Category Archives: formalism and aesthetics

Beyond Bakhtin: Towards a Cultural Stylistics – Fiona Paton

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Paton, Fiona. “Beyond Bakhtin: Towards a Cultural Stylistics.” College English, vol. 63, no. 2, 2000, pp. 166–193. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/379039.

  • Language, said Michael Halliday, is a “social semiotic” and as such needs to be studied in terms of the lived experience of its users, rather than as an abstract system of logically consistent rules.
  • What is the text’s own rhetorical situation? How can we recover these conditions in any pure, unmediated way?  The general shift from textualist to contextualist stylistics
  • What is the relationship between style and ideology in the literary text?
    Cultural critics, while brilliantly interrogating the ideological implicatedness of a lit-
    erary text, rarely engage with its language
  • stylisticians, on the other hand, although acknowledging the ideological dimensions of the literary text, rarely move beyond its
    language

Marxism and Literature – Raymond Williams

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http://strongreading.blogspot.com/2011/08/raymond-williams-marxism-and-literature.html

Chapter 4: “Ideology”

Ideology for Williams is an inherently problematic concept, which he thinks requires radical revision. He outlines three meanings the concept has had in Marxist theory:

  • (i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group;
  • (ii) a system of illusory beliefs – false ideas or false consciousness – which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge;
  • (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

In one variant of Marxism, senses (i) and (ii) can be effectively combined. (55)

Part 3: “Literary Theory”

Chapter 1: “The Multiplicity of Writing”

this identification of art with “imaginative” skill involves a reduction of art to a series of forms labeled the proper objects of aesthetic experience. In literature this has resulted in the reduction of “literature” to specialized forms that obscure the multiplicity in types of writing practices: literature is “fictional” and not “factual,” it is “imaginative” and not “practical,” and it is not “subjective” rather than “objective.” Literature’s association with these concepts is specific to the capitalist era, and a Marxist literary theory must attempt to recapture the multiplicity of forms of writing outside of the categories left to it by bourgeois critics.

