This might be turning into a tradition.

[icepixie]

I re-read Possession this week. I read it before starting grad school, and it seemed appropriate to do the same after said schooling. (I did a similar read/re-read of Kluge's Alma Mater pre- and post-Kenyon.)

I still feel much the same way I did four years ago, although this time through, I could see, well, deeper into it than before, since I actually have a clear idea of the differences between structuralism and post-structuralism, or who Lacan is, or the crappy working conditions Roland in particular labors under.

...I had some thoughts about my own scholarship and criticism and the novel, but I don't seem able to put them in words. It was something about how the novel privileges both the historical context and the text, and so seems to be similar to my own style of criticism, which I think of as a blend of updated New Criticism and New Historicism (which, yes, I realize is like saying I am both a libertarian and a communist, or something equally impossible, but...it works for me, really), with a bit of cultural materialism/Marxist criticism for spice, mostly because I spent the past year with Jameson; and it was also something about how close readings seem to be coming back in style in contemporary criticism, though with the shadow of the context-heavy New Historicist style laying on them, which means that for once I am on the vanguard of a zeitgeist.

Anyway. I submitted my grades today, so I am officially finished with the semester, and thus, school. I should be thrilled, but at the moment, I'm staring down the abyss of real life and trying to get up the courage to jump. Hope my parachute works.*

* I should probably do a chromatic analysis of it at some point in the near future.

Comments

[elflore.livejournal.com]

Y'know, now that you mention it...I kind of think I /am/ a combination libertarian/communist. Huh.

(Which is to say I believe or would like to believe that ideally a truly free market would allow people to sort out a fair balance of trade and lifestyle, but I still think we've got to fix a lot of existing alienation between the haves and have-nots before the market could really get to being fair and free. How to do that, there's the rub.)

I'd like to hear more on how you blend New Crit/New Historicism, though!

[icepixie]

Y'know, now that you mention it...I kind of think I /am/ a combination libertarian/communist. Huh.

Huh indeed. Okay, new example: like being both a carnivore and a vegetarian. :)

I'd like to hear more on how you blend New Crit/New Historicism, though!

I like to combine the methodology of New Crit. and the theory of New Hist. Basically, everything I do stems from a love of close readings, but I integrate historical context rather than purely paying attention to diction, rhyme scheme, etc. So for the paper I just finished, I spent a lot of time analyzing the word choices and structure in a particular chapter from a Woolf novel, but elsewhere I tied it in with the history of social dance in the 1910s in order to argue that the particular sentence-level and structural choices she made stemmed from tensions between standardization and improvisation inherent in social dance teaching and performance at the time. (I also did some close readings of a particular dance manual in order to make a point about the pedagogical purpose of those manuals in general.)

[elflore.livejournal.com]

Your approach makes perfect sense to me. And it makes more sense than pure New Crit especially, I think. How can we truly divorce anything "in the text" from context? To recognize any meaning in a text at all, we have to either base it on our own concepts, the concepts of the author's time (or our concepts thereof), or both. Otherwise all we can really agree on is that there are some letters.

[icepixie]

I've been reading Professing Literature, by Gerald Graff, and he makes a decent case for the necessity of New Crit. at its historical period (1930s-1960s) in the American university system. At the time, it seems like it was necessary to focus on the text for a while, because the other options were pretty much philology or history, to the point where people were looking at Shakespeare in order to study the evolution of the English language and nothing else. And I think it can be useful for beginning English majors--if you don't know the context for something yet, you can at least look at the text and make arguable interpretations based on the evidence in front of your face. But at a certain point, you have to acknowledge that not every meaning in the text can be grasped through the words alone, no matter how rich they are.