Mapping Guillory's argument.

Unity of Self

Pretencious: I am invested in the belief that I can write myself into being. Some kind of whole, coherent entity found in a collection of thoughts that indicate ‘me’ as distinct from the world, rather than part of it. I want authors to acknowledge that they are individually located. The Other is incommensurable (aka Ien Ang). It is so feminist and embodied (aka Felski). But who is to say that we are these discreet bodies, or texts, anyway? The text is not a penis that penetrates the reader.

My commitment to the personal in literary criticism stems from the belief that ‘objective’ knowledge is always influenced by subjective positions (aka Felski, Sedgwick). However I see two major flaws. Firstly, how, as authors and readers, can we ever objectively know, disclose or admit our ‘true’ subjective position? In itself, that would require an arrogant and totalising form of self-knowledge, flawed in the ironic certainty of its own objectivity. Secondly, I’m not so sure that we are these coherent selves to be influencing and influenced by the external world as Other.

Here I am again in dialogue with the text, like a lover, unable to distinguish start and finish. The text as father figure perhaps? Or an ex-lover? Saturated with you everywhere I went: so deep in my pores that

in your absence I
had no presence. In
every song, every

walkway, no sense of
who I was without you, and
your perspective.

You used to dictate all I knew but now I’m reinscribing me, making you a distant memory, referenced in conversation. A “we” of foreign time, no longer lived. We were so involved. Our words danced in blissful identification, something mutual on the page. But now we meet as strangers. I’ve forgotten the structure of your arguments, your favourite phrases. Most of all, I’ve forgotten the me that used to love you.

But you still call to me, sometimes, from the sublime. You embody all manner of concepts and phrases. I lose my footing; stray from the path; from book to memory. Gravity fails, my stomach turns. ---- Maybe you were never there, just a trace, an echo in the great blurriness of we; all things in tandem. Or, more frighteningly, maybe you were just an extension of my self-identification.

Attempting to write myself into a coherent history, I try to read you, to read the world as you would. In my head I say

“You know what I’m like,”
as though “I” could ever be
reconcilable to some

kind of truth. A text
with discreet boundaries, able
to be located,

to have the cover
open or closed. The pages
kiss my fingertips.


- Ang, Ien (1995) “I’m a feminist but...: Other women and postnational feminism”. B Caine and R Pringle (eds.), Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, St Leonards: Allen and Unwin

- Felski, Rita (2009) “After Suspicion”, Profession, pp. 28-35

- Sedgwick, Eve (1999) A Dialogue on Love, Boston: Beacon Press

Guillory's Literary Capital

Guillory critiques liberal pluralism from a post-Marxian perspective, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu to address the class differences in literary capital.

Liberal pluralism is about equal representation of identities – women, black, Asian, poor, and so on. Many universities now include ‘non-canonical’ texts on the curriculum, claiming to represent those identities excluded and subordinated by dominant culture. But Guillory argues that the concept of ‘non-canonical’ is inadequate. It relies on extrinsic value and reinforces conservative control over the canon by maintaining and regulating ‘centre’ and ‘periphery.’ It erases specificity and difference, making particular texts representative of entire groups. Value is determined by degrees of marginalisation and oppression.

Reading Guillory was incredibly slow going and dense: faced with negatives and double negatives; he puts forward arguments that he doesn’t agree with only to refute them. I had to make a visual graph. Everything was clarified and then clarified again, to the point where I couldn’t tell which clarification I was supposed to agree with and which I was supposed to find ridiculous.

I was O’Brien’s child: reading too closely, too intensely, as though everything was new. I failed to maintain a balance between critical distance and emotional involvement. I didn’t understand the terms. I was General Stumm from How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read: plunged into profound anguish with no landmarks and nothing to hold on to. I was in so close that I failed to grasp the language itself; the very words seemed to slip away.

I felt outside the debate. Guillory was in dialogue with voices I couldn’t hear. However, this inaccessibility is exactly what Guillory is getting at. Not that language should be simplified, but that we should be better educated to understand and participate in it. Literary language, he argues, is constantly in dialogue with, and to some extent synthesises, texts and everyday speech, but is nonetheless specific. It endlessly refines itself into more effective modes of communicating cultural knowledge.

Yet somewhat ironically, reading Guillory forced me to recognise that this is a language I don’t understand, and I wonder if anyone ever really understands; if there is anything objective or if its just confidence (aka How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read) in the midst of intense ideological competition (aka Cassanova’s World Republic of Letters).

Central to Guillory’s argument is the idea that everyone should have access to literature through our educational institutions as the means of producing literary capital. This means access to all literature, not just canonical literature. The canon, he says, is an imaginary list of texts that is not expressive of a cultural homogeneity but retroactively constructs the impression of cultural unity. It can never represent everyone and does not reflect the syllabus. Rather the syllabus mediates the cultural imaginary and should thus be taught to people of all classes so that everyone can access cultural capital.

However, I wonder if privileging literary capital reflects Guillory’s self-interest in maintaining his own discipline. Perhaps other kinds of capital are valuable to different people. Individuals express specificities and nuances, without necessarily being universally communicable. Perhaps literary language changes so continuously that it is always illusive; always redefined depending on the position of the individual who speaks. A “common” literary language remains somewhat of an oxymoron when the enterprise is itself a refined and elite form of capital that, by its very nature, is not accessible to everyone. Although Guillory idealises that it might be so.

