I’m pleased to announce that Kathryn Freeman’s review of Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety has just appeared in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. I would like to thank both BIQ for sending my book out for review and Kathryn Freeman for taking time to review it. Freeman’s highly professional review accurately identifies both my book’s strengths and weaknesses and suggests revisions that I wish I had considered prior to publication (such as relegating my occasional references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to footnotes or developing them further). I would like to address a few of her specific criticisms here, but more for the purposes of clarification than rebuttal.

Freeman’s most significant criticisms are that my study is broad so at times shallow, spends too much time on background information, and is more effective in its treatment of Kierkegaard than of Blake. She understands the book’s central methodological purpose, which she summarizes in this way:

Just as this synthesis of history and subjectivity offers a rethinking of Blake and of Kierkegaard, Rovira’s revision of Derridean deconstruction from the hindsight of new historicism challenges the assumption of mutual exclusion between the two theoretical positions. More relevant for the study itself, this strategy has the potential to prevent the argument from being limited to mere synchronicity.

My study is certainly broad, and I was indeed deliberately attempting to avoid what Freeman calls “mere synchronicity” (I like her phrase). I attempted instead to identify a motivated synchronicity between Blake and Kierkegaard, describing the motivations for this synchronicity in terms of Blake’s and Kierkegaard’s shared cultural, political, and intellectual histories. So my first chapter compares the social and political milieu of Blake’s England to Kierkegaard’s Denmark, while my second and third chapters appeal to the Socratic tradition as shared intellectual context. Chapter two compares each author’s relationship to Plato’s works, and chapter three explains each author’s use of a model of personality arising out of Plato’s dialogs as it was developed throughout the medieval period. My fourth and fifth chapters argue my thesis about Creation Anxiety, which proceeds from a critique of generation present in both authors (chapter four) and then culminates in Blake’s creation myths (chapter five). My historicizing in chapter one reappears in chapter five while the intellectual history provided by chapters two and three lead into chapter four.

I would like to address the first two of Freeman’s three criticisms in terms of my desire to establish a motivated synchronicity between Blake and Kierkegaard and in terms of audience. Literary criticism in general tends to be divided between conceptual and historical approaches; Blake criticism perhaps even more so. My study is one of several recent works about Blake that consciously attempt to bridge this divide. But in order to demonstrate a motivated synchronicity, I had to consider two very different audiences: readers of Blake with perhaps marginal knowledge of Kierkegaard, and readers of Kierkegaard with perhaps no knowledge of Blake.

Problems involved in writing to such a diverse readership are compounded by the inclusion of historical material, as not all those interested in either literature or philosophy are concerned with history, and not all those interested in history are particularly interested in philosophy. My wife, for example, is very interested in British history but very annoyed with philosophy. Michael Phillips, who read and responded to my book shortly before a first draft was sent to the publisher, would probably agree with several of Freeman’s criticisms and generally shares my wife’s disposition toward philosophy. He wanted me to completely separate my material on Blake from my material on Kierkegaard, but I didn’t have the time to engage in that extensive a revision that late in the publication process. On the other hand, my colleague and editor, Sherry Truffin, initially considered majoring in philosophy but was put off by the male-dominated environment predominant in most philosophy departments, was drawn by Blake into the study of literature, and then by Flannery O’Connor into a study of Gothic literature. She has had relatively little interest in history but found my philosophical and literary material engaging.

To cover my possible audience bases, then, I had to review both British and Danish history and Socratic philosophy in ways that both brought my two authors together and then advanced my thesis. The result, I think, is that my book treats some subjects broadly and others in more depth (but which book does not?), and that those most interested in history will find the least original material in my discussions about that subject. My thesis is not about British and Danish history, but about Blake’s and Kierkegaard’s imaginative responses to their respective intellectual, cultural, and social contexts, so historical material is primarily background to my study.

The three historical tensions that serve as the focus of chapter one, tensions between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and artifice, reappear in my final chapter’s review of The [First] Book of Urizen, the only chapter that Freeman did not quote or even reference in her review. So when she describes an “unassimilated quarry of historical material,” I am unsure if she read the whole book carefully. She should have observed that I attempted to assimilate this material in my fifth chapter and then evaluated how well I did so.

