University of Victoria’s

Graduate Student Language and Literacy Conference:

The Multiple Perspectives of Language and Literacy 

March 3-4, 2006

Presenter:   Susan Barber

Title:     Aesthetics or Literary Theory: How Shall We Teach Literature Today?

INTRO: 

            I’m going to start off by posing a question:  Do you think nowadays when we read literature that we are still able to fully enter into an aesthetic experience?  Can we let go of ourselves fully enough to really become one with a character or group of characters and imagine what it is like to be living that life?  Or, are we too politically aware now, too sensitive to what might not be “politically correct”?  Maybe we’re too easily jarred by views we might not share.  Or worse, suspect the work is promoting an ideology that we have to be wary of?

            Just put that on the side for a bit, in your temporary files, and I’ll come back to it later.

Part 1:  This is actually a very postmodern type of question.  Different thinkers disagree on whether postmodernism is a true philosophy or just a fashionable way of thinking that has reached its zenith and its influence is already waning.  And what is postmodernism anyway?  It has never been a unified movement; it is more of a collection of ideas – drawn from art, literature, architecture, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and so on.  Tentatively, however, two main concepts seem to emerge across the board, that of subjectivity, and the belief that everything involves a political dimension.

In terms of literature, postmodernism took its starting point from modernism which already was moving towards greater subjectivity in writing.  There was an important shift from what was observed to how it was observed, like the stream of consciousness in Joyce.  Multiple points of view emerged rather than omniscient narration (Faulkner), and there was no clear moral center.  There was a blending of genres – for example, prose with poetry (Woolf, Joyce), broken or disjointed narratives, self-conscious voice or reflexivity, being aware of itself as text.  Pop culture was celebrated over high culture or mixing of forms, and a playful spontaneity. 

            But postmodernism differs in attitude from modernism.  While modernism finds the loss of coherence in human existence tragic, it still relies on art to provide meaning and direction. Postmodernism, meanwhile, revels in chaos, relativism and fragmentation.  Life may be depressing but art forbears through playing with nonsense and rejecting all that has come before, especially concepts of traditions and authority. 

            For these very reasons and others, postmodernism runs into some difficulties with the idea of a Western literary canon.  At some point in history, the most popular works became the literature that survived due to having some value to the culture that preserved it.  After universities were established this tried and true collection became venerated for its quality, and the canon became the Canon, capital “c”.  During the last one hundred years, many have argued for the establishment of a core canon, mainly composed of works by Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Tolstoy, Joyce and the like.  The choice of these works was partly aesthetic, partly for the knowledge of life they had to share.  There now seems to have been two camps forming in the last fifty years regarding the role or “function” of literature; the first being formalist, for the “art” of representing the experience of learning what it is to be human, in the sense of exploring human lives or ways of being in the world.  The second is more utilitarian or aimed at how to use art to illuminate certain social issues, or teach history, provide a guide to moral virtue, proper living, social reform, an illustration of political consequences and so on. 

            Before the 1960’s there was very little ethical criticism of literature. It was considered violating the academic norms of objectivity.  Literature was read as literature and not something else (Booth 4).   But at this time a number of fields were beginning to feel the effects of ideas that intermingled with the avant-garde of art, the growing sense that nothing could be known for certain after the ravages of World War II.   As a direct result, some thinkers, those who became known collectively as postmodernists, began to question the role of literature.

            For example, Derrida rejected the structuralists’ ideas about the way we order the world, and argued that it is not based on fixed divisions.  He deconstructed binary opposites, like powerful/weak, man/woman, and showed there is some overlapping or “play” in the system.  In the history of philosophy, he says there have been many ruptures, shifts in thinking that resulted in substituting one system for another.  For example, the Christian era put God at its center, then the Enlightenment substituted “reason” for God, to be exchanged again by Freud’s “unconscious”.  In political or cultural terms, Derrida sees Europe during the Enlightenment as considering itself the center of all civilization, superior to other non-Western civilizations, and yet later, anthropologists began describing other cultures as autonomous, quite unaware that Europe was their supposed center.  Binary opposites were not functioning anymore.

With literature, all texts create an illusion of completeness, but Derrida targets details in the text that give clues as to what is missing, what the text pretends it has no need for.  In a political sense, deconstruction uncovers hidden assumptions about race, gender, minorities, and so on.  The language used in particular disciplines attempts to generate the essential “presence” which legitimates its knowledge.  Derrida asks, what term is privileged over another, what is present and what is absent?  Deconstruction also reveals the wider power structures at work in language, seen in the contradictions and flaws, the “play” in the text’s system.

            Another postmodern thinker, Foucault also delves into the workings of power and its discourses, especially in the well established institutions of medicine, law, science, philosophy and so on.  Their discourses create binaries of insider/outsider.  Foucault feels these discourses are politically dubious because they either bestow power or authority on the members of the discourse group, or exclude, subordinate or marginalize outsiders, which ultimately results in a form of control. 

