Chapter 3. What Is Literature? [00:10:08]

Now in addition to defining literature, literary theory also asks questions obviously not unrelated but which open up the field somewhat. What causes literature and what are the effects of literature? In a way, there's a subset of questions that arises from those, and as to causes these are, of course, what we'll be taking up next time: the question "What is an author?" That is to say, if something causes literature, there must be some sort of authority behind it and therefore we find ourselves asking, "What is an author?" By the same token, if literature has effects, it must have effects on someone, and this gives rise to the equally interesting and vexing question, "What is a reader?" Literary theory is very much involved with questions of that kind, and organizing those questions is basically what rationalizes the structure of our syllabus. You'll notice that we move in the syllabus--after a couple of introductory talks that I'll mention in a minute--we move from the idea that literature is in some sense caused by language to the idea that literature is in some sense caused by the human psyche, to the idea that literature is in some sense caused by social, economic, and historical forces. There are corollaries for those ideas in terms of the kinds of effects that literature has and what we might imagine ourselves to conclude from them.

Finally, literary theory asks one other important question--it asks many, but this is the way at least I'm organizing it for today--it asks one other important question, the one with which we will actually begin: not so much "What is a reader?" but "How does reading get done?" That is to say, how do we form the conclusion that we are interpreting something adequately, that we have a basis for the kind of reading that we're doing? What is the reading experience like? How do we meet the text face-to-face? How do we put ourselves in touch with the text which may after all in a variety of ways be remote from us?

These are the questions that are asked by what's called hermeneutics, a difficult word that we will be taking up next week. It has to do with the god Hermes who conveyed language to man, who was in a certain sense, among many other functions, the god of communication, and hermeneutics is, after all, obviously about communication. So hermeneutics will be our first topic, and it attempts to answer the last question that I've mentioned which is raised by theory of literature.

Chapter 4. The Idea of an "Introduction" [00:13:10]

All right. Now let me pause quickly over the word introduction. I first started teaching this course in the late 1970s and 80s when literary theory was a thing absolutely of the moment. As I told the teaching fellows, I had a colleague in those days who looked at me enviously and said he wished he had the black leather concession at the door. Theory was both hot and cool, and it was something about which, following from that, one had not just opinions but very, very strong opinions. In other words, the teaching fellows I had in those days--who knows? They may rise up against me in the same way this semester--but the teaching fellows I had in those days said, "You can't teach an introduction. You can't teach a survey. You can't say, 'If it's Tuesday, it must be Foucault. If it's Thursday, it must be Lacan.' You can't approach theory that way. Theory is important and it's important to know what you believe," in other words, what the basis of all other possible theory is."I am a feminist. I'm a Lacanian. I am a student of Paul de Man. I believe that these are the foundational moments of theorizing and that if you're going to teach anything like a survey, you've got to derive the rest of it from whatever the moment I happen to subscribe to might be."

That's the way it felt to teach theory in those days. It was awkward teaching an introduction and probably for that reason [laughs] while I was teaching Lit 300, which was then called Lit Y, Paul de Man was teaching Lit Z. He was teaching a lecture course nearby, not at the same time, which was interpretation as practiced by the School of de Man. That was Lit Z, and it did indeed imply every other form of theory, and it was extremely rigorous and interesting, but it wasn't a survey. It took for granted, in other words, that everything else would derive from the fundamental idea; but it didn't for a minute think that a whole series of fundamental ideas could share space, could be a kind of smorgasbord that you could mix and match in a kind of happy-go-lucky, eclectic way, which perhaps we will be seeming to do from time to time in our introductory course.

Well, does one feel any nostalgia now for the coolness and heat of this moment? Yes and no. It was fascinating to be--as Wordsworth says, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive"--to be around in those days, but at the same time I think it's rather advantageous for us too to be still "in theory." That is to say we still have views. We still have to recognize that what we think derives from this or that understanding of theory and these or those theoretical principles. We have to understand the way in which what we do and say, what we write in our papers and articles, is grounded in theoretical premises which, if we don't come to terms with them, we will simply naively reproduce without being fully aware of how we're using them and how, indeed, they are using us. So it is as crucial as ever to understand theory.

In addition, we have the vantage point of, I suppose, what we can now call history. Some of what we'll be studying is no longer practiced as that which is the absolutely necessary central path to methodology. Some of what we're studying has had its moment of flourishing, has remained influential as a paradigm that shapes other paradigms, but is not itself, perhaps, today the sole paradigm--which gives us the opportunity of historical perspective, so that from time to time during the course of the course, I'll be trying to say something about why certain theoretical issues and ideas pushed themselves into prominence at certain historical moments, and that too then can become part of our enterprise. So an introduction is not only valuable for those of us who simply wish to acquire knowledge. It's also valuable, I think, in lending an additional perspective to the topic of theory and to an understanding about how theory is, on the one hand and perhaps in a certain sense, now an historical topic and is, on the other hand, something that we're very much engaged in and still committed to: so all that then by way of rationale for teaching an introduction to theory.