However, I remain dissatisfied with my combination of historical and conceptual approaches to literature, so like Freeman I am somewhat unhappy with my own work on that point. At the time, I wanted a synthesis. The result of this dissatisfaction is my next book project, Interpretation: Theory: History, which takes historical approaches to figures important to the development of textual interpretation and to the rise of literary theory. I describe how this project arose out of Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety in a December 29th, 2011 blog post entitled “Theorizing History: Historicizing Theory.” In this blog post I explain that I have abandoned any desire for a synthesis between historical and conceptual approaches in favor of maintaining them as Blakean contraries, each in dialog with the other with neither achieving dominance.

I plan to address Freeman’s criticism about the effectiveness of my treatment of Blake in a separate blog post. However, I am not saying at present that her criticism of my book on that point is unfair. I need to review her points and then my book in a bit more depth before I respond to that claim, a response which may take the form of corrections to my book rather than a defense of it. I would like to take the rest of my time here, instead, to respond to a few criticisms tangential to my thesis, responses that are again in the interests of clarification, not necessarily rebuttal.

Freeman takes issue with my claim that Blake’s description of A Vision of the Last Judgment presents “an explicit condemnation of nature” (p. 48 in my text). My claim is embedded within language characterized by qualifications and hesitations, however. I say immediately before making this claim that Blake “at times” “seems to validate Platonic idealism” (p. 48, emphasis added here). I then say it is “very easy” to read Platonic idealism into Blake, which in the context of my earlier qualifications was meant to be read as a warning against simply reading Blake as a Platonic idealist. I then repeat the phrase “seems to” at the beginning of the next paragraph.

So while I did claim that Blake issued an explicit condemnation of nature, I meant to set that claim up for rebuttal later in the chapter by using highly qualified language early on, a rebuttal which Freeman does register. My intent for this section was to acknowledge that Blake’s language does at times entail an explicit rejection of material nature. For example, later in A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake claims, “We are in a World of Generation & death & this world we must cast off if we would be Painters” (Erdman p. 562). Claims such as these are difficult to assimilate to a positive view of nature: my argument is not that Blake completely rejects nature, which he certainly does not elsewhere, but that he rejects a specific phenomenology of nature inspired by Bacon, Newton, and Locke (p. 109).

However, I do not want to deny Blake’s very explicit language of rejection. This topic perhaps needed more discussion in my book and has been in the back of my mind since I first started writing. The question nags, but my ideas remain undeveloped. Blake’s language about nature moves back and forth between the positions of outright rejection and praise. For example, in Jerusalem:

A murderous Providence! A Creation that groans, living on Death.
Where Fish & Bird & Beast & Man & Tree & Metal & Stone
Live by Devouring, going into Eternal Death continually (Erdman p. 199)

which we might compare to:

Where we live, forgetting error, not pondering on evil:
Among my lambs & brooks of water, among my warbling birds:
Where we delight in innocence before the face of the Lamb (Erdman p. 165)

Or we might simply compare “The Lamb” to “The Tyger.” I explain this dichotomy in my book in terms of a dialectic between different phenomenologies, but Blake’s own language of rejection sounds at times intense and personal, raising suspicions about attitudes toward nature perhaps driven by his own grief over his brother Robert’s death — and what do we make of William and Catherine’s childlessness (addressed by others, I know)? I still need to think through this topic. Though I believe that the discussion of this topic in my book was adequate for my immediate purposes, I too am unsatisfied with where I left it.

Freeman’s most personally mortifying criticism is that I “collapsed forty years of feminist criticism on Blake to a single 1977 study.” Within the context of my discussion Freeman’s claim is a little exaggerated, as I claim Susan Fox’s 1977 study is an example only of “some feminist criticism of Blake” (p. 77, my emphasis), not all of it. I do review criticism of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and The Book of Thel and cite books and articles appearing in 1977, 1980, 1989, 1990, 2002, and 2006. My focus was on criticism that compared the two works, some of which was feminist in orientation and some of which was not.

My problem is that I criticized one work of feminist criticism on Blake without drawing on later feminist criticism, but I never intended to survey all feminist criticism on these works. What I observed in scholarship on both authors as I was reading for this book was a deep division among feminist scholars about their subject’s possible misogyny. Feminist scholars have viewed both Blake and Kierkegaard (separately) as intensely misogynist or radical and liberatory. Because both sides have good points to make, I think the division itself is interesting, and I attempted to account for it in terms of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on historical contingency in his discussions of women and childbirth in The Concept of Anxiety, a discussion that appears on pages 98-100 of my book. I did observe what I believed were similar patterns in Blake criticism but did not draw that discussion forward into my section on Blake’s critique of Generation, however, so have no one but myself to blame for that.

