Studies in Literary Theory

In this seminar we will be pursuing those aspects of meaning that occur not “in” texts but in between them – meaning that is to be found in the uses that  texts make of other texts, and that readers make of texts, in the histories that accumulate around texts and their different uses, in the histories also of their transmission and circulation.

We could say that during the seminar we will investigate the ground between two assertions Bakhtin makes in “The Problem of Speech Genres.”  Early in that essay he comments: “the novel as a whole is an utterance just as rejoinders in everyday dialogue or private letter are.”  A bit later he observes: “Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another . . . . Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances . . . . Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account.”  We will thus be interested in the particular kinds of “conversations” that link text-utterance to text-utterance, texts to users, texts to the uses that come to be made of them.  Reconstructing those conversations will involve us in careful thinking about different dynamic forms of contextualization, and about what is referred to as the indexical functioning of language: the way language produces meaning not simply semantically, but by drawing on other, prior uses of language.

Specifically, we will think about how novels make use of other novels through a reading of a set of novels that could be said to be mutually involved in a number of different conversations: about novelistic form, about the ambitions novels might have to be instruments of knowledge, about the kinds of knowledge novels might want to be able to produce.  We’ll be particularly interested in sociological and aesthetic forms of knowledge and the relations novels produce between them.

The novels we will look at are Scott’s Waverley, Balzac’s Les Chouans, Cooper’s The Pilot, Eliot’s Felix Holt, Proust’s A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.  (You are welcome to read in translation.)  We’ll accompany our reading of the novels with readings of a wide range of theorists and critics including Bakhtin, Lukács, Benedict Anderson, Franco Moretti, Catherine Gallagher, Margaret Cohen and others.