Well I think it’s time to extricate myself from the (admittedly interesting) discussion about the role of ‘theory’/Theory/theory in our lives, and instead maybe write something a little different, largely about the academic self-flagellation that is the course I’m taking this term in ‘Viking Poetry’. This post comes to you, by the way, from an East Coast train from York to London, hurtling along (or so I’m reliably informed by the little widget that’s helpfully appeared on my desktop) at somewhere between 68-72mph, with 174 minutes of my journey remaining – plenty of time!
I’m taking two literature modules this term, a course on Viking Poetry taught by Matt Townend and Fictions of Audacity, which is a course on ME romance with Nicola McDonald. Nicola’s module is very similar to one she teaches on the undergraduate English course here at York, though I missed out on that since I ‘ticked the wrong box’ on the module selection form, ending up in Gabriella Corona’s ‘The Good, The Bad and The Holy – Medieval saints’ lives’, instead of Nicola’s ‘From Gawain to John Wayne: popular romance’ (it was, I think, the western connection that threw me!) Still, I’m really enjoying doing something that’s a little later than my usual milieu, ie something that’s not in OE!
The other module, Viking Poetry, I’m a little more wary of. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the course, per se, and it’s taught by Matt Townend, who’s not only a great expert on Old Norse (a language I’m valiantly trying to force into my mind-hoard), but also on Skaldic poetry in general. I suppose what worries me is that I’m taking a course which hopes to engage with poetic form itself – that’s just not my bag, baby! For the first seminar, last week, we were talking about Snorri Sturluson’s Edda and, more specifically, were trying to make sense of his poetic form, including his use of kennings and heiti and what their significance might be. I was pleasantly surprised at the breadth of our discussion, if I’m honest, since we did (fortunately) touch upon some of the ideological complexities of a text in which a late-Medieval Christian writer brings together and attempts to reconcile stories of the Trojan Diaspora, Norse mythological stories and Christian creation mythology. Snorri’s success in this, I think, varies. The Edda is an impressively eclectic text – important for its preservation of both Norse mythologies but obviously also for its treatises on Old Norse verse forms. Moreover, Snorri’s argument that the mythology is as vital to the verse form as the verse form itself is to the mythology is a compelling one. To my mind, it explains a lot of the Christian reclamation of pagan language, so that ‘Alfadr’ can be used to describe both Odin and, later, a Christian God or, in Old English, the word ‘Dryhten’ comes to mean ‘the Lord’ rather than ‘a lord’ in its secular sense. It also serves to provide evidence of the developing paradigm for the acceptance of pagan elements into Christian discourse in the form of, for example, royal genealogies. Thus Asser can trace Alfred’s lineage from his literal, living-memory, parentage, through his genealogical associations to folkloric and mythological figures such as Woden and Scyld Scefing, to his eventual relationship to the Judaeo-Christian Adam.
Perhaps what we see here is the creation of the ‘third space’, the point at which it no longer benefits to dichotomise the relationship between Christian present and pagan past, but rather to deterritorialise, or to decentre, both paganism (in its many and various forms) and Christianity itself. If ideology, as Žižek has noted, is not a way of providing ‘closures’ but rather is a way of negotiating past, through, or around such limiting ways of thinking, then we see here, in Snorri Sturluson, the complexity of such a negotiation. He is writing through, past and around the ideological ‘closure’ of Christianity and its mutual exclusivity with a pagan past. I almost might have been convinced to leave this post at that point, a kind of hanging assertion, just train-bound thinking aloud, except that my word processor informed me that the post came to exactly 666 words and since I’m incredibly superstitious, the addition of this extra sentence became necessary.
Perhaps more after the PMRG has met on Monday.
Ta-ta for now,
Mike
Thursday 28 January 2010
Sunday 17 January 2010
What a mistake to ever have said ‘Literary Theory’…
I don’t appropriate the language of Anti-Oedipus lightly, mainly because I don’t understand it. If only I could be at the stage in reading Deleuze where I could be flippant with it (much like Slavoj Zizek is with Lacan, or indeed, anything), but the problem seems to be, there isn’t a great deal of flippancy in Theory. What’s Deleuze and Guattari’s basic problem with psychoanalysis? The familial thing, sure, the emphasis on lack, blah blah blah, but surely it’s much simpler – they think it’s BORING, that it always ends up saying the same things. Theory gets the fun taken out of it by not only its serious critics (the ‘anti postmodern theory’ people Michael mentions above) but, much more worryingly, also by its most dreadfully earnest exponents.
