The criticism of enthusiasm

[Update | Greetings, visitors from Eyresses. Thanks for clicking through; I hope you'll read what I've actually written. I'd love it if you also clicked through to Roland Greene's post, to which this is a response.]

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This is a response to Roland Greene's post "The Social Role of the Critic," cross-posted from the comment thread at Arcade.

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Roland writes:

The fact that so many blogs are produced by enthusiasts is a symptom; critics are not enthusiasts.

This is perhaps the central point that fan studies would contest. One can have reservations about fan studies, but I think there's something to be said for the notion that there can be a meaningfully critical criticism of enthusiasm, what Catharine Stimpson long ago called "reading for love." I've heard Roland argue elsewhere that perhaps close reading ought to be rethought vis-à-vis other modes of critical reading, like translation. I could imagine this argument compassing creative responses of greater or lesser craft as well, as scholars like Julie Levin Russo have suggested, most recently at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference a few weeks ago.*

It is probably not an accident that so much of the critical fan culture that inspires so much scorn is driven by women (think Eyresses or Gaga Stigmata). Feminine reading is by definition uncritical reading, as we see in that scene in Nana (1880) in which Nana, mass culture in the flesh, reads a naturalist novel about a character very much like herself and doesn't "get it." But as theorists of children's literature have pointed out, sometimes enthusiasm is only made possible by a radical imaginative rereading--or rewriting--of the text that does indeed tell us something about literature that's different from what literature tells us about itself. To return to Nana, for example, to be a reader gendered "feminine" is to constantly love literature only insofar as one can critically reread or, indeed, rewrite the elements that figure you, the reader, as, oxymoronically, a non-reader, one who is incapable of reading critically or of "getting it."

The question that Arcade itself, with its three rubrics of "Conversations," "Transactions," and "Publications," raises is what an e-journal is besides a blog, and what a blog is besides an e-journal. Is the front page of Arcade simply a continuum from the raw to the cooked? Do these rubrics differ in degree or in kind?

As my colleague Monica Soare has posed the question, what besides gender and class is the difference between the gendered and classed terms of "enthusiasm" and "connoiseurship"?

*Naturally I heard of this through the high-pitched, fluttering, terrifyingly feminine interface with mass culture known as Twitter, where a bad music video performed by a thirteen-year-old girl has been trending for a week, above several quite major news events, largely on the strength of an outpouring of scorn that was, oddly, directed specifically at the female child in question, rather than at any of the many adults actually responsible for the video.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1983. Print.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "Reading for Love: Canons, Paracanons, and Whistling Jo March." New Literary History 21.4 (Autumn 1990) 957-976. JSTOR. Web. 21 March 2011.

Double double

There's an uncanny (yeah, I went there) degree of consonance between my research and teaching lately. I'm currently working on an article on the animals and children (and feral children), and one of the things I'm writing about is that there's usually a double mimesis at work in instances of the cute and the uncanny. For instance, in Sianne Ngai's example of a cute, "anthropomorphic" frog sponge, the sponge isn't just anthropomorphized. Instead, the sponge is made to look like a frog that has in turn been anthropomorphized. Likewise, these poor pets are animals that have been dressed up to look like children dressed as animals. Mimicry is thought to be the particular domain of children and animals. (This is why we always fear that kids will do exactly what they see on TV. I mean, sometimes they do tie a bath towel around their necks and try to fly. Mimics!) It seems that, faced with one another, children and animals just go the whole hog and mimic doubly.

Now a student rightly notes the same dynamic at work in Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS, of which we watched a clip in class (since I am the meanest teacher). My student writes:

As I mentioned in class, I think maybe the core of the problem is that when I see Cats the Musical, I don’t see cats; I see people acting like cats.

After Tuesday’s discussion, I realized that the creepiness is actually one level deeper than that. It’s not just people pretending to be cats, it’s people pretending be cats pretending to be people. The reason why Mr. Mistoffelees gets a song/poem is that he does magic like a human magician. He hunts mice and whatnot, but he also does tricks with dice and cards, which require opposable thumbs (and...wit), which we have and cats do not.

