NAKED GRADUATE SCHOOL. TRUE UNCANNY STORIES FROM UC BERKELEY.
I came into graduate school with a fairly thorough education in 20th century intellectual history and a quite developed disdain for the central tenets of postmodernism, anti-foundationalism and extreme social constructionism. I had also developed by this time a contempt for persons who embraced these tenets, especially uncritically. When I met the True Believers at UC Berkeley, I didn’t hide my contempt for these ideas nor for the people who believed them, partly because I couldn’t believe anyone was so naïve. I’m not going to say that I wish I HAD hid my contempt, only that I now find myself nodding and smiling rather than arguing with people whom I must regard quite frankly as irrational.
In my first semester of graduate school at Berkeley, I decided against advice to enroll in the graduate seminar in literary theory, Approaches to Classical Texts, offered every two years. It is required of the graduate students in Classics, but not in my program, which is assumed to be less literature-based.
I was the only person in a very full classroom who was not a Classics graduate student, although we had read a great, great deal of the same ancient literature. I assumed that they would like Greek and Roman history but simply be more interested in Greek and Roman literature. As I have great interest in literature of classical antiquity, especially Aeschylus on the Greek side and Petronius on the Latin, I assumed that I would have much in common with these folks.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from a reading knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, these people were about as different from me as could be imagined. The differences were not merely age (I was ten years older than some of them) or life experience (many had never worked before, and almost all had, after prep school, gone straight through college and graduate school out of high school, with no break) but deeper, more philosophical, emotional, intellectual, temperamental. I ended the course with a rather low opinion of most of them. I was left with the conclusion that although I love ancient literature and always have loved it, I cannot study it. The way people study it now is just not the way I want to study it. The ways that literature is studied today, especially in allegedly "cutting edge" institutions like Berkeley, is fundamentally flawed by several things. Firstly, its epistemological foundations are entirely based upon the axiomata of postmodernism which essentially denies any epistemology, any basis for knowledge. Secondly, no cultural or social study can be done today in a school like this unless you are a flaming leftist. There is no other way, and no other political view is allowed by or practiced by those who perform cultural or social studies of the ancient world. Thirdly, the way literature is taught now, and the postmodernist foundations of it, are implicitly hostile to the historical project (i.e. the project of trying to find out what happened). This sounds like, perhaps, an exaggeration, but it is quite well borne out at UC Berkeley; worse, this school must represent dominant trends in scholarship in the USA at least. I must blame much of this sorry state of affairs to deep causes in literary theory, although certain psychological trends in many of its practicioners can also be observed.
Modern literary theory, to those who know little of it, to whom this piece is primarily aimed, has an interesting history in the U.S. There have of course always been many ways of approaching texts, many emphases throughout human history. Few discounted the world outside the text. The first great break occurred with what is called New Criticism, and it became ascendant in the United States after the Second World War. Drawing on its forerunner, Russian Formalism, which had enjoyed some vogue earlier in the twentieth century, New Criticism (over)reacted against a style of literary criticism canonical at the time which concerned itself with the biography of the author of a given literary work and which tried to use the work to get to the author. Perhaps New Criticism represented a breath of fresh air. In any case, it became canonical, and there are still people today, whom I must call idiots, who believe that it is a virtue to deliberately ignore the historical circumstances in which the author of a text was enwebbed.
Despite this shortcoming, New Criticism grew. Why? Because there is an absolute concentration on the words of the text. You don’t need an encyclopedia or any works of biography history to understand a text with New Criticism; you only need the text and perhaps a dicitonary. With the massive growth of higher education occasioned by the return of soldiers after the Second World War on the GI Bill, New Criticism was a convenient way to teach literature: no books necessary, just a few poems and a pair of eyes sufficed. New Criticism, some would argue, taught us how to perform close, close readings, to look in a text for patterns, equivalences, symbols, metaphors. I cannot believe that these habits did not exist before New Criticism, but I am willing to credit it with an insistence on close readings. What does seem new with New Criticism is an insistence that what the author intended does not actually matter since: 1.) Whatever he intended might not have ended up in the text; 2.) He may have not known exactly what he intended, as with the poets in Plato’s Apology, but may have been, at least metaphorically speaking, daimonically possessed by a creative divinity; 3.) His statement about what he intended may not be trustworthy; 4.) Often such a statement does not exist and the author is dead and cannot be interviewed; 5.) There is more in the text than the author intended, and that must be looked at too: no author can control all that ends up in a text. This last one, #5, would be built upon later in the 20th century, its significance expanded.
The denial of the importance of life events of the author always annoyed me, but the insistence on examining a text rather than guessing at the intention of the author was salutary. To write a mock essay in the style of New Criticism is a most useful exercise: you are forced to attend only to what is present, and to weigh out each word with wonderful carefulness. You must discipline yourself from referring to the socio-historical milieu of the author. Such an exercise helps you to read better, to think better.
