant practice owes much to my
conversations with Paul Smith and Gary Wihl, and I am grateful
to both, both for their critical assistance and for their friendship.
The final chapter in this book was originally a contribution to a
volume edited by Paul Smith called After Theory. There I indicated
that I was interested in trying to work out a series of writings on
resistance. Virtually as I began to write this Preface I received in
the mail a copy of Paul Smith's recent book, Discerning the Subject
(Minnesota, 1988), in which he lays the groundwork for a theoretical
discernment of the possibilities of a resistant agent. He has taken
the theoretical project much further than I could have hoped to
and has opened up a major area for us all. His reflections on the
neglect of the subject of the 'subject' stand as a useful resistant
complement to this book. Smith's thesis, that theory has neglected
a theory of the 'subject', ought to have occurred to me, because
that is exactly what is lacking here. Smith argues that it is essential
for a resistant theory to be able to provide an analysis of a 'subject'
capable of resistance. If I had had the benefit of his book earlier,
this one would have been different. Having it now, my thinking
in the future will be different from what it would have been
otherwise.
While correcting the copy-edited version of this book I finally
found the time to read Frank Lentricchia's Criticism and Social
ix
X Preface
Change, a work certainly temporally prior to my own juxtaposition
of Kenneth Burke and de Man. Had I read it earlier I probably
would not have differed from it so much in my own work. I share
Lentricchia's enthusiasm for Burke, even if I cannot quite work
myself up to the same levels of occasional apparent distaste for
what he takes to be de Man's formalism. What still puzzles me
about Lentricchia's admirable work is how he can praise Burke for
deconstructing concepts of agency, substance, act, and so on, and
apparently condemn de Man for not giving us enough substantial
ground on which to stand in order to be capable of committed
historical action. Like Lentricchia I want to be on Burke's side; but
I see no way of avoiding the deep problematising of action marked
in de Man's writing. Burke is clearly a largely unacknowledged
temporal precursor of deconstruction. But there is a sense in which
de Man's conceptual rhetoric is logically prior to Burke's: at least
in so far as it challenges us more deeply to account for our
purposiveness in criticism.
A version of the chapter on Marquez (Chapter 7) appeared in
the Journal of Art and Ideas and in the book Garcia Marquez and Latin
America, edited by Alok Bhalla. I am grateful to him for organizing
the conference on Marquez in Hyderabad and for inviting me to
take part. A version of the chapter on English departments and
deconstruction (Chapter 10) appeared in the issue of the Dalhousie
Review guest-edited by Paul Smith. I am grateful to him and the
editors for permission to include that material here.