Journal of Literary Theory (JLT)

Hartner, Marcus; Universität Bielefeld
Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft

English

Basic Concepts of Narrative Theory: A Polyphonic View [David Herman/James Phelan/Peter J. Rabinowitz/Brian Richardson/Robyn Warhol, Narrative Theory. Core Concepts & Critical Debates, 2012.]

Eilittä, Leena; University of Helsinki
Docent (PD) of Comparative Literature

Typologies of the Iconotext [Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, 2011.]

Böhm, Elisabeth; Universität Bayreuth

Dennerlein, Katrin; Universität Würzburg

DFG, Frauenbeauftragte der Universität Bayreuth, Universität Würzburg, Universität Bayreuth

Das generische Feld des Bildungsromans [Der Bildungsroman im literarischen Feld. Neue Perspektiven auf eine Gattung mit Bourdieus Feldtheorie. Internationale, DFG-finanzierte wissenschaftliche Tagung. Universität Bayreuth, 19.–21.04.2013.]

Haekel, Ralf; Universität Göttingen

 1 
Ralf Haekel 
 
Looking Back at Theory 
 
• Nicholas Birns, Theory after Theory. An Intellectual History of Literary Theory 
from 1950 to the Early 21st Century. Peterborough, Ont./New York: Broadview 
Press 2010. 345 p. [Price: EUR 22,99] ISBN: 978-1-55 11933-5. 
 
 
1. Introduction 
 
In recent years it has become rather fashionable to claim that literary and cultural studies have 
entered an era »after theory«. In 1999, David Scott Kastan published Shakespeare After 
Theory, Valentine Cunningham Reading After Theory in 2002 and Terry Eagleton After 
Theory in 2003. ›Theory‹, it seems, had run its course by the beginning of the new millen-
nium. For somebody unfamiliar with literary studies of the past fifty years, this whole scena-
rio must sound utterly strange: how can one properly investigate literature in an academic 
environment without some theoretical presumptions? Of course, ›theory‹ in this context does 
not refer to the general meaning of the term but rather to a very specific usage that comes up 
in the 1960s and begins its gradual decline already some twenty years later. Although this use 
of the term theory is very special or even narrow, it is nevertheless immensely difficult to 
grasp, as Jonathan Culler writes: 
 
Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods for its study [...]. It’s a 
body of thinking and writing whose limits are exceedingly hard to define. [...] The most convenient de-
signation of this miscellaneous genre is simply the nickname theory, which has come to designate 
works that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they ap-
parently belong.1 
 
To describe and take account of this notion of theory or of the theoretical movement in lite-
rary studies in the second half of the 20th century is the task Nicholas Birns sets himself in his 
encompassing study Theory after Theory. However, the title of the book is strangely mislead-
ing. It is neither a thoroughly theoretical book – although it treats theory as its sole topic – nor 
is it really concerned with a contemporary theory after ›theory‹. The subtitle An Intellectual 
History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early 21st Century is much more to the point, as 
Birns’s book, whose scope is nothing less than impressive, provides an overview of the dif-
ferent schools and writers subsumed under the umbrella term. 
 
 
2. Beginnings 
 
In seven chapters, Birns aims at describing late 20th-century literary criticism in all of its sub-
disciplines by introducing its main thinkers. After a chapter on Michel Foucault and one on 
Jacques Derrida as the two single most important theorists, Birns investigates Feminist 
Theory, Anti-Racist Theory, Post-Colonial Theory and Queer Theory to end with an overview 
of the state of the art in the 21st century. The book begins, though, with an extensive preface 
in which Birns describes the state of theory in the 1950s, identifying the New Critics, the New 
York Intellectuals and the Leavisites as the main protagonists. The New Critics’ focus on 
close reading created a theoretical atmosphere that is, ccording to Birns, characterized by the 
attempt to interpret literature according to the paradigm of what he calls the »resolved sym-
bolic« (11 ff. and passim), i.e. the tendency to insist that a poem »has a coherent, indissoluble 
 2 
meaning, making the text determinate and ›resolved‹« (15). The fact that the New Critics in-
vestigated just a very small and elitist literary canon led to a crisis that eventually paved the 
way for ›theory‹ (cf. 30). 
 