“Discourse in the Novel” – Bakhtin

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Essay notes

  • “There is a highly characteristic and widespread point of view that sees novelistic discourse as an extra-artistic medium, a discourse that is not worked into any special or unique style. After failure to find in novelistic discourse a purely poetic formulation (‘poetic’ in the narrow sense) as was expected, prose discourse is denied any artistic value at all; it is the same as practical speech for everyday life, or speech for scientific purposes, an artistically neutral means of communication” (260). I sort of disagree. I think all speech is rhetorical and, therefore, art. But this opens up dialectics between speech and utterance, rhetorics and poetics.
    • Significance: “Thus stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: either to acknowledge the novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi-artistic genre, or to radically reconsider that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is grounded and which determines all its categories” (267). One solution is turning to rhetoric and coding novels as rhetorical texts rather than as poetic art. “The novel is an extra-artistic rhetorical genre” (268). Tbh, I think this is a Cartesian split. “… the very reliance on rhetorical forms has a great heuristic significance. Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and not the philosophy of language“ (268-69).
    • Double-bind: “ The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse, but one that does not fit within the frame provided by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists” (269).
  • “The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” and “These heterogeneous stylistic unities, upon entering the novel combine to form a structured artistic system, and are subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole, a unity that cannot be identified with any single one of the unities subordinated to it” (261, 62). Indeed, “The stylistics uniqueness of the novel as a genre consists precisely in the combination of these subordinated, yet still relatively autonomous, unities (even at times comprised of different languages) into the higher unity of the work as a whole: the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of its ‘languages’” (262).
  • “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262). And those compositional unities help heteroglossia enter the novel: “These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization–this is the basic distinguishing features of the stylistics of the novel” (263).
  • Raznorečie in Russian.
  • It’s symphonic, synergistic. Tower of Babel
  • “A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute and abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia” (271). But he’s not critiquing here a “common language” so much as a “language conceived as ideologically saturated” (271).
  • Significance: This is problematic because of essentialism and consensus… “The victory of one reigning language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of languages, their enslavement, the process of illuminating them with the True Word, the incorporation of barbarians and lower social strata into a unitary language of culture and truth, the canonization of ideological systems,” and so on (272). And as long as language is enslaved, so too then by extension, are the people who voice it.
  • I’m hoping someone will be able to explain the centripetal and centrifugal force metaphors to me. Oh wait… so centripetal means a unifying language that sucks everything in ad co-opts it. Centrifugal is like heteroglossia, flinging several valid options out (?)
  • “The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance” (272).
  • Heteroglossia can be a site of resistance (273, 303).
  • What is the difference between discourse and rhetoric?
  • Active and passive responsive understanding as a prerequisite for rhetoric (280-82)
  • “Language [. . .] is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that fill it” (288).
  • Genres stratify language (288).
  • Mutual exclusion v. intersection of plural languages: “… languages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways (the Ukranian language, the language of the epic poem, of early Symbolism, of the student, of a particular generation of children, of the run-of-the-mill intellectual, of the Nietzschean and so on)” (291).
  • Stratification of literary language: “… in their intentional dimension one finds and common plane on which they can all be juxtaposed, and juxtaposed dialogically. The whole matter consists in the fact the there may be, between ‘languages,’ highly specific dialogic relations; no matter how these languages are conceived, they may all be taken as particular points of view on the world. However varied the social forces doing the work of stratification–a profession, a genre, a particular tendency, an individual personality–the work itself everywhere comes down to the (relatively) protracted and socially meaningful (collective) saturation of language with specific (and consequently limiting) intentions and accents. The longer this stratifying saturation goes on, the broader the social circle encompassed by it and consequently the more substantial the social force bringing about such a stratification of language, then the more sharply focused and stable will be those traces, the linguistic changes in the language markers (linguistic symbols), that are left behind in language as a result of this social force’s activity–from stable (and consequently social) semantic nuances to authentic dialectological markers (phonetic, morphological and others), which permit us to speak of particular social dialects. As a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in language, there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms–words and forms that can belong to ‘no one’; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is  not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world” (293). Each word has a “taste” of its influence (as the reading goes on to say). “The word in language is half someone else’s” (293). And it can only become “one’s own” when the speaker appropriates it by “populating it with his own intentions, his own accent” (293). And “Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language [. . .] but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” (293-94).
  • This reminds me of ideographs: “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated–overpopulated–with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process” (294). (is it?)
  • Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses, in other words, a ‘language’” (295). This reminds me a lot of Discourse (Gee, Swales, etc.)!! Wait… THAT’S THE CODE I CRACKED IT YAS >>> languages are discourses. Heteroglossia is capital D Discourse.
  • “As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that these were not only various different languages but even internally variegated languages, that the ideological systems and approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in peace and quiet with one another–then the inviolability and predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of actively choosing one’s orientation among them began” (296). And that, I argue is rhetorical.
  • While the poet tries to reduce language to its purest form by stripping it of its heteroglossia, the novelist tries to leverage heteroglossia and language stratification to hir advantage (298): “The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of others from the heteroglot language of his works, he does not violate those socio-ideological cultural horizons (big and little worlds) that open up behind heteroglot languages–rather, he welcomes them into his work” (299). Then, “Diversity of voices and heteroglossia enter the novel and organize themselves within it into a structured artistic system. This constitutes the distinguishing feature of the novel as a genre” (300). Indeed, “When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to an artistic reworking. The social and historical voices populating language, all its words and all its forms, which provide language with its particular concrete conceptualizations, are organized in the novel into a structured stylistic system that expresses the differentiated socio-ideological position of the author amid the heteroglossia of his epoch” (300).
  • Analysis of and application (of heteroglossia) to the comic novel and case study with Little Dorrit (Dickens)… Usually parodic.
    • “So it is throughout Dickens; whole novel. His entire text is, in fact, everywhere dotted with quotation marks that serve to separate out little islands of scattered direct speech and purely authorial speech, washed by heteroglot waves from all sides” (307).
    • But they’re not actual quotation marks because the other’s speech and author’s speech are “at none of these points clearly separated [. . .] the boundaries are deliberately flexible and ambiguous, often passing through a single syntactic whole” (308).
  • Leads to a sort of refracting of authorial voice/identity and intentions: “Heterogossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its incorporation), is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking and the refracted intention of the author” (324). And this is rhetorical (354).
  • I’m thinking too about how the author brings heteroglot voices to the novel in the language coded into it, but the reader also brings heteroglot interpretations to the novel as we decode it. Together we perform the text together, contributing to heteroglossia by interpreting it.
  • Then examples from Turgenev (// the “Dickens” section)
  • Heteroglossia includes not just the different kinds of speech, but also the character zones and incorporated genres, luxuries afforded the novel: “A comic playing with languages, a story ‘not from the author’ (but from a narrator, posited author or character), character speech, character zones and lastly various introductory or framing genres are the basic forms for incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel. All these forms permit languages to be used in ways that are indirect, conditional, distanced. They all signify relativizing of linguistic consciousness in the perception of language borders–borders created by history and society, and even the most fundamental borders (i.e., those between languages as such)–and permit expression of a feeling for the materiality of language that defines such a relativized consciousness” (323-24).
  • “Prose consciousness feels cramped when it is confined to only one out of a multitude of heteroglot languages, for one linguistic timbre is inadequate to it” (324).
  • Then there’s a section about the speaking character of the novel that I was completely spent while reading. I heteroglossed over it.
  • Contact zone (Pratt): “In the history of literary language, there is a struggle constantly being waged to overcome the official line with its tendency to distance itself from the zone of contact, a struggle against various kinds and degrees of authority. In this process discourse gets drawn into the contact zone, which results in semantic and emotionally expressive (intonational) changes: there is a weakening and degradation of the capacity to generate metaphors, and discourse becomes more reified, more concrete, more filled with everyday elements and so forth” (345).
  • “Such mixing of two languages within the boundaries of a single utterance is, in the novel, an artistic device (or more accurately, a system of devices) that is deliberate. But unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages. We may even say that language and languages change historically primarily by means of hybridization, by means of a mixing of various ‘languages’ co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches or different groups of such branches, in the historical as well as paleontological past of languages–but the crucible for this mixing always remains the utterance” (358-59).
  • “The novelistic plot serves to represent speaking persons and their ideological worlds. What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system. There takes place within the novel an ideological translation of another’s language, and an overcoming of its otherness–an otherness that is only contingent, external, illusory. Characteristic for the historical novel is a positively weighted modernizing, an erasing of temporal boundaries, the recognition of an eternal present in the past. The primary stylistic project of the novel as a genre is to create images of languages” (365-66). Therefore, “Every novel, taken as the totality of all the languages and consciousnesses of language embodied in it, is a hybrid. But we emphasize once again: it is an intentional and conscious hybrid, one artistically organized, and not an opaque mechanistic mixture of languages (more precisely, a mixture of the brute elements of language)” (366).

