Zhang Dexu's reading of Literary Criticism | the politics of literary criticism

Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, by Joseph North, translated by Zhang Dexu, Nanjing University Press, Watchmen, October 2021, 380 pp. 68.00 yuan

On January 4, 2018, the American Modern Language Association's (MLA) annual meeting was held as scheduled in the midst of a blizzard in New York that had not been seen in 60 years. When I arrived on time at the largest breakout room for a hundred people, it was already full. The subject of the study was Yale Assistant Professor Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Harvard University Press, 2017). The discussion was so lively that everyone seemed to have completely forgotten about the heavy snow that was falling outside the window.

In addition to the packed venues, I subsequently saw the book gain a wide range of attention in several other institutional venues: book reviews from major journals and magazines, book clubs for doctoral students at American universities, and must-read books on graduate program syllabuses. This work outlines the main paradigms of literary studies over the past hundred years, points out the current problems of the discipline, and plans for the future of the discipline. It is conceivable that the topicality of this book can naturally arouse wide interest in the academic community. At a deeper level, the great attention aroused by the book reflects the disciplinary crisis facing literary studies at present: it has become over-specialized, so that it has lost its original vitality and sense of reality, and has gradually drifted away from the concerns of ordinary people. Perhaps it is precisely because of the anxiety about the lack of legitimacy of this discipline at the moment that people pick up North's book and walk into his discussion hall to find out what kind of development trajectory literary research has undergone, and how to get out of the current predicament, to find a rational reason for the reasonable existence of literary research in the ill-funded neoliberal university system.

In North's view, the value of the discipline of literary studies is mainly reflected in its practical utility in cultivating sensitivity and intervening in society, but at present the discipline has largely degenerated into empty cultural analysis and has become useless. The main reason for the failure of the discipline is that it abandons the literary "criticism" model of its founding in the 1920s,that is, the use of aesthetic education to cultivate people's sensibility, which in turn leads to large-scale social reform. Literary Criticism aims to restart the lost literary criticism, thereby activating the political potential of literary studies and making this discipline about people once again closely related to human life. Reconstructing the true relevance of literature to life is the ultimate meaning of the word "politics" in the title. Through the perspective of "politics", North's rewritten history of literary criticism not only reveals the intricate development of the discipline over the past century, but also allows us to reflect on the current literary research and teaching practices, so as to envision a disciplinary future that will contribute to a good life.

Two paradigms: literary criticism and literary scholarship

North's motivation to rewrite the history of literary criticism stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the depolitical nature of the current paradigm of research. In his view, the literary research in Britain and the United States for decades has been mainly based on the academic purpose of knowledge production, starting from a specific historical context to analyze the cultural form in which works are written and read. Literary studies since the late 1970s, such as postcolonialism, neo-historicism, neo-Marxism, feminism, queer theory, etc., have all stemmed from this literary academic paradigm, or "historicist/contextualist" paradigm, which takes cultural analysis as its mission. The dominant paradigm is represented by left-wing liberals, whose political views sound radical and replace conservative models of criticism that emphasize form and aesthetics, such as Levisism and new criticism, so that it feels that it must be progressive and desirable politically. North argues, however, that this paradigm is precisely depolitical. On the one hand, research under this paradigm no longer harbors the ambition to cultivate subjectivity and intervene in reality, but retreats to conservative goals such as "making better cultural analysis", showing distinct "right-wing attributes" (p. 17). On the other hand, since the 1980s, neoliberalism has "undisputedly established its own position of global hegemony and defeated the left in every field", and literary studies naturally cannot be left alone and must be influenced by historical trends (p. 13). Therefore, under the combined action of internal and external factors, the current paradigm, although it has no lack of investment in historical context and materiality, as well as a critique of universalism and essentialism, is not far from being far away because of the lack of political practice of "systematically transforming the world" (p. 27).