Despite the inclusion of F.R. Leavis and his school, which was based at Cambridge Universi-
ty, the overall focus of Birns’s preface is not on theory as an abstract entity but on theory as it 
entered American academic institutions some time in the 1960s, a focus which is also charac-
teristic for the rest of the book. This choice is not unproblematic. On the one hand, the con-
centration on literary studies in the US virtually excludes any important theoretical school 
such as Russian Formalism as taking place before or outside of theory. The following quote is 
symptomatic: »It must be realized that many European intellectuals who were alive and active 
in the 1950s, such as George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin, 
and Theodor Adorno, were either not known in the English-speaking world or not seen as 
relevant to literature. (Now these intellectuals are considered proto-theorists.)« (23) To any-
body writing outside the US, the description of some of the most important thinkers of the 
20th century as »proto-theorists« must be considered if not utterly narrow-minded then at least 
quite amusing. Furthermore, this restriction of theory to the influence of Derrida on American 
literary criticism, which is most plainly visible in the variations of the term deconstruction in 
each of the chapter headings, renders the entire gargantuan project problematic. It ignores that 
theory is not a vogue that comes and goes but is inr nsic to the discipline of literary studies as 
such, even in its rejection of theory – a main point made by de Man in his famous essay »Re-
sistance to Theory«. It is therefore one of the benefits of Terry Eagleton’s widely popular and 
influential Literary Theory of 1983 to begin with a chapter on the question »What is Litera-
ture?« In this opening chapter, he states: »If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it 
would seem obvious that there is something called lit rature which it is the theory of.«2 Al-
though to outsiders of academic literary studies thi may seem to be a question easy to an-
swer, this is far from being the case, as Eagleton has to admit himself. In this sense, Birns’s 
study is not concerned with the theoretical problems posed by literature and the act of reading 
and understanding, but solely traces the history of Deconstruction in American literary stu-
dies. 
 
 
3. Taking Account of Deconstruction 
 
As said before, Birns treats Foucault and Derrida as having triggered ›theory‹ after the crisis 
of the 1950s: »Foucault and Derrida were the two ›big names‹ of the theoretical era. They 
were the two thinkers whose names evoked the most cheers or shudders in the corridors of 
academic departments.« (46) Of the two, Birns consider  Derrida surely to be more important, 
at least most influential. It is only in the third chapter on Derrida that the term ›post-
structuralism‹ is introduced – and with it the linguistic turn, the radical restructuring of lite-
rary studies in the wake of Saussure’s investigations into the nature of language. Here it be-
comes evident that Birns pays less attention to abstr ct concepts and rather concentrates on 
people and constellations. This dense history of the different schools has many merits because 
we can actually trace the history of the development of different lines of thought. For in-
stance, a traditional approach to literary theory, resembling a grand and teleological narrative 
beginning with Saussure, leading via Czech and Russian Formalism to Structuralism and end-
ing with Deconstruction, can be replaced by the history of actual schools, people developing 
their ideas in a given academic environment. In this case it is a matter of debate whether one 
should really discuss Judith Butler in the chapter on Queer studies and not in the one on 
Gender Studies (cf. 267 f.), or whether the Marxist Fredric Jameson was really the most im-
portant inspiration for New Historicism rather than, say, Clifford Geertz or Foucault (cf. 111 
 3 
f.). But at the same time this approach also renders the very combinations of topics questiona-
ble. The main bulk of the sub-chapter on the de Man scandal concerning the posthumous dis-
covery that the most important deconstructive literary scholar wrote journalistic articles for a 
Belgian pro-Nazi newspaper in his youth is concerned with the rhetorical, aesthetic and psy-
chological theory of the sublime from Longinus to Burke and Kant and afterwards with 
Gérard Genette’s narratology (cf. 101–106). This is puzzling, as this rather random chain of 
associations gives the reader the impression of following the author clicking on a link in the 
middle of an article published on the internet. Furthe more, the approach also tends to neglect 
the fundamental critique of agency and authorship discussed in the 1960s. Considering what 
Derrida actually did write and what he has come to stand for, it is confusing to read that  
»Derrida is saying, basically, that no one can truly do deconstruction unless one is Derrida or 
is willing and able to conduct Deconstruction in a Derridean style.« (87) 
 
