1.Listen to Pr.

Paul Fry lecture at

https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300/lecture-1 and follow the transcript

2. Prepare main issues of his talk

ENGL-300: INTRODUCTION TO THEORY OF LITERATURE

Lecture 1 - Introduction [January 13, 2009]

Chapter 1. Introduction [00:00:00]

Professor Paul Fry: I thought I'd begin today--this [gestures to outline on
chalkboard] is, by the way, the regular practice. This is as close as I get to bulleted
Power Point. It's all there. I ought to have got through those topics by the end of
the lecture. If I don't, not to worry. I'll pick up wherever the dotted line emerges in
the subsequent lecture.
In any case, I thought I'd begin today by making a few remarks about the title of
our course because it has some big words in it: "theory" and "literature," but also
"introduction." I think it's worth saying a word or two about the word
"introduction" as well.
Now the word theory has a very complicated etymological history that I won't
trouble you with. The trouble with the etymology of theory and the way in which
the word has been used traditionally is that sometimes it actually meanspractice,
and then at other historical periods it means something very different from
practice, something typically from which practice is derived. Well, that's the sense
of theory that I like to work with, and I would pause over it by saying that after all,
there is a difference and practice and we shouldn't too quickly, at least, confuse the
terms. There's a difference between theory and methodology. Yes, it's probably fair
enough to say that methodology is applied theory, but there's a great danger in
supposing that every aspect of theory has an immediate application. Theory is very
often a purely speculative undertaking. It's an hypothesis about something, the
exact nature of which one needn't necessarily have in view. It's a supposition that
whatever the object of theory might be, theory itself must--owing to whatever
intellectual constraints one can imagine--be of such and such a form.
At this level of abstraction, plainly there isn't all that much incentive to apply
thinking of that kind, but on the other hand undoubtedly theory does exist for the
most part to be applied. Very frequently, courses of this kind have a text--Lycidas,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a short story--and then once in a while the
disquisition of the lecture will pause, the text will be produced, and whatever
theory has recently been talked about will be applied to the text; so that you'll get a
postcolonial reading of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner--something, by the way,
which is absolutely fascinating and important to do--and so on through the course.
Now I suppose it's my reluctance to get into the intricacies of questions having to
do with applied theory that makes me prefer to keep it simple. Our text is a story
for toddlers called Tony the Tow Truck. I've decided not to pass it out today
because, after all, I want to get it into the right hands! You can't read it unless you
take the course!--and so I'm going to wait a little bit. [holds up the text] We won't
come back to it at least for the moment, but you see that it's mercifully short, and
as time passes we will do some rather interesting tricks with it. We will revert, as
others revert to Lycidas, to Tony the Tow Truck for the purpose of introducing
questions of applied theory.
Now this choice may suggest a certain condescension both toward theory and
toward literary text, which is not at all intended. It's much more a question of
reminding you that if you can do it with this, you can do it with anything; but also
of reminding you that, after all, reading--reading just anything--is a complex and
potentially almost unlimited activity. That's one of the good things that theory
teaches us and that I hope to be able to get across in the course of our varied
approaches to Tony the Tow Truck.

Chapter 2. Theory and Philosophy [00:04:29]

Now theory resembles philosophy perhaps in this: that it asks fundamental
questions and also at times builds systems. That is to say, theory has certain
ambitions to a totalization of what can be thought that resembles or rivals
philosophy. But theory differs from philosophy--and this is something that I'm
going to be coming back to persistingly in the second half of this lecture and many
times hereafter: theory differs from most philosophy in that it involves a certain--
this is by no means self-evident, and "Why should this be?" is one of the questions
we're going to be asking--it involves a certain skepticism. There seems to be a
doubt, a variety of doubts, about the foundations of what we can think and the
basis of our opinions, that pervades theory, and is seen somehow or another to
characterize its history. Not all theory that we read in this course is skeptical. Some
of the most powerful and profound thought that's been devoted to the subject of the
theory of literature is positive in its intentions and in its views, but by and large
you will happily or unhappily come to terms with the fact that much of what you're
going to be reading this semester is undergirded, or perhaps I should say
undermined, by this persisting skepticism. It's crucial, as I say, and I'm going to be
coming back to it, but it's just a point I want to make in passing about the nature of
theory now.
Turning to the word literature, this is not theory of relativity, theory of music, or
theory of government. This is a course in theory of literature, and theory of
literature shares in common with other kinds of theory the need for definition. That
is to say, maybe the most central and, for me, possibly the most fascinating
question theory asks is--well, what is literature? How do we know it when we see
it? How can we define it? Much of what we'll be reading takes up the question
"What is literature?" and provides us with fascinating and always--for the moment,
I think--enticing definitions. There are definitions based on form, circularity,
symmetry, economy of form, lack of economy of form, and repetition. There are
definitions based on psychological complexity, psychological balance,
psychological harmony, sometimes psychological imbalance and disharmony, and
there are also definitions which insist that somehow there is an epistemological
difference between literature and other kinds of utterance. Whereas most utterances
purport to be saying something true about the actual state of things in the world,
literary utterance is under no such obligation, the argument goes, and ought
properly to be understood as fiction--making it up as opposed to referring.
All right. Now all of these definitions have had currency. We'll be going over them
again and finding them, I hope, more fascinating as we learn more about them; but
at the same time, even as I rattle off this list of possibilities, probably you felt in
yourself an upsurge of skepticism. You say, "My goodness. I can easily find
exceptions to all of those rules. It's ridiculous to think that literature could be
defined in any one of those ways or even in a combination of all of them.
Literature is many things, a many-splendored thing," you say to yourself, "and it
simply cannot be confined or trapped within a definition of that kind." Well and
good, properly ecumenical of you, but at the same time it gives rise to a sense that
possibly after all, literature just isn't anything at all: in other words, that literature
may not be susceptible of definition, of any one definition, but it is rather--and this
is the so-called neo-pragmatist argument--but it is rather whatever you think it is or
more precisely whatever your interpretive community says that it is. This isn't
really a big problem. It's kind of unsettling because we like to know what things
are, but at the same time it's not really a big problem because as long as we know
about the fact that a certain notion of literature exists in certain communities, we
can begin to do very interesting work precisely with that idea. We can say there's a
great deal to learn about what people think literature is and we can develop very
interesting kinds of thinking about the variety of ways in which these ideas are
expressed. And so it's not, perhaps, crippling if this is the conclusion we reach, but
at the same time it's not the only possible conclusion. The possibility of definition
persists. Definition is important to us, and we're certainly not going to give it short
shrift in this course. We're going to make every effort to define literature as
carefully as we can.

