I'm reading the new translation of the Iliad rn and it's interesting how, when the gods send people dreams, the dreams themselves are personified like Ariel from The Tempest ("hearing these words, the dream dashed off at once"). That + this post bring to mind how even the driest and most rational fields stand on irrational pillars, like how the scientific method, the periodic table, and the structure of the atom all have their origins in dreams.
There is something to be said for the study of literature as, not a subfield of history per se, but a sort of communion across or inside history. When you read something like The Iliad ofc there are recognizable expressions of big emotions, fear, grief, rage etc but by the peak of the age of the novel you get the penetrating eye of someone like Tolstoy who can put you in a society that feels very alien in certain ways but then describe a tic, a passing feeling, a little annoyance that's identical to something you felt yesterday (and I'm having a very similar experience with Eliot as well). And that moment of recognition shocks you into realizing that the people living then were as fully human as you are now, which is as important to historical study as the monographs on grain production and whatnot.
Right, it makes me think of the passage in Middlemarch in the IC about the world as "whispering gallery" with messages traveling unpredictably across far reaches of time. I think the retrospective effect of writers like Tolstoy and Eliot on Homer is that they help us to infer subtleties not articulated in the older work.
"If literature is the agent of social change, on the other hand, it has an undeniable authority but probably much less authority than more obviously agential texts, such as laws, political discourses, or works of mass culture; therefore, it belongs as minor subfield to rhetoric. Establishing this latter idea was more or less explicitly the goal of the theory set in the late 20th century, as the more manifesto-like passages of Terry Eagleton’s broadly influential Literary Theory indicate."
Yeah, this proved to be the worst possible solution for exactly the reasons you say. In trying to treat literature as an agent of social history, it made social history, rather than literature, the primary object of analysis, even for scholars of literature. As soon as people realize that literature has less of a claim to shape the nature of the state than the army or the legal system or tax collection (which is not that hard to do), there's no longer any reason to read it. In more straightforwardly materialist accounts, at least literature remained the object of study, even if such studies couldn't explain its value. So long as its value could be taken as axiomatic, though...
Definitely a conundrum. I do probably subscribe to what might be called the diffusionist model: serious art does have an effect, generally positive, but one highly mediated due to its frequent lack of a popular audience (especially after modernism) and relying on its assimilation by various elites until it becomes influential on pop culture and/or taught in school. (I just read an excerpt of a letter by George Eliot to Harriet Beecher Stowe, of all people, positing a 19th-century version of this idea.) When theory-era figures like Eagleton, Said, or our mutual friend Nancy (joking, I've literally never met her) retreated to more modest positions making affirmative cases for canonical literature later in their careers, they seemed to end up at something like that. Still problematic, of course.
I don't disagree in broad terms--culture is part of society; canonical literature by the very fact of its canonicity influences how questions of value and meaning are framed over time, etc. But the problem you initially identified is a real one, and either leads people to move away from literature into a broader social history, or to wildly overstate the direct, causal impact of literature on norms, which is understandably tempting but makes you look like a lunatic. Also, it's a theory that's much better adapted to the 19th century social novel than to, say, witty little carpe diem poems.
You went above and beyond with that footnote! Interestingly Ganz has made some arguments that remind me a bit of your idea about Trump being spiritually Italian a few times in the last year, essentially that the logic of Trumpism is a kind of universalization of the logic of a mafia-“the world’s just a big racket, but I’m gonna cut you in on it” etc. It *is* a little unbelievable that Freud never experienced that feeling, even if Jung sometimes seems to have had too much of it.
The middlebrows aren't always wrong-it's a good book, one of the best popular histories I've read in a while, and subtler than you'd think. Where I sometimes disagree with him is where I sometimes disagree with intellectual historians generally: often gut feelings and prejudices arising in an individual really do matter more than this or that theorist someone's read. Which is incidentally what stuck out to me about the mafia take!
The Pynchon/DeLillo style of novel really is the only truly realist form of contemporary novel, there are troops of Oedipa Masses and Jack Gladney's out there.
I know, my work's basically middlebrow too! And I do like Ganz in some way or I wouldn't read him all the time (same goes for him and the fascists, I assume), partly because I am also drawn to intellectual history. Agreed on Pynchon/DeLillo, though, speaking as something of an Oedipa/Jack myself.
Thanks! Yes, there's something to the mafia thing...I wouldn't reduce "Italian" to "mafia" but my impression is that Italian political culture more than others has a feature I've attributed to poetry: it runs between fascism and anarchism (with their shared open cynicism about power) rather than between conservatism and liberalism.
I'm reading the new translation of the Iliad rn and it's interesting how, when the gods send people dreams, the dreams themselves are personified like Ariel from The Tempest ("hearing these words, the dream dashed off at once"). That + this post bring to mind how even the driest and most rational fields stand on irrational pillars, like how the scientific method, the periodic table, and the structure of the atom all have their origins in dreams.