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature – Franco Moretti

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The bourgeois was always, as Franco Moretti puts it, “an enigmatic creature, idealistic and worldly,” and the form that best mapped out the boundaries and the gray compromises between these poles of bourgeois identity was the realist novel. In The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, Moretti shows how the novel as form served as the capacious and adaptable home within which the bourgeois could both assert and camouflage itself.

With the passing of the last remnants of feudal society, bourgeois culture had the difficult job of asserting its specificity while finding a language through which to speak for the whole social order.

His method is to track the significance of particular keywords, and the texture of particular kinds of grammatical form

Long before the pioneering sociologist Max Weber identified “instrumental reason” as a key characteristic of bourgeois culture, Defoe created a syntax for it. Robinson’s labors are nothing if not efficient. What is useful is beautiful on the island of bourgeois thought, and what is both beautiful and useful is without waste. The world is nothing but a set of potential tools and resources. “The creation of a culture of work,” Moretti claims, “has been, arguably, the greatest symbolic achievement of the bourgeoisie as a class.”

The bourgeois self sees a world of particular things as if they were put there to be the raw materials of the work of accumulation

“[F]illers rationalize the novelistic universe,” Moretti writes, “turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all.” This is the world that Marx describes, in Capital Volume 1, as appearing as an “immense accumulation of commodities.” The creeping welter of filler, present in Defore, will reach its apogee in Flaubert. It is the bourgeois novel’s one great narrative invention

In the novel, subjectivity decreases and objectivity increases. Description becomes analytic rather than romantic, induction rather than ornament. Or so it appears. Moretti: “description as a form was not neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply into the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable.” This is the novel’s conservative side. While the bourgeois in the economic sphere is a demiurge of industry and accumulation, in the political and cultural sphere he stands, above all, for the solidity and persistence of all things.

