Session II: American Studies, Literary Studies, and
Cultural Studies
em39asik_1154: important to
note
This session is meant to introduce you to a particular vision of American studies
as an academic field.1 Because American studies is a relatively young field, and
because it is an interdisciplinary2 one, it differs significantly from the subjects you
may know from school (such as “Englisch,” “Deutsch,” or “Geschichte”), and it also
differs from many of the more ‘traditional’ academic disciplines. For the upcom-
ing session, and for the seminar as a whole, it will be important that you are ready
and willing to see (and explore) these differences.
One important aspect that makes American studies special is its interest in the
connection between literature, culture, and society. This interest determines how
we think about literature, and about texts more generally, what kinds of meaning
we look for and what kinds of questions we ask. Put more specifically, this interest
determines the way that Americanists tend to be interested in the politics3 a text
has.
This session is part of the first segment of the LC-I seminar,4 and the entire
section will focus on this connection. It will position American studies generally
and literary studies in particular in relation to cultural studies. This week’s read-
ings will thus introduce you to this connection, and the following three weeks
will discuss ‘class,’ ‘gender,’ and ‘race’ — three exemplary categories of difference
that can help think about how texts and culture relate.
At the end of this session (and at the end of every following session) there
is a set of reading questions.5 Take them seriously as a tool to assess what you
have understood, and what you might not have understood, so that you can ask
follow-up questions during the seminar.
This session is also the basis of your first PVL,6, 7 an annotation exercise.
1
More background information on the (relatively short) history of American studies, a com-
paratively young field of inquiry. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1049#36684
2
An ”interdisciplinary field” is one in which several disciplines come together to study an ob-
ject or phenomenon. In the field of American studies, for example, literature, sociology, his-
tory, politics, and others come together to think about ”America.” Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/
srx/52017#53768
3
Hans Bertens’s ”Political Reading” serves as a first overview over the developments sketched
above. This is the introductory part of his chapter on those theories that have a particularly impor-
tant tradition in American studies and that focus on the ’key categories’ of race, class, and gender.
Use it to understand when and why these interests and theories became relevant in academia in
general and in American studies in particular, and use it to understand the limitations of looking
at only these three categories for now. ⇒ Cf. page 9
4
This section is devoted to literary-studies-as-cultural-studies. Read this primer to learn more.
Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1049#11973
5
Test your understanding of the session’s readings with this (non-graded) set of reading ques-
tions. ⇒ Cf. page 21
6
See this card for more instructions on the PVL. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/52168#52170
7
These instructions will be helpful for your first PVL. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/20008#
22486
1
Session II-V: American Studies, Literary Studies,
and Cultural Studies
About this Section / About the Next Four Sessions
This first section of the LC-I seminar, consisting of a total of four sessions, focuses
on American studies’ interest in the relationship between texts and culture. This
interest is one of the distinctive features of American studies, and it sets the dis-
cipline of American literary studies (or: the field of American studies) apart from
many of the more traditional philological forms of literary studies.
This has to do in part with the history of the field. American studies became a
field of study in its own right fairly late, in the 1950s, and it started to blossom at
a time of great political activity (the late 1960s and ’70s). This has led to a particu-
larly ‘political’ understanding of ‘literature’ becoming the dominant paradigm in
American studies from the 1960s onwards.
Here, the goal of literary studies (as cultural studies) is not to identify the
‘best’8 texts that communicate supposedly timeless and universal ‘truths of hu-
man experience. Rather, American studies asks how and why certain texts by cer-
tain authors have come to be regarded as prime examples of universal experi-
ence (and thus part of the ‘canon of ‘great literature’) while other texts have been By first sight, definition of canon
by ”example of universal
ignored completely. More often than not, such choices of canonization reflect experience” criteria seems to
answer contemporary questions
a text’s surrounding structures of political power, social hierarchies, and cultural more that ”truth” criteria. But is
biases much more than any of the text’s artistic values.9 This also means that lit- Maybe
there a itreal
is always be like
difference that but
between
now
them? weMaybe
are less ashamed
now canon to is say
erature is not seen as something that can be appreciated only by the educated that out loud?
different because of other
reasons?
Unfortunately I can’t get the
elite while the masses are reduced to the passive enjoyment of popular culture.
connection between this thesis
And it means that the old binary between high culture (including Literature with Rj59wewe_916:
and previous oneVery interesting
view of literature.
a capital L) and mass culture is reconceptualized as a spectrum, or maybe even a lilli.dietmann:
qt-π: LiteratureWhat’s
=/= literature?
the
difference
What’s the between
difference?
’Literature’
network, where supposed boundaries blend into each other and where the pop- and ’literature’?
ular employs strategies of high culture, and vice versa.

Race, Class, Gender as Examples of Theorizing Lit-

erature and Culture
This first section of LC-I, consisting of a total of four sessions aims at achieving
three important learning goals for you:

1. To make you familiar with the basic idea of reading literature for the effects
it has on culture and for the way that it expresses cultural, social, and polit-
ical dynamics, struggles, and conditions.

2. To move you away from thinking about literature primarily as an abstract,

’innocent,’ aesthetic object, something to be admired for its beauty.

3. To introduce you to the most traditional, most canonical methodological

frameworks of relating literature to culture.
8
As Lauter explains, the ”best” in ”best text” in such a classical, non-American-studies view
often refers to formal qualities. ⇒ Cf. page 8
9
This becomes visible, for example, in how literature written by women was often excluded
from the canon. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/88023#88146

2

We began with the thesis that we
plan to discover the connection(s)
between literature and culture.
Now I’m curious: how is author
correlates culture and politics?
Isn’t the concept of culture
broader?
After an introductory session on the purpose of theory and on the link be-
tween American literary and cultural studies, we will use three sessions to discuss
particularly traditional theoretical frameworks. We will talk about Marxist theory
as a way of discussing the connection between literature and such categories
as social class, economic power, and ideology. In the following session, we will
talk about gender studies as a framework that analyzes how literature reflects (or
creates) male and female gender identities, how it reflects (or impacts) the dis-
tribution of power based on gender, and how it relates to questions of sexuality.
Lastly, we will look at theories of race to discuss how literature has worked to em-
power (and has been used to silence) ethnic minorities, how it reflects or engages
social distinctions based on ethnicity.
As you will learn, these frameworks will provide you with sets of ideas of how
to relate literature and culture to one another as well as with a vocabulary to ex-
press your findings. These sessions thus introduce you to the activities of criti-
cally interrogating and interpreting a text. Later sessions will provide you with
the toolset to speak/write analytically about how a text works, about how it func-
tions. Later LC seminars will continue to work along this axis by improving your
analytical, interpretive, and writing skills.
Approaches in American Studies
As you will realize over time, these (and some other) ‘approaches’ seem to ‘work’
for all texts. This is not because they suggest that every text has the same mean-
ing (regarding race, class, gender, etc.). They do not. These approaches work for
almost all texts because they help you ask particularly productive questions of
a text.10 Of course, any text can be asked how and why it speaks about race, or
about class, or about gender — or how and why it fails to do so. These approaches
therefore can provide starting points for how to think about a text, they can help
you develop productive questions, or enter into a conversation with the text itself
and with what other academics have written.
You will also notice, over time, that this interest in the connection between
literature, culture, and society makes American studies disregard some questions
that other literary studies programs are more interested in (and that your teachers
in school might have found interesting). Accordingly, we care less about what the
author had in mind11 when producing a text (and more about how the text might
take on meanings on its own, meanings that were never intended). And we care
less about judging the aesthetic value of texts (and more about why some texts
came to be seen as aesthetically valuable and others not). This, in turn, tends to
make American studies into a fairly ‘political field, one that is always interested
in how power plays out in literature, or in how literature impacts, advances, or
inhibits power.
10
Many writing manuals suggest that ideas come naturally simply by reading a text (and Bar-
net, Berman, and Burto in Session XII do so, too). Experience shows that this is only rarely
the case. Usually, a (literary) text triggers ideas if you have a general interest or question in
mind and then read it carefully... race, class, and gender can serve as such basic interests. Cf.
http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/752#52163
11
This disinterest in the author is sometimes, hyperbolically, referred to as signaling the ”death
of the author” (and the birth of the reader). Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/623#52162
3
Sample Essays
The following three sessions each come with a sample essay, a five paragraph es-
say analyzing class, gender, and race in the film The Pursuit of Happyness12 . These
essays give you a practical sense of how an Americanist might read a primary text
for these categories. They also give you a sense of how you should be able to read
by the end of the semester.
The fact that there are three different essays on the same text also means that
this is not about finding ‘the one, right interpretation.’ Rather, these three essays
explore how one primary text, The Pursuit of Happyness, interacts with its sur-
rounding cultural context in terms of race, class, and gender — how it bolsters
problematic views on economic success, or on masculinity and femininity, or on
whiteness. In other words, the essays explore what the politics of the film are.
Importantly, as you will notice, they do not make claims about the politics of the
film-makers. In fact, one could probably argue that the actors, the script writers,
and the director have far more progressive views. Instead, the three essays look
at how the text is problematic despite its good intentions.
Lastly, in reading these essays, pay attention to how they make their argu-
ment.13 You might find that you disagree with some of their points, and some
of them would be very implausible without their argumentative context. The ar-
guments in these essays work because their points all support each other. This
quality, argumentative coherence, is something we will talk more about later in
the semester.

