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Poetics
POETICS PAPER-2, 3, & 4
Politics Prompt
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own
door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and
the mink do. First along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and
the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From
many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their
works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his
affairs, church and state — and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and
agriculture, — even politics, the most alarming of them all — I am pleased to see how
little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still
narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveler thither. If you
would go to the political world, follow the great road, — follow that market man,
keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it — for it too has its place
merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean field into the
forest, and it is forgotten. In one half hour I can walk off to some portion of the
earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another and there
consequently politics are not, for they are but as the cigar smoke of a man.
Thoreau, from “Walking”
I’m asking that your paper be in two parts:
FIRST, using as a guide Roy Porter’s introductory essay to his book Flesh in the Age of Reason
(this introductory essay is attached in the email this document was attached to, and is in sakai),
chronicle the humanist narrative of the rise of the individual and its concomitant isolation of
the self in the history of Western poetics from Plato to Eliot, folding into your analysis an
explanation of how the literary orientations of mimeticism, pragmatism, and expressivism,
with their respective definitions of nature to buttress their claims, functioned to support this
narrative—then explain the post-humanist deconstruction of this narrative, making reference
to the theorists we read in that camp: Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault.
You could do worse for this first part of the paper than to merely summarize Porter, but I
would hope that you would supplement that summary with elements from our readings that he
doesn’t refer to. And too, I’m asking that you synthesize with that explication what we’ve
observed about the role mimesis, pragmatism, and expressivism, and their respective theories
of nature, have played in that narrative.
What Porter’s essay does well, which is particularly informative and useful for you with this
assignment, is present both the humanist and the post-humanist perspectives of this narrative.
What Cronon does with the dust bowl narratives Porter does for the rise of the self in Western
thought. (A difference in their analyses is that Cronon provides several alternative narratives,
whereas Porter relegates alternative narratives to ‘subplots’ of the major one, which is the story
of the unabashed exaltation of the self.) I am asking that this first part of your paper likewise
present both the humanist and post-humanist perspectives.
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You will get special merit in this section for displaying an understanding of the forces that
caused the transitions from each historical period to the next: ancient to Medieval to
Renaissance to Neoclassicism to Romanticism to Modernism to Contemporary humanism and
post-humanism.
SECOND, perhaps in the context of the first half, analyze the implicit and/or explicit politics
of your own creative writings: do your writings fall in line with the narrative of the rise of the
self, or do they subvert that narrative? But to answer that overarching question, you may have
to inquire more specifically into what it means to be political in your creative writing.
The unspoken challenge in this part of the assignment is to define for yourself what is political.
If I were to do that for you, I would possibly limit the scope of your inquiry. That being said,
let’s start with some standard definitions: 1) Politics is the process by which groups of people
make decisions. 2) Politics consists of "social relations involving authority or power” and
refers to the regulation of a political unit, and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and
apply policy. 3) Political science (also political studies) is the study of political behavior and
examines the acquisition and application of power. Related areas of study include political
philosophy, which seeks a rationale for politics and an ethic of public behavior, and public
administration, which examines the practices of governance.
So since, as you can see, an overarching concern of politics is the question of who deserves to
make decisions for others, let me suggest that you view the political engagement of your
writing in terms of the audience you write for. In our readings, we have seen our theorists
discuss the role of audience: Plato argues that Homer is a bad influence on youth; Aristotle is
more lenient toward literature perhaps because he envisions a more mature audience for
tragedies; Wordsworth claims a democratic audience, albeit sexist by our standards; Marx,
being a historical materialist, claims the audience of literature is and always has been determined
by the ideology of its respective period. We have also seen how our theorists' choice of
audience for their own theoretical writings affects the political nature of their theories: we could
argue that we see a progressively more democratic audience from Plato and Aristotle to Pope,
Wordsworth, and Marx, and thus progressively more democratic theories expressed in those
writings (Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s intended audience may be more difficult to discern—
which may bring up an interesting debate concerning post-humanist politics: what are they?).
So we can argue that the focus of a writer’s political engagement is his or her choice of
audience. Sometimes the theorist him or herself openly professes a relationship to audience:
Socrates believed himself to be a spokesperson for reason (who might that audience be?);
Pope a spokesperson for taste, sense, and tradition (who might that be?); Wordsworth simply
“a man speaking to men.” Different relationship to audience, different politics. So you could
examine the politics of your own writing by exploring who your audience is and what you wish
to be to that audience (teacher? priest? guru? fellow citizen? agitator? mediator-at-large?). I
suggest that, after writing section one of this assignment, you choose a theorist or two you
have the most political affinity with and explicate and analyze his or her theories of the
appropriate audience for literature, followed by an analysis of your own writing in the context
of the one or two theorists you will have just analyzed.
