There are so many
universities in the world that we have only estimates of their number; an App
can’t track them because some don’t call themselves universities (MIT and many
others) and because some are bogus. But I’m fairly confident that spread across
those universities there are thousands of Departments which offer undergraduate
degrees in Literature, most commonly the Literature of the country in which
they are based or, at least, written in its national language.
I’m also fairly
confident that poems and novels are always taken as exemplary for Literature and that survey courses which introduce students to representative samples of
different periods and genres within the national literature are very common.
It’s for that reason that I can walk into my local bookshop and buy cheap,
well-edited editions of nineteenth century English language novels easily
identifiable by their black Penguin Classics spines. I benefit from the student
demand for these things.
Undergraduates are
expected to read the representative material assigned and quite often do. But
what else are they supposed to accomplish? For over a century now departments
of Literature have struggled to make their work - well, more disciplinary.
Various approaches have been proposed and almost certainly more approaches than
in the harder sciences where a textbook author can even dream of writing a book
which will be used world-wide - at school in the 1960s my textbook for
Economics was simply called “Samuelson” and probably got close to having world-wide
success outside the then Communist world.
To begin with, the new
Literature departments could trade off what was already an established way of
responding to poems and novels which could be found in pre-1914 European and
North American journals, reviews, and newspapers where Response often took the
form of assuming a moral high ground from which, in particular, immorality
could be seen for what it was. Literature was often immoral and readers needed
to be told that in their own interests. How else could they know which novels
to buy for themselves but keep from their servants (for whom a separate category
of improving literature was available - The
Blind Washerwoman, and such like). The new university departments could
easily accommodate to such disciplinary activity and still do though nowadays
there is much debate as to whether students are in the same category as
servants and to be protected from immorality. Remarkably, students can now be
found who will, in any case, demand protection, whereas In My Day ….
Beyond moralising raps
on the knuckle the next most common form of Discipline was the demand that
students Pay Attention to the words on the page in such a way that they would
not attribute character traits or motives or moods or conclusions clearly
contradicted by words to be found at page 123 et seq.
You could read Toril
Moi as urging the case for a more subtle and sophisticated version of that kind
of (elementary?) discipline, basing herself on the later philosophy of
Wittgenstein as mediated by Stanley Cavell in particular. Literature makes use
of ordinary language to do fairly extraordinary things and paying careful, engaged attention to it - and to one’s own responses - is the way in.
But is the way in also
the goal and conclusion? When you’ve read something attentively is that
it? Toril Moi does not think so - she is
not trying to resurrect what was once called the New Criticism whose advocates
would tell you very firmly that if it wasn’t on the page you had no
business talking about it and that if you did talk you couldn’t expect an A or
even a B. Like Rita Felski who uses the
“flat” ontology of Bruno Latour [see my review of Felski’s Hooked on this site, 24 February 2022 ],
Moi accepts that to fully appreciate (acknowledge) what the words on the page
are being used to do it may be entirely appropriate to draw attention to the
author’s biography, to the historical circumstances in which the book was
written, to the author’s assumptions about likely or desired readers, to the
author’s awareness of current censorship practices (an awareness which, in my
reading, for example, blights Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray, this site 16 August 2021). She wants us to think of
poems and novels as forms of action or enactment connected to situated human
existence and not detached “texts” which could have dropped from the skies.
But at the same time she wants to resist the
approaches of those who just want to put the “text” through a grinder -
Marxist, Freudian, Feminist, Post-Colonial ….. basically in order to
demonstrate how the work Fails but, as just reward, enables the grinder-operator to get an A.
She is interested in keeping a mind which is at once open and informed so that
the “text” has a chance to lead us to new ways of looking at things which we
may otherwise take for granted. At page 211, for example, she separates Viktor Shklovsky
from other formalists and says that he got things right when he championed defamiliarization as something rather
more than simple “technique”. I agree - and the idea itself can be found a
century earlier in Coleridge’s response to Wordsworth. The genuineness of
Shklovsky’s commitment is to be found in his memoir, A Sentimental Journey.
*
If you show
experimental subjects the two arrow-headed lines which comprise the Müller-Lyer
illusion they will all agree, independently of each other, that the arrows are
of unequal length. Even when told that they are not, the illusion persists.
The illusion reveals
something about how human vision works; that we agree in our responses is a distributive agreement which has nothing
to do with anything we have learnt, been taught, or discussed. Similarly, young
children (before the age of four or five) make drawings which develop in ways
and in a sequential order which is common across cultures and owes nothing to
the surrounding cultures of visual representation into which some children will
subsequently be inducted. The naïve child artists agree in the way they think
faces and figures are to be represented though no one has taught them this (or,
in Wittgenstein’s language, trained
them). Pile up such examples of distributive agreement (being frightened by a scary story…) and you can
then begin to think of agreement in responses as something natural and you can read some of the things Wittgenstein says as
supportive of that and you can make him into a naturalist as did Colin McGinn in Wittgenstein on Meaning (1984). Wittgenstein does not make it easy,
however, because he has very little to say about babies and infants and what he
does say seems bleakly conventional and uncomprehending.
But, of course, there
is another kind of agreement which can be called collective. This does not require that we have voted or held
debates or even talked about it though sometimes we will have done so. We can
come to agree by various means but by those diverse means our form of life
comes to have a social or communal or conventional character as explored by philosophers
like David Lewis in his Convention (1969)
and much subsequent literature including the work of Margaret Gilbert. We agree
collectively, not distributively, to drive on the left not the right, and so
on. Social constructionists think that everything (or nearly everything) has this character and they can find ways of reading
Wittgenstein which turns him into a sociologist of culture. They did a lot of
that in Oxford where Wittgenstein’s account of “following a rule” got construed
as “following our rule and don’t dare disobey”, as if the nature of language could be entirely understood via
the local dialect. This emphasis on the social is found most
clearly in the work of Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker in books such as Language, Sense and Nonsense (1984). My
own view is that the Oxford Wittgensteinians fell into the trap which Dennis
Wrong once characterised as “The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern
Sociology” (a 1977 article).
Toril Moi’s book covers
a lot of ground and is really the product of a life time of careful engagement.
It’s lucid and held together by the thread provided by Stanley Cavell’s work,
which is much more humane and resonant than anything the Oxonians came up with.
Whether Moi’s book will in practical terms solve or dissolve the problem of what kind of Discipline is best suited to deal with Literature is
another matter.