At any rate, despite evident flaws, I am grateful that Freeman ends her review on a positive note:

With a shift away from the stark contrasts that form its skeleton, Rovira’s book offers a fresh possibility of viewing each writer through the lens of the other in a number of tantalizing suggestions, such as through the relationship between generation and creation. Rovira’s observation that the creator figure in Blake’s The Four Zoas is Enion rather than Urizen, for instance, has intriguing implications for the earlier section on Thel and Oothoon (113). In this regard, the book contributes to a rethinking of the boundaries of theory, particularly as they need to be addressed vis-à-vis the field of European and British romanticism.

What I attempted was very difficult and somewhat unusual in its approach, so I expected some flaws. I had predecessors and fellow travelers but no real models to follow. Freeman’s review provides good direction for my own future work.

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Reviewing the Reviewer: Katherine Ashley’s review of Sherry R. Truffin’s Schoolhouse Gothic: Haunted Hallways and Predatory Pedagogues in Late Twentieth-Century American Literature and Scholarship (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).

Katherine Ashley’s review of Sherry Truffin’s Schoolhouse Gothic is a serious enough case of careless and irresponsible misreading that it requires a response. What is particularly intriguing about this case is that Ashley manages to briefly summarize each individual chapter with a fair degree of accuracy while still missing the point of the book. Truffin’s monograph is a literary study of a subgenre of gothic literature that she calls “schoolhouse gothic,” a term which she has coined. Schoolhouse gothic literature, as Truffin defines it, represents the school as “the loci of Gothic experience” (my emphasis). It depicts students suffering a variety of “psychic pressures” within academic settings who “suffer mental disintegration” and then “become monsters” (p. 26). In short, Truffin’s work is an examination of student psychology as it is projected and then magnified in fictional works. Truffin explains in her thirty-one page introduction that she will theorize her study by combining the work of Chris Baldick and others on Gothic literature with Foucault’s discussions of the relationship between power and knowledge, which makes her study a Foucauldian approach to a subgenre of Gothic literature. The works Truffin examines following this methodology include The Shining, Carrie, and Rage by Stephen King, The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates, and Oleanna by David Mamet.

Before the second page of her study ends, however, Truffin makes it very clear that she is not commenting on her own educational experience; neither is she attempting to comment on the realities of educational practice in the United States or anywhere else. She opens her introduction with the memory of hearing her senior song being broadcast over school loudspeakers shortly before graduation: Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” She quotes lyrics such as “We don’t need no education. / We don’t need no thought control. / No dark sarcasm in the classroom. / Teacher, leave those kids alone.” What struck Truffin at the time that she heard this song was both how much it resonated with her schoolmates and how little it reflected her actual experience. Upon considering these lyrics for the first time, Truffin says, “It struck me that they did not particularly fit my experience of school. My teachers often seemed harried—but never sadistic. Public education sometime seemed like babysitting—but never brainwashing” (p. 2).

However, Ashley misunderstands this passage in two significant ways. First, she describes it as a “cutesy” reference to Truffin’s high school song in order to complain about unevenness of tone. I never recall thinking of any song on Pink Floyd’s The Wall as being cutesy, particularly this one, which describes an abused spouse compulsively repeating in the classroom the abuse that he suffers at home. It also describes teachers as being “sick” and “sadistic.” More importantly, it is clear that Truffin does not recount this experience on the first page of her book to be cute, but rather to explain the origin of her idea and her approach to her material. I doubt Ashley could find material for any other examples of unevenness of tone, and even this one does not particularly support her case. Truffin’s anecdote is clearly intended only to be an opening attention-getter that contextualizes her study and explains its purpose.

But even worse, Ashley literalizes Truffin’s study, defining the value of Truffin’s selections in terms of their fidelity to real conditions, even going so far as to treat Truffin’s selection of fictional works as if they were “case studies” (see below): “Even though the selection of King, O’Connor, Morrison, Oates, and Mamet deals with extreme cases, the issues their works are concerned with are real and in need of reform.” Truffin, however, could not be more clear that her purpose was not to explore fidelity to educational realities in her study: “The afternoon of the senior song was not the first time that I had considered whether or not a particular image or representation was ‘realistic,’ but may have been the first time that I considered, on some unsophisticated level, that an image or representation might do something other” than accurately reflect the world (p. 2). She believes that this event was the first time she considered that a “text can perform ‘cultural work,’” in this case empowering her peers by giving voice to what she called a vague sense of discontent. I think it is worth noticing that Truffin’s high school officials both allowed students to select this song and then publicly broadcast it.

