JAC Volume 14 Issue 2

In traditional humanist literary studies, theory supports criticism, the way teachers talk about literature. Humanist theory provides a vocabulary, a set of categories, a methodology, a way of justifying, more or less self-evidently, the project of literary criticism as an academic endeavor; it tells us, usually in the form of assumptions about human nature or about the role of art, how to respond to texts, to literature. The inexorable growth of theory, however, which began in earnest in the 1960s with structuralism and seems to have reached some sort of apex with the arrival of postmodernism as a hotly disputed but nevertheless pivotal intellectual category, has undone the traditional relationships among theory, criticism, and literature, and has complicated the ways in which teachers and students can talk about literary texts. This story about theory and its relationship to literature is by now rather well-known, but I would argue that the effects of theory are still being sorted out in the classroom, where literature is still very often taught according to humanist and modernist assumptions about expression, representation and aesthetics. Teaching literature still means talking about what texts mean; even postmodernism, for all of its contradictions and overlappings and its contested status, can be easily thematized into a style or period or way of reading within a literature course.

As part of the postmodern scene,¹ however, teachers in the literature classroom today need to confront the contemporary "distortion" of the traditional and established textual hierarchy that has until now privileged literature over criticism and theory. I would argue, in fact, that the changing structure of the literature classroom is not simply due to the destabilizing impact of postmodern culture or postmodern theory--which are too often characterized only by their ontological skepticism, love of otherness and fragmentation, and refusal of reified notions of rationalism and Truth--but because of the built-in dead-end of modern(ist) aesthetics, which deprives literature of its life-giving and life-enhancing social context by fixating on a truncated notion of "meaning" within a reified notion of art as a distinct sphere of experience. The most obvious example of this aesthetic is the New Criticism, which jettisons context in order to focus on the meaning of the aesthetic artifact itself; newer critical theories of interpretation, moreover, fall into a similar epistemological trap (of finding or locating meaning) when they too "interpret" a text according to their own principles. In the wake of postmodern critiques of epistemology, which are also critiques of the search for meaning, what is necessary now is a different way for teachers to orient themselves in relation to literature. I want to argue in this essay that postmodern theory offers a framework for restructuring the relationship between critical (secondary) and literary (primary) texts in a way that will allow us to continue to talk about literary texts in the classroom without recapitulating new critical assumptions or other modern, epistemologically-oriented perspectives. It can be argued from the perspective of postmodernism that, although they use different codes, conventions, and languages to pursue their claims about knowledge, all texts are discursive practices that articulate a world-view; theory and criticism can be read as genres that are meant not simply to disambiguate literature, but exist beside it. Literature, in other words, is another genre of theory, if by theory we mean a way of trying to make sense of the world and our position in it. Reading literature from a postmodernist perspective thus involves a larger project, a critique not of aesthetics or expressiveness, but a cultural criticism that uses a plurality of texts to shape and respond to cultural positions and values within our current historical situations.

The motivation for this essay, however, involves more than an attempt to describe an alternative conceptual model for literary studies that rests on a philosophical notion of postmodernism as an epistemological critique. My argument is also propelled by more urgent historical, social and professional issues. Over the last two years, the nature and role of English departments has been debated in the national press, in the pages of MLA newsletters, and, most illustratively for me, on my own campus.² Unlike other disciplinary arguments about the usefulness or accuracy of different theoretical approaches which have occurred in cascading fashion over the last thirty years, these more recent arguments, while encompassing and growing out of theoretical differences, have focused sharply on the place(s) English departments are supposed to occupy in our society. For instance, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, as president of the MLA, wrote in Profession 89, the association's year-end disciplinary exercise in self-analysis, that "literature" is no longer a solid referent, "literary study" encompasses everything and nothing, and the discipline itself is coming apart despite "institutional inertia" (2-3). Her statement was meant to encourage as much as to analyze. Since Smith's "manifesto," other proposals addressing the institutional direction and vigor of English have appeared. Robert Scholes, for example, has presented a revamped model of literary study that quite consciously dismisses literature and aesthetic interpretation in favor of developing the skills of textual power he has previously elaborated ("Flock").

Defenses of English departments as they now more or less exist have also been written, and these are particularly interesting because of the ways they seek to define the institutional role of literary studies. Writing to a broader audience (specifically, beyond the profession) in Harper's, Louis Menand has presented a liberal-traditionalist argument about the future of literary studies. Despite his acknowledgment that canons reflect cultural self-interest and that models of objective knowledge have been discredited, Menand still recoils from actually suggesting that teachers change the way they present literature: "English professors . . . are taught how to identify tropes, not how to eliminate racist attitudes. . . . [They] are trained to study culture, not conserve it (whatever that would mean)" (56). We may infer as well from Menand's narrow definition of professionalism that teachers are not supposed to criticize culture either. The university, in Menand's view, should "restrict itself to the business of imparting some knowledge to the people who need it" (56). In short, Menand tells us that the conflicts and disagreements that animate contemporary culture are not part of the academy's concern, which should seek only to sustain its own niche as the chief purveyor of a subservient and instrumental literacy. Menand's reconstruction of the ivory tower not only furthers the use of higher learning as an exercise in the reproduction of middle class power and authority,³ it also seeks to tame one of the most powerful insights of postmodern theory (which is also most corrosive to institutional academic structures): knowledge must be historically and materially connected to its social foundations, to its history of defining and disciplining the way people act, especially within the knowledge-producing culture of the academy (Hariman 213). By stepping into the debate about what English departments look like and what they do, I want to argue that postmodernism offers a way to confront the conflict surrounding the role of literary studies in contemporary society, a way to understand why this debate is occurring and what is at stake for people who, like me, are faced with the problem of defining a professional life in a time of intellectual and political turmoil.