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Implicit in this suggested approach—of using your choice of audience to detect your
politics—is that it’s relatively easy to detect who your audience is. What if it’s not, you ask.
What do I look for in my own writing to indicate who my audience is, and what do I use as
evidence to make my argument? I would argue that our politics manifests, whether we’re
aware of it or not, in the technical literary elements of our writing, e.g., diction, syntax, theme,
tone, meter, point of view, scene, characterization, etc. So you could analyze, say, two or more
of these elements as they appear in your work and from that analysis, again, draw conclusions
about audience. If you choose characterization, for instance, you may want to look for age,
race, gender, or class stereotypes or eccentricities, an analysis that in turn would tell you about
who your audience is and your relationship to that audience. If you choose diction, you could
analyze how familiar your words are to the average high school graduate, to the average college
graduate, which in turn would help indicate who your audience is and what or who you want
to be to that audience; do you have your characters use mannerisms of speech that are familiar
only to a certain group? That choice of audience will in turn indicate political sympathies or
affiliations. Are you right wing—do you believe ‘privileged’ classes deserve their privilege and
‘unprivileged’ deserve theirs, and that the purpose of government is to maintain that status
quo, perhaps by maximizing the freedoms that allow the deserving to maintain their desserts?
Are you left wing—do you believe the role of government is to help the underprivileged
achieve socio-economic parity with the privileged, whose privileges were predominantly
inherited? Perhaps your politics involve ideas concerning the appropriate role of the military in
the culture, or how campaigns are run, or attitudes about family or how money is spent on
education. Positions on any or all of these political issues, one could argue, are determined by
who is being addressed.
Perhaps your poems are introspective, intensely self-examining—do those meditations make
literary or philosophical references that only those with a certain level of education would
appreciate? Wordsworth claimed to be radically democratic—was he? What are the politics
involved in the exaltation of the self these intense reflections manifest?
But, you say, audience may be only one aspect of my politics. What about what I’m saying to
that audience, as opposed merely to whom I’m saying it? That is, isn’t the content of my message
as much or more the crux of my politics as the form? Perhaps yes. Explain. Perhaps you will
want to refer to the additional prompts below.
ADDITIONAL PROMPTS FOR THE POLITICAL ANALYSIS OF YOUR OWN
WRITING
I’ve suggested above that you use your choice of audience, conscious or not, to help focus
your analysis of your politics in your creative writing. Below are some additional prompts
you may want to consider for your analysis, perhaps in conjunction with your focus on
audience, or in lieu of it. I suppose you could write your entire second section by answering
three, two, or even just one of these following questions. My purpose in presenting so many
choices here, a kind of buckshot of prompts that risks overwhelming you, is to offer you a
variety of ideas in hopes that one or two may strike a chord with you.
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1. Can we surmise from Plato’s and Aristotle’s thoughts about literature’s role in politics
what those attitudes were prior to them? If one were to base one’s ethics and politics on the
way gods behave toward people in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, or the way Yaweh in The Old
Testament treated people (and the way those people, in both cases, responded), what would
those ethics and politics be concerning literature’s political role in society? Do your writings
mirror those politics? That is, in what ways are your writings ‘ancient,’ perhaps snubbing
modern ‘delusions’ about the value of individual rights.
2. Plato and Aristotle both discuss a psychology of literature—that is, they focus on literature’s
effects on a person’s thinking and behaving. But does that psychology presume a certain
prescribed relationship of the individual to the community, one different from what we
adhere to today? What is that prescription of theirs and do you espouse it in your writing?
(The contemporary poet and political activist Adrienne Rich argues that all politics is
personal—would Plato and Aristotle agree?)
3. As Hazard Adams describes in his introduction to our text, events in Europe around 1600
compelled writers to replace mimeticism with an internalized dwelling on consciousness and
the process by which knowledge is created. Why would that spawn something like Sydney’s
defense of poetry and, a bit later, Hamlet? Have we in our own age moved beyond Hamlet’s
psychological preoccupations? (Eliot’s Prufrock comes to mind.) How do Sydney’s claims,
which seem so grandiose to us, speak to the concerns in Hamlet, and how do those concerns
manifest politically? Does your writing share the same political presumptions and aspirations
as Sydney’s text does, or perhaps the political anxieties of Hamlet?