I've had research and teaching converge before, but this is really kind of amazing. (It helps to have great students.)

(Posts related to the article in progress: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)


Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005): 811-47. Print.

Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

One reason that feral children are always partially fictive is that they instantiate the "forbidden experiment." To admit of the genuineness of any given case would be to outflank the prohibition.

The fictiveness of wolf-children

The question surrounding wolf-children is always, are they even real? They are the stuff of myth: Romulus and Remus, etc. But in the nineteenth century the many cases of wolf-children that were documented, especially by British colonial officers in India, were constantly dogged (so to speak) by doubts of the stories' veracity, or, granting that the children themselves were real, doubts that they were in fact raised by wolves (as opposed to just living in the wild). Adriana S. Benzaquén notes that

In a "well-known London club," an argument over whether the story [of Amala and Kamala, the "wolf-girls of Midnapure"] was to be believed ended in a fist fight. A few months later, a writer regretted that the wolf girls' return to civilization had been "tragically unlike that of fortunate Mowgli, who throve alike among wolves and men." (225)

Wolf-children are always to some degree fictive, even when they are real.

This is due, in part, to the colonial notion that wolf-children were an Indian thing; thus William Crooke's Things Indian: Being Discursive Notes on Various Subjects Connected with India (1906) contained an entry on wolf-children (Benzaquén 224). Anything from India, "that land of rhetorical conceptions and of mental imagery," as one British doctor put it in 1927, was likely to be fabulous (qtd. in Benzaquén 225).


Benzaquén, Adriana S. Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappointment in the Study of Human Nature. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006. Print.

Better (than this): cuteness is a moment in the uncanny, the heimlich moment subject to reversal. The uncanny has a diachronic dimension that we tend to efface in our attention to it as a minor aesthetic category.

(By the way, Marilyn Ivy writes about the link between cuteness and the uncanny here [Muse], though I would go further than she does.)

Noted:

1. The uncanny is the original minor aesthetic category.

2. Cuteness is a special (heimlich) case of the uncanny.

Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’" In Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmud Freud. Ed. James Strachey et al. Vol. XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. 218-52. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955. Print.

Ngai, Sianne. “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005): 811-47. Web. JSTOR. 5 February 2011.

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Spring semester

Yesterday a colleague and I wandered out for a post-MLA, pre-spring semester tea. In the process, it came to our attention that it actually is kind of springlike. I've been going around in a cardigan. It's sunny and beautiful here, while all of our friends are digging themselves out of snowdrifts. We're at that stage of life when we don't quite know where we'll be next year. But right now? Bay Area, people. It's pretty nice.

"Winter" in Berkeley. (The Japanese quince outside my apartment, photo taken five minutes ago.)

With the new semester about to begin, it feels like a good time to take stock of current projects.

Teaching.

I'm very excited to be teaching an advanced American modernist poetry seminar this semester. Cal students are great, and we'll be reading some of my favorite poetry. Any time I teach texts I really adore, I feel like I'm beating the system. Which I guess I kind of am. I have a somewhat unorthodox exercise planned for the first day of class; I'll report back if I actually do it.

I'm also serving as faculty sponsor for the De-Cal "Video Games as an Artistic Medium," which should be fun.

Conferences.

• I'll be giving a paper on feminist periodization at ACLA in Vancouver. I was kind of suckered into this, but I've brought myself around to the idea that overcommitment is a good thing, and I'm looking forward to going. I've heard good things about the ACLA seminar format, and now's as good a time as any to see it in action.
• Scott Selisker and I are putting together a panel for MLA 12. I'm excited about every aspect of this except the part where I draft the proposal, which I'm supposed to be doing this weekend instead of blogging. Prepare to be blown away. Will there be Roombas? Maybe.
• I really am going to propose that Against Innovation panel for MSA 13. I've had a surprising amount of interest already, considering I haven't actually put out a CFP, but you know. Interested/amused/bewildered parties are still more than welcome to contact me.