Chapter 3. What Is Literature? [00:10:08]

Now in addition to defining literature, literary theory also asks questions obviously
not unrelated but which open up the field somewhat. What causes literature and
what are the effects of literature? In a way, there's a subset of questions that arises
from those, and as to causes these are, of course, what we'll be taking up next time:
the question "What is an author?" That is to say, if something causes literature,
there must be some sort of authority behind it and therefore we find ourselves
asking, "What is an author?" By the same token, if literature has effects, it must
have effects on someone, and this gives rise to the equally interesting and vexing
question, "What is a reader?" Literary theory is very much involved with questions
of that kind, and organizing those questions is basically what rationalizes the
structure of our syllabus. You'll notice that we move in the syllabus--after a couple
of introductory talks that I'll mention in a minute--we move from the idea that
literature is in some sense caused by language to the idea that literature is in some
sense caused by the human psyche, to the idea that literature is in some sense
caused by social, economic, and historical forces. There are corollaries for those
ideas in terms of the kinds of effects that literature has and what we might imagine
ourselves to conclude from them.
Finally, literary theory asks one other important question--it asks many, but this is
the way at least I'm organizing it for today--it asks one other important question,
the one with which we will actually begin: not so much "What is a reader?" but
"How does reading get done?" That is to say, how do we form the conclusion that
we are interpreting something adequately, that we have a basis for the kind of
reading that we're doing? What is the reading experience like? How do we meet
the text face-to-face? How do we put ourselves in touch with the text which may
after all in a variety of ways be remote from us?
These are the questions that are asked by what's called hermeneutics, a difficult
word that we will be taking up next week. It has to do with the god Hermes who
conveyed language to man, who was in a certain sense, among many other
functions, the god of communication, and hermeneutics is, after all, obviously
about communication. So hermeneutics will be our first topic, and it attempts to
answer the last question that I've mentioned which is raised by theory of literature.

Chapter 4. The Idea of an "Introduction" [00:13:10]

All right. Now let me pause quickly over the word introduction. I first started
teaching this course in the late 1970s and 80s when literary theory was a thing
absolutely of the moment. As I told the teaching fellows, I had a colleague in those
days who looked at me enviously and said he wished he had the black leather
concession at the door. Theory was both hot and cool, and it was something about
which, following from that, one had not just opinions but very, very strong
opinions. In other words, the teaching fellows I had in those days--who knows?
They may rise up against me in the same way this semester--but the teaching
fellows I had in those days said, "You can't teach an introduction. You can't teach a
survey. You can't say, 'If it's Tuesday, it must be Foucault. If it's Thursday, it must
be Lacan.' You can't approach theory that way. Theory is important and it's
important to know what you believe," in other words, what the basis of all other
possible theory is."I am a feminist. I'm a Lacanian. I am a student of Paul de Man.
I believe that these are the foundational moments of theorizing and that if you're
going to teach anything like a survey, you've got to derive the rest of it from
whatever the moment I happen to subscribe to might be."
That's the way it felt to teach theory in those days. It was awkward teaching an
introduction and probably for that reason [laughs] while I was teaching Lit 300,
which was then called Lit Y, Paul de Man was teaching Lit Z. He was teaching a
lecture course nearby, not at the same time, which was interpretation as practiced
by the School of de Man. That was Lit Z, and it did indeed imply every other form
of theory, and it was extremely rigorous and interesting, but it wasn't a survey. It
took for granted, in other words, that everything else would derive from the
fundamental idea; but it didn't for a minute think that a whole series of
fundamental ideas could share space, could be a kind of smorgasbord that you
could mix and match in a kind of happy-go-lucky, eclectic way, which perhaps we
will be seeming to do from time to time in our introductory course.
Well, does one feel any nostalgia now for the coolness and heat of this moment?
Yes and no. It was fascinating to be--as Wordsworth says, "Bliss was it in that
dawn to be alive"--to be around in those days, but at the same time I think it's
rather advantageous for us too to be still "in theory." That is to say we still have
views. We still have to recognize that what we think derives from this or that
understanding of theory and these or those theoretical principles. We have to
understand the way in which what we do and say, what we write in our papers and
articles, is grounded in theoretical premises which, if we don't come to terms with
them, we will simply naively reproduce without being fully aware of how we're
using them and how, indeed, they are using us. So it is as crucial as ever to
understand theory.
In addition, we have the vantage point of, I suppose, what we can now call history.
Some of what we'll be studying is no longer practiced as that which is the
absolutely necessary central path to methodology. Some of what we're studying
has had its moment of flourishing, has remained influential as a paradigm that
shapes other paradigms, but is not itself, perhaps, today the sole paradigm--which
gives us the opportunity of historical perspective, so that from time to time during
the course of the course, I'll be trying to say something about why certain
theoretical issues and ideas pushed themselves into prominence at certain historical
moments, and that too then can become part of our enterprise. So an introduction is
not only valuable for those of us who simply wish to acquire knowledge. It's also
valuable, I think, in lending an additional perspective to the topic of theory and to
an understanding about how theory is, on the one hand and perhaps in a certain
sense, now an historical topic and is, on the other hand, something that we're very
much engaged in and still committed to: so all that then by way of rationale for
teaching an introduction to theory.

Chapter 5. Literary Theory and the History of Modern Criticism [00:18:11]