Adjectives like “hard,” “fresh,” “sharp,” or “dry” express a judgment without a judge, the author having retreated behind the screen of her or his putatively neutral prose. This, for Moretti, is the real significance of the bourgeois novel’s free indirect discourse, that strange point of view characteristic of the novel, which hovers close to a character but is not identical to it: “It is as if the world were declaring its meaning all by itself

The bourgeois realist novel went through three phases: ascendant, hegemonic, and a third, where it falls apart. The boom in the novel corresponds to the aftermath of the French Revolution; its decline to the rise of imperialism, and the emergence of social questions that — with rare exceptions, like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — it was not able to encompass. The novel then split into two parallel streams. On the one hand, the genre novel, which presses on into uncharted territory, addressing a mass audience on themes the realist novel had only touched on: class struggle, the death of God, the industrial revolution, the colonial other. On the other, the modernist novel, from Joyce to Platonov, plays out a series of variations on the formal properties inherent in the novel as form, while at the same time trying to speak to the shock of the historical event which now outstrips the speed and scope of the trauma of the French Revolution

 

The Soviet Novel, History as Ritual – Katerina Clark

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Citation

Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981

Contents

 

Introduction: the Distinctive role of Socialist Realism in Soviet Culture

 

  1. Socialist Realism before 1932
  2. What Socialist Realism Isand What Led to Its Adoption as the Official Method of Soviet Literature
  3. The Positive Hero in Prevolutionary Fiction
  4. Socialist Realist Classics of the Twenties
  5. High Stalinist Culture
  6. The Machine and the Garden: Literature and the Metaphors for the New Society
  7. The Stalinist Myth of the “Great Family”
  8. The Sense of Reality in the Heroic Age

III. An Analysis of the Conventional Soviet Novel

  1. The Prototypical Plot
  2. Three Auxiliary Patterns of Ritual Sacrifice
  3. Soviet Fiction since World War II
  4. The Postwar Stalin Period (1944-53)
  5. The Khrushchev Years
  6. Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained?

Author

 

Katerina Clark is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is author of Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution and coauthor (with Michael Holquist of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Context

Thesis

the Soviet novel “in terms of the distinctive role it plays as the repository of official myths.”

Methodology

Key Terms

Socialist Realism, the Master Plot, the Positive Hero, the “spontaneity”/”consciousness” dialectic, the “Great Family,”

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

middlebrow- more like police novel, rests on canonical examples

tools for studying medieval hagiography or other formulaic genres better suited than highbrow lit tools

question of extratextual meaning, aesthetics not important ideology is

started in 1932 with writer’s conference

canon

Gorky – mother, klim Sangin

Furmanov – Chapeau

Gladkov – Cement

Sholokhov – quiet flows the Don, virgin soil upturned

Ostrovsky – how the steel was tempered

Fadeev- The rout, the young guard

***

Master plot is a ritual in the anthropological sense, a focusing lens for cultural forces, parables which confirm Marxist-Leninist stages of history over course of Soviet novel the cliches represented different things.

[Patristic Texts]

Lenin 1905 – “Party organization and party literature” – foundational text, party-mindedness

Gorky’s mother as putative foundational text / Borges on Kafka: each writer creates his own precursors

1927- Stalin consolidates power

Gleichschaltung –  a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of society, “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education”.

comic combination of verisimilitude and mythicization

bad because it’s schitzophrenic

German debates (Lukacs and Brecht) not found in USSR

topics @ the congres: form vs. content, bracketing of modernism

-Lenin and Stalin as classic texts, dismissal of use of dialect as alienating (peasantry)

-validity of realism and surpassing of critical realism, good and bad romanticism, sense of history and the new man

Trotsky – against neologisms and regionalisms

skaz – oral form of narrative

Babel – Odessa tales (dialects)

obsession with transparency

“a monologic dream of cultural and ideological homogeneity”

Skaz and experimentation of 20s came under strict militaristic regimentation in 1930s

 

***

 

-it makes (perfect) sense to study socialist realism “from the point of view of the semiotics of culture, to discriminate the meaning of texts and the tradition they form, as opposed to their brute structure, by appealing to differences in different culture systems.”

Antimonies of Realism – Fredric Jameson

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Citation

Contents

Author

Context

Thesis

 

to balance linear story-time with impersonal presence: realism’s attempted compromise.

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

– THE ODD THING about literary “realism” is that it is not a descriptive term at all, but a period: roughly 1830–1895,

-Many classics of 19th-century realism would be conspicuously ruled out if plausibility were any criterion.