 
4. Theoretical Schools. Past and Present 
 
The focus on individuals, constellations and schools also shapes the ensuing chapters. The 
chapter on feminist theory does not only give an overview of the most important theses and 
waves of feminist thought, it also provides an insight into the working conditions of women in 
the academia as a vital background to the development of key feminist theses. Yet again, it is 
highly doubtful whether a reduction to these given circumstances really does the sophisticated 
gender criticism developed in the past 50 years justice: »For instance, the largest annual lite-
rary academic meeting, the Modern Language Associati n (MLA) convention, was held just 
after Christmas, making it very difficult for mothers and grandmothers to attend the conven-
tion and also be with their families during the holidays.« (153) Notwithstanding the fact that it 
is also quite difficult for fathers and grandfathers to attend the convention and be with their 
families at the same time, it is not this image of w men primarily as mothers and only then as 
academics that feminist criticism has struggled for in the past century. 
 
The ensuing chapter gives an overview of anti-racist theory, tracing the history of anti-racist 
fiction as much as giving the reader an idea of the theoretical development in the field. The 
chapter, which Birns presents as a success story, ends with a focus on Barack Obama’s first 
victory and his election as president, but whether anti-racist theory really »preserved the way 
for him in terms of discourse and of representation« (216) may be considered as a matter of 
debate. 
 
The following chapter on post-colonial theory focuses on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Ed-
ward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, as well as on the notions of hybridity and ›writ-
ing back‹. But, as opposed to feminism and anti-racism, Birns claims on a nationalistic note, 
that the end of theory in this realm is not crowned with success: 
 
The biggest mistake that the rhetoric of both post-c lonialism and globalization made was underrating 
the persistence of nationalism and how the nation, despite being ›imagined‹, may be productive of  
meaningful discourse. [...] This underrating of nationhood foretold that interesting developments might 
come in the future (when the nation was allowed to come a bit more back into fashion) from a shar-
pened idea of what a national literature was. 
(256 f.) 
 
The chapter on Queer Theory is very brief and therefore might have been included in the 
chapter on gender theory, although, on the other hand, the importance of the topic, especially 
for contemporary theory, is positively stressed. The focus of this chapter is on the notion of 
 4 
performativity of gender developed in the writings of Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam and 
on how normativity is culturally produced rather than given as a fact. 
 
The final chapter on theory in the 21st century gives an account of the different notions f lite-
rary theory which are discussed today. Mentioning a whole range of writers from Giorgio 
Agamben via Bruno Latour to, rather surprisingly, the essayistic James Wood and ultimately 
Sianne Ngai, this chapter provides an overview of current trends rather than a thorough ac-
count of literary theory today, a scene which is as diverse as can be expected after the demise 
of a theoretical paradigm such as deconstruction. The very search for such a new paradigm is 
rather well captured in the overview that this chapter rovides. 
 
 
5. Conclusion  
 
Theory after Theory is a sort of encyclopaedia of late 20th-century literary theory. Yet, the 
very wealth of the book may be considered the reason for its failure. To proclaim the end of 
theory is, as said at the onset, en vogue, but to give the entire picture, a gigantic task that Birns 
attempts to do, means to treat a whole variety of discourses as if they were all following the 
same rules. In this sense, Birns’s book necessarily becomes the very grand narrative that   
20th-century theory sought to deconstruct. It is rather t  scope of the book that is, I would 
claim, impossible to master, than the failure of an individual author. Hence, the entire book is 
a strange mixture between a very detailed description of theorists and schools on the one hand 
and a rather random association of how to combine them on the other. The entire procedure is 
reminiscent of Locke’s association of ideas or, in modern terms, in following links on the in-
ternet. The scope of this book is nothing less than impressive, yet it suffers from this very 
scope: it provides almost too much information for a reader unacquainted with literary theory 
whereas experienced readers find neither new insights nto the existing theories nor any new 
suggestions as to how literary theory should be pursued in the future. 
 