This idea extends beyond the individual and permeates society.  The more dominant the discourse, the more normalizing or natural it seems.   It becomes a habit of thinking and slips into language usage.  Ultimately, Foucault says, it is a way of keeping people in their place.  The concept of self is bound up and indivisible from the workings of language, social structures and institutions. 

            Lyotard is another postmodern thinker who specifically attacks the literary canon because he agrees with Foucault that there can be no truth at the center of the structure, only subjective views from different points on the structure.   In other words, there is no ultimate authority or metanarratives, only smaller local narratives, each with its own particular view.  Lyotard believes it is impossible to create an ethical system that avoids silencing or alienating minority voices.  There can be no grand narrative that speaks to or for all people.  As a result of this idea, postmodernism has been charged with promoting a  moral relativism and a loss of common moral standards.  But Lyotard maintains a skeptical attitude; pointing out that social conditions are in disarray as well as the grand narratives that held them together.  Lyotard sees culture as embracing a number of perpetually competing stories or local narratives.  The problem here, some critics believe, is how to find some common ground, some harmonizing ideology, that will help multicultural societies overcome their differences and avoid chaos. 

Part 2:  Now I’d like to look at the idea through the other end of the telescope.  Literature is many things to many people.  It is a means of knowing others more intimately, to discover more about the self, to find out how to live, to have vicarious experiences and expand possibilities.  To some, it is a kind of religion or spirituality, offering transcendence.   Through its special language, deliberately making strange and announcing itself as literariness, literature organizes an appeal to the senses in order to command attention.  Aristotle defends it as not showing us the truth, but what could possibly happen.   Overall, however, Bloom (29) proposes, “The strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure”. 

            This, of course, is the humanist view, where literature is seen as “good for you”, able to improve the mind and increase understanding of the vagaries of life and other human beings.  Bloom makes some critical points on the function and importance of literature.  Ultimately, he says (22) we read in order to fortify ourselves.  Feelings of being healed or strengthened are pleasurable and this may be why aesthetics have always been disparaged by social moralists, from Plato down to the current self-righteous academicians.  Bloom sees moralists as needing to assign a purpose to literature, turning a “selfish” pleasure into some public good, even channeling the development of the individual imagination into motivation to improve other lives. 

            He (23-28) goes on to recommend five principles for restoring the ability to read well and engage profoundly with literature.  First, “clear your mind of cant”, read as though your thoughts were all your own; second, “do not attempt to improve your neighbor or neighborhood by what or how you read”.  Self-improvement is a large enough project for your mind and spirit:  there are no ethics of reading.  Third, “a scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light”.   Bloom elaborates on this in saying, “you need not fear that the freedom of your development as a reader is selfish, because if you become an authentic reader, then the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others.”  Fourth, “one must be an inventor to read well”, or, trust that one’s development through deep reading is like a “second birth” of the mind.  When other minds are perceived as more finely wrought, we step up to their level and gain from the experience.  Lastly, to overcome the destructive capacity of ideology, Bloom suggests a “recovery of the ironic”.  Irony requires paying attention and holding sets of conflicting ideas in the mind at one time. Without irony, there can be no surprise, no discovery.  Irony can explode ideological cant and permit more finely attuned ways of seeing.

            Even Bloom at times feels the battle is being lost, especially on university campuses.  What began as a positive move towards respecting minorities, encouraging more voices, giving greater opportunities to be recognized he sees as now beginning to evolve towards something else.  Interestingly, Bloom may be correct in his pronouncement that ideology has become so pervasive that it is starting to be seen as “normal”.  How ironic is that?  One can only wonder what this says about momentum, discourses and control.

            Eagleton (1996) also gives an account describing the role of literature, what it ought to do and has done in the past.   He says, “in nineteenth century England, literature emerged as an extremely important idea, a special kind of writing charged with several functions.  Made a subject of instruction in the colonies of the British Empire, it was charged with giving the natives an appreciation of the greatness of England and engaging them as grateful participants in a historic civilizing enterprise.  At home it would counter the selfishness and materialism fostered by the new capitalist economy, offering the middle classes and the aristocrats alternative values and giving the workers a stake in the culture that, materially, relegated them to a subordinate position.  It would at once teach disinterested appreciation, provide a sense of national greatness, create fellow-feeling among the classes, and ultimately, function as a replacement for religion, which seemed no longer to be able to hold society together.” 

