Thoughts and Questions about Miner's Comparative Poetics and Finnish Folklore

Earl Miner’s Comparative Poetics (Intro and Chapter 1) relating to Finland’s folklore—comments and questions:

•      “Aristotle’s founding his Poetics on drama illustrates the validity of the very concept of drama…all other examples of poetics are founded not on drama, but on lyrics. Western literature with its many familiar suppositions is a minority of one” (Introduction, pg. 8)

o   Finland folklore is founded also on lyric, not drama: shaman incantation runes, stories were told in the form of song. Written culture nonexistent until long after the oral; even then, it was written in lyrical form (Lönnrot’s work with the Kalevala)—so is Finland “western literature”? How should it be categorized? It certainly is not Eastern either== seems to exist in its own marginalized space?

•      “Names designate authors of works that are identifiable, separable from those by other named authors, from anonymous writing, and from other writings not deemed autonomously literary. Until such distinction of authorship and kinds of knowledge are reached, a poetics is infeasible. That is also to say that a poetics presumes the existence of other distinct autonomous kinds of knowledge.” (Comparative poetics, pg. 14)

o   Shows the work Lönnrot does (compiler [and in a way creator] of the Kalevala—Finns’ epic)

§  Prior to Kalevala, no published and circulated text of Finnish culture; it existed in oral tradition. When Lönnrot published work, it established the Finnish poetics, if only by the fact that it created a named distinction—something “identifiable, separated”—that otherwise was nonexistent in Finnish identity.

•       “Without a text, we have no evidence of the writer’s work…the reader can have access to the authorial creation only by means of a text, by which is meant here some physical coding, whether in our familiar black marks on paper, in the sound waves of a recitation and theater, or in the recollected memory of the poet or anyone else who can summon memory of the creation. The more often the physical text is multiplied, the more variations will be introduced…it is also evident that the multiplication of readers leads to the varying reception of what there is to know.” (Comparative Poetics, pg. 16)

o   This concept amplifies even more in the nature of oral tradition; with concrete text, multiple readers can refer back over time to some consistent thing-- objectively the same. As long as there exists an “original manuscript” of the writing, the variants come only through the interpretations of the readers. However, orally, the reciter applies small nuances in each retelling of the rune, and adds an entirely new source of disparity. I now wonder how this aspect of oral tradition changes after the written publication of Kalevala?  Now that a solid, tangible “archive” is added to the discourse, will oral tradition become more or less fluid (continuing to develop off the base of previous oral stories along the same trajectory, or trying to adhere to [or even adjust to] the canonized standard of the newly defined Finnish culture)?

Criticism challenges/re-imagines the status quo (existing state of affairs)

I was inspired by the conversation in class yesterday, but particularly Bo’s comment about the rejection of Chinese theorists due to their inaccessibility to western audiences, to take a closer look at the Norton Anthology. After graduating with a Masters in German literature, I’d been asked to teach a freshmen elective course in World Literature. Being sorely underprepared to teach such a course, I was relieved to have a volume of texts with explanations that could serve as a foundation. As the semester wore on, and as I further researched the texts my co-teacher and I would be teaching, some inadequacies in the text became apparent. For example, if we were to look at Genesis and the story of Job as profoundly Hebrew texts, why were we reading them in King James’ English? These translations were replaced in the third volume with a more recent translation by Robert Alter, which makes efforts to remain faithful to the poetic rhythms of the original. But what brought about this change?

Interested more specifically in the volume of Theory and Criticism that was the subject of yesterday’s conversation, I turned to Samaa Gamie’s review of the Theory and Criticism Anthology, which I heartily recommend. In this review, Gamie deconstructs Norton’s introductory statements about generously including women, people of color and post-colonial critics within their volume. Gamie reveals this generous account to be no greater than 7 non-white critics to a whopping 131 white critics. Further, rather than integrating these authors into the Anthology by virtue of the function of these texts within their respective literature, they are chosen merely by virtue of the author’s identity. Although being included in a canon of texts (albeit, a canon that changes with each edition) lends authority to these texts, isolated texts, removed from context and situated by virtue of identity will do little to restore the unique literary, linguistic and cultural identity to these marginalized communities. In fact, Gamie’s collective critical arguments with this recent anthology reflect those issues we’ve been talking about directly in class.

