6 February 2012 Why critical theory?

Implicit cultural assumptions of the value of a liberal arts education, of the study of literature associations with preparation for citizenship Challenge to New Criticism underlying humanist assumptions that the study of literature made you a better person Rise of deconstruction, post-structuralism, queer theory Late 1980s, early 1990s New Historicism as challenge to post-structuralism; attempt to reintroduce historical contexts New Historicism challenged by Cultural Theory Ethnic and racial challenges to literary studies rise of identity politics Balkanization of Critical Theory Borges, T.S. Eliot, Foucault All texts about production of literature from perspective of author No important distinction between what it means to be a critic/author Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent Historical status of this essay so often criticized as a text that canonizes tradition Not necessarily interested in canonization, perhaps grounding a new sense of what tradition ought to be Taboo of traditional Argument against individualism Moment of high modernist experimentation with form that was both highly praised and censured Great writing as product of individual with most innovative way of experiencing breaking tradition Critiques notion that individualism (breaking tradition) is the equivalent of the greatest virtue of art Subversive challenge to history of high modernism and romanticism Uninterested in emotions; makes a distinction between emotions and feelings Tradition involves the historical sense not only the pastness of the past, but of its presence sense of timeless and temporal together; consciousness of contemporaneity A traditional writer is not just trying to take specific themes from the past and trying to reanimate them Author just as a medium for new work Simultaneous existence of works of art Response to cult of personality your work is not more relevant because you are alive Modernism and postmodernism, even, could be entirely traditional Traditional writing (done in the way Eliot is most interested in) is the most innovative writing The traditional is the most interesting form of the subversive In fact, it becomes extremely hard to pinpoint exactly what traditional means in this essay Intentionality becomes a problem What does it mean to sacrifice ones personality? Notion of the problem of tradition is inherent in the problem of what constitutes writing every time someone writes is an attempt to engage with tradition Timeless: great literature is enduring and eternal or what a great work of literature does is transform history in a way that what came before is simply the transformed

Literature has the effect of challenging our historical narrative altogether He may in fact have more in common with Foucault than people prescribe Emotion vs. feeling: to express feelings that are not part of emotions at all Comparison to chemical experiment: entry of the writer into catalysis distillation and fusion, under the pressure of the experiment, what were left with is feeling; feeling is uninterested in the individuality of emotions Feelings as aesthetic effect produced by work of art Emotions are individual experience in and of itself are aesthetically uninteresting Notion of self-sacrifice as extinction of personality form of martyrdom, extinction of self in the hopes that martyrdom will make you, in effect, a part of things Self-sacrifice without a return theory of impersonality as described in this essay is crucial in thinking about what constitutes literary value, value of literary works and act of being a writer On the one hand, art is an act of self-sacrifice (giving up personality for Great Work of Art to reenter and transform tradition), but at the same time is the notion that what art does and what tradition does is to eradicate, altogether, the self What it means to create great art an act as a form of redemption? Or is it an act of impersonal selferadication with no possibility of returning or repayment Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote Is Borges trying to give a literary enactment of Eliots theory? Or is Borges making fun of Eliots argument? Exposing certain incoherencies? Who is this narrator, and why do we need him as a guide to Pierre Menard? What it means to write a story from the voice of a literary critic?