Can we extract, from a multifarious set of discourses, a literary critical methodology, or a methodology of literary study, and oppose this to literary theory?I think we can, though I'm still just working out this idea--in other words, though what we extract can only, as of yet, be a theory (a literary theory) of this study of method. However, we should have no qualms about this: it is precisely the job of literary theory to theorize about such things (things that may oppose it), since theory itself is nothing that should be overcome, over with, etc., however tired we become of it. Perhaps, indeed, it is nothing that can be overcome (and that's a theory right there, Paul de Man's). Literary theory (we may elaborate on de Man's thesis) speculates on its demise, constantly being hindered by the possibility that this demise is impossible.
What, though, would we now extract? In other words, what do we mean by "methodology?" The particular practices, attitudes, moves, approaches of literary study at particular moments in its history, as well as at particular sites in the wide spread of its deployment. In short, it would be the formalization of the way in which we usually talk about certain ways to study literature, just before we begin trying to ask ourselves what these ways of study presuppose about the literary object or the task of criticism: we might say Geoffrey Hartman in Wordsworth's Poetry is very sensitive to the historical import of a psychology, for example, and that Walter Benjamin in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels was obviously under the pressures of writing something that could be academically accepted. These are ways of talking about how studies of literature work that are as of yet impressionistic, aesthetic, biographical, or organized around a sort of study of influences or crude history of ideas. But what is in question in them are ways a study of literature actually proceeds, its texture, its general approach, its particular form of responsiveness. What makes them particularly special, however, is that what is accounted for is not a general set of formal presuppositions, but (almost like a stylistics, but concerned also with function and aim) a discrete set of critical operations: transitions, modes of citation, the structuring of a study, its local strategies, its momentary deployments of rhetoric (which may indeed be material, everyday practices, actions outside of the text proper). When we talk about the toning down of Benjamin's aphoristic tendencies in the light of how he was trying to submit Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels as his Habilitationschrift (that is, as George Steiner nicely talks about him in his introduction to the Verso edition) this is oddly particular: it is a statement indifferent to the limits of Benjamin's way of working, but sketches the positive features of that way in terms of practical (that is, limited) limits. It is focused on method.
I need a better example, but for now I can also give some depth to the notion of a literary critical methodology by putting it in relation to literary theory--which is not necessarily always implied in this way of talking, but, unopposed by any other way of talking about these phenomena, these practices, continually exerts pressure upon this area of discourse and lifts it into the sphere of theory (in short, colonizes it). A methodologist would get at all those things a theorist talks about and then turns into a theory: a set of general, almost a priori theses about the role of literature and the role of literary study, which must be overcome or opposed by another theory, another set of theses. In Paul de Man's terms, methodology would be somewhat like the study of reading (de Man would just say, reading itself--that is what makes him a theorist and not a methodologist), which is something prior to theory but which also, at times, interrupts theory. And indeed, here too is a good example of precisely what I mean: what we are doing here is not only outlining what methodology is, but actually defining the procedures of literary theory as a counterexample. In doing this, what we construct, following but also revising de Man, is a description of the method of literary theory: it is characterized here--I claim--by an operation of generalizing, or perhaps overgeneralizing (that is, by totalizing). I do this, I construct this description, before I call it into question, and insofar as I am doing this, my gaze is on theory as method, as a general practical approach with specific ramifications (I can think of specific texts where this generalization is most clear--indeed, in very crucial sites in de Man's work, but to get into this would take us too far astray) and, most of all, specific moves or functions (as an aside, one of my points here is that the increasing use of this word "move," the surprising extent of its acceptance, can be traced to an attempt to get at this level of method, particularly with respect to theoretical arguments, and I think is proof we're already talking on a methodological level--and that talking on a theoretical level about these things is inadequate). In short, I'm not focused here on theory as theory, but theory as a method.
The task somewhat defined, we encounter objections. First, the object of such a methodology would not be literature, but literary study. So what is the pertinence of such a discourse for the study of literature specifically? What distinguishes it from institutional history?