-realism becomes, in the folk vocabulary of everyday criticism, simply “the way that we used to do things.”

-This realism was supposedly built on “the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self.”

-But there wasn’t subjective plenitude, characters were neurotic, Dickens characters were trager of economic roles.

-Realism is not a cultural logic, but instead multitasking, Realism was instead a period of uneasy transition between two types of narrative: the traditional forms of storytelling like the Bible or medieval romance, and new strategies for describing experience and sensation which were emerging in the 19th century. This struggle between showing vs. telling also had to do with the effort to illuminate historical processes: the attempt to make sense of the social world on the one hand, and the attempt to fully describe personal sensory experience and habits of mind on the other. The harsh truths of life vs. intense self-awareness.  It is more helpful to think about realism not as the unmistakeable presence of a set of classic features, but as an open-ended compromise, a tension arising between these narrative approaches.

– to balance linear story-time with impersonal presence: realism’s attempted compromise.

-realism consisted of a number of ambitious deployments and maneuvers to outflank the stalemated face-off between narration and description, story and scene.

-Realism’s antinomies are parsed in terms of three such unrepresentable projections: providence, war, and “staging our own present as historical.” All of these are untellable visions, but they have in common the collective that Utopia gropes to construct. Also, the titanic stature of Tolstoy’s War and Peace can be accounted for anew, as a book that tries to straddle all three straits: to be a historical novel about war, capped by a theory of historical causality.

“Jameson’s two poles of realism, the registering of affect and the unique destiny, suggest another (unmentioned) recent work: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. All of the techniques of Scientology represented — the wall-touching, the unblinking confessional, the various tests of endurance, the states of inebriation — are certainly apparatuses of bodily specification and the discrimination of intensities; while the religious cult and its insertion into a thoroughly “periodized” (Hopper-esque) Americana evoke all of the problems of a collectivity (“The Cause”) and its emergence. The Master ignites all of these Jamesonian nodes — by way of L. Ron Hubbard’s own authorial proclivities, one could even make a connection to science fiction!”

– If there is to be, in Jameson’s phrase “realism after realism,” it will have to mean reclaiming motivation and decisions and the tracing of explanations, in whatever mode available, which will probably have to be invented.

 

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form. – Anna Kornbluh

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Citation

Contents

 

Introduction: ‘A case of metaphysics’: realizing capital — Fictitious capital/real psyche: metalepsis, psychologism, and the grounds of finance — Investor ironies in Great Expectations — The economic problem of sympathy: parabasis and interest in Middlemarch — ‘Money expects money’: satiric credit in The way we live now — London, nineteenth century, capital of realism: on Marx’s Victorian novel — Psychic economy and its vicissitudes: Freud’s economic hypothesis — Epilogue: The psychic life of finance.

Author

Context

 

In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature’s unique facility for evaluating ideas in process.

Thesis

 

reality of the financial capital is itself structured like a fiction.

Methodology

 

The realist novel engages economics neither via reference to economic content nor through its production and consumption in the market, but in its narratological, rhetorical, and temporal structures and the resonance, smooth or sticky, intensive of ironic, across those structures.

Key Terms

 

Reading – attending to the aesthetic material of literary language. to the historicist’s reduction of literature to discourse. I oppose deconstruction’s insistance on the irreducibility of tropes to intuitive ideas, and I work instead to encounter the material and process of literary thinking.

Social close reading – blending deconstructive techniques and the best historicist impulses to explore the intellectual and political force of literary forms that do not reiterate a preexisting world, but rather limn. ironize, and even unmake forms of worlding.

literature – a mode of thought structured by juxtoposition and condensation, by senuous syntheis and syncretic sedimentation. To pose the question “what connexion could there be?” between voices, motifs, temporalities, and images that and mobilized within one bounded work.

Criticisms and Questions

 

Book is mostly useful in showing a powerful approach to Marxist literary reading. Finding an object of study, and to offer a methodology of close reading.

 

For Kornbluh, realism written in the 19th-century blossoming of finance capitalism performs much of the same work as political theory. She works with a specifically Marxist framework, but instead of subjugating literature to a Marxist program, her version of “aesthetic mediation” finds similar historical, aesthetic, scientific, and political thought in Marx’s metaphors and in the critiques embodied in novels.

