Reversion: Control and Mastery

Yes, I have been absently absent digitally. Note to self: Never schedule major presentations and papers to be due during midterms and your birthday.

In our Victorian Literature class, Emily Allen was surprised at the lack of ability to do a close reading among graduate students. I flashed back to my first close reading ever, on Blake's poem about the chimney sweep. My reading was pedantic, but at least it was a close reading: I interpreted the adjectives used, the line breaks, the form of the poem, and its allusions.
I'd never even consider that as a valide essay now.
We have become so immersed in "cultural studies" in the loosest sense of the term that we have forgotten the main methods of our field. Even the great scholars in literary theory spend so much time contextualizing that their "close readings" seem to be simply quotations with a nod toward the reader: Look at this quote. We all know how to read it. Now let's see how Dickens' financial situation influenced his use of the word "miser" here.
This is not a close reading. Instead, the sort of close reading and mastery over the text that the New Critics provided us with has been shunted aside; perhaps because we are loathe to remember the ideology from which close reading emerged. The "empirical" feel to close reading and the New Critics' attempts to scientize literary studies makes us very uncomfortable. And so close reading becomes one technique among many, and not the primary goal of an interpretation.
I won't say whether this is right or wrong in general (as a rhetorician, I cannot speak for the literary critics), but to me this feels irresponsible. As Professor Burleson so naively says in my communication studies class, the point of literary studies is to "understand" (another word we hesitate on) the work in front of us. And that means a certain mastery over, control over, the text itself which we in this postmodern non-arboreal, anti-hierarchical context cringe at. We say we are doing a "violence" to a text when we "mark" it (Bartholomae, Ways of Reading introduction and Derrida, Acts of Literature). The instant we comment on it, the text is no longer "the" text--it mutates and becomes something else, Derrida says. This may be true: My marks on Wordsworth's "Prelude" have made it very different from the original text. And I certainly intend to do a violence to it by leaving my own mark upon the history of that text and its various meanings.
But I do this through what I call a "rhetorical" analysis--and rhetorical analysis is not afraid of close reading. Rhetorical analysis seeks to master the text and its life in the real world. Rhetorical analysis looks at possible intent, possible effects, possible meanings: it is forceful and assumptive, and until recently was unapologetic about making statements such as "Women are drawn to softer colors; therefore, O'Keefe's painting is aimed toward the feminine understanding." We make assumptions about the meaning of an italicized word, about the use of a comma, about the need for a border around an advertisement based on the commonplaces of our given society. It's Aristotelian, it's Burkiean, it's whitemale.
Other than the types of questions asked, a "close reading" done for literary studies is no different from one done in rhetorical studies. I wonder why our students--and, it seems, grad students--do not seem to have the procedures embedded in their brains. (Of course, I didn't have those in there until I took Lamar's Intro to Lit and Sue's Mass Media class in the same semester and began noticing overlaps). Do we fear so much to master a text that we have abandoned the notion of getting "close" to a text?
I sound like a conservative East Coast literature person, I know. But cultural studies is not a method for getting at a text's meaning--it's a method of getting at a text's culture, it's ideologies, it's seeds and progeny. We have only one method of attempting to understand meaning, and that's through close reading. It may be a reversion of sorts, but it doesn't have to be. You can still use the methods of close reading and assert a multiplicity of views at once. You can make the large assumptions that rhetorical theory requires (thanks so much, Aristotle et al) and still acknowledge that for any given culture or individual, these readings might not be the same. There doesn't have to be an air of empirical certainty to your reading; nor is it avoidable to do the violence to the text that Derrida describes (in fact, he doesn't lament that we do this violence--I'd argue he simply points it out).
The mixed methodologies of cultural studies (in its formal sense) allows us to use whatever we can get our hands on in order to explain a given rhetorical situation. To do so, we examine texts and their interaction with the context in which they are created. We must read the texts a culture produces just as much as we should the research economics, ecololgy, material conditions, interpersonal relationships, etc that were available in that time. If the time is a present time, we should empirically research the attitudes towards an idea, towards a text, towards a statement and catalogue for future generations our understandings of this data. How do people feel about dystopian films? What explanations are commonly given for reading 1984? And then, what about Brave New World's construction, content, or style might be appealing to high school teachers so that it ends up on syllabi? How does the text argue for change, and how does that argument reflect the conditions in which Huxley was writing? What other treatises were available that same year, and how were those formally constructed? What genre conventions are present in these novels, and how do those conventions transfer to film? How is the hero represented, and how do audiences feel about that hero when they actually are reading? Close reading mixes with historical research and can blend in empirical, qualitative, attitudinal studies. (And it will).
Literature meets rhetoric in the text itself. A true rhetorical theory of fiction (sorry Booth, you didn't go far enough) would combine all of the elements above. And I believe that literature studies needs rhetorical studies right now (and perhaps vice versa), as we make the so-called "ethical turn" in literary theory. The ethical turn is concerned with the text's relationship to the reader and how much the text imposes upon the reader's values and selfhood. How can we possibly understand that without understanding how to read, and how a text is carefully constructed affectively (toward affect)?
As I read attempts at close readings, I keep thinking that if these critics had knowledge of rhetorical theory and methods they wouldn't be working so hard to make claims about "style". What is missing from close reading is a mastery of reading as an act that takes place in time and space. Burke's methods of criticism--if we can call them methods--seem to me the perfect blend of the literary and the rhetorical senses of close reading. He examines not only what happens as a reader reads, but looks at other uses of the metaphors in question over the lifetime of the author. He looks at how a sentence moves the reader from one idea to the next--how ideas get transformed and speculates, based on contextual information why an author would write such a transformation. He imagines what a reader "learns" or gains from a text as to why some texts become canonical or popular. He theorizes the connection between author and reader as one taking place in an undefined space that both share--shared values, common vocabulary, communal traditions and rituals that make two seem like one. And only then does he (begin to) consider larger social movements.
Literary studies tends to do this backward: the context is selected and then applied to the text. Good studies look at the give and take between text and context, but rarely do we see the close attention to each individual word and punctuation that Burke would have us do. His reading of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is considered masterful by literary critics (traditional!) and rhetorical critics alike because it is such a close reaidng, not only of the text, but of the texts surrounding Keats at that time.
In order to write my dissertation, I am going to have to argue for a Burkeian methodology for literary studies. Few, if any, have tried to extrapolate what that methodology might look like, had Burke ever set a literary "program" as he did a rhetorical one. And I will use dystopian fiction as an exemplar to make this argument, showing how texts--especially modern ones--inflitrate so many areas of culture (and, of course, that it is important to study the arguments these texts make) that it is necessary to adopt a different approach to literature. Mastery of a text doesn't just mean exploring a context. It doesn't just mean doing a close reading. Mastery involves all those moves that Burke makes in his readings of literature that few have been able to replicate since then.
The question is, can I do it?

Reversion

six shots of espresso later and i'm still yawning
dawn is no closer than the last repeat of the cd
--can i call it a daydream when it's still night--
bloody cardinals and inky jays and muddy hawks
skirt the edges of the heavy parts of the air
that settled just above here last night
it's weighted with water to drown out the pain

musty carpets and bathrobes smell like before
(before i left for eastern pastures)
our insubstantial consubstantial murmurings at dinner
--we can call it immediate for now--
mixed elves wtih oily corn, love with silk shirts
the stones we leaped in the fog, in a waltz
reeked old dampness from the creek and the dew

elastic in my veins is like (mutatis mutandis)
when love was so easy (sine qua non)