This problem of defining a professional life is not merely limited to philosophical and moral issues, however. My attempt to re-fuse literary studies through postmodernism also addresses the intra-disciplinary and scholarly-professional split between literature and composition, between reading and writing. Postmodernism offers a way for me to attempt to avoid this split, to find a way to participate in both of these intellectual projects without giving in to the structural impetus of the discipline that glorifies literature (and theorizing about it) and denigrates the teaching of writing. As Peter Elbow remarks in What Is English?, in literary studies "the study and teaching of literature are privileged and people who study and teach writing are treated shabbily, both materially and ideologically" (138). Yet Elbow also does a good job in his book of documenting (or perhaps articulating) the complicated, love-hate relationship teachers in the discipline of English have with literature. Literary texts are often one of the primary inspirations for people who enter the field of English, but we often cannot justify veneration as a useful or even responsible mode of teaching. Though at different times in the book Elbow tentatively offers "language arts" as an answer to the question his title poses (a solution I am drawn to), it is his more provocative point that drives my desire to reformulate my approach to literature: that "writing could serve as a paradigm for English--a paradigm that offers help on some of the important problems in the profession" (130). Rather than continue to argue about the role of literature in writing classes, as Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate have done recently,⁴ it is time to reverse the debate and ask why so little writing, which is itself a form of theorizing, of establishing relationships and linkages and causalities, is undertaken in literature classes. It is time, to put the challenge more forcefully, to ask why literary studies as a discipline privileges the reading of culturally anointed texts over other approaches that engage language and meaning in a fuller social and political context.

In order to present my notion of a re-fused postmodernist literary studies, I want first to show what we have to gain by abandoning the modern(ist) view that opposes literature as expression to philosophy as knowledge. Second, after describing this alternate postmodern epistemology, I want also to present a picture of what a postmodern literary studies might look like or do as it turns away from interpretation in a modern sense and toward the ethics of reading and writing. As Lester Faigley has recently argued in Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition, writing (and the emergence of composition as an independent discipline) potentially offers a way to solve the "impasse" of postmodern theory, the situation where no "principled position" can be maintained in the face of postmodern critiques of knowledge, subjectivity, and politics (xii). Faigley argues that, from within the postmodernist frame, "ethics becomes a matter of recognizing the responsibility of linking phrases" (Faigley 237). By exceeding, or perhaps even negating, "aesthetic" discussion in the literary classroom, postmodernism positions literary studies as a materially grounded, socially implicated, existentialist discourse that takes as its focus the relationship among texts, cultural forms and representations, and individual and collective identities. Interpretation, within this model, must be understood as an argumentative and value-laden process which requires that all participants have the opportunity to write and to argue about meaning and to be able to establish their own relations with(in) culture as they are educated.

Postmodernist Perception and Knowledge

As David Harvey defines it, postmodernism brings a number of the crises that energized modernism, especially the search for a transcendent truth or beauty amid a growing acceptance of flux and ephemerality as the basis for experience (10), to a breaking point. Denying modernity's desire for transcendence, postmodernism "swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is" (44). This description can be given a more critical inflection, furthermore, if we acknowledge that postmodernism, as an epistemological theory, breaks up accepted, normative ways of understanding and speaking about the world, and argues that new models must be formulated to "overcome the deficiencies of modern discourses and practices" (Best and Kellner 30). In other words, knowledge, as a modern code-word for the processes that energize us as conscious agents, no longer functions as a monolithic category or a series of epistemologically grounded procedures that arbitrates our relationship with truth or value. Postmodern theories instead posit new models for apprehending the world, models which deal in particular with the problems of representation and the incompleteness of knowledge.

John Berger, for instance, in the deceptively simple Ways of Seeing, has pointed out that we confront reality through expectations; one's understanding of the world is always preceded by a pre-constructed knowledge of it, a specific way of seeing, or framing, the world. To put this process into a linguistic register, as Robert Scholes does, we learn not directly about the world, but acquire different discourses that enable us to see it (Textual 141). As we better understand a discourse and are familiar with a wider variety of discourses, so we perceive the world with more complexity. Indeed, experience itself is a textual process where the "productive quality of discourse" engenders both subjectivity and agency (Scott 793). Reality, and, more crucially, identity are part of a resolutely informational process; they are a matter of finding, choosing, or--to acknowledge some degree of the determinism of discourse--simply arriving at fairly stable positions within the possibilities articulated by one's social and historical circumstances. By framing reality as part of a set of expectations, Berger frees his art criticism from the hegemonic (modern) cultural frame that aestheticizes images so that he may see art differently and derive a more useful experience from it. Rather than try simply to figure out what a picture means, Berger uses an image to "place [him]self historically" ("Between" 140), to find in his own responses and answers about himself, both individually and socially, as a viewer and as an agent.

Walter Truett Anderson's popularizing account of postmodernism as "constructivist" foregrounds the spirit of Berger's discursive framing of perception and captures more fully the ontological skepticism of the postmodern point of view: as contemporary Western subjects, we live with(in) a burgeoning number of "belief systems," and we can no longer trust the assumption that "somebody posess[es] the real item, a truth fixed and beyond mere human conjecture" (3). The existence of these multiple ways of believing suggests that we need to do more than simply seek out the shape or form of knowledge(s), which is necessarily only part of the process of learning. We also have an obligation to place ourselves in relation to other beliefs and belief systems, and to see knowledge as a collection of discourses that enable us to articulate and explain our material and historical situations. Knowledge merely helps us gain access to and map out the debate about how we construct our lives and our social experience; it does not absolutely convey to us the nature of reality. As Richard Rorty, perhaps the most well-known exponent of this point of view, has argued, "we [should] see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe" (389). Rorty also argues that this right is best sustained through "conversation," the hermeneutic process of exploring understanding and belief that focuses on opening up problems for investigation rather than regulating them through epistemological algorithms (389, 320). This position, moreover, leads to the explicitly anti-cognitivist and holist corollary that learning is not so much a matter of having a truth demonstrated, but of "getting acquainted" with something, of being able to use or manipulate the discourses of knowledge through an engagement with language and writing (319).