There is a problem with Theory. Part of it comes from having a capital ‘T’. Freud, for instance – psychoanalysis is a critical toolbox for many (I would count myself among such people) – but do we do a disservice to Freud’s work if we just teach and read it as ‘Theory’, as a kind of answer to critical problems? I even find the very pragmatic term ‘toolbox’ a little troubling – it suggests wrenching and repairing texts so that they do the right kind of work, because they’re not playing the game properly. Freud’s writing is vast, varied, inconclusive, and haunting, and is no more coherent than any of us are, really. The same goes for the other ‘serious theorists’ – Foucault, Derrida, and even the productive anti-theory of Deleuze, the place where concepts “are exactly like sounds, colours, or images, they are intensities which suit you or not, which are acceptable or aren't acceptable”. Michael mentioned Adam Phillips, but the most wonderful thing that he has shown me is to read, as he puts it, for sentences, for pleasurable moments that provoke a passionate redescription.
When Gilles Deleuze writes this in Dialogues II, he notes that there is “no question of difficulty”. This must be the most serious issue for anyone who isn’t the ‘theory’ crowd – this apparent difficulty, or inaccessibility, or impenetrability. It’s unfortunate that theory is so often seen as a kind of insurmountable precipice or obscure jungle, because it takes away the warmth and poetry from writing that can be an experience of the everyday. I’m not a cynic at all, quite the opposite – I’m a naïve idiot that actually believes in what I say – and I tend to think reading Freud or Deleuze or whatever is much more than some kind of academic allegiance, and an ethics in itself, a critical disposition that extends into your experience of the world. Two examples from recent seminars: “Well, I’ve never been trained in Theory, so I don’t really know what it’s all about”. “I just don’t really understand Lacan or whatever, so I find it too intimidating to engage with”. I wish I knew the solution to this situation, because it’s a sentiment I often share, though I should know better. One has to ask: what exactly would training in Theory involve? Surely the most radical thing about some of these writers would be an absolute resistance to that kind of process itself? I can’t remember the exact remark, but Foucault said somewhere in ‘The Subject and Power’ or something like that his work constituted neither a theory nor a methodology.
The serious theory problem seems to be one of preposition use – how do practice literary criticism? Do we do it ‘with’ theory, ‘through’ theory, ‘around’ theory? Do some of us even write to get ‘towards’ theory, or ‘beyond’ it, or ‘behind’ it? The problem of theory seems to be a spatial one as well as a temporal one, us always locating ourselves in relation to the work, either gazing up at it in supplication like frightened children or trying to straddle it to put it in its place. It almost seems dreadfully old fashioned to be raising these kinds of questions, as if I’m living in the eighties, because EVERYBODY knows the big theory meta-narratives are dead. (I am incredibly conservative in this respect - my secret, perverse project is that I really do just want to write about Lacan, but have to use the Middle Ages to do it, in a kind of ridiculous obsessional economy in which I do everything I can to put off the act but do it nonetheless). Undergraduate and postgraduate discussions seem revolve around the utility and problems with ‘applying’ theory (a completely vulgar term that I despise, partly because it makes literary critics sound like plasterers or dodgy builders) rather than thinking about how we arrived at describing certain things as, or why we might want to call such things, ‘Theory’ in the first place. Where, for instance, would John Ruskin, or Walter Pater stand – men who wrote passionately and particularly about their particular passions – in relation to Theory? Freud, of course, merely writes about the pleasures of a specific kind of conversation, or the surprising pleasures in the act of dreaming. It would perhaps be better if we just make new machines with theory, surprising alliances that change the whole plane on which we conduct our reading practices. To go back to Deleuze and Guattari for a moment, perhaps we ought to realize that ‘Theory’ is not the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, but rather:
Everywhere it is machines-real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.
This is a pretty long-winded way to get things going, really.
Much Love!
