Nouvelle Critique Research Articles

On the Teaching of Literary Theory

ON THE TEACHING OF LITERARY THEORY by David Gershom Myers My title is intended to evoke Lionel Trilling's famous essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature." And my theme is similar to his. But where Trilling was convinced that modern literature is betrayed by teaching unless students are not left in the dark about their teacher's commitment to it, fear of it, ambivalence to it, I believe the only way to teach literary theory is to take issue with it. Although many teachers of theory claim to engage in "oppositional pedagogy," dieir opposition falters at theory itself. If the available materials are any indication, die most common approach to the subject is the taxonomical survey, with lessons or units on Saussurean linguistics, structuralist anthropology, la nouvelle critique, deconstruction, rezeptionästhetik and reader response, Marxist criticism, psychoanalysis, feminism, the New Historicism, etc.1 Here theory is represented as dieories, and what is imparted in die classroom are die propositional contents of various and differing bodies of doctrine. Students are instructed diat language, meaning, and the selfare socially constructed, diat discourse is ideological, that il n'y a pas de hors-texte, that paradigms shift, that the author is dead. The ideas of literary theory, in short, are treated as accomplished facts. Such an approach has something to recommend it. It is a convenient way to organize a syllabus; it acknowledges and conveys the significance of theory as a historical movement; it is founded upon the sound educational precept that learning can take place only where there is something in particular to be learned. But pretty clearly the teaching of literary theory as a set of facts is not the teaching of it as theory. Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 326-336 David Gershom Myers327 Although theorists like to speak of solving problems, although their followers act upon occasion as if the achievement of recent theory has been to settle certain issues and close off certain inquiries, it is a betrayal of literary theory to teach it with this attitude, reducing theory to received ideas. On one hand die attitude is untheoretical. Traditional humanists are abused for believing in the normative force of preexisting standards when "post-modernist lit profs by definition recognize that 'literary standards'—literatures themselves—are socially constructed and therefore ideological."2 But to speak so confidently of what is "therefore" the case is to insist without further argument that true statement p entails true statement q, and this is not (in Gilbert RyIe's words) a "dieory-constituting sentence": such expressions belong not to players on the field oftheorybut to spectators and cheerleaders.3 If teachers really believe that theory has solved some of the traditional problems of criticism and interpretation it would be dishonest of them not to drill students in the solutions, perhaps with the aid of mnemonic rhymes. But if literary theory means anything by definition it is that all verdicts about literature and literary standards—and not only humanists ' —are open to interrogation. Otherwise, the culture of humanism is merely being unseated by the culture of theory, and tiieory is misunderstood as die authoritative source of a New Wisdom. The original hope that theory would offer defiance to just such a moral and literary education based on cultural authority is diwarted. Most teachers would probably agree that genuine learning has not been attained witii the ability to recite that-sentences ("Derrida says that . . ." or "feminists assert that . . ."). It also involves the knowledge how to carry forward a specific inquiry for oneself. Is theory then a set of methods and probative techniques? R. S. Crane once proposed such an approach, in which critical theories would be treated heuristically, "not as doctrines to be taught, but radier as more or less useful tools of our trade. . . ."4 Instead of boggling at the word trade, which may seem to imply a bourgeois conception of teaching and critical activity, it might be worthwhile to consider tiiis heuristic approach, while holding the question of its class consequences in abeyance. For it, too, is a favored approach to the teaching of literary theory, perhaps only slightly less common than the taxonomical survey. Here different theories are abridged and...