A Postmodernist Refusal of Literature and the Discipline of English

The revival of antifoundationalism has especially energized critiques of the academy and its role in the construction of knowledge; these critiques, which are also often made under the banner of postmodernism, challenge traditional (essentialist and objectivist) methods of organizing knowledge by investigating the "knowledge-power formation embodied in academic institutions, practices, and languages" (Conner 11). In the case of literary studies, an investigation of this sort concentrates not only on how texts have been cut off from their social context in order to critique them from the perspective of formalist and humanist aesthetics, and but also on how these texts are then used to fabricate a specific world-view. Humanist aesthetics, in other words, marginalize language and rhetoric in favor of an epistemology that foregrounds the search for truth (or beauty) and, consequently, posit the subject as autonomous, stable, and given. Before literary studies can be reframed as a postmodernist and pragmatist conversation that seeks to explore the problems and the potential of our culture and our identities within it, therefore, we need to understand how modernity constructs the opposition between literature and knowledge, which, as philosophy, has traditionally been the premier discourse and final arbiter of truth and knowledge in the humanities. Once the opposition between literature and philosophy has been undone, literary studies can be brought into line with the mission Patricia Harkin and John Schilb have set out for rhetoric and composition as it solidifies its own disciplinary identity: rather than simply serve larger (and more powerful) discourses of knowledge, literature--like writing--can function as an "inquiry into cultural values" (1). Under this postmodernist rubric, literature and philosophy are both discursive practices, and they can be read as attempts to make sense of ourselves and our relation to the world.

Another way to frame the problem is to say that literature pedagogy is still burdened by modernist, New Critical assumptions. By avoiding the epistemological idea that language used to set out a proposition about the world, the New Criticism, in its quest for aesthetic purity, left itself open to the very dichotomies that have come to stifle traditional academic criticism. These dichotomies--the split between art and life, high and low culture, the artist-genius and the ordinary person--continue, moreover, to represent the official picture of literary studies, despite the obvious violations of this ideology that are visible in the everyday practice of English departments. The problem, therefore, is getting the rest of the academy, not to mention the larger culture, to accept the changes in our theories and practices and our new, and increasingly dominant, institutional self-image. One example that sets out the task facing us can be seen in Jürgen Habermas' attempt (and I read him symptomatically as an expression of the modern cast of mind) in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity to enforce the essential genre distinctions between philosophy and literature.⁵ Habermas' defense of the modern(ist) project in philosophy, particularly the separation and articulation of distinct spheres of knowledge, provides New-Critical literary studies with the warrant that underlies its critical practice. The division of labor that results from these distinctions, and which also marginalizes writing within English, however, also clarifies the nature of the crisis the official discipline faces today. Habermas argues that modernity and rationality, embodied best by the project of philosophy, are still useful and productive concepts and must be defended from the incursion of postmodern irrationality, which, by denying the transcendent power of reason, leads us into epistemological and political chaos. His defense of rationality deserves consideration as a claim for the usefulness of one particular discourse; his consistent dismissal of poststructuralist and postmodern theory, however, suggests an unwillingness to face the possibility that discourse can still be vital even if it is unhitched from its ontological moorings and allowed to function in a more provisional style as a way of mapping out the world for us and to us. Unfortunately, if Habermas' argument about genre distinctions holds and literature continues to be narrowly defined as expression, English departments need to return the discursive territory annexed from philosophy and other disciplines, bar new forms of criticism, and resign themselves to the traditional role of aesthetic interpretation and validation (as keepers of the canon) while accepting an intellectual backseat in contemporary cultural relations and in progressive politics that seek to challenge current doxa, both inside and outside the academy. Composition, as a discipline, is not likely to fair much better in institutional struggles under a Habermasian framework. Like literary studies, composition will constantly have to defend itself against the epistemological status of philosophy, which robs composition of its claim to generate knowledge or value(s).

Habermas' "Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature" thus provides a starting place for a critique that seeks to unmask modernist claims of epistemological and ontological superiority, claims that marginalize both literature and composition. Dominick LaCapra has described The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in which the "Excursus" appears, as "a monument to good housekeeping of the mind" which tries to "defend monogeneric forms and to reassert the decisively hegemonic role of analytic distinctions in defining the central core of a discipline or genre" (4). LaCapra accurately characterizes the institutional politics in Habermas' argument about analysis and classification, which, in his choice of the word "leveling" instead of another territorial metaphor such as blurring, implies a hierarchical arrangement of discourse that clearly privileges philosophy. The more immediate and important lesson of the title, however, is that it forecasts the rhetoricity of Habermas' own argument, an argument that claims to rest securely on the strength of analytic discourse.

The "Excursus" extends Habermas' attack on Jacques Derrida's philosophy, which culminates in the previous chapter with charges of mysticism and irrationalism. In this essay, however, Habermas argues that Derrida rejects logic in favor of rhetoric in order to avoid the consistency requirements that are necessary for philosophical discourse--but which, so Habermas claims, are unnecessary within the literary tradition of rhetorical, or stylistic, analysis--because they short circuit his critique of reason (188). Habermas specifically claims that Derrida's deconstruction "stand[s] the primacy of logic over rhetoric, canonized since Aristotle, on its head" (187). This argument rests, however, on his misrepresentation of Derrida's interpretation of the logic-rhetoric polarity, which does not simply invert the status of these two "different" discourses, but deconstructs their opposition to show how one differentially uses the other to define and establish itself within language. While this disagreement, especially since it seems focused on the way philosophical criticism may legitimately proceed, may seem quite distant from the problems facing literary studies, it is here that we can find the fate of a postmodern literary studies, since undoing the logic/rhetoric opposition is the first step to retrieving literature from the immobilizing frame of aesthetics.