This is a perplexing situation. In the reading this week, Spivak showed us how to look at widely read texts with new eyes. Jane Eyre can no longer be seen as merely a feminist text, but one that reveals the perceived hellish result of imperial conquest (an animal-like Creole and her proper English husband). Should Jane Eyre or any of the other texts deconstructed by Spivak be dismissed? For that matter, should Norton’s Anthologies? We’re living in a world in which Oprah and Ellen DeGeneres can host talk shows and even the Oscars; a world in which Barack Obama could be elected President of the United States and Angela Merkel chancellor of Germany. Things are changing; can this be due to a critical attitude towards the status quo? Although far from perfect, the Norton Anthologies are making changes and adjustments. Although Spivak’s interpretation of Jane Eyre dampens the ardor of youthful reading, unlocking this text revitalizes its cultural importance, providing substance to critical statements towards reimagining the status quo. Spivak’s chapter on literature makes strides towards imagining a new status quo, as does Gamie’s book review, and Shu-Mei’s defense of Taiwan’s cultural wealth. But who will imagine this status quo? This will be decided by the persuasive capabilities of the critics. 

3/3 class, postmortem

Since I didn’t manage to post about the readings beforehand (and managed to get out most of comments during class), I’ll write a few thoughts on our discussion today.

Both Izzy and Max brought up really important doubts and questions about the project of postcolonial criticism as we’ve seen it in the context of these course readings. Izzy, in particular, questioned the presence of actual, clear solutions and approaches to addressing the disparities the critics are highlighting.

For me, what’s refreshing about a non-prescriptive argument how we address these problems of imbalanced representation of both literary and critical archive from the non-Western world is that it both points to and tackles the problem that the issues are in the very rhetoric and logic that we use as critics to make literary texts communicable. It’s an extremely tricky, and fraught, mode of critical intervention. Can you perform what you are pointing to at the same time? It’s kind of a mindfuck.

But I'll admit that I find this very compelling about deconstruction. As a critical strategy, it seems to get us to push at what we think are the limits of our expression of knowledge. I think there is a venue for more outlined, prescriptive, exegetical scholarship or argumentation. But it seems to me that a tool through which we can interrogate and expand the structures through which we create knowledge (which is what we purport to do) is essential.

The outcome of the utilization of such a tool may simply mean you approach your work with a new transparency about what you’re doing. This can be the take-away for a person in any field. I really appreciated Dr. Abel’s comment on Spivak’s postcolonial deconstruction project as a sort of 10% shift in the way we think about texts we both encounter for the first time and hold near-and-dear. It’s similar to the comment we made about Spivak’s project in her “History” chapter, in which we lay bare the structures of rhetoric and knowledge we are deploying, though not destroying them.  It means that when we teach our own version of CMLIT 010, Introduction to World Literature, we make a proactive, transparent decision about our chosen topography of World Literature.

Postcolonial theory and wheel-spinning

I hesitate to publish this response, because I worry it is too negative. Perhaps given some distance from the texts, I might feel differently. But my response to today's reading was primarily frustration. It seems like every article we have read for this micro seminar says much of the same thing; the Western hegemonic discourse is bad, incorporating non-Western theory and literary works are good. Other scholars have tried their best, and some of them have done well explaining certain parts of this Euro-centricism, but inevitably, they all somehow perpetuate the hegemonic discourse in some way. Spivak beats Eagleton and other scholars over the head with this perpetuation in her Literature chapter, all the while responding (primarily in the footnotes) to criticisms of her own work. In Krishnaswamy's article, he criticizes not only Spivak, but theories on the subaltern in general by saying, "theories associated with subaltern studies and postcolonial studies have not fared much better in their attempts to analyze or evaluate Dalit literature, in part because these theoretical models are dominated by the binary colonizer and colonized, and in part because they are overly reliant on a terminology of mobility and hybridity" (414). Of course, Shih's article implicitly, if not explicitly, criticizes postcolonial studies for not being able to accommodate the liminal nature of Taiwanese culture. But it seems like much of this is just patting themselves on the back. Are we ever going to accomplish the kind of teaching and discussion of world theories that each of these articles proposes? If left up to the scholars of these three articles, I don't know. I hesitate to speculate about Shih, considering I only have read the introduction to a book-length discussion of Taiwanese hybridity. But at the very least, it seems Spivak's chapter does not offer any real solutions for confronting this imperial discourse. Though Krishnaswamy offers examples of latent, emergent, and alternative explicit literary theories that could be included in pedagogy, he fails to provide a model or a method for integrating these works and avoiding Euro-centricism. He himself cites the Norton Anthology's overwhelming proportion of white, male theorists to minority theorists ( fifteen out of over 140 theorists), but acknowledges the Norton's attempt to become more inclusive. Though he clearly sees their current efforts to include any minority or non-Western theory as a failure, he does not offer any ideas on how his suggestions for non-Western theory can be incorporated. With the best intentions of talking about these thinkers, but without a methodology for integration (or timeline, for that matter, demonstrating at what point we will have conquered Eurocentricism) offered convincingly by any of the post-colonial writers we've encountered so far, I wonder if his attempts to "initiate such an epistemologically inclusive and methodologically open-ended study of 'world literary knowledges'" will succeed, or if they will end up in the same boat as the Norton Anthology: trying hard, but still failing (408). 

