Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012

"Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012" is a critical history of the unfolding of feminist literary study in the US academy. It contributes to current scholarly efforts to revisit the 1970s by reconsidering often-repeated narratives about the critical naivety of feminist literary criticism in its initial articulation. As the story now goes, many of the most prominent feminist thinkers of the period engaged in unsophisticated literary analysis by conflating lived social reality with textual representation when they read works of literature as documentary evidence of real life. As a result, the work of these "bad critics," particularly Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin, has not been fully accounted for in literary critical terms.

This dissertation returns to Dworkin and Millett's work to argue for a different history of feminist literary criticism. Rather than dismiss their work for its conflation of fact and fiction, I pay attention to the complexity at the heart of it, yielding a new perspective on the history and persistence of the struggle to use literary texts for feminist political ends. Dworkin and Millett established the centrality of reality and representation to the feminist canon debates of "the long 1970s," the sex wars of the 1980s, and the more recent feminist turn to memoir. I read these productive periods in feminist literary criticism from 1968 to 2012 through their varied commitment to literary works.

Chapter One begins with Millett, who de-aestheticized male-authored texts to treat patriarchal literature in relation to culture and ideology. Her mode of literary interpretation was so far afield from the established methods of New Criticism that she was not understood as a literary critic. She was repudiated in the feminist literary criticism that followed her and sought sympathetic methods for reading women's writing. In that decade, the subject of Chapter Two, feminist literary critics began to judge texts on the basis of their ability to accurately depict the reality of women's experiences.

Their vision of the relationship between life and fiction shaped arguments about pornography during the sex wars of the 1980s, the subject of Chapter Three. In this context, Dworkin was feminism's "bad critic." I focus on the literary critical elements of Dworkin's theories of pornographic representation and align her with Millett as a miscategorized literary critic. In the decades following the sex wars, many of the key feminist literary critics of the founding generation (including Dworkin, Jane Gallop, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Millett) wrote memoirs that recounted, largely in experiential terms, the history this dissertation examines. Chapter Four considers the story these memoirists told about the rise and fall of feminist literary criticism. I close with an epilogue on the place of literature in a feminist critical enterprise that has shifted toward privileging theory.

Akrasia and the Aesthetic: Human Agency and the Site of Literature, 1760-1820

This study focuses on a series of foundational stylistic and formal innovations in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and argues that they can be cumulatively attributed to the distinct challenges authors faced in representing human action and the will. The study focuses in particular on cases of “acting against better judgment” or “failing to do what one knows one ought to do” – concepts originally theorized as “akrasia” and “weakness of the will” in ancient Greek and Scholastic thought. During the Enlightenment, philosophy increasingly conceives of human minds and bodies like systems and machines, and consequently fails to address such cases except as intractable or incoherent. Yet eighteenth-century and Romantic narratives and poetry consistently engage the paradoxes and ambiguities of action and volition in representations of akrasia. As a result, literature develops representational strategies that distinguish the epistemic capacities of literature as privileged over those of philosophy.

The study begins by centering on narratives of distempered selves from the 1760s. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey narrate cases of knowingly and weakly acting against better judgment, and in so doing, reveal the limitations of the “philosophy of the passions” that famously informed sentimental literature at the time. These texts find that the interpretive difficulties of action demand a non-systematic and hermeneutic approach to interpreting a self through the genre of narrative. Rousseau’s narrative in particular informs William Godwin’s realist novels of distempered subjects. Departing from his mechanistic philosophy of mind and action, Godwin develops the technique of free indirect discourse in his third novel Fleetwood (1805) as a means of evoking the ironies and self-deceptions in how we talk about willing.

Romantic poetry employs the literary trope of weakness of will primarily through the problem of regretted inaction – a problem which I argue motivates the major poetic innovations of William Wordsworth and John Keats. While Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought to characterize his weakness of will in philosophical writing, Wordsworth turns to poetry with The Prelude (1805), revealing poetry itself to be a self-deceiving and disappointing form of procrastination. More explicitly than Wordsworth, John Keats identifies indolence as the prime symbol and basis of what he calls “negative capability.” In his letters and poems such as “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817) and “Ode on Indolence” (1819), Keats reveals how the irreducibly contradictory qualities of human agency speak to the particular privilege of “disinterested aesthetics” – a genre fitted for the modern era for its ability to disclose contradictions without seeking to resolve or explain them in terms of component parts.

