Literary Criticism and Aesthetic Education

239 Pages·2013·2.38 MB·English

Useful Works: Literary Criticism and Aesthetic Education

Samuel Joseph North

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2013
©2013
Samuel Joseph North
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

Useful Works: Literary Criticism and Aesthetic Education

Samuel Joseph North

This dissertation identifies the scholarly historicist/contextualist paradigm on the basis of which
most work in the discipline of English Literature now proceeds, and proposes a critical and
materialist paradigm as an alternative.

The first two chapters offer a new reading of the history of the discipline of English Literature.
Chapter one traces the early history of the discipline from the 1920s through to the mid twentieth
century, focussing on the project of literary criticism, as distinct from the project of literary
scholarship. It demonstrates that literary criticism’s characteristic methodologies of “close reading”
and “practical criticism” were initially created as the tools of a broader project of aesthetic education,
where the category of the aesthetic was being rethought in instrumental or incipiently materialist
terms. This model of criticism was then turned to quite different purposes by later critics, who
were committed to an idealist account of the aesthetic. Chapter two traces the history of the
discipline from the late 1970s to the present, identifying a “scholarly turn” that transformed it from
a discipline housing both the project of literary criticism and the project of literary scholarship, into
a discipline that housed the project of literary scholarship alone.
On the basis of this history, the dissertation goes on to argue for the development of a new project
of literary criticism, understood as the close engagement with literary texts for the purposes of
cultivating readers’ aesthetic sensibilities. The third and fourth chapters begin to lay the foundation
for such a project. Chapter three attempts to provide criticism with both a new philosophical basis
in a materialist account of the aesthetic, and a new way to conceptualise its institutional site as a site
of radical, rather than liberal, education. Chapter four attempts to provide criticism with the first
elements of a methodology of reading by way of a case study of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway
(1925).

The dissertation thus has four elements: in chapters one and two, a historical element; in chapter
three, philosophical and institutional elements; and in chapter four, a methodological element.
Taken together, these provide at least the few first sketches of a foundation on which a project of
materialist aesthetic criticism might seek to establish itself today.
Table of Contents

Introduction 1 - 35
General Introduction to Chapters One and Two 36 - 37
Chapter One: From Richards to New Criticism 38 - 67
Chapter Two: From Williams to the Present 68 - 120
Chapter Three: Useful Works, Useful Work – Aesthetics, Education, Criticism 121 - 177
Chapter Four: Mrs Dalloway and Political Feeling 178 - 226
Bibliography 227 - 232

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Acknowledgements

My dissertation advisors Sarah Cole, Nicholas Dames, and Erik Gray have been
extraordinarily kind, generous, and trusting. I cannot thank them enough.
Warm thanks also to Jennifer Davis, Anne Diebel, Matthew Hart, Jessica Fenn, Darragh
Martin, Sarah Minsloff, Sherally Munshi, Bruce Robbins, Lytton Smith, Gayatri Spivak, and
Kate Stanley.
Janice, Samuel, Blainey, and Samuel Ingemar.
Gaurav, of course.
Special thanks to Adam Alexander, Jason Alexander, David Backer, Winter Casuccio,
Aleksandra Perisic, and Jason Wozniak. My thinking is no longer separable from theirs.
Thanks most of all to Katja Lindskog, for just about everything.

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For Katja
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1

Introduction
I
Very few people, it seems to me, start reading a novel by Virginia Woolf with the primary aim of
learning more about British cultural life in the 1920s. Most of those who do are scholars. What
non-specialist readers are looking for in literature is rather less easy to define: perhaps the best we
can do at the outset is to say that they are looking for something to go on with; something that will
help them live their lives.
Few resources now exist within the disciplines of literary study that can help us to respond to this
observation. A whole range of mid-twentieth century critical practices that tried to put literature
into contact with these kinds of vague and capacious terms, the central example perhaps being F.R.
Leavis’ neo-Arnoldian “criticism of life,” now operate within the discipline only in residual,
discredited, and nostalgic forms. In their place, today’s most influential methodologies for literary
study are all, in their various ways, historicist/contextualist, not only in the broad and welcome sense
that they see literature in other than transcendental, universalising, ahistorical terms, but also in the
rather more specialised sense that they treat literary texts chiefly as opportunities for producing
knowledge about the cultural contexts in which they were written and read. Recent efforts to break
new ground – “New Formalism”; “Surface Reading”; “Distant Reading” – have been, in this sense,
repetitions of the same.1 In contrast to the non-specialist reader, the majority of today’s literary
scholarship is most interested in Woolf for what she can teach us about her time and place. One