Ralf Haekel 
Universität Göttingen 
Seminar für Englische Philologie 
Notes 
1 Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 2011, 3. 
2 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory. An Introduction, Minneapolis 1983, 1. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 
2013-06-05 
JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990 
 
Copyright ©  by the author. All rights reserved. 
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author 
and JLTonline. 
For other permission, please contact JLTonline. 
 
 
 
 
How to cite this item: 
 
Ralf Haekel, Looking Back at Theory. (Review of: Nicholas Birns, Theory after Theory. An Intellectual 
History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early 21st Century. Peterborough, Ont./New York: Broadview 
Press 2010.) 
In: JLTonline (05.06.2013) 
Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-002465 
Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-002465 


Looking Back at Theory [Nicholas Birns, Theory after Theory. An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early 21st Century, 2010.]

Fessenbecker, Patrick; Johns Hopkins University

 1 
Patrick Fessenbecker 
 
Why Books Can Be Good For You 
 
• Joshua Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions. New York: Oxford University Press 
2012. xiii, 250 p. [Price: EUR 43,99]. ISBN: 978-0195188561. 
 
 
In his eminently readable and concise new book, Profess r Landy has made an important con-
tribution to the increasingly substantial field of literary criticism devoted to theorizing the 
relationship between ethics and literature. Now enteri g its second generation, the theoretical 
movement sometimes called »the ethical turn« remains vibrant, and How to Do Things with 
Fictions will merit a place alongside Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge and J. Hillis 
Miller’s The Ethics of Reading as one of the central texts in this field.1 Landy admirably mas-
ters a massive body of criticism – approximately a third of the book is devoted to footnotes – 
and carefully distinguishes his notion that fiction can be »formative« from a number of poten-
tial alternatives. 
 
He does so especially in the book’s first two chapters – the first a theoretical introduction, the 
second an analysis of Chaucer’s »The Nun’s Priest’s Tale« – provocatively arguing that »It is 
time, I submit, to reclaim fiction from the meaning-mongers« (8). Landy means here a certain 
default assumption about how one ought to go about engaging literary texts, exemplified by 
an undergraduate student who, upon reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, expressed 
frustration that Morrison took so long to get to the point (cf. 1). This attitude, which Landy 
terms reading for »the message« or for »propositional content« (ibid.) is in his diagnosis per-
nicious, with negative effects on critics, writers, and readers (cf. 8). Against this view, he 
seeks to develop an account of the »pragmatics«, intead of the »semantics«, of literature; as 
he puts it, we could cease »to talk about what a text ›says‹ – if indeed there is such a thing – 
and [begin] to talk again about what it does« (9, emphasis in original). But in developing this 
view, Landy emphasizes that we need to pay as much attention to what readers want from the 
texts as what the texts offer: marking out a distinction between his account and Nussbaum’s, 
he explains that readers must want to be developed in a certain way by a text for it to effec-
tively do so. »The Nun’s Priest’s Tale«, which tells the story of a rooster who ignores a dream 
that he will be caught by a fox, only to escape from a fox the very next day through the fox’s 
arrogance (after being caught precisely because of his own pride), serves Landy well here. He 
persuasively argues that the story might serve as a parable for the dangers of conceit, but just 
as well might serve as a parable for the portentous power of dreams – and whichever moral 
the reader accepts depends not on the story, but on what the reader already believes plausible 
(cf. 25). Similarly, while he is content to agree with Nussbaum that fictions can develop our 
capacity for moral attention, he insists that this w ll only occur if readers are »predisposed to 
moral improvement«, and inclined to »come to the text for that« (38f., emphasis in original). 
 