Ashley further literalizes Truffin’s readings, and adds factual errors to her review, by failing to distinguish between Truffin’s own ideas and those of the theorists from whom she draws. For example, Ashley claims that “Truffin argues that the academy is the ‘site of institutional surveillance and normalizing disciplinary power’ (p. 10)” (my emphasis) when in fact Truffin was clearly quoting Michel Foucault:

Both the literature and the scholarship that functions in this mode depict the academy as haunted by its post-Enlightenment role, which is—from Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective—keeper and purveyor cultural capital and—from Michel Foucault’s perspective—site of institutional surveillance and normalizing disciplinary power. (p. 10)

Ashley repeats this error with her very next quotation, which expresses an idea that she ascribes to Truffin but which was in fact Truffin’s conclusion of her summary of the critiques of the academy by James Berlin and J. Elspeth Stuckey.

Ashley’s literalization of Truffin’s analysis extends further to misunderstanding the nature of gothic literature itself, which she seems to think requires literal haunted houses stalked by literal ghosts. She generously suggests that this lack of literally haunted houses does not completely mar Truffin’s study, however:

There are predatory pedagogues to spare in the texts that Truffin studies, but one is hard-pressed to pinpoint any “haunted hallways,” at least in a literal sense (there are no ghostly students or teachers); rather, the pupils in these contemporary American texts are figuratively “haunted” by their educational experience, just as the contemporary American academy is “haunted” by its “shared history of class, race, and gender exploitation” (p. 17). In this respect, Truffin uses the term “gothic” in its broadest sense. This does not entirely detract from the author-specific case studies that are presented. (my emphasis)

While I am glad to hear Ashley believes that Truffin’s unwillingness to deliver a real ghost “does not entirely detract” from the “author-specific case studies that are presented” (my emphases), I find Ashley’s ability to demonstrate understanding even while completely getting her material wrong difficult to account for. She understands that the word “haunted” is being used figuratively. She does not, apparently, understand Truffin’s clear and detailed exposition of Baldick’s work on gothic literature, which asserts that “broad definitions” of Gothic literature associate it with “ghost stories… horror stories… tales of terror…” (p. 4) – the literal ghost stories that Ashley expected are what constitute the “broad sense” of gothic literature, not what Truffin actually provided, which is consonant with more sophisticated work by Baldick and many others on the Gothic, work that “sees the defining characteristic of the Gothic mode as its obsession with the past, with archaic beliefs and power structures” that are juxtaposed sharply against the rise of Enlightenment thought (p. 6). Or, in other words, a Gothic “experience,” one that is primarily psychological in nature.

Unfortunately, in defending Truffin’s work here, I feel that I am misrepresenting it as well. Most of my points emphasize Truffin’s use of her source material, which was fully and clearly explained in her introduction. But it occurs to me that all of Ashley’s points seem to be drawn from the introduction: she makes very short work of individual chapters and goes into no specifics about Truffin’s detailed, insightful, and original literary analysis, which does not meet usual H-Net review standards. This analysis makes up the content of Truffin’s book, however, excluding her introduction and conclusion. I can only conclude that Ashley very likely wrote her review having only read the introduction and perhaps the conclusion of Truffin’s book, pulling brief quotations from each chapter to support short chapter summaries that she could draw from the introduction anyhow. If Ashley does not understand the goals, nature, and purposes of a literary study, or for that matter have the patience to read one, why did she accept this review assignment?

I find myself hard-pressed to account for such a badly-executed review on H-Net, which usually delivers quality, reliable work. I notice that this study was commissioned by Jonathan D. Anuik, Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. As of the time of this writing H-Net provides no information about Katherine Ashley, so I am unsure of her academic qualifications, or if she even has any, but since this review was commissioned by someone in the field of education and distributed to the Education list on H-Net I can only assume that Ashley is in the field of education as well. In that case, why was she commissioned to review a book comprised of literary analysis? Or, why did she not take the time to explain that she will be reading Truffin’s book against the grain of its intent to discover its value to the field of education? She does not seem to understand the difference between fact and fiction (Stephen King’s The Shining and Carrie are “case studies”?), much less the difference between a sociological analysis of real world conditions and a theoretical analysis of literary works.

