Literature Against Itself
Hancher, Michael
a charity that surpasses our capacity to claim it." To this day she finds no fault with such ideas, nor with the early lesson that "the desire to know, love, and serve God should be our first...
...But such defensiveness leaves untouched the vital importance of Takaki's topic...
...The very act of denying all 'naive' realism presupposes an objective standpoint," he remarks early in the book...
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...Whites set themselves apart from and dominated all these peoples through stern self-denial or what Alfred Thayer Mahan approvingly called "self-repression...
...Di-vorced, as Theroux now is herself, her parents"don't have a marriage anymore, but they have something...
...Often the point takes a somewhat broader form, patterned after a comment by the Marxist critic Georg Luk~cs...
...and so corporate capitalism and pri- vate egoism foster each other in grotes- que symbiosis...
...History doyen C. Vann Woodward has reviewed this reading of our past with what Albert Camus would have called "atrocity bartering": where is any men- tion of what happened to aborigines south of the border, to Jews in Germany, to inmates of the Russian gulag, and-- most egregiously--to racial minorities in U.S.-ravaged Indochina...
...We might as well be Catholic.' " The ex- tended family had a bent anyway for mysticism...
...He insists that Classified RATES: 70¢ a word, one time...
...The antithesis, which Professor Graft finds to be the blame of much of contemporary culture, is the post-Kantian proposition that reality is only a mental' or linguistic concept...
...For all her interest in theology Phyllis Theroux is closer in spirit and style to Jean Kerr than to Simone Well, which is fine...
...I The dulce versus the utile LITERATURE AEAINST ITSELF: LITERARY IDEAS IN MODERN SOCIETY Gerald Graft University of Chicago, $15, 260 pp...
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...In general, he argues that the preconditions of any action do not exhaust its significance...
...After reading Robinson Crusoe as a boy, he had "become obsessed by these things" and never left the house without preparing to be "cast onto a desert island and totally dependent upon my own re- sources...
...Her other grand- credit, cherishes unlovely eccentrici- mother, the wealthy one, was different...
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...Seeking to understand the hegemonic Anglo-Americans, Takaki undertakes a comparative analysis of their responses to Native Americans, Afro-Americans, Chicanos, for skeptics...
...Her father, who used to earn his living "selling puffed raisins and dried apricots to loony bins up and down the state," celebrated his sixtieth birthday by buying a Honda motor scooter...
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...Jtichas'd Drinnon I N ONE of his letters from prison, An- , tonio Gramsci lamented the passing of "Robinsonism, which provided an im- aginary world for so many generations...
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...Professor Graft has published humor- ous essays on a few of these topics, but they are not part of this book...
...She doesn't write pretentiously...
...That title captures both the thesis and the antithesis of Gerald Graff's new book...
...therefore they logically "presuppose" their opposites...
...the necessity to any discourse of some conventional code does not establish that the code or sign-system is in itself suffi- cient to generate meanings...
...The old New Criti- cism, structuralism, post-structuralism, art-eroticization, and even the student- centered approach to Freshman English, all come under attack for surrendering the critical powers of literacy and litera- ture just at the time when they are most needed to effect real social and cultural reform...
...there- fore Graft makes an effort to set the liter- ary record straight by surveying what is really implied by the world-views of Joyce, Borges, Barthelme and others...
...According to Graft, most academic approaches to language have conspired to deprive literature of its power to work upon the world...
...Phyllis Theroux, to her that person to me...
...her cousin Tim Gallwey's book The Inner Game of Tennis must hai, e pleased her mother, whose wish for all her dear ones is that they might some- how, in time, "go national...
...the con- suming (in both senses) egoism of mod- em private life has found its own equiva- lent to laissez faire in fais ce que voud- ras...
...What's wrong isn't that she slides over her failed marriage, which presumably might be a later" book's focus, but that she dwells overlong and overcutely on some of the details of her adolescence...
...in particular, that the necessarily subjective nature of the mechanisms of perception does not in itself guarantee that the result must be in error...
...And in the 1890s came a still more terrifying prison, the "demonic 'iron cage' "of an imperialistic war and overseas colonies...
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...Picking up Max Weber' s"iron cage" metaphor and multiplying it, Takaki argues that following 1776 the Revolutionists put their instinctual life under arrest, "promoted a republican ideology rooted in the Protestant ethic and devised what may be called republican 'iron cages' to help [white?] Americans rule the emotional part of themselves...
...63¢, six times...
...Grandmother was morning...
...Freud, too, is mentioned twice only, and Horace not at all, but it is hard not to read this book as a dispatch from some Manichaean literary contest between the pleasure principle and the reality princiCommonweal: 508 defense of naive realism against skeptical objection...
...Not G-ramsci's letter but his currently fashionable notion of hegemony is the starting point of Ronald T. Takaki: "By culture, I essentially mean what Antonio Gramsci has called cultural hegemony, 'an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society...