Spivak Quotes and Thoughts

Just some quotes and a few thoughts for this week from the Spivak chapter.

First, a baffling one: “The broad strokes of my presuppositions are that what is at stake, for feminist individualism in the age of imperialism, is precisely the making of human beings, the constitution and ‘interpellation’ of the subject not only as individual but also as ‘individualist.’ This stake is represented on two registers: childrearing and soul-making.” (116) I can see women’s role child-rearing as the making of individuals, but I don’t understand what women have to do with soul-making, which is far as I understand it, is a reference to the imperialist discourse of granting humanity to citizens and “savages.” Also, I have no idea what the term “individualist” is doing here.

Here is something that I took as a kind of thesis statement... sort of. “No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been an incommensurable and discontinuous other into a domesticated other that consolidates the imperialist self.” (130) The second clause is what I take to be a thesis (beginning with “the project of imperialism...”), but I cannot figure out how this logically fits with negation in the first clause: “No perspective critical of imperialism.”

“But it is of course Victor Frankenstein, with his strange itinerary of obsession with natural philosophy, who offers the strongest demonstration that the multiple perspectives of the three-part Kantian subject cannot cooperate harmoniously if woman and native informant are allowed into the enclosure.” (136) This sounds very compelling, and I’m willing to believe that it is, but I do not see where the proof for this is. It doesn’t seem to be in the paragraph before, about the character Clerval in Frankenstein, nor in the sentences that follow, about the categorical and hypothetical imperatives.

This next one I have a little more to say about, from 138: “The sheer social reasonableness of the mundane voice of Shelley’s ‘Genevan magistrate’ reminds us that the radically other cannot be selfed, that the monster has ‘properties’ that will not be contained by ‘proper’ measures: ‘I will exert myself’ he says, ‘and if it is in my power to seize the monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment proportionate to his crimes. But I fear... that this will be impracticable.’” This is interesting since it is not about the positive affirmation of a “wild” subject, but rather it is about the inability for the dominant system of law to adequately provide punishment. Still, the extension from man-made monster to man-made “subject” (the native, Caliban), seems fraught with trouble. For one, there is the obvious difference of a reanimated person and a discovered person, even if the discovered one is considered savage. Second of all, is the problem is really about the “humanization” of anyone, monster or subaltern, than what do we get by examining the subaltern that we can’t get form examining Frankenstein’s monster? In other words, this passage does not really help us understand what I take to be Spivak’s mission, which is highlighting the specific case of what happens to the effacement involved in “naming” and “humanizing” of the subaltern subject.

From 155. Spivak writes off a student’s attempt to give an ethical reading to Baudelaire’s “negress.” The student suggests that “Baudelaire meant to focus on her predicament as being exiled without history or geography.” Just wondering what everyone thought about this. To me the student’s opinion seemed plausible.

Lastly, I found the conclusion strange. We read several texts, but it ends with just a wrap up of Foe. What’s the rationale for this kind of non-conclusion?