4. I’ve said in class that the history of knowledge is the story of our growing recognition that
all systems are self-serving (see my lecture on Aristotle, on blackboard). In that context Marx
and Nietzsche represent an “arrival” (perhaps Nietzsche more so than Marx, as Foucault
would argue). I would argue that their insights present a political challenge to us that we are
still facing today. If we accept that our political system is not ordained by any higher power,
then how are we to decide what that political system should be? How does your writing
respond to that political vacuum that Nietzsche describes?
5. Modernism: we could argue that all those partially suppressed Enlightenment fears listed
in the handout entitled “Conflicting Attitudes Toward Political, Religious, and Philosophical
Developments of the Enlightenment” bloomed into realities in the early part of the 20th
century, giving rise, especially after WWI, to full blown despair. One classic response to
despair is nostalgia and, accordingly, nostalgia is one of the primary elements of modernist
literature: Proust, Joyce, Waugh, Faulkner, Eliot, Pound, Woolf, all mourned the loss of
some former glory or “state” (and I mean that word to connote its political meaning). But
what is the politics of nostalgia? In its passiveness, it would seem to merely create a vacuum
that invites some extremist, opportunistic ideology like fascism. (Nietzsche resisted that
passivity and argued for a very assertive, very personal politics, though some saw him,
ironically, as promoting a fascism based on that very nationalism he himself despised.) Does
your writing reflect this debate at all? Does it prescribe, implicitly or explicitly, nostalgia for
lost time, perhaps despair, or does it look more forwardly. What are the political implications
of your perspective?
6. Paralleling the rise of the individual in modernism is the rise of women’s rights (one
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version in the 18th century, its genesis, and another in the early 20th). In what ways could it
be argued that gender politics trumps all other political concerns? (In Barry’s chapter on ecocriticism, he presents the environmentalist objection to feminism, as well as other -isms, by
likening feminism to working for worker’s rights on the Titanic while it sinks. One could
rebut by folding into one’s feminism an eco-feminism.) Does your writing promote feminist
principles, and does it do so conspicuously? You could analyze the writerly concerns a
contemporary creative writer faces to achieve his or her feminist political goals.
7. We’re living in an age of the triumph of global democratic capitalism, which is based on
the principle that economic growth is a measure of success. But we’re also seeing its pitfalls,
ecological destruction and all the repercussions of imperialism’s exploitation of cheap labor
(not to mention the 2008 economic collapse). Of course that “cheap labor” nonetheless pays
its workers a salary they couldn’t otherwise earn (albeit poorly by U. S. standards). Does your
writing resist or support the capitalist ideology of growth economy?
8. How would you answer the charge that literature is merely an elitist activity, part of the
larger elitist higher education “constituency,” engendered (recall Barry’s analysis of the rise
of English as a discipline) to create a fear of the upper classes among the lower and middleclasses. Foucault argues that knowledge is power, which maintains itself by virtue of its
silence and invisibility, but that we can’t attribute responsibility for this system to any one
constituency, that it’s a monolithic system. To understand Foucault’s meaning on this, I like
to picture the many elements of a super bowl half-time ceremony to bring to mind the many
constituencies he had in mind, which function to reinforce one another: sports industry (of
course); advertising industry (commercials); fashion & cosmetics (commercials); food and
beverage (commercials); music industry (performing half-time guests, and commercials);
military industry (commercials and sometimes conspicuous military displays—jets flying
over, etc.); Washington’s politics industry (cameo appearances by politicians in the crowd,
and of course the president always calls the winning coach after the game). Does your
writing resist or support this “invisible” ideological matrix by helping to maintain the elitism
inherent in our culture’s reverence for literature? (This could be related to #6, which is why
Foucault is popular among contemporary feminist intellectuals: doesn’t this presentation
during a National Football League event—an exclusively male sport—evidence the
argument that our culture’s hegemonic ideology is patriarchal?)
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Note: If this paper happens to go to 10 to 11 pages, you may choose to write only one
more paper for the course, another 10 to 11 page paper. If it’s a shorter paper, you may
simply write another two shorter papers, or one longish one (c. 15 pp.). I’m looking for
a minimum of 25 pages of analysis from you for the entire course. Concerning the topic
of your work after our political unit, your paper(s) can be on one or both of the two
remaining units, philosophy & psychology. (Paper-2 can also be the entirety of the rest
of your 25 pages—after P-1.)