Several other schools of thought spun off from this and began a life of their own, building on point #5 in interesting ways. People began to look for structures in texts that revealed unconscious desires and thought-patterns of the author: Freudian literary theory had a certain vogue. People then realized that a text would inevitably contain, unintentional to the author and unbeknownst to him, thought patterns from the larger culture to which the author belonged. For an unknown reason such thought patterns, within which the author is assumed to be inextricably enmeshed, became known as ideologies, an ill-fitted usage of the term. However, the more I explored the history of literary theory after the twentieth century, the more I became aware of an orgiastic maelstrom of such misuses of words, an effete and quite pretentious aping of, on the one hand, scientific words and ideas, as Jacques Lacan performed with his attempt to explain psychoanalysis with mathematical formulae that never made sense, and on the other hand, highly specific reanimations of archaic or obsolete words of germanic, latinate or hellenic provenance, selected more for their obfuscatory non-Englishness than for their older meanings in these languages: for example, habitus, used, actually, by Quinitilian to mean simply “bearing” as in posture; revived by Bourdieu in an unusually useful fashion for his ilk to mean the total way a person carries, presents, and projects himself.
Postmodernism
In an above paragraph I used the expression “the more I explored the history of literary theory …” This requires a little clarification. I had studied, read about, and read many of the ideas we were presented already. I had read existentialist literature at a very young age: my sister’s English translation of Camus’ L’Etranger was one of the first books I ever read. (Regrettably, it was the translation with the hatted clowns on the cover, which failed to reproduce Camus’ tough-guy, semi-hemingwayesque, noir detective style that he used in the French. Regrettably also, it translated the first word of the book, maman, as “mother”: inexcusable.) The ideas contained within it had moved me. I had been raised a fairly strict Catholic, a religion to which I have perversely returned; however, at thirteen I left the Church in a huff. Why? Because of this exact reason and no other – before I get to the reason, let me state the things that did not cause me to with to leave the Church: the reasons, that is, which some folks might list for having left the Church, but which attracted me greatly to the Church: the strictness. The discipline of silence, of sitting, kneeling, standing, response, ritual, prayer. The fact that in a rationalistic world we engaged in worship. The priests and nuns in their seriousness. The ritual silence. The code of morals. The fact that we were not to dishonor an invisible being around whom, although untouchable, undetectable, unmentionable, we were somehow supposed to center our lives. The reading of the Bible. No, I left for one reason: I could not imagine that it would be possible that we Catholics could be correct and everyone else all over the world could be wrong. This seemed beyond probability. I left the Church, after promising my mother, while she grieved over the abandonment of the Church that all my four siblings had enacted, that I would not leave it.
I had been playing with relativism, too, for many, many years, wrestled with it mentally. I had gone through a fairly, but not totally, extreme relativist phase: I never stopped believing that there were physical rules (or, if you prefer, lawlike regularities) in the physical world that did not go away, but all other things, including the value of human life, were relative.
(TO BE CONTINUED.)
In my first semester of graduate school at Berkeley, I decided against advice to enroll in the graduate seminar in literary theory, Approaches to Classical Texts, offered every two years. It is required of the graduate students in Classics, but not in my program, which is assumed to be less literature-based.
I was the only person in a very full classroom who was not a Classics graduate student, although we had read a great, great deal of the same ancient literature. I assumed that they would like Greek and Roman history but simply be more interested in Greek and Roman literature. As I have great interest in literature of classical antiquity, especially Aeschylus on the Greek side and Petronius on the Latin, I assumed that I would have much in common with these folks.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from a reading knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, these people were about as different from me as could be imagined. The differences were not merely age (I was ten years older than some of them) or life experience (many had never worked before, and almost all had, after prep school, gone straight through college and graduate school out of high school, with no break) but deeper, more philosophical, emotional, intellectual, temperamental. I ended the course with a rather low opinion of most of them. I was left with the conclusion that although I love ancient literature and always have loved it, I cannot study it. The way people study it now is just not the way I want to study it. The ways that literature is studied today, especially in allegedly "cutting edge" institutions like Berkeley, is fundamentally flawed by several things. Firstly, its epistemological foundations are entirely based upon the axiomata of postmodernism which essentially denies any epistemology, any basis for knowledge. Secondly, no cultural or social study can be done today in a school like this unless you are a flaming leftist. There is no other way, and no other political view is allowed by or practiced by those who perform cultural or social studies of the ancient world. Thirdly, the way literature is taught now, and the postmodernist foundations of it, are implicitly hostile to the historical project (i.e. the project of trying to find out what happened). This sounds like, perhaps, an exaggeration, but it is quite well borne out at UC Berkeley; worse, this school must represent dominant trends in scholarship in the USA at least. I must blame much of this sorry state of affairs to deep causes in literary theory, although certain psychological trends in many of its practicioners can also be observed.
