Guillory and Our Government

Of all the words I would not use to describe what I have gained from my three years of education in the Arts faculty, “skills” is high up on the list. The Government does not agree with me, preferring to classify my degree under an umbrella term that suggests reading literature and studying to be an electrician are completely analogous. Both admirable pursuits, but certainly not the same.

Julia Gillard’s recent “oversight” in failing to assign the Education portfolio to a cabinet member is not so much memory lapse as it is a concerning trend in governmental approach to education. In its initial statement, the Government neglected to assign a minister with responsibility for the Education portfolio. After outcry from higher education institutions, the Government very briefly suggested that Peter Garrett had education covered under ‘School Education, Early Childhood and Youth’. Upon realizing it unwise to trust Garrett with anything, let alone our education system, ‘Tertiary Education’ was hastily added to Evans portfolio, making him the minister for ‘Tertiary Education, Jobs, Skills and Workplace Relations’. What seems like a logical grouping to the Government seems like a concerning policy statement to me.

Because whilst Senator Evans will now administer tertiary education, Kim Carr will be responsible for Research (which most would assume bears an important relationship to tertiary education), and Garrett will deal with schools. The dissolution of the former Education portfolio, and the alignment of tertiary education and “skills” is what John Guillory identified as “the appearance of a new social function for the university, the task of providing the future technobureaucratic elite with precisely and only the linguistic competence necessary for the performance of its specialised functions” (264).

Most at risk here are the humanities, and concerning for us, literary curricula. A literary education is not a “skill”, ipso facto, a government that equates literary education with “skills” will be unable to find a rationale for the prioritisation of literary education within their agenda. In my opinion, Guillory correctly identifies that the canon debate is somewhat of a red herring. Defining “literacy” as “the systematic regulation of reading and writing”, Guillory suggests “literacy is a question of the distribution of cultural goods rather than the representation of cultural images” (18). Whilst we can argue about how accurately and equitably society is represented in the canon, this will ultimately have little bearing on how accessible education at a tertiary level is to the socially marginalised. Without access to this cultural capital, representation in the canon matters not.

The problems with insufficient access to cultural capital are significant. Effective engagement with the machines of democracy is limited, and thus solving the problem of representation becomes even more difficult, because it cannot be achieved at a political level. So providing greater access to society’s cultural capital is incredibly important. But beyond what can be quantified at a macroscopic level, literary education can provide individuals with that great moment of, as Edmundson puts it, “transformation” (60) in their lives. “A prerequisite for sharing literary art with young people should be that belief that, overall, its influence can be salutary; it can aid in growth” (Edmundson 60). One wonders whether such a thought has occurred to our policy-makers.

And in light of the importance of a literary education to every individual, I don’t completely concede that the canon debate is irrelevant in this broader scheme of access to education. The canon debate inexorably leads to a discussion of how the texts deemed to be canonical influence pedagogical practices at all levels of the institution of education. Who and what is read is important, because the effect that this has on students in the classroom cannot be underestimated, and should not be overlooked for the sake of examining the problem at the level that Guillory does. Dissolution of the education portfolio in Australia thus creates a second problem of fragmenting what should be a unified approach to literary curricula.

In order to reprioritise tertiary education, and especially literary education, Australia and its policy-makers need to fundamentally change their approach to the education institution. As long as the reading of literature is considered a “skill” and nothing more, it will be difficult to find a rationale for its very clear importance.

Works Cited

Edmundson, Mark. "Against Readings." Profession (2009): 56-65.

Guillory, John. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Barthes and The Author

Whilst I find Barthes’ argument to be persuasive, I also find it difficult to completely banish any notion of intentionalism from literary criticism. My intuitive impulse is to disagree with Barthes, however I am under no illusions that his incredibly influential essay must be influential for a reason. Trusting my instinct and realising that Barthes must almost certainly account for my opinion are difficult things to reconcile, however this post will document my attempt to do so.

The question of intentionalism appears to me to be at the heart of the debate surrounding Barthes’ argument. In approximately four pages Barthes believes he is able to dispel with the previously well founded notion that the Author “is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child” (Barthes 222). The argument invites us to question how criticism functions, as Barthes believes the Author and Critic’s deaths to be simultaneous. Do we require a categorical framework for criticism? If so, what do we use to establish it?

Barthes argues that writing and the subject do not coexist, because writing is the “destruction of every voice, of every point of origin…that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost” (221). The text is not an antecedent of the Author, but rather “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (223). In burying the Author thus, Barthes implicitly contests the principles of Romantic Intentionalism. By questioning the assumption that, no matter how deficient in quality or technique, an Author has a very clear idea of the meaning of his or her work, Barthes dispels with any need for attempting to ascertain the Author’s intention. I believe it to be true that a text can have meaning without any Authorial intention. Simply, that the meaning of a text can change with a typographical error suggests that the meaning of the text and the intent of the Author are not synonymous.