As an alternative, Landy develops an account of what he calls »formative fictions« (10). Such 
works do not offer us propositional knowledge, but rather serve as training exercises for cer-
tain specific capacities: »rather than providing knowledge per se«, what such texts »give us is 
know-how […] what they equip us with are skills« (ibid.). And in the book’s four main chap-
ters – on the Book of Mark, Stéphane Mallarmé, Plato, nd Samuel Beckett, respectively – 
Landy goes on to show how the formal features of the texts serve not to convey a set of 
propositions, but rather to appeal to and subsequently develop a certain faculty on the part of 
the reader. Cleverly, Landy shows how the formative function depends precisely on the reader 
looking past the actual propositional content of the literary text. 
 2 
Thus, for instance, he notes the peculiar fact that despite the common notion that Jesus used 
parables to make his meaning clear, Christ’s parables in the Book of Mark often serve pre-
cisely to confuse the point – and indeed, the reactions to the parables in Mark’s description 
are often confusion, as the disciples are often »completely at a loss« (47). The problem is that 
such people are trying to understand the parables in propositional terms, when they are in fact 
deliberately obscure: Landy emphasizes the surprising fact that Christ himself says he speaks 
»so that they [the listeners] may […] hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and 
be forgiven«, which is to say that parables function precisely to »prevent people from under-
standing them« (ibid.). The right reaction, which is possible only from the few people who 
have a certain capacity, is found in the parable of the »Syrophoenician Woman«, who cru-
cially answers an obscure metaphor from Christ with another metaphor. Put succinctly, the 
right reaction is not translation but production – amely, of figurative language. This leads to 
Landy’s depiction of a »formative circle«, which is structured to parallel the hermeneutic cir-
cle: readers have a certain capacity – to speak figuratively, for example – and the formative 
text affects them by developing it. And if in the Book of Mark there is a connection between 
this capacity and spiritual affinity, Landy provocatively suggests that there might be some-
thing of secular value in the notion of a »figurative state of mind«. 
 
The book is at its best generally in its patient and scrupulously documented explanation of 
how tortured critical interpretations can become when they insist on reading for a coherent 
propositional content, and how simply and easily the formative account can explain the com-
plexities such interpretations cannot acknowledge. Of course this emerges first in the reading 
of Mark, where Landy takes some pains to acknowledge and refute the long tradition that in-
sists Jesus Christ wanted to be understood, but a similarly impressive example is his discus-
sion of Plato. Landy notes Socrates’s famous argument that no man can willingly pursue what 
he believes to be bad, but then calls our attention to the way Plato depicts people doing pre-
cisely this – in the case of the Symposium, Alcibiades, who in a final speech claims that Soc-
rates makes him realize the worthlessness of his »political career«, but then can’t bring him-
self to give it up (98). He then develops a provocative reading emphasizing not Socrates’s 
coherence – he painstakingly demonstrates the failures of readings that attempt to synthesize 
Socrates’s statements – but precisely Socrates’s failures. In this way, Landy suggests, Plato is 
ironic: the reader is meant to recognize in characte s like Alcibiades examples that contradict 
Socrates’s own psychological theory. And thus we miss the invitation Plato offers when we 
try to read the texts coherently; what they rather ask us to do is disagree with Socrates pre-
cisely the way he disagrees with others. Thus, the text does not teach us – indeed, we will get 
it wrong if we require it to do so. Rather, it trains us in a particular kind of discourse. And this 
way of reading Plato explains precisely why his dialogues are so complicated and contradic-
tory in the first place. 
 
There are a number of theoretical virtues to Landy’s approach. It is first of all admirably lo-
calized: Landy admits that not every text is a formative fiction. And as he persuasively notes, 
this humility in claiming to only explain certain literary texts rather than the literary as such is 
a virtue rather than a weakness (cf. 17). Second, as Landy again emphasizes, this account can 
explain why readers might re-read a text, since they ar  being trained by it; this is in contrast 
to the »propositional content theory«, which cannot explain why readers might return to a text 
whose message they have mastered (14). Finally, Landy can address perhaps the central prob-
lem in thinking about ethics and literature – namely, why reading books doesn’t always make 
people better. After all, for Landy, books operate formatively only on those readers prepared 
for them to do so. 
 