Albert Camus, The Stranger (review)

182Philosophy and Literature pages on prominent friends, famüiars, and rivals ofher protagonist (e.g. Nizan, Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Bataüle); and she provides a fascinating assessment of such majorjournals as Esprit, Critique, and La Nouvelle Critique. More generaUy, Boschetti's work constitutes a suggestive reflection on the reasons texts are written and read in certain ways at certain times. Boschetti's work, however, is not entirely persuasive. She often relies on conventional psychology to account for certain attitudes: for instance, Zola's depiction of professors as faüed writers is explained by his flunking his exams and his being rejected as a candidate for the Académiefrançaise (p. 16). She also frequendy takes "sociological" shortcuts: the dispositions characterizing the personalists of Esprit—they are first-generation Catholic inteUectuals who come from the upwardly mobüe and salaried provincial (lower) middle class—account for their group ethos: "an ascetic and meritocratic, spiritualist, and elitist moral rectitude" (p. 156). Above all, in her attempt to prove that cultural production and cultural success are governed by the configuration of the cultural field, she leaves litde room for individual choice and action or, if one prefers, for disorder and chance. In spite of these reservations, I believe that Boschetti succeeds in showing how much a Bourdieu-inspired sociology of culture can contribute to literary and philosophical criticism and history. University of PennsylvaniaGerald Prince Albert Camus, The Stranger, by Patrick McCarthy; xii & 109 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, $5.95 paper. The Stranger is a twentieth-century classic, a book that defined us when we read it just after World War II, a book that continues to define us but that keeps shifting and multiplying its meanings with every new reader and interpretation . It is a "landmark"—to use the word for the series in which Patrick McCarthy's book has been published—an event that signaled a turning point in the craft of fiction and in self-understanding. Though we each have our own Meursault, our own interpretation of his story, we look forward to the appearance of still another among the thousands of studies of The Stranger, to see what discoveries have been made, what meanings have been added to the top of the mountain. It is a litde like watching Sisyphus at work: there wUl always be another reading to carry up. McCarthy's contribution to die endless interpretation of The Stranger, whUe more modest than his previous book on Camus, is like it in its brashness, Reviews183 liveliness, provocativeness, and willingness to take chances. Though it avoids the jargon of recent criticism, it uses elements of theories and methodologies from structuralism to deconstruction and reaches back to Marx and Freud for ideas that will explain the text. It also strives to be a synthesis of existing interpretations of The Stranger. The book opens with "Contexts," sketches of Camus's life and the social, cultural, and historical background of The Stranger. In Chapter 2, the bulk of the study, McCarthy examines the novel episode by episode, commenting on various aspects of each in the light of concepts drawn from structuralism, psychoanalysis, sociology, and theology. A third chapter places Camus's novel in the context of other works in the cycle of the Absurd and compares TL· Stranger with Sartre's Nausea and TL· Wall. The last chapter shows how Sartre and others shaped our understanding of TL· Stranger, evaluates influences, and ends with advice for further reading and a comment on Visconti's unsuccessful film of the story. "Meursault's Languages," perhaps the most important part of McCarthy's study, points out the various kinds of utterance—or silence—used in TL· Stranger, but stresses the languages of authority (the law, the courts, lawyers, police, etc.) and dissent (Meursault and his "friends," the oppressed, generally, both honest and criminal, the Arab victims) and shows how, finally, the language of authority is subverted by its victims. McCarthy's interest in language is one of the unifying threads of his essay. Another is what he terms the "psychoanalytical novel" in TL· Stranger, the "incestuous" character of Meursault's relationship with his mother and unconscious motivation in general in the fiction. In the...

Reconstructing Literature (review)