            When I first read this passage, I must admit I had never thought of the novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters, and so on, quite in these terms.   Furthermore, Austen has come under fire by postmodernists not only for cultural imperialism or promoting manners of a certain class, but also as an indictment of the people who remained at home and their indifference towards colonialism.  Now that I understand the issues behind these charges, I’m still wondering if it is a fair attack on an author who had no political agenda, whose only aim was to portray a type of life where finding proper marriage partners was raised to a social art form.  I began to wonder if we need to hand these novels over to political analysts to know how to interpret them.  If politics are not a part of the work, why attempt to make the author accountable?   These novels belong to a certain time period that reflect the values of their age.  Obviously times have changed and thankfully our thinking about many of these issues, such as colonialism, has moved on.  And yes, there are many political issues to be worked out here.  No one would want to gloss over injustices or atrocities committed in the past that still affect us today. 

            And yet, to put it in perspective, if our writers today attempt to be sensitive to all groups, isn’t it highly possible, even probable, that our era will be judged harshly for its own moral corruption – even in ways we can hardly imagine?   Those readers in the future will surely be able to mark their own progress as we can with the canon we have.  These future writers may feel just as secure, even self-righteous in their greater civility as they acknowledge that they have moved on from such backward views as those in held in the year 2006.

            So, how should an author write?  Perhaps looking at postmodern literature as a guide will help.  What can be said about postmodern literature?  It is deliberately chaotic, intentionally less “masterful”, more playful, anarchic, more concerned with the process of understanding than making meaning, less likely to hold narration together and resists interpretation.  Representatives of the genre, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jeanette Winterson and others are not interested in character or coherent plots as much as the workings of their own authorial language.  In comparison, writers in the literary canon seized on new styles and ideas in their age but never at the expense of the aesthetic.

            Will these postmodern works eventually become part of the literary canon?  Time alone will tell.    Butler (104) is less generous in his overall appraisal of postmodern literature, says, “Explicitly doctrinal, postmodern work often looks disablingly academic in this sense.   There is a bigger difference between doctrinal postmodernism and the kind of contemporary art that can provide an intellectual stimulus over a long period than many postmodern critics seem to appreciate.  Of course, works of art should ‘call into question’—what else does the tradition of tragedy from Antigone to Hedda Gabler do?  But they need to do so in far more complex and enduring ways than we find in most recent postmodernist literature.”

PART 3:  What I have been trying to do here is to give some background on the two camps.  It is now time to examine what a synthesis of these two ideas might look like.  While most people would agree we can learn much from the postmodernists’ warnings about what might be embedded in literature, how it may promote certain discourses, and reminding us to look at what the canon leaves out, we also do not want to ignore what aesthetics can do.  What’s more, students need more than ever to engage with quality literature. 

            In today’s world students can hardly hear themselves think.  The roar of the world is nearly deafening and there are too many easy and more gratifying distractions than reading.  People feel they need to be busy and productive in order to be living full, exciting lives.  Bloom (How 23) also blames the age in which we live.  “A childhood largely spent watching television yields to an adolescence with a computer, and the university receives a student unlikely to welcome the suggestion that we must endure the hard pleasures and the realities of life.  Reading falls apart, and much of the self scatters with it”.  At this stage of their lives, it is much more difficult to teach aesthetic appreciation if students have not formed certain habits of mind that are aided by deep reading. 

            Furthermore, if students are not going to experience Shakespeare in school with a teacher to guide them, where will they get exposure to one of the greatest minds who ever lived?  It may not be easy nor appear relevant to all children’s needs, but literature like Shakespeare’s work opens a door which the mature student may decide they want to enter later in life.   At that time it will not be overwhelming, unfamiliar or elitist because they have engaged with it before. 

            Nussbaum is one thinker who appears to me to be attempting to synthesize the camps of aesthetics and literary theory.  She comes to literature through philosophy and law and pursues what a good citizen in the present day should be and know.  She believes one solution to the most pressing problems in our society is dialogue -- that brings together people from many national and cultural and religious backgrounds.  She (9) cites three capacities essential to the cultivation of what it is to be human today.  First, to be able to think critically about oneself and one’s traditions – “for living what, following Socrates, we may call ‘the examined life’.  This means accepting no belief as authoritative simply because it has been handed down by tradition or become familiar through habit.  Better to question all beliefs and accept only those that survive reason’s demand for consistency and for justification.  Training this capacity requires developing the capacity to reason logically, to test what one reads or says for consistency of reasoning, correctness of fact and accuracy of judgment.”  A second capacity is for citizens not just to see themselves as belonging to a local group but also as belonging to the collective of humanity.  This allows us to identify with what is part of human experience, no matter where in the world it is found.  Third, “closely related to the first two, can be called the narrative imagination.  This means the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.” 

