The Limits of Literary Historicism

Modernism and the Aesthetics of Cultural Studies

Modernism and the Aesthetics of Cultural Studies R. M. Berry In his introduction to the 2005 volume The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, Michael Bérubé professes “incredulity” at a 1998 quote by Marjorie Perloff in The Chronicle of Higher Education in which she pits aesthetics and cultural studies against each other (2–3). Bérubé’s contention is that cultural studies, if not consistently in its American version then in the version represented by Raymond Williams, has always been engaged with aesthetics, and he sets out to elaborate the aesthetic theory underlying their engagement. I don’t find Bérubé’s aesthetic theory satisfying, and one especially concrete reason will motivate my discussion here. For me, the aesthetics of cultural studies unwittingly legitimates the dominant discursive regime of contemporary poetry and fiction—by which I mean the mutually supporting system of university creative writing programs, literary reviews, cultural support foundations, writing contests, trade publishers, media conglomerates, bookstore chains, masscirculation reviews, national book prizes, subsidiary and foreign rights agents, and the global marketing apparatus with which this regime is continuous. In short, I consider Bérubé’s aesthetic theory ideological, where I use the word “ideology” to refer to the misrepresentation of a contested position as the natural and obvious one, that is, as what goes without saying.1 Since Bérubé’s ambition is precisely to dislodge hegemony of this kind, my claim that he has done the opposite demands elaboration. I can’t satisfy that demand at the outset , but I can state the source of my dissatisfaction succinctly: it is that, while Bérubé calls the stability of our aesthetic concepts into question, he goes right on using the word “aesthetic” as though his question demanded no answer. Bérubé’s proposed reconciliation of evaluative criticism with social critique involves a model of aesthetics drawn from Jan Mukařovský’s 1936 work Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts. In this model, according to Bérubé, the meaning of aesthetics varies with “the social and historical circumstances in which cultural works are produced and perceived” (12). R. M. Berry 128 As Mukařovský says, “The limits of the province of aesthetics . . . are not provided by reality itself and are exceedingly changeable” (quoted in Bérubé 12). It does not trouble Bérubé that Mukařovský’s observation would apply to every English word, including such serious and consequential words as “power,” “rape,” “poverty,” and “genocide,” or that all concepts depend for their intelligibility on particular historical and social circumstances, and the reason for his complacency appears to be that Bérubé doesn’t regard the exceeding changeableness of the word “aesthetic” as any obstacle to its present use. On the contrary, in the very next sentence Bérubé remarks: “Mukařovský points out that what we now call the aesthetic function is not a transhistorical category” (12; italics mine). I feel like asking: just what do we now call the aesthetic function? And if the answer varies with specific social and historical circumstances, why does Bérubé assume his reader will know what he’s talking about? A close reading of Bérubé’s essay will show, I believe, that whenever Bérubé does give a concrete meaning to such words as “aesthetic” or “literary ,” he merely assumes a commonsensical, unreflecting, or parochial understanding of these concepts. That is, his use confirms Simon Frith’s premise about how “all cultural judgments work,” specifically, that “people bring similar questions to high and low art, that their pleasures and satisfaction are rooted in similar analytic issues,” a premise that Frith elaborates by listing the topics of middle-brow aesthetic discourse: “believability,” “coherence,” “familiarity,” “usefulness,” etc. (19).2 Contrary to what some imagine, there is no rational justification for passing off this middle-brow program as “what we now call the aesthetic function.” However, to explain how Bérubé’s attempt to reconcile our aesthetic and social criticism could so utterly backfire, I need to go back more than a decade to his 1996 review of George Levine’s Aesthetics and Ideology. In the introduction to this volume Levine expresses a hope of preserving literature’s distinctiveness and poses the question of what knowledge a novel or poem might provide that isn’t equally available from non-literary texts. Why, he asks, “should we read literature at all if what we want to know can be discovered through other materials?” (9).3 Bérubé, in his review, understands Levine here...