Reviews119 Kripke tries to avoid the skepticism inherent in Frege's distinction between meaning and reference by arguing that meaning is not the product of an arbitrary structure but instead is itself referential. The signified, for Kripke, is always already constituted; we simply name the referent. Though this might seem to answer deconstructive skepticism, in Norris's view it fails expectedly to account for the problematic and metaphoric "origin" or prior existence of referential signification. Norris's book hints at connection and mutual problems in ways which show that Rorty has just scraped the surface in taking note of the challenge of deconstruction. Contemporary philosophy and the historiography ofphilosophy are caught up in the deconstructive turn. Either most professional philosophers have too much at stake to recognize it or (less likely) have chosen to respond to it with the silence which Norris leaves open as the only option available to those who would challenge deconstruction. Texas A&M UniversityStephen H. Daniel Reconstructing Literature, edited by Laurence Lerner; 218 pp. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1983, $27.50. One professed purpose ofReconstructing Literature is to launch a "counterattack" (p. 3) on semiotics, structuralism, and deconstruction in literary studies, and the book's (mainly British) writers challenge selected principles of these interpretive modes. This counterattack is complemented, however, by the book's second purpose: to select the more useful elements from structuralism and poststructuralism without abandoning "belief in reason, in the possibility of meaning , in the conception of literature, and in the need for value-judgments" (p. 9). The editor's introduction presents the partisans in current critical debate as already hopelessly polarized into "two simple extremes": one (la nouvelle critique) holds that "all meaning is subjective" and the other (traditionalist criticism) maintains that "every text has one fixed meaning" (p. 14). Resolved to borrow the best from extremists on either side, the contributors to Reconstructing Literature trust the "reader's acumen" to judge the best ways to read (p. 15). They implicitly assume that any specific interpretive procedure can be judged apart from its place in a structure of constraints which disciplines the reader with the rigors of method. While the contributors sometimes make useful observations about individual ideas in contemporary criticism, the book as a whole lacks a common or even 120Philosophy and Literature coherent grasp of the systems of thought it intends to oppose. The cheerful and occasionally quirky eclecticism of most of the essays has few attractions because the contributors often presuppose without discussion the very ideas their opponents have labored to discredit. For instance, the editor's assertion that poststructuralism is "subjectivist" leads neither him nor his colleagues to analyze the poststructuralist contention that "subjects" must be understood in the context of socially validated, intersubjective forms of knowing. Other characterizations of contemporary critical theory are so frequently onesided or inadequate, if not inaccurate, that it becomes difficult to credit the book's synthetic ambitions. To cite only a few instances, structuralism is treated as if it were a nongenerative formalism, Fredric Jameson's The Prison-House of Language is cited as if it championed textuality, and Roland Barthes's texts are discussed as if they comprised a single homogeneous statement. Only Gabriel Josipovici seems aware that quite different epistemologies inform Barthes's various texts, but for all its strengths, Josipovici's essay is marred by the failure both to consider sufficiently the Cartesian context of Barthes's ideas and to see that Proust is a cultural eminence with and against whom Barthes works. Wayne Booth praises Gérard Genette's achievement but at the expense of slighting the serious questions raised about origins in current critical theory. Furthermore, several contributors see deconstruction as the consequence of infusing structuralism with leftist political sympathies. To American eyes, this judgment seems quite mistaken because it discounts deconstruction's roots in phenomenology and confuses deconstruction with other currents in poststructuralism . As Edward Said and Frank Lentricchia have frequently observed, deconstruction is a political quietism because it submits all projects — including leftist ones — to a deconstruction of their description, rationale, and intentions. To see Paul de Man, Hillis Miller, or their epigones as radical leftists requires a rare comic gift. Lerner and his...

