Author Archives: Peter Levine

the “general turn to ethics” in literary criticism

I need to revise my book manuscript about Dante, which is under consideration by a publishing house. In the book, I argue that interpreting literature has moral or ethical value. Literary critics, I claim, almost always take implicit positions about goodness or justice. They should make those positions explicit because explicit argumentation contributes more usefully to the public debate. Also, the need to state one’s positions openly is a valuable discipline. (Some positions look untenable once they are boldly stated.)

I had taken the stance that contemporary literary theorists and academic critics were generally hostile to explicit ethical argument. My book was therefore very polemical and critical of the discipline. But I was out of date. In Amanda Anderson’s brilliant and influential book The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006), she announces: “We must keep in mind that the question. How should I live? is the most basic one” (p. 112).

This bold premise associates her with what she rightly calls the “general turn to ethics” that’s visible in her profession today (p. 6). This turn marks a departure from “theory,” meaning literary or cultural theory as practiced in the humanities from the 1960s into the 1990s. “Theory” meant the use of (p. 4) “poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and queer theory” in interpreting texts and discussing methods and goals within the humanities.

“Theory” tended to deprecate human agency. Poststructuralism “limit[ed] individual agency” by insisting that we could not overcome (or even understand) various features of our language, psychology, and culture. Multiculturalism added another argument against human agency by insisting “on the primacy of ascribed group identity.” Anderson, in contrast, believes in human agency, in the specific sense that we can think morally about, and influence, the development of our own characters. We don’t just “don styles [of thinking and writing], … as evanescent and superficial as fashion” (p. 127). Instead, we are responsible for how we develop ourselves.

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Woolf’s Orlando

I picked up and read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando over the weekend. Generally not my cup of tea–I could do without the coy inside jokes and the motif of “barbarian” Africa, which begins on p. 1 and runs throughout. However, I found myself developing respect for two aspects of this highly unusual novel.

First, it is impressive how the narration evolves to match the historical period described on each page. The language shifts from courtly Elizabethan prose to the rapid-fire, cinematic feel of a movie. James Joyce does the same thing even more radically in Episode 14 of Ulysses. Perhaps Woolf’s subtler experiment is more satisfactory; but in neither book is this technique a gimmick. I think modernism arises when artists, in any medium, realize that you cannot simply describe the world. You always do so in a style; and styles vary. The problem is: Why should you pick one style instead of another? Why, therefore, should you make art at all? One answer is abstraction, which means dropping the pretense of objectivity. Woolf and Joyce try something different; they make the change of style itself the subject of their story.

Second, I came to see that Woolf respects her protagonist. Orlando is generally identified with Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf had a relationship. For quite a few pages, I thought the portrait of Sackville-West was patronizing. Orlando has great legs and lots of money. He (later she) yearns to be a writer, but writes nothing of value. I cannot imagine that Sackville-West would want to be so portrayed. But it turns out that Orlando matures as the novel progresses, and the story of his/her development is moving because it reaches a conclusion in full, self-conscious, capable and creative adulthood.

tips for student interviewers

Students often seem to be required now to interview “experts” as sources for their term papers. For whatever reason, I get several interview requests each week from students who are not enrolled at my university. I am generally inclined to help them, but I’ve developed some tips that other interview targets might want to borrow, and professors might want to recommend to their students:

Don’t tell me that you want to interview me because you need several sources for a required paper. Tell me that you are interested in an important topic and want to talk to me because I seem to know something about it.
Before you contact me, read at least some of the most prominently posted material on my organization’s website. I will help you to navigate through our site, but I want you to look first. Ideally, your questions will be prompted by something that my colleagues or I have written or said.
Send me the questions by email so that I can respond right away and don’t have to email you back to schedule a time for a call.
Be polite. For example, “thank you” is considered a nice ending to an email. (Email, btw, is an old-fashioned alternative to texting.)

part of the problem

I generally don’t like to quote at length from prominent blogs, but I can’t improve on this reaction by Jay Rosen:

I was watching CNN for Obama’s speech. Moments after it concluded Wolf Blitzer was asked to tell us what he heard in it. Wolf’s ear is the big ear for the Best Political Team on Television, according to CNN. So he went first. And according to Blitzer, Obama’s speech boils down to a “pre-emptive strike” against various attacks on the way: videos, ads, and news controversies that are sure to keep Reverend Jeremiah Wright and “race” in play as issues in the campaign. (I don’t have his exact words; if someone out there does, ping me.)

Wasn’t the speech about that very pattern?

This is the style of analysis–and the level of thought–we have become miserably utterly used to, especially from Blitzer, but also many others on TV: everything is a move in the game of getting elected, and it’s our job in political television to explain to you, the slightly clueless viewer at home, what the special tactics in this case are, then to estimate whether they will work.

That Blitzer, offered the first word on that speech, did the savvier-than-thou, horse race thing tells you about his priorities (mistakenly “static,” as Obama said about Wright) and his imaginative range as an interpreter of politics (pretty close to zero.)

Compare Wolf to active, thoughtful citizens who care:

“The Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of a mostly white evangelical church of about 12,000 in Central Florida … said the Obama speech led to a series of conversations Wednesday morning with his staff members. “We want for there to be healing and reconciliation, but unless it’s raised in a very public manner, it’s tough for us in our regular conversation to raise it.”

Julie Fanselow: “Time and again Tuesday, speakers at Take Back America and writers on blogs like The Super Spade and Booker Rising and Pam’s House Blend echoed and dissected and even wept over what Obama had said in Philadelphia.”

Rich Harwood reflects on what we should do when someone (such as Rev. Wright) “cross[es] the line of politeness and rupture[s] norms of give-and-take.” We should, says Rich, “step forward and renounce them in ways that reflect the kind of public life and politics we seek to create. Let us take in the fullness of their argument and respond in kind – with clarity, forthrightness, and strength of conviction, even love. I do not suggest that anyone should back down, but neither do I advocate a slash and burn response that poisons the very public square we wish to invigorate.”

Less favorable to Obama, but equally responsible and deliberative, is Bill Galston’s take.

guest blogger: Doyle Stevick

Doyle Stevick is an education professor at the University of South Carolina. Here is his contribution to the CANDE newsletter. (My contribution was yesterday’s post.) The assignment, again, is to describe an ideal civics class, without worrying about what might be politically palatable or practical.

Between 2001 and 2004, I spent hundreds of hours in civic education classrooms all over Estonia. I observed teachers in different cities, sometimes on the same day, and the drives gave me a great deal of time to reflect on things I’d like to see change in civic education generally. Here, I’ll keep myself to just three.

In my exposure to civic education materials, I have seen very little representation of children as social actors. And yet children do and have done extraordinary things. It is one thing to see the work of Craig Kielburger, who traveled around Asia at age 12, founded an international children’s organization, and the like. His is an inspiring tale, well represented in his own words in his book “Free the Children” and the Bullfrog Films documentary “It takes a Child.” Yet, as with college students who read about Paul Farmer in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains, the sheer scale of his accomplishments can overwhelm rather than inspire and inspire a sense of civic self-efficacy in children.

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