Research projects.

• An article on Berssenbrugge, on which I've posted a few times, is close to being sent out.
• Remember when I said I didn't have time to write anything on the relationship between children and animals? I'm going to.
• An article on Stein, in progress.
• Possibly, text-mining, the responsible version (not the epistemic candy version.)
• My book. I can't really summarize what's happening with the book, but let's provisionally say that the Williams chapter is leading inevitably to Olson and thence to contemporary notions of "experiment."

Arcade.

New multimedia will go live as soon as our tech editor has time to flip the proverbial switch. Colloquies and a Drupal upgrade will follow.

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It probably says something about academia that I find the beginning-of-semester onslaught as familiar and comforting as a fuzzy blanket, but I'm just going to roll with it. Happy spring semester, everyone!

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!

Tension, anxiety, fear

I may see more of this than most--I work in modernism and science studies after all. But it seems to me that literary critics talk an awful lot about "tensions" in lit and culture, social "anxieties," and historical "fears."

It would be too glib to just call this projection on the part of a famously neurotic lot. But I'd like to think more on why it is that tensions, anxieties, and fears play such a large part in contemporary literary criticism.

(And is it just me or was "excess" all the rage in the 90s?)

Is criticism a métier?

I've come to think that criticism is defined by the cultivation of a particular kind of self, one that has the right feelings and perceptions as well as the right thoughts and professional training and work-disciplines.

What are the consequences of this understanding of criticism?

Thoughts, others?

Clarity and work

It occurs to me that discussions of "clarity" usually implicitly hinge on the following assumption:

Difficulty for the writer means ease for the reader; ease for the writer means difficulty for the reader.

This is why accusations that writing is unclear so often devolve into accusations of authorial laziness, and why defenses of dense writing so often hint that the aggrieved readers are lazy. This is why the discussion so easily becomes moralistic. (Work is after all a moral category.)

It isn't at all clear to me (modernist that I am) that it is easy to write dense prose, though. How does it change the discussion about clarity, if we bracket the above premise?

My mind goes in unfortunate places.

Oh dear FSM, did I really just make a mental comparison between a Mei-mei Berssenbrugge poem and Regretsy?

I guess I just did. And it's going to have to go here, because it is definitely not going in the article.

Berssenbrugge, from "Dressing Up Our Pets":

I sew a bright hood for my pet mouse.

I make holes for the eyes, the nose and ears.

I stand it on two legs and it stands on its own, a while.

My friend, the white mouse, is iridescent, not an image that began in my intuition as ready-found material.

I sew a hood for the rabbit, eye and nose holes, sheathed ears.

THE IMAGE:



[Source.]

In case you can't tell, that's a photo of a baby chicken dressed in a hand-knitted...item.

Yes, I know it's wrong. But there's an element of embarrassment in the Berssenbrugge poem that's worth exploring, and let me tell you, the Regretsy comparison hits that particular nail right on the head.

Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei. "Dressing Up Our Pets." Nest. Berkeley: Kelsey St., 2003. Print.

Written, extruded

Here's the journalist Janet Malcolm on Gertrude Stein, chiming in with a long, woman-hating tradition (on which see DeKoven and Stimpson) of describing Stein's writing as a kind of bodily effluvium:

Her literary enterprise was itself almost entirely work-free. Mabel Dodge’s four-volume autobiography, “Intimate Memories,” begun in 1924 (after her fourth marriage, when she became Mabel Dodge Luhan), gives us a rare glimpse of Stein at her desk during the long visit she and Toklas made to the Villa Curonia in 1912. It was late at night, and Stein was “writing automatically in a long weak handwriting—four or five lines to the page—letting it ooze up from deep down inside her, down onto the paper with the least possible physical effort; she would cover a few pages so and leave them there and go to bed, and in the morning Alice would gather them up.” Stein never, or hardly ever, revised (a rare false start to “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” exists among Stein’s papers), and in “Everybody’s Autobiography”she said that she never wrote much more than half an hour a day (but added significantly, “To be sure all day and every day you are waiting around to write that half hour a day”). Stein didn’t even type her work; she just oozed into her notebooks and Toklas did the rest.