Habermas' criticism of Derrida, rather than disqualifying deconstruction as a philosophical discourse and keeping literature in its place, actually reinscribes a larger conflict within philosophy. The relationship between rhetoric and dialectic, as Chaim Perelman has argued in The Realm of Rhetoric, is not as permanent or distinct as Habermas claims. According to Aristotle, rhetoric is "a branch of dialectic and similar to it. . . . Neither rhetoric nor dialectic is the scientific study of any one separate subject: both are faculties for providing arguments" (The Rhetoric 25-26). In an extension of this traditional linkage, Perelman's reconstruction of Aristotelian argumentation "subordinat[es] philosophical logic" to his "new rhetoric" (5); this action revives Aristotle's connection between these two discourses, and rescues rhetoric from its degraded and marginalized status as a discourse on style, or "the study of ornate forms of language" (3). By excavating the history of these discourses, Perelman notes that Aristotle's distinction between analytical reasoning--or formal logic--and dialectical reasoning--or arguments that proceed from "generally accepted opinions" and "theses" and which seek "to persuade or convince" an audience--had been erased by Peter Ramus in his formulation of the trivium of the liberal arts (2, 3).⁶ This erasure effectively disassociated rhetoric from dialectic, and reduced rhetoric to mere ornamentation. As a result, when modern logic developed in the mid-nineteenth century under the influence of Kantian philosophy and dialectic was consequently subsumed into formal logic, any sense of argument operating within a social realm was suppressed in favor of scientistic demonstrations (Perelman 3). Rhetoric, within this constellation of modern knowledge, was treated with contempt while only scientific knowledge, based on "evidence," was acceptable. Perelman's new rhetoric, however, sets out to reclaim Aristotle's linkage between dialectics and rhetoric and, as "a theory of argumentation, covers the whole range of discourse that aims at persuasion and conviction" (5). By admitting the discursive nature of knowledge claims, and using this awareness to support these knowledge claims through argument, Perelman's rhetoric thus "becomes the indispensable instrument for philosophy" (7). Rhetoric provides a way to analyze arguments while also understanding that knowledge is not permanently, ideally, or, in modern terms, scientifically indisputable. For Perelman, in other words, rhetoric functions as a method of analysis as well as persuasion. In light of this, Habermas' account of Derrida's deconstruction of the logic-rhetoric polarity is incorrect; Derrida actually reinvokes an ancient relationship, one that stresses the provisionality of human knowledge of the world and our ability or desire to act on this knowledge.

When Habermas accuses Derrida of adopting a literary criticism that "merely continues the literary process" and which therefore cannot "end up in science," he also situates himself within a Western metaphysics that makes an artificial distinction between the "purely cognitive" aspect of "problem solving" and its discursive ties (188). For Habermas, thinking and writing are unconnected activities: "As soon as we take the literary character of Nietzsche's writing seriously," he writes, "the suitableness of his critique of reason has to be assessed in accord with the standards of rhetorical success and not those of logical consistency" (188). By operating within this opposition, however, Habermas ignores or misses the possibility of the discursive logic of rhetoric, or, perhaps an even more frightening possibility, the ethos of logic, which seeks to convince us by the power of its logical demonstration, and not just by its logic. Habermas' defense of the analytical progress of philosophy against Derrida's rhetorical analysis thus also seems somewhat disingenuous: "Derrida does not proceed analytically, in the sense of identifying hidden presuppositions or implications. This is just the way in which each successive generation [of philosophers] has critically reviewed the works of the preceding ones" (189). Yet a rhetorical analysis necessarily performs the tasks Habermas defends as the simultaneous method and goal of philosophy. Rhetoric, like philosophy, seeks the cracks in the edifice of a text so we might more effectively respond to it and offer counter-claims, corrections, or amplifications. We could even argue further, against Habermas, that aesthetic discourse, like philosophical discourse, works within a similar logic of successive counterstatement. David Lodge theorizes, for instance, that succeeding generations of writers respond to previous models of representation by moving between the linguistic poles of metaphor and metonymy to disclose their versions of reality ("Modernism"). And surely Marcel Duchamp's critical reappraisal of aesthetic categories through his own avant-garde art is as much a philosophical as an aesthetic statement. In short, Habermas' claim for a privileged style of progressive knowledge-building on the part of philosophy seems overstated at the very least. Habermas--and here he most fully represents the modernist world-view--longs for a purely cognitive philosophy, a way of thinking that is similar to the role of avant-garde art in Adorno's negative dialectics, which, as Habermas writes, "preserves our connection with the utopia of a long since lost, uncoerced and intuitive knowledge belonging to the primal past" (186). Indeed, Habermas' use of Adorno's aesthetic concept belies the influence the category of pure rationality has on his own work. This category ignores, unfortunately, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith observes, the way "value," as well as meaning, is "the product of the dynamics of some economy ("Value" 1). Habermas' model of communication follows the Saussurian tradition and its idealized vision of language that assumes a message can be straightforwardly and innocently decoded. As Smith notes, however, "that model of discourse . . . along with the entire structure of conceptions, epistemological and other, in which it is embedded, is now increasingly felt to be theoretically unworkable" (2). In fact, that which opposes the value of rationality in Habermas' communicative action, what he calls "distortions," can be seen as the very ground out of which rationality grows (Smith 9). Self-referentiality, world disclosure, fictiveness--in short, the qualities of language used to define aesthetic discourse--are necessary to establish a notion of rational communication, and they in turn need rationality in order to be defined. Habermas creates a category of communication that is "sublime . . . but also quite empty" (Smith 16); crucially, however, he fills this category on the academic level with philosophy, which offers a version of argumentation as a way to escape the snares of rhetoric. Referring to his "What is Pragmatics?" Smith accuses Habermas of constructing a model that, as

a type of communication that excludes all strategy, instrumentality, (self-) interest, and above all, the profit motive, reflects what appears to be a more general recurrent impulse to dream an escape from economy, to imagine some special type, realm or mode of value that is beyond economic accounting, to create by invocation some place apart from the marketplace--a kingdom, garden or island, perhaps, or a plane of consciousness, form of social relationship, or stage of human development--where the dynamics of economy are, or once were, or some day will be, altogether superseded, abolished or reversed. (17)

