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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Your heart? Broken!
I describe the big ideas behind my annotated bibliography project, explaining the big movements in literary theory that occurred during the 20th century, dwelling on Stanley Fish and his so-called "reader response" school of criticism.
Tuesday, 2004-10-05 | Classic Gin, Literature
My Milton presentation went off without too many hitches. For your perusal, I've made my annotated bibliography available here. You'll find that I've endeavored to illustrate the trajectory of literary games and theory since Wimsatt and Beardsley. We pass through two New Criticism text-sniffers on our way to Fish and then finished up with Derrida and a bizarre Israeli psychological study. The argument implicit in my annotated bibliography? Why sure, I'd be glad to explain it.
First, a word about the difference between criticism and theory. Criticism describes and interprets an object. The object might be a text, it might be shoe, it might be Mrs Havisham. Theory, on the other hand, renders an object. We use theory to narrow our scope--to decide what we're going to describe and interpret in our criticism. It might be the case that we're feminists and we want to demonstrate the marginalization of characters based on sex, we might write for Penny-Arcade and seek to demonstrate what about a game appeals to the niche gamer or we might write for Rolling Stone and desire to lionize popular music figures by describing the audacity and panache in their actions.
There is criticism, and there is theory. You see, beginning with W&B; and the post-World War II world of uncertainty and trepidation, critics and theorists desired, above all else, to secure the objective meaning of literary texts. W&B; don't talk about texts, so much, but rather, about poems. Either way, the idea is that they were after a 'one meaning one text' theory. As Formalists their plan was to analyze forms (grammar, diction, sentence length) because forms can be agreed upon by everyone. This presents problems for their original plan, however, because in order to read old poems we have to look at old dictionaries or try to understand words whose meanings have changed. The problem lies in the fact that in seeking these things, we're trying to find the author's intentions--trying to figure out what he meant. Which brings us to...
Intentionalism was championed by one E.D. Hirsch. He's not represented in my annotated bib., but his defense of Intentionalism is the most convincing. You see, Hirsch recognized that there was no 'one meaning, one text' to gained from a theory that stuck to forms only. So, he said, we must seek the author's intention. He also argued that we're doing it all the time; if I tell you that my car is out of gas, you don't think that my train car has run out of boron. However right Hirsch is, he still hasn't gotten us any closer to one meaning per text.
This, of course, was all taking place during the heyday of the New Criticism. Critics combined the best of formalism and intentionalism and tried to stay as close to the text as possible and begrudged biographical and historical information. The idea was to approach each text as though it could have been 'found.' The New Critics' most lasting contribution was to teach us the perils of assuming the fait accompli of a given author--if we appreciate each text as if we had no idea who wrote it, we temper the assumptions we make by acknowledging that we're trying not to make them.
Fish comes along with Reader Response and fucks up the whole shooting-match. He was very controversial in his day.
Reader Response, as he first argued for it in 1964 and then later set it down in 1980 (with Is there a Text in this Class?), has nothing to do with a particular reader or a response to anything. It has everything to do with the manner in which language is parsed and the effects a text produces. There is a certain lability or 'slippage' to be found in the process of reading. I invite you to consider Fish's favorite example:
That Judas perished by hanging himself, there is no certainty in Scripture.Due to the fact that we read from left to right, top to bottom, when we get half-way through the sentence, we're already waiting for the punchline. That's how reading is a temporal process, one that occurs. For example, at the comma we might predict any of the following:
That Judas perished by hanging himself, is (an example for us all).What's important about the lability or temporal nature of reading, is not what we predict. It's that we predict. As we read, we understand a little bit at a time, in the order that the text provides for.
That Judas perished by hanging himself, shows (how conscious he was of the enormity of his sin).
That Judas perished by hanging himself, should (give us pause).
So, you see, Reader Response theory has nothing to do with a particular reader and what he might be able (due to prior training) to predict while reading or what response to the final text that the author may have intended.
Some of Fish's more short-sighted critics argued that Reader Response deprives the author of authority and thus impoverishes the text and the author. Fish would counter that we can analyze the effects of a text without having to contend over whether or not the author intended them or not. The idea is that Reader Response theory allows us to render what a text 'does' as our critical object. A sentence or series of sentences that lead us to believe one thing and then point us to another does something--it has jerked us around. That jerking around is what we take as our critical object when we do Reader Response criticism. We analyze and interpret the effect.
Returning to our larger conversation, it's clear that Fish's method is very much in keeping with his by-the-numbers, keep-it-simple-stupid, legalistic approach. We don't fuck around with trying to ignore or predict the unpredictable whims of the elephant in the livingroom that is the author of our text. We practice a procedure that has the same result every time; it lets us see what a sentence 'does' as we parse it.
Returning, then, to my annotated bibliography, I follow Fish with Bouchard, another Miltonist of note, and then onto Derrida. The idea there was to illustrate that, in the time after Fish, his method was the elephant in the theoretical living room and that, at least in Bouchard, his Reader Response procedure could not be ignored.
Derrida sits at the penultimate position on my arc; his hermetic musings demonstrate what the theoretical free-for-all of 194X-6X left in its wake: a power vacuum. As it became increasingly clear in the end of the 20th century that there was no way to procure an objective meaning for any text, all manner of moron rushed in to fill the void. 'Since we're not going to get an answer,' they said, 'we might as well write poetic texts about our feelings and attempt to pass them off as theories for criticism.'
Anyway, that's all for Fish and all for Milton for tonight; go forth and sin no more.