America as Discourse

David Cowart. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1980.154 + ix pp. James M. Mellard. The Exploded Form : The Modernist Novel in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1980. 208 + xv pp. Sanford Pinsker. Between Two Worlds: The American Novel in the 1960s. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1980.139 + x pp. Thomas Hill Schaub. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1981. 165 + x pp. John 0. Stark. Pynchon's Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. 183 + ix pp. Mark Royden Winchell. Joan Didion. Boston : Twayne Publishers. 1980. 185 pp. America doesn't exist. I know—I've lived there. (Alain Resnais: Mon Oncle dAmérique) Toto. I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.... (Dorothy arriving in Oz: epigraph to Part 3 of Gravity's Rainbow) "Why... is everybody so interested in texts?" ( The Crying of Lot 49) "If," Roland Barthes asserted in his inaugural lecture in the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France, "by some unimaginable excess"' all but one of our learned disciplines "were to be expelled from our education sys- tem, it is the discipline of Literature which would have to be saved, for all knowledge, all the sciences, are present in the literary monument."' That is a large claim and, coming from the iconoclastic semiologist of S/Z and Le Plaisir du Texte, gratifyingly soothing to beleaguered humanists. It is after all in part because of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and other members of the French nouvelle critique that the much-cherished American insistence on the autonomy of the literary text and the uniqueness of the artistic vision has been so disturbingly and fundamentally challenged in recent years. With Barthes on our side after all, are we perhaps permitted to see texts as more than nodes within differential networks of significance carrying with them an illimitable force of multiple, disseminated meaning? Perhaps we can cau- tiously continue to privilege "literature" as society's unusually acute under- standing (or lack of understanding) of itself? Celebrating the festival of words, we might after all learn to cheat the facticity of the world.

Letter to my Friends Overseas

bdellatif Laabi was born in Fez, Morocco, in 1942. He took a degree in French literature at Rabat University, and until the time of his arrest in 1972, he taught French at the Lycée Al Laymoune in Rabat. Laabi is a leader of Morocco's Marxist-Leninist Frontiste movement. In 1966 he founded the radical literary revue Souffles, first published in French and later in French and Arabic. In 1971 he founded another magazine, Anfas ( in Arabic). Both Souffles and Anfas were important influences on the new generation of writers and poets in Morocco, and both were banned when Frontiste members were rounded up in 1972. Arrested on 27 January 1972 along with a number of teachers, students and other intellectuals, Laabi was tortured, imprisoned, given a provisional release, then re-arrested and transferred to the secret detention centre at Moulay Cherif in Casablanca. He undertook a series of hunger strikes before he was granted a trial in August 1973, when he was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for conspiracy against the state. After being held at Casablanca and later at Kenitra, where he spent several months in solitary confinement, Laabi was transferred to a prison hospital in 1978, suffering from severe rheumatism ( with a risk of paralysis) and eye problems. Laabi's long poem Letter to My Friends Overseas, excerpts of which we reproduce here, was sent out of prison part by part, ostensibly as separate letters to twenty different ‘friends overseas’. The poem was later assembled and published with Laabi's permission by the Paris magazine La Nouvelle Critique, in its issue of August-September 1978. Other poems by Abdellatif Laabi are available from Inéditions Barbare publishers, Paris.

The Crossroads of Critical Consciousness: A Response to Jonathan Culler's "Structuralism and Grammatology"

Let me begin by acknowledging my general admiration for Professor Culler's exemplary contributions to a theory of structuralist poetics, a movement that, at the risk of privileging Gallic precedents, might best be considered la nouvelle critique in American literary criticism. I should preface my remarks with the further acknowledgment that I share in the pursuit of a structural poetics, or a semiotic theory generally. Thus, my response will appear more analytical than polemical, although I begin with a critique of certain paradoxical assumptions in Professor Culler's argument as a means to elaborate further the problematic arising from the premises and implications underlying the formalities of structuralism as well as the informalities of deconstruction.

Literary Meaning in the Middle Ages: From a Sociology of Genres to an Anthropology of Works

T IS STRIKING to find that, in order to analyze literary theories applied to the Middle Ages, we turn to researchers in countries outside France. The contents of this issue of New Literary History confirm the sibylline remark made by Maria Corti at the beginning of her article: If France, whose orientation is different, is left to one side. What orientation could justify such an exclusion? Of course, we must take into account the overall effect of university teaching and research in France, particularly regarding medieval literature. So centralized is the French system that one or two dogmatic minds could control appointments, competitive examinations, and publishing, thereby stifling research, or at least restricting it to a level of respectable mediocrity. Undoubtedly, a large proportion of writings published in France perpetuate a positivistic and bookish approach, merely shifting information from one point to another, ensuring an appearance of knowledge which disarms criticism. This molelike activity is not without merit, for it prepares the ground for use. But others, seekers unimpressed by an institution's respectability or by the venerable antiquity of the buildings housing it, must come to sow and reap. The astonishing fertility of the French nouvelle critique has not extended to the Middle Ages. However, this discouraging impression might be dispelled if we considered the work of French scholars less enslaved by the system, working in the direction defined by Maria Corti (Italy) and Eugene Vance (Canada)-Jean Batany's sociological semantics,' Michel Zink's investigation of Romance sermons,2 and Jean-Charles Payen's ideological criticism.3 Theoretical virtuosity is indeed less apparent in these studies than methodical demonstration. But the writers are well aware

