[rec] Theory is more fun than Literature (at least some of the time)
This is an American Cultural Studies // Literary Theory rec-post. This is not - by any means - an all-inclusive list of the subject. In fact, it's pretty narrow in scope as my research in Uni focused primarily on the 19thC (why I'm writing a thesis on contemporary fandom is a question I still ask myself on a daily fucking basis because I do NOT fangirl Henry Jenkins the way I fangirl the people on this list FML basically).
As such, there are quotes and links and I will try to provide links to thinks ya'll can actually read, but a lot will be stuff I only own in print. However, in the States it is possible through Interlibrary Loan to request chapters of books not available at your library to be converted to pdf and emailed to you by other libraries. So! If there's something particular you want - you can make inquiries at your own library, or I can work on making requests also to make things more available.
Libraries are so very useful and the less you actually use the resources - the greater chance that they will disappear.
This is also pretty much a rec post for upupa_epops because I want her to be a fangirl with me, but also specifically for angearia because I dropped the term "cultural studies" at her once and then... never followed through with an explanation as to what I meant. (Apparently I do this a lot and it's something I'm working on.) Any definition I'd try to throw at anyone would fail - so here's an incomprehensive list of some of my favorites and the things they say, which will be a better explanation.
Herein lie links and pretty words.
Amy KaplanThe Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Convergences: Inventories of the Present) which includes her thesis on Manifest Domesticity (basically her argument is that the American "manifest destiny" was funneled through a representaton of Domesticity and Domestification) she's just lovely. This book is one of my favorites - there's a chapter that looks at blackness/whiteness and the history of lesbian pornography in New Orleans. I mean: WHAT ISN'T TO LOVE SERIOUSLY?
Here's her definition of Manifest Domesticity::
“... the discourse of domesticity was intimately intertwined with the discourse of Manifest Destiny in antebellum U.S. culture. The “empire of the mother” developed as a central tenet of middle-class culture between the 1830s and 1850s, at a time when the United States was violently and massively expanding its national domain across the continent... The ideology of separate spheres configures the home as a stable haven or feminine counterbalance to the male activity of territorial conquest”
Also there is:: The Social Construction of American Realism which looks at specific pieces of literature in more detail. (Her chapter on Edith Wharton I read over and over just because it is so yummy.)
Here are some quotes from Social Construction to give you a sense of Kaplan's voice and sass::
This one in particular I think is a decent definition of what Cultural Studies does with Literature:
Historical perspectives hold that the textual production of reality does not occur in a linguistic vacuum; neither is it politically innocent, of course, but always charged by ideology - those unspoken collective understandings, conventions, stories, and cultural practices that uphold systems of social power.
I love this quote, because the Realist movement is so often misunderstood and I love how this quote breaks down exactly all the reasons why what you thought was probably not true::
Class difference struck the realists less as a problem of social justice than as a problem of representation. They were less concerned with the accuracy of portraying “the other half” than with the problem of representing an interdependent society composed of competing and seemingly mutually exclusive realities.
They totally knew that there were multiple realities in the world and were pretty cool with it. Ballers.
She's so sassy sometimes I adore her everything:
The unreality of domestic space lies not in its insulation from the marketplace, but in its unacknowledged enslavement to that realm whose disorderly clutter is reproduced in the home.
Since I don't expect any of you to go out and purchase these expensive texts, I scrounged up some of her articles (that I haven't read yet - but I don't doubt they are wonderful and I can't wait to read them myself) so that you can read at will.
Manifest Domesticity
Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003
Edith Wharton's Profession of Authorship
Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s American Literary History
To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature by Eric SundquistI'm going to be completely honest and tell you that I've only read the intro and one chapter of this particular text and have never looked into the author until today. I'm going to blow your mind with the fact that that ONE CHAPTER is probably over 200 pages. The entire monster is over 700 pages and there's only three chapters + an introduction. And it's a lovely read. The particular chapter I read detailed the history of blackface and minstrelsy and how it's legacy manifests in popular culture today. (All of the quotes I have from this saved in my docs are in regards to rape culture? Which isn't particularly fun, but I wrote a paper on rape in the Marrow of Tradition so that's all I've got. Just take me at my word that reading this feels like candy and not at all like work... regardless of what my fellow classmates thought.)