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...Many of Graft's subsidiary points deserve more than the terse summary that follows: He corrects the false assumption, implicit in much modern criticism, that texts which represent the ambiguity of experience are themselves necessarily indeterminate in meaning...
...According to Graff, this empty idiom, along with various other symptoms of our times, can be largely blamed on the epistemological disease now epidemic among professors of the humanities...
...and both the gist and the terms of this remark recur again and again...
...They contracted, that disease from reading and misreading modern and postmodern literature...
...A subordinate cause for concern is the sappy techno-therapeutic idiom that marks the modern vernacular of both popular speech and mass culture...
...A tippling uncle "ate dog food out "We should all have one person who of squash trophies and didn't give a good knows how to bless us despite the evi- Goddam where [he ] would be tomorrow dence," she writes...
...One couldn't help hope that it would happen to you" is not a sentence worthy of the English department of the Dominican Convent, much less Manhattanville...
...But then nobody should turn to this book for a holiday or entertainment, when Graft's main ambition is to have us recognize that literary criticism is serious work...
...To this day she finds no fault with such ideas, nor with the early lesson that "the desire to know, love, and serve God should be our first concern...
...But all the recently in- fluential movements in literary theory have abandoned the intellectual ap-paratus that is needed to recognize, let alone remedy, this state of affairs...
...Her editor should also have been more fastidious...
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...and Chinese Americans...
...With the substantial increase in the cost ofmatedais, they find themselves seriousiy in debt...
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...We look Catholic,' said my father...
...in general the tone is earnest and even somber...
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...They do this by denying the referential and propositional powers of language, or the extra-literary reality of the world, or both...
...Michael Hanches" TiHE COMEDIAN Robin Williams has a record album out (which I haven't heard) called Reality . . . What a Con- cept...
...The occasional joke (like calling the unre- fusability of experience "the Godfather Effect") is more likely to provoke de- construction than direct amusement...
...I don't quite know what it is...
...The word "critical" in...
...The coun- tervailing thesis for which Graft argues is that our unreflective, "naive" concept of the real world is backed by various "un- refusable facts," which we had better acknowledge for our own cultural good...
...and although Matthew Arnold is mentioned only twice, he would not have written a very different book...
...The modern capitalist state is mindlessly agnostic regarding all serious questions of value and ideology...
...Her mother, who once curled wigs in a Shir- ley Temple doll factory, consults an as- trologer...
...We don't need to hear quite so much about how she wanted to be Margaret O'Brien, or how she ate so many ice cream cones she had to shop at Macy's Chubette department...
...May tribes like hers increase...
...She and her siblings and parents con- verted to Catholicism en masse, "partly due to a certain inexorability that both my parents felt about making such a choice...
...He need not write about victims everywhere to show that in this country repression and racism have always been locked in their unloving embrace and that caste, class, and sex are integral components of our Commonweal: 510...
...loaded to the gills" is too much of a cli'ch6...
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...Echoing their master's con-tempt for the "vegetative" life of native peoples, Gramsci and other Marxists have shared fully the Western colonial dream of escape from "civil" society into a world without people, those desert islands where desires for domination have free play amorig obliging natural objects called Fridays or "natives...
...the bandleader Miller's name was not spelled "Glen...
...But it is the treason of the academic clerks that causes him the most concern and that finally dominates this book...
...ties like these along with more charming she "didn't like to be without whipped traits and keeps close track of her cream or an exit, and she often hired a kinsmen however randomly fate may taxi which she kept running outside, just fling them...
...High energy" isn't an adjective...
...To secure these points he makes judicious use of the work of E. H. Gombrich, whoseArt andlUusion has sometimes been treated as a handbook Up from substructure IRON CA|ES: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America Ronald T. Takaki Knopf, $15.95, 361 pp...
...But she seems to have it in her to probe her subjects a little more deeply than she here attempts to do...
...Wil- liams's album title samples and no doubt parodies.that idiom...
...Funds should be sent to: SIS- TER PAULA DE BLOCH, URSULINE PROVINCIALATE, KANKE ROAD 273/ 303, RANCHI 348 008, BIHAR, INDIA (Airmail 31...
...Ironi- cally, all these movements (or eddyings) are decadent academic epiphenomena of the romantic and modernist .traditions, which at their most truly creative always did manage to engage the real world in a "critical" way...
...Readied thereby for Jackson and the Market Revolution, whites appropriated Indian and Mexican lands, exploited laborers black and white, and moved into new quarters, "the corporate 'iron cage' of bureaucratic capitalism...
...they visit the sick in the villages, teach catechism, and administer relief in times of famine...
...this sense occurs dozens of times inLit-erature Against Itself...
...What redeems this book is its author's conviction that families.can keep a sense of themselves even when their headquarters are sold and their elders gone, even in case something downtown occurred to in the face of deracination and divorce...
...The implication is that all marked categories, such as "dis- tortion,""myth,"" fiction," are dialec- tical categories...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 16
