American literature is distinguished by the number of dangerous and disturbing books in its canon--and American scholarship by its ability to conceal this fact.
Leslie Fiedler (Missoula, October 13, 1959)
Why is lit crit almost all the same, even under the flag of difference? Why is the writing so bloody poor--the writing about art so artless, about the body and the erotics of power so unsexy, the demystification of hegemony so transparent and self-congratulatory? Is the courting of aesthetic transport by the reader-teacher-scholar necessarily neo-con, or can it be the vehicle of knowing, of making knowledge and making known, the scene of instruction in why profess and how, crucially, to deliver? These are questions that young Americanists ask me, only to discover they are not alone in their plotting and hopes. I, for another, want to eat my cake and kick butt, too.
If (as religious historian Robert A. Orsi has charged) the hardest thing for modern sophisticates to deal with is "the radical presence of the gods to practitioners," then the hardest thing for the postmodernist super-sophisticates in the MLA disciplines to deal with is the felt radiance of literature to readers: the delicious and seductive and transfigurative magic of the text, at once sacred and damning, liberating and oppressive, vitalizing and laying waste. But, for all these past decades of relentless suspicion and condescension, who among us really doesn't want to own, or rather be owned by (and thus have to own up to), art's power?
My invitation for the fall is to confront these demons, personal because professional, professional because personal, by means of the genre that for me teaches best: the modern American novel. What I want for us is to inhabit a successive group of (neo)canonical novels to the point where each novel lives in and through us, in all its glory & terror: each text made fully present to us by the fearless witness of our reading, first individually, then collectively; we made fully present to ourselves and to each other, by the procreative force of the text, novel after novel; a process of reciprocal realization in which, at the last, we do not so much analyze the text as the text analyzes us--caught deliciously in its web, doing its thing, as guilty as it is, maybe more, but thereby radiant, too.
As you might suspect, at the most basic level, this is just a fancy way of saying that the purpose of this course is to recall and affirm why we love to read and love to talk about what we read and love to research and write about and press back against what we read. But, in the hyper-reflexivity that goes hand in hand with the sublime self-abandonment we seek, the course is at the same time an opportunity to motivate, articulate, and effect the edgiest criticism I know. Yes, there will be a certain amount of supplementary criticism/theory in play (and I won't be able to stop myself from referencing the twentieth-century novel's great rivals of song and screen), but our primary scene of instruction in critical inquiry and cultural critique will be the novels themselves, which in the self-knowing-ness of their narrative and figuration, fracture and drama, rhythm and resonance, beat the hermeneutics of suspicion at their own game--and more. What could be nastier in its readerly entrapments, for instance, than Herman Melville's Billy Budd, but then again isn't that what makes the novel so painful, so exquisite? The idea is to challenge the persisting presumptions and protocols, epistemologies and ontologies of the profession at the deepest levels--especially the always-already Puritan disciplining of American Studies--so much of them self-defeating despite their worthy causes, in order to take the future of English into our own hands.
The ambition here is no joke. First, I ask your help in recollecting and re-inflecting the problematics of love & death (sex, violence, & sanctity) in the modern American novel, serving to my mind a major reclamation of the mythopoetics of the U.S. imagination, on an order that no one sees or at least dares to confess anymore. Second, I ask your help in developing a meta-vocabulary for the differences in archive, approach, and affect between what we are doing and English-business-as-usual, which will require us, disconcertingly, to engage certain verboten thinkers and to break the fourth wall of our proceedings. And, third, I ask your help in bringing to the profession at large what we will have begun to practice amongst ourselves, as you work to write criticism of your own that is as intoxicating and beguiling and transformative--as gorgeous, even when it is as nasty as all get-out--as your chosen subject.
"Oh, Hester, you are a demon," D.H. Lawrence once quipped, implicating Hawthorne that "blue-eyed darling of a Nathaniel" in the lusciously dark subtext of America, too.
NOVELS TO BE CHOSEN FROM: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter; Herman Melville, Billy Budd; Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware; Henry James, The Wings of the Dove or In the Cage; Willa Cather, A Lost Lady or The Professor's House; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises; Nella Larsen, Passing; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust (with Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?); Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy The course will foreground no more than nine novels, reading at a week-and-a-half pace; speak up, if you have high hopes.
SUPPLEMENTARY CRITICISM (DEPENDING): Leslie Fiedler, Camille Paglia, D.H. Lawrence, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tracy Fessenden, James T. Fisher, Richard Rodriguez, Frank Lentricchia, Robert Orsi, Walter Benn Michaels, and yours truly.
SUMMER PREPARATION: Watch Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction if you have never done so, for the pleasure of our first class. I will make a very short Fiedler essay available to you, too.
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