This objection presupposes that the study of literature is itself not a particularly remarkable discourse, as if its remarkable thickness (its proliferation) were merely the excrescence, the remainder of a more primary sphere of artistic production (as if it were merely "secondary texts" compared to "primary texts"). I would reply as follows. While I think it has the sort of analytical function that is similar to that of science, in that it possesses an object and studies that object--and indeed I believe it should retain that function, that homology to science, rather than proceed as if it did not establish knowledge, as if it itself were art--the study of literature has a specificity that increases the more and more it becomes distinct from the consumption of texts and indeed, the mere interpretation of them. In short, it can less and less be defined in terms of its object. (And as we can see from recent histories of science, we find that this does not mean the study of literature is therefore different from science, as if science had a clear object and literary studies, or the humanities more generally, did not: indeed, precisely like certain sciences, it cannot be defined merely in terms of its object.) Because on the one hand the study of literature at least since the advent of theory establishes this distinction more concretely (in short, because we are working to define ourselves less by our object), and on the other because literary study, or the type of study that we now call the study of literature--perhaps including aspects of rhetoric, exegesis, or the study of language generally--has a long history of refusing to simply perform either of these functions (that is, because literary study was never defined by its object in the first place), this specificity is quite high. It seems clear then that a certain distinctiveness which demands its own type of study would inhere in the practice of criticism; a literary critical methodology would be that type of study.
We run the risk in claiming this, however, that we might just be entrenching more and more the notion that literary study is just the study of a literary object. That is, another objection to our rebuttal lies in wait: we could only give some specificity to the study of literature itself at this point in our analysis of it, when the literary study is indeed extremely confident that it has an object. We would then be taking the existence of the object for granted, and would merely create a new object existing beside it (the object would be the analysis of the first object). In short, we cannot just posit that the existence of a certain specificity of literary study merits treating it as an autonomous sphere. We cannot confuse specificity with autonomy (it might indeed be the case that with greater specificity there is less autonomy when it comes to literary study). We cannot shirk from the task of actually establishing its relationship to literature, thereby making literary critical methodology somehow pertinent to literature itself.
I get into this confusing territory here because many of the attempts to talk about the way the study of literature proceeds--in other words, attempts to talk about its method--refuse to do this. Two discourses are set up: that of literature, and that of literary study, both having very clear (though very, very different) institutional ties. (Very bad) Marxist criticism and Foucauldian criticism sometimes do this: the assumption is that you can have, say, a depiction of the institutions of power within a novel, or, still staying within the realm of the literary, a certain circulation of a literary document in the marketplace, while you also have a certain set of critics who, years later, have ties to the university and circulate their studies of literature in that (separate) institution. The lines are not always so clear, however, and more of these Marxist and Foucauldian studies assume the existence of two discourses without actually stating anything about them: they are implied in certain gestures (again we see the benefit of looking at method) whose purpose is to call into question the position from which a critic is speaking of a particular work. In short, rather than clearly establishing the relationship of two different discourses to each other, it is more advantageous for a particular type of criticism (and again, it is usually naive, or very bad) to say that they are in fact totally related at particular times, and then at other times say that they are different, incommensurate.
Pierre Bourdieu resolves these problems when it comes to the sphere of literature and literary criticism, and thereby comes the closest to performing the sort of study of critical method that we are advocating. At the heart of his project is an effort to show that the study of literature and the production of literature are two aspects of one process, which can also still be differentiated across a wide continuum in a nuanced way. In short, he makes the distinction we are making between literary production and the study of literature, but he also establishes a relationship between the two. In doing so, he also accomplishes what we seek to accomplish: the destruction of the notion that the study of literature is the same thing as the study of a literary object. He sees in this notion not only all that we have remarked above about the problems of supposing the literary study is a secondary text appended to a primary text (that is, unlike many theorists in the 70's/80's, he does not invert the old paradigm and assert that literary commentary may indeed be literature--cf. Geoffrey Hartman's famous essay, in Criticism in the Wilderness), but also sees a certain notion of art itself bound up with it. We can call it the aesthetic consideration of art, or, perhaps better, the Kantian notion: the literary critical act is, in this view, nothing more than a very sophisticated response to the work. Even when it tries to be rigorous, to be scientific, it comments upon literature as if it were an entity existing over against a subjectivity that experiences it: the task of the critic, then, is to be as true to the experience of the literature insofar as it corresponds to the nature of the text (to what is "in" it). Of course, you can deviate from this model, but still retain the aesthetic function, the Kantian standpoint: most notably, you can grant some autonomy to the act of responsiveness itself, and no longer demand that literary criticism concern itself with the amount of correspondence between what is said about a text and what is actually in it. But this approach may still reasonably suppose that literary criticism has a privileged view upon the object, for example, such that it can nevertheless still say things about what is actually present in a text. This is indeed reasonable, but it is also still Kantian, still aesthetic: as de Man puts it, it presupposes a type of phenomenality exists in the literary object which allows a critic (as opposed to someone else) to say such things, to suppose that, even if he is not concerned with how his statements correspond to the text, or whether they are true of it, might still actually say something about a text.
