I'm doing M.A. coursework (English Lit.) again for the first time in awhile. Yesterday was the first meeting of the course I'm taking this semester (Textuality). Thinking about something as heady as theories of the text after discussing online marketing in meetings all day is as disconcerting as I expected, but oddly soothing considering the anxiety I used to associate with academia.
Anyway—some cool stuff…
We were discussing this passage from T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent":
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. [...] The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered…
So one point of the discussion was to think about the phenomenon of old literature being transformed by new literature as an example of what Freud called deferred action (which in Freud's sense of the term entailed him observing his patients not experiencing the trauma of a certain event until later gaining significant knowledge or experience—Freud's main focus being of course on the infamous primal scene not being traumatic until gaining a knowledge of what was occuring). Eliot's description is of a dialectical progression rather than fully deferred realization, but I guess the point is that the actual shift is somewhere in between a dialectical progression and a deferred reaction.
So this one guy in the class pointed out that the New Historicists, in their attempt to put whatever literature is under their study back into its original context, can be seen as undermining the deferred-action alteration that later texts have made to what they're studying.
It's an awesome point—the professor was rather giddy off it—but erasing their own historical knowledge isn't exactly the aim of New Historicists, so far as I can tell. Shoddy New Historicism can end up there, sure, but the ideal goal of a New Historical reading would be to study the relationship between literature and history by sussing out the differences between contemporary and historical meanings of whatever lit's under the microscope. Whether or not that really gets accomplished is a question for someone who's read a lot more of those New Historicist folks than I have.
What?
Why, oh why must we kill our fathers?!?
So does the Freud-Eliot convergence = \"anxiety of influence?\" Sure sounds like it, at least from my understanding. Makes sense, being that you can\'t be competitive with your predecessor (i.e. the manifestation of the trauma) without knowing who you\'re up against.
LOL leave it to the damn shrinks to turn a simple dialectical progression into neuroses! Can\'t we all just get along?? :) (Insert New Historicist leanings here? Bah!)
Keep us posted on class insights! My brain is dying, dying, dying in LA!
uhhuh…
Maybe he was waiting for someone to make the connection?
We read \"Tradition\" and \"Anxiety\" together in Lockridge\'s class (you know, like the one time I went, ha ha), which is why it made sense that way. So no, I am not a criticism genius. :) But yeah, I was thinking of the Family romance too.
you *are* a practical cat
It\'s totally anxiety of influence… I\'m surprised that PM didn\'t bring it up. (Though, heh, when I first read your comment I thought you were suggesting that Eliot was all bugged out about competing with Freud and I was like…er…???)
I only have an excerpt from the intro to the Bloom book on hand, but he does say that \"the relations between poets [are] akin to what Freud called the family romance.\" No mention of Tradition and the Individual Talent in the excerpt I\'ve got, but I\'d be surprised if it\'s not somewhere later in the book. We know how much Bloom dislikes Eliot, but leaving that essay out of a book about literary influence would\'ve been a pretty telling example of…you know…anxiety thereof.
But yeah, what\'s wrong with those shrinks anyway? The Eliot/Bloom explanations are way less terrifying.
[...] Today in my Textuality class I learned for the first time of Beau Brummell, (apparently) the original dandy. [...]
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