Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. Volume 31 (2015) Reading Practices

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1 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 31 (2015) Reading Practices Edited by Winfried Fluck, Günter Leypoldt and Philipp Löffler

2 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 31

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4 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring Winfried Fluck Herbert Grabes Donald E. Pease 31 Reading Practices Edited by Winfried Fluck, Günter Leypoldt and Philipp Löffler

5 Notice to Contributors The editors invite submissions of manuscripts appropriate to the topics of the forthcoming volumes of REAL. The 2016 volume, edited by Ingo Berensmeyer, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning, will be on Literature and Cultural Change. The 2017 volume, edited by Sarah Fekadu, Isabel Kranz and Tobias Döring, will be on Meteorologies of Modernity: Weather and Climate Discourses in the Anthropocene. Each author will receive one copy of the yearbook and a pdf file of the article. Articles submitted for consideration may be sent directly to the volume editors or via an advisor. They should reach the volume editors by December 1 of the year prior to publication, and should not exceed 10,000 words (including endnotes and references). To facilitate processing, they should be sent in duplicate and on cd or disc; they must be typed in English, doublespaced, and should observe the conventions laid down in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003 sqq.). Editors Tobias Döring, LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D München, Germany Winfried Fluck, Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nord - amerikastudien, Lansstraße 5-9, D Berlin, Germany Herbert Grabes, Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, D Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease, English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey (University of Wales), Marshall Brown (University of Washington), Ronald Shusterman (Université Jean Monnet), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) Text-editing and final layout: Dominik Fungipani, Berlin Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D Tübingen All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems without written permission of the publisher. info@narr.de Printed in Germany ISBN ISSN

6 Acknowledgements This volume first took shape during a conference at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, that was hosted by Günter Leypoldt and Philipp Löffler in June 2013, entitled Acquired Taste: Reading and the Uses of Literature in the Age of Academic Literary Studies. We are grateful to all the participants for their presentations, their lively discussions during the four days of intellectual exchange, and also their inspiring comments during the conception of this volume. For making this conference possible we wish to thank the German Research Foundation (DFG), the American Embassy, and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. Wendy Griswold s and Hannah Wohl s contribution has appeared in Poetics 50 (2015), Copyright Elsevier. Amy Hungerford s contribution will be included in her forthcoming monograph Making Literature Now, copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. Thanks to the copyright holders for their permissions, and to the authors for having tested early versions of their texts at Heidelberg. Günter Leypoldt, Philipp Löffler, Winfried Fluck

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8 Contents Acknowledgements... V Contributors... IX Philipp Löffler Introduction: Reading in the Age of Academic Literary Studies...1 Winfried Fluck Shadow Aesthetics Günter Leypoldt Acquired Taste (Toni Morrison on Oprah) Amy Hungerford GPS Historicism Wendy Griswold and Hannah Wohl Evangelists of Culture: One Book Programs and the Agents Who Define Literature, Shape Tastes, and Reproduce Regionalism Daniel Silliman and Jan Stievermann Reading the Supernatural in Contemporary American Ethnic and Christian Fiction Timothy Aubry The Discipline of Feeling: The New Critics and the Struggle for Academic Legitimacy Merve Emre Fulbright Love Philipp Löffler Identity Fiction and the Rise of Theory Amy L. Blair Tasting and Testing Books : Good Housekeeping s Literary Canon for the 1920s and 1930s Christa Buschendorf Reading Shakespeare Matters: Symbolic Struggles over Literary Taste among Black Intellectuals Paul B. Armstrong How Historical is Reading? What Literary Studies Can Learn from Neuroscience (and Vice Versa) Dustin Breitenwischer Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience (and the Case of Sylvia Plath s Soliloquy of the Solipsist )...219

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10 Contributors Armstrong, Paul. Department of English, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA Aubry, Timothy. Department of English, Baruch College, One Bernard Baruch Way, New York, NY 10010, USA Blair, Amy. Department of English, Marquette University, 1217 W. Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53233, USA Breitenwischer, Dustin. Englisches Seminar Nordamerikastudien, Albert- Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Rempartstraße 15, Freiburg, Germany Buschendorf, Christa. Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Goethe- Universität Frankfurt, Grüneburgplatz 1, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Emre, Merve. Department of English, Yale University, 63 High St, New Haven, CT , USA Fluck, Winfried. John-F.-Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Abteilung Kultur, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstraße 7-9, Berlin, Germany Griswold, Wendy. Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL , USA Hungerford, Amy. Department of English, Yale University, 63 High St, New Haven, CT , USA Leypoldt, Günter. Anglistisches Seminar, Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Universität Heidelberg, Kettengasse 12, Heidelberg, Germany Löffler, Philipp. Anglistisches Seminar, Universität Heidelberg, Kettengasse 12, Heidelberg, Germany Silliman, Daniel. Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Hauptstraße 120, Heidelberg, Germany Stievermann, Jan. Theologische Fakultät, Heidelberg Center for American Studies, Universität Heidelberg, Hauptstraße 120, Heidelberg, Germany Wohl, Hannah. Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL , USA