There are, as far as I can see, two philosophical grounds on which the death of the Author can be argued. The first is an epistemic argument, which states that no one can ever know anything about the Author’s state of mind, including the Author, and so intention and meaning bear no relation. The second is a metaphysical argument, which says that even if we could know anything about the Author’s state of mind, intention itself is ontologically ambiguous. Barthes’ argument seems to be more metaphysically based, suggesting that “a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (223).

The problem that I have with Barthes’ argument is its implications for criticism. His characterisation of criticism is very narrow. Today, criticism is a broad practice that involves a great deal more than simply attempting to ascertain the intention of the Author-God, and declaring victory upon its discovery. Criticism does not exist as the singular strand that Barthes implies. Similarly, his explication of textualism is possibly contradictory. The “tissue of quotations”, or a similar metaphor, is regularly used in explanations of intertextuality and adaptation, where the Author’s intention and context are but a small part of the innumerable intertexts that intersect in any work. To bury the Author is to suggest that their intention is not one of the many strands that form the tissue, which I find hard to comprehend.

It appears to me that a complete removal of intention is difficult, and unwanted. Barthes’ framework for criticism is to rebirth the reader, and allow him or her ultimate control of the text. The reader is “someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted” (Barthes 224), and as such, to determine the unity of the text, we must look to its destination rather than its origin. Having established this framework, Barthes feels no need to ever invoke the intention of the Author. There are instances, however, where Authorial intention is necessary to determine the meaning of the text. For example, irony that is not evident upon reading the primary text may be revealed with knowledge of the context in which the Author wrote, and the intent they possessed at the time of writing. Whilst this isn’t necessarily an argument for the reinstatement of the Author, it is an example of where the Author must necessarily still live in order to allow us to understand the unity of a text. Biography can occasionally be confined to historical context, and thus intent may remain separate from criticism, but this does not appear to be an adequate rule.

Ultimately, I was less concerned with my inability to adopt a finite position on this issue, because I don’t think there is one. Barthes’ argument is not invalid because there are examples of criticism where intention may be relevant. But by the same token, the Author does not appear to be dead yet. Barthes’ essay should serve to provoke us into different strands of criticism, and make us wary of any belief that the intention of the Author is the key to the meaning of a text. Provided that intentionalist criticism is approached with a healthy scepticism, our framework for criticism is only strengthened.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. 221-224.

Edmundson and Against Readings

Reading Edmundson’s article, I am reminded of the Christian Humanist and Marxist readings that I was forced to apply King Lear in Year 12. Whilst it is incredibly clichéd to criticize the HSC syllabus, it is worth restating that it was incredibly absurd to expect students to apply such complex readings to an equally complex play, when none of us had a comfortable grasp of either, teacher included. I can emphathise with Edmundson’s position, as I wish King Lear had been taught to me in the way he suggests it should have. I do, however, take issue with aspects of his argument.

To an extent, I agree with the sentiment that Edmundson expresses. The literary education as the “great second chance” (57) through “the experience of change” (59) is an appealing notion, and a validating one for all of us who’ve ever experienced that moment where we feel we’ve created what we’ve only heard (58). At the heart of Edmundson’s argument about this “great second chance” is a belief in the importance of providing society with the opportunity to attain cultural capital and to be “socialised” (57). So to the extent that his article is about cultural capital, I also agree that providing students with the greatest opportunity to connect with literature is important. The greatest lessons we learn are those we feel we knew all along.

I also agree with Edmundson’s implicit questioning of the distinction between lay-reading and critical reading, because such a distinction is potentially fallacious. We must ask what the fundamental purpose of reading is, and whether, based on that, we can truly state that one type of reading is more valuable than another in that it is more capable of highlighting the true meaning of a text. Literature is rarely written for critics, and I agree with Edmundson that there is a certain arrogance based on exclusivity that governs some academic and intellectual practice, which runs counter to the very principles of teaching literature.

On the surface, I agree with dismantling the barriers of analytic vocabulary when they are barriers. Edmundson reserves room for his argument amongst the practices of “interpretation” and “criticism”, and suggests that either of those practices are fine when they involve engagement with the text on its own terms, not on those of an externally imposed vocabulary. However, I believe that literature is largely a continuum of work, a process of dialogue where each text is affected by and in turn affects works that precede and succeed it. As such, I believe that constructing debate between ideas and texts, such as the example of applying Marx to Blake that Edmundson gives (61), can be beneficial and productive in certain cases.

I do take issue with Edmundson’s belief that the teacher and student should be able to locate the author’s true motive beneath the text, and remain as true to that as possible. It relies on two assumptions, both of which are shaky foundations for such an argument. The first is that the author’s intention is discernible, and the second is that, assuming the first, the intention is continuous and coherent throughout the creation of the text.