There is something to be said for the study of literature as, not a subfield of history per se, but a sort of communion across or inside history. When you read something like The Iliad ofc there are recognizable expressions of big emotions, fear, grief, rage etc but by the peak of the age of the novel you get the penetrating eye of someone like Tolstoy who can put you in a society that feels very alien in certain ways but then describe a tic, a passing feeling, a little annoyance that's identical to something you felt yesterday (and I'm having a very similar experience with Eliot as well). And that moment of recognition shocks you into realizing that the people living then were as fully human as you are now, which is as important to historical study as the monographs on grain production and whatnot.
Right, it makes me think of the passage in Middlemarch in the IC about the world as "whispering gallery" with messages traveling unpredictably across far reaches of time. I think the retrospective effect of writers like Tolstoy and Eliot on Homer is that they help us to infer subtleties not articulated in the older work.
"If literature is the agent of social change, on the other hand, it has an undeniable authority but probably much less authority than more obviously agential texts, such as laws, political discourses, or works of mass culture; therefore, it belongs as minor subfield to rhetoric. Establishing this latter idea was more or less explicitly the goal of the theory set in the late 20th century, as the more manifesto-like passages of Terry Eagleton’s broadly influential Literary Theory indicate."
Yeah, this proved to be the worst possible solution for exactly the reasons you say. In trying to treat literature as an agent of social history, it made social history, rather than literature, the primary object of analysis, even for scholars of literature. As soon as people realize that literature has less of a claim to shape the nature of the state than the army or the legal system or tax collection (which is not that hard to do), there's no longer any reason to read it. In more straightforwardly materialist accounts, at least literature remained the object of study, even if such studies couldn't explain its value. So long as its value could be taken as axiomatic, though...
Definitely a conundrum. I do probably subscribe to what might be called the diffusionist model: serious art does have an effect, generally positive, but one highly mediated due to its frequent lack of a popular audience (especially after modernism) and relying on its assimilation by various elites until it becomes influential on pop culture and/or taught in school. (I just read an excerpt of a letter by George Eliot to Harriet Beecher Stowe, of all people, positing a 19th-century version of this idea.) When theory-era figures like Eagleton, Said, or our mutual friend Nancy (joking, I've literally never met her) retreated to more modest positions making affirmative cases for canonical literature later in their careers, they seemed to end up at something like that. Still problematic, of course.
How interesting about Eliot!
I don't disagree in broad terms--culture is part of society; canonical literature by the very fact of its canonicity influences how questions of value and meaning are framed over time, etc. But the problem you initially identified is a real one, and either leads people to move away from literature into a broader social history, or to wildly overstate the direct, causal impact of literature on norms, which is understandably tempting but makes you look like a lunatic. Also, it's a theory that's much better adapted to the 19th century social novel than to, say, witty little carpe diem poems.
Thank you for sharing Oates’s talk, which by contrast reaffirms for me how nonderivative my writings on the Muse are
You're welcome! Your Muse writings are definitely more original than the well-trodden dream ground.
You went above and beyond with that footnote! Interestingly Ganz has made some arguments that remind me a bit of your idea about Trump being spiritually Italian a few times in the last year, essentially that the logic of Trumpism is a kind of universalization of the logic of a mafia-“the world’s just a big racket, but I’m gonna cut you in on it” etc. It *is* a little unbelievable that Freud never experienced that feeling, even if Jung sometimes seems to have had too much of it.
Lol Ganz gets the Obama middlebrow kiss of death—will happily eat these words if Major Arcana makes the list next summer, of course:
https://x.com/BarackObama/status/1823082706462253510
Btw I saw this because MAGA thinks "Headshot" is a coded pro-Trump-assassination message
The middlebrows aren't always wrong-it's a good book, one of the best popular histories I've read in a while, and subtler than you'd think. Where I sometimes disagree with him is where I sometimes disagree with intellectual historians generally: often gut feelings and prejudices arising in an individual really do matter more than this or that theorist someone's read. Which is incidentally what stuck out to me about the mafia take!
The Pynchon/DeLillo style of novel really is the only truly realist form of contemporary novel, there are troops of Oedipa Masses and Jack Gladney's out there.
I know, my work's basically middlebrow too! And I do like Ganz in some way or I wouldn't read him all the time (same goes for him and the fascists, I assume), partly because I am also drawn to intellectual history. Agreed on Pynchon/DeLillo, though, speaking as something of an Oedipa/Jack myself.
Thanks! Yes, there's something to the mafia thing...I wouldn't reduce "Italian" to "mafia" but my impression is that Italian political culture more than others has a feature I've attributed to poetry: it runs between fascism and anarchism (with their shared open cynicism about power) rather than between conservatism and liberalism.