All right. Now the question, "How does literary theory relate to the history of
criticism?" That is a course that I like to teach, too; usually I teach Plato to T.S.
Eliot or Plato to I.A. Richards or some other important figure in the early twentieth
century. It's a course which is absolutely fascinating in all sorts of ways, and it has
one very important thing in common with literary theory: that is to say, literary
criticism is, too, perpetually concerned with the definition of literature. Many of
the issues that I raised in talking about defining literature are as relevant for literary
criticism as they are for literary theory, and yet we all instinctively know that these
are two very different enterprises. Literary theory loses something that literary
criticism just takes for granted. Literary theory is not concerned with issues of
evaluation, and it's not really concerned with concomitant issues of appreciation.
Literary theory just takes those for granted as part of the sense experience, as one
might say, of any reader and prefers, rather, to dwell on questions of description,
analysis and speculation, as I've said.
So that's what's lost in theory, but what's new in theory? Here I come to the topic
which will occupy most of my attention for the remainder of the lecture. What's
new in theory is the element of skepticism that literary criticism by and large--
which is usually affirming a canon of some sort--doesn't reflect. Literary theory, as
I say, is skeptical about the foundations of its subject matter and also, in many
cases, about the foundations of what it itself is doing. So the question is: how on
earth did this come about? It's an historical question, as I say, and I want to devote
the rest of the lecture to it. Why should doubt about the veridical or truth-affirming
possibilities of interpretation be so widespread in the twentieth century?
Now here is a big glop of intellectual history. I think the sort of skepticism I mean
arises from what one might call and what often is called modernity--not to be
confused with Modernism, an early twentieth-century phenomenon, but the history
of modern thought as it usually derives from the generation of Descartes,
Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Notice something about all of those figures:
Shakespeare is preoccupied with figures who may or may not be crazy. Cervantes
is preoccupied with a figure who is crazy--we're pretty sure of that, but he certainly
isn't. He takes it for granted that he is the most rational and systematic of all
thinkers and raises questions about--since we all take ourselves to be rational too--
raises questions about just how we know ourselves not to be paranoid delusives
like Don Quixote. So that can be unsettling when we think of this as happening at a
certain contemporaneous moment in the history of thought.
Now Descartes, you remember, in his Meditations begins by asking a series of
questions about how we can know anything, and one of the skeptical questions he
asks is, "Well, might I not be crazy?" In other words, Descartes is still thinking
along these same lines. He says, "Well, maybe I've been seized by an evil genius of
some kind or maybe I'm just crazy." Now why--and here is the question--why do
we get this nervousness about the relationship between what I know and how I
know it arising at this moment? Well, I think it's characterized at least in part by
what Descartes goes on to say in his Meditations. Descartes settles the matter--
perhaps somewhat sweeping the question of whether he is crazy under the rug
because I'm still not sure he answers that question--but he settles the matter
famously by saying, "I think. Therefore, I am," and furthermore, as a concomitant,
"I think, therefore, all the things that I'm thinking about can be understood to exist
as well."
Now the Cartesian Revolution establishes something that is absolutely crucial for
what we call the Enlightenment of the next hundred, hundred and fifty years--in
other words, the idea that there is a distance between the mind and the things that it
thinks about, but that this distance is a good thing. In other words, if you look too
closely at a picture or if you stand too far away from it you don't see it clearly--it's
out of focus--but if you achieve just the right distance from it, it comes into focus.
The idea of scientific objectivity, the idea that motivates the creation of the
great Encyclopedia by the figures of the French Enlightenment--this idea all arises
out of the idea that there is a certain appropriate objective distance between the
perceiver and the perceived. Gradually, however, the idea that this distance is not
too great begins to erode so that in 1796 Kant, who isn't exactly enlisted on the
side of the skeptics by most of his serious students, nevertheless does say
something equally famous as that which Descartes said and a good deal more
disturbing: "We cannot know the thing in itself." Now as I said, Kant erected such
an incredibly magnificent scaffolding around the thing in itself--that is to say, the
variety of ways in which although we can't know it, we can sort of triangulate it
and come to terms with it obliquely--that it seems churlish to enlist him on the side
of the skeptics, but at the same time there's a sense of a danger in the distance
between subject and object that begins to emerge in thinking of this kind.
Now by 1807, Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind is saying that in recent
history and in recent developments of consciousness something unfortunate has set
in. We have "unhappy consciousness," unhappy consciousness which is the result
of estrangement, or Verfremdung, and which drives us too far away from the thing
that we're looking at. We are no longer certain at all of what we're looking at, and
consciousness, therefore, feels alienated. All right. So you can already begin to see
a development in intellectual history that perhaps opens the way to a certain
skepticism. But the crucial thing hasn't yet happened, because after all, in all of
these accounts, even that of Hegel, there is no doubt about the authority of
consciousness to think what it thinks. It may not clearly think about things, about
objects, but it has a kind of legitimate basis that generates the sort of thinking that
it does. But then--and here is where I want you to look at the passages that I've
handed out. Here's where three great figures--there are others but these are
considered the seminal figures--begin to raise questions which complicate the
whole issue of consciousness. Their argument is that it's not just that consciousness
doesn't clearly understand what it's looking at and is therefore alienated from it. It's
also that consciousness is alienated from its own underpinnings, that it doesn't have
any clear sense of where it's coming from any more than what it's looking at: in
other words, that consciousness is not only estranged from the world but that it is
in and of itself inauthentic.
So just quickly look at these passages. Marx, in the famous argument about
commodity fetishism in Kapital, is comparing the way in which we take the
product of human labor and turn it into a commodity by saying that it has objective
value, by saying that we know what its value is in and of itself. He compares that
with religion. The argument is: well, God is a product of human labor. In other
words, it's not a completely supercilious argument, sort of "God is brought into
being the same way objects that we make use of are brought into being." God is a
product of human labor, but then we turn around and we say God exists
independently and has value objectively. Marx's argument is that the two forms of
belief, belief in the objective value of the commodity and belief in God, are the
same. Now whether or not any of this is true, believe me, is neither here nor there.
The point that Marx is making is that consciousness, that is to say the way in
which we believe things, is determined by factors outside its control--that is to say
in the case of Marx's arguments, social, historical and economic factors that
determine what we think and which in general we call "ideology"; that is to say,
ideology is driven by factors beyond the ken of the person who thinks
ideologically.
So you see the problem for consciousness now is not just a single problem. It's
twofold: its inauthentic relationship with the things it looks at and also its
inauthentic relationship with its own underpinnings. The argument is exactly the
same for Nietzsche, only he shifts the ground of attack. For Nietzsche, the
underpinnings of consciousness which make the operations of consciousness
inauthentic are the nature of language itself. That is to say that when we think
we're telling the truth we're actually using worn-out figures of speech. "What then
is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms--in short,
a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified,"
etc., etc., etc., "and are now no longer of account as coins but are debased."
Now that word "now" [laughs] is very important. It suggests that Nietzsche does
somehow believe that there's a privileged moment in the history of language when
perhaps language is a truth serum, when it is capable of telling the truth, but
language has now simply become a question of worn-out figures, all of which
dictates what we believe to be true. I speak in a figurative way about the
relationship between the earth and the sky, and I believe that there's a sky god. I
move from speech to belief because I simply don't believe that I'm using figures of
speech. All of this is implied in Nietzsche's argument. In other words, language,
the nature of language, and the way language is received by us, in turn determines
what we can do with it, which is to say it determines what we think, so that for
Nietzsche the distortion of truth--that is to say the distortion of the power to
observe in consciousness--has as its underlying cause language, the state of
language, the status of language.
Freud finally argues for exactly the same relationship between consciousness--that
is to say, what I think I am thinking from minute to minute--and the unconscious,
which perpetually in one way or another unsettles what I'm thinking and saying
from minute to minute. You know that in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
Freud reminded us that the Freudian slip isn't something that happens just
sometimes--and nobody knows this better than an ad libbing lecturer--;it's
something that happens all the time. The Freudian slip is something that one lives
with simply as a phenomenon of the slippage of consciousness under the influence
of the unconscious.