Habermas' claims about ordinary language and the autonomy of fictional discourse in the "Excursus" reflect a similar wishfulness. He suggests, at least by implication, that reason, through the instrument of philosophy, will eventually lead to a utopia. Though he does not naively contest the idea that rhetoric can ever be fully removed from language, Habermas does claim that it can be "tamed" in order to function analytically (209). Yet this confidence in the domestication of language, which is grounded in ordinary language theory, rests finally on the idealized ground of a transparent language. Put bluntly by Jonathan Arac, Habermas wishes to "trade excessive rhetoric for sensible analysis" but "at just these moments, however, [his] own rhetoric swells" (xii). In the end, Habermas' defense of philosophy from the incursions of literary criticism and theory shows more about academic cultural history and politics than it does about the power of reason to understand the world and make it a better place.

Beginning to Re-Fuse Literary Studies

If crumbling genre distinctions between philosophy and literature only partially point to a need to reconstruct literary studies, though, Habermas' criticism of textualism shows how we can begin to rethink the uses of literary criticism and the purposes of our institutionally mandated talk. The concept of a "universal text" (Habermas 190), or, as John Murphy suggests, the notion that linguistic structures are at the center of social systems (241), provides Habermas with a picture of an inescapable circuit of information, an endless loop of regressive, repetitive, and finally pointless conversation. In his dismissal of textualism, Habermas essentially accuses Derrida (and poststructuralism) of a linguistic idealism (and nihilism), the notion that we are trapped within the constraining powers of language, devoid of human agency. Poststructuralism allegedly removes the distinctions between different discourses and negates any kind of criticism beyond a non-generic exegesis of texts; critical discourse is reduced to a "mechanistic combinatoire, in which everything is given in advance, in which there can be no practice but the endless recombination of fixed pieces from the generative machine" (Polan 49). Murphy proposes, however, that the universal text should be construed as a "syntase . . . a process whereby the parts of society are directly integrated, without the aid of an ahistorical regulatory system . . . society can resemble a patchwork of language games" (248). In other words, Derridean deconstruction does not narrowly destabilize or disseminate meaning, nor does postmodern theory abolish or simply relativize categories or genres. In fact, the more postmodernism undermines the regulative power of genre, the more it affirms its constitutive power (see Perloff 4).

Textualist criticism does not deny or submerge formalist distinctions, because such an act would indeed negate all criticism; it instead denies formalism its ontological force, and this move enables critics to focus on how distinctions get made and unmade in different historical moments and from different perspectival positions. Habermas' defense of genres, grounded in a version of ordinary language philosophy, overgeneralizes and naturalizes different speech strategies. Mary Louise Pratt, for instance, has pointed out how the formalist distinction between ordinary language and literary language cited by Habermas is one of degrees within discourses, not between different kinds of discourse (29). Metaphor "is a property of language," and it exists in all texts (Brodkey, Academic 65). Indeed, Habermas overlooks contingencies that affect ordinary and fictional discourse such as different levels of competence or, even more crucially, categories such as temporality or perspective, which influence not only reception but also production, and which certainly complicate the communicative act. In short, the distinction between knowledge and literature, which also bolsters the separation between knowledge and writing (thus undermining writing) does not hold up. Knowledge and discourse are intimately, inherently connected, and attempts to keep them separate undermine the productive power of discourse.

Habermas' failure to maintain the boundaries between philosophy and literature, between argument and expression, between cognition and representation, creates, therefore, the space that enables us to rethink the role and function of literary studies as an academic discourse. To see literary studies as focusing on a discrete form of aesthetic experience devalues the workings of discourse and misreads the argumentative dimension of representation, which must always be read in the context of cultural power. The failure to recognize that current disciplinary boundaries are also complicit in maintaining the status quo, moreover, relegates fields like literary studies to a project that supports current hegemonic social and cultural structures. Literary studies, therefore, if it wants to be able to do more than reaffirm the cultural status quo without constantly having to defend itself against charges that it has overstepped its essential boundaries, needs to avoid the modernist tendency to look for meaning as an end-point of its activity. Producing readings is not enough. By adopting a postmodern notion of constructing meanings within the context of our relation to our world and our understanding of this world, we can allow criticism, as Mary Poovey urges us, to "reconstruct the debates and practices in which texts initially participated" (623), and we can, more importantly, use these debates to enter contemporary discussions about meanings and values in the world around us. This act of disciplinary re-focusing can revitalize the power of literary critique, for it enables an interrogation of reified constructions of knowledge that serve specific ideological agendas, and it does so on the explicit premise of writing. "Literary" texts must be subsumed into a notion of argumentation; teachers and students need to talk back to and along with literature and not merely attempt to fathom its meaning.

Before moving on to describe a postmodern literary studies, though, it would be helpful to get a fuller sense of the educational context in which it is located. Henry Giroux has identified postmodernism with what he calls border pedagogy, which "stresses the necessity for providing students with the opportunity to engage critically the strengths and limitations of the cultural and social codes that define their own histories and narrative" (248). In light of Giroux's statement, the important difference between the modern and postmodern approach to interpretation shows up in what we do after we gain access to texts, to the codes that structure our lives. Giroux sees postmodernism as "a culture and politics of transgression . . . a challenge to the boundaries in which modernism has developed its discourses of mastery, totalization, representation, subjectivity, and history" (227). Foremost among these transgressions must be the "modernist distinction between art and life" (227), for, as Dick Hebdige observes, modernist aestheticism "privileges form over content or function, style over substance, abstraction over representation" (52). In short, modernist aesthetics value a reified, fixed and immobilized object over the acting subject. A postmodern approach to literature, in contrast, allows us once again to use representations as maps for locating ourselves within history and current social positions.