Benjamin
There is a problem with Theory. Part of it comes from having a capital ‘T’. Freud, for instance – psychoanalysis is a critical toolbox for many (I would count myself among such people) – but do we do a disservice to Freud’s work if we just teach and read it as ‘Theory’, as a kind of answer to critical problems? I even find the very pragmatic term ‘toolbox’ a little troubling – it suggests wrenching and repairing texts so that they do the right kind of work, because they’re not playing the game properly. Freud’s writing is vast, varied, inconclusive, and haunting, and is no more coherent than any of us are, really. The same goes for the other ‘serious theorists’ – Foucault, Derrida, and even the productive anti-theory of Deleuze, the place where concepts “are exactly like sounds, colours, or images, they are intensities which suit you or not, which are acceptable or aren't acceptable”. Michael mentioned Adam Phillips, but the most wonderful thing that he has shown me is to read, as he puts it, for sentences, for pleasurable moments that provoke a passionate redescription.
When Gilles Deleuze writes this in Dialogues II, he notes that there is “no question of difficulty”. This must be the most serious issue for anyone who isn’t the ‘theory’ crowd – this apparent difficulty, or inaccessibility, or impenetrability. It’s unfortunate that theory is so often seen as a kind of insurmountable precipice or obscure jungle, because it takes away the warmth and poetry from writing that can be an experience of the everyday. I’m not a cynic at all, quite the opposite – I’m a naïve idiot that actually believes in what I say – and I tend to think reading Freud or Deleuze or whatever is much more than some kind of academic allegiance, and an ethics in itself, a critical disposition that extends into your experience of the world. Two examples from recent seminars: “Well, I’ve never been trained in Theory, so I don’t really know what it’s all about”. “I just don’t really understand Lacan or whatever, so I find it too intimidating to engage with”. I wish I knew the solution to this situation, because it’s a sentiment I often share, though I should know better. One has to ask: what exactly would training in Theory involve? Surely the most radical thing about some of these writers would be an absolute resistance to that kind of process itself? I can’t remember the exact remark, but Foucault said somewhere in ‘The Subject and Power’ or something like that his work constituted neither a theory nor a methodology.
The serious theory problem seems to be one of preposition use – how do practice literary criticism? Do we do it ‘with’ theory, ‘through’ theory, ‘around’ theory? Do some of us even write to get ‘towards’ theory, or ‘beyond’ it, or ‘behind’ it? The problem of theory seems to be a spatial one as well as a temporal one, us always locating ourselves in relation to the work, either gazing up at it in supplication like frightened children or trying to straddle it to put it in its place. It almost seems dreadfully old fashioned to be raising these kinds of questions, as if I’m living in the eighties, because EVERYBODY knows the big theory meta-narratives are dead. (I am incredibly conservative in this respect - my secret, perverse project is that I really do just want to write about Lacan, but have to use the Middle Ages to do it, in a kind of ridiculous obsessional economy in which I do everything I can to put off the act but do it nonetheless). Undergraduate and postgraduate discussions seem revolve around the utility and problems with ‘applying’ theory (a completely vulgar term that I despise, partly because it makes literary critics sound like plasterers or dodgy builders) rather than thinking about how we arrived at describing certain things as, or why we might want to call such things, ‘Theory’ in the first place. Where, for instance, would John Ruskin, or Walter Pater stand – men who wrote passionately and particularly about their particular passions – in relation to Theory? Freud, of course, merely writes about the pleasures of a specific kind of conversation, or the surprising pleasures in the act of dreaming. It would perhaps be better if we just make new machines with theory, surprising alliances that change the whole plane on which we conduct our reading practices. To go back to Deleuze and Guattari for a moment, perhaps we ought to realize that ‘Theory’ is not the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, but rather:
Everywhere it is machines-real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.
This is a pretty long-winded way to get things going, really.
Much Love!
Benjamin
Saturday 16 January 2010
What is Medieval Studies, anyway? or, Where have all the hyphens gone?
When setting up the template for this, until recently, empty ‘blog I made a bit of a faux-pas. Without really thinking about it, I used two terms to describe our new reading group and its accompanying website. It was a faux-pas mainly because ‘Post-Medieval’ and Postmedieval might, after all, be two very different things, especially for a group whose aims might include the interrogation of our critical relation to the medieval past.
Because that hyphen- the oh-so-small yet oh-so-significant little punctuation mark, has remarkable implications for the future of medieval studies if, indeed, the future of the field rests in one of those terms. Ben and I are, I guess, at a strange moment in our careers – neither ‘proper’ medievalists nor ‘lowly’ undergraduates, we’re like hyphens ourselves – separating real academia from the hobbyist endeavours of our undergrad years (are we post-graduates or postgraduates?)