Chapter 6. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion [00:32:10]

Now in the passage I gave you, Freud says a very interesting thing, which is that
after all, we have absolutely no objective evidence that the unconscious exists. If I
could see the unconscious, it'd be conscious. Right. The unconscious, Freud is
saying, is something that we have to infer from the way consciousness operates.
We've got to infer something. We've got to figure out somehow how it is that
consciousness is never completely uninhibited, never completely does and says
what it wants to say. So the spin on consciousness for Freud is the unconscious.
Now someone who didn't fully believe Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, a very
important modern philosopher in the hermeneutic tradition named Paul Ricoeur,
famously said in the fourth passage on your sheet that these great precursors of
modern thought--and particularly, I would immediately add, of modern literary
theory--together dominate a "school of suspicion." There is in other words in
Ricoeur's view a hermeneutics of suspicion, and "skepticism" or "suspicion" is a
word that can also be appropriated perhaps more rigorously for philosophy as
negativity. That is to say, whatever seems manifest or obvious or patent in what we
are looking at is undermined for this kind of mind by a negation which is
counterintuitive: that is to say, which would seem not just to qualify what we
understand ourselves to be looking at but to undermine it altogether. And these
tendencies in the way in which Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have been received
have been tremendously influential. When we read Foucault's "What is an
Author?" next time we'll return to this question of how Marx, Nietzsche and Freud
have been received and what we should make of that in view of Foucault's idea
that--well, not that there's no such thing as an author but that it's rather dangerous
to believe that there are authors. So if it's dangerous to believe that there are
authors, what about Marx, Nietzsche and Freud? Foucault confronts this question
in "What is an Author?" and gives us some interesting results of his thinking. For
us, the aftermath even precisely of the passages I have just quoted, but certainly of
the oeuvre of the three authors I have quoted from, can to a large degree be
understood as accounting for our topic--the phenomenon of literary theory as we
study it. In other words, literary theory, because of the influence of these figures, is
to a considerable degree a hermeneutics of suspicion recognized as such both by its
proponents and famously--I think this is perhaps what is historically remote for
you--by its enemies.
During the same period when I was first teaching this course, a veritable six-foot
shelf of diatribes against literary theory was being written in the public sphere.
You can take or leave literary theory, fine, but the idea that there would be such an
incredible outcry against it was one of the most fascinating results of it. That is to
say for many, many, many people literary theory had something to do with the end
of civilization as we know it. That's one of the things that seems rather strange to
us today from an historical perspective: that the undermining of foundational
knowledge which seemed to be part and parcel of so much that went on in literary
theory was seen as the central crucial threat to rationality emanating from the
academy and was attacked in those terms in, as I say, at least six feet of lively
polemics. All of that is the legacy of literary theory, and as I say, it arises in part
from the element of skepticism that I thought it best to emphasize today.
Now I think that one thing Ricoeur leaves out, and something that we can
anticipate as becoming more and more important for literary theory and other kinds
of theory in the twenty-first century, is Darwin. That is to say, it strikes me that
Darwin could very easily be considered a fourth hermeneut of suspicion. Of
course, Darwin was not interested in suspicion but he was certainly the founder of
ways of thinking about consciousness that are determined, socio-biologically
determined: determined in the realm of cognitive science, determined as artificial
intelligence, and so on. All of this is Darwinian thinking and, I think, increasingly
will be central in importance in the twenty-first century. What will alter the shape
of literary theory as it was known and studied in the twentieth century is, I think,
an increasing emphasis on cognitive science and socio-biological approaches both
to literature and to interpretive processes that will derive from Darwin in the same
way that strands of thinking of the twentieth century derive from the three figures
that I've mentioned.
But what all this gives rise to--and this brings me finally to the passages which you
have on both sides of your sheet and which I don't want to take up today but just to
preview--the passages from Henry James' Ambassadors from 1903, and from
Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard from 1904. In other words, I am at pains to remind
you that this is a specific historical moment in which, in a variety of ways, in each
case the speaker argues that consciousness--that is to say, the feeling of being alive
and being someone acting in the world--no longer involves agency: the feeling that
somehow to be conscious has become to be a puppet, that there is a limitation on
what we can do, imposed by the idea that consciousness is determined in ways that
we cannot control and cannot get the better of, so that Strether in The
Ambassadors and Yepihodov in The Cherry Orchard speak for a point of view
which is a kind of partially well-informed gloom and doom that could be
understood to anticipate texts that are much better informed, that we will be
considering but nevertheless are especially important as an aspect of their historical
moment. I want to begin the next lecture by taking up those passages. Please do
bring them, and I will also be passing around Tony the Tow Truck and I'll give you
a brief description of what the little children's book actually looks like, and then we
will plunge in to the question "What is an author?" So I'll see you on Thursday.

ENGL-300: INTRODUCTION TO THEORY OF LITERATURE

Lecture 2 - Introduction (cont.) [January 15, 2009]

Chapter 1. Introduction [00:00:00]

Professor Paul Fry: Last time we introduced the way in which the preoccupation
with literary and other forms of theory in the twentieth century is shadowed by a
certain skepticism, but as we were talking about that we actually introduced
another issue which isn't quite the same as the issue of skepticism--namely,
determinism. In other words, we said that in intellectual history, first you get this
movement of concern about the distance between the perceiver and the perceived,
a concern that gives rise to skepticism about whether we can know things as they
really are. But then as a kind of aftermath of that movement in figures like Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud--and you'll notice that Foucault reverts to such figures when
he turns to the whole question of "founders of discursivity," we'll come back to
that--in figures like that, you get the further question of not just how we can know
things in themselves as they really are but how we can trust the autonomy of that
which knows: in other words, how we can trust the autonomy of consciousness if
in fact there's a chance--a good chance, according to these writers--that it is in turn
governed by, controlled by, hidden powers or forces. This question of determinism
is as important in the discourse of literary theory as the question of skepticism.
They're plainly interrelated in a variety of ways, but it's more to the question of
determinism I want to return today.