- Bayard, Pierre (2007) How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. Jeffrey Mehlman (trans.) London: Granta Book

- Cassanova, Pascale (2004) "Principles of a World History of Literature". The World Republic of Letters. M. B. Debevoise (trans.), Harvard: Harvard University Press

- Guillory, John (1993) Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press

- O'Brien, Geoffrey (2000) The Browser's Ecstacy: A Meditation on Reading. Washington: Counterpoint

A Fearful Disclosure

I am never sure of the gap between what I say and how it is read. “The writer who experiences this void believes only that the work is unfinished, and he thinks that a little more effort, along with some propitious moments, will permit him and him alone to finish it. But what he wants to finish by himself remains interminable; it involves him in an illusory task” (Blanchot, 23).

In writing I try to organise myself into being – a way of telling my own story, of legitimating my existence. Like Philip Wroth and Henry James – either committed to preservation or revision but both “interested in maintaining the integrity and relevance of their writing” (Murphy, 163) – what is really at stake is identity. How to adequately represent the self in the text even though both author and context continue to change?

I’m lost. A case of traumatic amnesia: “the unfortunate one who finds that she has forgotten her story does not know who she is, having lost the text of her identity” (Cavarero). I am not sure how to separate one kind of interest or thought from another. How are the ideas for this course different from all the other ideas? Is it a formal and informal distinction, the length of the piece, the use of references?

How do I distinguish the dialogue with myself from the dialogue that is worth having with the world? Only parts are worth communicating beyond the momentary action of writing. I don’t know where to start. The ideas repeat themselves without reference to a structure. I tell my story over and again until it is entirely mutable. Vast volumes disappear without recognition, endlessly dispersing self into nothing.

It comes back to the fear that I don’t know enough, that I won’t be in control of representation. I feel too vulnerable for exposure. I don’t want to commit because I’m afraid. I want a perspective on myself that I can’t possibly have. But I need to accept that it is a process of becoming, that I am still learning.

I remind myself that unless I am transparent I will never become universal. It must be a total disclosure – to the point where self is erased. We “require this silence precisely, this vigorous force by which the writer, having been deprived of himself, having renounced himself, has in this effacement nevertheless maintained the authority of a certain power: the power decisively to be still, so that in this silence what speaks without beginning or end might take on form, coherence, and sense” (Blanchot, 27).

- Blanchot, Maurice (1982 [1955]) The Space of Literature, Ann Smock (trans.), Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press

- Cavarero, Adriane “The Desire for One’s Own Story”, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood

- Murphy, Stephen (2008) “Revision as a “Living Affair” in Henry James’s New York Edition”, The Henry James Review, 29; 2, 163-180.

Relations with Texts

What does it mean to be a critical reader? For me, reading is always personal: a dynamic, aesthetic dialogue between self and other, in which judgements are repeated and exchanged. I befriend my texts, engaging with them as “the testaments of human beings who have lived and suffered in the world” (Edmundson, 63).

I write phenomenologically, in a way that “seeks to make the familiar newly surprising … exposing the strangeness of the self-evident” (Felski, 32). I take an individual as a starting point. The individual is in a relationship where reading the text, just like dating the boy, says something about the individual’s identity, and vise versa: the text, or the boy, is informed by the interaction with the individual.

I pose the question of who reads and who is read? When entering into a relationship with a new text we submit to the thrill of what Warner describes as “an open future of personal and collective liberation, of full citizenship and historical belonging” (Warner, 14). The nerves sing with anticipation.

My friend says to me that she has the key to her new text; that only she can open it and discover its answers. She sees something no-one else can. Her knowledge is possessive – anxiously, beautifully so. Because the relationship offers an aesthetic exploration of self, her identity is very much at stake. She discovers herself as she stands in front of the text as mirror, as she stands beside the text as a point of comparison and aesthetic identification.

I take this one step further. My investment in my individual interpretation and understanding of the text seems to preclude all other possible interpretations. Not only am I the only one who has seen these things before but, in imagining that I am the only one, the text itself loses value. In reciprocation I imagine that it doesn’t value me either, that I am not necessary to it. It would exist without me. The aesthetic relationship begins to crumble.

The individual and the text collide and lose themselves in one another. Each fails to appreciate the other in its own right, spiralling into co-dependency. The individual seems irrelevant to the text. The text seems irrelevant without the individual. The individual wants desperately to regain a privileged position as reader. The text expects the individual to clean up after him.

Distantiation begins: the text, or the boy, is observed as a distant object in “paranoid suspicion of textual attachment” (Warner, 16). Each fights to claim some universal truth. “The literary text performs a metacommentary on the traps of interpretation, a canny reading of its own possible readings, a knowing anticipation and exposure of all possible hermeneutic blunders” (Felksi, 29). The individual cannot distinguish “anxiously anticipatory knowingness… from ordinary critical distance” (Warner, 17).

A stand off: the individual and the boy-as-text, text-as-boy, stand in judgement of each other. Both wanting to expose or demystify the ‘truth’ of their relationship, to claim the role of reader over what is read, but each is too involved to comprehend it. Neither can determine ‘right’ action or judgement.

Attempting to escape the limitations of knowledge, the individual suspiciously believes that the text is transgressive. Perhaps this doubt rests on an inability to be honest about our own “attachment, investment, and fantasy” (Warner, 17). Each relationship with each text is a fantasy of identity, of desire. Our identity comes into conflict with the text, we fear its fixity, and we flee from commitment. Our poly-amorous relations with texts explore our multiple fantasies of self as we shift through time and space.

- Edmundson, Mark (2009) “Against Readings”, Profession, MLA

- Felski, Rita (2009) “After Suspicion”, Profession, MLA

- Warner, Michael (2004) “Uncritical Reading”, in Jane Gallop (ed.), Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, London & New York: Routledge