Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 1990"

Comparative criticism: Cultural and historical roots in the theoretical forest

Abstract: manifestos which tend to overstate their case in order to get attention or even publication and deem it wiser, after all, to give their students some 'traditional' background before setting them adrift on the choppy seas of sharply conflicting theories, e3 22 Ibid. 23 It is to be noted that Speaking for the Humanities (footnote 17), which in essence defends the necessity for challenge of the canon, nevertheless recommends "that humanities programs continue to teach the great works of the traditional canon in relation to historical scholarship 186 HENRY H. H. REMAK There are other, empiric reasons why teachers must rely on a canon, or rather fashion their own canonical preferences. It is, of course, impossible for a teacher to read all the texts that might possibly qualify for inclusion in her course. She has to rely on others' appraisal. After all, we all write in hopes that others will accept our evaluations, at least for a time. But, in addition, most of us feel that we do an adequate job only after we have taught and re-read texts several times. In that sense we may be doing more justice to texts we teach than those we just write about. In thisprocess, justas in the larger evolution of canon formation, we drop those texts that lose in re-reading (or may just be too long or for other reasons pedagogically unsuitable) and become attached to texts that deliver more per page, good texts in which we and our students discover new angles and riches every time. Every reading and teaching produces a new text on top of the old text. Good texts get better with every re-reading and reteaching, and that leads, very naturally, to canon formation. Besides, no approach can avoid canon formation. As in political history where revolutions, once in office, turn into Establishments, dissent is bound to create its own canon. And if it has been charged that in the past the canon has led to the glorification of particular authors at the expense of others (and, in particular, of authoresses), it may also be asserted that the alleged cult of personality has been replaced by the cult of theory and ideology. And of the critic. Americans like, want, and need a story. Literature is the source and medium of stories. But literary scholarship these days seems to do everything it can to obfuscate the story. The textual agenda is discarded in favor of the "hidden a ge nda " o f t en , one suspects, more of the critic than of the author. Academic critics seem to worship words and forget the existential craving of people for imaginative stories and for commentaries whose clarity and attractiveness of mediation and critical theory" (p. 33) while experimenting with other texts and approaches. COMPARATIVE CRITICISM 187 enhances rather than hides the story. What the public and the students see now, if they are not too discouraged to look at criticism at all, is self-extolling of the 'creative' critics, solipsistic fireworks at the expense of the author and his story. To what extent and in what depth is the American reading public outside the halls of ivy aware of and interested in criticism's battle of the canon ? I will not venture a hypothesis on depth, a rare commodity in contemporary American life given the insatiable, rapid-fire consumption or creation of dramatic or spicy issues by the American visual and auditory media. But the range of awareness is quite extraordinary, thanks (or "no thanks", depending on one's ideology) to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy, both bestsellers in the non-fiction category in American bookstores for months (an almost unheard-of event for scholarly books), and many stories on both in many leading newspapers and magazines in the United States. Most readers of these books and the stories on them have children or grandchildren in high schools and colleges and are therefore personally interested in what they learn or do not learn there. The dissemination of Bloom's and Hirsch's books helped. They were deemend to possess a 'public interest' po t en t i a l an expectation more than fulfilled by their successsufficient to be published by two of the most prominent American commercial publishers (Simon & Schuster, New York, and Houghton Mifflin, Boston, respectively) whereas the rejoinder (Speaking for the Humanities), much shorter, was published as a non-commercial brochure. Pending a complete analysis of the public and academic reaction to Bennett, Bloom, Hirsch, Cheney, Speaking for the Humanities etc, ~4 of which I am as yet unaware, I suspect that z~ William John Bennett, To Reclaim a Leoaey. A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education. Washington, D. C., National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984.--Lynne V. Cheney, Humanities in America. A Report to the President, the Congress, and the American People. Ibid., 1988. Both favor the "Great Books" and a central though not 188 HENRY H. H. REMAK most of the public will favor the "Great Books" side in the argument. Even politically liberal parents and grandparents, when it comes to the education of their children and grandchildren, will favor the "solid food" side, books they may have read, enjoyed, and admired, not to speak of many religiously inclined parents who may instinctively connect the attack on the "Great Books" with the "Great Book" they believe in: the Bible. There is another r easonnot necessarily related to the validity of the argument, often very well presented on both sides-why the public advantage may lie with the 'traditionalists' (a designation not really fair to them because the "Great Books", while they have become a tradition, are great precisely because in their time they criticized as well as defended tradit i o n and do so even today). Critics tend to rate more attention than defenders. But, while the non-canonists think of themselves as critics of the establishment, the cultural legacy defenders are in the unusual position of being able to describe the anti-traditionalists as academically well entrenched usurpers who have managed to occupy the academic literary establishment which the traditionalists are now trying to reconquer. Hence public favor probably lies with the aggressively critical cultural heritage side rather than those who are seen as 'undermining' tradition. The 'traditionalists' also enjoy a higher public visibility and much more media savvy. Bennett and Cheney have served as Chairs of the National Endowment for the Humanities, directly appointed by and responsible to the President of the United States, regularly testifying before Congress, with considerable powers as national policy-makers and dispensers of funds. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that these polemical encounters have had and will have no consequence for the high school, college, and graduate curriculum. To refer to my own experience, although I am far from being an anti-canonist, my own reading lists in courses I teach have experienced a voluntary tilt exclusive grounding in western culture in high school and college. So do Bloom and Hirsch (see footnotes 13 and 7). COMPARATIVE CRITICISM t89 toward non-western literary samples and toward women authors (e~g, Lady Murasaki, Mine de Lafayette, Kate Chopin) without wishing to challenge the necessity of some kind of quality consensus on past works of literature or the primary but certainly not exclusive western orientation of literature in a primarily but not exclusively west-structured society (and that orientation is by no means limited to American citizens of western origin). But it would be an equal mistake to overestimate the enduring effect on society of the challenge to the 'canon' as we did e.g. in the case of the 'deconstructing' student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Imagine how much more pervasive the impact on American society would have been if the attack by our irredentist critics had not been directed at the secular literary canon but at the religious canon, at Holy Scripture or at a deep-rooted national-emotional symbol like the flag: As it stands, not even Comparative Literature scholars have been too exercised about the critical sentences Bloom expressly devotes to our discipline. 25 So much for the incremental dichotomy between academic and public criticism in the United States from the time of the graduate reorganization of American universities to our own days. Bridging the years between the New Criticism, which, though it has often been interpreted as text-isolationist and antisocial, is also democratic in the sense that a specific and complete text, accessible to any reader, high school, undergraduate, graduate, or professorial, lay as well as academic, is the final arbiter for literary evaluation, and the present, I see a more direct linkage between criticism and socio-political-cultural influences of a democratic hue in the promotion of scholarly criticism of Trivialliteratur (popular writing) and of oral literature which has made considerable advances in the United States in the last two decades. The "New Historicism", presently in full swing, working up data from all strata of life, results from the same urge to democratize scholarship, at least