If this discipline is to go far and become useful, it needs the active planning of the discipline people to make it relevant to people's current daily lives and release their political potential. North turned his attention to the literary "criticism" pioneered by Ricciats and others in the early twentieth century, drawing intellectual resources from it. He points out that in the one hundred years since the establishment of literary studies in Britain in the 1920s, two paradigms have generally emerged in this discipline: one is the "critical" paradigm created by Ricciard and others at Cambridge University: as "an institutional system of aesthetic education", literary criticism "uses literary works as a means to intuitively cultivate new sensibilities, new subjectivities and new experiential abilities, thereby realizing the educational purpose of enriching culture" (p. 9). The other is the academic (scholarly) paradigm mentioned above, which can be quantified as a paradigm of cultural knowledge production that is quite suitable for the current assessment requirements of neoliberal universities. Based on these two paradigms, North revised the disciplinary history of biquanology (usually dividing the twentieth century into two periods in the context of "1945", "1968" or "postmodernism") and reclassified it into three stages: the first from the 1920s to the 1950s, dominated by the traditional "critical" paradigm; the second from the 1960s to the 1970s, where the "critical" paradigm coexisted with the "academic" paradigm; and the third from the late 1970s to the present, dominated by the "academic" paradigm. North makes an important thesis here: the history of literary studies and the history of the development of Western capitalism are roughly overlapped, and the three stages of the former correspond to the liberal stage, the welfare state stage, and the neoliberal stage of the latter. As a result, the folds of the history of literary studies have been removed, and its dynamic relationship with politics has been pushed to the foreground. Viewed from a political perspective, the dominance of today's "academic" paradigm is closely related to the neoliberal system's statutes for the humanities. Indeed, it is difficult for us today to read the kind of text that corresponds to people's daily experience and personal feelings, and more commonly, it is a historical study that conforms to academic norms, and the text reading has become an ornament embellished in order to support academic arguments.

In North's view, this shift is certainly related to the requirements of the job market of neoliberal colleges and universities, but it also stems from a misunderstanding of the concept of literary "criticism", which is the concept of cultural conservatism pointed to by Levi's "great tradition", or the concept of textual self-consistency and aesthetic self-discipline of new criticism. North traces the origins of literary criticism back to Ricciard, who expounded the materialist aesthetics in Practical Criticism and The Principles of Literary Criticism, laying the philosophical aesthetic foundation for the creation of the modern discipline of literary studies. However, through Levi's play, literary criticism gradually evolved in England into a hierarchical order of classical literary works; across the sea to North America, literary criticism was transformed by Lantham and his students from the South of the United States, becoming the new criticism as we now know it. Both Levi's and the New Criticism are a misreading of Ricciard's concept of literary criticism, invariably ignoring the materialist elements of Ricciard's aesthetic conception and retreating to Kant's idealistic aesthetic view, thus leading to the separation of the text from the world. For Ricciati, the "aesthetic potential" of literary works is the key to literary criticism. In other words, aesthetic education should be the focus of literary criticism in the cultivation of our practical ability. When it comes to "aesthetic potential", later idealistic aestheticians often understand it as the formal beauty of the work itself, and forget the materialist aesthetic view of Ricciard, that is, literary works can be used to cultivate our practical skills and improve our thinking. Ricciati's doctrine is committed to opening up the connection between text and reality, enhancing effective communication among human beings, maximizing the publicity of literature, and thus helping to resist neoliberalism's clamping on literary studies and even on the entire humanities discipline. After some profound adjustment and mobilization, this discipline even has the potential to improve people's lifestyles in today's capital-

Looking to the Future of discipline: "Critical Unconscious"

In the fourth chapter, the longest in the book, North envisions and mobilizes the future of the discipline. As can be seen from the title of this chapter, "Criticism of the Unconscious," he is clearly alluding to Frederick Jameson's "political unconscious." If Jameson, as a representative of the historicist/contextualist paradigm, is committed to a deeply interpretive practice aimed at digging hidden political meanings from the gaps in the text, then North's "critical unconscious" is the opposite: he wants to learn from the literary criticism and its materialist aesthetic foundations pioneered by Ricciard and others, and develop a literary research paradigm that can produce political effects, thereby replacing the skeptical hermeneutics that currently dominates the discipline.

