In my dissertation, I spend a fair amount of time talking about the history of feminism, the politics of gender, and the way women's participation in society was constrained in general in the U.S. and in Britain, circa 1890 to 1935.
When I tell people this about my dissertation, they're usually not surprised (my feminism shows, maybe, more than I think it does), but it came as a bit of a surprise to me. Up until about a year and a half ago, I didn't know that my dissertation would involve these topics. My plan was to write about the history of physiological psychology as it pertains to Modernist literature. I won't bore you with the details of how or why my dissertation topic developed to include a focus on the women's movement, but suffice it to say, on or about March 2015, my day-to-day life suddenly included a bunch of reading about women's suffrage and related turn-of-the-century political rhetoric (and counter-rhetoric).
One novel I write about is The Judge. The book is by Rebecca West, who these days is known almost exclusively for writing a WWI novella called The Return of the Soldier, even though her literary career spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s. No one really reads The Judge, meaning that most people also wouldn't know that the novel isn't actually about professional judging, but instead follows the story of a young Scottish woman whose life basically falls to shambles because of her overbearing mother-in-law and emotionally volatile husband.
There's a passage early in the novel where our heroine, Ellen, spends the day roving around the idyllic Edinburgh countryside with her future husband, Yaverland. West has a knack for gorgeous scenic description, and she evokes a sense of graceful abandon as she describes "a wide moor of dark moss-hags, flung like a crumpled cloth on a slope that stretched as far as the eye could see to the base of blackhills about which clambered white mists." Ellen sprints through the fields, deer-like, for no other reason than the fact that the Pentlands are a landscape that demands joyous sprinting. As she runs, her legs jostle the items in her pockets, and they rattle noisily.
You don't often find girls or women running full-sprint in turn-of-the-century British literature. Literary women are more likely to be reposing creatures, sometimes walking but rarely running. If they're running, they're usually fleeing something in panic. The Judge seems to acknowledge this, as Yaverland, observing Ellen with some wonderment, remarks, "In a way, you're awfully like a boy."
This passage pops into my mind every now and then when I'm on the treadmill at the gym. There's a pretty significant gap between running gleefully through overcast Scottish moors and running for the sake of cardiovascular fitness on an indoor rubber loop, but that's kind of the point. It cheers me to picture myself not in a smelly gym, but in Ellen's place, under clouds with the "magnificent quality of mountains," ecstatic simply to have the opportunity to be outside and use her body in an athletic way.
And it cheers me to not be in Ellen's place. Unlike Ellen, I do not regard running as a rare treat that typically only boys get to enjoy. I do not have to run in skirts. Unlike Ellen, my freedom to run, at will and in shorts, is consistent with other freedoms. After Yaverland likens Ellen to a boy, she retorts, "I wish I was. But I'm a girl, and I've nothing before me." This crosses my mind while I'm on the treadmill, too.
Because I spend much of every day working on my dissertation, I'm frequently in this in-between mental space, swimming through the literature, politics, and culture of the 1910s as I go about my day in the 2010s. Mundane happenings or turns of phrase will resonate with things I've read in my research. Particularly when it comes to the opportunities available to women.
The 2016 election, I think, would have been meaningful to me regardless of my current job. But I'm glad my dissertation work is lining up the way it is.
Friday, October 28, 2016
Friday, October 7, 2016
Can't you come back?
I graduated early from college, so I technically never had a second semester of my senior year. But because I can comfortably be classified as a SuperNerd, and because I was still living near campus and finishing my honors thesis, I decided to (possibly illegally?) audit a class during that otherwise empty semester.
The class was Literary Theory, and it had a reputation for being the most difficult English course at the college. The professor, WC, carried some of the blame for that, as he had his own reputation for having the highest standards of any faculty member of the department, but the course itself probably earned the rep on its own merits. "Literary Theory" is a blanket term that refers to all those abstruse "-isms" that critics use to talk about literature: historicism, Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism, New Criticism, feminism, postcolonialism, etc. To study Literary Theory is to study how we choose to approach and interpret literature (as opposed to most English classes, which tend to just stick to doing the approaching and interpreting). In a Lit Theory class, you don't read novels. You read theoretical argy-bargy by people whose names have mega-currency in terms of intellectual name-dropability, like Saussure and Barthes and Cixous and Zizek.
For the final, WC told the class that we would have to write and defend our own theoretical guide to literary criticism. Which literary theory (or theories) would we subscribe to, and why? Cite examples. I didn't have to take the final (again, graduated), but I thought it was a fun assignment and decided to do it anyway (again, SuperNerd).
I began my essay as follows: "My theoretical guide to literary criticism is based on two core beliefs that I hold about literature. First, that literature is foundationally for the purpose of communication and understanding, meaning that writers, readers, and critics alike participate in 'literature' to gain increased knowledge, be it personal or cultural, of the human experience. Second is my belief that, put simply, the more information, the better."