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I’m currently accepting submissions for the forthcoming volume Interpretation: Theory: History, an edited anthology examining figures significant to the history of textual interpretation within the context of their social, political, cultural, and intellectual histories. Those interested should visit the InterpretationTheoryHistory at WordPress for more information.

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I’ve recently been informed by Continuum that Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety is scheduled to be published in paperback in October of 2011. Thanks to all who have ordered library or personal copies of my book.

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I’m pleased to announce that the second positive review of Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety is scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal Choice. To quote:

“Accessible yet provocative, this book makes a significant contribution and offers critical challenges to
the scholarship surrounding both figures, and close readings (and re-readings) expose lingering tensions between self and subjectivity. Generous notes and a substantial comprehensive bibliography round out this excellent study. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above.”

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Our current spending on the Iraq War from a 2009 report posted to the National Priorities Project:

“Meanwhile, the President’s fiscal year 2009 budget proposes an additional $70 billion in war-related spending, on top of the $102.4 billion the Administration continues to pursue for fiscal year 2008. The amount requested for fiscal year 2009 is merely a placeholder for the first few months of next fiscal year, vastly underestimating what would be required to continue the war in Iraq at the current level of involvement. The administration plans to seek additional funding for fiscal year 2009 in the Spring. The Iraq war has thus far cost $522 billion.”

War spending has to be up to at least $700 billion by now, if it hasn’t reached a trillion yet.

I wish that we could spend our next trillion dollars helping rebuild Japan.

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An interesting speech to consider in the light of recent events…

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Jason Whittaker of Zoamorphosis has posted the first review of Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety. Many thanks for his timely and professional review.

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Magnetic resonance imaging of foods….particularly fruits and vegetable.  I think the artichokes are the best.

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Yesterday, my wife and children and I stopped at an unnamed fast food restaurant* in Perrysburg, Ohio for a short break and a quick snack on the way to Toledo.  A condiment packet labeled “Honey Sauce” was sitting on the windowsill next to our table.  I’d always known this particular restaurant to serve packets of real honey with its biscuits, so I was pretty curious what this new “honey sauce” consisted of.  So, flipping over the packet, I see that honey sauce contains the ingredients (in order)

High Fructose Corn Syrup
Sugar
Honey
Corn Syrup
Natural Flavor
Caramel Color

The mind reels.  I’m trying to picture the type of person or persons who think honey needs to be sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, and sugar.  I understand adding “natural flavors” if someone wanted something more than a straight-up honey taste — maybe honey and orange flavoring, and blueberry, etc.  But adding sweetener to honey?  I don’t think so.

So, what’s behind this nonsense?

Once the idea came to me, it was so obvious I was amazed I didn’t think of it before.  Fast food restaurants don’t exist to profit by selling their customers good food.  They exist to profit by selling their customers food ingredients. A packet of honey involves only honey growers and a packaging plant, with a range of middlemen common to all industries.  But a packet of honey sauce involves a range of industries — not just honey growers, but corn farmers (for the two different kinds of corn syrup), sugar farmers, and the manufacturers of various food additives such as natural food flavoring and food colorings.

What does my unnamed fast food restaurant care about food ingredients?  Back when it was a sole proprietorship, or when it was a franchise managed by that sole proprietor and his or her board, nothing at all.  But this company was formerly owned by PepsiCo and is now owned by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, which recently acquired Bank One out of Columbus, Ohio, which I guarantee you has a substantial interest in corn farming, seeing that half of Ohio seems to be corn farms and the other half soy.

Fast food restaurants, as the merchants of food ingredients rather than food, are both the channel of and an arm of a wide array of corporate agricultural and manufacturing interests whose sole concern is the sale of as much of, and as many different kinds of, its products as possible.  They don’t care about the taste of its food.  They can’t, otherwise, why add sweetener to honey?  At my own peril, I just tasted the stuff and it tastes and feels like honey with artificial sweetener.  It is d i s g u s t i n g.  They don’t care about the health of their customers either.  High fructose corn syrup, which is in almost everything, is to human blood sugar what BP oil is to the Gulf of Mexico.

And we’re just talking about a packet of honey sauce.  Forget about what’s in the prepared food, which doesn’t have a ready list of ingredients or a list of ingredients for their ingredients.  What is truly evil about this whole enterprise is that it doesn’t have to poison us to make a profit.  It could make just as much money selling healthy foods as unhealthy foods.  Most people wouldn’t  notice a difference in taste either; if they did, they’d notice that the food probably tastes better.   So far as I can tell, it’s just poisoning us because it can… because we let it.

*KFC

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