Unbracketing the aesthetic as a distinct category also opens up the possibility of thinking about postmodern culture and society as strictly material and historical, a world made up of and continually remade by its own subjects and processes. For example, John Johnston describes a "semiotics of flow" that "link[s] the philosophical problem of radical immanence or multiplicity to a theory of culture conceived as the conjoining of different 'semiotic regimes' with various material arrangements, but without recourse to any transcendent unity . . . that would stand outside the historical field or domain as their cause or ground" (156, 154). Johnston's schematic thus both avoids instituting any ahistorical or transcendent regulating device and positively theorizes the notion of a temporalized, provisional ground, a situation that modernism casts as a "negative other" in its idealizing attempt to locate and secure meaning. Such a definition of postmodernism, as Murphy argues, does not destroy or fatally relativize truth, history or order, but reconceptualizes them within historical narratives and exigencies and thus opens a space for truly transformative action: "the world is not denied but made erotic" (250). More importantly, from within these definitions literary criticism can therefore reconstruct itself as an ongoing interpretive action that seeks to return to a living community the power to define truth, history, and knowledge as concrete concepts and not reified systems that control identity. Rather than straightjacket itself by denying its contingency as a discourse, literary studies can position itself as one of many semiotic systems that seek to (re)define reality. A textualized cultural matrix demonstrates the need for literary studies to develop a procedure we might call a semiotics of contingency, which acknowledges that all interpretations are ideological in that they are attached to larger, usually unspoken, semiotic codes and discourses, and which recognizes further that these discourses must be historically contextualized and adduced a product of specific value systems.

Murphy's and Johnston's critical paradigms are especially encouraging for a postmodern literary studies because both programs are grounded in an enlarged concept of reading, one that at least implicitly acknowledges that writing is concomitant with reception.⁷ Johnston argues that postmodernism necessitates that we read in "a new and completely different way," a way which "seeks to formulate the relationships between literature (and art) and the social context on a new conceptual basis (148). Using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "agencement," he argues that a postmodernist literary analysis could examine how different codes of meaning function together in a system. Such a system of semiotic analysis allows a critic to look for breaks within regimes of meaning that can be exploited by a reader while making interpretations and counter-arguments. Murphy's plan similarly presents reading as an "existential problem" (242), where one does not methodically find an abstract modern and reified truth or beauty, but creates them through an "erotics" of interpretation, a concrete and human-scale knowledge that depends on a political process of personal control. The distinction, as Linda Brodkey points out, is between an exercise in "mining out" elements of meaning predetermined by formalist theory, and finding connections between writers and their worlds (Academic 66-67). A postmodernist version of reading stresses both attaching ourselves to larger codes as well as seeing how these codes relate to each other, conflict, or break apart under scrutiny. What is necessary is a willingness and ability to read these discourses not in terms of their own self-justifying existence, but in their relationship to other discourses and to a subject's own contemporary existential situation.

Literature, Writing, and Cultural Studies in the Postmodernist Classroom

For literary studies to join such a project, teachers must first displace the formalist paradigm that dominates literary criticism. Terry Eagleton's functionalist definition of literature grounds literary studies specifically in the rejection of the distinction between everyday language and literature that Habermas defends, and argues instead that literature be defined through the way people "relate themselves to writing" (Literary 9). Rejecting generic, formalist and pragmatic definitions of literature, Eagleton instead arrives at a description that stresses the material, political procedures we use to define what is literary:

John M. Ellis has argued that the term "literature" operates rather like the word "weed": weeds are not particular kinds of plants, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps "literature" means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. (9)

Literature, instead of having an essence, is powerful because it possesses a strategic flexibility that locates it within larger cultural power structures. Eagleton provides, in short, an ideological definition of literature, where value-systems function through hegemony, and literature, particularly in its most recent historical conception, serves the interests of ruling minorities.

A return to rhetoric and, ultimately, to composition is inevitable in light of these definitions of culture and literature, for, as John Schilb notes, it is composition that "best embodies the preoccupation with discourse associated with . . . postmodernism" (176). It makes sense, therefore, that Eagleton does not offer a counter (political) theory at the end of his survey of the leading schools of literary theory. Because literary theories are "social ideologies" (204), Eagleton instead promotes rhetoric as a constitutively political model of criticism. Returning to his definition of literature as strategic and functional, he promotes a critical enterprise that examines language to see how it affects people, that is, how language gets people to believe or act or interpret. This critical perspective, moreover, does not merely displace previous theories, but actually encompasses them. "Rhetoric" he writes,

or discourse theory, shares with Formalism, structuralism and semiotics an interest in the formal devices of language, but like reception theory is also concerned with how these devices are actually effective at the point of "consumption"; its preoccupation with discourse as a form of power and desire can learn much from deconstruction and psychoanalytical theory, and its belief that discourse can be a humanly transformative affair shares a good deal with liberal humanism. (205)

Rhetoric, while not stepping in as a super-discourse or interpretative metanarrative, allows us to strategically and contextually define our approaches to literature and our reasons for reading it. In Eagleton's case, for instance, the crucial question is not how but why one approaches literature, and his preferred reason is the "strategic goal of human emancipation" (211), which he, expectedly, elaborates in terms of lived experience and not just as a form of abstract enlightenment.

