Somebody thinks so, apparently... http://books.guardian.co.uk/forwardp...586472,00.html

Thanks for posting this, Peter. So good to see someone given the space in the mainstream press to articulate why poetry and the arts are important.

Christine

And there's more good news from the UK press - "Theory is dead" says the current Times Higher Education Supplement (not free online, but you can browse in newsagents). There's allegedly a trend in UK univs towards reading literature rather than reading theories about literature.

Hallelujah!

Christine

I can't find anything on the internet about it (yet), but I heard on the radio today that The Poetry Foundation has awarded its annual Pegasus Awards, which are quite generous. They gave the criticism prize to William Logan, which seems quite in keeping with Poetry Magazine's recently announced policies on poetry reviews.

epigone

Amen, indeed!

Tim, that is good news! I hope this trend takes off. "Reading theories about literature" rather than reading literature was what made me a refugee from literary studies, and IMO turns off (and turns away) countless students in literature classes every day!

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/rolleyes.gif

Yes, let's return to the days when teaching literature amounted only to making certain that students followed the plot, caught the Biblical and classical allusions, and underlined (in pink or purple, one hopes) the felicitous phrases.

And then, the instructor stands in front of the adoring students and explains to them (since how would they know if they've never read any theory?) what is really going on.

People have been pronouncing theory dead for decades now. It's preposterous. I love literature, and I think reading and appreciating literature should be at the heart of literary studies, but banishing theory is a ridiculous response to the excesses of the 80s and 90s.

epigone

By the way, the Forward Prize has several components - before we get all excited about the Guardian's coverage (& they are great, they make a ot of space for poetry) let's take a minute for the other winners, who aren't mentioned in the interview!

Helen Farish won Best First Collection, which is published by Cape, and Paul Farley won Best Single Poem.

The shortlist was very heterogeneous, including Alice Oswald, John Stammers and Alan Jenkins.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/forwardp...585545,00.html

The above link gives you a chance to read a poem by each of the other winners.

KEB

Here's the press release about the Pegasus awards:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/release_100705.html

Susan

How true that is, Epigone. I read literature for twenty years before I returned to university. And all that time, in my deep and untutored ignorance, I actually believed that I was seeing what was going on in the books I read.

What a fool I was.

It was not till I re-enrolled as a student that I discovered how blind I had been. To my great surprise, I learned, among many other things, that Shakespeare's plays were not the powerful presentations of human experience I had thought. No, they actually turned out to be encoded presentations of social repressions and controls. And furthermore, I learned that reading these plays as powerful insights into human reality was merely a trick of propaganda perpetrated on naïve readers by fascist “traditionalists”, whose real motivation was the inculcation of a sense of membership in a cultural elite.

What a lucky escape I had, and all thanks to contemporary literary theory. Without the spectacles of this social theory (and the linguistic theories which supported it) I would still be a blind and naïve reader. So let's hope this rumour of the death of theory is just that, and literature can continue to be saved from such ignorant approaches as mine.




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Mark Allinson

I'm a simple soul. I just yearn for the day when there are as many volumes of poetry on the library shelves as there are volumes explaining it. There are even large numbers of volumes explaining poetry that I can't find in the same library.

Those who choose can get on with the talking--I'll join the dancers.
Janet

I don't believe you, Mark.

I don't believe you were ever the naive reader of Shakerspeare (or anything else) that you claim to have been. Rather, your reading was always informed by theoretical perspectives. Your earlier reading was informed by theoretical perspectives that you found more genial than the post-structural analysis that you abhore, but it was still theory. If we banish theory, we do not just banish Derrida; we banish Northrop Frye, Erich Auerbach, Wayne Booth and M. H. Abrams as well. That would be a terrible shame.

But I'm curious. I've read quite a bit of postmodern theory, including postmodern readings of Shakespeare, and I don't recall ever coming across a critic who described Shakespeare's texts in the manner you describe. Whom do you have in mind? And in any case, if I did come across such dogmatic nonsense, I would (and do) feel free to disagee with it as I'm sure you did.

epigone

Hey,

I'm with you, epigone.

As a teacher, I am glad that theory exists since it gives me a principled way to present perspectives and readings of texts other than my own.

I am always surprised by how many otherwise tolerant and intelligent readers get driven into a blind rage by the very idea that someone may have a different -- even a radically different -- perception of a text, or of the act of writing, than they have. I suppose a lot of it has to do with getting burned by departmental politics in Grad School, which I haven't had to deal with.