Chapter 2. Anton Chekhov and Henry James [00:01:52]

Now last time, following Ricoeur, I mentioned Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as key
figures in the sort of secondary development that somehow inaugurates theory, and
then I added Darwin. It seems particularly important to think of Darwin when we
begin to think about the ways in which in the twentieth century, a variety of
thinkers are concerned about human agency--that is to say, what becomes of the
idea that we have autonomy, that we can act or at least that we can act with a sense
of integrity and not just with a sense that we are being pulled by our strings like a
puppet. In the aftermath of Darwin in particular, our understanding of natural
selection, our understanding of genetic hard-wiring and other factors, makes us
begin to wonder in what sense we can consider ourselves, each of us, to be
autonomous subjects. And so, as I say, the question of agency arises.
It's in that context, needless to say, that I'd like to take a look at these two
interesting passages on the sheet that has Anton Chekhov on one side and Henry
James on the other. Let's begin with the Chekhov. The Cherry Orchard, you know,
is about the threat owing to socioeconomic conditions, the conditions that do
ultimately lead to the Menshevik Revolution of 1905, to a landed estate, and the
perturbation and turmoil into which the cast of characters is thrown by this threat.
Now one of the more interesting characters, who is not really a protagonist in the
play for class reasons, is a house servant named Yepihodov, and Yepihodov is a
character who is, among other things, a kind of autodidact. That is to say, he has
scrambled into a certain measure of knowledge about things. He is full of a kind of
understandable self-pity, and his speeches are in some ways more characteristic of
the gloomy intellectual milieu that is reflected in Chekhov's text really than almost
anyone else's.
I want to quote to you a couple of them. Toward the bottom of the first page, he
says, "I'm a cultivated man. I read all kinds of remarkable books and yet I can
never make out what direction I should take, what it is that I want, properly
speaking." As I read, pay attention to the degree to which he's constantly talking
about language and about the way in which he himself is inserted into language.
He's perpetually seeking a mode of properly speaking. He is a person who is
somewhat knowledgeable about books, feels himself somehow to be caught up in
the matrix of book learning--in other words, a person who is very much
preoccupied with his conditioning by language, not least when perhaps unwittingly
he alludes to Hamlet. "Should I live or should I shoot myself?"--properly speaking,
"To be or not to be?" In other words, he inserts himself into the dramatic tradition
to which as a character he himself belongs and shows himself to be in a debased
form derived from one of those famous charismatic moments in which a hero utters
a comparable concern.
So in all sorts of ways, in this simple passage we find a character who's caught up
in the snare--if I can put it that way--the snare of language. To continue, he says at
the top of the next page, "Properly speaking and letting other subjects alone, I must
say"--everything in terms of what other discourse does and what he himself can
say, and of course, it's mainly about "me"--"regarding myself among other things,
that fate treats me mercilessly as a storm treats a small boat." And the end of the
passage is, "Have you read Buckle?" Now Buckle is a forgotten name today, but at
one time he was just about as famous as Oswald Spengler who wrote The Decline
of the West. He was a Victorian historian preoccupied with the dissolution of
Western civilization. In other words, Buckle was the avatar of the notion in the late
nineteenth century that everything was going to hell in a handbasket. One of the
texts that Yepihodov has read that in a certain sense determines him is Buckle.
"Have you read Buckle? I wish to have a word with you Avdotya Fyodorovna." In
other words, I'm arguing that the saturation of these speeches with signs of words,
language, speaking, words, books, is just the dilemma of the character. That is to
say, he is in a certain sense book- and language-determined, and he's obscurely
aware that this is his problem even as it's a source of pride for him.
Turning then to a passage in a very different tone from James's Ambassadors. An
altogether charming character, the elderly Lambert Strether, who has gone to--most
of you know--has gone to Paris to bring home the young Chad Newsome, a
relative who is to take over the family business, the manufacture of an unnamed
household article in Woollett, Massachusetts, probably toilet paper. In any case,
Lambert Strether, as he arrives in Paris, has awakened to the sheer wonder of
urbane culture. He recognizes that he's missed something. He's gone to a party
given by a sculptor, and at this party he meets a young man named Little Bilham
whom he likes, and he takes Little Bilham aside by the lapel, and he makes a long
speech to him, saying, "Don't do what I have done. Don't miss out on life. Live all
you can. It is a mistake not to. And this is why," he goes on to say, "the affair, I
mean the affair of life"--it's as though he's anticipating the affair of Chad Newsome
and Madame de Vionnet, which is revealed at the end of the text--"couldn't, no
doubt, have been different for me for it's"--"it" meaning life--"[life is] at the best a
tin mold either fluted or embossed with ornamental excrescences or else smooth
and dreadfully plain, into which, a helpless jelly, one's consciousness, is poured so
that one takes the form, as the great cook says"--the great cook, by the way, is
Brillat-Savarin--"one takes the form, as the great cook says, and is more or less
compactly held by it. One lives, in fine, as one can. Still one has the illusion of
freedom."
Here is where Strether says something very clever that I think we can make use of.
He says, "Therefore, don't be like me without the memory of that illusion. I was
either at the right time too stupid or too intelligent to have it. I don't quite know
which." Now if he was too stupid to have it, then of course he would have been
liberated into the realm of action. He would have been what Nietzsche in an
interesting precursor text calls "historical man." He simply would have plunged
ahead into life as though he had freedom, even though he was too stupid to
recognize that it was an illusion. On the other hand, if he was too intelligent to, as
it were, bury the illusion and live as though he were free, if he was too intelligent
to do that, he's a kind of an avatar of the literary theorist--in other words, the sort
of person who can't forget long enough that freedom is an illusion in order to get
away from the preoccupations that, as I've been saying, characterize a certain kind
of thinking in the twentieth century. And it's rather charming at the last that he
says--because how can we know anything--"I don't quite know which."