To focus on emancipation, though, is also to focus in some sense on subjectivity, on the ways people make sense of their lives through their values and actions. There can be little doubt that, as a social institution, literary studies is intimately involved in the shaping of subjectivity, and that modernist literary studies, with its stress on transcendent meaning, produces the bourgeois subject as a universal subject.⁸ Postmodern literary studies, therefore, needs to work toward the development of an alternative model of selfhood. Subjectivity emerges as a crucial category in postmodernist literary studies because, as Cornel West observes, it "returns humanistic studies to the primal stuff of human history, that is, structured and circumscribed human agency in all its various manifestations" (4; emphasis added). In her theorization of "situated knowledges," moreover, Donna Haraway locates a responsible subject only in the embodiment of partial perspective, which, because it relies on "epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating," provides a ground for "conversation, rationality, and objectivity" that "resists the politics of closure" (195-96). These ideas are useful for a postmodernist literary studies because Haraway's situated knowledge and West's notion of the integrated individual foreground agency within a coded reality and enable the deployment of a notion of intersubjectivity which focuses on the relationship forged between separate subjects within social spaces, and which is also material and historically situated knowledge that can support standards of evaluation or of truth in workable forms that do not automatically become reified and oppressive. Intersubjectivity operates on the assumption "that individuality is properly, ideally, a balance of separation and connectedness, of the capacities for agency and relatedness" (Benjamin 82), and it limits and tethers one's position within semiotic regimes or an historicized erotics of interpretation, thereby enabling a cogent rhetorical analysis to take place. Rejecting the autonomous--and thus unaccountable or irresponsible subject (Haraway 191)--the intersubjective model relies on negotiation and mediation, on a "split and contradictory" self, which, because it is open, can join in a rational conversation with an eye toward agreement that requires neither dominance nor submission but a dialogue of positions (Haraway 193). Critics often accuse postmodernism of abandoning standards, of denying that individuals can know something and act on it; intersubjectivity, as a model of in(ter)dependent identity, provides an answer to that charge by offering a standard of evaluation that can be objectively measured in material culture. Because it sets limits on the play (without denying it) of language games or the disruption of semiotic systems, intersubjectivity provides postmodernism with a standard of evaluation consistent with its aims of opening up the discursive structures that define reality.

From the perspective of an intersubjective definition of language and identity, a model for literary studies that depends on pre-conceived and reified aesthetic response actually looks quite destructive. If the life-world is threatened by cultural rationalization, and if the reification of the life-world can only be overcome by the interaction of all spheres of culture (Habermas, "Modernity" 9, 12), then rhetoric, defined as a linguistic model of intersubjectivity, offers a powerful opportunity to make progressive incursions and connections through textual analyses. John Fiske has demonstrated the power of one form of rhetorical analysis, for example, through his reading of the jeans people wear and how they wear them (1-23). Fiske's analysis demonstrates how cultural meanings are both constructed and evaded by consumers who are constantly locating themselves within their culture and society. Similarly, in a literature class, examining the influence of Walt Whitman can likewise demonstrate how ideas, styles, and world-views are passed on and influence not only contemporary poets and constructions of poetry, but our ways of understanding the value of emotion, our relationship with nature or with our own bodies, and our desire for authenticity. Rhetorical analysis strategically connects different spheres of experience and diverse texts to overcome the reification of our lives into the homogenous existence which modernity threatens to bring us. This form of analysis encompasses rational, expressive, and normative discourses, and seeks to return to individuals, as a goal of education, concrete control over their own historical positions and the processes that determine them.

A number of possibilities emerge from the postmodern, intersubjective model of literary studies in terms of the classroom. Writing theory and pedagogy offer the most effective model for rethinking interpretation as a practice in the classroom. English teachers and students must, most obviously, write more in English while managing to write less about what a text simply "means." As Christy Friend has noted in her insightful critique of Gerald Graff's Professing Literature, by focusing on interpretation teachers perpetuate dominant power relations that require efficient decoders of information but not people who might, by writing, question the status quo (281-83). Writing, in effect, is more subversive than reading because it lets us, and our students, reinscribe reality from our own perspective. By drawing the way recent composition theory and pedagogy rejects formalist paradigms and their use of preconceived narrative forms that stress the quality of expression and devalue substance, literary studies can be opened up to allow students to explore their own worlds directly. Because poststructural composition theory also acknowledges that ideologies--that is, belief systems--are inextricably linked to expression, students must not only become competent in the conventions of writing, they also must learn to make, as Linda Brodkey explains, "a sustained interrogation of the doxa out of which claims about reality arise" ("Transvaluing" 600).

Patricia Bizzell's concept of rhetorical authority offers one possible approach that can be used in literature classrooms to explore the doxa in which we are situated. According to Bizzell, progressive teachers need to stop pretending that they are "merely investigating" different ideas or texts ("Beyond" 672), and, instead, "aver provocatively that we intend to make our students better people, that we believe education should develop civic virtue" (671). Rather than inviting a teacher naively to "impose" his or her viewpoint or set of values on students (673), however, Bizzell's classroom model foregrounds the rhetorical process, the making and defending of arguments as well as the ethos of the orator. In Bizzell's model, both the teacher and students need to study the "historical rootedness" of their beliefs (Afterword 292), and learn to acknowledge and understand the assumptions on which they base their claims and the values which remain unarticulated in their evaluations. Beyond this act of clarification, however, members of the classroom need to be able persuade each other, including the teacher, about which values work best (Afterword 292). Consequently, Bizzell argues that "pedagogical mechanisms whereby everyone's access to rhetorical authority could be realized" must be implemented (Afterword 293). Bizzell's model of teaching can allow literature courses, in other words, to pursue dialogues about how we imagine our world, how texts give us ways to conceptualize and judge reality and our selves. These dialogues, moreover, can proceed democratically, not as part of a teacherly oration.

The return to rhetoric in the classroom, in short, can reinvigorate the study of literature (and its language) by showing that literature is a constituent part of our social ground and our consciousness, not just a set of static texts which are good for us to know. Literary interpretation, like composition, must engage in an investigation of the life-world; classes that foreground reception can take a text, in the words of Adrienne Rich, "as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us" (35). Responding to texts is not merely a matter of getting the message or the "meaning," but must also involve taking a meaning into a critical conversation that does not limit itself to the world of art as a discrete form of experience (Scholes, Textual 38). Sharon Crowley sees criticism as "a rhetorical strategy for opening the discursive possibilities offered by texts" (191), and she points out that literary studies, whether it admits it or not, needs rhetoric to justify its own project. Indeed, Crowley is absolutely right when she notes, with (justified) satisfaction, that the salvation of literary studies depends on its ability to enlarge the domain of English to "the study of texts, any and all of them" (191), including the texts generated within a classroom by students.