Historicism and Literary History: Mapping the Modern Period

including the term literature itself-modern and period are at the same time indispensable and highly problematical. Put together in a single phrase-the modern period-they are paradoxical. Period implies an end, yet in some senses we still feel that we are living in the modern period. will the Modern Period end? Ihab Hassan has asked. Has ever a period waited so long? When will modernism cease and what comes thereafter?' One answer is that the modern period has already ended and that we are now living in the postmodern period. Hassan himself, in the essay from which I quote, makes a useful contribution to the definition of postmodernism, but regards it as a change or development in modernism rather than a decisive break with it. In any case, the question, what comes hereafter, remains. end of periodization? The slow arrival of simultaneity? are among Hassan's apocalyptic suggestions. The Parisian savants of our day would, I think, applaud this prospect. Levi-Strauss, for instance, has offered the utopian vision of a world in which automation would free man to enjoy all the advantages of a timeless primitive existence and none of its disadvantages: Henceforth history would make itself by itself. Society, placed outside and above history, would be able to exhibit once again that regular and, as it were, crystalline structure which the best preserved of primitive societies teach us is not antagonistic to the human condition.2 If such a society read literary texts at all, it would surely approach them in the spirit of the nouvelle critique, as semantic playgrounds rather than as historical expressions or representations. In such a society, it is safe to assume, there would be no university courses in literature, no scholarly journals, and no MLA Conventions, all of which institutions are heavily dependent on periodization for the conceptual organization of their subject matter. The question of periodization is therefore part of a larger question about history as a mode of knowledge and its application to literature: is literary history possible, or desirable? I would say that it is certainly unavoidable, in the sense that even those writers and critics who seek to escape from

Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences

Some literary arguments, such as those about the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, clarify and enrich the works around which they center. Others-the debate between the New Critics and the Chicago School or the battle over la nouvelle critique in France-are valuable because they reveal differences in critical ideologies and suggest alternative ways of looking at texts. But in many ways, the most fascinating are those controversies which force a radical reexamination of our critical vocabulary. These quarrels often deal ostensibly with a specific text, but they unintentionally and unconsciously reveal something more general: a fundamental inadequacy in the way we talk about literature. Not only can't we resolve the differences between the critics, but lacking the terminology to explain the disagreement fully, we are left with the sense that we don't even understand just what it is about or why it has occurred. If pursued, such quarrels can transcend their initial subjects and lead us to substantial critical insights. One such controversy surrounds Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. The novel itself is in the form of a poem by the recently deceased professorpoet John Shade, with an introduction, commentary, and index by Shade's nextdoor neighbor and colleague, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote's elaborate exegesis relates the poem to historical events in a country called Zembla, events which climax in the escape of King Charles at the outbreak of the Zemblan Revolution. The reader soon learns that Kin-