1 For new formalism, see for example Marjorie Levenson, "What is New Formalism,” PMLA, vol.122, no. 2 March
2007, pp.557-569; and Caroline Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Towards a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian
Studies 48 (Summer 2006): 625-57. For surface reading, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An
Introduction,” Representations Vol. 108, No. 1 (Fall 2009): 1-21. For distant reading, see the papers collected in Franco
Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013).
2

might then say that Jameson’s slogan “always historicize” is the horizon beyond which the
disciplines of literary study have so far been unable to see.
It has certainly been a very useful slogan. Many of the advances made by the discipline in the 1980s
and 1990s were made by those acting in its spirit, if not always directly under its banner – the
paradigmatic advance being the movement from those mid-century critical practices that treated
works of literature as repositories of timeless and universal human values, to our contemporary
scholarly practices that treat texts, in the broadest sense of “texts,” as deeply embedded in particular
histories. Yet it has seldom been noted that our period’s governing injunction to historicise is by no
means a unitary one, and has in fact concealed within itself two rather different demands, neither of
which is logically necessary to the other. On the one hand, it has called on us to demonstrate the
historical and cultural contingency of categories elsewhere taken as timeless, essential, or universal;
yet on the other hand it has called on us simply to write cultural history. The two projects are quite
distinct, and neither is implied in the other: just as one can, if one likes, write history from a
universalist standpoint, one can also critique essentialisms without having to act as a historian.
Jameson’s slogan – from The Political Unconscious (1981) – comes to us from a turning-point in the
history of literary studies: the point at which our own historicist / contextualist paradigm began to
assume its present dominance.2 We can see something of the complexion of this moment by
observing Perry Anderson in 1982, opening his first Wellek Library Lecture at U.C. Irvine.3 Not
without a certain performance of archaism, Anderson begins by looking back to Leavis, reminding
his audience that:
literary criticism, whether ‘practical’ or ‘theoretical,’ is typically just that, criticism – its
irrepressibly evaluative impulse spontaneously tending to transgress the frontiers of the text

2 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Durham: Duke UP, 1981).
3 Later published as Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983).
3

towards the associated life beyond it Social theory as such paradoxically lacks a comparable
discriminatory charge built into it.
(9, emphasis in original)

Here at, or perhaps just after, the inception of the new historicist/contextualist paradigm, it was still
just possible for Anderson to speak in the old way, as if it were generally understood that “criticism”
was something distinct from and even opposed to “social theory,” and that the former was primarily
a matter of forming judgments about the relative aesthetic merits of literary works – judgments that
would then be taken to have some bearing on the rest of “life.” This was, I think, about the last
moment in the history of the discipline when one could speak in these kinds of terms and hope to
be widely understood. Over the next thirty years, the terms “criticism” and “social theory” would
both be absorbed into a single project of historicist/contextualist analysis, making them all but
interchangeable. Today “literary critics” read texts in order to understand and theorise the social.
The specific sense of “criticism” that Anderson relies on here has been lost.
But at that moment the two categories were still so clearly distinct from one another that it was
possible for Terry Eagleton to outline a provocative strategy for turning “criticism” into “social
theory,” or as he put it, “cultural analysis.” In 1983 Eagleton wrote that:
Such a strategy obviously has far-reaching institutional implications. It would mean, for
example, that departments of literature as we presently know them in higher education
would cease to exist… Whatever would in the long term replace such departments… would
centrally involve education in the various theories and methods of cultural analysis…. The
genteel amateurism which regards criticism as some spontaneous sixth sense has not only
thrown many students of literature into understandable confusion for many decades, but
serves to consolidate the authority of those in power. 4

If one could no longer outline this strategy today, that is because it has succeeded: over the last three
decades departments of literature have exchanged the project of evaluative criticism, with its

4 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 185-6.