Reading notes 03/03 & Questions

Spivak

• Reading 19th cen. British literature with Imperialism in mind
• List of Texts: 
• Jane Eyre-Wide Sargasso Sea-Frankenstein: read from context of imperialism 
• Caliban vs. Ariel
• Mahasweta Devi: Pterodactyl
• Baudelaire: Le cygne
• Kipling: William the Conquerer
• East India Company directors discussion
• Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Roxana
• Coetzee: Foe
• Colonialism vs. neo-colonialism vs. post-colonialism

Shih

• Utopic vs. dystopic globalization 
• Utopic: freedom, subjectivity, flexibility, hybridity, multiplicity 
• Dystopic: disparity, neo-colonisation, exploitation, “lowest cultural denominator” (American pop culture) = Americanization 
• Global: explicit and implicit universal
• Local: particular embodiment of difference and otherness
• The “Taiwan question”
• Taiwan marginalized in post-colonial discussions because it was colonized by Asian instead of Western powers
• Perspectives
• Liao Pinghui: How to not talk about Taiwan in terms of postcoloniality, postmodernity, and globalization 
• Ko Yufen: Consumption and globalization, Hello Kitty as product of ex-colonizer 
• Liou Liangya: Queer representation in Taiwan fiction that opens up conflicting space between Western and Taiwanese queerness
• Yue Mingbao: Diasporic longing for national community 
• Kelly Kuo: Critique of multiculturalism-very true (affirmative action?)
• What would Shih have to say about Taiwan in 2014? Especially since it is probably more culturally influential now than it was in 2003. 

Krishnaswamy

• Postcolonialism simply response to the West? 
• Death of cmlit? What does this mean? 
• Krishnaswamy's solution: World literary knowledges
• “Radically re-vision question of what counts as theory in the first place” 
• Anti and post colonialism only dented Eurocentric practices
• “Knowledges”: indicates local or indigenous epistemologies that have been marginalized by Western high theory
• Proposition: regional, subaltern, popular traditions studied alongside canonic and counter-canonic traditions

Outline and Interpretation of Shu-Mei Shih's "Globalisation and the (in)significance of Taiwan"

Outline and Interpretation of Shu-Mei Shih's "Globalisation and the (in)significance of Taiwan"

Globalization

·      Utopic

o   Free, flexible

·      Dystopic

o   “homogenize world cultures and replace them with lowest common denominator” (pg. 143)

·      Taiwan is neither of the above— it is caught in the “ in between” of extremes: forgotten for its insignificance (pg. 144)

o   Because not colonized by West, Taiwan does not enter realm of post-colonial thought

§  In this way, is post-colonialism still a selfish view of the west? Looking only at what we have influenced, and disregarding study of those not on our immediate radar.

·      “It was the close of British colonialism and Hong Kong’s retrocession to China in 1997 that made imperative, and, some say, viable, a space for Hong Kong cultural studies.” (pg. 144) == only after West’s connection, did Hong Kong become “worth studying”

§  In order to survive in the world, necessary to globalize—but do not have luxury of time to stop and consider how to do so in the best way (pg. 147)

·      “Farewell China”

o   Taiwan separate from China in political and national identity, but mixed in economy and culture (pg. 147)

§  Results in confused dilemma that seeks to race toward western globalization (pg. 148)

§  “The question for Taiwan to solve is how one can partake of an ethnic Sino-Chinese heritage without having to be part of China” (pg. 149)

o   If Taiwan neither connects to Chinese nor “Taiwan nativism” completely, with what should it culturally identify? What should it accept? The globalization gives the easy answer of filing the void with a westernized society—but is there a way to reconcile without complete surrender to that? (pg. 149)

·      In search of inauthenticity

o   Taiwan is neither Chinese nor Japanese culture; the forced identification to one or the other will only end in inevitable futility and disappointment (Wu Chuoliu’s example) (pg. 150)

§  Need to instead “dis-identify” with those completely, and from here the acceptance of a new, mixed culture is possible

·      “The death of the subject, here no longer metaphorical but literal, spells out the necessity of dis-identification (not simple counter-identification), upon the basis of which new collective imaginings of a non-authentic multi- culture may be possible.” (pg. 150)

§  “Taiwan’s abject status may paradoxically help spur new imaginings of transculturalism while avoiding the many pitfalls of multiculturalism.” (pg. 152) – the fact that Taiwan is in such a marginalized position may prove to be the very thing that saves it; as other cultures look at the difference in order to solidify their own identity (binary); thus, the more other cultures reify their identity through Taiwan, the more Taiwan does, indeed, develop an identity—based upon inauthenticity, rather than a forced identification