What Bourdieu does to rid us of this notion, of this function of criticism, is to situate it, as we said, on one and the same plane with literature itself. Literary criticism then can be seen as a particular activity that indeed has a relationship to literary production--the production of texts. But it is an activity that stands alongside other activities, like the process of book distribution, marketing, reviews, all of which now are seen as differentiated, distinct ways of handling (I emphasize this word, since it retains a nice Heideggerian valence) literary production, indeed as modes of production in their own right, as opposed to a homogeneous set of responses to the text. Institutions also are part of this network (as it were), but again exist only beside other practices of handling literature: they do not, as in Foucault, gain a sort of autonomy except insofar as they work against the other practices to achieve the effect of autonomy, the appearance of it (this is why Bourdieu's critiques of institutions are much more rigorous, something which the work of my buddy Evan, in a paper given at the UCLA Southland Graduate Student Conference recently made clear).
We can now return to the project of a methodology of literary study: Bourdieu resolves the problems that arise when one begins to posit some specificity to the literary critical task, when one begins to separate the study of literature apart from the production of literature itself, but it is not clear that positing such a separation would immediately restore the Kantian, aesthetic status of literary criticism. To put it a different way, Bourdieu's way of working is only perhaps one solution, not the solution to the Kantian problem. Indeed, once you begin to see the force of putting things on one plane, as it were, or seeing them (in his terminology) in terms of a field, it becomes hard to then study isolated elements of that field, in the way that we are proposing literary study should itself be studied in terms of its method. For it is (rightly) not obvious why you would then look at one point as opposed to another, or, better, without also considering all the others (you feel, again rightly, as if you are falling back into the old illusions). And while indeed I believe with Bourdieu that it makes little sense to see literary criticism without also looking at literary reviews, say (or at least looking at where it comes from--i.e. the academy), we might still be able to keep a focus on this area which would not immediately land us back into the old aesthetic problems, or for that matter unknowingly perpetuate them.
All this is to say that there are, I think, reasons for talking about literary study (and specifically its methods) apart from literature which, on the one hand, don't have to presume literary criticism is autonomous or, on the other, don't have to assume the totality of a field as the object proper to a study. We can have at the same time a wider and a narrower object. Part of this comes from a view of the way in which literary criticism proceeds that is very similar to Bourdieu's: a study of literary critical methodology would see literary criticism as a set of approaches, as a set of operations (some textual, some institutional, some habitual), which are not too distinct from the practices that he thinks ultimately make up the field (by inserting themselves in it). Thus our resistance to talking about certain aspects of literary study as theory is not entirely negative: it is grounded in a more positive account of activity that is basically that of Bourdieu's, which refuses to see them--as many theorists do--in the abstract realm of ideas, of competing thoughts.
There are other objections, I'm sure--particularly from those who might indeed defend this sphere of thought apart from action, who would like to see literary criticism not as a set of actions but as a form of thinking--but the one concerning the merits of treating literary criticism itself as the material for study is the most important, and I have treated it accordingly at length. What remains to be articulated is more of what such a study--such a methodology--would relate to literature itself if it is not entirely going to do so as Bourdieu says. For now, let us just say that without supposing literature is destined to be interpreted or studied critically (which is another way, as we saw, of conceiving literature and literary criticism aesthetically), the operations of literary criticism are indeed important in that they tend to bear also upon modes of reading, which are themselves essential--though not always--to literary production. I'd have to think more about what this means, and whether it isn't just putting everything in different (though no doubt, better) words. The fact that literary criticism also deals so much with language--both its nature and, more often, with its use--indeed brings its contributions to reading out of the sphere of mere reflections on consumption.
I do think though that formalizing the way we talk about the way literary study proceeds would, however, be highly profitable--it might have enough amazing results on its own. This, I'll maintain, would require us to talk about methods instead of theories, or at least begin to differentiate between the two more. On the other side of the spectrum, we would also have to differentiate more between basic activities in life (like Benjamin composing for the academy), and the specific practices that make up literary criticism: there are not styles of criticism, or greater or lesser sensitivities to texts, or unique approaches, but specific methods of literary criticism.