Central Concepts for this Section

There are different, equally valid ways of thinking about the four sessions that bb70taba_1156: There is no real
truth, only what the reader
make up this section, and the following concepts can help with that. You can believes to be true
rediscover all of them throughout all of these sessions (and throughout the rest
of the seminar as well).
Cultural Work: One way of thinking about the relationship between literature
and culture is through what Paul Lauter calls a text’s “cultural work.” In fact, Lauter
goes so far as to call American studies the one (only) discipline that is specifically
dedicated to exploring the cultural work texts do. In consequence, this concept
can be particularly helpful for understanding how American studies relates liter-
ature, culture, society, and politics.
Theory: Jonathan Culler makes a complex (but concise) argument about what
theory is and how it works. Specifically, he points out that theory, as a genre of
thinking and a genre of writing, is critical and speculative, that it cannot be ‘proven’ be-
cause it does not rely on hard evidence. In this line of thinking, the author’s opin-
ions and beliefs do not matter because a text’s meaning exceeds the author’s in-
tention, and texts have a meaning (and cultural effects) that are independent of
why they were written. The ways the following sessions relate literature to culture Hm, author of course not that
alive like earlier, but it is really
work in exactly this way. They make plausible arguments about how, for exam- working on society understanding
ple, racism and literature interact. But these arguments end up being ‘merely’ aim when we totally ignore
author? Sometimes it really
plausible, not proven in any strict sense. matters when we recognize bitter
irony or even a prank
12
For more information on the sample essays and to take a look at them, cf. this card Cf. http:
//www.shrimpp.de/srx/34490#51937
13
We will talk more about good and bad arguments in Session XII. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/
srx/743#52164

4

There is a thin line here. I think
there is a possibility to get into
absurd when you trying to find
hiding politics. Or find gems.
Yes, this magical psychological
effect seems obvious now. The
same we can say about ”freedom”.
The
Thismore we feel activity
”unboxing” us free, the less
is really
we and
are.
worth to work on it hardly
continuously. This seems
genuinely and true. It can save
lives. I wish I can do it some day.
Very interesting question was
raised. Earlier for me existing
debates in Facebook or so on
text’s impact here and now
seemed more natural than in
academia. Academia obviously
can’t be so up-to-date. It needs
time to think. But now I think that
it should take her time. Academia
still has power in ”unboxing”
hidden ideologies. So author
entrusted a mission to American
Politics: Americanists tend to think that a text (rather than an author) is politi-
cal. They tend to say that texts have politics. This is to say that any text, literary or
otherwise, will interact with existing structures of power. It can challenge them,
it can affirm them, or it can do both at the same time. But whenever a text is
being read, it is also, inherently and inevitably, political. In this line of thinking,
even a text that has no visible political project necessarily has one – it is just either
unaware of it, or it is hiding its project particularly well.
Ideology14 : The notion of “ideology,” first made productive in Marxist criti-
cism, is another concept that you can use to organize all of the following sessions.
In its broadest sense, this term denotes any set of ideas and values that determine
how groups of people understand, and relate to, the world around them. Note
that unlike its everyday use, this understanding does not oppose ‘ideology’ to
empirically founded notions of ‘truth’ (as in “He is an ideologue” or “the ideology
of fascism”). Instead, ideology is understood as all-pervasive and inescapable, as
a seemingly natural way of how we engage the world. Ideology in this sense is
particularly effective if it seems natural and common-sensical. Ideology, this logic
suggests, is strongest when we think we are free of it. Texts, here, either affirm
dominant ideologies, or they contain moments of resistance that can help people
see the otherwise hidden ideology that unknowingly structures their thinking.
The Cultural Work of Texts
Few recent books have generated as much discussion as Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s
Willing Executioners. Reviewers have debated its evocation of ”German excep-
tionalism,” and historians have discussed the persuasiveness of the evidence it
offers as well as the cogency of its explanatory framework. But one may also wish
to ask about the role the book is playing in the United States today: what cul-
tural15 work is it performing at a moment in which the Holocaust seems itself an
ever-larger presence on the American scene? This seems to me an absorbing, in-
deed major, question. But I do not want to address it here. Rather, I wish to ask
”where should such a question be studied within the academy?”
By ”cultural work” I refer to the ways in which a book or other kind of ”text” —
a movie, a Supreme Court decision, an ad, an anthology, an international treaty,
a material object—helps construct the frameworks, fashion the metaphors, cre-
ate the very language by which people comprehend their experiences and think
about their world. The question of the cultural work Hitler’s Willing Executioners
is performing today is not, then, an historical issue, strictly speaking; individual
historians might venture answers, but most would maintain that it is rather more
a matter for imaginative speculation than for the assessment of facts, logic, and
alternative explanations—the historian’s stock in trade. While the book is by any
definition a ”text,” it remains unlikely grist even for the varied mills of English stud-
ies. A cultural anthropologist might take the issues on, but those who study the
United States are rare, and courses rarer.
Are we then to conclude that this is a matter not for the academy but for
that fabled hero, the Public Intellectual, or for more mundane Sunday morning
TV pundits? That conclusion sells the academy short. More important, perhaps, it
14
We will talk more about this understanding of ideology in the context of Marxist theory. Cf.
http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/88006#92635
15
What is the ”culture” in ”cultural work”? Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1076#51834
5
ignores the fact that the question of a text’s cultural work is not one restricted to a
few exceptional volumes like Goldhagen’s. On the contrary, the issue arises with
any human production—the movie Jurassic Park, for example, or the ”Contract
With America”—that mobilizes creative imagery and artful details that resonate
with force in the society. Nor do such issues emerge only with respect to con-
temporary works. The question of where and how one studies the cultural work
of texts comes up as well with Herman Melville’s ”Benito Cereno,” the Dred Scott
decision, A Sociology for the South, or a Virginia sampler. So the question re-
mains: where — and how — do we study not so much the texts themselves as
what I have been calling the ”cultural work” they perform? Where, moreover, do
we ask how and why certain texts or objects come into existence in the particular
historical landscapes of the United States?
The brief answer, I think, is in American studies.