Rachel Blau Duplessis "Breaking the Sentence, Breaking the Sequence" which can be found (only!) in the anthology Essentials of the Theories of Fiction is a source that I cite in EVERY PAPER I WRITE. Seriously. My heart beats for this essay. She defines her terms so well you can use her as a source for so many wonderful things.
... women are not purely and simply Outsiders; otherwise one would not have to exhort them to remain so. They are, however, less integrated into the dominant orders than are men of their class. Women are a muted or subordinate part of a hegemonic process. [...] Hegemony includes a relationship in conflictual motion between the ideologies and practices of a dominant class or social group and the alternative practices, which may be either residual or emergent, of the muted classes or groups...
Isn't that a handy and lovely definition? Thank you, Duplessis.
Since I can't get you the actual article that I love (though a library should) (or my library if it comes to that) here is an article on Virginia Woolf and here is an article on Essays.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is probably the most important read on this list, in my humble opinion: Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. She's a great resource if you're looking for Feminism that isn't bound tooth and nail to a Western perspective. In fact, her interrogation of the Western perspective is necessary and relevant. This particular article was originally published back in 1988. YUP. She has since written a response to it in the form of a chapter in her book, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (link to chapter one), "Under Western Eyes" Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.
Toni Morrisonis mostly known for her fiction, but her literary analysis should be read by everyone everywhere. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is by far the most easy read in all of 'literary' analysis. It feels like you are reading poetry, not theory. Here is a portion of it.
Judith ButlerNo rec list made by me would be complete without Butler and Bodies that Matter. If you have the stomach to click on that link and actually last more than 20 minutes staring at her sexy prose - pm me and we'll talk about it. Butler is a professor of Rhetoric at Berkeley University and the leading theorist in Queer Theory. Basically she's a walking, talking, living philosopher. The fact that she's a real person who breathes air in the same universe that I do keeps me awake at night with wonder. (How though?)
The relation between culture and nature presupposed by some models of gender ‘construction’ imply a culture or an agency of the social which acts upon a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart
See? Brain-twisty and confusing!
The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not forclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power.
And also this one is just really interesting I think:
For women, then, propriety is achieved through having a changeable name, through the exchange of names, which means that the name is never permanent, and that identity secured through the name is always dependent of the social exigencies of paternity and marriage. Expropriation is thus the condition of identity for women. Identity is secured precisely in and through the transfer of the name, the name as a site of transfer or substitution, the name then, as precisely what is always impermanent, different from itself, more than itself, the non-self-identical.
Butler don't play.
Judith Halberstam - another queer theorist, but with a stonger emphasis on Lesbian Studies. Her text, Female Masculinity, is one of my favorite things in the entire universe. History of lesbianism in literature and alternative presentations of gender? Hell yes. She is relevant to everyone's interests by the mere fact that SHE'S ADORABLE. I mean - brainy as hell here have some articles by her.
Some historians still try to hold on to the label “lesbian” as a way of classifying a whole range of pre-nineteenth century sexual practices between women… eras[ing] the specificity of tribadism, hermaphroditism, and transvestism and tends to make lesbianism into the history of so-called women-identified women...
(Seriously I want to make out with her brain.)
She apparently wrote an article on Dracula and there goes any and all possibilities of productivity for the night...
Here is a section of her book, which is so lovely. I read the entire thing just for fun my first semester of grad school.
(YES MY FIRST SEMESTER OF GRAD SCHOOL I READ A 200+ PAGE BOOK OF QUEER THEORY FOR FUN THIS IS THE PERSON I AM AND YES THIS IS HOW ENTIRELY FUCKING WONDERFUL THE TEXT IS.)
I'm making myself stop before I give myself and everyone else an aneurysm. There's of course a BILLION names and articles missing from this list - but I need to pace myself.
If there's interest, maybe I'll do a rec post like this once a month or so - probably smaller ones next time, this is a BIT EXCESSIVE - to promote conversation and lovely nonfiction reading time!