The idea that finance is the naturally complex lifeblood of our economy whose path only a rarefied group of white men can chart, and not the triumph of the middle man: that’s a trope. It’s a cultural narrative, with material consequences. It’s a cultural narrative that engages with the question of what is and isn’t real because, for example, only Goldman Sachs’s money was treated as real in the last crisis.

the realms of value, fiction, and language are inextricable from each other. Money is a real fiction, itself a representation, and as Kornbluh writes, it is like literature, “a kind of representation that makes a claim to value.” Money is “a claim to represent an abstraction that lacks ontological positivity, money contrives to effectuate the concrete existence of that abstract substance” that is value. It’s only in seeing this contrivance that we might see how we create value and what is realistically open to change.

Kornbluh wants to denaturalize one of the “seminal metaphors of late modernity”: the idea of “psychic economies.”

– What We Talk About When We Talk About Finance By Michelle ChiharaNotes

“By tracing the cultural circulation of two specific tropes–“fictitious capital–” and “psychic economy”–Kornbluh makes a compelling argument about the complex figurative ties that bind the realist novel to our understanding of both capitalism and the psyche. This exciting and original book will make us reconsider the novel’s cultural work as well as that of its criticism.”

-Mario Ortiz-Robles, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Notes

 

Introduction: ‘A case of metaphysics’: realizing capital —

realism is a destabalization of reified reality, victorian novel’s investigating financial capitalism’s parallel destabilizations.

the realism of capitalism is not a matter of mimetic recording, but rather of aesthetic mediation: “the only true social element in literature is the form” -Lukacs

The truly financial element in realism is the form. The realist novel engages economics neither via reference to economic content nor through its production and consumption in the market, but in its narratological, rhetorical, and temporal structures and the resonance, smooth or sticky, intensive of ironic, across those structures.

London, nineteenth century, capital of realism: on Marx’s Victorian novel —

For Marx, capital functions like a novelistic protagonist.

Two tropes in catpial: personification, the representation of an abstraction for a person, and metalepsis, the substitution of one figure for an another with which it is closely related. And the concert between these two concepts intone the concept of drive. Coats and linen are personified, but people are just trager, agents of the ur-person: capital itself. Capital is the subject in this world.

the psychic economy metaphor is arguably nothing other than the personification of capital.

the power of these metaphors show how Capital realizes its insights not argumentatively, but aesthetically.

 

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network – Caroline Levine

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Citation:

 

  • Levine, Caroline, 1970. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, Princeton , New Jersey, 2015.

 

context: a way around the whole formalism/historicism debate

 

Thesis:

 

“This book makes a case for expanding our usual definition of form in literary studies to include patterns of sociopolitical experience like those of Lowood School. Broadening our definition of form to include social arrangements has, as we will see, immediate methodological consequences. The traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context dissolves. Formalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature. Forms are at work everywhere”

 

​Notes:

 

“Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, I define politics as a matter of distributions and arrangements.4 Political struggles include ongoing contests over the proper places for bodies, goods, and capacities. Do working-class crowds belong in the public square? Do women belong in voting booths? Does earned income belong to individuals? What land belongs to Native Americans? Sorting out what goes where, the work of political power often involves enforcing restrictive containers and boundaries— such as nation-states, bounded subjects, and domestic walls. ”

 

Forms constrain. According to a long tradition of thinkers, form is disturbing because it imposes powerful controls and containments. For some, this means that literary form itself exercises a kind of political power. In 1674, John Milton justified his use of blank verse as a reclaiming of “ancient liberty” against the “troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.”5 Avant-garde poet Richard Aldington made a similar claim in 1915: “We do not insist upon ‘freeverse’ as the only method of writing poetry. We fight for it as for a principle of liberty.”6 In our own time, critics—especially those in the Marxist tradition—have often read literary forms as attempts to contain social clashes and contradictions.

 

Forms differ. One of the great achievements of literary formalism has been the development of rich vocabularies and highly refined skills for differentiating among forms. Starting with ancient studies of prosody, theorists of poetic form around the world have debated the most precise terms for distinct patterns of rhyme and meter, and over the past hundred years theorists of narrative have developed a careful language for describing formal differences among stories, including frequency, duration, focalization, description, and suspense.