North attributed the new trends of dissatisfaction with the current academic paradigm that have emerged since the twenty-first century into three categories: Pendulums, Intimations, and Expansions. The "pendulum" trend calls for the return of aesthetics and forms, represented by the new aestheticism of the British feminist scholar Armstrong Isabel; the new trend contained in "suggestion" expresses the importance of private emotions in literary experience to literary research, represented by the researchers of American queer theory and emotion theory Eve Sedwick, D. Miller and Lauren Berant; the "expansion" trend requires a substantial extension of the temporal and spatial framework of literary research, represented by the American scholar David Damroche, Song Huici and Patricia Jaeger. These innovations, large and small, flash the light of Ricciarts's criticism, constitute a counter-trend against the academic paradigm as a whole. When the time comes, they are expected to "coalesce into a whole new paradigm" (p. 269). The new paradigm envisioned by North has the following characteristics:

It pays close attention to aesthetics and forms; perceives sensations and emotions as ways of cognition, and sees both as important determinants of individual and collective change and even historical change; it has a wide range of aspects, spanning different periods, regions and cultures; it is willing to use literature as a tool for ethical education; it emphasizes not simply the diagnostic role of literature but also the therapeutic role of literature; and it also performs its public functions in a profound, rigorous, but still very direct way. (271 pages)

Here, North is mobilizing disciplines. He called on people in the discipline to consciously integrate these "critical unconsciouses." At a time when neoliberalism is once again in crisis, literary researchers need to judge the situation and open a new critical paradigm that is facing the general public and can affect the real world, so as to revitalize the discipline. In the final analysis, the literary criticism advocated by North focuses on the form and aesthetics of literary works themselves, and is sensitive to capturing the multiple dimensions of emotion, cognition, time and space, history, and ethics involved in reading, and strives to cultivate a new type of sensitivity with material roots, thus intervening in reality. In this regard, North's Literary Criticism, together with Sedgwick's Moving Sensations: Emotion, Pedagogy, and Activism (2003), Atridge's The Uniqueness of Literature (2004), Firsky's Use of Literature (2008), and Critique and Post-Criticism (2015), constitute a collective appeal by academics for disciplinary paradigm reform since the twenty-first century.

Style impression

As far as the style of Western scholarship is concerned, the historical exposition of thick lines seems to be easier to identify and understand by domestic readers, and the aphorisms scattered throughout such works often resonate with the general audience. In contrast, although Literary Criticism is also a historical work, in order to reveal the complexity of the problem in detail, the book is full of various twists and limitations, causality and twists, so that in some places the logic of argument is not clear enough. In addition, the author's discourse language is not objective and neutral, but is mixed with satire, parody, and acting, as a professor at Penn University said in our private chat, the tone of the book is often attitudeal and emotional. This style undoubtedly increases the difficulty of understanding and translation. In his book, North advocates the literary criticism model that was created by Ricciard and almost disappeared at present, and criticizes the dominant academic paradigm or historicist/contextualist paradigm today, so when he discusses, he also tries to avoid overall historicization and contextualization, but adopts a heuristic (heuristic) discourse style, and strives to be stylistically close to the literary criticism he calls for. This style of discourse, when evaluating the academic achievements of previous scholars, is reflected in the semantic analysis he frequently uses: key paragraphs are extracted from the most influential academic works, the arguments, wording, emotions, attitudes, styles, etc. are explained, the obvious semantic ambiguity and the logical contradiction of the context are pointed out, and finally the advantages and disadvantages of the work are judged by hindsight. Reading this, although we will feel sympathy for the senior professor he reproaches mercilessly, we also vaguely feel a sense of revenge. Indeed, those who do foreign literary studies, both beginners and skilled workers, face up to the imprecision and (sometimes unnecessary) complexity of the discipline, which is why "negative abilities" (Keats) are particularly important to people in the discipline. Due to the lack of objective evaluation standards, literary research often draws readers into the vortex of semantics—others speak in a mess, and we read in the clouds. Therefore, when such an academic newcomer as the author of this book appears, he does not hesitate to offend the authoritative figures, reads the core paragraphs of the classic academic works carefully, and deconstructs the original views in a meticulous way, and the reader seems to have obtained a sense of peace of mind in the noisy and cutting discourse. Even if there is no shortage of flippant arguments in the book, the book can evoke a sense of identity among the reader. This style of argument that does not hesitate to offend academic tycoons requires not only a comparable level of intellect, but also the courage to sacrifice oneself for the law.