Also if ya'll have requests, etc, maybe I can seek out pdfs from my library and stop sending you on wild goose chases to amazon so much :(
As such, there are quotes and links and I will try to provide links to thinks ya'll can actually read, but a lot will be stuff I only own in print. However, in the States it is possible through Interlibrary Loan to request chapters of books not available at your library to be converted to pdf and emailed to you by other libraries. So! If there's something particular you want - you can make inquiries at your own library, or I can work on making requests also to make things more available.
Libraries are so very useful and the less you actually use the resources - the greater chance that they will disappear.
This is also pretty much a rec post for upupa_epops because I want her to be a fangirl with me, but also specifically for angearia because I dropped the term "cultural studies" at her once and then... never followed through with an explanation as to what I meant. (Apparently I do this a lot and it's something I'm working on.) Any definition I'd try to throw at anyone would fail - so here's an incomprehensive list of some of my favorites and the things they say, which will be a better explanation.
Herein lie links and pretty words.
Amy KaplanThe Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Convergences: Inventories of the Present) which includes her thesis on Manifest Domesticity (basically her argument is that the American "manifest destiny" was funneled through a representaton of Domesticity and Domestification) she's just lovely. This book is one of my favorites - there's a chapter that looks at blackness/whiteness and the history of lesbian pornography in New Orleans. I mean: WHAT ISN'T TO LOVE SERIOUSLY?
Here's her definition of Manifest Domesticity::
“... the discourse of domesticity was intimately intertwined with the discourse of Manifest Destiny in antebellum U.S. culture. The “empire of the mother” developed as a central tenet of middle-class culture between the 1830s and 1850s, at a time when the United States was violently and massively expanding its national domain across the continent... The ideology of separate spheres configures the home as a stable haven or feminine counterbalance to the male activity of territorial conquest”
Also there is:: The Social Construction of American Realism which looks at specific pieces of literature in more detail. (Her chapter on Edith Wharton I read over and over just because it is so yummy.)
Here are some quotes from Social Construction to give you a sense of Kaplan's voice and sass::
This one in particular I think is a decent definition of what Cultural Studies does with Literature:
Historical perspectives hold that the textual production of reality does not occur in a linguistic vacuum; neither is it politically innocent, of course, but always charged by ideology - those unspoken collective understandings, conventions, stories, and cultural practices that uphold systems of social power.
I love this quote, because the Realist movement is so often misunderstood and I love how this quote breaks down exactly all the reasons why what you thought was probably not true::
Class difference struck the realists less as a problem of social justice than as a problem of representation. They were less concerned with the accuracy of portraying “the other half” than with the problem of representing an interdependent society composed of competing and seemingly mutually exclusive realities.
They totally knew that there were multiple realities in the world and were pretty cool with it. Ballers.
She's so sassy sometimes I adore her everything:
The unreality of domestic space lies not in its insulation from the marketplace, but in its unacknowledged enslavement to that realm whose disorderly clutter is reproduced in the home.
Since I don't expect any of you to go out and purchase these expensive texts, I scrounged up some of her articles (that I haven't read yet - but I don't doubt they are wonderful and I can't wait to read them myself) so that you can read at will.
Manifest Domesticity
Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 17, 2003
Edith Wharton's Profession of Authorship
Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s American Literary History
To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature by Eric SundquistI'm going to be completely honest and tell you that I've only read the intro and one chapter of this particular text and have never looked into the author until today. I'm going to blow your mind with the fact that that ONE CHAPTER is probably over 200 pages. The entire monster is over 700 pages and there's only three chapters + an introduction. And it's a lovely read. The particular chapter I read detailed the history of blackface and minstrelsy and how it's legacy manifests in popular culture today. (All of the quotes I have from this saved in my docs are in regards to rape culture? Which isn't particularly fun, but I wrote a paper on rape in the Marrow of Tradition so that's all I've got. Just take me at my word that reading this feels like candy and not at all like work... regardless of what my fellow classmates thought.)