11 Winfried Fluck Shadow Aesthetics What do Literary Studies do? Ever since literary studies was defined as a field of study in its own right and institutionalized at colleges and universities, the field had to grapple with questions of legitimation. I am thinking not so much of attacks by natural scientists who questioned the field s status as a science, or of die-hard positivists and empiricists in the social sciences who questioned how literary scholars could ever hope to provide hard evidence for such elusive concepts as aesthetic value or aesthetic experience. I am thinking of the challenges, often voiced from within the field, what the relevance of the field is. Ever since I was a student in the 1960s, these debates have stood at the center of the field, which explains why I have returned repeatedly in my own work to questions about the function of literature and the changing functions of fiction. The Hegelian Answer When I look at literary studies from this perspective, I see three major stages in the self-legitimation of literary studies. The first may be called Hegelian and was long the dominant paradigm for the study of literature and for its justification as a field of study in higher education. 1 From a Hegelian perspective, questions about the relevance of literature are easy to answer, since the literary text embodies the spirit of its time 2 and can thus be taken as a supreme expression of a national or regional identity, or, in the Marxist 1 Hegelianism also stands at the beginning of the discipline of art history. On the constitutive role of Hegelianism in the formation and institutionalization of the humanities see my essays on Transatlantic Narratives about American Art and Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings. 2 More precisely, human history is the process of a gradual self-recognition of the universal spirit that manifests itself in different cultures and nations at different times. In Transatlantic Narratives About American Art, I have provided a description of the three central assumptions on which a Hegelian approach is based: 1) the assumption that art can be read as a historical manifestation and significant cultural expression of a nation, society or particular group; 2) the claim that art is an instrument of selfrecognition of that nation, society or group and can thus provide superior insights into their identity; 3) the assumption that the historical development of art is organized by unifying principles that give certain historical or social formations their characteristic identity. The challenge for the interpreter therefore consists in identifying this unifying principle, often called the spirit of a nation or period.

12 12 Winfried Fluck appropriation of Hegelianism, of the spirit of capitalism or of a particular class identity. These Hegelian claims were ideally suited, not only to justify the study of literature, but to put it at the center of a humanistic education. Expressing the inner spirit of a particular historical or social formation such as, for example, of the Renaissance or of America or of the American South or of the middleclass the literary text gains national or social representativeness and becomes something like a key to understanding a nation, region or social formation. In effect, not only a key, but a privileged key, because the study of literature offered two advantages that strongly recommended it for a liberal arts curriculum. Not only could one circumvent the otherwise complex and cumbersome study of historical or social formations by focusing on one of their representative self-expressions. This turn - for example to the study of a nation through its representative texts - also held the promise of a deeper understanding than social or empirical studies could provide. 3 For as an expression of the spirit of a nation or particular region, the representative literary text provided something like a condensation of the essential features of this formation, that is, a key medium of self-recognition. To study a nation through its representative literary texts thus also promised to gain a deeper understanding of that nation since, as a condensed articulation of its essential spirit, the literary text or the work or art could bring us closer to the true spirit of a nation than any other form of expression. Hegelianism in American Studies In American Studies, this line of argumentation can be found in exemplary fashion in the founding period of the field. Much of the work of this period stands in the tradition of intellectual history and is firmly grounded in an underlying Hegelianism, although I suspect that many, if not most, American scholars were not necessarily aware of this philosophical underpinning. The basic assumptions of Hegelianism seemed so self-evident and were so readily 3 In the formative years of American Studies, this promise of a deeper understanding was a regular feature of theoretical reflections on the theory and method of American studies. Formalism is considered inadequate to help us understand American culture, but so is sociology. See, for example, Henry Nash Smith: We are no better off if we turn to the social sciences for help in seeing the culture as a whole. We merely find society without art instead of art without society. The literary critic would cut esthetic value loose from social fact; the social scientist, despite his theoretical recognition that art is an important aspect of culture, uses techniques of research which make it difficult or impossible for him to deal with the states of consciousness embodied in serious art (Smith 203). Cf. also Robert Spiller s musings on the failure of an interdisciplinary seminar in his essay Value and Method in American Studies: The Literary versus the Social Approach : The social scientist strives to isolate the social fact from its cause and its consequence so that it may stand up and be counted; and the literary critic strives to free the work of art from both intention and effect so that its supposed meaning may be read from its own being, the text, unconfused by what are considered to be extraneous circumstances. Not only is the artist once more being deliberately alienated from his society, but society is being deliberately robbed of its aesthetic experience (21).

