N0: Anthologically Speaking
Reading the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism is a really big book, perhaps precisely as big as you are imagining it, clocking in at 2,672 pages of dense, neat font. I picked it up for who knows how many reasons, chief among them the idea that, this late along the path to oblivion, I could still figure something out. What’s there to figure out? Probably, whether something is at stake, or nothing.
What is it filled with? Various texts from various times, loosely linked by their important influence on the field of literary theory. Literary theory? As in the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for literary analysis? Yeah, that’s what we have in mind, but always the rub - you may have heard, somewhere along your winding way here, the phrase “theory” thrown around, without really knowing what it meant. You may have also made a personal observation on this no-longer-new trend toward “interdisciplinary studies,” or something along those lines. The interdisciplinary nature of those studies, so to speak, is kind of what theory is - this all-encompassing network of texts that discuss other texts and in turn reflect on the world and the nature of our knowledge. “If you had to say what ‘theory’ is the theory of,” writes Johnathan Culler in his fairly helpful Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction,
the answer would be something like ‘signifying practices’, the production and representation of experience, and the constitution of human subjects - in short, something like culture in the broadest sense.
Kind of a lot. But wait! Are we talking about theory, or literary theory? Are they different? I’m not really sure. Theory as it’s meant today originates either with literary theory or critical theory, which is its own thing that is used specifically to critique culture and, ideally, change society. Critical theory from its outset was political, whereas in the popular imagination literary theory has to do with symbols and metaphors (though we will discover this to not be the case, even in the early days). The anthology’s preface says contemporary theory
entails a skepticism toward systems, institutions, and norms; a readiness to take critical stands and to engage in resistance; an interest in blind spots, contradictions, and distortions (often discovered to be ineradicable); and a habit of linking local and personal practices and responses to the larger economic, political, historical, and ethical forces of culture.
Not having read any further in the anthology I plan to write at length on, and not having gone to graduate school on this topic, I want to step away from the more technical aspects, but a few last threads to wrap up. Like any sufficiently interesting topic, it’s so large that one can’t really talk about it as much as talk around it. I find it helpful to think of “theory” not as, like, a scientific theory, but as a conspiracy theory, of the largest possible order. Instead of individual actors who seek to deceive us and enrich themselves by manipulating the systems that conceal them for nefarious purposes, it’s the systems themselves (of power, of meaning, even of being) that are the actors here, despite being abstract and of our own creation, that somehow consciously or unconsciously plot to divorce us from ourselves, from history, and from the world. It’s hard to believe! Only random anecdotes will suffice as evidence. I’ll cite an example Culler cited as an example:
The American critic Nancy Armstrong argues that 18th-century novels and conduct books - books about how to behave - produced “the modern individual,” who was first of all a woman. The modern individual, in this sense, is a person whose identity and worth are thought to come from feelings and personal qualities rather than from his or her place in the social hierarchy. This is an identity gained through love and centred in the domestic sphere rather than in society. Such a notion has now gained wide currency - the true self is the one you find through love and through your relations with family and friends - but it begins in the 18th and 19th centuries as an idea about the identity of women and only later is extended to men…Today, this concept of identity is sustained by films, television, and a wide range of discourses, whose scenarios tell us what it is to be a person, a man or a woman.
If this were true (it certainly feels true, but is notably unprovable (a hallmark of this type of thinking)) it would have huge implications, or, if you’re so inclined, none at all. Does it matter that “who we are” was somehow invented by the popularity of specific literary genres hundreds of years ago? On the one hand, yeah - being aware of this could lead to new ways of thinking, and may even change my behavior, especially if I decide to get angry about how my depoliticization has actually been a centuries-long scheme concocted by the Victorian media industries of an empire I was never a citizen of. On the other hand, no; does my life change from knowing it? Do I not have to go to work anymore?
Theory is rife with these kind of ideas, these notions that simultaneously do nothing and threaten to undo the entire framework by which we understand ourselves, society, and the world. What started simply as a framework for understanding what texts “mean” has come to also include ways of understanding what texts (and all forms of media) “do.” Does art do anything? Perhaps very rarely, but potentially it has done much more than we thought.
So I’m going to read this book and report back on it to you, as my little nonfiction project, so that hopefully at the end we both know more than we did at first, despite me doing all the work. It’s definitely more for my enrichment than yours, but hey, I do this for free. A lot of stuff is an excerpt, so when I read Plato, for example, I won’t be reading the Republic, but chunks of it deemed significant by whatever panel assembled this book. I only say this because I know at some point someone who actually knows the material is going to pop in and say I missed something, and I can say, Actually, they didn’t include that part. I think it will go well, be interesting, worthwhile, etc. But maybe not. Find out! And maybe there will be other stuff too.