Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today

260 Pages·2000·1.15 MB·English

by  Michael P. Clark

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Revenge of the Aesthetic
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Revenge of the
Aesthetic
The Place of Literature in Theory Today
EDITED BY
Michael P. Clark
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
' 2000 by the Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Revenge of the aesthetic : the place of literature in theory today / edited by Michael P.
Clark.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn0-520-22002-1 (alk. paper). (cid:209) isbn0-520-22004-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Literature(cid:209)History and criticism(cid:209)Theory, etc. 2. Aesthetics, Modern(cid:209)20th
century. 3. Literature(cid:209)Philosophy. I. Clark, Michael P., 1950— .
pn49.r45 2000
8019.93(cid:209)dc21 99-29827
CIP
Manufactured in the United States of America
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). s‘
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This collection of essays is dedicated to
Murray Krieger
University Research Professor
University of California
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Michael P. Clark / 1
1. Marvell and the Art of Disappearance
Stanley Fish / 25
2. Ekphrasis Revisited, or Antitheticality Reconstructed
Hazard Adams / 45
3. Friedrich Schlegel and the Anti-Ekphrastic Tradition
J. Hillis Miller / 58
4. On Truth and Lie in an Aesthetic Sense
Ernst Behler / 76
5. Pictures of Poetry in Marot(cid:213)s(cid:131)pigrammes
Stephen G. Nichols / 93
6. Murray Krieger versus Paul de Man
Denis Donoghue / 101
7. Organicism in Literature and History: From (Murray Krieger(cid:213)s)
Poetics to (Jules Michelet(cid:213)s) Politics
David Carroll / 117
8. Of Wisdom and Competence
Wesley Morris / 136
9. What Is Literary Anthropology? The Difference between
Explanatory and Exploratory Fictions
Wolfgang Iser / 157
vii
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viii CONTENTS
10. (cid:210)A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text(cid:211): Poetics and Politics of Witnessing
Jacques Derrida (translated by Rachel Bowlby) / 180
11. My Travels with the Aesthetic
Murray Krieger / 208
notes on contributors
/ 237
index
/ 241
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Introduction
Michael P. Clark
The aesthetic can have its revenge upon ideology by revealing a power to complicate
that is also a power to undermine.
murray krieger,Ekphrasis
The essays in this volume argue for the importance of aesthetic values and
formal characteristics speci(cid:222)c to literary texts. This theme has taken on a
contrarian quality today, as aesthetic issues have often been displaced from
a (cid:222)eld that only twenty years ago could still be called (cid:210)literary(cid:211) theory with-
out drawing the battle lines that these quotation marks imply. In the years
following World War II, after a bitter debate between literary historians and
the New Critics, the priority of aesthetic value and the privileged status of
the literary text had been (cid:222)rmly established among theorists in the United
States. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, that priority was insti-
tutionalized in the American academy by the emergence of literary theory
as a distinct discourse and (cid:222)eld of study that re(cid:223)ected the formalist empha-
sis on the self-referential autonomy of literary language and its indepen-
dence from other forms of discourse. Literary theory was distinguished
from the biographical and historical positivism of earlier literary criticism
on the one hand and, on the other, from most forms of theoretical dis-
course in philosophy and the social sciences. Through the pioneering his-
torical work of W.K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Ren(cid:142) Wellek, and Mur-
ray Krieger, and in in(cid:223)uential anthologies by W.J. Bate and Hazard Adams,
literary theory traced its genealogical roots back to Plato and constituted
the (cid:210)poem,(cid:211) or literary language in general, as a unique object of knowledge
resistant to other analytic perspectives.1
The privileged status of literary language among critics and theorists
in the United States was (cid:222)rst challenged effectively by the rise of poststruc-
turalism in the early 1970s, following the appearance of The Structuralist
Controversy and the translation of Jacques Derrida(cid:213)sOf Grammatology.2 Ini-
tially, the in(cid:223)uence of this work on most American critics was limited. Post-
structuralism emerged from a Hegelian-Heideggerian tradition that was
1
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2 MICHAEL P. CLARK
quite distinct from (and almost incomprehensible within) the Kantian lin-
eage of most Anglo-American criticism at the time. In addition, the term
poststructuralism itself denoted less a coherent theoretical program than a
convenient historical marker. It grouped together some in(cid:223)uential theo-
rists who often had little in common apart from an interest in the consti-
tutive role of linguistic functions in human experience, and a corollary re-
jection of humanistic touchstones such as (cid:210)Man(cid:211) and most philosophical
absolutes and metaphysical foundations. Otherwise, their work was quite
diverse, and most of it was dif(cid:222)cult to classify according to conventional
academic categories. In particular, apart from the brilliant exceptions of
Roland Barthes and the early Michel Foucault, few of those called post-
structuralists directly addressed literary issues in the usual sense, especially
as that sense had been narrowed down by the New Critics.
As poststructuralism spread in the United States, however, it was quickly
adapted to more speci(cid:222)cally literary study by J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hart-
man, Paul de Man, and others.3In their hands, the general antihumanism
of the French theorists was focused sharply on literary issues in the form
of deconstruction, and it was aimed at one of the most important tenets of
American criticism: the semantic independence and autotelic coherence of
the poem understood as a closed and internally consistent linguistic system.
The poststructural critique of coherence and closure went much farther
than a debate over the formal properties of the text, of course. The New
Critics(cid:213) model of literary form had been directly derived from what Cole-
ridge had described as the organic symbol, and the autotelic model of the
poem implied(cid:209)and at times explicitly claimed(cid:209)a unique status for lit-
erary language that was the aesthetic embodiment of the spiritual tran-
scendence and ontic presence associated with the metaphysics of English
Romanticism. To challenge the formal coherence of the poem and its dis-
cursive autonomy was therefore to challenge the philosophical foundation
of Western humanism as it had been derived from the Romantic preoccu-
pation with the symbol and from a Kantian faith in the constitutive power
of symbolic categories in general. The threat posed by poststructuralism to
Anglo-American criticism was thus real and substantial. It not only targeted
the integrity of the literary text but also attacked the entire system of values
and intellectual practices associated with that text as (cid:210)literature.(cid:211)
In less than a decade, deconstruction won this battle and replaced the
contextualist formalism of the American New Critics as the dominant theo-
retical paradigm in the United States. Like poststructuralism in general, de-
construction was as various as the range of its practitioners, and certainly
never as programmatic as the simplistic straw men excoriated by many of its
opponents. The work characterized as deconstructive was, nevertheless,
usually consistent in its critique of structural closure and semantic coher-
ence as formal virtues of poetic language. Those aesthetic attributes were