Divisions of Academic Disciplines

My longer answer to these questions, to the problem of the academic divisions of
knowledge, derives from what may be a distinctive experience of student capac-
ities in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses, especially in American
studies and in English, as well as in reviewing American studies programs. What
is very striking to me are the differences among even—or perhaps particularly—
stronger students in English, history, and American studies. Whether or not they
do it well, English students seem drawn inexorably to close reading16 formats,
even when these are inappropriate to an assignment.17 Most have seemed to me
deaf to entreaties, demands, or even lessons in how to ”contextualize” through
anything but the vaguest references to ”historical background.” On the other hand,
most history students seem to think it strange, at best, to focus on the textualiza-
tion of concepts, on the specific linguistic constructions that give form to ideas,
much less on the ways in which language and form can come implicitly to con-
tradict, or at least call into question, the very arguments being made. They seem
used to more generalized discussions of a writer’s ideas, or to questions of how
well or badly a scholar has marshaled evidence and worked out the logic of an
argument. I am, to be sure, making large generalizations, and I would not try
to insist upon them too unequivocally. But they do suggest that after all is said
and done, literary and historical study continue, adequately or not, to maintain
what were their earlier methodological emphases. Such methods are, of course,
quite relevant to the varied forms of study that have come to dominate American
studies as it is practiced in the United States.
But such traditional approaches, and the subject matters they effectively un-
derwrite, simply do not begin to cover what is now being done in American stud-
ies. It was once the case that American studies amounted to a loose amalgam
of history, literature and art (HLA, to use the Harvard formulation). No more. In
fact, I think, the return to more traditional methods and subjects now often urged
upon English and history departments118 needs to be understood as a response
16
You will learn more about close reading in a later session. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/
108002#108033
17
This does not mean that a close reading of a text is unnecessary - in fact it is often crucial to
a good thesis. Yet, Lauter urges students to think outside the box of literary devices and further
contextualize literary particularities culturally. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/737#51835
18
See footnote 1. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/51714#51719

6

...and it is thrilling and natural. I
think this confrontation (in good
sense) can only contribute to
more ideas
Theresa: What is the traditional
distinction between literature and
writing that is referred to here?
to newer forms of academic work pushing up between and within these older dis-
ciplines. I believe we are in the midst of a fundamental alteration in the academic
division of what are sometimes termed the ”human sciences.”
Approaching Texts Differently
How we divide academic knowledge is not altogether arbitrary, though it is deeply
inflected by historical accidents. There is no necessary logic to the structure of
English departments, for example, most of which are internally divided between
literature and writing (and often further divided between ”creative” and ”reme-
dial” writing), and many of which contain, or once did, areas like speech, film,
and theater. Nor are these departmental divisions fixed, though the institutional
structures in which they are embedded do persist, indeed tend to resist change.
Still, as new ways of thinking about the world emerge, new disciplines like soci-
ology and anthropology arise.19 Often such new areas of study develop within
existing departments, from which, if they grow and flourish, they then separate
as independent entities. But the place of such new programs in the academic sys-
tem, their very right to exist, can long remain at contest. At my own institution, for
example, anthropology emerged as a small independent department just three
or four years ago. This is not surprising since much of the academy is conservative
by design and exclusive in practice. Still, one cannot usefully pursue an inquisi-
tional approach to new knowledge: one cannot exclude by fiat what intellectuals
persist in asking about and what students find compelling.
Both intellectuals and students persistently ask about movies, Jurassic Park
for instance. In a broadly-constituted English department, one might approach
it as yet one more ”text,” whose plot, characters, themes, and aesthetic tactics
can fruitfully be analyzed in more or less traditional ways. But what if one wishes
then to historicize20 this ”text,” addressing the conflict between its condemnation
of commodifying dinosaurs and its real-life existence as one of the most success-
ful commodifications of dinosaurs or, indeed, anything else in human history?
Again, in light of the movie’s thematic critique of technology applied to profit,
how does one best study the origins, development, and use of the advanced
technologies upon which the movie is so dependent? How does one explain
the film’s great audience appeal in the particular, post-Gulf War moment of its
distribution and consumption; its role in salvaging the economic fortunes of the
Matsushita Electric Industrial Corporation; or its function in the spreading interna-
tionalization of cultural production? Doesn’t the pursuit of these historical, eco-
nomic, marketing, even technological issues draw one away from any traditional
discipline—even one as flexibly constituted as English—and into other, distinctly
interdisciplinary fields, like film studies or, more often, American studies?
19
Since ”new ways of thinking” or new schools of (literary) theory develop time and again, one
might not think of it as a fixed set of tools but rather a ”body of thinking and writing whose limits
are exceedingly hard to define.” Theory can further be interpreted as a genre that draws from a
whole range of different fields and disciplines. ⇒ Cf. page 16
20
The move of ’historicizing’ a text is often linked to the work of Fredric Jameson, who famously
urged critics to ”always historicize.” ⇒ Cf. page 8
7
The Intersection of American Studies
I point toward American studies in part because the annual convention of the
American Studies Association and its journal, American Quarterly, have become
venues of choice in the United States for many of those active in cultural studies
and related areas concerned with mass culture, the media and its institutions,
the politics of communications, academic conventions and discourses, and the
like. At the same time, though the process has been less apparent, distinctive
theoretical paradigms as well as objects of study have emerged within American
studies. To compare the reading lists of introductory graduate courses in English,
history, and American studies is to observe three very distinct domains, within
which practitioners are asking rather different, if related, questions. Such a course
in American studies will include work by people located in English and history, as
well as in sociology, anthropology, political science, art, and music departments.
But what is more striking are the number of works that are very unlikely to be
central to either introductory graduate history or English courses, books like —
to cite just two from 1996 — Richard Ohmann’s Selling Culture and Rob Kroes’
If You ’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen the Mall.221 Cixous, Culler, de Man, Derrida,22
Fish, Gilbert, Gubar, Hartman, Spillers, Spivak23 continue to constitute meat and
potatoes in literary criticism; Williams,24 Trachtenberg, Radway, Lowe, Lipsitz, Hall,
Denning, Carby, Anzaldua in American studies.

Methodological Principles of American Studies

Such core texts in American studies generally embody a number of distinctive
methodological principles. One is embodied in Fredric Jameson’s injunction ”al-
ways historicize,”25 by which is generally meant focus less on the formal qualities
and structures of a text or a material object26 and more on why it emerges as it
does in its particular moment, how the forms of its production, distribution, and
consumption materialize—what forces, social, economic, aesthetic, technologi-
cal, have come together to produce this thing in this place at this time? The em- Principle First

phasis on historicizing texts extends to books in the field, including its ”classics,”
works like Perry Miller’s Errand Into the Wilderness or Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin
Land, for example. These can be explored not only for their arguments but to
understand why they emerged at a particular historical juncture and what were
the roles they played in constructing an older, essentially cold war paradigm of
American studies.327 Just as scholars wish to understand the origins and the work
of such texts, they likewise seek to grasp the functions of their own intellectual
labor within the changing shape of American institutions, like the culture indus-
21
See footnote 2. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/51714#51727
22
Derrida famously claimed the death of the author. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/623#
51839
23
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a postcolonial literary theorist and feminist critic. One of her
most influential essays is ”Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). ⇒ Cf. page 21
24
Raymond Williams’ theoretical work is crucial for our contemporary understanding of ”cul-
ture:” Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1076#51841
25
Lauter already gave an example of what it means to ’historicize’ the film Jurassic Park. ⇒ Cf.
page 7
26
American studies’ relative disinterest in praising a text’s formal qualities is tied to its distrust
of the canon. ⇒ Cf. page 2
27
See footnote 3. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/51714#51731

