︎ 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.

(Romina Wainberg)