13 Shadow Aesthetics 13 accepted as the basis of intellectual history that they shape the work of scholars of all political persuasions, from the left liberal progressivist Vernon Louis Parrington, who focused on Main Currents of American Thought, to the liberal conservative Perry Miller who studied The New England Mind, from the liberal radical F.O. Matthiessen who wanted to describe the true spirit of American democracy in his seminal study American Renaissance, 4 to such influential intellectual historians as John Higham or cultural historians like Warren Susman, who set out to determine the unifying principle that gave the Progressive Period, the Twenties, or the Thirties their distinctive character. In one way, the myth and symbol school rebelled against this tradition, but only on the basis of a metaphorically condensed Hegelianism: instead of studying the mind of a nation or region, for which Perry Miller still needed two packed volumes, it became now possible to understand a nation like the United States through one of its key myths or symbols. Again, the promise was not merely to provide an important insight, but a better, deeper understanding. In a key essay of disciplinary self-definition called American Studies A Defense of an Unscientific Method, the major theoretician of the myth and symbol school, Leo Marx, argued, for example, that the study of Herman Melville s Moby-Dick would provide deeper insights into America than any sociological study: I would submit that the argument for the usefulness of Moby-Dick in the kind of inquiry I have described is identical with the argument for the intrinsic merit of Moby-Dick as a work of literature. It is useful for its satisfying power, its capacity to provide a coherent organization of thought and feeling, or in a word, for its compelling truth value (89). However, the essay by Leo Marx also highlights the main problem of Hegelianism which brings us to a second major stage in the self-legitimation of American literary studies. The problem of Hegelianism is how the representativeness of a literary work can be determined. After all, Hegelianism s whole reasoning depends on the assumption that the literary work is nationally and culturally representative. But how can we determine whether and to what extent a literary text is representative of a particular historical period or social formation? From a Hegelian perspective, the literary work should be put at the center of a humanistic education, because it expresses a deeper truth; it expresses a deeper truth, because it reflects and condenses the spirit of a historical or social formation. However, not every literary text can do this. Many texts, especially in the realm of popular culture, only blindly reproduce prevailing conventions or ideologies. Only the work of art can provide this kind of deeper insight. The question then is what a work of art is, and the Hegelian answer is circular at this point: art distinguishes itself from other texts and cultural objects, because it has successfully managed 4 There is some uncertainty whether Matthiessen should not be classified as a formalist. But in his study on Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman, Günter Leypoldt claims correctly that Matthiessen staged aesthetic excellence as a mark of cultural expressiveness, implying that the art of America s Whitman illuminates its cultural essence better than the conventional writing of her Longfellows (that is, representatives of a second-order literature that merely reflects contingent cultural surfaces) (251).

14 14 Winfried Fluck to capture the spirit of a nation. In other words: the text itself cannot tell us whether and to what degree it is truly representative or not. In the final analysis, it is the critic or scholar who determines what counts as a deeper insight, and, as a rule, he or she will do this on the basis of already existing assumptions about what the deeper truth is, for example about America. One of the reasons for the longevity of Hegelianism is that it is a self-confirming system that can be easily used for positive self-definitions of a social formation (or, at the other end of the spectrum, for stinging critiques). Most myth and symbol scholars were left liberals, who used literature and its use of myth and symbol to argue against the threat of a materialistic, superficial, and conformist American consumer society. By doing this, they used the authority of the literary work of art for the confirmation of their own left liberal critique of America. The Formalist Answer When I began my studies in the early 1960s, intellectual history was already on the way out, however, not only because it works with sweeping generalizations about the national mind, but also because it easily lent itself to nationalist apologies. Thus, any alternative would have to meet two criteria: it would have to be less speculative, more firmly grounded in evidence, and it would have to be more resistant to ideological misuse, perhaps even provide an antidote to it. If one looks for an explanation for the almost complete dominance formalism had in literary studies for several decades, whether in the form of Russian formalism, Czech structuralism, American New Cricitism, French Explication de Texte, or German werkimmanente Methode, then one answer is that formalism turned out to be the perfect counter-perspective to Hegelianism. Whereas Hegelian American Studies argues that the analysis of a literary work should focus on the national or regional spirit by which it is shaped, for formalists it is the work s artistic form that distinguishes it from other texts. Instead of relying on broad generalizations about the mind of a nation or region, only a close reading of a literary text s formal structure can therefore do justice to its meaning and cultural significance, and hence its specific value. Formalism therefore placed the legitimation of literary studies on a professional expertise that only experts, who had systematically studied literary form and linguistic expression, could apply competently. The interpreter was no longer an intellectual who indulged in large-scale generalizations, for example about America, but a trained professional who insisted on close readings as the only reliable source of insights. Close reading became an almost magic word, as if it could already in itself produce ideologically untainted knowledge that had been obscured before. The basis for this shift lay in a redefinition of the field s function. Its importance, that is, the reason why it should be studied, did no longer lie in its national representativeness but in its aesthetic value. This aesthetic value seemed to exist independently from national or ideological content; in effect,