I suppose that the difference between the post-medieval and postmedieval is that the former is engaged in the totally linear passage of time – we can, for example, study post-medieval architecture, art or literature as synonymous or contemporaneous with that spurious periodisation of the early-modern. The postmedieval, meanwhile, might mean a moving past the medieval, without necessarily being conceptually confined by the passage of time. The publication of the journal, ‘Postmedieval’ in April of this year, has at its core an approach that aims to bring the modern and medieval into productive critical relation. This has all been explained better than I ever could on the journal’s webpage, whose critical overview reads like a who’s who of my favourite medievalists (is it sad that I have such a list, even if I’ve not yet written it down?)
Since it’s not really my place to write (nor could I write) about the new journal, perhaps instead I should write something about why we decided to set up the ‘Postmedieval Reading Group’ here at York, and a little about myself (with the expectation being that Ben will do something similar in response). The York CMS has an amazing culture of extra-curricular (another hyphen – they get everywhere, see!) reading and research groups, more so even than the University’s English department. One of the great things about all these groups is that they are entirely open and free-forming – there is no set membership, no requirement for entry other than an appetite for reading interesting texts and discussing them openly. They encourage an interdisciplinary and varied approach – historicists mix (often uncomfortably) with theorists and linguists, archaeologists and art historians. We have reading groups specialising in reading everything from Orderic Vitalis (the imaginatively-named ‘Orderic Vitalis Reading Group’) to Middle English Romances, with groups being either thematically or periodically linked.
Sessions are run both by postgraduates and by members of the academic staff within the department, and the reading is provided in advance often in both the original and in translation. So where did we see the Postmedieval Reading Group fitting into this vibrant academic culture?
We had been speculating about setting up some sort of theory-based reading group within the CMS. Ben and I both did our undergraduate degrees in English at York, and the department is particularly strong in its appreciation of postmodern critical theory. While studying here, we both fell in love with, in particular, psychoanalysis (Ben fell first, and I shortly after) and we’re particularly lucky to have Adam Phillips, a practicing psychoanalyst and prolific writer, as visiting Professor in Literature and Psychoanalysis in the department. Having attended both the postgraduate seminars and the open lecture series he delivered at York, we became more and more embroiled in the theory, which led us reading outwards and sideways into the deepest, darkest realms of critical theory. (Here I should note that Ben’s impressions may be entirely different, and I perfectly expect him to correct me, or re-evaluate me in his own post later!)
Given the encouraging reception of our approach at undergraduate level, we were sort of expecting something similar from our MA. Never, however, have I experienced such alarm at my first mention of Deleuze & Guattari in a seminar on Gaimar, and rarely have I felt so ostracised as at my analysis of Grendel’s arm as Lacanian lamella in Beowulf. Ben, as I’m sure he’ll corroborate, was having the same experience in different modules. It was almost as though we were working with a group of people who felt that contemporary critical theory had no place in the Middle Ages. I mean, this isn’t entirely true, of course: there are certainly people on our course who are similarly enamoured with Žižek, Freud and the like– but they seem few and far between. Our worst suspicions were confirmed when, in a seminar at the end of our first term on ‘The postmodern Middle Ages’ two of our classmates gave as their reason for being on this particular MA that they wanted ‘to avoid postmodern theory’.
It was almost that very moment, as Ben and I looked agawp at each other, that the ‘Postmedieval Reading Group’ crystallised and came into being. Perhaps, we decided, there was space for such a group purely because, certainly among our classmates (although we’re a small sample size, admittedly), there was no such space. So there we have it: full circle. It seems as though the Postmedieval reading group at York is a kind of hyphen itself – creating the very space between two seemingly incompatible, or at least resistant, concepts. Its aim, therefore, should surely be to eliminate its own necessity – to get people challenging the sorts of tacit assumptions we make as ‘medievalists’ up to the point where the group itself is entirely unnecessary. Then again, let’s hope this doesn’t happen all too quickly…
And remember, in the immortal words of the Chaucer blogger:
Swynke, Drynke, Swyve...and aftir, meke retracioun.
Mike Pryke.