Chapter 3. Author and Authority [00:11:26]

That, too, strikes me as a helpful and also characteristic passage that can introduce
us to today's subject, which is the loss of authority: that is to say, in Roland
Barthes' terms, "the death of the author," and in Foucault's terms, the question
"What is an author?" In other words, in the absence of human agency, the first
sacrifice for literary theory is the author, the idea of the author. That's what will
concern us in this second, still introductory lecture to this course. We'll get into the
proper or at least more systematic business of the course when we turn to
hermeneutics next week.
Now let me set the scene. This is Paris. It wouldn't have to be Paris. It could be
Berkeley or Columbia or maybe Berlin. It's 1968 or '69, spilling over in to the
seventies. Students and most of their professors are on the barricades, that is to say
in protest not only against the war in Vietnam but the outpouring of various forms
of authoritative resistance to protest that characterized the sixties. There is a
ferment of intellectual revolt which takes all sorts of forms in Paris but is first and
foremost perhaps organized by what quickly in this country became a bumper
sticker: "Question authority." This is the framework in which the then most
prominent intellectual in France writes an essay at the very peak of the student
uprising, entitled "What is an Author?" and poses an answer which is by no means
straightforward and simple. You're probably a little frustrated because maybe you
sort of anticipated what he was going to say, and then you read it and you said,
"Gee, he really isn't saying that. In fact, I don't quite know what he is saying" and
struggled more than you're expected to because you anticipated what I've just been
saying about the setting and about the role of Foucault and all the rest of it, and
were possibly more confused than you might have expected to be. Yet at the same
time, you probably thought "Oh, yeah, well, I did come out pretty much in the
place I expected to come out in despite the roundabout way of having gotten
there." Because this lecture is introductory, I'm not going to spend a great deal of
time explicating the more difficult moments in his argument. I am going to
emphasize what you perhaps did anticipate that he would say, so that can take us
along rather smoothly.
There is an initial issue. Because we're as skeptical about skepticism as we are
about anything else we're likely to raise our eyebrows and say, "Hmm. Doesn't this
guy Foucault think he's an author? You know, after all, he's a superstar. He's used
to being taken very seriously. Does he want to say that he's just an author function,
that his textual field is a kind of set of structural operations within which one can
discover an author? Does he really want to say this?" Well, this is the question
raised by the skeptic about skepticism or about theory and it's one that we're going
to take rather seriously, but we're going to come back to it because there are ways,
it seems to me, of keeping this question at arm's length. In other words, Foucault is
up to something interesting, and probably we should meet him at least halfway to
see, to measure, the degree of interest we may have in it. So yes, there is the
question--there is the fact that stands before u--that this very authoritative-
sounding person seems to be an author, right? I never met anybody who seemed
more like an author than this person, and yet he's raising the question whether there
is any such thing, or in any case, the question how difficult it is to decide what it is
if there is.
Let me digress with an anecdote which may or may not sort of help us to
understand the delicacy of this relationship between a star author, a person
undeniably a star author, and the atmosphere of thought in which there is, in a
certain sense, no such thing as an author. An old crony and former colleague of
mine was taking a course at Johns Hopkins in the 1960s. This was a time when
Hopkins led all American universities in the importing of important European
scholars, and it was a place of remarkable intellectual ferment. This particular
lecture course was being given by Georges Poulet, a so-called phenomenological
critic. That's one of the "isms" we aren't covering in this seminar. In any case,
Poulet was also a central figure on the scene of the sixties. Poulet would be
lecturing along, and the students had somehow formed a habit of from time to
time--by the way, you can form this habit, too--of raising their hand, and what they
would do is they would utter a name--at least this is what my friend noticed. They
would raise their hand and they would say, "Mallarmé." And Poulet would look at
them and say, "Mais, oui! Exactement! A mon avis aussi!" And then he would go
on and continue to lecture for a while. Then somebody else would raise his hand
and say, "Proust." "Ah, précisément! Proust. Proust." And then he'd continue
along. So my friend decided he'd give it a try [laughter] and he raised his hand and
he said, "Voltaire," and Poulet said "Quoi donc… Je ne vous comprends pas," and
then paused and hesitated and continued with his lecture as though my friend had
never asked his question.
Now this is a ritual of introducing names, and in a certain sense, yes, the names of
authors, the names of stars; but at the same time, plainly names that stand for
something other than their mere name, names that stand for domains or fields of
interesting discursivity: that is to say--I mean, Poulet was the kind of critic who
believed that the oeuvre of an author was a totality that could be understood as a
structural whole, and his criticism worked that way. And so yes, the signal that this
field of discursivity is on the table is introduced by the name of the author but it
remains just a name. It's an author without authority, yet at the same time it's an
author who stands for, whose name stands for, an important field of discourse.
That's of course what my friend--because he knew perfectly well that when he said
"Voltaire," Poulet would [laughs] have nothing to do with it--that's the idea that my
friend wanted to experiment with. There are relevant and interesting fields of
discourse and there are completely irrelevant fields of discourse, and some of these
fields are on the sides of angelic discourse and some of these fields are on the side
of the demonic. We simply, kind of spontaneously, make the division.

Chapter 4. "The Founders of Discursivity" [00:19:36]