15 Shadow Aesthetics 15 the fact that it transcended national and ideological borders (so that readers in other nations or political systems could also enjoy it), was now considered one of the main reasons for its status as a supreme cultural value. If the value of a literary text no longer lies in its national or cultural representativeness, it must lie somewhere else, and this somewhere else are the text s formal strategies that determine the reading experience. Every literary text has characteristic forms of expression, but not in every case these forms are valuable. Formalism thus also needed an aesthetic theory that would help to determine what kinds of literary forms were especially valuable and possessed aesthetic value. The idea of aesthetic value became central and crucially important for the justification of the field, not because of an ingrained elitism, as has sometimes been argued, but because of expectations connected with the idea of a humanizing power of art that can make us better, more self-aware and selfreflexive human beings and thus immune to the pitfalls of ideology. But what were the aesthetic qualities of art that could produce such an effect? Are there formal elements that have an inherent aesthetic value? As it turned out, formalism drew its idea of what constituted aesthetic value largely from the literary modernism of its time, which meant that certain forms of expression myth and symbol, ambiguity, irony, paradox, semantic indeterminacy, and, frequently, defamiliarization were considered supreme aesthetic values and became almost identical with the idea of the aesthetic itself. One casualty was American realism, which had an increasingly hard time to qualify as an aesthetically valuable form of literature and lost the high cultural status it had had in the 1930s. In order to qualify as art, a literary work had to have structure, but the term structure was not simply used to describe any type of formal organization (as would later be the case in structuralism). Structure here refers to a unifying formal principle that gives the literary text its own, semantically self-contained Gestalt which is the precondition for its autonomous status. 5 Formalism in American Studies Formalism s role in American Studies was never one of entirely unquestioned authority. During the heyday of the myth and symbol school, it was considered an indispensible part of the professional tool-kit of literary studies, including American literary studies, but not sufficient as a method. Two problems remained. One was that for formalism cultural significance was dependent on aesthetic value; only if a literary work possessed aesthetic value could it be considered culturally significant. The other problem was that formalism equated aesthetic value with a New Criticism-version of it 5 This is the reason why formalism is not identical with close reading. The latter can be done in the service of many different approaches; the former is based on a specific view of literature that locates its aesthetic value in organizing principles that provide the literary text with a self-contained unified structure that a close reading sets out to reveal. For an analysis of this logic see my essay on Aesthetic Premises in American Studies.

16 16 Winfried Fluck that excluded not only realism, but a whole body of texts, ranging from ethnic literatures to African-American literature or female traditions such as the sentimental and the domestic novel. I have traced the consequences of this conflation of the category of the aesthetic with a particular New Critical version of it in my dissertation on the history of reception of Mark Twain s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Fluck 1975). The example is of special interest, because after World War II a general critical consensus existed that Twain s novel was one of US-America s literary masterpieces. However, if it was a masterpiece, it must be distinguished by specific formal qualities that provide it with a unified structure. Thus, in the heydays of formalism, we encounter about twenty-five years of Huck Finn-criticism in which ever more questionable claims are made about the compositional unity of a literary text that had been carelessly crafted over a period of altogether seven years and shows all kinds of formal flaws and inconsistencies. Never mind, if one wanted to call the novel a literary masterpiece in order to justify the book s central role in higher education, one had to find an argument through which one could attribute a unifying aesthetic structure to the book. Or, to put it differently, in contrast to Hegelianism, formalism may make claims for a more objective, unbiased method, but in the final analysis it is merely projecting different assumptions into the literary text. No matter how close and appreciative a formalist reading is, it will nevertheless confirm the premises from which it took its point of departure. The Revisionist Turn The formalist legitimation of literary studies, based on the idea of aesthetic value, began to collapse in the 1970s, and with this collapse we are beginning to enter a third stage in the self-legitimation of literary studies. It is a stage in which the field s legitimation is put on entirely new grounds. This third stage has been ushered in by a far-reaching revisionist turn in the wake of the 1960s. It has produced a broad spectrum of different approaches within literature departments that range from Cultural Studies to a new form of structuralist Marxism, from Foucauldian discourse analysis to New Historicism, from poststructuralism to Race and Gender studies, all of them also shaping American literary studies decisively. However, despite their many differences in theory and method, these approaches share two basic assumptions. One is a rejection of the category of the aesthetic as a key concept for literary analysis, the other is a shift from aesthetics to the politics of literature as the main criterion of relevance. Both aspects are logically intertwined. The concept of the aesthetic is dismissed, because a focus on the aesthetic dimension of the literary text will obscure its politics. Contrary to the claims of formalism, the aesthetic and the political do not constitute two distinctly separate realms; rather, throughout its history literature has also had important political functions, and a discussion of literary texts primarily in terms of their aesthetic dimension has helped to hide this fact. Literary studies have thus