 3 
Alongside these strengths, however, there are some genuine problems. First, Landy’s account 
of the current state of the field and his positioning of his argument within it is importantly 
incomplete. The book opens with an impressive chart of theorists who have addressed the 
benefits of reading fiction, whom Landy sorts into three primary categories and thirteen total 
ways of »looking at a fiction«. What is confusing about this list is that it is neither of Landy’s 
enemies nor precisely his allies, but rather something like alternatives to his view; he counts 
»over a dozen non-message-based theories« (6). The position that needs the most explanation 
– the reader who attends to propositional content, or the »meaning-monger« whom Landy will 
criticize throughout the book – receives surprisingly short shrift: two footnotes refer briefly to 
mid-twentieth-century figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Ian Watt, Iris Murdoch, and a few others 
(cf. 153). Rather than substantively grounding the view in a charitably represented critical 
opponent, Landy speaks of this reading strategy as the one »currently being taught in high 
schools« and »evaluated in the public domain« (8); his citation for these claims refers to Jen-
nifer Lopez’s speech at the 2006 Academy Awards (cf. 153). Similarly, he suggests that there 
is a »contemporary cultural bias« that decrees »every book« as »valuable for its message« 
(120). Given, however, his opening categorization, which demonstrates the flowering of theo-
ries of fiction that do not emphasize the way it conveys a message, it is difficult to agree with 
Landy’s broad generalization that this is what most readers are up to: certainly in the critical 
academy Landy taxonomizes, much the opposite would appear to be true. 
 
The problem is made more noticeable by Landy’s failure to engage much of the secondary 
criticism on the ethical turn. The point at the center of Landy’s argument, that critics need to 
stop reading for the message of literary texts, is one that has been made before, and made in 
this particular debate: Adam Zachary Newton developd his »narrative ethics« in contrast to 
theories that emphasize the »translated meaning of the literary text«; Simon Haines has criti-
cized philosophers who read such texts for their »reformulable ideas«; and David Parker 
wrote recently that the ethical value of literature does not lie »in ethical propositions that can 
be gleaned from it«.2 This is to say shortly that literature has already been rescued from the 
meaning-mongers, and there is no need to do it again. L ndy’s approach may be new – in-
deed, I think it is – but the problem that drove him to it, which is his sense that unsophisti-
cated critics were reading for messages rather than form, is one that theorists have been think-
ing about for some time. And rather than situating his account against philosophers like 
Heidegger and Hegel (who receive a place in his categories) it would be clearer what was new 
about Landy’s approach if he had distinguished it from that of other participants in the ethical 
turn, authors like Newton and Parker. 
 
And as a theoretical matter, Landy’s central concept of the »formative« appears vulnerable to 
some of the objections he presses against his rivals. For instance, in arguing against the notion 
that literary texts reliably develop the moral abilities of their readers, he relies on the fact that 
there is »only shaky empirical evidence that well-intentioned art actually makes a difference 
in how people act« (33). But it seems to me that Landy’s account similarly relies on dubious 
empirical claims: for instance, in describing the formative circle, he has to posit that there is a 
mental faculty for generating figurative language, and that it can reliably be improved by 
reading certain texts (A footnote gestures at this problem without solving it: Landy says he is 
»leaving open« the way analyses of the brain would un erstand such a faculty, and refers to 
one 1978 psychology paper on »metaphoric competence« as an example of the sort of study 
needed rather than as one supporting his more specific claim; see 173 n. 68). The problem is 
complicated by the fact that the »capacities« the development of which Landy analyzes in his 
four chapters are not parallel entities. As I understand it, they are our capacity for generating 
figurative language (Mark), our capacity to engage in a willful self-delusion that re-enchants 
the world (Mallarmé), our ability to understand the inconsistencies in a theoretical position 
 4 
(Plato), and our desire for a certain kind of philosophical self-contentedness (Beckett). Since 
these are not obviously the same sort of psychological items, empirical verification for any 
one – suppose for example that reading Plato with an eye towards irony really did make one 
more capable of seeing tensions in philosophical views and ways to resolve them – would 
suggest little about the relationship between literary texts and the other capacities. 
 
