Christopher Norris

Christopher Norris a lecturer in English at the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, is the author of a study of William Empson and of Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.

Reading as a woman

Christopher Norris, 4 April 1985

Why these books should have come to a male reviewer is perhaps more a question for the editor than myself. All the same, it is an issue that can hardly be ducked in the context of present-day feminist debate. Is it possible for a well-disposed male heterosexual to ‘read as a woman’, overcoming all the gender-based habits and assumptions imposed by a rigidly patriarchal culture? Jonathan Culler argues as much in the opening chapters of his recent book On Deconstruction. For Culler, this serves as a paradigm case of the way that deconstructionist strategies of reading can work to undo such naturalised categories as ‘male’ versus ‘female’, conceived in biological or essentialist terms. It is not enough for feminist critics to identify subjectively with women writers, or with those elements of repressed female experience there to be uncovered in the texts of patriarchal tradition. Such thinking is the first stage only, since it cannot do more than put up local resistance and leave the opposition male/female firmly in place. What is needed, Culler argues, is a systematic process of displacement which interrogates the logic underlying such assumptions and shows it to rest on a certain blindness to its own textual workings. Thus Freud’s discourse on female sexuality reveals all the symptomatic twists and distortions of a theory bent upon establishing power over that which would otherwise elude its control. Hysteria and penis-envy are just two of those mythic explanations which Freud has to invent by way of warding off this threat to the phallocratic order of things.

Letter

Plain English

20 December 1984

SIR: T.S. Eliot apparently meant it as a compliment when he wrote that Henry James possessed ‘a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’. The remark might be applied less charitably to the present Henry James Professor of Letters at New York University. I refer to Denis Donoghue’s curiously off-the-point review of Inside the Myth: George Orwell – Views from the Left (LRB, 20 December 1984)....

Some Versions of Narrative

Christopher Norris, 2 August 1984

Philosophers are understandably aggrieved when literary critics presume to instruct them in the finer points of textual interpretation. Particularly irksome is the claim of conceptual rhetoricians like Paul de Man that philosophy has not yet caught up with ‘elementary refinements’ that criticism has long since taken for granted. Deconstruction goes furthest towards contesting the status of philosophy by showing how its concepts finally come down to the ‘unmasterable’ play of linguistic figuration. There is a striking example of de Man’s mercilessly consequential logic – deployed to most ‘illogical’ ends – in his reading of Kantian aesthetics, collected in the Shapiro and Sica volume. This essay deconstructs the Critique of Judgment by pressing its concepts and categories to the point where they yield up a series of perverse rhetorical manoeuvres at odds with any self-respecting ‘philosophic’ argument. It is tropes, not concepts, that structure the economy of Kantian reason and enable its crucial transitions from stage to stage of ‘enlightened’ critique. From the deconstructive viewpoint, de Man’s is a reading of exemplary rigour and scrupulous textual awareness. To most analytic philosophers – those trained up, let us say, on the regulative mastery of concept over trope – such ‘rigour’ looks more like mere semantic juggling, the sort of thing which had better be confined to university departments of literature.–

Beyond Textualism

Christopher Norris, 19 January 1984

One gets the impression from Riffaterre’s book that he enjoys playing single-minded hedgehog to the foxy representatives of Parisian post-structuralist fashion. Despite some fairly arcane terminology, he is basically an old-style formalist whose forays into theory are largely in the service of traditional interpretative ends. The literary text, for Riffaterre, is an object of patient and erudite close-reading, a ‘monument’ whose utterly distinctive character the critic sets out to describe and explain. At bottom, there is not much difference between this kind of ‘structuralist’ activity and the techniques of verbal analysis perfected by ‘old’ New Critics like Wimsatt and Brooks. Of course there is a shift of technical idiom, from the homespun rhetorics of Ambiguity, Irony and Paradox to a post-Saussurian language of signifier and signified, text and intertext. But Riffaterre’s commitment to the structuralist project stops well short of dissolving the poem into a play of circumambient codes and conventions beyond all reach of formal analysis. His readings are squarely opposed to the current mood of ‘textualist’ euphoria which merges poem and commentary in an endless exchange of productive signification. Criticism has its work cut out, he thinks, in explaining what it is about the nature of literary texts that both marks them out clearly as ‘literary’ and preserves their meaning against the ravages of time and cultural change. There is much here that would gladden the heart of a rearguard New Critic, but little – besides the somewhat de rigueur terminology – that a current post-structuralist would want to take on board.–

From Plato to Nato

Christopher Norris, 7 July 1983

Eagleton’s book is both a primer and a postmortem. It surveys the varieties of recent and present-day literary theory, only to suggest – in its closing chapter – that they had better be abandoned in the interests of a practical, transformative involvement in cultural politics. Like Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus, Eagleton asks his reader to think, and think hard, about the theories on offer; then, having achieved a perspective that transcends them, to kick away the ladder and enjoy the prospect thus afforded. Those familiar with Eagleton’s earlier writings will hear the crash of ladders distinctly near home as the book comes to deal with structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Gone is the Althusserian quest for a ‘science’ of the text and its productive mechanisms, the project which Eagleton resourcefully argued in Criticism and Ideology (1976). As that scientistic dream receded, so the influence of Foucault replaced that of Althusser, and the truth-claims of knowledge were increasingly seen as effects of a dominant ideological discourse. No matter how radical their proclaimed intent, critical theories were all too readily processed and adapted to the ends of maintaining the institutional status quo. If ‘truth’, as Foucault argues, is a reflex function of the power to impose such a dominant discourse, then it is the concept of truth which itself needs dismantling, and along with it the old opposition between ‘science’ and ‘ideology’.–

Return of the real

A.D. Nuttall, 23 April 1992

The idea has got around – among ‘advanced’ thinkers of various political persuasions – that realist epistemologies are a thing of the past, that truth values in criticism...

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Theory and Truth

Frank Kermode, 21 November 1991

The autumn catalogues of some very enterprising publishers announce as many books as usual under the rubric Literary Criticism, or possibly more, but few have titles of a sort that, even ten...

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Paul de Man’s Abyss

Frank Kermode, 16 March 1989

Paul de Man was born in 1919 to a high-bourgeois Antwerp family, Flemish but sympathetic to French language and culture. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he wrote some pieces...

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Sabotage

John Sturrock, 31 March 1988

Bait them and the Derrideans certainly rise. When the English version of Derrida’s Glas appeared last year in the United States*, I wrote a griping review of it, to regret mainly that a...

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Untheory

Alexander Nehamas, 22 May 1986

The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry which Plato described, and in which he took part, is still being fought. Poetry today has become, more generally, ‘rhetoric’,...

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Plain English

Denis Donoghue, 20 December 1984

Orwell took little care of his manuscripts. He didn’t anticipate that collectors of such things would pay real money for them, and that universities would think it a privilege to turn a...

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Textual Harassment

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1984

In a recent review in this paper, Edward Said used the word ‘narrative’ about thirty times. This might have seemed a lot even in the present state of litcritspeak, and even in an...

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Wild, Fierce Yale

Geoffrey Hartman, 21 October 1982

There are no Departments of Literary Criticism; and even proposals to have a Criticism question in official examinations can cause turbulence in academic circles. What is at stake? By now, of...

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