17 Shadow Aesthetics 17 played a major role in obscuring power relations or being in complicity with them. What formalists have praised as the power of art has thus really been the art of power, to quote Mark Seltzer s chiasmatic bonmot about the politics of the novels of Henry James. Views of the role and relevance of literature have changed radically in the new revisionism. Before, literature was praised for its supreme potential to embody ideals and values that had not yet been subjected to (political or other forms of) instrumentalization and could therefore be enjoyed for their own sake and on their own terms, that is, without asking for a practical use value. The ability to resist or evade instrumentalization was a virtue celebrated with terms like disinterestedness, play, or references to a utopian dimension of literature. In contrast, revisionist critics argue that one cannot stand outside of politics or of other power relations and that aesthetics therefore cannot be separated from its politics, so that an analysis in which the literary text is approached primarily or even exclusively through the category of the aesthetic must be seen as a screen for ideological and political interests. In order to draw attention to a literary text s politics, one must get rid of the aesthetic as a central or privileged analytical concept. Thus, Walter Cohen, in an essay on Political Criticism of Shakespeare published in the mid-1980s, can already state that political interpretation has become central to work on Shakespeare ( ) to the point where political approaches arguably form the cutting edge of academic criticism in the United States (18). The same can be said about interpretations of American literature. This rejection of the aesthetic is part of a wider shift in political and intellectual perspectives that began to transform American humanities in the 1970s. It has dominated American literary criticism and American Studies ever since. With Leo Marx we may speak of periods before and after the divide. 6 Before the divide, the politics of American literary criticism and American Studies were basically liberal. Then, in the 1960s and its Marcusean critique of repressive tolerance, this liberal tradition although certainly not homogeneous in itself was replaced by a new form of radicalism that, in contrast to the political radicalism of the 1930s, may be called cultural radicalism. In political radicalism, the source of political power (and hence of political repression) lies in political institutions like the state or the judicial courts or the police that are controlled by the ruling class. Change can thus be envisioned only where control can be wrested from these forces, for example by a leftist party or the labor unions. In this scenario, literature may be used to enlighten and move the masses in the right political direction. On the other hand, the cultural radicalism that emerged in the 1960s took its point of departure from the puzzling fact that workers in the post-war Western world did no longer show any willingness to get engaged in such political struggles. Cultural radicalism s explanation was that before questions of political engagement could even arise, the identity of the oppressed (and hence their perception and interpretation of reality) had already been decisively 6 Cf. his important essay On Recovering the Ur Theory of American Studies.

18 18 Winfried Fluck shaped by culture. Culture thus becomes the actual source of power, because it constitutes subjects and their identities before they are even aware of it either, and this is where the varying positions within cultural radicalism differ, by language (the subject is spoken by language), or by discursive regimes (Foucault, New Historicism), or by misrecognition in the mirror stage of subject-formation (Lacan, Althusser, New Materialism), or by race, gender, or sexual preference as regulatory cultural norms. 7 Whiteness Studies offer an exemplary argument for the latter: the key aspect about racial discrimination is not legal discrimination, as liberalism claims, but whiteness as a basic constitutive norm of identity. 8 For the perception of the aesthetic, this shift from liberalism to cultural radicalism had to have consequences. In liberalism, the aesthetic has a high status because, as a disinterested, that is, not-yet instrumentalized form of communication, it can counter the self-alienation produced by modernity or by capitalism and help the individual to become aware of its potential as a subject. For cultural radicalism, this is a naïve liberal illusion, for if the subject is already constituted or interpellated by culture, it is not free to develop its potential; on the contrary, as part of the cultural system, the only role of the aesthetic is to contribute to this type of subject-formation. Whereas in liberalism the aesthetic, as a seemingly disinterested mode of experience, is the antidote to ideology in fact, the place where ideology is successfully undermined or rejected -, it can now be an especially effective agent of ideology. It must therefore be the starting point for revisionist literary studies to expose the illusory character of the liberal notion of art and of the aesthetic. While intellectual history claims to have an important function 7 An interesting consequence of these different positions is that they attribute the crucial constraints on the subject s freedom to very different social forces. For political radicalism, the source of the problem is capitalism, for liberalism it lies in mass society (as an unforeseen perversion of democracy), and for cultural radicalism it lies in modernity and its project of enlightenment. 8 For Terry Eagleton, the aesthetic is another one of these cultural power effects through which the sensuous nature of the subject is reconstructed from the inside : For before interpretation in its modern hermeneutical sense was brought to birth, a whole apparatus of power in the field of culture was already firmly in place and had been for about a century. This was not an apparatus which determined the power-effects of particular readings but one which determined the political meaning and function of culture as such. Its name was and is aesthetics. It will be part of my argument that the aesthetic, at least in its original formulations, has little enough to do with art. It denotes instead a whole program of social, psychical and political reconstruction on the part of the early European bourgeoisie (327). The aesthetic, in other words, marks an historic shift from what we might now, in Gramscian terms, call coercion to hegemony, ruling our and informing our sensuous life from within while allowing it to thrive in all its relative autonomy (328). It is easier, in other words, for reason to repress sensuous Nature if it has already been busy eroding and subliming it from the inside and this is the task of the aesthetic (329). Structures of power must become structures of feeling and the name for this mediation from property to propriety is the aesthetic. (...) What matters in aesthetics is not art but this whole project of reconstructing the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with this law which is not a law (330).

