Table Of Content

bowlby - xx - 4 - final 11/01/2018 12:15 Page i TTAALKING WWAALKING ESSAAYYS IN CULLTTURAL CRITICISM bowlby - xx - 4 - final 11/01/2018 12:15 Page ii For my father, Ronnie Bowlby bowlby - xx - 4 - final 11/01/2018 12:15 Page iii TTAALKING WWAALKING ESSAAYYS IN CULLTTURAL CRITICISM R AC H EL B OW LBY bowlby - xx - 4 - final 11/01/2018 12:15 Page iv The right of Rachel Bowlby to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ISBN 9781845199111 (Paper) ISBN 9781782845294 (PDF) ISBN 9781782845270 (EPUB) ISBN 9781782845287 (Kindle) First published 2018, in Great Britain by SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS PO Box 139 Eastbourne BN24 9BP Distributed in North America by SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS ISBS Publisher Services 920 NE 58th Ave #300, Portland, OR 97213, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. An Acknowledgements (page 239) provides information on the publication history of some of the articles published in this volume. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bowlby, Rachel, 1957– author. Title: Talking walking : essays in cultural criticism / Rachel Bowlby. Description: Brighton ; Portland : Sussex Academic Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017046724 | ISBN 9781845199111 (pbk : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Literature—History and criticism. | Literature, Modern—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN86 .B69 2018 | DDC 824/.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046724 Typeset and designed by Sussex Academic Press, Brighton & Eastbourne. Printed by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall. bowlby - xx - 4 - final 11/01/2018 12:15 Page v Contents Preface vii Modern Spaces 1 Talking Walking 3 2 Half Art: Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life 18 3 Readable City 28 4 Motoring through History: Woolf’s ‘Evening over Sussex’ 33 5 Shopping for Christmas 42 6 Please Enter Your Pin 48 Family Mutations 7 After Œdipus: Changing Family Stories 59 8 The Third Parent 76 9 Woolf and Childhood Abuse 79 10 Kinship under All: Judith Butler on Antigone 82 11 James’s Maisiein Manhattan 86 Critical Languages 12 Domestication 93 13 The Joy of Footnotes 115 14 Clichés in the Psychology of Advertising 122 15 Who’s Framing Virginia Woolf? 132 16 Woolf’s Working Window 143 17 Woolf in Scholarly Form 149 18 Ginny Whizz 152 19 The Pinker Thinker 155 20 Cultural Studies and the Literary 157 21 Derrida’s ‘Once and for All’ 160 22 Derrida One Day 164 23 Yale Theory 168 24 The Future of Literary Thinking 170 25 Passionate about Literature! 172 bowlby - xx - 4 - final 11/01/2018 12:15 Page vi vi Contents Interview 26 Interview with David Jonathan Y. Bayot and 181 Jeremy De Chavez Acknowledgements 239 Index 240 bowlby - xx - 4 - final 11/01/2018 12:15 Page vii Preface When something called theory first broke onto the seemingly stag- nant scene of literary studies, it offered bright new ways and fields for critical reading: new methods and subjects, and also new words to speak them. The syllabus and the styles would never be the same, and methods of reading inspired by theory were proudly claimed as a mode of social critique. At a long remove and in different ways, the essays and the interview in this book are all indebted to the sense of critical openness and movement which began at that time: that really learning to read in an active sense was a way of learning to think about the cultural forms that surround us. ‘Talking Walking’ is, at one level, simply the name of one of the chapters of this book, a talk about walking. But the title is also meant to suggest broader questions that extend into the interview (at the end of the book) and the different sections. To begin with, talking and walking connect to the representations of movement and moder- nity that occupy the book’s first chapters: between the urban and the rural, or the car and the store. In a simple way, the two activities have been used to suggest the authenticity of a natural culture unspoilt by the artifice of technology and consumption, as when Aldous Huxley has a mildly dissenting character invite a girlfriend to share in a simple rural pleasure away from the usual world. Her response, with the feminine complacency of Huxley’s women: ‘Walking and talking – that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon’.1‘Readable City’ looks at how such clear codes of cultural meaning are both present (and practically formative) and also, inevitably, provisional and precarious. And in essays by Baudelaire and Woolf, the subject of two further chapters, the fleeting and variable views of city walker and rural motorist each, in quite different ways, provide a means of thinking about new presentations of history and change. This section also includes two short pieces on supermarkets which follow the positioning of customers and cashiers in their respective subjective places within this strange modern space in which people and trolleys slowly process towards their passage through the checkout. The second section is about changing conditions of parenthood. Walking and talking are two of the fundamental skills acquired in bowlby - xx - 4 - final 11/01/2018 12:15 Page viii viii Preface the humanwards development out of babyhood. In the charmingly antiquated language of present-day childcare books, they are ‘mile- stones’; but all around these ancient boundaries, it is as if everything else in the parenting world is in flux. The family situation into which the baby is born may well be quite different from the one that its parent or parents found themselves in a generation before – as chosen single parenthood, or same-sex co-parenthood, for instance, become increasingly common. And even before she or he was born, the talking walker may have been subject to processes of creation unknown to any pre-baby until this present time, as new reproductive technologies have actually altered the seemingly natural and eternal ‘facts of life’. Talking and walking may stand together as solid stages of every child’s growth, but like the words of a babbling beginner or the elements of a basic poem, they also go together because they rhyme – because they sound as if they belong together. And that brings me to the third section, which is about the languages of criticism. The pieces here engage with different arguments now and earlier about the uses and history of critical reading – of literature, and also of other cultural forms. There are short pieces on the changing styles of critical writing, and on the place of particular writers – Woolf or Derrida – in contemporary critical culture. There are essays on clichés, on footnotes, on the language of the university job interview, on the use of ‘domestication’ as a catch-all negative term. In the development of the book, it was the interview, now at the end, that came first. David Jonathan Bayot is to be thanked for that: for the initial idea and for formulating the questions and putting the text together when it was published by De La Salle University Press in 2014. It was his idea too that the interview could be amplified for publication in the present form, with a selection of additional writ- ings that would hopefully do several things. It could show in more detail the kind of work talked about in the interview, and it could also introduce further areas – like reproductive technologies – that didn’t get mentioned much in that exchange. It could gather together pieces previously scattered in different kinds of publication – from newspapers to academic articles to, in one instance, a blog – or not previously published in any medium. And it could give a sense of changing preoccupations and changing writing styles over a fairly long period of time. So while I don’t pretend that this particular mix of research interests is anyone’s but mine, I also think that there may be something more recognisably representative in how I have gone about pursuing them in writing. This sort of likeness probably emerges much more clearly when, as is now the case, many of the bowlby - xx - 4 - final 11/01/2018 12:15 Page ix Preface ix pieces have passed some way beyond their initial present time. And sometimes, too, this question of contemporary styles and subjects is the topic I’m talking about (‘Passionate about Literature!’, for instance, or ‘Woolf in Scholarly Form’). The book derives from several decades of working and writing and talking and walking within the changing contemporary landscape of literary and cultural studies. I hope that both old inhabitants and new arrivals into this world will find pleasures of reading and matter for thinking. 1 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 77.