Because that hyphen- the oh-so-small yet oh-so-significant little punctuation mark, has remarkable implications for the future of medieval studies if, indeed, the future of the field rests in one of those terms. Ben and I are, I guess, at a strange moment in our careers – neither ‘proper’ medievalists nor ‘lowly’ undergraduates, we’re like hyphens ourselves – separating real academia from the hobbyist endeavours of our undergrad years (are we post-graduates or postgraduates?)
I suppose that the difference between the post-medieval and postmedieval is that the former is engaged in the totally linear passage of time – we can, for example, study post-medieval architecture, art or literature as synonymous or contemporaneous with that spurious periodisation of the early-modern. The postmedieval, meanwhile, might mean a moving past the medieval, without necessarily being conceptually confined by the passage of time. The publication of the journal, ‘Postmedieval’ in April of this year, has at its core an approach that aims to bring the modern and medieval into productive critical relation. This has all been explained better than I ever could on the journal’s webpage, whose critical overview reads like a who’s who of my favourite medievalists (is it sad that I have such a list, even if I’ve not yet written it down?)
Since it’s not really my place to write (nor could I write) about the new journal, perhaps instead I should write something about why we decided to set up the ‘Postmedieval Reading Group’ here at York, and a little about myself (with the expectation being that Ben will do something similar in response). The York CMS has an amazing culture of extra-curricular (another hyphen – they get everywhere, see!) reading and research groups, more so even than the University’s English department. One of the great things about all these groups is that they are entirely open and free-forming – there is no set membership, no requirement for entry other than an appetite for reading interesting texts and discussing them openly. They encourage an interdisciplinary and varied approach – historicists mix (often uncomfortably) with theorists and linguists, archaeologists and art historians. We have reading groups specialising in reading everything from Orderic Vitalis (the imaginatively-named ‘Orderic Vitalis Reading Group’) to Middle English Romances, with groups being either thematically or periodically linked.
Sessions are run both by postgraduates and by members of the academic staff within the department, and the reading is provided in advance often in both the original and in translation. So where did we see the Postmedieval Reading Group fitting into this vibrant academic culture?
We had been speculating about setting up some sort of theory-based reading group within the CMS. Ben and I both did our undergraduate degrees in English at York, and the department is particularly strong in its appreciation of postmodern critical theory. While studying here, we both fell in love with, in particular, psychoanalysis (Ben fell first, and I shortly after) and we’re particularly lucky to have Adam Phillips, a practicing psychoanalyst and prolific writer, as visiting Professor in Literature and Psychoanalysis in the department. Having attended both the postgraduate seminars and the open lecture series he delivered at York, we became more and more embroiled in the theory, which led us reading outwards and sideways into the deepest, darkest realms of critical theory. (Here I should note that Ben’s impressions may be entirely different, and I perfectly expect him to correct me, or re-evaluate me in his own post later!)
Given the encouraging reception of our approach at undergraduate level, we were sort of expecting something similar from our MA. Never, however, have I experienced such alarm at my first mention of Deleuze & Guattari in a seminar on Gaimar, and rarely have I felt so ostracised as at my analysis of Grendel’s arm as Lacanian lamella in Beowulf. Ben, as I’m sure he’ll corroborate, was having the same experience in different modules. It was almost as though we were working with a group of people who felt that contemporary critical theory had no place in the Middle Ages. I mean, this isn’t entirely true, of course: there are certainly people on our course who are similarly enamoured with Žižek, Freud and the like– but they seem few and far between. Our worst suspicions were confirmed when, in a seminar at the end of our first term on ‘The postmodern Middle Ages’ two of our classmates gave as their reason for being on this particular MA that they wanted ‘to avoid postmodern theory’.
It was almost that very moment, as Ben and I looked agawp at each other, that the ‘Postmedieval Reading Group’ crystallised and came into being. Perhaps, we decided, there was space for such a group purely because, certainly among our classmates (although we’re a small sample size, admittedly), there was no such space. So there we have it: full circle. It seems as though the Postmedieval reading group at York is a kind of hyphen itself – creating the very space between two seemingly incompatible, or at least resistant, concepts. Its aim, therefore, should surely be to eliminate its own necessity – to get people challenging the sorts of tacit assumptions we make as ‘medievalists’ up to the point where the group itself is entirely unnecessary. Then again, let’s hope this doesn’t happen all too quickly…
And remember, in the immortal words of the Chaucer blogger:
Swynke, Drynke, Swyve...and aftir, meke retracioun.
Mike Pryke.
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