First of all, whuh? Really, we're going to just take Mabel Dodge Luhan at her word?

Ok, now that that's out of the way, I'm struck (and plain irritated) by the judgmental tone that Malcolm takes when it comes to Stein's writing. Lazy!, Malcolm scolds. "Work-free." It's as though Stein isn't writing so much as pooping. "Stein didn’t even type her work; she just oozed into her notebooks and Toklas did the rest."

There's a strange Protestant ethic running through the passage that suggests that there's something reprehensible about not doing your own typing (that is, if you're a woman!). Malcolm's Stein is indolent, lazy, not a worker but a sort of repulsive literary Jabba the Hutt (on which, again, see Stimpson).* Underlying this tone of revulsion is a sharp distinction, particularly inappropriate in Stein's case, between work and rest. If it's work, Malcolm seems to suggest, it's imbued with intention, attention, and is therefore art--and if it is not (as Stein might say), then not.

Where does Malcolm's work ethic get us in understanding Stein's actual writing?

Not very far, I think. Rather, I tend to think it gets us further in understanding a twinned horror of female literary accomplishment and the female body, which persists even at this late date.


*Full disclosure: Stimpson does not actually use the words "literary Jabba the Hutt." Probably to her credit.

I pretty much think Marjorie Perloff's review of Two Lives is right on, especially this part:

But then Malcolm—and this is what makes her book finally so unsatisfactory—has no use for the bulk of Stein's writing. She dismisses it early in Two Lives as "unreadable," making a sharp distinction between the "experimental writing" of Tender Buttons or the Portraits and nonfiction of the twenties and "conventional" work, like The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the thirties to attract a larger public. I find this distinction dubious: even Alice B. Toklas uses a panoply of modernist devices, and certainly it has little or no plot or "rounded" characters. (94)

DeKoven, Marianne. "Introduction: Transformations of Gertrude Stein." Gertrude Stein. Spec. issue of Modern Fiction Studies 42.3 (1996). 469-483. Project Muse. Web. 25 July 2010.

Malcolm, Janet. "Gertrude Stein's War: The Years in Occupied France." The New Yorker (2 June 2003). The New Yorker. Web. 25 July 2010. This is an excerpt from her book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007).

Perloff, Marjorie. Rev. of Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm. Common Knowledge 15.1 (Winter 2009). Project Muse. Web. 29 July 2010.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein." The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives. Spec. issue of Poetics Today 6.1/2 (1985) 67-80. JSTOR. Web. 18 April 2008.

Critical gestures like this are irritating to endure:

These tortured writhings are irritating to endure. But they constituted part of what Gertrude Stein had to experience in order to reach full subjectivity in her writing. (83-4)

Don't even get me started on the idea that Stein "gestat[ed]" her characters.

Bridgman, Richard. Gertrude Stein in Pieces. New York: Oxford UP, 1970. Print.

Working in the quiet of the library with a friend:

1. One of us starts visibly trying to hold in laughter.

2. The other looks up quizzically.

3. The first sends an email with some funny, obscure item encountered in research.

4. The other now likewise has to contain her snorts of laughter.

Repeat as needed.

There once was a young ABD
Who valued her respiratory.
But one sad spring day
It went quite away
But for lozenges, honey, and tea.


There was a near-done dissertation
About to pull into the station.
But ere it was writed
The writer was blighted
With a nose-and-throat complication.

What is a girl author?

Planning to do research is almost as satisfying as actually doing it. I'll be doing a little research at the Bancroft Library this summer, on Mark Twain and his very dubious notions of girlhood. (This has not gone uncommented in the scholarship by any means, but I'll be focusing in particular on the notion of girl authorship with respect to Twain's daughter Susy, in contrast with, for instance, Emmeline Grangerford). Twain is one of those straight-talkers who can never, in fact, be taken straight. I'm looking forward to getting started on this project. But first I need to finish the one I'm currently doing! On we go.