Discursivity, discourse: that's what I forgot to talk about last time. When I said that
sometimes people just ultimately throw up their hands when they try to define
literature and say, "Well, literature's just whatever you say it is. Fine. Let's just go
ahead," they are then much more likely, rather than using the word "literature," to
use the word "discourse" or "textual field," "discursivity." You begin to hear, or
perhaps smell, the slight whiff of jargon that pervades theoretical writing. It often
does so for a reason. This is the reason one hears so much about discourse. Simply
because of doubt about the generic integrity of various forms of discourse. One can
speak hesitantly of literary discourse, political discourse, anthropological
discourse, but one doesn't want to go so far as to say literature, political science,
anthropology. It's a habit that arises from the sense of the permeability of all forms
of utterance with respect to each other, and that habit, as I say, is a breakdown of
the notion that certain forms of utterance can be understood as a delimited,
structured field.
One of the reasons this understanding seems so problematic is the idea that we
don't appeal to the authority of an author in making our mind about the nature of a
given field of discourse. We find the authority of the author instead somewhere
within the textual experience. The author is a signal, is what Foucault calls a
"function." By the way, this isn't at all a question of the author not existing. Yes,
Barthes talks about the death of the author, but even Barthes doesn't mean that the
author is dead like Nietzsche's God. The author is there, sure. It's a question rather
of how we know the author to be there, firstly, and secondly, whether or not in
attempting to determine the meaning of a text--and this is something we'll be
talking about next week--we should appeal to the authority of an author. If the
author is a function, that function is something that appears, perhaps
problematically appears, within the experience of the text, something we get in
terms of the speaker, the narrator, or--in the case of plays--as the inferred
orchestrator of the text: something that we infer from the way the text unfolds. So
as a function and not as a subjective consciousness to which we appeal to grasp a
meaning, the author still does exist.
So we consider a text as a structured entity, or perhaps as an entity which is
structured and yet at the same time somehow or another passes out of structure--
that's the case with Roland Barthes. Here I want to appeal to a couple of passages. I
want to quote from the beginning of Roland Barthes' essay, which I know I only
suggested, but I'm simply going to quote the passage so you don't have to have
read it, The Death of the Author. It's on page 874 for those of you who have your
texts, as I hope you do. Barthes, while writing this--he's writing what has perhaps
in retrospect seemed to be his most important book, it's called S/Z. It's a huge book
which is all about this short story by Balzac, "Sarrasine," that he begins this essay
by quoting. This is what he says here about "Sarrasine":
In his story "Sarrasine" Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes
the following sentence: "This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her
irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings and
her delicious sensibility." [Barthes says,] "Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of
the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is
it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of
Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing "literary" ideas on femininity? Is it
universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good
reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.
Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject [and this is a
deliberate pun] slips away ["our subject" meaning that we don't quite know what's
being talked about sometimes, but also and more importantly the subject, the
authorial subject, the actual identity of the given speaking subject--that's what slips
away] the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the
body writing.
So that's a shot fired across the bow against the author because it's Barthes'
supposition that the author isn't maybe even quite an author function because that
function may be hard to identify in a discrete way among myriad other functions.
Foucault, who I think does take for granted that a textual field is more firmly
structured than Barthes supposes, says on page 913 that when we speak of the
author function, as opposed to the author--and here I begin quoting at the bottom of
the left-hand column on page 913--when we speak in this way we no longer raise
the questions:
"How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning?
How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the
designs which are properly own--its own?"
In other words, we no longer say, "How does the author exert autonomous will
with respect to the subject matter being expressed?" We no longer appeal, in other
words, to the authority of the author as the source of the meaning that we find in
the text.
Foucault continues,
Instead, these questions will be raised: "How, under what conditions, and in what
forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place
can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by
obeying what rules?" In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its
substitute)… [That is to say, when we speak in this way of an author function,] it is
a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) [a character, for example, or a
speaker, as we say when we don't mean that it's the poet talking but the guy
speaking in "My Last Duchess" or whatever] of its role as originator, and of
analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.
"The subject" here always means the subjectivity of the speaker, right, not the
subject matter. You'll get used to it because it's a word that does a lot of duty, and
you need to develop context in which you recognize that well, yeah, I'm talking
about the human subject or well, I'm talking about the subject matter; but I trust
that you will quickly kind of adjust to that difficulty.

Chapter 5. Critique of the "Author Function" [00:28:20]