8
 tries and the university. In this respect, the central concerns of American studies
promote a kind of intense self-scrutiny among its practitioners, an effort to situate
one’s own practice and assumptions within American institutional life.
A second principle has to do with the fundamental importance of textuality,
not just of the written sort but, as I have suggested, in the variety of forms people
construct for the many purposes to which we devote ourselves. Textual form as
such is of less concern here than the ways in which such forms express various
relations of power, and also how texts themselves, like all cultural phenomena,
Principle Second shape and are shaped by the material conditions of everyday life.28 Moreover,
like their colleagues in literary study, Americanists are interested in how language
and form often reveal what an argument tends, indeed wishes, to veil, or how im-
agery and details reinforce or contradict a writer’s ideas. An Americanist teach-
ing certain founding documents, like Tom Paine’s ”Common Sense” or Alexander
Hamilton’s ”Federalist No. 6” might call attention to the differing ways both em-
ploy gendered imagery to suggest what constitutes ”manly” forms of behavior in
the distinctive moments of these texts’ creation.429 One might point to how the
language of the final sentence of Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden opens a
critique of the book’s main argument about the centrality of American ”high” cul-
ture to the sustenance of humane values.530 Or to Priscilla Wald’s intense scrutiny
of the revisions of the Declaration of Independence or the terms used in the ma-
jority opinion of the Dred Scott case.631 Similarly, Amy Kaplan roots a brilliant cri-
tique of how earlier forms of American studies had ignored American imperialism
in her observation of how Perry Miller’s brief African experience returns obses-
sively to Miller’s account of the origins of his project to study America’s ”Errand
into the Wilderness.”732

Political Reading
What the major approaches to literature that I have so far discussed have in com-
mon is that they focus strongly on literature itself. Richards’s practical criticism
and the New Criticism limit themselves in their search for a text’s meaning to the
’words on the page’.33 Formalism is primarily interested in what makes literature
different from other ways of using language and in the literary reasons for literary-
historical change. Structuralism34 seeks to establish the structures that underlie
narratives and that make meaning possible. Conspicuously absent is a serious
interest in what many literary academics would now consider very important is-
sues such as the historical situatedness, or historical embedment and the politics
of literary texts. To what extent are literary texts the product of the historical pe-
riod in which they were written? The world has gone through enormous socio-
economic and political changes in the last millennium. Isn’t it reasonable to ex-
28
... or shaped by other texts respectively, a phenomenon which is understood as intertextual-
ity. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/2998#51842
29
See footnote 4. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/51714#51735
30
See footnote 5. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/51714#51732
31
See footnote 6. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/51714#51733
32
See footnote 7. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/51714#51734
33
As Bertens observes, only thinking about the words on the page without dialoging them with
historical and cultural questions can quickly become quite limiting. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/
srx/743#2755
34
On structural discipline as a discipline, cf. Neumann and Nünning. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.
de/srx/76#2445

9
pect those changes to turn up in our literature?35 And isn’t it at least plausible
to assume that those changes have somehow affected the way we experience
things? Can the human condition have remained essentially the same?36 And Charlotte Baronius: What exactly
is the human condition ?
what sort of view of the prevailing socio-economic and political condition do we
find in a given text? Does the text support the status quo or does it take an openly
or more implicitly critical stance?

The Emergence of Political Reading

Before the late 1960s—the years that function as a watershed in this book—such
questions were by the large majority of English and American literary academics
thought to be irrelevant or even detrimental to reading and to interpretation.
With only a few exceptions, critics had not much use for historical context and
even less for politics.37 In this chapter on literature and politics I will focus on
three major modes of political criticism that became a forceful presence in Anglo-
American literary studies in the course of the 1970s: Marxism, feminism, and crit-
icism that concerns itself with racial relations.38 In Marxist criticism social class
and class relations39 function as central instruments of analysis, in feminist criti-
cism the concept of gender 40 is the crucial critical (and political) instrument, while
in criticism concerned with racial relations the fundamental category is of course
race. 41 I should point out that the 1960s-to-1980s version of these critical ap-
proaches, to which I will limit myself in this chapter, are by current standards
rather traditional. Literary theory and criticism would go through great changes
under the impact of the literary-theoretical upheavals of the later 1970s and the
1980s — of the spectacular rise of poststructuralism. 42 Still, the fairly traditional Helga Radermacher:
post-structuralism discards the
character of the Marxism, the feminism, and the race-oriented criticism that I will idea of interpreting media (or the
look at here in no way diminishes their importance: traditional perspectives still world) within pre-established,
socially constructed structures.
play an important and valuable role within the world of literary studies. It must Structuralism proposes that
human culture can be understood
be kept in mind, however, that there are newer versions of these and other critical by means of a structure that is
approaches which have assimilated the poststructuralist thought that I will dis- modeled on language.
cuss in the next chapter and which continue political criticism from somewhat
different perspectives. For strategic reasons, which will become clear in my dis-
cussion of feminism, I will first discuss Marxist literary criticism.

35
Note that this interest in how literature reflects social change is not how literary studies has
always worked. ⇒ Cf. page 13
36
And moreover: Has there ever been a universal human condition shared among all cultures?
Cf. the comments on early narratological work for how this question has been expressed in schol-
arship. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1220#2447
37
Such disregard for a text’s politics is expressed, for example, in the idea that a given text’s
”greatness” (it’s belonging to great literature) is tied to it saying something ”universal” (it’s ability
to speak to all humans at all times). This sense of universality often overlooks minority groups... for
example when text’s from clearly male-gendered perspective are seen as universal and as great,
thus silencing the experience of women. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/88023#95868
38
These three were already introduced in the Session Background. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/
srx/1049#13289
39
Session III is on class. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1485#2452
40
Session IV is on gender Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1146#2453
41
Session V is on race. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1543#2454
42
Among other things, poststructuralism (a critique of some and intensification of other struc-
turalist impulses) has questioned the easy distinction between the real and the fictional. Cf.
http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/920#2455

