Reading scholarly
takes from Professors, especially when they're from accomplished, celebrated
Professors of Literature, are such a sweet delight in itself. Ain’t they?
Be it Professor Catherine Belsey, who has given us newy directions and delightful
detours of sorts with her nuanced text, Critical
Practice, that has ably proved itself such a profound poststructuralist
text, positing the premise that theory indeed matters, as much as the heart does
matter!,
Or Professor
Judith Butler, who’s given us a groundbreaking book of sorts, Gender Trouble, in which she brings
forth her pioneering postulates on the performative theory of gender, and seeks
to premise the proposition that, sex is a socially constructed category that stems
from its social and cultural milieu, and there’s nothing to validate the
traditional, patriarchal assumptions, or what Peter Barry would call, the ‘basic
givens’ to vouchsafe to the fact that, sex is a ‘natural given’ category and
gender is an ‘acquired cultural-social category!’,
Or
Professor Gayatri Spivak, who’s provided us with such a scholarly
treatise of sorts, with her A Critique of
Postcolonial Reason, in which she talks about the exclusivity-strategies practised
by European intellectual interventionists, and takes us along with her in such an
engaging manner, even as she strives to redefine the label of postcolonial
studies, as much as she strives to reposition the role of the postcolonial
critic, and move on to the much wider arena of transnational global studies,
Or
Professor Bill Ashcroft, who’s given us a ground-breaking book of
sorts, On Post-Colonial Futures, in
which he delves deep into the therapeutic nature of postcolonial writing, the transformative
effects of postcolonial resistance and its sustained impact and relevance in
the present world scenario. In this lovely read of sorts, like his contemporary
Spivak, Ashcroft also forays much into literature, history and philosophy,
(Like Spivak does in her Critique of
Postcolonial Reason!) and postulates a new theoretical paradigm for evaluating
postcolonial literatures. This paradigm, to him, is not simply limited to an
overhaul of the canon, but also has an impactful intervention in our
perceptions and ways in which all literature can be read!
In this line, yet another Professor who’s been giving me such
sleepless nights of great delight, is Gerald
Graff! Culling out a chunk from his
informative bio on his own official webpage - Gerald Graff stands as the profession’s indomitable and indispensable
Arguer-in-Chief. In his books Graff invites all parties—students, teachers,
scholars, citizens—to gather where the intellectual action is, to join the fray
of arguments that connect books to life and give studies in the humanities
educational force.
Well, at a time and clime when Professors from all over the world, especially in the US, have been lamenting the decline of
funding and patronage to the Humanities, (Remember the famous John Hopkins’
Conference on 21 October 1966, that gave us Derrida, which was sponsored by the
Ford Foundation!) there’s one ‘luminous wing’ in academia, of a professor
clamouring hard for the ‘educational force’ of the humanities, in his oeuvre,
with such intense ‘conviction’ and such amazing ‘force’!
He has real got us enthralled all along,
with his wonderful reads that are a smashing sway of sorts into the impenetrable
world of academics, with that extra-special emphasis on literary studies.
Sample this, for a taste-test!
The
word ‘cluelessness’ for example, gets such an heightened significance in Gerald
Graff's book bearing the same name!
This ‘cluelessness’,
to Graff, is so in sync with the utter ‘impenetrability of the academic world!’
And
this ‘impenetrability’, according to Graff, in itself is a ‘ploy’ by academia
themselves to reinforce cluelessness and thus perpetuate the misconception that
the life of the mind is a secret society for which only an elite few could
possibly qualify.
Graff’s main argument in the book is
that, academia the world over, take such immense pleasure and delight in
reinforcing this aspect of ‘cluelessness’ again and again, on the minds of its pavapetta, unsuspecting, gullible,
innocent and wary wards, by making its ideas, problems, and ways of thinking
look more and more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning
capacities than they are or rightfully need to be!
One such book that was such an allure to
me on the reading front, these past few days, is the Graffian delight titled, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in
Modern Society.
Well, over the past few days, this read
has been my staple of sorts!
The reasons are not far to seek!
To put it in a nutshell, a brilliant
metacritique on ‘literary thinking’, in any many years.
Although we’ve had enough of avid
advocates of the aesthetic over the past decades, this Gerald Graff release has
got us all real hooked till the 239th page all through!
You ain’t ever gonna see yourself doing a
heave-ho ambling up the pages, even as you saunter your way past the pages,
turning by themselves, in such a gripping succession, without you, the reader,
even bothering a heck to take that scintillating sippa over the cuppa, staring
staring, glaring glaring at you, right at your desk!
And well, although Harold Bloom has given
us a plethora of points to ponder over the canonical, the aesthetic, the
sublime and the artistic, Graff has got his sensibilities so in sync with the
soul of the literatteur, when he talks about how both the artist and the critic
are to blame for the current perils in literary readings, that have never had
themselves succumb to ideological charms of the ‘intellectual elite’.
Graff has got nothing to tweak, little to
twist! He’s got his thoughts sprinkled on this read in such a coherent sequence
that you never once find the going tough!