Cult and criticism: Ritual in the European reception of Shakespeare

Abstract: The phrase 'Shakespeare cult' is one of those terminological counters we play with far too thoughtlessly both in the technical discourse of our discipline and in the more casual language games of the educated layman. A counter assumed to be convertible into practically every currency, it is hardly ever considered worth defining, and even less do we take it seriously as a possible object of systematic research. Counters, after all, are not what the games are about, so why bother? The juxtaposition of 'Shakespeare' and 'cult' looks so disarmingly simple that we immediately accept it as a solution and thereby lose sight of the problem. No wonder we tend to forget that when yoked together, the name of a writer and that of a religious phenomenon would suggest a daring analogy between literary life and religious practice; nor does it occur to us that a patient exploration of that analogy and its amply documented historical variants could enhance our knowledge about the anatomy of literary cults in general and maybe, to a lesser extent, that of other quasi-religious secular cults as well. Literary historians have been engaged in analysing the dramas themselves, whatever that may mean, or the history of Shakespeare criticism as ideas or judgements mostly in a vacuum; cultural anthropologists, on the other hand, have studied cults in the manifestations of Ndembu ritual in Africa, or the new sect and cult movements in the United States, or the carnival in Rio. 1 If and when the

Semiotic systems and plot typology inJagua Nana's daughter

Abstract: Jagua Nana's Daughter, though a literary work on its own, contains reminiscents ofJagua Nana to the point of becoming a continuation of the latter. The enigma around which centers the narrative plot is situated in the obscure zone, a zone of interaction and a zone of friction. This is further characterized by “being” and “appearance” (l'ordre de l'etre et l'ordre du paraitre) which seem to explain the series of disjunctions and conjunctions in the narrative.