10

pp23haha_1080: !
So, driven by idea of setting us
free from any hidden ideology by
unrevealing it, American Studies
focused on 3 most important
oppressive powers :authority, sex
and elitism. How they shine
through the text? It will be
interesting to read this annotation
in half a year. Will my
understanding change?
LittleFreak: How would ’the actual
meaning’ be determined? We
can’t ask Shakespeare how he
intended anything and if he was
using specific phrases to indicate
the things we now interpret. Did
such an ’Interpretation’ only exist
in a time when interaction with
the author was possible then?
Wouldn’t we need another term
do distinguish? - Asking for a
friend
Political Reading: A Summary
Literary texts always have a political dimension in the sense that on closer inspec-
tion they can be shown to take specific stances with regard to social issues, either
through what they say or through what they do not say — through the elision
of certain themes or topics.43, 44, 45, 46 Marxist critics are especially interested in is-
sues of class and social exploitation and are specifically attentive to the cultural
mechanisms and their literary versions — that keep people unaware of their ex-
ploited status. Literary feminism has called our attention to the pervasive male
bias that we find throughout Western history. It has rediscovered forgotten or
marginalized female writers and established a history of writing by women; it has
expanded the literary field by including the sort of personal writing that we find
in letters, in diaries, and journals in its interests;47 and it has shown how writing
by women is thematically marked by the historically difficult position of female
authors. A third important political category, on a par with class and gender, is
that of race. African, Caribbean, and African-American authors and critics have
demonstrated the pervasive presence of racial prejudice in Western writing. Like
feminism, African-American criticism has rediscovered forgotten or marginalized
black writing. It has sought to establish a specially black tradition in writing that
is not only thematically, but also in its recurring tropes different from writing by
white Americans. African-American feminists have shown how writing by black
women can again be distinguished from that of their male colleagues.
Literature, Interpretation, and Literary Theory
There was a time when the interpretation of literary texts and literary theory seemed
two different and almost unrelated things. Interpretation was about the actual
meaning48 of a poem, a novel, or a play, while theory seemed alien to what the
study of literature was really about because its generalizations could never do jus-
tice to individual texts. In the last thirty years, however, interpretation and theory
have moved closer and closer to each other. In fact, for many contemporary crit-
ics and theorists interpretation and theory cannot be separated at all. They would
argue that when we interpret a text we always do so from a theoretical perspec-
tive, whether we are aware of it or not, and they would also argue that theory
cannot do without interpretation.49
43
The notion of the ”implied author” can help you think about how a literary text can ”take
specific stances with regard to social issues.” Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/372#13290
44
Thinking about how literature and culture relate to one another means thinking about the
political dimension of literature. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1049#2978
45
An important facet of a text’s politics lie in what the text says or does not say; Obviously, this
also holds for nonfiction, as H. Porter Abbott points out. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/997#2457
46
Earlier on in his text, Bertens points out that we always have a theoretical perspective. ⇒ Cf.
page 11
47
It thus adopted a new definition of literature and culture, voiced in T.S.Eliot’s ”Notes towards
the Definition of Culture”: Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1076#2461
48
This seminar challenges the idea of an ’actual meaning’ in many different ways, among others
by turning to theories that proclaim the ’death’ of the author. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/631#
20339
49
We will address some specifically political dimensions of texts later in the semester. If you
want to know a little more at this point, this summary might be an interesting starting point. ⇒
11
Literary Studies and Cultural Studies
But what is the relation between literary studies and cultural studies? In its broad-
est conception, the project of cultural studies is to understand the functioning
of culture, particularly in the modern world: how cultural productions work and
how cultural identities are constructed and organized, for individuals and groups,
in a world of diverse and intermingled communities, state power, media indus-
tries, and multinational corporations. In principle, then, cultural studies includes
and encompasses literary studies, examining literature as a particular cultural prac-
tice.50, 51, 52 But what kind of inclusion is this? There’s a good deal of argument
here. Is cultural studies a capacious project within which literary studies gains
new power and insight? Or will cultural studies swallow up literary studies and
destroy literature?53 To grasp the problem we need a bit of background about
the development of cultural studies. |43| I can’t see any danger to literature
in this case. Literature obviously
Cultural studies dwells in the tension between the analyst’s desire to analyse will not loose other , except
cultural work, their functions.
culture as a set of codes and practices that alienates people from their interests People will need psychotherapy
and creates the desires that they come to have and, on the other hand, the an- by literature. Literature and
Culture can make each other
alyst’s wish to find in popular culture an authentic expression of value. One so- richer.
lution is to show that people are able to use the cultural materials foisted upon
them by capitalism and its media industries to make a culture of their own. Pop-
ular culture is made from mass culture. Popular culture is made from cultural
resources that are opposed to it and thus is a culture of struggle, a culture whose
creativity consists in using the products of mass culture. |45|
Now the relationship between cultural studies and literary studies is a com-
plicated problem.54 In theory, cultural studies is all-encompassing: Shakespeare
and rap music, high culture and low, culture of the past and culture of the present.
But in practice, since meaning is based on difference, people do cultural studies
as opposed to something else. As opposed to what? Since cultural studies arose
out of literary studies, the answer often is, ’as opposed to literary studies, tradi-
tionally conceived,’ where the task was the interpretation of literary works as the
achievements of their authors, and the main justification for studying literature
was the special value of great works: their complexity, their beauty, their insight,
their universality, and their potential benefits to the reader. |46| in this part opposition is not so
obvious.

What is Literature?
Even a bit of historical perspective makes this question more complex. For twenty-
five centuries people have written works that we call literature today, but the

Cf. page 11
50
Cawelti’s interest in formula opens up an important interface between literary studies and
cultural studies. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1265#2242
51
Cawelti proposes one link between cultural studies and literary studies. Cf. http://www.
shrimpp.de/srx/1249#2234
52
In similar fashion, cultural studies has begun to include and encompass narratology. Cf. http:
//www.shrimpp.de/srx/1223#2204
53
As Jonathan Culler points out, there is (or: was) a fear that cultural studies could swallow up
literary studies. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/351#354
54
The close relationship between American studies and cultural studies is based in part on
American studies being a very young discipline. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1049#1739

12

We can also think about ancient
Greeks literature in this example.
It is interesting, what would they
say if someone will tell them that
literature analysis should be
separated from political discourse
and should be unique? Does that
mean that we just made a turn to
Greeks again?
This is important to keep in mind
modern sense of literature is scarcely two centuries old.55 Prior to 1800 litera-
ture and analogous terms in other European languages meant ’writings’ or ’book
knowledge.’ Even today, a scientist who says ’the literature on evolution is im-
mense’ means not that many poems and novels treat the topic but that much has
been written about it. And works that today are studied as literature in English or
Latin classes in schools and universities were once treated not as a special kind of
writing but as fine examples of the use of language and rhetoric. They were in-
stances of a larger category of exemplary practices of writing and thinking, which
included speeches, sermons, history, and philosophy. Students56 were not asked
to interpret them, as we now interpret literary works, seeking to explain what
they are ’really about.’ On the contrary, students memorized them, studied their
grammar, identified their rhetorical figures and their structures or procedures of
argument. A work such as Virgil’s Aeneid, which today is studied as literature,
was treated very differently in schools prior to 1850.
The modern Western sense of literature as imaginative writing57 can be traced
to the German Romantic theorists of the late eighteenth century and, if we want
a particular source, to a book published in 1800 by a French Baroness, Madame
de Staël’s On Literature Considered in its Relations with Social Institutions. But
even if we restrict ourselves to the last two centuries, the category of literature
becomes slippery: would works which today count as literature—say poems that
seem snippets of ordinary conversation, without rhyme or discernible metre—
have qualified as literature for Madame de Staël? And once we begin to think
about non-European cultures, the question of what counts as literature becomes
increasingly difficult. It is tempting to give it up and conclude that literature is
whatever a given society treats as literature—a set of texts that cultural arbiters
recognize as belonging to literature.
Such a conclusion is completely unsatisfying, of course. It simply displaces
instead of resolving the question: rather than ask ’what is literature?’ we need to
ask ’what makes us (or some other society) treat something as literature?’ There
are, though, other categories that work in this way, referring not to specific prop-
erties but only to changing criteria of social groups. Take the question ’What is a
weed?’ Is there an essence of ’weedness’—a special something, a je ne sais quoi,
that weeds share and that distinguishes them from non-weeds? Anyone who has
been enlisted to help weed a garden knows how hard it is to tell a weed from a
non-weed and may wonder whether there is a secret. What would it be? How
do you recognize a weed? Well, the secret is that there isn’t a secret. Weeds are
simply plants that gardeners don’t want to have growing in their gardens. If you
were curious about weeds, seeking the nature of ’weedness,’ it would be a waste
of time to try to investigate their botanical nature, to seek distinctive formal or
physical qualities that make plants weeds. You would have to carry out instead
historical, sociological, perhaps psychological enquiries about the sorts of plants
that are judged undesirable by different groups in different places.
55
The genre of ’theory’ discusses the question of what literature really is in more depth; begging
the question, of course, of whether theory writing is a form of literature or not. ⇒ Cf. page 14
56
In contemporary concepts of literary studies as cultural studies, we do no longer try to un-
derstand what a text is ’really about,’ but instead we often ask for how social change is reflected
in literature, among other things. ⇒ Cf. page 10
57
This modern sense of literature is also expressed in a range of social institutions and prac-
tices that demarcate texts as imaginative writing/literature. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/936#
10945
13
 Perhaps literature is like weed.58 Good comparison. Except of
wrong gardening can’t produce
But this answer doesn’t eliminate the question. It changes it to ’what is in- fascism.
volved in treating things as literature in our culture?’

What is Theory?
In literary and cultural studies these days there is a lot of talk about theory—not
theory of literature, mind you; just plain ’theory’. To anyone outside the field, this
usage must seem very odd. ’Theory of what?’ you want to ask. It’s surprisingly
hard to say. It is not the theory of anything in particular, nor a comprehensive
theory of things in general. Sometimes theory seems less an account of anything
than an activity—something you do or don’t do. You can be involved with theory;
you can teach or study theory; you can hate theory or be afraid of it. None of this,
though, helps much to understand what theory is.
’Theory’, we are told, has radically changed the nature of literary studies,59 but
people who say this do not mean literary theory, the systematic account of the
nature of literature and of the methods for analysing it. When people complain
that there is too much theory in literary studies these days, they don’t mean too
much systematic reflection on the nature of literature or debate about the distinc-
tive qualities of literary language, for example. Far from it. They have something
else in view.
What they have in mind may be precisely that there is too much discussion of
non-literary matters,60 too much debate about general questions whose relation
to literature is scarcely evident, too much reading of difficult psychoanalytical,
political, and philosophical texts. Theory is a bunch of (mostly foreign) names; it
means Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,61, 62 Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Judith
Butler,63 Louis Althusser, Gayatri Spivak, for instance.