 

Various forms overlap and intersect. Surprisingly, perhaps, schools of thought as profoundly different from one another as the New Criticism and intersectional analysis have developed methods for analyzing the operation of several distinct forms operating at once. The New Critics, who introduced the close reading method that dominated English departments in the middle decades of the twentieth century, deliberately traced the intricacies of overlapping literary patterns operating on different scales, as large as genre and as small as syntax. Intersectional analysis, which emerged in the social sciences and cultural studies in the late 1980s, focused our attention on how different social hierarchies overlap, sometimes powerfully reinforcing one another—how for example race and class and gender work together to keep many African-American women in a discouraging cycle of poverty

 

Forms travel. ​certain literary forms—epic, free indirect discourse, rhythm, plot—can survive across cultures and time periods, sometimes enduring through vast distances of time and space.10 Something similar is true, though less often acknowledged, for social forms. Michel Foucault draws our attention to the daily timetable, for example, which begins by organizing life in the medieval monastery, but then gets picked up by the modern prison, factory, and school.

secondly, The most important of these were binary oppositions— masculine and feminine, light and dark—which imposed a recognizable order across social and aesthetic experiences, from domestic spaces to tragic dramas. Structuralism later came under fire for assuming that these patterns were natural and therefore inexorable, but one does not have to be a structuralist to agree that binary oppositions are a pervasive and portable form, capable of imposing their arrangements on both social life and literary texts. Some critics have also worried that aesthetic forms can exert political power by imposing their artificial order on political life.

 

Forms do political work in particular historical contexts. In recent years, scholars interested in reviving an interest in form (sometimes called the “new formalists”) have sought to join formalism to historical approaches by showing how literary forms emerge out of political situations dominated by specific contests or debates. Since the late 1990s, literary critics like Susan Wolfson and Heather Dubrow have argued that literary forms reflect or respond to contemporary political conditions.14 Forms matter, in these accounts, because they shape what it is possible to think, say, and do in a given context.

 

if you read Jane Eyre as Levine suggests you should, then you might see “narrative and gender as two distinct forms, each striving to impose its own order, both travelling from other places to the text in question, and neither automatically prior or dominant.” The novel, by this interpretive light, mediates a tense competition among forms, which pits their affordances against one another and thereby affords us a way of seeing how they shape human destinies.

 

It is precisely because The Wire is, as she puts it, “constructed and stylized” that it provides such a powerful “theorization of the social.” To understand the show as a kind of sociology is not to deny its fictionality and artifice, but to see its formal devices as part of what gives it such a compelling vantage on collective experience. Instead of assuming that The Wire is a symptom of the society that produced it, in other words, Levine defines the show as a formed object that affords thinking about social form.

 

There are forms in politics and in our ways of understanding society, just as there are in literature. Structuralism was able to connect dots to context, interweaving patterns of the aethetic and the social, while new critics could see complex overlap of different ordering principles within single text.

 

Strategic Formalism – complex, composite vocabulary for thinking of the array of forms that overlap, compete, and interconnect. Not just forms of class, gender, race but also forms of knowledge

 

The Wire:

 

All of these forms overlap to show that social reality is best represented not by the focused gaze of sociology, but by the expansive causal network which is shown in the Wire.

 

Bounded Wholes – Sobotka fights over installing stained glass, tries to get police involved, but that expands to larger national investigation beyond his control.

 

Rhythm – school year, daily newspaper deadlines, and crime reports all have different time imperatives, which each have their own social tempo effects. major institutions endure over time.

 

Hierarchy – vertical structures crop up everywhere, but are complex and uneven overlappings of norms and practices with unpredictable consequences.

 

Network – “The Wire imagines that the process of capturing social experience will not lie in stories that follow a sequence of seperate institutional forms — one narrative about a hospital, another about lawyers, a third about a school— but through attention to the many points where forms collide.

The Experimental Arabic Novel – Stefan Meyer

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Citation

 

Meyer, Stefan G., 1949. The Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the Levant. State University of New York Press, Albany, 2001.

 

Contents

Intro: Experimental Arabic Novel and Comparitive Modernisms

Chapter 1: Modern Ambivalence and the Beginning of Narrative Experimentation

-existentialism and the fragmentation of narrative voice

-the defamiliarization of narrative

-The strategy of ironic distance

Chapter 2: Recovering the Past: The “Arabization” of the Novel

-cultural and historical counternarrative: Abdelrahman Munif

-Magical realism: Selim Barakat

-Folk Narrative and subjective expression

Chapter 3:

Recovering the Presents: the Lebanese Civil War

-fragmented reportage: Ghada Samman

-the patchwork novel: Elias Khoury

-The dynamics of war and sexuality

-The novel of interior situations.