Modern literary theory, to those who know little of it, to whom this piece is primarily aimed, has an interesting history in the U.S. There have of course always been many ways of approaching texts, many emphases throughout human history. Few discounted the world outside the text. The first great break occurred with what is called New Criticism, and it became ascendant in the United States after the Second World War. Drawing on its forerunner, Russian Formalism, which had enjoyed some vogue earlier in the twentieth century, New Criticism (over)reacted against a style of literary criticism canonical at the time which concerned itself with the biography of the author of a given literary work and which tried to use the work to get to the author. Perhaps New Criticism represented a breath of fresh air. In any case, it became canonical, and there are still people today, whom I must call idiots, who believe that it is a virtue to deliberately ignore the historical circumstances in which the author of a text was enwebbed.
Despite this shortcoming, New Criticism grew. Why? Because there is an absolute concentration on the words of the text. You don’t need an encyclopedia or any works of biography history to understand a text with New Criticism; you only need the text and perhaps a dicitonary. With the massive growth of higher education occasioned by the return of soldiers after the Second World War on the GI Bill, New Criticism was a convenient way to teach literature: no books necessary, just a few poems and a pair of eyes sufficed. New Criticism, some would argue, taught us how to perform close, close readings, to look in a text for patterns, equivalences, symbols, metaphors. I cannot believe that these habits did not exist before New Criticism, but I am willing to credit it with an insistence on close readings. What does seem new with New Criticism is an insistence that what the author intended does not actually matter since: 1.) Whatever he intended might not have ended up in the text; 2.) He may have not known exactly what he intended, as with the poets in Plato’s Apology, but may have been, at least metaphorically speaking, daimonically possessed by a creative divinity; 3.) His statement about what he intended may not be trustworthy; 4.) Often such a statement does not exist and the author is dead and cannot be interviewed; 5.) There is more in the text than the author intended, and that must be looked at too: no author can control all that ends up in a text. This last one, #5, would be built upon later in the 20th century, its significance expanded.
The denial of the importance of life events of the author always annoyed me, but the insistence on examining a text rather than guessing at the intention of the author was salutary. To write a mock essay in the style of New Criticism is a most useful exercise: you are forced to attend only to what is present, and to weigh out each word with wonderful carefulness. You must discipline yourself from referring to the socio-historical milieu of the author. Such an exercise helps you to read better, to think better.
Several other schools of thought spun off from this and began a life of their own, building on point #5 in interesting ways. People began to look for structures in texts that revealed unconscious desires and thought-patterns of the author: Freudian literary theory had a certain vogue. People then realized that a text would inevitably contain, unintentional to the author and unbeknownst to him, thought patterns from the larger culture to which the author belonged. For an unknown reason such thought patterns, within which the author is assumed to be inextricably enmeshed, became known as ideologies, an ill-fitted usage of the term. However, the more I explored the history of literary theory after the twentieth century, the more I became aware of an orgiastic maelstrom of such misuses of words, an effete and quite pretentious aping of, on the one hand, scientific words and ideas, as Jacques Lacan performed with his attempt to explain psychoanalysis with mathematical formulae that never made sense, and on the other hand, highly specific reanimations of archaic or obsolete words of germanic, latinate or hellenic provenance, selected more for their obfuscatory non-Englishness than for their older meanings in these languages: for example, habitus, used, actually, by Quinitilian to mean simply “bearing” as in posture; revived by Bourdieu in an unusually useful fashion for his ilk to mean the total way a person carries, presents, and projects himself.
Postmodernism
In an above paragraph I used the expression “the more I explored the history of literary theory …” This requires a little clarification. I had studied, read about, and read many of the ideas we were presented already. I had read existentialist literature at a very young age: my sister’s English translation of Camus’ L’Etranger was one of the first books I ever read. (Regrettably, it was the translation with the hatted clowns on the cover, which failed to reproduce Camus’ tough-guy, semi-hemingwayesque, noir detective style that he used in the French. Regrettably also, it translated the first word of the book, maman, as “mother”: inexcusable.) The ideas contained within it had moved me. I had been raised a fairly strict Catholic, a religion to which I have perversely returned; however, at thirteen I left the Church in a huff. Why? Because of this exact reason and no other – before I get to the reason, let me state the things that did not cause me to with to leave the Church: the reasons, that is, which some folks might list for having left the Church, but which attracted me greatly to the Church: the strictness. The discipline of silence, of sitting, kneeling, standing, response, ritual, prayer. The fact that in a rationalistic world we engaged in worship. The priests and nuns in their seriousness. The ritual silence. The code of morals. The fact that we were not to dishonor an invisible being around whom, although untouchable, undetectable, unmentionable, we were somehow supposed to center our lives. The reading of the Bible. No, I left for one reason: I could not imagine that it would be possible that we Catholics could be correct and everyone else all over the world could be wrong. This seemed beyond probability. I left the Church, after promising my mother, while she grieved over the abandonment of the Church that all my four siblings had enacted, that I would not leave it.
I had been playing with relativism, too, for many, many years, wrestled with it mentally. I had gone through a fairly, but not totally, extreme relativist phase: I never stopped believing that there were physical rules (or, if you prefer, lawlike regularities) in the physical world that did not go away, but all other things, including the value of human life, were relative.
(TO BE CONTINUED.)
posted by Timo-t at 4:24 PM
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