Putting to the side the well-worn epistemic and metaphysical responses to the idea of an author’s “intention”, it is arguable that the result of discerning the “intention” of the author may be as arbitrary as the application of an external vocabulary that one believes highlights crucial aspects of the text. At the heart of both practices is an enourmous subjectivity, and it is a flawed argument to suggest that a true motive is somehow discernible, because it inevitably involves a personal and subjective response. Such an argument becomes dangerous when a pedagogical theory is based on it, as allowing subjectivity to reign supreme may eliminate any framework for criticism, which is not what Edmundson advocates.

Perhaps the most fundamental question asked by Edmundson is what the role of the teacher actually is, and in light of that we must remember to whom Edmundon is addressing this paper – the academic fraternity. This is first and foremost a theory of pedagogy. I am inclined to take his argument less literally, then, and rather to see it as gentle encouragement in a certain direction – that of nurturing individual responses, and cultivating in students a true love of the humanities and of literature, and love that can only be truly established through the partial removal of the partitions that are analytic vocabularies.

Works Cited

Edmundson, Mark. "Against Readings." Profession (2009): 56-65.

Bayard and Non-reading

My first reactions to the opening chapters of Bayard’s book were relief and vindication, and I think that as a student of literature, and a confessed non-reader, my own experience is a valid way to open discussion of Bayard. The two best English essays I have written at university were both on novels that I had not “read” fully (although I am starting to doubt whether, had I even managed to turn every page of each of those books, I would have actually “read” them at all). For both of them, the marker praised my ability to situate the novel’s concerns within a broader framework of ideas, something I believe I did have a grasp of as I had spent most of my time “reading around” the novels in an attempt to compensate for having not actually read them. In contrast, I wrote one of my worst essays at university on a novel that I read closely, twice. Whilst I am not suggesting that reading or not reading those novels are the sole explanation for the marks they received, as there are obviously myriad reasons to explain that, I think that Bayard’s ideas, when viewed in the context of our experiences as students of literature, raise interesting questions.

[As a brief side note, I believe that Bayard’s work, whilst popular, is in fact situated in the realm of critical discussion, and so I will not be analysing his argument from a lay-reader’s perspective, but from our perspective as students of literature engaging with works critically].

One of the key assumptions that Bayard’s argument makes is that we can rely upon critical material alone to form our opinion of a work of literature, as Valéry does, judging Proust’s work based on the opinions of André Gide and Léon Daudet. To a very large extent, “Other people’s views are…an essential prerequisite to forming an opinion of your own” (18), something that many, if not most students of literature, would certainly hope to be true. As Bayard points out, we cannot possibly have read everything we will ever be called on to discuss as students of literature; it is unlikely we will get to even skim a number of the books we will discuss in our lives. And as he argues, we shouldn’t have to. Whilst very few people (with the possible exception of Valéry) would suggest that we should be writing our essays on literature having not read the work in question, what Bayard argues is that the critical material surrounding the work is as, if not more, useful in helping us situate it, an argument I think he largely succeeds in making.

Beyond helping us situate works in their relation to other works, critical material also introduces and familiarises us students with the central ideas that a work raises. Whilst originality is sought after in critical analysis, as undergraduates, very few of us would be so confident as to suggest that we could simply read the primary material and then form an original thesis that contributes validly to the discourse surrounding a work. Ultimately, critical thought is engagement with this discourse, and so by familiarising ourselves with the discourse, Bayard argues that this may, in some instances, be more helpful than familiarising ourselves with the work itself. And as Bayard suggests that knowledge of location may be a sufficient substitute for knowledge of content, familiarising ourselves with the work and the discourse may be equally interchangeable. It is a practice that the majority of us would be familiar with.

The flaw in this approach, however, is that by simply approaching literature macroscopically, as Musil’s librarian does, and to place primary importance on “totality” and “exhaustiveness” (8-9), we risk losing sight of the mutable relationships that works of literature have with each other. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that texts engage in a continual discourse with one another, constantly informing and being informed by preceding and succeeding works. T.S. Eliot similarly believed in a continuum of literature, one where the past and present altered each other in a continuous dialogue. What can be taken from such an approach is the likelihood that the relations between individual works of literature change depending on how they engage with the continuum of literature, and the context in which they are interpreted and critiqued. Over-reliance on critical material potentially discourages something that is completely necessary in literary criticism: constant reference back to close readings of the original material. Reading around works, whilst occasionally appropriate, will never be totally sufficient.

It is important to note where Bayard’s ideas are situated. Whilst it is easy to conclude that he is not presenting his thesis as a recommendation for academic practice, but as a method for the attainment of cultural literacy, the book has only received popular acclaim serendipitously. It was originally written for an audience of Parisian academics (Sage), and whilst it engages with the debate over the humanities and cultural literacy, the argument’s heavy reliance on critical material, whilst largely acceptable, provokes questioning. At the least, it should remind us that, in order to assuage our guilt, someone has to keep on doing the close reading.

Works Cited

Bayard, Pierre. How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Granta, 2007.

Sage, Adam. The Times. 5 February 2007. 12 August 2010 <http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article1329421.ece>.