I want to round out the model of postmodern literary studies I have sketched by explicitly invoking the attitude and critical practice of cultural studies.⁹ Complementing the pedagogical lessons offered by writing scholars and theorists, cultural studies, because it is historically committed to democratic procedures and self-determination as goals of both education and culture, explicitly enables postmodern literary studies to find a warrant to expand its subject matter and sharpen its political commitment. As Richard Johnson describes--and to a certain extent defines--it, cultural studies thrives on the intellectual "alchemy" of critique, and uses and constructs a wide range of knowledges in a project that intimately investigates "relations of power" (38, 53). In pursuing this agenda, Johnson argues, one of the central goals of cultural studies is the understanding of "the historical forms of consciousness or subjectivity, or the subjective forms we live by," that is, the way individuals shape and are shaped by their culture (43). John Fiske similarly focuses on subjects and agency as he champions "popular culture as a site of struggle," and defines his project through a focus on the dialectic between the "processes of incorporation" and the "popular vitality and creativity that makes incorporation such a constant necessity" (20). Though Fiske restricts the range of his analysis to the roles commodities play in hampering or helping struggles for self-determination, his methodology could easily apply to a wide range of texts, especially literary ones, and easily answer Robert Scholes' call for a textual studies that utilizes a negative hermeneutic that "question[s] the values proffered by the texts we study" (Textual 14). Influenced by cultural studies, a postmodern reading of literary texts would focus not on just texts, but also on the readings, meanings, and criticisms that are received and generated inside and outside the academy. Hegemonic subjectivities, classifications, or canons cannot be completely avoided or evaded, but, from within these positions, and bolstered by the antiauthoritarian politics of cultural studies (Nehring 235), we can chart alternative spaces of understanding entailed by the constructedness of our (narrated) reality. Parallel to the way composition enables the process of interpretation to be reframed as an argumentative and rhetorical process, cultural studies offers literary studies a way to reframe literary texts in ways that allow us to continue to organize our teaching through texts without having to "teach" these texts. Rather than suffer some sort of postmodern self-immolation, literary studies can, through the examples of composition and cultural studies, more effectively confront the ways we use texts to build and defend the versions of our world that we care to champion.

Neopragmatism, which provides the version of postmodernism I have used in this essay with much of its progressive potential, does not amount to, as Cornel West says, "a wholesale rejection of philosophy [or literary studies], but rather a reconception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism that attempts to transform linguistic, social, cultural, and political traditions for the purposes of increasing the scope of individual development and democratic operations" (230). As I have been arguing throughout this paper against tradition, against the institutional hegemony of contemporary English departments, I feel the need to reassert, with West, that "tradition per se is never a problem, but rather those traditions that have been and are hegemonic over other traditions" (230). Critically and pedagogically, contemporary literary study operates institutionally within the tradition of modernist thought, and often perpetuates the problems that accompany a striving after transcendent value.¹⁰ A postmodern literary studies wants not to find simply the best reading--though it will use readings to articulate ideas and arguments; its goal is a fundamentally progressive opening up of human possibilities and potential, a project that needs to be undertaken without the bother of having to apologize for the presence of values and politics in culture.

Modern consciousness often displays itself in a frozen conflict between the transcendent and the real. Take, for example, J. Alfred Prufrock's paranoid fear of the other that finally obliterates his own pure subjectivity in a "drowning" into reality, or Yeats' recurrent meditations on the corruption of politics and purity of aesthetics. Much postmodern literature, on the other hand, like Graham Swift's Waterland, focuses on the quality and fullness of representation, the constantly shifting areas of solid and liquid, the temporary foundations of meaning and the currents that erode them. David Lodge's novels similarly explore the shifting power of individual identity and experience and the pressure of discursive determinations. In How Far Can You Go? Lodge simultaneously examines the erosion of the metaphysical and existential certitude of religious belief and the conventions of contemporary novel writing. In both cases, as his title implies, he wonders what will happen to us as we lose these guideposts. Life, however, is a matter of getting on, of making something out of what the characters in the story have. Talking about Virginia Woolf in the context of pragmatism, Linda Brodkey sums up the attitude literary studies needs to develop in the postmodernist context: "language cannot be possessed, but must be created by the lovers who use it" (Academic 75). Postmodernism, by freeing us from the constraints of a modernist conception of knowledge, avoids polarizing knowledge and chaos, the self and other, and maintains a human(ist) perspective on the formation of power and knowledge structures.

Undeniably, certain strands of postmodern thought turn to discourses that reject all stability for flux, play, or infinite cynicism, but they finally expose the imperial (modernist) self, not a negotiated subjectivity, which holds such inclinations in check. Postmodernism, as a theoretical perspective and as a set of values, offers us an opportunity to strategically promote the value of radical democracy through a renewed interest in discourse. Institutionally, postmodernism provides the study of literature, as a mechanism of culture, with a chance to refocus its activities. We might continue the critique made by literature: the desire to refigure knowing and living as part of a community, the need to make meaning, especially when it is beyond what other forms can or will provide. Literary studies needs to ground itself in Robert Bellah's notion of culture as "an argument about the meaning of the destiny its members share" (27), an argument that has strong affinities with what Jasper Neel calls "strong discourse" and its "tolerance for, even encouragement of, other discourses" (208). I think of Bellah's cultural argument, to again acknowledge Chaim Perelman, as one that "gives meaning to human freedom" by avoiding the absolutism of "compelling" truth or the violent assertion of an "arbitrary" relativism (The New Rhetoric 514). Literary studies, in the postmodern frame, may not be able to provide solid answers in the form of discrete readings of reified objects; it could, however, make literature once again democratically viable by encouraging readers to articulate their own lives.

University of Texas
Austin, Texas

NOTES

Works Cited