19 Shadow Aesthetics 19 in supporting a nation s self-recognition, and formalism sees itself as guardian of superior values that prevent us from being instrumentalized by mass society, revisionist literary studies set themselves the task of recovering the political or social subtext that the literary text and its aesthetic surface hide. Revisionist literary studies have developed several ways of pursuing this project. In fact, the history of literary theories in the last decades could be rewritten on the basis of their changing conceptualizations of the relation between the aesthetic and the political. In the following section of this essay I will trace different attempts to eliminate the separation of the aesthetic and the political and focus on three especially interesting examples, namely British Cultural Studies, Structuralist (=Althusserian) Marxism as one of the strongest proponents of a hermeneutics of suspicion, and the New Historicism. Although these approaches have been frequently discussed, they deserve another look in the context of our discussion, since most discussions have focused on how political these approaches really are. In contrast, I want to focus on what happened to the aesthetic in some exemplary approaches that stand at the center of the revisionist turn in literary studies. Symptoms of an Absent Cause Although Cultural Studies did not constitute itself against the aesthetic but against the limitations of literary studies more generally, it did so in part because it considered literary studies to be an uncritical champion of social distinctions based on the idea of aesthetic value. In his book Marxism and Literature Raymond Williams argues, for example, that the emergence of aesthetics as a separate philosophical branch and the increasing importance of the concept of the aesthetic in literary studies must be seen as a result of the division of labor established by industrialization which has led to the creation of a class society. Whatever the merits of a particular aesthetics may be, the category itself leads to a separation of social spheres that were originally part of a whole way of life. In order to overcome this social separation one has to reject the idea of the aesthetic as a separate value and ontological sphere. For Williams aesthetic theory is a form of evasion: Art and thinking about art have to separate themselves, by ever more absolute abstraction, from the social processes within which they are still contained. Aesthetic theory is the main instrument of this evasion. (...) Thus we have to reject the aesthetic both as a separate abstract dimension and as a separate abstract function (154-56). Similarly, Fredric Jameson argues at the beginning of his study The Political Unconscious, certainly one of the most influential books of the revisionist turn, that the convenient working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not becomes something worse than an error: namely, a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life. Such a distinction reconfirms that the structural, experiential, and conceptual gap between the public and the

20 20 Winfried Fluck private, between the social and the psychological, or the political and the poetic, between history or society and the individual, ( ) maims our existence as individual subjects (20). 9 Stephen Greenblatt provides an apt summary of this argument when he writes: A working distinction between cultural texts that are social and political and those that are not that is, an aesthetic domain that is in some way marked off from the discursive institutions that are operative elsewhere in a culture becomes for Jameson a malignant symptom of privatization. (1989, 2) Both Williams and Jameson reject the aesthetic as a concept that deepens class distinctions and obscures the absent cause by which social relations are perverted. But there are also important differences. Both argue against the separation of the aesthetic from the political dimension, but they do so for different reasons and on the basis of different views of the role of culture in society. These different views also lead to different reconceptualizations of literary studies: on the one hand as Cultural Studies, on the other hand as a revised form of Marxism. For Willliams, the aesthetic has been elevated to the status of a separate sphere because of its usefulness as a form of class distinction, and hence for the consolidation and maintenance of a class society. For Jameson, the aesthetic has come to take on an important role in the humanities, because it can help to hide the absent cause that shapes society and culture decisively which is capitalism and its mode of production. For Jameson, the separation of the aesthetic and the political therefore has an even deeper effect than the humiliation produced by a new, classbased status order. It maims the subject by arresting it in a state of permanent self-alienation that stands in the way of any potential revolutionary self-awareness. As a consequence of these different views, Williams and Jameson also go in different directions in their methods of interpretation. For Williams, it is crucial to recover the sense of a whole way of life in which artificial separations are overcome and the aesthetic dimension becomes part of a common culture again. As he argues in The Long Revolution in (unacknowledged) pragmatist fashion, everyday life is inherently creative and hence potentially aesthetic. In this sense, culture is ordinary : the fact that certain texts are privileged for their special aesthetic value has historical reasons and can be undone by a careful historical reconstruction, as Williams himself shows in his history of the changing meanings of culture in his Culture and Society. The method best suited to put the aesthetic back into the context of a whole way of life is a Cultural Studies approach for which - as Dick Hebdige has shown in his book Subculture. The Meaning of Style - even a mundane everyday object like a safety pin can be turned into an aesthetic object, depending on the cultural context in which it is used for particular purposes of resignification, and possibly, resistance. 9 In Jameson s argument, to focus on the aesthetic as a separate sphere leads to a perpetuation of self-alienation, whereas, for example in the Frankfurt School Critical Theory of T.W. Adorno it is the only remaining antidote against self-alienation.