The Term ’Theory’

So what is theory? Part of the problem lies in the term theory itself, which ges-
tures in two directions. On the one hand, we speak of ’the theory of relativity’, for
example, an established set of propositions. On the other hand, there is the most
ordinary use of the word theory.
”Why did Laura and Michael split up?”
”Well, my theory is that…”
What does theory mean here? First, theory signals ’speculation’. But a theory
is not the same as a guess. ”My guess is that...” would suggest that there is a right
58
In a different context, Neumann and Nünning claim that ’fictionality’ is similarly defined by
”a set of social conventions.” Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/924#2352
59
See this card to get a sense of how, as one example, Marxist literary theory has ”radically
changed” the common ”way of reading literature” Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1511#2595
60
Of course, the complaint that ”there is too much discussion of non-literary matters” makes an
implicit assumption about what counts as literature (and, by rejecting theory as a genre, avoids
exactly this question, among others). ⇒ Cf. page 13
61
Michel Foucault makes two larger appearances in this reader, one in the context of his ques-
tion ”What is an Author?” Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/635#16708
62
Michel Foucault makes two larger appearances in this reader, one in the context of ’Sex.’ ⇒
Cf. page 17
63
Judith Butler is a philosopher and gender theorist who developed the theory of ”gender per-
formativity.” Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/88059#87943

14
answer, which I don’t happen to know: ”My guess is that Laura just got tired of
Michael’s carping, but we’ll find out for sure when their friend Mary gets here.” A
theory, by contrast, is speculation that might not be affected by what Mary says,
an explanation whose truth or falsity might be hard to demonstrate.
”My theory is that...” also claims to offer an explanation that is not obvious.
We don’t expect the speaker to continue, ”My theory is that it’s because Michael
was having an affair with Samantha.” That wouldn’t count as a theory. It hardly re-
quires theoretical acumen to conclude that if Michael and Samantha were having
an affair, that might have had some bearing on Laura’s attitude toward Michael.
Interestingly, if the speaker were to say, ”My theory is that Michael was having
an affair with Samantha,” suddenly the existence of this affair becomes a matter
of conjecture, no longer certain, and thus a possible theory. But generally, to
count as a theory, not only must an explanation not be obvious; it should involve
a certain complexity: ”My theory is that Laura was always secretly in love with
her father and that Michael could never succeed in becoming the right person.”
A theory must be more than a hypothesis: it can’t be obvious; it involves com-
plex relations of a systematic kind among a number of factors; and it is not easily
confirmed or disproved. If we bear these factors in mind, it becomes easier to
understand what goes by the name of ’theory’.

Theory as Genre
Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods
for its study (though such matters are part of theory and will be treated here, pri-
marily in Chapters 2, 5, and 6). It’s a body of thinking and writing whose limits
are exceedingly hard to define. The philosopher Richard Rorty speaks of a new,
mixed genre64 that began in the nineteenth century: ’Beginning in the days of
Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle and Emerson, a new kind of writing has devel-
oped which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions,
nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophecy, but all of these
mingled together in a new genre.’ The most convenient designation of this mis-
cellaneous genre is simply the nickname theory, which has come to designate
works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than
those to which they apparently belong. This is the simplest explanation of what
makes something count as theory. Works regarded as theory have effects beyond
their original field. This simple explanation is an unsatisfactory definition but it
does seem to capture what has happened since the 1960s: writings from outside
the field of literary studies have been taken up by people in literary studies be-
cause their analyses of language, or mind, or history, or culture, offer new and
persuasive accounts of textual and cultural matters. Theory in this sense is not
a set of methods for literary study but an unbounded group of writings about
everything under the sun, from the most technical problems of academic phi-
losophy to the changing ways in which people have talked about and thought
about the body. The genre of ’theory’ includes works of anthropology, art history,
film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanal-

64
Note, again, the productivity of the concept of genre: Cawelti defines it via its French meaning
(a ’kind’) and notes its looseness. In the context of this seminar, we have used it to classify literary
texts, to think about seminar papers (as a particular genre of writing), and Culler here uses it to
define theory as yet another genre of writing. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1238#2481

15
ysis, science studies, social and intellectual history, and sociology.65 The works in
question are tied to arguments in these fields, but they become ’theory’ because
their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people who are
not studying those disciplines. Works that become ’theory’ offer accounts others
can use about meaning, nature and culture, the functioning of the psyche, the re-
lations of public to private experience and of larger historical forces to individual
experience.

Theory’s Effects

If theory is defined by its practical effects, as what changes people’s views, makes
them think differently about their objects of study and their activities of studying
them, what sort of effects are these?
The main effect of theory is the disputing of ’common sense’: common-sense
views about meaning, writing, literature, experience. For example, theory ques-
tions
• the conception that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the speaker
’had in mind,’66
• or the idea that writing is an expression whose truth lies elsewhere, in an
experience or a state of affairs which it expresses,
• or the notion that reality is what is ’present’ at a given moment.
Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions, and further,
an attempt to show that what we take for granted as ’common sense’ is in fact
a historical construction,67 a particular theory that has come to seem so natural
to us that we don’t even see it as a theory. As a critique of common sense and ”Unboxing again!”

exploration of alternative conceptions, theory involves a questioning of the most

basic premisses or assumptions of literary study, the unsettling of anything that
might have been taken for granted: What is meaning? What is an author?68 What
is it to read? What is the ’I’ or subject who writes, reads, or acts? How do texts
relate to the circumstances in which they are produced?
What is an example of some ’theory’? Instead of talking about theory in gen-
eral, let us plunge right into some difficult writing by two of the most celebrated
theorists to see what we can make of it. I propose two related but contrasting
cases, which involve critiques of common-sense ideas about ’sex’, ’writing’, and
’experience’.

65
Since ”new ways of thinking” or new schools of (literary) theory develop time and again, one
might not think of it as a fixed set of tools but rather a ”body of thinking and writing whose limits
are exceedingly hard to define.” Theory can further be interpreted as a genre that draws from a
whole range of different fields and disciplines. ⇒ Cf. page 7
66
This conception is closely related to notions of authorship. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/
623#2484
67
This relates back to the discussion of the effects of theory–exposing the socially constructed
character of seemingly natural common-sense is one of them. ⇒ Cf. page 19
68
Incidentally, this question is literally asked by Michel Foucault in his essay by the same title.
Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/635#13485

16
Foucault on Sex
In his book The History of Sexuality, the French intellectual historian Michel Fou-
cault69, 70, 71 considers what he calls ’the repressive hypothesis’: the common idea
that sex is something that earlier periods, particularly the nineteenth century,
have repressed and that moderns have fought to liberate. Far from being some-
thing natural that was repressed, Foucault suggests, ’sex’ is a complex idea pro-
duced by a range of social practices, investigations, talk, and writing–’discourses’
or ’discursive practices’ for short—that come together in the nineteenth century.
All72 the sorts of talk—by doctors, clergy, novelists, psychologists, moralists, so-
cial workers, politicians—that we link with the idea of the repression of sexu-
ality were in fact ways of bringing into being the thing we call ’sex’. Foucault
writes, ”The notion of ’sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial
unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures;
and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an
omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere.” Foucault is not
denying that there are physical acts of sexual intercourse, or that humans have
a biological sex and sexual organs. He is claiming that the nineteenth century
found new ways of grouping together under a single category (’sex’) a range of
things that are potentially quite different: certain acts, which we call sexual, bio-
logical distinctions, parts of bodies, psychological reactions, and, above all, social
meanings. People’s ways of talking about and dealing with these conducts, sen-
sations, and biological functions created something different, an artificial unity,
called ’sex’, which came to be treated as fundamental to the identity of the indi-
vidual. Then, by a crucial reversal, this thing called ’sex’ was seen as the cause
of the variety of phenomena that had been grouped together to create the idea.
This process gave sexuality a new importance; and a new role, making sexuality
the secret of the individual’s nature. Speaking of the importance of the ’sexual
urge’ and our ’sexual nature’, Foucault notes that we have reached the point

where we expect our intelligibility to come from what was for many
centuries thought of as madness, ... our identity from what was per-
ceived as a nameless urge. Hence the importance we ascribe to it, the
reverential fear with which we surround it, the care we take to know it.
Hence the fact that over the centuries it has become more important
to us than our soul.

