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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Mark Davies: Australian literary theory after liberalism « Previous | |Next »
February 26, 2008

The popular discourse about the humanities and criticism still remains dominated by modernist critical paradigms such as Leavisism and New Criticism that are underpinned by a throwback to a residual Arnoldianism. This is contested by critical theory, which has its roots in the new critical practices derived from Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, queer theory and postcolonialism, and which uses the strategies of defamiliarisation.

Literary liberals were among the main antagonists of critical theorists and so we had the culture wars of the last decade. Things seemed to have changed though. The heat about 'theory' has gone in academia, and some sort of shift in the cultural terrain has taken place. But what kind of shift? My gut feeling is that it has something to do with both the conservative attacks on both liberalism and contemporary critical theory, and literature becoming a minor art for marginalised groups to use as an arena for articulating political struggle--eg., Grunge literature. But I'm not clear how the fallout is working.

In his The clash of paradigms: Australian literary theory after liberalism in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, (Vol 7, 2007) Mark Davies argues that:

contemporary Australian literary theory, like most varieties of contemporary critical theory, is losing whatever relevance it once had, not because ‘theory’ has lost intellectual force, but because the contexts in which it operated have radically changed. A ‘crisis in liberalism’ and the rise of neo-liberalism and the new conservatism... requires a reassessment of the project of critical theory.

Davis understands 'crisis' in terms of a new political force that has emerged---- the rise of the new conservatism and the increasing entrenchment of neo-liberalism, since the early 1970s, at the centre of most national public spheres, and its growing reach into institutional centres of power and everyday social meanings.

Davies spells this out in a way that is akin to a critical aesthetics in that he argues that 'literature' is more than a “pile of old and aging books”, and more a cultural formation that has a powerful set of ideological effects that continue to produce meanings that have little to do with whether or not literary books are written or read. He identifies this cultural formation as:

post-war forms of criticism such as New Criticism and Leavisism [which] helped perpetuate a post-Romantic aesthetic turn in literary criticism that remains relevant in settler nations such as Australia. Such forms of criticism inaugurate a critical language, a class of intellectuals who speak that language, and an audience for that language that together work to delimit the terms of discussion even as Australian writers and critics engage with topical issues such as race politics. Even where political questions are broached, engagement has been at the level of the symbol and has tended to orient around individuated notions of “tolerance” and “inclusion” (coded assimilation), rather than approach questions of racialised social agency or cultural context.

He goes on to say that:
At the same time, the dominant forms of public criticism, as spoken in newspaper book reviews, author interviews, prize-giving speeches, literary festival sessions, and so on, explicitly exclude alternative critical models, arguably because of their strong interrogation of the (white) conditions of public knowledge. Literary criticism as it exists in the popular critical consciousness, in short, continues to function as a veiled defence of colonialism and white nationalism.

The political strategy for preserving national heritage and a national literature aims to keep both ethnicised “outsiders” and those academic theoreticians who want to ask difficult questions, not least about the hidden class-cultural allegiances of literature outside the door. The aesthetic strategy has its roots in the texts of Arnold, Eliot, Pound and Leavis. This conservative aesthetics sees literature and knowledge as central to society, and as a tradition, it goes back to Coleridge’s idea that “cultural values” are embodied in a “clerisy”, a central educated group that stands as an ideal for the rest of society.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:31 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

Gary,
I agree with pretty much everything you say here. Although I think it's worth pointing out that at the end of his essay Davis opens the door to a sort of truce with the Liberal Literary paradigm practitioners where he argues that what might be shared is more important than the differences in this time of neoliberal-neoconservative conjuncture. Robert Manne's elevation from Cold War warrior in the 1980s to the dominant moral Liberal-voice in Australia in the last few years indicates that Davis is right about the profound right-ward shift in culture, but Manne's moral voice and his 'reasonableness' sits badly with me.

The other aspect of Davis' essay that I'm a little uneasy about is how he reduces the Liberal Literary paradigm, with its Arnoldian-Leavisite practices, to a discourse in which Whiteness becomes the dominant hidden ideology of all tropes and forms which a 'critical theorist' can reveal at work in canonical texts.

Davis:
"[For]the Australian literati [r]ather than contextualise works as social acts, the emphasis, instead, is on symbol, metaphor, imagination
and the integrity of the creative act and the artistic work, as well as the close
identification of the artist with the work and its self-conscious moral content."

Davis shows that one way of re-reading these non-contextualised products of the Liberal coterie is to bring the metaphysical, romantic and transcendental symbols and metaphors of fine writing back into an Australian cultural history in which white settlement and race are the central facts of a still colonial nation.

A prime example here is David Malouf's Remembering Babylon, where the hybrid figure of the British-born Jemmy Fairlie is effectively indigenized. This is the ideology of whiteness at work.

Davis' main point is that "liberalism has arguably started to interrogate its own racialised practices." I wish it would go further and interrogate its own complicities with neoliberalism, and I think that Davis' essay could have taken this part of his critique a lot further.

Michael,
your comment:

The other aspect of Davis' essay that I'm a little uneasy about is how he reduces the Liberal Literary paradigm, with its Arnoldian-Leavisite practices, to a discourse in which Whiteness becomes the dominant hidden ideology of all tropes and forms which a 'critical theorist' can reveal at work in canonical texts.

That reduction sits uneasily with me too. Whiteness plays a very strong part in Australian culture in the 2oth century. But many social liberals and those working within a Leaviste cultural formation were critical of the treatment of Aboriginal people.