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Below are some notes that I took (unedited, for the most part) from a recent panel given at the Madison Literature conference, held by UW-Madison’s English dept. I found it interesting to hear the struggles that the humanities seems to be going through, particularly as they grapple with changes that are occurring as a result of digitization. In the same way that notions of “literacy” are changing, ideas about what to think of “literature” as, at least in terms of an object or domain of study, will likely change as well. If they do not — if English departments continue to limit their topics of study to the “classic” texts — they will likely be digging their own graves. At this panel, for example, one professor denounced wikipedia (“I refuse to look at the thing”) and another decried the increasing pressure to teach students valuable transferable skills (as opposed to, I believe, the value inherent to literature studies).
Curious.
Notes on Material Cultural Studies as a Methodology
Panel Title: Does literary studies need a text?
DL
Does literary studies need professors? I’m going to talk about what it means and what it meant in the early modern period to what we understand as text. Or I’m going to ask what kinds of texts or text… (“Literature” has a very long and complex history)
Previously included Poetry prose drama fiction essays, but should now be exapnded because the study of literature should be circumscribed to these…
Bacon said, that literature is the “domain of all knowledge in written form”
We are being truer by emphasizing breadth, rather than specializing literature towards imaginative writing associated with say the romantic premium on imagination. When you ask yourselves what do we mean by literature, what i’m suggesting is that – in the early modern period it had an extrordinarily exclusive sense, and we’re in the process of rediscovering this.
Take, for example, John Fox’s [something]
He used collaborators yet put his name as author, it was an unstable yet evolving text that went through many editions, it was political, it raised issues relating visual and print culture.
Elisabeth used symbols, wrote prayers and speeches, not poetry and prose.
Only since 2000 has there been a scholarly look at her texts; elisabeth was indeed an author and virtuoso writer, though not in the sense of “imaginative writing” but she did produce texts that now warrant our attention in critical ways.
M
I was going to talk about derrida – there is nothing outside the text. Instead I’d like to talk about the figure of the animal in late victorian fiction. I think this isolates four approaches in tying evolution and literature together. These are:
- Thinking of evolutionary theory in rhetorical terms. E.g. middlemarch, author uses evolution/darwinian language to think about society, how there is a web of affinities that connect us all. This does not answer the question of how evolution can help us think about literature critically
- The second point is to think about literature as a discursive phenomenon – to think about how ideas that informed the evolution project enable the realist novelist program of representation of making plausible the deliberate …
- Moretti: evolution in historical terms. Think of literary evolution. So Moretti, novels and genres follow an evolutionary path in the “slaughterhouse” of literature. Evolution occurs around “cultural selection”
- If all human social behavior can be traced to inherited characteristics then literature should be a product of the mind acting according to a set pattern of behaviors. Cites e.o. Wilson, mind as a narrative machine. Interesting to think about literature as “pre-coded” which returns us to derrida
If the genetic code is like literary code, then there really is nothing outside the text.
Tk
Visual culture has been a long part of culture. Thinking about the visual requires me to think about conceptual possibilities at the edges but also at the middle of reading the text.
Looking at how allegory operates in modernity.
[There's something here about the tensions between the specific and the general]
The visual is often diagrammatic, or conceptual. SO with visuality, we may rarely find it worthwhile to talk about what ‘looks real” instead visual phenomenon should attend to “how it looks”
Call for interdisciplinary work perhaps
Question
Q1 What’s at stake in calling something a “text”
TK: In an era where text is ‘imaginative literature’ I think that people think of text as a substitute term for studying things … it has been for 200 years so why would you want to change that? Something about rhetoric…
M: ~
Q1.1: What are the kinds of skills/methods or analysis that we need to bring to bear on texts?
Red shirt: they did a lot of studies that did not use the word “text” . I think our purview is extremely wide, however there are all sorts of complications that arise from that – it totally messes up your idea of ‘coverage’ what does it mean to be a romanticist?
If we use our tools to study a political speech, we might look at something different than political historians. We might look at things differently, we should not be apologetic for it. We SHOULD be in discussion.
Q2. ?? something about giving our attention to texts in certain ways
A: Your approach changes the way that you construe the text
Q?: What do you see as the role of enjoyment? What is the trajectory that you see for students?
A:
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