Chapter 4: Redefining the Future: Questions of Artistic Choice.

 

Author

Context

Thesis

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

 

Answers many many questions about the perceived lack of certain stylistic innovations in Arabic fiction, the continued dominance of realism, and the tricky question of postmodernism.

 

Notes

 

Introduction:

-writers in the Arab world were never bohemians, alienation was due to search for harmony in society with weakness and failed institutions.

-where privilege of ironic distance, hindrance to more complex forms of novel.

-experimental arabic novel self-conscious revolt againt Arabic narrative tradition and its ambivalence to modernity.

-Arabic novels have focused more on social conditions experienced within a particular class — whether bourgeois, peasant, or urban — and the relationship among members of a particular class.

Chapter 1:

-Kanafani – all that’s left to you, Jabra’s the ship, Mahfouz’s miramar (heavily influenced by Faulker)

-Najma Agostos really weird and unsettling.

-the strategy of ironic distance: Zayni Barakat, the pessoptimist, also Arab history and folk tradition as vehicle for irony.

Chapter 2:

 

-Abdulrahman Munif: cultural and historical counternarrative. Looking for innovative narrative style not imitative of the West. (Nihayet) challenging both Saudi and western colonial view of history.

-Selim Barakat and Magical Realism: the closest of any Arab author to Latin American magical realism. Uses words in weird counter-semantic ways, reminiscent of the maqama where the major purpose was the compositional process to play with the meaning of words.

-Despite being Kurd, he is perhaps the master prose stylist in Arabic today. Producing distintly Arabic work.

Al-jundub al-hadidi – formal linguistic experimentation

Fuqaha’ al-zalam – pure form of magical realism. Highly political but subordinates that to creating a new type of cultural panorama.

Folk narrative and subjective expression – Syria has been the most resistant to experimentation, realism lingers: Hannah Mina, Faris Zarzur, and Hani Rahib.

-the literary legacy of socialist realism has created its own momentum.

-Syrian historical novels of the 90s: Nabil Sulayman, Fawwaz Hahhad, Khayri al-Dhahabi, and Nihad Sirris. Way to talk obliquely about social problems.

Chapter 3:

radical fragmentation of form in attempt to express complete dislocation caused by Lebanese Civil war.

-Elias Khoury and Ghadda Samman

-Hoda Barakat – stone of laughter challenge male ethic of violence and expose ambiguities and contraditions on the other. Feminine and masculine features in one character. Atomizes the masculine war culture.

-Rashid al-Da’if exposed space between drowsiness and sleep (1986)  -dream and physical reality mixed. Hallucinatory, fragmentation and interiorization lays bare psychological aspects of war.

Chapter 4:

-Ibrahim Nasrallah – prairies of fever (1985) – uses symbolist poetry techniques for narrative. Lyricism of al-jundub al-hadidi with interiorized quality of gates of the city.

-Rashid al-da’if – tiqniyat al-bus (1989) – entire novel of short guy based on minute recording of reality.

-Edward Kharrat (1990) women of Alexandria – experiment with lyrical form reminiscent of proust thirties and fourties, women of every type in the city. Exhuberant sense of unite underlying life.

Hasan Daoud – ayyam zaidah – dialect between internal and external.

Dhat – mimicking postmodernity – with rise of consumerist society – criticizing dependence on foreign goods and not being productive which leads to traditionalism. Stille enthralled to subserviene.

Conclusion:

-Edward Said wrote shitty intro to Khoury novel, calling it postmodern, which is lazy labeling unaware of local trends.

-like in Latin America, postmodern rise had to do with demobilization of the left.

Modernism in Arabic literature began from a radicalized political viewpoint and a conservative approach to experimentation with language. Modernism in the West, on the other hand, presented radical experimentation with language, and a conservative political agenda.

-Modernism in Arab world is awareness of not living in a modern era.

-Faysal Darraj – postmodernism just another attempt to import a grand recit, and to import cultural imperialism.

-experimentalism in Arabic cannot be labeled postmodernism but has to be seen in its own context.