In response to my last post, CPP left a comment asking: “Can you explain what the difference is between “literature” and “theory”?”
Aw, CPP. You have no idea what a can of worms you’ve just opened. Where to begin?
Ok, let me start with the most basic, and practical, distinction.* Basically, I think that most people would regard “literature” as an imaginative, creative work, often narrative in nature (tells a story), or lyric in nature (imagistic, evokes a particular feeling, with an aesthetic attention to language). In contrast,people tend to regard theory as philosophical, argumentative.
Now, there are huge problems with the above. Some theory is literary in its orientation – i.e., who could say that Cixous is not literary? – or that literature is theoretical in its orientation – i.e., Ulysses theorizes itself. And further: one might argue that all language is discursive, that it might have theoretical and/or literary implications based on its situation (or situatedness, for look at me, I can rock the jargon).
Basically, these questions – What is theory? What is literature? – I would argue are the questions of the discipline of English throughout the 20th century. And I’m not sure that there is, actually, a simple answer, or even any one answer at all.
I can talk to you about the differences in teaching the two, though. When I teach literature, I attend to the story above all else. (This, in part, has to do that I am primarily a specialist in fiction and narrative/narratology). It’s all about the text, and the story that the text tells.) In contrast, when I teach theory, it’s all about how to read – how to decipher the code, how to find a map for understanding in the text. In other words, theory for me is a gateway drug – it’s a way into the literature. In contrast, literature is the heroin. I think that this might be the difference between philosophers and literary critics, between people who “do” philosophy and people who “do” theory: a theory is always in reference to something else – it’s always about trying to figure something else – the “real” thing – out, whereas philosophy stands alone in a more pure way.
But having said all of that, people in my field in literature (especially) often argue that there is no “literature of my period” without theory, and vice versa. Basically, if you work on what I work on, there is this sense (partly because my field emerges simultaneously with the emergence of theory) that theory is literature, and vice versa. That the two are inextricable.
So that brings me back to my own plain language. When I read literature – say, Virginia Woolf – on a dreary January day, I lose myself in the story, and I am transported, and I forget myself. Regardless of the deep business that is going on, the deep truth. When I read theory – say, Maurice Blanchot – on a dreary January day, I want to kill myself, because I understand that there is no truth, there is no reality, and any gesture toward believing in truth that I might feel is always already a mystification.
The theory might help me to find a new way into the literary text, and it might give me a new map for understanding. But at the end of the day, theory, for me isn’t truth, and it isn’t the heart of the matter. It’s a tool. In contrast, literature might give me a new way of seeing the world, and it might change my entire perspective on what it means to understand, but it doesn’t give me a pattern or a map. It just “is.” (And yes, I have been reading Blanchot. What.)
*Note, I’m being basic and practical. Not precise or sophisticated or deliberate. This matters.
When I read theory – say, Maurice Blanchot – on a dreary January day, I want to kill myself, because I understand that there is no truth, there is no reality, and any gesture toward believing in truth that I might feel is always already a mystification.
That doesn’t sound like much fun.
In theory I agree. And yet I would much rather read Roland Barthes on a dreary January day than James Joyce, who makes me want to poke my eyes out with a fork.
One of my favorite grad classes involved reading theory as lit: Foucault works pretty well as romance (medieval, not kissy face). And reading theory with that sort of care helped me be a much better reader all around!
I’m assigning Barthes to some grad students so I’m glad to hear that you don’t think he falls into the ‘kill myself after reading camp’, gwinne.
Historians, as a rule, don’t do nearly as much or feel nearly as comfortable with theory as do other humanists. I have to watch how large of a dose I feed my students, although a few years ago I was pleasantly surprised to start a student off with Foucault and then step out of zie’s way as zie dove right in, finding the guidance necessary to produce a kick-ass research paper!
I would take Barthes over James Joyce anyday. Actually I really enjoy Barthes as literature.
I kind of disagree that historians don’t do theory; I think they just don’t always acknowledge the theory that they’re doing. I guess that there are still some old school historians out there that think that you can ‘just’ read the sources and construct a narrative of events, but they are fewer and fewer. One of the contributions of women’s history has been to highlight that you need to unpick what it means to ‘read’, to interrogate what’s absent as well as present, etc, and that is an application of theory at its most basic. I also suspect that, at that level, literature specialists are requiring theory within their lit courses. And, the difference is that the theory courses require students to recognise what the theory is that they’re using and how it developed (and maybe even how it might be refined), while lit people just require them to use it.
So, if I was going to explain this to a scientist: I would say that that the lit people are those working on how to cure cancer, while the theory people are working on refining how to analyse cells or deconstruct dna for its own sake. Both groups are contributing to the curing of cancer, but one of them is applying it to the cancer, the other is working out the method.
Yay Roland Barthes! For me, particularly late Barthes – A Lovers Discourse or The Pleasure of the Text, most notably. (By the way, if you find Barthes enchanting, you all should SO READ Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. Immediately.)
So I, too, would probably pick Barthes over Joyce on a dreary day in January, though I will say that if I were forced to read the Joyce, I’d probably feel more virtuous and enriched than if I just went with my personal inclinations.(Confession: I only read Joyce these days when I assign him in my courses. And I love it when I do, but I need an assignment. This is not unlike how I only read Joyce in courses where he was assigned when I was an undergraduate. In contrast, there are other authors that I teach that I do read when I’m not teaching them.)
Also, Blanchot *isn’t* much fun, but he is fucking genius. And worth the whole “nothing means anything” bit. And has been the key to figuring out the chapter on which I’ve been stalled.
Excellent! So theory is basic science, and literature is translational and clinical research!
And just as there are studies that exist on the cusp of, say basic science and applied research, there are texts that exist at the cusp of literature and theory. I’d further cast it as a kind of continuum: that the “pure” literary proposes the aesthetic as its sole and self-justified purpose, while the purely theoretical text proposes itself as the interpretive and explicative framework for other kinds of artifacts.
While neither of these texts–purely literary or purely theoretical–actually exists, they do suggest an aesthetic/pleasure vs. instrumental/reason scale on which we might attempt (uneasily) to place individual pieces of writing.
C’mon now, before I was adjunctified I was a fledgling Blanchot scholar, and to boil him down to “nothing means anything” is a bit of an overstatement, err, understatement as the case may be. I think the great appeal of him, but also what leaves many a literary critic feeling queasy is that he torches the ground on which we all might resort to neat, clean distinctions between, say, literature (understood as an intentional fictional creation) and philosophy or theory, both of which front as non-fictional. The error of western philosophy up to Heidegger, and then Blanchot who takes Heidegger to his logical extreme is its conceited belief that there is non-fictional language that can be distinguished from fictional. Such distinctions are rooted in the institutional structures/systems that benefit from maintaining them than in, say, truth. (and yes, I’m kinda’ channeling Foucault here, but as you probably know, Foucault was a big Blanchot fan, and wrote what for my money is the single best essay on him)
Chris – of course you are right, and better on Blanchot than I was. My only explanation is that I only do reductive and lame theory on blog, for two reasons: 1) If I’m going to do theory well, I’m doing it for publication and under my own actual name and 2) I insist on not doing drafts of blog posts – I write and then post, which is similar to the reasoning for #1, but it’s not so pointed as the theory thing… it’s actually lazier than that. The point is? I am really glad that you talked about Blanchot in a smart way in my comments, ’cause I know I failed at that in this post.
All that said? I’m reading Blanchot right now because I need to and not because I want to. Blanchot kinda hurts my feelings. Even though (or especially because) I need him.