Rachel Blau Duplessis "Breaking the Sentence, Breaking the Sequence" which can be found (only!) in the anthology Essentials of the Theories of Fiction is a source that I cite in EVERY PAPER I WRITE. Seriously. My heart beats for this essay. She defines her terms so well you can use her as a source for so many wonderful things.
... women are not purely and simply Outsiders; otherwise one would not have to exhort them to remain so. They are, however, less integrated into the dominant orders than are men of their class. Women are a muted or subordinate part of a hegemonic process. [...] Hegemony includes a relationship in conflictual motion between the ideologies and practices of a dominant class or social group and the alternative practices, which may be either residual or emergent, of the muted classes or groups...
Isn't that a handy and lovely definition? Thank you, Duplessis.
Since I can't get you the actual article that I love (though a library should) (or my library if it comes to that) here is an article on Virginia Woolf and here is an article on Essays.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is probably the most important read on this list, in my humble opinion: Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses. She's a great resource if you're looking for Feminism that isn't bound tooth and nail to a Western perspective. In fact, her interrogation of the Western perspective is necessary and relevant. This particular article was originally published back in 1988. YUP. She has since written a response to it in the form of a chapter in her book, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (link to chapter one), "Under Western Eyes" Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.
Toni Morrisonis mostly known for her fiction, but her literary analysis should be read by everyone everywhere. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is by far the most easy read in all of 'literary' analysis. It feels like you are reading poetry, not theory. Here is a portion of it.
Judith ButlerNo rec list made by me would be complete without Butler and Bodies that Matter. If you have the stomach to click on that link and actually last more than 20 minutes staring at her sexy prose - pm me and we'll talk about it. Butler is a professor of Rhetoric at Berkeley University and the leading theorist in Queer Theory. Basically she's a walking, talking, living philosopher. The fact that she's a real person who breathes air in the same universe that I do keeps me awake at night with wonder. (How though?)
The relation between culture and nature presupposed by some models of gender ‘construction’ imply a culture or an agency of the social which acts upon a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart
See? Brain-twisty and confusing!
The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not forclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power.
And also this one is just really interesting I think:
For women, then, propriety is achieved through having a changeable name, through the exchange of names, which means that the name is never permanent, and that identity secured through the name is always dependent of the social exigencies of paternity and marriage. Expropriation is thus the condition of identity for women. Identity is secured precisely in and through the transfer of the name, the name as a site of transfer or substitution, the name then, as precisely what is always impermanent, different from itself, more than itself, the non-self-identical.
Butler don't play.
Judith Halberstam - another queer theorist, but with a stonger emphasis on Lesbian Studies. Her text, Female Masculinity, is one of my favorite things in the entire universe. History of lesbianism in literature and alternative presentations of gender? Hell yes. She is relevant to everyone's interests by the mere fact that SHE'S ADORABLE. I mean - brainy as hell here have some articles by her.
Some historians still try to hold on to the label “lesbian” as a way of classifying a whole range of pre-nineteenth century sexual practices between women… eras[ing] the specificity of tribadism, hermaphroditism, and transvestism and tends to make lesbianism into the history of so-called women-identified women...
(Seriously I want to make out with her brain.)
She apparently wrote an article on Dracula and there goes any and all possibilities of productivity for the night...
Here is a section of her book, which is so lovely. I read the entire thing just for fun my first semester of grad school.
(YES MY FIRST SEMESTER OF GRAD SCHOOL I READ A 200+ PAGE BOOK OF QUEER THEORY FOR FUN THIS IS THE PERSON I AM AND YES THIS IS HOW ENTIRELY FUCKING WONDERFUL THE TEXT IS.)
I'm making myself stop before I give myself and everyone else an aneurysm. There's of course a BILLION names and articles missing from this list - but I need to pace myself.
If there's interest, maybe I'll do a rec post like this once a month or so - probably smaller ones next time, this is a BIT EXCESSIVE - to promote conversation and lovely nonfiction reading time!
Also if ya'll have requests, etc, maybe I can seek out pdfs from my library and stop sending you on wild goose chases to amazon so much :(