21 Shadow Aesthetics 21 Jameson s position must be seen in the context of a transformation of classical Marxism into a Structuralist Marxism, inspired, above all, by Louis Althusser. In a radical revision of the Hegelian premises of classical Marxism, ideological analysis is moved from a focus on content to one on form, from the analysis of a spirit that expresses the whole to the postulation of a structure that constitutes the whole. 10 But in bourgeois society, this truth cannot be told, so that the determining structure cannot be represented and can only be traced through its effects. The aesthetic is such an effect. In analogy to Lacan s description of the mirror-stage in which the mirror provides the child with a mistaken sense of wholeness, literary texts can be effective in providing a mistaken sense of reality not necessarily because of a particular ideological content, but because literary forms can create coherent images of the world. In a stunning reversal, classical realism, in Marxism long considered a privileged literary form to provide at least some degree of critical insight into the true nature of capitalist society, is now seen as the ideologically most harmful literary form. The political determines culture, and the aesthetic is merely a symptom of its hidden presence. However, although the aesthetic is now reduced to the status of a symptom, there is a shadowy aesthetic implied here. If a realist aesthetic of truthful mimesis is the epitome of ideological deception, then anti-mimetic forms, no matter whether they reflect a conscious choice or are produced inadvertently, may have a subversive or deconstructive effect, because they can undermine the illusion of the reality effect. In American literary studies this has led to a revisionist revival of the genre of the American romance, but the problem with this strategy is that the politics of the romance are often dubious. Jameson thus pursues another way in The Political Unconscious. It lies in the deconstruction of realist claims for successful mimesis by regarding textual surfaces as symptoms of something that cannot be openly admitted and has to be repressed. This absent cause may be hidden, but since the literary construction of a false totality is, by definition, a forced imposition, the literary text will never be entirely successful in hiding all traces of this repression, and the strain of this failed attempt will show up in cracks, ruptures, and tensions of the text that emerge where the illusion of a false totality can no longer be successfully maintained. The result is a shadow aesthetics of semantic heterogeneity that undermines representational claims for coherence and homogeneity, but should not to be confused with a poststructuralist aesthetics of heterogeneity, as propagated by Roland Barthes and others. Jameson takes pains to distance himself from Barthes s aesthetics of semiotic liberation; heterogeneity, for him, is only useful where it can be read as symptom of an absent cause. One may therefore also call his shadow aesthetics an aesthetics of the absent cause. I have elsewhere discussed this approach as an example of a hermeneutics of suspicion in which the textual surface is analyzed as only a screen that hides an absent political cause. This absent cause can only be retrieved by 10 For a more detailed analysis, see my essay on Surface Readings and Symptomatic Readings.

22 22 Winfried Fluck seeing the textual surface and hence the text s form - as symptom of an underlying reality that cannot be openly acknowledged. In their essay Surface Reading, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus have pointed out to what extent such symptomatic readings in search of the absent political cause have come to dominate contemporary criticism: The influence of Jameson s version of symptomatic reading can be felt in the centrality of two scholarly texts from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick s Epistemology of the Closet (1991), which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set forth an agenda for studying the structuring role of race in American literature. Both showed that one could read a text s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently from its pages (Best 6). To this list of influential, agenda-shaping texts in queer studies and African American Studies, Edward Said s book Culture and Imperialism (1994) may be added as a paradigmatic work in postcolonial studies - for example, when Said claims that Jane Austen s social and literary world is grounded in the absent cause of imperialism. Race, queerness, empire, or the nation-state have been the dominant absent causes in revisionist literary studies of the last decades. It is interesting to look at the interpretive practice that has developed from this claim. Whereas myth and symbol critics like Leo Marx are still in an often desperate - search for a formal element of the literary text that can provide unity of structure, so that the literary text can be interpreted as a condensed expression of a national spirit, political revisionists are in search of the hidden political reality of a text, and for this purpose, it does not really matter whether a formal element is carefully crafted or not, or whether a literary composition is skillfully patterned, or whether a literary text is held together by a unifying principle. The starting premise of a New Americanist book like Amy Kaplan s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture is that imperialism is the absent cause that is everywhere and shapes every aspect of the literary (and, in her case, also filmic) text, so that it can be found in the often most surprising aspects of the text. It is, under these circumstances, irrelevant at best and suspicious at worst, to use categories like the aesthetic. Once one no longer accepts that the aesthetic and the political belong to different spheres, the question arises how their relation can still be described. All approaches within the revisionist turn reject the formalist claim of separate spheres, but they differ significantly in their reconceptualization of the relation. For Raymond Williams and British Cultural Studies, the separation is an artificial one created by historical forces. It reflects the division of labor ushered in by industrialization which has led to a perversion of the idea of culture in its original meaning as a whole way of life. However, for Williams industrialization is not a negative force per se. Whether it is positive or negative depends on whether and to what extent its negative consequences can be controlled by politics. The separation between the aesthetic and the political