On the Interpretation of Drama

HERE is a pronounced tendency in modern criticism to deny literary works their generic consistency. One can recognize without too much trouble whether a critical essay is written by a psychologist, sociologist, philosopher, or a linguist; but if we do not already know in advance the genre is under discussion, we cannot decide without difficulty whether he is speaking of a novel, a drama, or a lyric. The question of critical method seems to have pushed aside the question of form, or to be more exact, the question of the mode of existence of a literary work. We discover, says Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, that the critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it. In spite of the abundance of critical discussion about literature, we still lack studies of the novel, drama (and even lyric poetry) can match the studies of the epic by Millman Parry, Albert B. Lord, and C. S. Lewis. With the partial exception of the pioneering book by Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater, the modern critic presents literature to us-if we can put it this way-in a crumbled state, like a flow of words, or pictures, or psychological complexes, or social attitudes, connected among themselves in one way or another; but the moment all these fragments become one literary creation remains unperceived. Or, dans la mesure oi la psychocritique cesse de decrire son object pour tenter de 1'expliquer, says Serge Doubrovsky in his study Pourquoi la nouvelle critique, volatilise. Elle n'approfondit pas les structures qu'elle decouvre, elle les d6truit . . . . Ce que nous vivons, ce ne sont pas les hesitations de Pyrrhus oi0 les ardeurs de Phedre, c'est le long cauchemar primitif et indiffkrenci6 de Racine. What was said of the psychoanalytic criticism of drama-which entirely overlooks the fact both Phaedra and Andromaque are dramas and not lyrics-is equally valid for the majority of other critical methods we know: generally

Ideological Warefare: Ricardou's Purge of Bachelard

In the middle sixties a great debate was suscitated by a series of polemics between Raymond Picard and Roland Barthes. Barthes published his Sur Racine, a study incorporating Freudian psychology, anthropological concepts of totemism and phenomenology in an attempt to renovate our long-founded appreciation of the greatest French classical playwright; Raymond Picard, author of a biography of Racine and editor of the Pleiade volume of Racine's Oeuvres, counter-attacked with Nouvelle Critique ou nouvelle imposture, a study defending the more traditional point of view held by the Sorbonne. From that point French readers witnessed an ideological strife as lively as any in the history of French literature. Henri Peyre defended Picard's cause in editing a book of essays by Gustave Lanson; Barthes responded with Critique et v6rit6 and an article in the Times Literary Supplement entitled Les Deux Critiques widening the gap even further; Serge Doubrouvsky who, like Peyre, has written from the security of the United States, composed a solid apology for criticism in Pourquoi la nouvelle critique... that nonetheless remains polemic.1 One new critic, however, has appeared to have begun a new purge, this time within the ranks of the new wave itself. One can review Jean Ricardou's attack on Gaston Bachelard and consider its

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access Pourquoi la Nouvelle Critique: Critique et Objectivité. By SERGE DOUBROVSKY. Paris: Mercure de France. 1966. xx+262 pp. 16.95 frs. J. M. COCKING J. M. COCKING LONDON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XXIII, Issue 3, July 1969, Pages 323–324, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XXIII.3.323 Published: 01 July 1969

The Critical Position of Roland Barthes

A general review of the literary past has been going on in France since the Second World War, and with increasing momentum in the last ten years. The works have been approached in the light of new interests and inquiries. In the essays and books of Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Poulet, Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Lucien Goldmann, and Jean Starobinski-to mention some of the leading names-one sees the results of this contact between the established works on the one hand, and on the other, principles coming from movements such as Marxism, Freudianism, existentialism, structuralism, and phenomenology. Actually there is little real consensus in this group of writers, although they refer to each other rather frequently. Their awareness of constituting a group seems to arise especially from the fact that they are reacting against the same things. In the fall of 1965 Raymond Picard, a professor at the Sorbonne, and well-known for his exhaustive research-basically historical in conception-on Racine, published a short but hard-hitting little book entitled Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture (New Criticism or New Imposture).' While it is clear that Picard intended to question the procedures of the whole group of New Critics, his principal target was Roland Barthes, a professor at the Ecole pratique des hautes 6tudes, who had been indiscreet enough to publish in 1963 a volume of studies on Racine, done in one of the new modes. Barthes takes there, as his point of departure, the proposition that Racine's characters form a horde or tribe of about fifty people, dominated by harsh father-figures usually at war with their sons over women and power.