One illustration of the way sex was made the secret of the individual’s being, a
key source of the individual’s identity, is the creation in the nineteenth century of
’the homosexual’ as a type, almost a ’species’. Earlier periods had stigmatized acts
of sexual intercourse between individuals of the same sex (such as sodomy), but
now it became a question not of acts but of identity, not of whether someone had
69
Michel Foucault has also written about the death of the author, a topic that Bennett and Royle
also talk about. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/623#20091
70
Michel Foucault was mentioned already in Session III in the context of our considerations
about the signficance of the author. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/635#16230
71
Michel Foucault has also written about the death of the author. You can find his text here. Cf.
http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/20002#12992
72
Note the resonance with Foucault’s move here: Foucault argues that the seeming ”repression
of sexuality” was actually a way ”of bringing into being the thing we call ’sex.’ A similar argument
can be made for many texts: the absences they contain (and maintain) speak most loudly of the
ideologies they express and perpetuate. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/1511#2590

17
performed forbidden actions but of whether he was a homosexual. Sodomy was
an act, Foucault writes, but ”the homosexual was now a species”. Previously there
were homosexual acts in which people might engage; now it was a question,
rather, of a sexual core or essence thought to determine the very being of the
individual: Is he a homosexual?
In Foucault’s account, ’sex’ is constructed by the discourses linked with vari-
ous social practices and institutions: the way in which doctors, clergy, public offi-
cials, social workers, and even novelists treat phenomena they identify as sexual.
But these discourses represent sex as something prior to the discourses them-
selves. Moderns have largely accepted this picture and accused these discourses
and social practices of trying to control and repress the sex they are in fact con-
structing. Reversing this process, Foucault’s analysis treats sex as an effect rather
than a cause, the product of discourses which attempt to analyse, describe, and
regulate the activities of human beings.
Foucault’s analysis is an example of an argument from the field of history that
has become ’theory’ because it has inspired and been taken up by people in other
fields. It is not a theory of sexuality in the sense of a set of axioms purported to
be universal. It claims to be an analysis of a particular historical development, but
it clearly has broader implications. It encourages you to be suspicious of what is
identified as natural, as a given. Might it not, on the contrary, have been produced We definitely should be

by the discourses of experts, by the practices linked with discourses of knowl-

edge73 that claim to describe it? In Foucault’s account, it is the attempt to know
the truth about human beings that has produced ’sex’ as the secret of human
nature.

Theory’s Moves
A characteristic of thinking that becomes theory is that it offers striking ’moves’
that people can use in thinking about other topics. One such move is Foucault’s
suggestion that the supposed opposition between a natural sexuality and the so-
cial forces (’power’) that repress it might be, rather, a relationship of complicity:
social forces bring into being the thing (’sex’) they apparently work to control. A
further move—a bonus, if you will—is to ask what is achieved by the conceal-
ment of this complicity between power and the sex it is said to repress. What is
achieved when this interdependency is seen as an opposition rather than inter-
dependency? The answer Foucault gives is that this masks the pervasiveness of
power: you think that you are resisting power by championing sex, when in fact
you are working entirely in the terms that power has set. To put this another way
in so far as this thing called ’sex’ appears to lie outside power—as something so-
cial forces try in vain to control—power looks limited, not very powerful at all (it
can’t tame sex), in fact, though, power is pervasive; it is everywhere.
Power, for Foucault, is not something someone wields but ’power/ knowl-
edge’: power in the form of knowledge or knowledge as power. What we think Inportant. I understood Faoucault
in other way.
we know about the world—the conceptual framework in which we are brought
to think about the world—exercises great power. Power/knowledge has pro-
duced, for example, the situation where you are defined by your sex. It has pro-
duced the situation that defines a woman as someone whose fulfilment as a per-
73
Czarniawska points out that presumably neutral, scientific knowledge is also narrative–an
effect of discourses. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/909#2496

18
son is supposed to lie in a sexual relationship with a man. The idea that sex lies
outside and in opposition to power conceals the reach of power/knowledge.
There are several important things to note about this example of theory. The-
ory here in Foucault is analytical—the analysis of a concept—but also inherently
speculative in the sense that there is no evidence you could cite to show that this
is the correct hypothesis about sexuality. (There is a lot of evidence that makes
his account plausible but no decisive test.)74 Foucault calls this kind of enquiry
a ’genealogical’ critique: an exposure of how supposedly basic categories, such
as ’sex’, are produced by discursive practices.75 Such a critique does not try to
tell us what sex ’really’ is but seeks to show how the notion has been created.
Note also that Foucault here does not speak of literature at all, though this the-
ory has proved to be of great interest to people studying literature. For one thing,
literature is about sex; literature is one of the places where this idea of sex is con-
structed, where we find promoted the idea that people’s deepest identities are
tied to the kind of desire they feel for another human being. Foucault’s account
has been important for people studying the novel as well as for those working in
gay and lesbian studies and in gender studies in general, Foucault has been es-
pecially influential as the inventor of new historical objects: things such as ’sex”,
’punishment’, and ’madness’, which we had not previously thought of as having a
history. His works treat such things as historical constructions and thus encour-
age us to look at how the discursive practices of a period, including literature,
may have shaped things we take for granted.

What the Examples Show

Foucault and Derrida are often grouped together as ’post-structuralists’ (see Ap-
pendix), but these two examples of ’theory’ present striking differences. Derrida’s
offers a reading or interpretation of texts, identifying a logic at work in a text. Fou-
cault’s claim is not based on texts — in fact he cites amazingly few actual docu-
ments or discourses — but offers a general framework for thinking about texts
and discourses in general. Derrida’s interpretation shows the extent to which lit-
erary works themselves, such as Rousseau’s Confessions, are theoretical: they of-
fer explicit speculative arguments about writing, desire, and substitution or sup-
plementation, and they guide thinking about these topics in ways that they leave
implicit. Foucault, on the other hand, proposes to show us not how insightful
or wise texts are but how far the discourses of doctors, scientists, novelists, and
others create the things they claim only to analyse. Derrida shows how theoret-
ical the literary works are, Foucault how creatively productive the discourses of
knowledge are.
There also seems to be a difference in what they are claiming and what ques-
tions arise. Derrida is claiming to tell us what Rousseau’s texts say or show, so the
question that arises is whether what Rousseau’s texts say is true. Foucault claims
to analyse a particular historical moment, so the question that arises is whether
his large generalizations hold for other times and places. Raising follow-up ques-
tions like these is, in turn, our way of steppinq into ’theory’ and practising it.
Both examples of theory illustrate that theory involves speculative practice:
74
Theses in literary studies and ’Theory’ are both speculative: they can be made plausible but
they cannot be proven. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/743#13317
75
Speaking generally, theory often attempts to show that ”what we take for granted as ’com-
mon sense’ is in fact a historical construction.” ⇒ Cf. page 16

19
accounts of desire, language, and so on, that challenge received ideas (that there
is something natural, called ’sex’; that signs represent prior realities). So doing,
they incite you to rethink the categories with which you may be reflecting on
literature. These examples display the main thrust of recent theory, which has
been the critique of whatever is taken as natural, the demonstration that what
has been thought or declared natural is in fact a historical, cultural product. What
happens can be grasped through a different example: when Aretha Franklin sings
”You make me feel like a natural woman”, she seems happy to be confirmed in a
’natural’ sexual identity, prior to culture, by a man’s treatment of her. But her for-
mulation, ”you make me feel like a natural woman”, suggests that the supposedly
natural or given identity is a cultural role, an effect that has been produced within
culture: she isn’t a ’natural woman’ but has to be made to feel like one. The nat-
ural woman is a cultural product.
Theory makes other arguments analogous to this one, whether maintaining
that apparently natural social arrangements and Institutions, and also the habits
of thought of a society, are the product of underlying economic relations and on-
going power struggles, or that the phenomena of conscious life may be produced
by unconscious forces, or that what we call the self or subject is produced in and
through the systems of language and culture,76 or that what we call ’presence’,
’origin’, or the ’original’77 is created by copies, an effect of repetition.

