The Sublime

Professor
J. Jennifer Jones

Literary-Theoretical Progression in the C-20

Belle Lettres. Translates (literally) into “beautiful letters,” also connoting in this context “light” or “elegant” or “fine” letters. The belle lettristic was a mode of interpretation centered on style as stylishness, a mode that focused on the aesthetic qualities of a literary art work as opposed to moral or other value. It also celebrated what we might today call “emo” – shared soppy feeling as an end in itself. Belle Lettres was not concerned for literature to change the world or an individual mind but rather to be pretty, in other words. Whereas a belle lettristic interpretation would tend toward extolling the beauties of literature, its critics (historically, it would be the New Criticism that would rise up in resistance to it) would fault this type of interpretation for being light and artificial. We associate this type of interpretation as continuing to exert a force into the first decades of the twentieth century.

New Criticism. Beginning c. 1930 and exerting tremendous influence into the 1960s, NC is a literary movement that set itself specifically against biographical and historical context or from authorial intent as the basis for interpretation of a literary work, though it also resisted the “easy” or “surface” reading of the belle-lettristic mode. Instead NC wanted to think of a literary work as a self-contained, autonomous entity that exists for its own sake, quite apart from any context whatever, and moreover one that contained depth through the relation of form to content. All one needed to sound these depths was the literary work itself and the individual mind for interpretation to properly occur. Furthermore, NC did not emphasize “the personal” (again, in contradistinction to BL), but instead valued emotions and ideas that were “universal” and shareable among all humankind. Because NC wanted to understand the literary art work as a “whole” made up of form and content, it celebrated in particular such thing as how symbol or irony produces meaning in the text rather than such things as themes or plot.

New critical work focused largely on Modernist texts (T.S. Eliot, as an example) and also celebrated in particular the metaphysical poets (John Donne, as an example) and famously derided Romantic-era poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, presumably at least in part because these authors/texts were in part associated with outpourings of belle- lettristic emoting and so forth. W. K. Wimsatt was a prominent new critic; however, in the mid-1950s he began writing on Romanticism in the mode of intellectual and genre history as a means to begin to argue for the merits of, and the poetic veracity and complexity of, the Romantic writers/texts. By his late career, Wimsatt served as an early bridge, followed by “the Yale School” (a group of literary critics that at first taught at Yale and eventually moved in numbers to the new UC school, UCI, including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller and others), helping to move criticism from the NC mode into the structuralist/poststructuralist modes that would come next and that would embrace Romanticism, taking it as the central historical period to study.

Postmodernism. Roughly refers to the period following high Modernism in the first third of the twentieth century and can be seen both as a continuation of the aesthetic preoccupations and practices of Modernism as well as a departure from them. For example, absurdity and alienation, which were huge preoccupations of Modernism, continue to be so for postmodernism; however in the latter the fragmentation associated with both is a matter for celebration rather than anxiety or horror. Unlike poststructuralism, postmodernism is not a term confined to the literary or even the intellectual, but rather extends to everything from music to architecture to fashion to politics.

Structuralism. An intellectual movement that began in France in the 1950s and began to exert power over US intellectuals by the late 1960s through the work of such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. One of the most important contributions of structuralism to contemporary thought is the fundamental assumption that all human activity is constructed, not natural or essential. Another major contribution is the way that structuralism moves our thoughts away from what is termed “mimetic criticism,” criticism concerned with the relationship between a given literary text and the world it depicts, and which judges the value or greatness of a text based on its fidelity of imitation or reflection of the world, of life itself. Structuralism does not view a literary artifact as representing “reality” or even as the “expression” of an author. Even further, structuralism moves the focus away from meaning itself – what a text means – to the text as a structure, or to how the text means. Ultimately, structuralism denies the possibility of meaning outside of “structures,” or contexts, so that there is no such thing as universal, or essential, truths.

