Response to Marshall Brown

As I read Marshall Brown’s “Period Resistance” and “Theory Without Method” I couldn’t help feeling that he was reading my mind. Throughout this past year, we (those of us in CMLIT 502 and CMLIT 503) have been consistently forced to think of periods and schools of thought—studying the pre-modern, the medieval, the modern, and the postmodern—and cramming literary theory—sometimes studying two or three theorists per week and sometimes ten or twelve—all with the aid of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.

As graduate students in a comparative literature department we are trained to think in periods, obliged to choose among schools of thought (at least for the duration of our graduate experience), and forced to apply particular literary theories to our work, depending upon the choices we have made. If we decide to study twentieth century Latin American literature and use a Marxist methodology or study medieval French and Anglo-Saxon literature and apply a feminist methodology, we are bound to those decisions for five or more years and begin to feel tinges of guilt if we decide to take a seminar focusing on Italian Renaissance texts or the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

As Brown points out in “Period Resistance”, these categorizations are necessary for practical purposes and I can’t even imagine how much more difficult our lives would be if they had not already been established. However, I also can’t help wondering how limiting (and excluding) these categorizations may be, and Marshall addresses these concerns in “Theory Without Method” by pointing to the NATC's own limitations. We know that the theories included within the NATC are not the only theories; yet we can’t help thinking that these are the ones that matter; these are the ones to include within our own writing; these are the ones we should be in conversation with.

This past year, I have also felt very overwhelmed with the terminology that has been presented to us and with how to apply these theories and terminologies to the literature I study. I know that I now have the NATC as a resource (and that I know it well enough to find answers to specific questions within it) and I better understand (some) schools of thought; however, questions such as the ones Brown poses, “Why does it matter that Lacan is obscure, what are the implications of Saussure’s structures of difference, what is fetishism, what are the resonances of the term différance, what was Bakhtin getting at with the terms that the introduction labors to define?” (“TWM” 456) constantly (and consistently) fill my thoughts. Although I don't feel there is a single solution to any of these issues, I wish we would have been introduced to more resources, providing us with more diversified points of view, including non-Western and non-Northern texts, which would indeed make us better scholars.

(Please forgive my Vicoden-induced rantings… I just had to get these thoughts out of my system after reading Brown’s texts.)