Browsing by Subject "Literary criticism"

This dissertation applies the concept of a therapeutic emotional style, drawn from the cultural study of the emotions, in a historical and theoretical interpretation of ascendant psychoanalytic discourse in modernist studies. I historicize the ascendance of a “therapeutic style” in modern novels and literary criticism through genealogical analysis of the legacy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I approach the novel’s tradition historically, in terms of Eva Illouz’s account of therapy, and theoretically, in terms of Edward Said’s ideology critique of imperial culture. Turning to novelists Graham Greene and Paule Constant, the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud and Karen Horney, and American Vietnam War novels read alongside Robert Jay Lifton’s trauma theory, I establish the basis for understanding why Heart of Darkness has been institutionalized as a paradigmatic text for the therapeutic culture of modern and contemporary literature and literary criticism.

Just over 300 years have passed since John Locke proposed that the basis of the individual was property and, in turn, that the labor which was the individual’s first property in his own person was the source of all property he accumulates. Labor, in other words, and the property it produces would transform the subject into the independent individual of the liberal imaginary. When we turn to the realist novel, however, labor is notoriously absent, as if to make us aspire to a way of life in which we do not work for money but our money works for us. While the novel suggests that, to become an individual with a story to tell, one must transcend the world of work; liberal political economic theory argues that it takes work, as well as our capacity and will to do it, to become a full-fledged individual. To turn principle into paradox, the novel draws on romance as the means of redefining work as the obstacle rather than the means of rising in the field of social relations. Romance incites the individual to find a position apart if not above work, often in a household where one finds self-completion in a union with an ideal other. In this way, romance provides the foundation for a domestic sphere that restores the individual’s body and spirit by means of the freely given labor of love. As it reimagined the single-family household as a site of social reproduction, the novels of the Victorian period also leant both tangibility and accessibility to an apparatus that ensured that the relations of capitalist production would be reproduced down through the generations. Labored Romance: The Contemporary Novel and the Culture of Late Capitalism begins by showing how a classic work of realism, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, stages a struggle between the necessity of labor as the foundation of value and the work of romance as the transcending of waged labor. If the struggle between work and romance is realism’s legacy, then contemporary fiction calls attention to the fact that romance is missing from the novels that vie for critical recognition today. At the same time, these novels put not only the protagonists but virtually the entire field of characters to work and, indeed, they do little else. Given that novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder are not only works of fantastic fiction, the question is why? In the contemporary novel, both traditional romance and the household that constituted a world apart—a space of love without labor—has all but disappeared while labor is all but impossible to avoid. Instead of a space of personal gratification and replenishment, these novels offer us a virtually boundless workplace that has subsumed both the trappings and functions of the home. On the other hand, the discourse of romance, at once indexed to and detached from the household, is attached to and integrated into waged work. How, in its appropriation of many of the reproductive functions once served by the household, does information work make use of the infectious properties of romance? What purpose does romance now serve if not to compel and sanctify the composition of the basic consumer unit, the heteronormative family? These are the questions that Labored Romance asks of three contemporary novels published during the first decade of the present century.

“Out of Service: The Work of Character in the Novel of Post-Industrial Society” argues that the formal innovations in the novel since 1945 reflect the form’s revolutionary redevelopment as a technology of social production. Over the last seventy-five years, the novel has registered, both in its form and its substance, a momentous social and economic revolution, in which the manufacturing economies of industrialized Europe and North America have steadily given way to a tertiary service sector devoted to the production of “immaterial” goods like knowledge, care, affect, communication, leisure, and art. This dissertation points to the reciprocal relationship between the work of fiction and the work of service, as two components of a single mode of social production, which is to say the production of human subjectivity and social relations. To produce its social commodities, this ascendant service industry makes use of an entirely new set of tools, which, I argue, include the narrative machinery of the novel. At the same time, the contemporary novel not only draws on the new service class for its subject matter—that is, by taking as its exemplary subject the work of servants, knowledge workers, care providers, artists, and writers—but also incorporates the techniques and methods of service labor at the level of form.

In addition to exploring the socioeconomic trends that have inspired the contemporary novel to engage in the work of satisfying consumers, creating knowledge, and providing care, this dissertation also explores how the rise of service has effected a qualitative shift in how the novel shapes subjectivity. The novel traditionally serves its readers by making abstract economic relations imaginable in the fictional social relations of a literary character. In the realist fiction of the age of industrial capitalism, this character took the form of an autonomous and “problematic” individual, an atomistic figure that obscured the complex network of real social relations required to reproduce it. In this dissertation, I suggest that, as the service economy brings the production of social relations to the forefront of the reader’s consciousness, the novel has a much more difficult time representing subjectivity in the figure of a single individual. The novelists examined in this study—Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, and Tom McCarthy—use the methods available to them as social producers in a service economy, including information and communications technology, to explore alternative techniques of reproducing workable social relations in the form of singular and eccentric characters.

As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity turns to early queer and third-wave feminist scholarship to identify a unique strategy and style of literary criticism, which I name as/if criticism. As/if criticism is both born of and resistant to two conflicting imperatives in the US academy, which first come to a fore during the 1990s. The first is the demand to write “as”: that is, the institutional demand that critics use their gender, race, sexuality, etc. as credentials of authentic knowledge. The second is the demand to write “as if”: that is, the post-structuralist demand that critique suspend the idea of knowable or stable identity. Challenging both of these demands, as/if criticism employs four different strategies—recognition, qualification, intimacy, and interruption—in order to disrupt identity as it is produced and valued as a knowable category within literary criticism. Taking five authors as case studies, I examine Eve Sedgwick’s compendium of queer critical essays, Tendencies (1993); Deborah McDowell’s debut work of black feminist criticism, The Changing Same (1995); Barbara Johnson’s deconstructive take on race and gender, The Feminist Difference (1995); and Robert Reid-Pharr’s innovative critical essay collection, Black Gay Man (2001). Over the course of its chapters, As/if: US Literary Criticism and Identity makes the case that as/if criticism is well-suited to describe fraught social bonds, experimental allegiances, and unintuitive cross-identifications because its style mirrors the substance of its argument.

This dissertation inquires into the meaning and value of the concept of influence – namely, how one author’s work may shape or be shaped by the work of others – for literary studies today. Once a common critical topic, the concept has in recent decades had a lowly professional reputation; derided as narrow and uninteresting, it is considered an old-fashioned, even pernicious, subject for inquiry. I argue, however, that the study of influence is highly valuable: rather than simply a vehicle for hoary arguments over genius or reports on attribution, such study may serve as a means of investigating the relations between literary texts and their readers, and thus illuminate questions of meaning and critical method that are widely debated today. To make this case, I both trace the disciplinary history of influence study, revealing its previous intellectual richness and appeal, and demonstrate – using selected relations of influence as case studies – its contemporary insight and relevance. In doing so, I establish both the validity and purchase of inquiry into influence, challenging its long-standing disfavour and mapping its possible uses in future critical work.