An Attempt to Answer the Question

So what is theory? Four main points have emerged.

1. Theory is interdisciplinary—discourse with effects outside an original dis-

cipline.

2. Theory is analytical and speculative—an attempt to work out what is in-

volved in what we call sex or language or writing or meaning or the subject.

3. Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural. Or never been taken into account
at all

4. Theory is reflexive, thinking about thinking, enquiry into the categories we

use in making sense of things, in literature and in other discursive practices.

As a result, theory is intimidating. One of the most dismaying features of the-

ory today is that it is endless. It is not something that you could ever master, not a
particular group of texts you could learn so as to ’know theory’. It is an unbounded
corpus of writings which is always being augmented as the young and the rest-
less, in critiques of the guiding conceptions of their elders, promote the contri-
butions to theory of new thinkers and rediscover the work of older, neglected
ones. Theory is thus a source of intimidation, a resource for constant upstag-
ings: ”What? you haven’t read Lacan! How can you talk about the lyric without
addressing the specular constitution of the speaking subject?” Or ”how can you
76
The notion that a person, any person, even in real life, is, ultimately, a mask hiding a different,
unknowable presence (or absence?) is one example of how theory helps you to question common
sense. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/423#2505
77
The discussion of whether a narrative is a form of representation (of something that pre-exists
it) or a form of presentation (of something that is being created in the act of presentation) alludes
to a questioning of notions of ’origin,’ ’presence,’ or the original. Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/
32#2506

20

Yes! Feel the same! It is possible to
find a relief?
Super Turtlehop: I’m interested in
what people think of this idea. I’ve
found that you can quickly get
overwhelmed by this thinking,
and that it’s one hell of a pill to
swallow. No matter the effort,
there’s always more. When you
say you’re ”done,” it’s basically
admitting ”I don’t want to know
more for now” rather than
actually being done. I realise this
is ultimately deceptive, and that
the only way to make any sort of
progress is to not let this
ostensible futility get to you and
still keep learning and working.
While I think it’s ultimately a
crucial step in progressing as a
species, I feel like this notion is
also responsible for decreased
mental health. This is getting
somewhat philosophical, but I
think it’s important to talk about
this. So what are everyone else’s
thoughts on this? I’m genuinely
curious. Edit: I think this also ties
into echo-chambers and the idea
of ”post-facts-society.” People
don’t like to assume everything
they think certain could be
actually wrong.
write about the Victorian novel without using Foucault’s account of the deploy-
ment of sexuality and the hysterization of women’s bodies and Gayatri78 Spivak’s
demonstration of the role of colonialism in the construction of the metropolitan
subject?” At times, theory presents itself as a diabolical sentence condemning
you to hard reading in unfamiliar fields, where even the completion of one task
will bring not respite but further difficult assignments. (”Spivak? Yes, but: have
you read Benita Parry’s critique of Spivak and her response?”)
The unmasterability of theory is a major cause of resistance to it. No matter
how well versed you may think yourself, you can never be sure whether you ’have
to read’ Jean Baudrillard, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Hélène Cixous, C L. R.
James, Melanie Klein, or Julia Kristeva, or whether you can ’safely’ forget them. (It
will, of course, depend on who ’you’ are and who you want to be.) A good deal of
the hostility to theory no doubt comes from the fact that to admit the importance
of theory is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave yourself in a position
where there are always important things you don’t know. But this is the condition
of life itself.
Theory makes you desire mastery: you hope that theoretical reading will give
you the concepts to organize and understand the phenomena that concern you.
But theory makes mastery impossible, not only because there is always more to
know, but, more specifically and more painfully, because theory is itself the ques-
tioning of presumed results and the assumptions on which they are based. The
nature of theory is to undo, through a contesting of premisses and postulates,
what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not predictable. You
have not become master, but neither are you where you were before. You reflect
on your reading in new ways. You have different questions to ask and a better
sense of the implications of the questions you put to works you read.79
This very short introduction will not make you a master of theory, and not just
because it is very short, but it outlines significant lines of thought and areas of de-
bate, especially those pertaining to literature. It presents examples of theoretical
investigation in the hope that readers will find theory valuable and engaging and
take occasion to sample the pleasures of thought.
Reading and Study Questions (Session II)
The following questions are meant to help you with your independent study. Use
them to get a sense of what you have understood and what you have not under-
stood from this session’s readings. They are not graded and they only serve your
self-assessment. However, do take them seriously. It is one thing to think ”oh, I
know this,” but another to actually put it down in writing. To prepare for in-class
discussion in Session II, make sure you can
1. answer all questions
2. ground your answers in the reading
3. ask follow-up questions
78
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a postcolonial literary theorist and feminist critic. One of her
most influential essays is ”Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). ⇒ Cf. page 8
79
Even though Barnet, Berman, and Burto give a list of questions, theory can help you greatly
expand the questions you ask (and it can help you develop questions that are not just analytical
but also interpretive). Cf. http://www.shrimpp.de/srx/808#2507
21
 Your answers will be private (i.e. visible only to you), but all users can see how
many users have answered a particular question.

Reading Questions:
1. Name one (historical) reason why American studies is particularly interested
in the politics of texts! What is a “political reading and what would be the
opposite of it? The main historical reason is that
in 1950-1970 years in USA was a
boom of rethinking political
2. Why do the exemplary approaches of looking at texts via race, class, or gen- institutes, their effectiveness,
freedom, diversity, human
Because, according to opinion rights.
of
der tend to work for all texts? Political reading means revealing,
different, contemporary and not
analyzing and rethinking
theory authors, these 3 are impact
the
3. How does Paul Lauter define the “cultural work that a text performs? Para- of
mainliterature on ideologies,
”powers”, main socialwhichideas
and constructs.
deeply rules Analyzing
allmeans
aspects of text
our can
phrase in your own words. Cultural
literature work
according tohow
form and
lives
reflect and therefore
the most can
universalbe seen
social
”what author
everywhere means” will be an
experience.
opposite to thisOpposite -is another
approach.
4. One of the cards in Session II poses a big question: “What is Literature”? Try approach, when we choose text
by how it can reflect ”truth”.
to answer this question from an American Literary Studies perspective. Why
is literature “like weed,as Jonathan Culler claims? Literature - this is any text which
can reflect the universal social
experience. Today in AS
5. After reading the texts of this session, what is “theory to you? And why is perspective we see no strict
differences between elite’s
theory important for the study of American literature and culture? You may Literature and mass culture. They
use an example of “theory at work to answer this question. Theory
interfereiseach
a construction of
other. J.Culler
explaining
claims that any phenomenon.
we don’t need andIt is
complicated. In humanitarian
have to give strict theoretical
sciences
definitionwe ofcan’t prove- or
Literature refuteof
instead
the
this theory -it isjust
we should justthink
a complicated
assumption. Because
constantly if this of example
of that AS tightly
connected to politics,orsociology,
serves our purposes not.
cultural studies - it needs
theoretical basic of other
disciplines. For example political
studies (Marx), philosophy
(Foucault, Derrida) etc.

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