And finally, it is not quite clear why, if it is training in these capacities one wants, close read-
ing of literature is the thing most worth doing. Professor Landy’s argument offers an excellent 
reason why reading literature is preferable to reading iscursive, propositional treatments of 
the relevant issues: in their difficulty, the literary texts offer »training«, instead of merely 
teaching (19). But what is not clear is why training through literature is preferable to other 
forms of training, period. The problem here is most di cernible vis-à-vis the example of Plato: 
it seems to me we could concede to Landy that Plato’s texts train readers in the ability to »lo-
cate holes in an argument« (118), and yet hold that if this was the primary reason to read 
Plato, one had much better spend the time actually talking with a philosopher, who could no-
tice the strengths and weaknesses of a given student in this area and respond accordingly 
much more easily than Plato could. In other words, if Landy is right that what we want is 
training, it is not clear to me that this results in much reason to read literature at all. 
 
So for these reasons, I do not think that the book is quite successful in achieving its aims. But 
its intervention in these debates is nevertheless one that cannot be ignored, and deserves credit 
for moving the broader arguments a good distance forward. I am eager to see how Professor 
Landy’s thinking about these matters develops. 
 
Patrick Fessenbecker 
Johns Hopkins University 
Department of English 
Notes 
1 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, New York 1992; J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading, New York 
1987. 
2 Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics, Cambridge, MA 1997, 65; Simon Haines, Deepening the Self: The 
Language of Ethics and the Language of Literature, in: Jane Adamson et al. (eds.), Renegotiating Ethics in Lit-
erature, Philosophy, and Theory, New York 1998, 21–38, 24; David Parker, Ethics, Theory, and the Novel, 
Cambridge 1994, 17. I address this issue as well in my essay »In Defense of Paraphrase«, which is forthc ming 
in New Literary History. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 
2013-03-27 
JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990 
 
Copyright ©  by the author. All rights reserved. 
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author 
and JLTonline. 
For other permission, please contact JLTonline. 
 
 
 
 
How to cite this item: 
 
Patrick Fessenbecker, Why Books Can Be Good For You. (Review of: Joshua Landy, How to Do Things 
with Fictions. New York: Oxford University Press 2012.) 
In: JLTonline (27.03.2013) 
Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-002427 
Link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0222-002427 


Why Books Can Be Good For You [Joshua Landy, How to Do Things with Fictions, 2012.]

Brauneis, Adrian; Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

Alter & Ego. Sympathetische Beziehungen in der Methodendiskussion der Literaturwissenschaft [Sympathie & Literatur. Tagung an der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 21.–22.02.2013.]