He’s got quite a plethora of interesting
‘points of view’ over an equal plethora of ponderables, that border on the
sublime to pathos and extending up to pathos at places! For example, he calls
the New Critics as rapists, who delight in raping a text! Too crude an
expression at that!
To him, the influence of the ideological
on literature is ain’t bad at all, but laments the fact that it has led to a
widespread loss in the gentle connect between literary culture and society,
making all literature seem suspect!
At the same time, he is all praise for
the poststructuralist theories that have transformed our normatives and basic
givens over the years.
The success of deconstruction and a host
of related poststructuralist approaches to literature, is to him, “The Triumph
of the Vanguard”.
Reality, in this postmodern era, has
become so problematic, that he calls it, “the Unreality of Reality”.
In Chapter Two, where he elaborates on
this ‘Myth of the Postmodern Breakthrough’, he categorises the postmodern turn
in literature and literary criticism as a "breakthrough," because of
its significant reversal of the dominant literary and sociocultural directions
of the last two centuries, or in other words, the death of our traditional
Western concept of art and literature, a concept which defined "high
culture" as our most valuable repository of moral and spiritual wisdom.
He quips in one gentle phrasing, thus:
“The religion of art has been demythologized.”
And in his take on the topic, “Beyond
High Culture”, he elucidates on the so-called societal distinction between high
and low culture, as a symptom of ‘elitist ideology.’
His vehement and unique takes on the new
academic professionalism, along with the ‘Indoctrination Theory of English,’
have got all postcolonial theorists do a wide simper and a smirk, a snigger and
a smile of sorts!
This indoctrination theory, albeit
connotes much with Thiongo, Gauri Viswanathan and Homi Bhabha, in their claims,
and holds that English operates as an instrument of “acculturation” into
ruling-class values.
Graff also proceeds to offer his views on
the commodification of English in his take titled, English as Consumption.
Giving a gentle snub to the
de-intellectualization of the university, that’s rattled academia and university
curricula alike for the past two
decades, he concedes that, this de-intellectualisation is rationalized by a
‘false pluralism’!
Some of his thoughts are too vanguardish,
and blasphemous for the clichéd, malady-ridden University system of education
that plagues most of the developing nations across the world. Glimpses of a
Yuval are not hard to find on Graff, here!
To him,
“Since no world view or theory is
privileged to speak for everybody, the university no longer sees itself as
responsible for defining a central body of information or issues. The threat of
academic totalitarianism-frequently conjured up as the sole alternative to
incoherence-protects the university from having to define its intellectual
purposes or even from having to have any. And since there can be no central
body of information or issues, the only force capable of binding the fragments
of the university into a unity is the machinery of administration, which
possesses the advantage of representing no ideas.”
One irony of the current situation is
that, “though students study more contemporary literature and culture than they
ever did in the past, few of them attain what can seriously be called a minimal
comprehension of contemporary literature and culture. Because contemporary material
is rarely studied in conjunction with the history against which its identity as
"contemporary" is defined, the very concept of the contemporary
acquires no meaning.”
Though “popular culture” is a valid
object of study, our isolation of it in its own courses, divorced from history,
tends merely to reproduce the experience of discontinuity already sufficiently
available in contemporary culture itself. Contemporary culture contains few
ideas capable of liberating us from its provincialism.
In his final thoughts on “How Not to Save
the Humanities,” he writes,
One must assert that the notion of 'what
the text says' itself depends upon common procedures of reading. Conventions
themselves do not tell us in what circumstances they, as opposed to other conventions
within the same system, should be put into play. There has to be something
external to the convention that determines that this and not some other is the
convention to be applied.
For example, the expression “Keep off the
grass” can function either as an injunction not to walk on a lawn or as a
warning against narcotic stimulants. How do we know which of these two
conventions of interpretation to apply? The fact is we cannot know unless we
can guess the intention of the user of the expression, a guess we make on the
basis of the referential situation in which the expression is made (whether it
is normally the type of situation in which green grass or marijuana would be
referred to), the habitual concerns of the speaker, and so on.
He’s real got a baudrillardian take on
“Alienation , Inc.” where he charges that, it is our consumer society that is
the real culprit in popularizing ideologies of alienation. Catherine Belsey
proves so true here, ain’t she?
I quote -
But our consumer society not only
popularizes ideologies of alienation; to an increasing extent it invests its
capital in them. As Saul Bellow's ‘Herzog’ observes, people have begun “touting
the Void as if it were so much salable real estate”.
This interesting quip in the last few pages
of his argument, connects well with his initial claim that he’s made in his
introductory chapter, on alienation. He says,
The hold that, sophisticated ideologies
of alienation exert on the average citizen in his understanding of himself and
the world denotes the power of powerlessness. But powerlessness and alienation
no longer necessarily call themselves by these unflattering names. They
reappear under new titles-autonomy, liberation, even revolution.
Graff is a phenomenal grab of gripping
proportions!
239 pages, in the words of RL Stevenson,
go, ‘faster than fairies, faster than witches, bridges and houses, edges and
ditches, charging along like troops in a battle…”
Holds good to a tee for Graff’s
delightful read!
[Parts of this review were posted by this blogger for a lovely little Readers' Collective on whatsApp, Readers' Rendezvous]
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