Spic'ing into Existence: Epitaph, Epithet, and the Ethnopoetic Imagination

Quién Es, Quién Somos? Spic’ing into Existence claims a four-fold close-reading: first, analysis of texts: from theoretical meditations to (prison) memoir and film. Second, a half dozen central figures appear, largely Latinx and black American. They cut across a score of registers, socio-economics, ideological reservations, but all are, as Carl Carlton sang, poetry in motion. Writers, poets, theologians, pathologists, artists, comedians, actors, students whose vocation is invocation, the inner surge of their calling. Third, the manuscript draws from a series of historical moments—from radical liberation of the late 60s, to contemporary student activism. Finally, this body of work is movement, in all its social, gestural, and kinesthetic viscera. From this last heading, we peel away layers of what I call the ethnopoet, the fascia undoing that reveals its bio-political anatomy, dressing its bare life with kinship speech. First, the social revolutions of the Civil Rights, Black Power, abolitionism, the Black Panthers and Young Lords, boycotts and jarring artistic performances. These events are superficial not in vain sense, but key epicenters of underground murmurings, the workings of a cunning assailant. She robs not lavish estates, but another day to breathe. Gesturally, as perhaps the interlocutor, lies this author, interspersing his own diatribes to conjure her presence. The final branch is admittedly the most intangible. Kinesthetically, we map the nimbleness, footwork lígera of what I call the ethnopoet. Ethnopoet is no mere aggregate of ethnicity and poetry, but like chemical reaction, the descriptor for its behavior under certain pressures, temperatures, and elements. Elusive and resisting confinement, and therefore definition, the ethnopoet is a shapeshifting figure of how racialized bodies [people of color] respond to hegemonic powers. She is, at bottom, however, a native translator, the plural-lensed subject whose loyalty is only to the imagination of a different world, one whose survival is not contingent upon her exploitation. The native translator’s constant re-calibrations of oppressive power apparatuses seem taxing at best, and near-impossible, at worst. To effectively navigate through these polarized loci, she must identify ideologies that in turn seek “affective liberatory sances” in relation to the dominant social order (43). In a kind of performative contradiction, she must marshall the knowledge necessary to “break with ideology” while speaking within it. Chicana Studies scholar, Chela Sandoval, describes this dual movement as “meta-ideologizing”: the appropriation of hegemonic ideological forms in order to transform them (82). Nuestros padres se subieron encima de La Bestia, y por eso somos pasageros a ese tren. Y ya, dentro su pansa, tenemos que ser vigilantes cuando plantamos las bombas. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Sandoval schematizes this oppositional consciousness around five principle categories: “equal rights,” “revolutionary,” “supremacist,” “separatist,” and “differential.” Taken by themselves, the first four modes appear mutually exclusive, incapable of occupying the same plane, until a fifth pillar emerges. Cinematographic in nature, differential consciousness, as Sandoval defines it, is “a kinetic motion that maneuvers, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates while demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators and practitioners” (44). For Sandoval, then, differential consciousness is a methodology that privileges an incredible sense mobility, one reaching artistic sensibilities. Our fourth and final analytic of movement serves an apt example of this dual meaning. Lexically speaking, ‘movement’ may be regarded as a political mobilization of aggrieved populations (through sustained efforts), or the process of moving objects (people or otherwise) from one location to another. Praxis-wise, it is both action and ideal, content and form. Thus, an ethnic poetics must be regarded less as a series of stanzas, shortened lyric, or even arrangement of language, but as a lens through which peripheralized peoples kaleidecope ideological positions in an “original, eccentric, and queer sight” (43). Taking note of the advantages of postponing identifications, the thesis stands its ground on the term ethnopoet. Its abstraction is not dewey-eyed philosophy, but an anticipation of poetic justice, of what’s to come from callused hands. This thesis is divided into 7.5 chapters. The first maps out the ethnopoet’s cartographies of struggle. By revisiting that alleged Tío Tomas, Richard Rodriguez, we unearth the tensions that negatively, deny citizenship to one silo, but on the flipside, engender manifold ways of seeing, hearing, and moving . The second, through George Jackson’s prison memoirs, pans out from this ethnography of power, groping for an apparatus that feigns an impervious prestige: ‘the aesthetic regime of coercion.’ In half-way cut, the thesis sidesteps to spic into existence, formally announcing, through Aime Cesaire, myself, and Pedro Pietri, the poeticization of trauma. Such uplift denies New Age transcendence of self, but a rehearsal of our entrapment in these mortal envelopes. Thirdly, conscious of the bleeding ethnic body, we cut open the incipient corpse to observe her pathologist. Her native autopsies offer the ethnic body’s posthumous recognition, the ethnopoetics ability to speak for and through the dead. Chapter five examines prolific black artists—Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar—to elide the circumvention of their consumption via invoking radical black hi/her-stories, ones fragmenting the black body. Sixth, the paper compares the Black Power Salute of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to Duke’s Mi Gente Boycott of their Latino Student Recruitment Weekend. Both wielded “silent gestures,” that shrewdly interfered with white noise of numbed negligence. Finally, ‘taking the mask off’ that are her functionalities, the CODA expounds on ethnopoet’s interiority, particularly after the rapid re-calibration of her politics. Through a rerun of El Chavo del Ocho, one of Mexican television’s most cherished shows, we tune into the heart-breaking indigence of barrio residents, only to marvel at the power of humor to, as Friday’s John Witherspoon put it, “fight another day.” This thesis is the tip of my tongue. Y por una vez, déjala que cante.