Reading Resistance Value Deconstructive Practice and the Politics of
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Also by Alan Kennedy THE PROTEAN SELF: Dramatic Action in Contemporary Fiction MEANING AND SIGNS IN FICTION
Reading Resistance Value Deconstructive Practice and the Politics of Literary Critical Encounters ALAN KENNEDY Professor of English and Chair of the English Department Dalhousie University
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-20496-0 ISBN 978-1-349-20494-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20494-6 © Alan Kennedy 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-47410-5 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990
ISBN 978-0-312-04094-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kennedy, Alan, 1939Reading resistance value: deconstructive practice and the politics of literary critical encouters/ Alan Kennedy. em. p. Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-312-04094-9
I. Reader-response criticism. PN98.R38K4 1990 801'.95--dc20
I. Title.
89-29802 CIP
This is for the other members of the gang: Sanu and Ayus Aditya
To deprive the bourgeoisie not of its art but of its concept of art, this is the precondition of a revolutionary argument. (unattributed quotation used by P. Macherey in A Theory of Literary Production)
The we is not what resists; what resists is mind proceeding towards itself. Oean-Fran~ois
Lyotard, 'Discussions, or Phrasing "after Auschwitz"', 1986)
Contents ix
Preface
1 Reading as Resistance and Value
1
2 Undoing the Influence of Wordsworth on Robert Frost
19
3 Criticism of Value: Response to John Fekete
33
4 The Literal and the Law
49
Paul de Man: From Resistance to Value
63
6 Tristram Shandy and the Defensive Reading
91
5
7 One Hundred Years of Solitude: Resistance, Rebellion and Reading 8 The Inversion of Form: Deconstructing 1984 9
Reading Culture and Anarchy
10 Deconstruction Meets the Departments of Eng. Lit.
107 129 149
170
Conclusion
191
Notes
192
Index
197
vii
Preface While attempting to develop something like a theory of reading practice, focusing on specific 'literary' (if deconstructive) readings of individual 'works', I have been aware of the way that theory has been rapidly developing in other areas. Clearly I am not going to be master of all the discourses necessary to my task. I have tried to put a number of themes together in deconstructive readings that are not ignorant of social and political responsibilities. I take this practice to be primarily resistant, and to be necessitated by the ideological matrix of reader and writer. This deconstructive resistance necessarily involves me in questions of form, aesthetics and value. On questions of value I make belated mention, in Chapter 3, of the recent work of John Fekete. I have not been able to take in all that has been happening in the area of ethics and value theory. My own attempt to develop a resistant practice owes much to my conversations with Paul Smith and Gary Wihl, and I am grateful to both, both for t
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