Deconstruction and Poststructuralism. Poststructuralism is most often dated as emerging in late 1967 / early 1968 around a paper Jacques Derrida gave at Johns Hopkins in which he announced the onset of “deconstruction” in a way to critique “structure.” His argument was that the concept of “structure” itself is founded on an untenable paradox endemic to Western metaphysics, namely, that a structure must have a “center” or a “base” that is the origin of the properties of the structure. Yet the center/base is outside of the structure and not bound by its properties. The simplest example would be the system of ethics we accept from God in Christian theology. God, the origin and center of that system of ethics is not bound by it: he may kill, inflict cruelty, deceive, and so forth, with impunity. Derrida’s critique of structuralism is that it perpetuates this paradox by not calling attention to it, and furthermore, continuously attempts to move toward origins and explanations in search of a primary structure that ultimately, for Derrida, does not exist. The move toward origin is one that, for Derrida, can never be completed. However, instead of bemoaning this fact, Derrida’s response is to embrace it as what he terms “free play,” which he defines as “decenteredness.” The critical process of undermining the idea of wholeness or unit, of interrogating how binary oppositions work, and so forth, is one that is referred to as “deconstruction,” or even “Derridian deconstruction.” Poststructuralism is a broader term, indicating a literary-critical movement more than a critical method. The project of moving from the concept of the “individual” to that of the “subject” is one of the preeminent poststructuralist projects. Whereas the individual was defined as a unified self possessed of control and defined by will, the subject is a product of linguistic and discursive practices, without an essence or a center or an irreducible nature. It is important to know that Derrida himself did not identify himself as either a "deconstructionist" or a "poststructuralist," in spite of the fact that this method and approach take inspiration from his work.

Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a procedure for the investigation of mental processes (est. by Freud) that are almost inaccessible in any other way, especially inner experiences such as thoughts, feelings, emotions, fantasies, and dreams. Perhaps the most famous literary critic to employ Freud is Harold Bloom, who employed the “Oedipus complex” in his study of the power and anxiety that he argued constituted the relationship among "strong" poets; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar took inspiration and employed this structure in a feminist context, also extremely famous.

Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s work was informed by structuralist linguistics as well as a high degree of philosophical sophistication and is associated with poststructuralism insofar as it is focused on self estrangement, split – lack of “wholeness.” His thinking has produces various structures through which to think, including “the mirror stage” (taken up by Althusser in his study of ideology); the categories “imaginary,” “symbolic,” and “real,” which such as Frederic Jameson have used to great effect, along with Film Studies, which could be argued to have formed up around Lacanian psychoanalysis; feminist and social critics such as Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek have worked carefully with Lacan as well, focusing, for example, on the question of identity, desire, sacrifice, ethics, for individuals, cultures, and nations.

Course Packet. Available at Rhode Island Book Store

Longinus, On the Sublime. 1 A.D. Trans. W. H. Fyfe; Rev. D. A. Russell. Loeb Classical Library, 1996.
ISBN: 0674995635

 John Milton, Paradise Lost. 1674. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton, 2005.
ISBN: 0393924289

 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. A Bilingual Edition. Ed. George Heffernan. Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame P, 1990.
ISBN: 0268013810

The Book of Job. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. ISBN: 0060969598

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. Ed. James T. Boulton. Indiana: U of Notre Dame P, 1993.
ISBN: 0268000859

Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Judgement. 1790. Trans. James Creed Meredith. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. ISBN: 0198245890

Anne Radcliffe. The Italian. Ed. Frederick Garber. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
ISBN: 0198245890

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. Ed. Marilyn Gaull. New York: Longman, 2004.
ISBN: 0321202082

Suggested Texts

Michael Greer. What Every Student Should Know About Citing Sources with MLA Documentation. New York: Longman, 2006.
ISBN: 0321447379

Joseph Gibaldi. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th Rev. Edition. MLA P, 2003
ISBN: 0873529863

Diana Hacker. A Writer’s Reference. 5th Sprl edition. Bedford/St. Martin's P, 2003.
ISBN: 0312412622

Course Requirements

Participation (25%)
2 Short Essays (25%)
Seminar Paper (50%)