I argued, basically, that if you want to claim that you really "know" what's going on in a book, you have to wring as much information out of that book as humanly possible. Be curious about implicit meaning and authorial intent. Be curious about the author's historical milieu and intellectual influences. Be curious about how the book interacts with your own assumptions and biases. Be curious about how brains work when encountering literature, in general. Not being curious about any of these things means that you're consciously depriving yourself of something that could make your understanding of the human experience more complete. (To be clear, this is a holistic philosophy of criticism. For casual/leisure readers, all bets are off.)
In his response to my final, WC teasingly called me a "theoretical omnivore." I've embraced that label ever since.
When cases like the recent "unmasking" of Elena Ferrante pop up, I follow them with interest, and they always prompt me to revisit my theoretical omnivorism. Here's a new twist on what it means to be an author, a reader, a critic. Do I still believe that the more information, the better?
I've never read any of Ferrante's books and have no familiarity with her at all beyond vague name recognition. Prior to the kerfuffle that hit the literary world this week, I didn't know that "Elena Ferrante" was a pseudonym, or that this fact was well-known and heartily appreciated by a large subset of her readers. I didn't know how widely beloved (and widely translated) her novels -- all originally written in Italian -- are. I'm still not totally clear on what Ferrante's reputation is within the creaky and nebulous "literary establishment," but given that the revelation of Ferrante's real-life identity made front page news on approximately a billion media platforms, I'm guessing she can be considered a literary heavyweight.
For those who haven't followed the story, in last Sunday's New York Review of Books, a reporter published a lengthy article making the case that he discovered Ferrante's real identity, based largely on an analysis of public income, tax, and property records. Following that announcement, there were two waves of response: First, an uproar of outrage and backlash against the reporter for "outing" Ferrante and not respecting her wish to remain anonymous. (An illustrative headline from The Washington Post: "The violation of Elena Ferrante." From NPR: "For Literary World, Unmasking Elena Ferrante Is Not a Scoop. It's a Disgrace.") After that, a bubbling up of articles attempting to explain all the outrage to a bemused larger public. (From the BBC: "Why is the exposure of Elena Ferrante causing such outrage?" From the Wall Street Journal: "Inside the Fallout Over Elena Ferrante's Identity")
I find the arguments in favor of outrage somewhat persuasive: I can see why a reader would find experiential value in having an author's identity shrouded in mystery. I can see why an author would prefer to remain anonymous, and why it might be in the best interest for the reading public to let him or her remain so (particularly if, as in the case of Ferrante, the author believes she might not be able to write non-anonymously). I can see the gendered overtones associated with anonymity and reveal (only in the modern era have women been able to stop using male pseudonyms to get their work taken seriously, and even then there's a gender gap associated with literary prestige). It doesn't help that the reporter responsible for the revelation, Claudio Gatti, seems like kind of a prick.
I also find the counterpoints (a.k.a. the "what's the big deal?" camp) somewhat persuasive. I can see how any attempt by an author (or reader) to control how a work is read or received is a naive exercise in futility, since texts gain their own life once introduced to the public. I can see how an author's identity, particularly for authors among the Literary Elite, is of significant academic interest -- George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans is an interesting comparison study. I can see how the "gendered overtones" argument is uneasily applied here, since in this case, a female writer chose a female pseudonym.
Ultimately, in this case, I find that I'm still a theoretical omnivore. I can't help but welcome more information. What I know about reading and literary study has me believing that knowing this information will only, in the end, benefit both readers and the criticism of her work.
What I find curious is that I believe my stance is in the minority. In addition to the considerable backlash to Gatti's story, the Times Literary Supplement, the standard-bearer of contemporary literary opinion, argued that knowing Ferrante's true identity doesn't do anyone any good, and that, put in NYTRoB's shoes, they would have told Gatti to hit the bricks.
While I'm loath to disagree with the eminent TLS, I raise my eyebrow at this justification for outrage: "Most offensive about Gatti’s revelations are not his disregard of an author’s right to privacy or his failure to appreciate that literary anonymity is an art and not a crime, but his lumpen literalism, his misreading of the rules, his catastrophic misunderstanding of what criticism is or how reading actually works. He thinks he has put us out of our misery, but no one really wanted to know the identity of Elena Ferrante. It was a puzzle we enjoyed, and now Gatti has waded in and spoilt the game."
I refuse to believe that the pleasure of reading is so cobweb-delicate, and the practice of literary criticism so tenuous, that it can be ruined by a bit of factual knowledge. Gatti may have "spoilt" one game, but I like to think that when one game box closes, another one opens.
The class was Literary Theory, and it had a reputation for being the most difficult English course at the college. The professor, WC, carried some of the blame for that, as he had his own reputation for having the highest standards of any faculty member of the department, but the course itself probably earned the rep on its own merits. "Literary Theory" is a blanket term that refers to all those abstruse "-isms" that critics use to talk about literature: historicism, Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism, New Criticism, feminism, postcolonialism, etc. To study Literary Theory is to study how we choose to approach and interpret literature (as opposed to most English classes, which tend to just stick to doing the approaching and interpreting). In a Lit Theory class, you don't read novels. You read theoretical argy-bargy by people whose names have mega-currency in terms of intellectual name-dropability, like Saussure and Barthes and Cixous and Zizek.