23 Shadow Aesthetics 23 may therefore be overcome by a cultural politics that takes the aesthetic back into the context of a whole way of life in which it is one manifestation of creativity among others. For Jameson, on the other hand, the separation between the aesthetic and the political is not merely a deplorable result of historical developments that have been insufficiently controlled but may still be corrected. Rather, the separation is an inherent systemic feature of capitalism, needed to obscure its true nature. As such, it is an indispensable part of capitalism s ideological system, and cannot be overcome (unless one finds a way for systemic change). Whereas the Cultural Studies-scholar wants to eliminate cultural class divisions by revealing the creative dimension of everyday cultural practices, including popular culture, all the Structuralist Marxist can hope to do is to undermine the ideological hold of the aesthetic by using interpretation to lay bare the contradictions that the unacknowledged absent cause produces. In Cultural Studies, the conceptual separation between the aesthetic and the political is overcome by dissolving the aesthetic into culture, so that it can be reinserted into a whole way of life. In Structuralist Marxism, the separation is not overcome, but dissolved by interpreting the aesthetic as only a deceptive, symptomatic surface manifestation of a political subtext that has to be recovered in interpretation. The separation between the aesthetic and the political is erased, but at the price of redefining literary studies as a form of political criticism. From Absent Cause to Criminal Continuity Structuralist Marxism rejects claims that the aesthetic and the political can be seen as belonging to different ontological spheres. The New Historicism agrees but goes even one step further in radicalizing the claim. Thus, Mark Seltzer also argues against the critic s eagerness to define the literary as the reverse of the political and thus to posit the freedom and resistant autonomy of the literary (160). However, to overcome this dichotomy, New Historicists have taken a course that is different from other revisionists, moving from a vertical reflection model, in which the aesthetic is merely a reflection or symptom of the political, to a horizontal model of relations, in which the aesthetic and the political are on the same level. In consequence, as Walter Benn Michaels has put it, the only relation literature as such has to culture as such is that it is part of it (Michaels 1997, 27). Such a part cannot stand for a larger whole (as in Hegelianism), it cannot represent superior or alternative values (as in formalism), it cannot reflect, and therefore provide insight into, the economic base (as in Marxism), and it cannot even exemplify the creative potential of culture (as in British Cultural Studies). The literary text can only

24 24 Winfried Fluck exemplify the culture of which it is one part among many, and that means, more precisely, the systemic logic that is at work in this culture and shapes all of its parts. 11 In New Historicist studies of American literature this reasoning has led to an almost complete dissolution of the concept of the aesthetic. If everything is shaped by the same systemic logic, and there is no escape from it, then the aesthetic cannot stand out as having a different quality or function. In Walter Benn Michaels s book The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, this pervasive, all embracing logic is that of the market; in Mark Seltzer s study Henry James and the Art of Power, together with Michaels s book one of the best known New Historicist studies of American literature, the logic is that of power as defined by Foucault. Seltzer s rejection of the separation between the aesthetic and the political is thus based on a Foucauldian view of the politics of the novel (147). To be sure, the Jamesian novel hardly shows overt instances of the exertion of power. But it is, in its content as well as in its form, enacting the very technologies of power that Foucault has identified as the central aspect of modernity. Since power pervades the system even on the microsocial and micropolitical level, and since literature is part of the system and cannot stand outside of it, there exists a discreet continuity between literary and political practices (15). 12 Worse, since the Jamesian novel is not suspected of having any political aims because of its status as an aesthetically especially valuable literary form, it can be especially effective in its politics. What has long been celebrated in literary studies as the power of art is thus really an art of power. 11 See Walter Benn Michaels s essay The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, where the title already indicates that literary naturalism will be explained by a logic that shapes it decisively as a literary movement. At the end of the essay, Michaels emphasizes that the positions that he has discussed do not interest him per se: I want only to locate both these positions and their negations in the logic, or rather the double logic, of naturalism, and in so doing, to suggest one way of shifting the focus of literary history from the individual text or author to structures whose coherence, interest, and effect may be greater than that of either author or text (129). 12 See also one of Seltzer s programmatic opening statements: I explore the ways in which James represents social movements of appropriation, supervision, and regulation and examine how both the content and the techniques of representation in James s works express a complicity and rigorous continuity with the larger social regimes of mastery and control that traverse these works (13). At other points, Seltzer pushes his rhetoric even further and speaks of a criminal continuity : It is the criminal continuity between art and power and the ways in which the novelist and critic - through an aesthetic and theoretical rewriting of power - have worked to disown it that I want to examine. The novel does not simply refer to an extraordinary history of politics that lies beyond it; nor is history merely a ground or background of the literary text. The movements of power do not lie in some hidden depths, but are visible on the surfaces of the literary discourse; and the historicity of the text is to be sought not in the grand designs and teleology of an absent History but in the microhistories and micropolitics of the body and the social body, in the minute and everyday practices and techniques that the novel registers and secures. What follows is an attempt to define these practices and techniques and to trace the immanence of power in the novel (24).