Benthien, Claudia; Institut für Germanistik II, Universität Hamburg

Claudia Benthien
The Literariness of New Media Art –
A Case for Expanding the Domain of
Literary Studies
(With Analyses of Recent Video Art by Keren Cytter,
Freya Hattenberger, and Magdalena von Rudy)
Abstract: This article explores media-related aspects of literariness and exam-
ines them on the basis of spoken and written language in new media art, in
order to rethink the role of philology. The working hypothesis is that new media
art does, in fact, possess the potential for literary analysis; the article is therefore
intended as a case for the expansion of literary studies, its paradigms and
methodologies.
Literature, poetic structures and elements play a significant role in many
new media artworks – a fact that has been overlooked so far by both media
studies and literary scholarship. The article investigates this new, complex
interdisciplinary field in an exemplary analysis. To expand the application of
literary studies to new developments in the arts, including new media art work-
ing with language, one has to acknowledge that orally performed texts are as
complex in their aesthetic presentation and poetic signification as written and
printed literary works, and are therefore to be viewed as just as relevant subjects
of research.
In the introduction (part one), the research question will be contextualized
within contemporary trends in research, in particular within discourse concerning
the ›pictorial turn‹. It will be argued that the impulse to analyze audiovisual art
from the standpoint of art history (Bildwissenschaft) or media studies generally
overlooks or underestimates linguistic and literary components. However, in these
artworks it is often the complex interplay between orality and scriptuality that
creates poetic effects.
The second part of the article will introduce the concept and genres of new
media art and distinguish four central aesthetic strategies that are relevant for
›philological‹ analysis: (1) the integration of written texts or printed words with a
poetic intention into new media art; (2) the use of verbalized language in an
explicitly poetic manner; (3) the handling of pre-existing works of literature and
their transformation into audiovisual art; and (4) the exploration and adaptation of
literary genres by new media artists.
DOI 10.1515/jlt-2012-0001 JLT 2012; 6(2): 311–336
ngen
The concept of literariness in literary theory will be discussed in the third part
of the article, as it has been developed, amongst others, by Russian formalists, the
Prague school and various literary scholars in the English and German speaking
realm. The general aim will be the application of these notions of literariness to
the poetic use of language in new media art. The main focus will be on the notion
of poetic ›deviation‹ (Abweichung) and the increased self-referentiality of poetic
language that is created by way of a »foregrounding of the utterance« (Mukař-
ovský 2007, 19). Overall, poetic language can be perceived as such if it is
ostentatious or if it intentionally creates alienation, a heightened awareness of
its materiality, or an ›aesthetic surplus‹ that exceeds the mere communicative act.
In the parts four to six the article will then analyze three recent video art
works: Keren Cytter’s single-channel video Dreamtalk (2005), Freya Hattenber-
ger’s video performance installation Pretty Girl (2008), and Magdalena von Rudy’s
single-channel video Regnava nel silenzio (2008). These works have been chosen
as divergent and aesthetically innovative pieces by young and upcoming female
new media artists working in the German cultural context, and as representative
examples for a recent trend in video art to generate complex narrative and
aesthetic structures that strongly rely upon language. The three works will be
examined in close readings focusing on the use of language and literary struc-
tures, both in scriptural and in oral language.
It will be shown that these video artworks integrate elements from all three
literary genres – drama (e. g. choral speech, teichoscopy), poetry (repetitions,
parallelisms, rhyme, semantic ambiguieties, etc.), and epic prose (narrative
voices, literary ekphrasis). Furthermore, it is argued that these new media art
works create and make use of an ›aesthetic surplus‹ by way of a highly conscious
and ostentatious use of language that is viewed and presented as an artistic
material and a poetic ›tool‹. They also raise the question of agency inasmuch as
all three video works play with inauthentic or figurative discourse, which is either
articulated by someone else and only performed second-hand, or presented as
›re-presentation‹ as such. Moreover, in two of the three works discussed the
speakers are not conceptualized as characters articulating ›themselves‹ at all,
but as mere vocal instances mediating external content. Such experimental work
with language definitively exceeds existing parameters of figural speech and
character analysis both in film analysis and narratology. The language used by
the speakers refers to its act of articulation as such, or works with iterations and
other forms of language ›deviation‹ in actio. With regard to the concept of
literariness, such linguistic strategies must be considered poetic.
Claudia Benthien: Institut für Germanistik II, Universität Hamburg,
E-Mail: claudia.benthien@uni-hamburg.de
312 Claudia Benthien
ngen
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336 Claudia Benthien
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Full-length article in: JLT 6/2 (2012), 311–336.  
 
 
 
  
How to cite this item: 
 
Abstract of: Claudia Benthien, The Literariness of New Media Art – A 
Case for Expanding the Domain of Literary Studies.  
In: JLTonline (27.09.2012) 
Persistent Identifier: urn:nbn:de:0222-002327 
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The Literariness of New Media Art – A Case for Expanding the Domain of Literary Studies [Abstract]

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