Category Archives: Literary Theory

One of the great apocalypses of the western imagination was the entrance of the romantic poets and writers of the early nineteenth century. The romantic universe was articulated by M.H Abrams with instructive erudition in his Natural Supernaturalism. Abrams reveals the limits and nature of the romatic world, and it is worth outlining that world before ever understanding the visions of romanticism and or the legacy. The distinct syncretic fusion of Christianity in a post-revolution world created the climate for an unprecedented intellectual explosion.

The Romantic Worldview:

All processes and occurences move forward but also round and back, resulting in an inherent circulatity of argument and thought. Beginning with Wordsworth’s The Prelude for the first time in literature there occured a great consummation of mind and nature. This consumation, or marriage is a biblical testament to the power of redemption. The Prelude took our deep intuition of things in nature as coressponding to our souls. Each coressponding part was one with the whole of the cosmos, a marriage of Christian doctrine to neoplatonism.

Claims made in The Prelude anticipate our own age, for instance that man is alienated from nature and that he is divided within himself, from other men, and from his environment. The romantics merely adapted this thesis, which was based in a radical interpretation of good and evil and for the first time applied it to inner parts of the imagination, the soul and self.

Emanation is the burning fountain from which everything flows. Physical evil is associated with the farthests state of division. The neoplatonists moral sin or vice is said to be the matter of the body, which is the result of the fall or descent of man.

To this eternal process of immanent fall and return, we always go back to the One – to real being, or the source form which we came. The metaphor of the child father analogue and the parable of the internal quest for the spirit are central devices repeated in Blake, Coleridge and of course in Wordsworth himself. The order of return is always convergent upon itself and revealing unity in multiplicity, or chaos.

The romantics adapted three major aspects of neoplatonized Christianity:
1. the father becomes the perfection which is first principle, or absolute perfection and self-sufficient unity.
2. the falling away is always a falling out from the one. This brought about the idea that there is no eternal damnation, since all creatures and creation will return to the redemptive return to the divine unity.
3. a force of circuitous love- that holds the universe together and manifests itself to human awareness as the yearning to return to a radical undivided state.

The result of this neoplatonic influence was that the cause of redemption was a process of reintegration return, which reverses the results of the fall, in a cumulative reunion of male and female, bringing paradise to the world, heaven to earth and man, having reunited himself again and becoming spiritualized, man is rejoined by the creator in perfect unity.

A level of total union with the divine source can only be achieved by the mystic. The lord God is not even one because of sinners.

Parody has become ingrained in contemporary writing as the device which has enveloped the voice of the author. In Prophets of Extremity, (a very important book about Nietzsche’s canon and his disciples: Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida) the notion of the decline of modern modes of analysis, the anti-dialectic (Derrida’s signature form and style) the ever-shifting positions of the author towards power and opression (as in Foucault) and the blanketing ontological mysticism of philosophy and theory (Heidegger’s influence). These thinkers made possible a post-modernism. I wish to isolate the inevitability of parody in crical writing and what that inevitability portends for the role of the author in conventional terms. While this may seem to be a commentary on Foucault’s essay, “Death of the Author,” I intend to broaden the discussion and specifically focus on the role of the American critic, a la Daniel O’Hara.

In an interesting collection of essays by Daniel O’Hara’s about parody in American writing after Foucault’s influence- he puts forth the position that the troupe of critical writers, writing “after Foucalult” are all inevitable parodists…

The axiom from which we enter this viewpoint is important to understand. O’hara uses a self-created concept of literary and critical practice broadly entitled, “Ethical.” In the widest sense, ethical applies cultural consumption and interpretation as the modus operandi of the construction of the self. After all parody, when used most effectively is always self-parodic. Although O’Hara has a literary focus, his discussion usually encompasses more than just literature to include what he refers to as the collective archive of cultural production. The collective archive is not a single discourse, but rather taken in the general sense, it is “instances of discursive practices.” In other words, this refers to a rational form of applied rhetoric, technical studies and self-transformation… Is this referring to a narrow set of identities, a teleos for academe? Perhaps, but regardless of this possible esotericism, what does this mean for the modern writer? What truths are bottled up here, assumptions, etc.

Let’s explore more of the arguments:

The collective archive offers an “ever-changing range of possible selves not so much for one to become rather as for one to recall as inspirational or cautionary tales when faced with the inevitable everyday choices of living a life, pursuing a career, and understanding others and, one hopes, oneself.” Basically, this is a way to orientat toneself towards reading and to what comes out of reading; let’s call this a way of positioning oneself towards reality for convenience sake. So the theories basic view is that we have culturally-constructed lives and that are discursive practice in the world is a meditation upon the practical possibilities of self definition.

Make sense?

In an attempt to isolate parody even further in this outlook, I want to focus on the role and definition of the “self” in this line of thought.

The self is an ever-provisional, mobile effect of specific rhetorical acts- taken in the largest sense: the self is undergoing continual instances of an infinitely diverse construction and reconstruction of selected styles, or “profiles” that ultimately form a unified self. Note the axiomatic: there is no single existence of a natural or original self, rather the self is continuously amidst a process of variously utilizing selected imaginary elements from the past to interpret and be in the present more fully.

Let’s explore this argument in broader terms. Culturally constructed reality has become an established truth to contemporary life. Where has that tradition entered our popular consciousness? Looking to the historical argument put forth by Heiddeger on technology provides a glimpse.

Humanity or “westerm man” throughout history is continuously prevented from attaining his true essence. There is at all times a level of confinement of man’s full expression. This tension reasons one phenomenologically influences tangent of thought: there is at all times a constant effort of the will towrds destining. The blocking occurs in a systematic hold over the will, as follow,

“since destining starts man on a way to revealing man, he is continually on the brink of the possibility of pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in what is ordering.”

This means that your true self is only revealed in the ordering of the infinite profiles that you occupy without your self’s conscious awareness of their dominating role over your will, life and full-expression.

In this rather negative view of of the cultural creative impulse in reality construction, or destining, O’Hara continues his application of self-knowledge, to know a profile means to examine the minute revolutions of the self that have transpired in the life of that thinker.

The minute revolutions are the spaces that I find most important in my reading.