All right. So with this said, it's probably time to say something in defense of the
author. I know that you wish you could stand up here and say something in defense
of the author, so I will speak in behalf of all of you who want to defend the author
by quoting a wonderful passage from Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare, in
which he explains for us why it is that we have always paid homage to the
authority of the author. It's not just a question, as obviously Foucault and Barthes
are always suggesting, of deferring to authority as though the authority were the
police with a baton in its hand, right? It's not a question of deferring to authority in
that sense. It's a question, rather, of affirming what we call the human spirit.
This is what Johnson says:
There is always a silent reference of human works to human abilities, and as the
inquiry, how far man may extend his designs or how high he may rate his native
force, is of far greater dignity than in what rank we shall place any particular
performance, curiosity is always busy to discover the instruments as well as to
survey the workmanship, to know how much is to be ascribed to original powers
and how much to casual and adventitious help.
So what Johnson is saying is: well, it's all very well to consider a textual field, the
workmanship, but at the same time we want to remind ourselves of our worth. We
want to say, "Well, gee, that wasn't produced by a machine. That's not just a set of
functions--variables, as one might say in the lab. It's produced by genius. It's
something that allows us to rate human ability high." And that, especially in this
vale of tears--and Johnson is very conscious of this being a vale of tears--that's
what we want to keep doing. We want to rate human potential as high as we can,
and it is for that reason in a completely different spirit, in the spirit of homage
rather than cringing fear, that we appeal to the authority of an author.
Well, that's an argument for the other side, but these are different times. This is
1969, and the purpose that's alleged for appealing to the author as a paternal
source, as an authority, is, according to both Barthes and Foucault, to police the
way texts are read. In other words, both of them insist that the appeal to the
author--as opposed to the submersion of the author in the functionality of the
textual field--is a kind of delimitation or policing of the possibilities of meaning.
Let me just read two texts to that effect, first going back to Roland Barthes on page
877. Barthes says, "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text
becomes quite futile." By the way, once again there's a bit of a rift there between
Barthes and Foucault. Foucault wouldn't say "quite futile." He would say, "Oh, no.
We can decipher it, but the author function is just one aspect of the deciphering
process." But Barthes has entered a phase of his career in which you actually think
that structures are so complex that they cease to be structures and that this has a
great deal to do with the influence of deconstruction. We'll come back to that much
later in the course.
In any case, he continues.
To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final
signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism [and criticism is a
lot like policing, right--"criticism" means being a critic, criticizing] very well, the
latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its
hypostases: society, history, psyché, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author
has been found, the text is "explained"--a victory to the critic.
In other words, the policing of meaning has been accomplished and the critic wins,
just as in the uprisings of the late sixties, the cops win. This is, again, the
atmosphere in which all of this occurs--just then to reinforce this with the
pronouncement of Foucault at the bottom of page 913, right-hand column: "The
author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which
we fear the proliferation of meaning."
Now once again, there is this sort of the skepticism about skepticism. You say,
"Why shouldn't I fear the proliferation of meaning? I want to know what
something definitely means. I don't want to know that it means a million things.
I'm here to learn what things mean in so many words. I don't want to be told that I
could sit here for the rest of my life just sort of parsing one sentence. Don't tell me
about that. Don't tell me about these complicated sentences from Balzac's short
story. I'm here to know what things mean. I don't care if it's policing or not.
Whatever it is, let's get it done." That, of course, is approaching the question of
how we might delimit meaning in a very different spirit. The reason I acknowledge
the legitimacy of responding in this way is that to a certain extent the
preoccupation with--what shall we say?--the misuse of the appeal to an author is
very much of its historical moment. That is to say, when one can scarcely say the
word "author" without thinking "authority," and one can definitely never say the
word "authority" without thinking about the police. This is a structure of thought
that perhaps pervades the lives of many of us to this day and has always pervaded
the lives of many people, but is not quite as hegemonic in our thinking today
perhaps as it was in the moment of these essays by Barthes and Foucault.
All right. With all this said, how can the theorist recuperate honor for certain
names like, for example, his own? "All right. It's all very well. You're not an
author, but I secretly think I'm an author, right?" Let's suppose someone were
dastardly enough to harbor such thoughts. How could you develop an argument in
which a thought like that might actually seem to work? After all, Foucault--setting
himself aside, he doesn't mention himself--Foucault very much admires certain
writers. In particular, he admires, like so many of his generation and other
generations, Marx and Freud. It's a problem if we reject the police-like authority of
authors, of whom we may have a certain suspicion on those grounds, when we
certainly don't feel that way about Marx and Freud. What's the difference then?
How is Foucault going to mount an argument in which privileged authors--that is
to say, figures whom one cites positively and without a sense of being policed--can
somehow or another stay in the picture?
Foucault, by the way, doesn't mention Nietzsche, but he might very well because
Nietzsche's idea of "genealogy" is perhaps the central influence on Foucault's
work. Frankly, I think it's just an accident that he doesn't mention him. It would
have been a perfect symmetry because last time we quoted Paul Ricoeur to the
effect that these authors, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, were--and this is Ricoeur's
word--"masters." Whoa! That's the last thing we want to hear. They're not masters.
Foucault couldn't possibly allow for that because plainly the whole texture of their
discourse would be undermined by introducing the notion that it's okay to be a
master, and yet Ricoeur feels that these figures dominate modern thought as
masters.
How does Foucault deal with this? He invents a concept. He says, "They aren't
authors. They're founders of discursivity," and then he grants that it's kind of
difficult to distinguish between a founder of discursivity and an author who has
had an important influence. Right? And then he talks about the gothic novel and he
talks about Radcliffe's, Anne Radcliffe's--he's wrong about this, by the way. The
founder of discursivity in the gothic novel is not Anne Radcliffe; it's Horace
Walpole, but that's okay--he talks about Anne Radcliffe as the person who
establishes certain tropes, topoi, and premises that govern the writing of gothic
fiction for the next hundred years and, indeed, even in to the present, so that she is,
Foucault acknowledges, in a certain sense a person who establishes a way of
talking, a way of writing, a way of narrating. But at the same time she isn't a
person, Foucault claims, who introduces a discourse or sphere of debate within
which ideas, without being attributable necessarily, can nevertheless be developed.
Well, I don't know. It seems to me that literary influence is not at all unlike sort of
speaking or writing in the wake of a founder of discursivity, but we can let that
pass.
On the other hand, Foucault is very concerned to distinguish figures like this from
scientists like Galileo and Newton. Now it is interesting, by the way, maybe in
defense of Foucault, that whereas we speak of people as Marxist or Freudian, we
don't speak of people as Radcliffian or Galilean or Newtonian. We use the
adjective "Newtonian" but we don't speak of certain writers who are still interested
in quantum mechanics as "Newtonian writers." That's interesting in a way, and
may somehow or another justify Foucault's understanding of the texts of those
author functions known as Marx and Freud--whose names might be raised in
Poulet's lecture class with an enthusiastic response--as place holders for those
fields of discourse. It may, in some sense, reinforce Foucault's argument that these
are special inaugurations of debate, of developing thought, that do not
necessarily kowtow to the originary figure--certainly debatable, but we don't want
to pause over it in the case either of Marx or of Freud. Plainly, there are a great
many people who think of them as tyrants, right, but within the traditions that they
established, it is very possible to understand them as instigating ways of thinking
without necessarily presiding over those ways of thinking authoritatively. That is
the special category that Foucault wants to reserve for those privileged figures
whom he calls founders of discursivity.
All right. Very quickly then to conclude: one consequence of the death of the
author, and the disappearance of the author into author function is, as Foucault
curiously says in passing on page 907, that the author has no legal status. And you
say, "What? What about copyright? What about intellectual property? That's a
horrible thing to say, that the author has no legal status." Notice once again the
intellectual context. Copyright arose as a bourgeois idea. That is to say, "I possess
my writing. I have an ownership relationship with my writing." The disappearance
of the author, like a kind of corollary disappearance of bourgeois thought, entails,
in fact, a kind of bracketing of the idea of copyright or intellectual property. And
so there's a certain consistency in what Foucault is saying about the author having
no legal status.
But maybe at this point it really is time to dig in our heels. "I am a lesbian Latina. I
stand before you as an author articulating an identity for the purpose of achieving
freedom, not to police you, not to deny your freedom, but to find my own freedom.
And I stand before you precisely, and in pride, as an author. I don't want to be
called an author function. I don't want to be called an instrument of something
larger than myself because frankly that's what I've always been, and I want
precisely as an authority through my authorship to remind you that I am not
anybody's instrument but that I am autonomous and free."
In other words, the author, the traditional idea of the author--so much under
suspicion in the work of Foucault and Barthes in the late sixties--can be turned on
its ear. It can be understood as a source of new-found authority, of the freedom of
one who has been characteristically not free and can be received by a reading
community in those terms. It's very difficult to think how a Foucault might respond
to that insistence, and it's a problem that in a way dogs everything, or many of the
things we're going to be reading during the course of this semester--even within the
sorts of theorizing that are characteristically called cultural studies and concern
questions of the politics of identity. Even within those disciplines there is a
division of thought between people who affirm the autonomous integrity and
individuality of the identity in question and those who say any and all identities are
only subject positions discernible and revealed through the matrix of social
practices. There is this intrinsic split even within those forms of theory--and not to
mention the kinds of theory that don't directly have to do with the politics of
identity--between those for whom what's at stake is the discovery of autonomous
individuality and those for whom what's at stake is the tendency to hold at arm's
length such discoveries over against the idea that the instability of any and all
subject positions is what actually contains within it--as Foucault and Barthes
thought as they sort of sat looking at the police standing over against them--those
for whom this alternative notion of the undermining of any sense of that which is
authoritative is in its turn a possible source, finally, of freedom. These sorts of
vexing issues, as I say, in all sorts of ways will dog much of what we read during
the course of this semester.
All right. So much for the introductory lectures which touch on aspects of the
materials that we'll keep returning to. On Tuesday we'll turn to a more specific
subject matter: hermeneutics, what hermeneutics is, how we can think about the
nature of interpretation. Our primary text will be the excerpt in your book from
Hans-Georg Gadamer and a few passages that I'll be handing out from Martin
Heidegger and E.D. Hirsch.

© Yale University 2013. Most of the lectures and course material

within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Unless explicitly
set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party
content is not covered under the