Clarity

Some months after she had left Johns Hopkins but while her supervisor, Lewellys Barker, was still trying to get her research published, Gertrude Stein defended her representation of sections of the brain by appealing to their clarity. Her language is striking; clarity for Stein means a physical cutting away, "clear[ing] away the underbrush and leav[ing] a clear road." This, she argues, is the substance of her contribution; her drawings are "diagrammatic," burning away irrelevancies and leaving only that which is to be known.

"Not that the books do not all tell the truth as I know it," she adds, "but that they tell so much more."

I usually think of revision in similar terms--a process of retrieving essences and slicing away error. It requires a certain emotional grimness.

I'm usually a big proponent of affectless writing; I abhor any suggestion that one needs to feel like writing in order to write. The inevitable emotional turbulence that comes with thinking one's writing is or is not going well, I tend to observe at a remove. I might be happy with my chapter or I might not be, but either way I'll work on it.

But for those times when I feel I have a mess on my hands and need to clean it up, clear away underbrush, leave a clear road, there is a feeling that I want--a slightly grandiose determination that wrongness will flee before my flaming sword.

Honestly, I think it works pretty well.


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Unrelatedly: I am on a campaign to eliminate the word "congrats." It is a blot on the world's beauty.

Yes, my idea of clarity is remarkably similar to Gertrude Stein's; what of it?

The letter is not dated, but it is clearly from 1902. From the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, reproduced in Steven Meyer, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001), among other places.

Lofgeornost

Whom, under what circumstances, and how should we praise?

One needs a certain facility with praise in this profession. Every time I respond to a piece of writing, some praise must come in, and it must be honest. This is true of the work of the fragile freshman writer, and it is true of the work of a peer. It's a challenge to bring out the right praise, the praise that will be well placed and insightful as well as cheering.

I started thinking about praise recently, when called upon to engage in another kind of praise that we do professionally. It's the kind in which the person you're praising must not know what you say, but must know that you are praising her or him! The knowledge that the reference letter is a genre of praise makes it, for me, exceedingly awkward to ask for one. "Please," you are asking some senior scholar, "go on record praising my work!" What a thing to ask. I am so lucky to have the references I have.

Mary Beard humorously recounts the horrors of writing reference letters, "an average of about 30 minutes a reference, or 8 hours a week at peak times." Of course, that's Mary Beard's life -- in my juniority I write far, far fewer references. So for me the interesting question is not how to manage the influx, but how best to praise one person for another's benefit.

We do this in casual conversation from time to time -- it's hard not to tell your friends when a student asks, unprompted, for feminist history of science references. (That's just the kind of thing that makes your day. And yes that has happened to me.) But the thing you're writing also belongs to a genre of praise, which must itself be mastered.

That we have professional genres of praise is interesting. I've heard the tendency toward hyperbole in reference letters lamented (I think by Mary Beard, in fact); I've also heard it lamented that book reviews are rarely negative. But there is an art of praise; it must not be generic or canned; it must be stylized, but it must be real. To do it properly it's necessary to distill bright essences from weeks or months or years of small interactions and, perhaps, a few essays.

When I think of praise as a genre, I think of some quite formal poetic modes. I think of the stylized praise of Old English poetry, and the ambivalent praise of the ode. I once wrote a poem of praise for a colleague--a silly one, doggedly (and annoyingly) dactylic, but praise all the same. The formality of praise can be a help.

I think praise is a compelling competency to have to develop. Perhaps we should begin to compose our references in verse, the better to foreground its craft--the better to say, look, I have crafted this complex and well balanced thing on behalf of my student, who, after all, deserves it.

Beard, Mary. "How many references do you write in a week? A Don's Life. Times Literary Supplement Online Blogs. Web. 3 April 2010.