Loosing the Gordian Knot: Reading The Aspern Papers in a Course on Literary Theory

I had taken Mrs. Prest into my confidence; without her in truth I should have made but little advance, for the fruitful idea in the whole business dropped from her friendly lips. It was she who found the short cut and loosed the Gordian knot.

—Henry James, The Aspern Papers

Is Juliana Bordereau of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers an instance of the material supplement standing in for the ideal origin Aspern, a symptom of a cultural anxiety about American cultural backwardness, a phallic mother, a commodified object of exchange between men, a pivotal figure in an erotic triangle, or something quite different? In a course I teach entitled “Literary Theory and Critical Practice,” she takes on all those guises by turns—and if she can never quite be confined by any of them, nonetheless the way in which she occupies those interpretations brings theory and practice into focus again and again with satisfying clarity. The course is designed to introduce students to contemporary literary theory, with the trajectory always toward critical practice, and The Aspern Papers is one of three texts that we read and re-read in the course of the semester. (The two others are Shakespeare’s King Lear and Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems, works chosen with the intention of providing some diversity in genre and period.) Although these multiple theoretical optics can occasionally produce vertigo on the part of students who wish for a stable truth, or ennui on the part of those who grow impatient with re-reading the same text, the effect is mainly one of unfolding illuminations, as The Aspern Papers shows itself to be so perfectly amenable to (or productive of) a range of interpretations. What we do, in fact, is create something like a cross between John Carlos Rowe’s The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James and our own version of a Bedford casebook on The Aspern Papers—except that we create it anew each semester, out of a different collective reading enterprise. Although my own deconstructive, psychoanalytic, or new historicist reading might settle down into a predictable form, in class the readings are initiated by student presentations, and the result is not only to dislodge the notion of anything like a standard reading for a given methodology, but also to lead me to revise and improvise my own interpretations in response to the points of departure initiated by my students. Students can measure their assimilation of a theoretical perspective by their ability to translate it into a reading of a particular text—and they also gain increased interest in a literary text by seeing its richly generative relation to different interpretive questions. Both literary text and theoretical text benefit from this association.

The Design of the Course

Because the focus of this forum is pedagogy, I will open by laying out the design of the course, and I refer the reader to the syllabus at the end of this paper for particulars. The class moves through nine theoretical approaches to literature, and in all but the first two, there is a three-stage movement from theory to practice. We begin by reading theoretical selections, then shift to literary criticism written within that theoretical tradition, and then turn to our regular literary texts and become practicing critics. The theoretical sequence is as follows: formalism (both Russian formalism and American new criticism), structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, marxism, feminism, new historicism, ethnic and postcolonial criticism, and gender/lesbian and gay criticism. Because time is tight, I do not include practical criticism of either formalism or structuralism; in the first instance I can assume their familiarity with New Criticism (as a reading practice if not a named methodology) and in the second I am more interested in developing with them the theoretical concepts and vocabulary that will allow them to make sense of a wide variety of poststructuralisms—since my intention is to equip them for participation in the contemporary critical scene.

Critical Practice

The “payoff” of a literary theory course is, I believe, the way it transforms one’s practice as a critic...