            Her view on the literary canon is such:  what is strong in traditions will be able to be rationally defended.  Therefore, what is able to survive the scrutiny of Socratic argument will avoid cultural relativism.  She (33) goes on to add that “Socratic education requires ensuring that books do not become authorities”.  Her concern here is that if students accept a text as the authority on the subject they will stop questioning its ideas.  While books can challenge and exercise the mind, we need to think of literacy as training and nourishment, not just a goal, as in being able to say, “I have read this and that book”.   The danger is that books “become objects of veneration and deference, sitting in the mind without producing strength in the mind itself.”  This is most likely if they are presented as “cultural authorities”, like the canon.  There is no substitute for active thinking and searching.

            Furthermore, Nussbaum (37) takes issue with the postmodernists in terms of their logic, truth and reason.  “Left-wing opponents of Socrates think that logic is all right in its place but impotent as a critical tool, next to the entrenched realities of power.”  She counters this by citing the instances where reason has advanced the struggle for justice.  Other left-wing opponents state that “forms of logical argumentation don’t suit the minds of women and other minorities…logic itself is patriarchal or a tool of colonial oppression.”  Nussbaum says this reveals an ignorance of logical traditions of non-Western people and a prejudice against the abilities of women and minorities. 

            Lastly, she labels “pernicious” the claim by postmodernists that the usual goals of Socratic argument – truth and objectivity – are unavailable.  She answers that the pursuit of ethical truth is essential to full humanity and “we need only conceive of these goals in a more nuanced way.”  Nussbaum is most interested in using literature to educate people in moral imagination.

            Nussbaum (109) sees  “really grave cause for concern in the current teaching of literature.  There is the prevalence of an approach to literature that questions the very possibility of a sympathy that takes one outside one’s group, and of common needs and interests as a basis for that sympathy…Much teaching of literature in the current academy is inspired by the spirit of identity politics.  Under the label of ‘multiculturalism’ – which can refer to the appropriate recognition of human diversity and cultural complexity – a new antihumanist view has sometimes emerged, one that celebrates difference in an uncritical way and denies the very possibility of common interests and understandings, even of dialogue and debate, that take one outside one’s own group.”

PART 4:  Although I have much to read and understand on this topic, I would like to add my own ideas on this synthesis, especially in extending Nussbaum’s ideas a little further. 

            She of course makes some excellent points but her view of literature is still that of utilitarianism.  In my view she has missed the half of it.  The aesthetic experience can help people understand one another on another level altogether.  It goes much further than merely using literature as a point of departure for dialogue about characters and their situations, politics and cultures.

            I want to emphasize that it is true that some books may be so flawed that their sensibility is corrupt and we cannot read far before disgust or embarrassment stops us.  But I would like to keep my discussion to the core works of the canon.  Let’s take an example like Homer’s Iliad.  I’m not saying let’s gloss over the fact that ancient Greek men looked at women as war booty – as seen in the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon over Briseus.  I am saying it is vitally important to address the issue with the students before we even start to read the text and acknowledge the changes in our attitudes about women, minorities, and colonialism.   But it is still possible after that to appreciate other qualities in the work.

            For a moment, let’s say, yes, it is possible to acknowledge these changes in our awareness of injustice or prejudice and still benefit from reading the text.  What happens in the aesthetic experience then?

            If the author has done her job, we are taken into a world in which we may not otherwise have had access.  Through imagining and feeling what it would be like to live in that particular situation, we begin to identify with characters or a community.  We start to live vicariously and we have the sense that we have an idea of what it would have been like to have been in that person’s life.  And as a result, great understandings about different people are possible.   Literature can smash apart our preconceived ideas and stereotypes because it makes the vague specific.  It unsettles our views and may challenge us to change our thinking.  Or challenge us to reconsider the ways in which we live our lives.  We’re not being “told” what to think or being persuaded in discussion to change our views – it feels like we’ve come to the decision based on our own experiences.  Sometimes it comes to us all in a rush; other times we may need time to work through things we have been taught in our families and groups before we can come to our own new understandings.

CONCLUSION:         This is my main point then.  That we certainly need to be aware of the gap between beliefs held in literary works and the beliefs we hold now.  But too much is lost if we devalue quality literature and the aesthetic value of engaging with such works. 

            Maybe there is just too much social studies in the English classroom, and focusing on political/cultural/social analyses of texts just don’t belong there.  If there is no place where students can engage aesthetically with literary works, we may miss out on a means of entering into the human collective.  Reading literature is difficult at times but it is possibly the last discipline where people may truly find one another.

So, in winding things up and perhaps moving into an open discussion, I would like to return to my original question:  Do you think that when we read literature today we are still able to fully enter into the experience of the story, the world the author creates for us?  Can we leave ourselves behind and agree to go on the journey, suspend disbelief and be open to what we may find there?  Or in our rapidly and sometimes confusing modern/postmodern era, are we engaged in a mad struggle to hold onto who we are, to cling to our emerging identities as empathetic, politically aware individuals who feel a need to right many of the historical injustices committed in the name of civilization, enlightenment and advancement?  How shall teachers teach literature in the year 2006?

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