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Sacrifice and Sexual Difference: Insights and Challenges in the Work of René Girard
- Michigan State University Press
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242 Chris Allen Carter that his method “has little to do with the approaches and methodologies that have insured, in recent years, the growth of ‘interdisciplinary’ studies.”36 He goes on to say that the goal is not to “appeal to some extra-literary discipline presumed to be particularly ‘scientific’ in order to elevate itself in an a priori fashion above all literary texts.”37 Rather, the goal is to use literary texts themselves , especially the masterpieces of our tradition, to reveal the nature of the mimetic mechanisms of human relations. Interestingly, Burke had earlier done something close to this. He had taken key terms from the earliest literary criticism of the ancient theater, terms such as “catharsis,” “purgation,” and “ritual of rebirth,” and the names for the elements of the drama (act, scene, agent, counteragent, agency, attitude, and purpose) and built an entire system around this vocabulary. To this system, he gave the name “dramatism,” and, assuming that all human attitudes and acts are forms of symbolic action, he set out to use his dramatist system to more accurately describe the motives of such action. Similarly, Girard builds an entire system around a vocabulary he generates from his own analysis of the modern novel, with terms such as “doubles,” “mediators,” “mimetic rivalry,” “mimetic acquisition,” and “mimetic victimage.” To this system, we could give the name “mimeticism.” Assuming that all human thoughts and acts “ultimately go back to [various] mimetic mechanisms,” Girard sets out to use his mimeticist system to explore the origins of ritual, myth, religion, and culture, as well as key moments in subsequent great literature.38 In an age in which criticism, when not trying to escape reality, has been trying to match the prestige of science—another of the goals of the New Criticism in North America and structuralism in Europe—Burke and Girard offer methods based in literature itself. Such is their genius. Rather than ally themselves with the colonization of literary studies by the natural or social sciences, they would crown a new literary science as the sovereign discipline of the human sciences or les sciences de l’homme. Championing literature as few others have done, Burke and Girard so elevate the prestige of literature and literary criticism that it is perhaps surprising that they did not become the central figures of the leading schools. Burke is often classed as a participant in “the linguistic turn,” to use Richard Rorty’s phrase.39 If the eighteenth century employed the metaphor of the machine to describe the primary reality and the nineteenth century employed the metaphor of an organism, the twentieth century favored the metaphor of language. Burke, influenced by those American students of symbolism , Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead, directly extends their line. Girard, with partial roots in Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, and Lacan, Lessons from Early Girard 243 might be considered as a member of a more structuralist wing of the same movement if he did not so radically subordinate linguistic mechanisms to mimetic ones. In any case, both give their literary criticism an anthropological twist, Burke using Frazer and Malinowski, Girard making a systematic study of numerous ethnological sources as preparation for his great works.40 And in retrospect, we can see that both find their way to their own unique versions of sociolinguistics in the broadest sense. Burke takes the dramatist turn, focusing on the drama of the individual language user; Girard, basing everything on imitation, takes the mimeticist turn. ✽ ✽ ✽ After all these twists and turns, I can now tabulate those lessons that began taking root in me back in the late 1970s and would sustain my interest for the next twenty-five years: (1) synthesize the diverse; (2) rehabilitate the underappreciated; (3) value the independent; (4) philosophize; (5) intertextualize ; (6) contextualize, even geopoliticize; and (7) “interdisciplinize,” especially “anthropologize” and “literaturize.” Perhaps most importantly, we should refuse to sell literature short; instead we should treasure its wisdom, especially its revelation of the drama of mimesis. These Girardian imperatives furnished me with a method for meshing my studies of American criticism with the newer brands of Continental thought, for doing so without fawning over any particular “ism,” and for bringing the whole system to bear on issues that matter. In effect, Girard provided me with a justification for the direction of a life’s work. I had already decided to specialize in literature and the criticism of literature, with a special need to make both relevant to...