POETICS PAPERS 3/4: Philosophy and Psychology Units
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Philosophy prompt
We ran short of time this semester to read all the texts I usually assign for this course. In the
past we’ve studied the roots of modern philosophical skepticism, in David Hume, and the
birth of science, in Francis Bacon, and we’ve studied the effects of those movements on the
philosophical attitudes among contemporary writers. Nonetheless, we have read philosophers,
in the politics unit, who are primary thinkers in these traditions, or at least in modern
skepticism: Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, & Freud. The main current in this tradition is a
profound doubt concerning the existence of an ontological reality, a reality outside of our
perception of it; the skepticism even extends to a doubt about the existence of a self. My
argument in this aspect of the course is that every contemporary writer can be seen as
belonging in one camp or the other: those who believe in that ontological reality (and in the
self and its uncomplicated participation in that reality) and those who don’t. For those who
don’t, the doubt can range from a belief that the world is exclusively a matter of individual
perception (phenomenology or “perspectivism”) to a doubt that the self exists as well.
Explain that aspect of the development of skepticism in modern philosophy that most
interests you, from Nietzsche to Derrida and Foucault, and analyze characteristics of your own
creative writings that reflect your reaction to this doubt concerning the existence of a
knowable world outside yourself, perhaps including even the existence of the self.
Your analysis could take the form of a critique of the typical humanist-based college creative
writing workshop. Perhaps use as categories for your deconstruction keesey's categories: "text"
"author" "world"--or some such schema. (maybe there's a schema inherent in derrida's essay
we read for this course.) I'd love to see some good arguments for conducting workshops
according to more postmodern standards. "Postmodern standards" may be an oxymoron, but
it might be convincing to argue that the standard humanist workshop system hasn't sufficed
(or perhaps you suspect, as a result of the indoctrinating effects of all discourses, that you've
merely fooled yrself into thinking that it has). Perhaps you want to argue (this could be painful,
or liberating, depending on yr attitude) that your writing hasn't really improved, that is, by any
standards that aren't supported by the workshop "discourse." I'd love to see suggestions for
certain workshop activities that would align w/ a postmodern or "deconstructionist,"
Derridean, model. In other words, feel free to turn your critique into a "positive" analysis:
argue for what the workshop would be, were it to be more postmodern.
To return to a discussion of your creative writing per se, if your primary genre is fiction you
could examine the level of reality you assume your characters take on, and how this attitude
about what is real outside your own perception of things affects your development of these
characters. Or you may examine the level at which you project onto your characters their sense
of isolation from the world outside themselves. If a lyrical poet, you might consider ways this
philosophical subtext is a predominant tone in your poems, melancholy or playful or perhaps
both. You could examine your relationship to language, whether you believe language is
primarily a transparent conduit revealing the thing or idea it denotes or primarily signifiers
bouncing off themselves.
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If you are a firm realist on the one hand or a spiritualist on the other, and feel your work
expresses no doubt concerning the existence either of a knowable world outside yourself or of
the self, then you could defend that position against the tenets of modern radical skepticism.
Psychology prompt
Once it was revealed in the 16th century by new astronomy instruments that the earth literally
moves, it became apparent that the old way of thinking, which assumed that the earth was
stable, would not do. This crisis spawned a debate about how the mind works in determining
what we come to think of as knowledge: hence the birth of psychology. Philosophers in that
debate split into two groups: the rationalists on the one hand, who believe that ideas come
before experience—you intuit them (Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza); the empiricists on the
other hand, who believe that knowledge comes from experience (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume).
At times in our studies this semester we’ve touched on this debate.
Locke, in the 17th century, gives us our first full articulation of empiricism, and is known as the
father of modern psychology. We don’t read Locke in the course, but we do read Nietzsche,
Derrida, and Foucault, who are radical eptistemological skeptics. This skepticism is an
important perspective in the course and serves to distinguish for us the philosophy unit from
the psychology unit, in that psychology, from this perspective, is a branch of philosophy that
assumes the existence of the self and claims to use the methods of science to measure and
describe the workings of the mind. (One can find a critique of this assumption in Foucault’s
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason and The Birth of the Clinic: an
Archaeology of Medical Perception.)
