Paul H. Fry [Fry - Theory of Literature

Theory of Literature

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fry, Paul H.

Theory of literature / Paul H. Fry.

p. cm. (The open Yale courses series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-300-18083-1 (pbk.)

1. LiteratureHistory and criticismTheory, etc. 2. Semiotics. I. Title.

PN441.F79 2012

801'.95dc23 2011045263

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all my Lit 300 Teaching Fellows, with fond gratitude

Contents

These chapters have passed through transformations that must be unusual in publishing, although the series the book appears in will probably change that. My twenty-six Open Yale Courses lectures in Lit 300 for the Spring 2009 semester were videotaped, yes, but you could hear them as audiotape, toowhile driving to work or going for a runand on the assumption that the written transcripts might also appeal, the process then began that morphed at last into the written form of this book. I had delivered the lectures extemporaneously, guided for each one by a page or so of scribbled notes. The audiotape was sent to San Diego, where a machine wrote down what it thought it heard. The result was then given to a human being in New Haven who made what she could of it. That was the point at which I should have done what Ive been doing for the last several months, but the incentive was then too low, and I took time only to glance through the transcripts and make a few quick changesdespite realizing that the written record was getting to look like a joke or a bit of gossip that has passed through too many hands.

In a way it then made sense to leave it alone, though, because these were supposed to be transcripts, not rewrites, and even though they had the accuracy of those instant captions for the hearing-impaired on television, nobody could say that any changes had intentionally been made. They are now to become a book, however: both digital and print, to be sure, but still a book. An editor at Yale University Press took the transcript in hand on first receiving it and made some cosmetic improvements. The lectures were then sent to me as a zip-file, the mark-up editing program already activated, and I went to work. At this point, I kept thinking about the first few paragraphs of a famous and famously difficult essay that Id assigned for the course (discussed in Chapter 13), Jacques Lacans Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious. His paper, he says, is a written version ( crit , in a volume called crits ) of a seminar presentation. He feels that the orality of that occasion is important to retain if he is to convey to the fullest what he wants to say about the role of language in the unconscious. At the same time (though Lacan doesnt say this), its quite obvious to any reader with experience as a listener that information conveyed in spontaneous speech is perhaps adequate to its occasion but not registered in at all the same way when its taken in during a readers more leisurely focus on a written text. Because this book is for readers, therefore, I have modified such parts of the lectures as seemed to me to need a more careful exposition, while hoping to retain a sense throughout of what the lectures sounded like. I am, notoriously, an impromptu speaker of prose, so when you encounter a long sentence, please dont think it was any shorter in the lecture.

Without the extensive and indispensable help of my assistant, Stefan Esposito, I wouldnt have been able to focus on the unexpected challenge I have described. Stefan was one of the teaching fellows for this videotaped version of the lectures and is an important emerging scholar and theorist in comparative literature. To him I happily entrusted a last read-through and correction of the chaptersfor each of which my subject line was always revised revision, #xwhen I sent them to him in Boston. He composed the bibliographical essay, The Varieties of Interpretation, with suggestions for further reading on each of our topics, which will be found at the end of the book. He has also furnished the references that we deemed necessary (as few as possible), and arranged in an appendix the handouts with passages to be discussed that I had circulated at some lectures or posted online.

Although references to the photocopied material I assigned have posed a challenge and at least conjecturally introduced a fussy element we had hoped in general to avoid, references to our main textbook were easy. I very strongly suggest that readers consider investing in this excellent volume, which stands out in the field for its judiciously and copiously chosen materials (including selections covering the entire history of criticism) and for its sensible introductions: David Richter, ed., The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends (3rd ed.: Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2007). All quotations from that volume are keyed in parentheses to the third edition.

The first two chapters are introductory and offer a good many of the apologies, disclaimers, and boasts that one might expect to find in prefaces, so I shall say very little here about what the ensuing tour through this vast subject matter includes. I am conscious, however, that there are certain recently influential names and ideas that the syllabus did not stretch to cover, although here and there some oblique or proleptic mention of these trends will be found. The ethical turn, for example, encompasses late Derrida, as I point out, but I do not discuss the work of Giorgio Agamben or of neo-Marxists like Jacques Rancire and Alain Badiou. Also current is the brilliant Marxist attention devoted to textual surface in England, with Simon Jarvis, Keston Sutherland, and others micro-reading in the spirit of founder J. H. Prynne, which has only reached American shores as yet in the shape of their promising students.