It's often the highly literate who raise these objections to theory. It's all well and good to argue for personal experience and personal interpretation when you have always had a strong foundation in the subject and when you have developed confidence early. I teach students who may not have read a book in the last year, students who never pick up a book unless it's assigned. Such students do not have a strong foundation and are not at all confident in their own readings. I have found them very receptive to hearing many different theories about what I have asked them to read. First, theory distills the understanding that comes from reading many more books than they will ever have cause to do. Second, the variety of theoretical perspectives helps justify and locate their own understandings of the text within a flexible framework.

Those of us who have never felt lost in the forests of bookland have no idea of how helpless students can feel when they're dropped off in the middle and told to find their way out without compass or map.

But reading-rich or money-rich, it's all the same. Those that are born with it think it's so easy to get.

-Dan





[This message has been edited by Daniel Pereira (edited October 08, 2005).]

PS:
Nobody ever denied that talking about poetry was a good career move. It's writing the damned stuff that's less acceptable.

Epigone, that is very true: there are no truly naïve readings of literature. A metaphysic, a philosophy, no matter how inchoate or unmeditated, lies behind all readings. I was just being hyperbolic.

I am not really against theory, as you suggest - there has always been literary theory, even before Aristotle and Longinus - I am only against the culturacidal Marxists, like Eagleton and his like, who go about shrieking down cultural elites (like the followers of Shakespeare), while making vast sums of money by the way. That was the crew I had in mind. Post-structuralist Marxists - they are my personal "black beasts" (see, I can't even bear to write the French term anymore).

No, I am not really against theory. But the way theory was approached before the mid 80s (in OZ) was to leave it till 3rd or 4th year. But with the advent of poststructuralism, stuff like Derrida and Lacan was inflicted on first year students who had come to literary studies to read literature, not French theory. And as mentioned in a post above, this approach turns away a great many students, my own daughter included.

Marxism has been proved a failure in every political situation it has been applied. Only one preserve remains for the Marxists: literary and cultural studies at universities. Here they are freely permitted to “white-ant” the culture from the inside. But if our culture should ever find itself pushed to the wall by world events, my guess is that such intellectual terrorism would soon be frowned upon, rather than ignored, which is the present case.

But lets just hope the rumours are indeed true about the decline in theory, and that people are finally sick of having their literature reduced to mere “social documents”.



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Mark Allinson

The problem with "theory" in the recent academic past is that it has tended to swallow all things into itself. When literature becomes mere grist for the theoretical mill, all sense of quality is lost, a comic book is as good as Shakespeare. Grist for the mill. The good news about "theory is dead" would therefore be: literature is no longer grist for the mill. It has an intrinsic value again.

Obviously, this does not deny the value of theory. It denies the imperial aspirations of theory. Theory is great, but when it starts to take itself too seriously, when it starts to think it's more important than the thing it's theorizing about, it has outgrown its usefulness.

Epigone: Frye, Auerbach, & Abrams (I haven't read Booth) are, above all, extraordinary appreciators of literature. Their theory is rooted in their appreciation. Postmodernist theory seems to untether itself from appreciation -- an intellectual adventure which, initially, informed by the remarkable intelligence of its initiators, is interesting & maybe even revealing, but which rapidly degenerates into a formula for outrageous pretentiousness. A blind alley.

Sixty plus years in and around literature of various sorts and I have yet to meet a literary theorist or to read an entire article on literary theory. I've no idea what such terms as "deconstruction" mean or meant. As for whole books on the topic, they are to me as spades to Gwendolyn Bracknall. I am happy to say I have never seen one.

Have any of the literary theorists mentioned above ever written a decent novel, story or poem? If so, I should like very much to know which of them has done so...that I might examine the product and perhaps modify this one of my numerous prejudices.

Is poetry important? Yes, to a very few people of whom I have been one, but not generally. Dana Goia thought poetry could possibly matter---if certain things were done. But those things are not being done and probably will not be done. Except for song lyrics verse-writing remains what it has long been, a trivial activity germane to the serious concerns of practically nobody.

G/W



[This message has been edited by Golias (edited October 08, 2005).]

I don't recall if it was this article which mentioned the Google figures for poetry or not, but I decided to try it myself.

