︎
On the Dead Matter of Literature: Criticism v. Aesthetics?
October 14
Literature’s matter matters to no one. The problem of the
matter of literature has been replaced with the question of why literature
matters, a question that makes little sense in the absence of an answer to what
literature is. My talk proposes that aesthetics and criticism—the two fields
that have claimed literature as an object of study after the implosion of
theory—have effaced rather than taken up century-long reflections on the
ontology of literary works. Threatened by the possibility that “Deconstructors”
could turn literature, criticism, and philosophy into generalized “forms of
what we would call ‘writing’, a[n] undifferentiated, and thus unprivileging
textuality” (Shusterman 1986: 22), many philosophers and critics have
championed epistemological outlooks that treat literature as anything but a text. Aesthetics, for
one, has opted to accentuate its age-old exclusion from literary studies’
debates via two central gestures: the application of traditional aesthetic
categories to “““philosophical””” authors (Mallarmé, Proust, Beckett, Kafka)
and a solipsistic focus on the relationship between literature and ethics. From
the criticism camp, cultural studies has proven to be a formidably capacious
and efficiently marketable one-trick pony. Although “close reading” remains
literary scholars’ preferred method, the field’s bottom-up exigencies have been
displaced by an inconspicuously top-down approach whereby a work is “mined” for
its contributions to preestablished agendas. Particularly in American academia,
where the ad hoc inclusion of “French
theory” operates as an implicit demand (Ferrer 2012: 376), literary scholarship
has begun to resemble “actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist
metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy” (Brassier 2011). Amid the
wasteland of the living, I propose to resurrect literary theory from the dead.