For the final, WC told the class that we would have to write and defend our own theoretical guide to literary criticism. Which literary theory (or theories) would we subscribe to, and why? Cite examples. I didn't have to take the final (again, graduated), but I thought it was a fun assignment and decided to do it anyway (again, SuperNerd).
I began my essay as follows: "My theoretical guide to literary criticism is based on two core beliefs that I hold about literature. First, that literature is foundationally for the purpose of communication and understanding, meaning that writers, readers, and critics alike participate in 'literature' to gain increased knowledge, be it personal or cultural, of the human experience. Second is my belief that, put simply, the more information, the better."
I argued, basically, that if you want to claim that you really "know" what's going on in a book, you have to wring as much information out of that book as humanly possible. Be curious about implicit meaning and authorial intent. Be curious about the author's historical milieu and intellectual influences. Be curious about how the book interacts with your own assumptions and biases. Be curious about how brains work when encountering literature, in general. Not being curious about any of these things means that you're consciously depriving yourself of something that could make your understanding of the human experience more complete. (To be clear, this is a holistic philosophy of criticism. For casual/leisure readers, all bets are off.)
In his response to my final, WC teasingly called me a "theoretical omnivore." I've embraced that label ever since.
When cases like the recent "unmasking" of Elena Ferrante pop up, I follow them with interest, and they always prompt me to revisit my theoretical omnivorism. Here's a new twist on what it means to be an author, a reader, a critic. Do I still believe that the more information, the better?
I've never read any of Ferrante's books and have no familiarity with her at all beyond vague name recognition. Prior to the kerfuffle that hit the literary world this week, I didn't know that "Elena Ferrante" was a pseudonym, or that this fact was well-known and heartily appreciated by a large subset of her readers. I didn't know how widely beloved (and widely translated) her novels -- all originally written in Italian -- are. I'm still not totally clear on what Ferrante's reputation is within the creaky and nebulous "literary establishment," but given that the revelation of Ferrante's real-life identity made front page news on approximately a billion media platforms, I'm guessing she can be considered a literary heavyweight.
For those who haven't followed the story, in last Sunday's New York Review of Books, a reporter published a lengthy article making the case that he discovered Ferrante's real identity, based largely on an analysis of public income, tax, and property records. Following that announcement, there were two waves of response: First, an uproar of outrage and backlash against the reporter for "outing" Ferrante and not respecting her wish to remain anonymous. (An illustrative headline from The Washington Post: "The violation of Elena Ferrante." From NPR: "For Literary World, Unmasking Elena Ferrante Is Not a Scoop. It's a Disgrace.") After that, a bubbling up of articles attempting to explain all the outrage to a bemused larger public. (From the BBC: "Why is the exposure of Elena Ferrante causing such outrage?" From the Wall Street Journal: "Inside the Fallout Over Elena Ferrante's Identity")
I find the arguments in favor of outrage somewhat persuasive: I can see why a reader would find experiential value in having an author's identity shrouded in mystery. I can see why an author would prefer to remain anonymous, and why it might be in the best interest for the reading public to let him or her remain so (particularly if, as in the case of Ferrante, the author believes she might not be able to write non-anonymously). I can see the gendered overtones associated with anonymity and reveal (only in the modern era have women been able to stop using male pseudonyms to get their work taken seriously, and even then there's a gender gap associated with literary prestige). It doesn't help that the reporter responsible for the revelation, Claudio Gatti, seems like kind of a prick.
I also find the counterpoints (a.k.a. the "what's the big deal?" camp) somewhat persuasive. I can see how any attempt by an author (or reader) to control how a work is read or received is a naive exercise in futility, since texts gain their own life once introduced to the public. I can see how an author's identity, particularly for authors among the Literary Elite, is of significant academic interest -- George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans is an interesting comparison study. I can see how the "gendered overtones" argument is uneasily applied here, since in this case, a female writer chose a female pseudonym.
Ultimately, in this case, I find that I'm still a theoretical omnivore. I can't help but welcome more information. What I know about reading and literary study has me believing that knowing this information will only, in the end, benefit both readers and the criticism of her work.
What I find curious is that I believe my stance is in the minority. In addition to the considerable backlash to Gatti's story, the Times Literary Supplement, the standard-bearer of contemporary literary opinion, argued that knowing Ferrante's true identity doesn't do anyone any good, and that, put in NYTRoB's shoes, they would have told Gatti to hit the bricks.
While I'm loath to disagree with the eminent TLS, I raise my eyebrow at this justification for outrage: "Most offensive about Gatti’s revelations are not his disregard of an author’s right to privacy or his failure to appreciate that literary anonymity is an art and not a crime, but his lumpen literalism, his misreading of the rules, his catastrophic misunderstanding of what criticism is or how reading actually works. He thinks he has put us out of our misery, but no one really wanted to know the identity of Elena Ferrante. It was a puzzle we enjoyed, and now Gatti has waded in and spoilt the game."
I refuse to believe that the pleasure of reading is so cobweb-delicate, and the practice of literary criticism so tenuous, that it can be ruined by a bit of factual knowledge. Gatti may have "spoilt" one game, but I like to think that when one game box closes, another one opens.
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