So our study of psychology actually begins in the philosophy unit. We just call what we’re
studying in the psychology unit psychology because the reading sources are writers who ignore or
deny Derrida’s skepticism (which really was begun, in modern philosophy, in David Hume’s
work in the 18th century), and these psychologists usually “carry out” (i.e., conduct research
based on the scientific method) assumptions about the self and the existence of the
unconscious that Humean and Derridian philosophers don’t adhere to. What I’m arguing here
is that psychology as a discipline carries some philosophical assumptions that as writers it may
be important to examine; we could argue, in fact, that in spite of Derrida’s claim in “Structure,
Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” that Freud’s work constitutes one of
those periods in the history of ideas in which the humanist center of knowing is destabilized—
in spite of this claim of Derrida’s, we could say that psychology as a discipline, on the whole,
denies the problems of the self, choosing to ignore those problems for the sake of carrying out
its scientific project on what it believes to be a stable individual psyche. (Frederick Crews does
not deny that problem in Freud’s work; but Crews is a staunch empiricist and simply wants to
deny Freud the status of scientist.)
I would argue that we writers cannot afford to ignore these epistemic problems—to do so is to
ignore a fundamental quality of existence, one that is richly depicted in many of the most
powerful works in modern and contemporary literature (some that come to mind are the
works of Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and, more recently, Italo Calvino, Milan
Kundera, and, in America, Paul Auster, Kurt Vonnegut, and Tim O’Brien). There is one
exception to this tendency of psychologists to postulate a stable self: Jacque Lacan, a skeptical
psychologist as it were, a post-structuralist philosopher/psychologist who embraces those
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problems. There also appears these days to be a whole slew of self-proclaimed Buddhistic
psychologists writing about the therapeutic virtues of no-self.
In this paper, you may analyze your own creative work from a psychological perspective, using
either a Freudian or Jungian methodology. You may want to re-read Barry’s chapter on
psychoanalytic criticism. I would love to see you at least give a nod in your paper to these
broader philosophical issues in this paper, outlined in the paragraphs above—that is, I would
love to see a defense of the self, if indeed you are conducting your psychoanalysis with the
assumption that the self is stable.
Another approach to a psychoanalysis of your writing is to examine the process by which
creative writing gets composed. Longinus notwithstanding, we don’t see any attention paid to
this subject in our texts from antiquity, precisely because it was presumed then that the source
of inspiration came from outside the writer (from God), an assumption that coincides w/ the
notion that there is a stable reality outside the self: it was the age of ontology. Psychology as
such was irrelevant b/c in effect there was no such thing as psychology (of course we now
believe there was; it was just ignored b/c it hadn’t occurred to anyone that we should think
about it). And thus we see an increased attention to this topic as we enter the age of
epistemology, an increased attention to the construction of reality by the human mind. As
explained in the paragraphs above, this attention marks the advent of the discipline of
psychology, which manifested for writers in the study of the psychology of creative
composition. You could, for this paper, summarize the various analyses we saw in our modern
texts concerning the psychology of creative writing composition. You could begin w/
Longinus, an anomalous treatment of the subject in that age, and as such a source of
inspiration for modern treatments. Sydney has something to say on the subject, as does Pope,
and then Wordsworth of course makes it a major subject of his essay, since it was important to
his defense of his poems and their subject matter and style. Eliot sharply criticizes
Wordsworth’s analysis, though one might argue he appears to be protesting too much (they
may not disagree as much as Eliot would like to believe they do). Foucault gives us a
postmodern perspective on the topic. After this brief survey I would expect you to analyze
your own composition process in the context of the historical context you’ve provided,
comparing it to one or more of those you summarize, defending your method or conjecturing
on what method or methods you may want to explore in the future. (I would expect, by the
way, that this analysis would include those larger philosophical attitudes that I briefly mention
in this prompt, that account for this preoccupation being relatively exclusive to post 16th
century modernity.) What would you focus on? Perhaps the role of emotion (or mood); the
role of sensibility; the role of the writer’s knowledge of the literary canon preceding him or
her; the role of language itself (I myself often use language conspicuously as a generating tool,
letting the sounds or meanings of words act as a springboard for the next few words or lines—
it could be argued this is a postmodern move, esp. if it’s acknowledged in the poem that the
inspiration is derived from language per se); the role of structure or genre conventions
(structuralism); etc.
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If you wish, you may combine the “philosophy” unit and the “psychology” since, as explained
above, they historically comprise one intellectual movement. You could defend psychology
from the skeptics and psychoanalyze your own work.
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