I am finding it almost impossible to use the following words, which get bandied about in discussions of literature continually, with any control--that is, with any sense of what they mean as opposed to what they don't mean:theory
methodology
critical
reading
form
figure
trope
practice
discourse
narrative
irony
rhetoric
metaphor
feeling
style
I could go on, but these are the big ones. "Theory" has to be the worst by far. Every sentence I write about "theory" I immediately regret, because I know the term can mean basically anything. Everyone will not only hear it differently, but also be equally in the dark as to what it means: the word survives by not being questioned. How we can talk at all with all these placeholders seems to me amazing. No wonder people like to talk about meter and octets and sestets on the one hand, or political tracts and historical documents on the other: these things are definite, and actually refer to something.
My feeling is that de Man had a lot to do with the expansion of these terms in recent decades into things that practically don't signify at all. If you look at his use of irony, you are led to ask, how can the term exclude anything? "The Return to Philology" is perhaps the most equivocal use of "philology," and with that, "reading," that I can think of. But the New Critics also introduced these things: "irony" there also can signify "tension" of any kind. "Metaphor" is also particularly bad (when Richards used this term, on the other hand, he meant something extremely precise about it: whenever it was used on a larger level than that of a particular syntactic operation in a sentence--I am avoiding the words "rhetorical" and "figure" here--it referred to a particular linguistic structure of cognition).
A willingness to use terminology: is that too much to ask for? Maybe it is all those hours spent in philosophy classrooms coming back, but why this reluctance to have a somewhat standardized vocabulary? Narratology had one and the results are amazing, given the immense complexity of the object. Actual standardization is probably not possible--and actually it is, I think, a merit specific to the literature department that it is able to get by and resist this standardization: it is amazing (as I said above) in this sense as well, because it reveals a will to talk that is powerful and productive. But some willingness to stop and consider the vagueness involved might be handy--that's all I'm saying. In other words, after a sentence is uttered involving the word "theory," it would be nice to hear more often the question: "Wait. What do you mean exactly by 'theory?'" This is of course something people say a lot, but writing some papers lately brought it home to me.
2 comments:
I've got to think there's *some* degree of slippage/vagueness in philosophy classrooms too, no?
But I hear you. And I agree, too, that English and English departments have "a will to talk that is powerful and productive," including a will to talk with and about interesting things going on in other disciplines. But I sometimes think that this "will to talk" manifests as a "will to agree," or "will to absorb all forms of talk" — at the expense of really having a rigorous language of our own.
I think a lot of these words get some degree of "term-feeling" from the fact that they're loan-words from other disciplines, often even other languages: "theory" and "practice" from philosophy (and particularly from Marxism), "form" and "figure" from the visual arts, etc. Does this happen to anything like the same extent in other disciplines? I remember Jeff D. saying something at a talk once about how literary study has never really had a rigorous terminology the way art history does. And I guess part of it is that we've always felt that we can steal from anyone we want when we're trying to sound good.
Literary "Theory" and "criticism" have become interchangable at my school, and I'm beginning to not know which to use myself. I am guilty of throwing out "trope" lately to pretend to bring my language up to grad school level if for no other reason. "Mimesis" is another knock-around word that pops up in our classrooms. And God! The abuse of any words concerning "devices" like "irony" and "metaphor" is rampant. Some of these things have been more rigorously defined than others, but others continue to lose focus, especially with undergraduate students. Maybe you should write a new handbook? (A dry task, but someone's got to do it!)
Post a Comment