Here are my findings for hits on the following topics:

[1] "Rock Music" - 5.6M

[2] "Christianity" - 35M

[3] "Poetry" - 115M

[4] "Novel" - 148M

[5] "Sex"- 191M

So, for a minor art, there does seem to be quite a bit of interest, which might not be the same thing as "serious concern", I admit.



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Mark Allinson

Given the courses and exams and eyes of needles through which people must be filtered to get as far as university courses, it makes sense that attempting to understand e.g. Derrida/Lacan makes an attractive challenge for them.

It doesn't mean much, insofar as I've never read or studied them, but the general ideas that I understand to have been put forward by these uber-intellectuals seem to me, of themselves, to be quite wonderful. Pretty much all those points may just as well apply to any work of literary analysis.

What I think is important, and may well be missing from the perception of some, is that the creation of literature is not the reverse of its analysis.

The question of the importance, or not, of poetry - the question of whether it 'matters', as DG wrote - is also embroiled in this little conundrum of analysis touching material and passing through spirit, as it were. The joke is a lot less funny when explained.

As David Harsent says in the article linked above, with reference to the peculiar forms of expression that are poetry and plastic arts:
The arts are marginal activities. I suppose TV and fashion and pop music are pretty pervasive, but even in those activities are people who seek the fringes. Think about whatever it is that you perceive to be artistic quality, and how it applies to the mainstream and the fringes. I think I can live with being a bit off-centre.

Peter the most intimate analysis of writing is writing itself.
In my humble.
Janet

We have not mentioned him, but Umberto Eco is both a first-tier literary theorist and a best-selling novelist.

Please be sure to let me know if this fact leads you to modify any prejudices.

epigone

As one who has friends in literature departments, I don't quite share your wish. First of all, I don't think it's so much that the best New Historicists "reduce [literature] to mere 'social documents,'" but that they use historical documents to illuminate literature. At least that has been my experience. For instance, my appreciation for the prosody of Paradise Lost has been enriched by knowing what the political situation of England was during the 17th C.

I do think it's important to focus on literature, but I also think context can illuminate a text. Insofar as theory can do that and make people ask questions they wouldn't have otherwise asked, read literatures they wouldn't have otherwise read, and make readers see old texts in a new light, I'm all for it. I do agree that theory shouldn't be the be-all-and-end-all of literature, but is a tool that should be used in service of the text. However, I don't think (political, economic, cultural) context should be ignored altogether, particularly when the text draws material from such spheres.

[This message has been edited by Jodie Reyes (edited October 08, 2005).]

Janet: "the most intimate analysis of writing is writing itself." - Is this like disappearing up one's own orifice? I thought one had to be a theorist to do that.

I think you guys are lucky just to have been exposed to theory at all. In my college English classes, the professors hardly did any talking about either theory OR the material; instead they'd ask the students to share their thoughts, so you got to listen to 75 minutes of "I hate Joseph Conrad because his sentences are too long." "Analysis" of a text meant judging the behavior of fictional characters against current mores and applauding or condemning the author accordingly.


[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited October 08, 2005).]

epigone,
Not only have I read Il nome della rosa in Italian but I attended a seminar at which Eco spoke. A lovely ebullient man who shocked all the pompous bores who had written theses about him because he made a marvellous string of jokes and "didn't seem serious". He had a little academic chap with him (now famous and I've forgotten his name) who droned on and on and was obsessed by theory and was the opposite of the vital Eco. He was the modern equivalent of "il dottore Bolognese".

Later when L'espresso seriously misrepresented, the then prime minister of New Zealand, David Lange's policy about nuclear weapons, I wrote to Umberto Eco (who had a weekly page in the journal) and asked him to straighten it out. He not only did so but wrote me a delightful letter which I still have among my treasures.

I love Umberto Eco but was turned off semiotics by his disciple, Paolo someone. I think I have remembered his name but won't write it here since my comments are a little harsh. In fairness my Italian was not up to his scholarly language which was delivered in a high, husky whisper.

In the end, like good painting, it's all in the brushwork. Umberto Eco has wit and vitality. I still laugh at his analysis of modishness. The front pack can never be caught up with by their imitators because by the time the imitators have managed to acquire the same set of manners and equipment the front pack is doing something else.

The joke was that Eco himself was attended by a retinue of imitators. He didn't mention that fact ;)
Janet

PS:
Just saw that Tim ;)
Touché.


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited October 10, 2005).]