[10:21 PM]

Collective memory consists of those shared remembrances that identify "a group, giving it a sense of its past and defining its aspirations for the future." For individuals and groups alike, memory forms an essential component of their social identity. By definition, collective memory involves sharing, discussion, negotiation, and often conflict. Remembering consequently becomes implicated in a range of activities that have as much to do with identity, power, authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of conserving and recalling information. Groups invariably fashion their own image of the world and their place in it by establishing an accepted version of the past, a sort of genealogy of identity. Although collective memories may trace a chronology readily recognizable to people outside the group, events within that narrative are assigned an importance distinct from the significance ascribed to them by outsiders. In addition to providing a singular ordering of the past, a group's social memory, like the myth described by Roland Barthes, addresses pressing concerns of identity; "it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact." (W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "No Deed But Memory," in his edited collection Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity)

[8:04 PM]

Lest the reader think I denigrate literature by according it only contingent value, it is perhaps necessary to say that I assume with Barbara Herrnstien Smith that all value is historically contingent and culturally produced. As Smith shows, such a position does not entail most of the consequences that believers in objective value think that it does. It does not, for example, open the gates to intellectual or cultural chaos; that values change does not mean that there are not always values. Nor does it rule out the existence of common human needs or interests, but rather recognizes that such needs and interests are experienced differently in different cultures and therefore do not produce uniform values or tastes. Finally, the position does not render evaluation and canon formation arbitrary or capricious; critics do not, for example, simply make up the canon out of their whims. On the contrary, the claim is that history, culture, and society all limit the range of evaluations that can be made. One of the most powerful of these limits is the history of evaluation and canonization itself. As Smith puts it, "the canonical work begins increasingly not merely to survive within but to shape and create the culture in which its value is produced and transmitted and, for that very reason, to perpetuate the conditions of its own flourishing. Nothing endures like endurance" (50 italics in original). But even works that endure do not remain the same, since readers and critics of different eras constitute works differently; in new cultural contexts enduring works come to serve new needs or desires, and different features of such works come to be valued (48). As a result, even the persistent high evaluation of a few American authors does not demonstrate their universality nor the continuity of American culture; the Emerson or the Hawthorne valued in 1900 is not the same as the one valued in the 1950s. (David Shumway, Creating American Cvilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline)

[4:26 PM]

I begin with what we might call a bipolar disturbance in literary criticism. Caught between the materialism of cultural studies and the formalism of philosophy, literary criticism is construed, on the one hand, as useless--struck dumb by its lack of purpose in the face of real politics and real bodies--and, on the other hand, as singularly efficacious, the only tool through which to reveal the essentially discursive character of all forms of culture, including bodies and politics. While this rhetorical model of criticism is regularly posited as politically bankrupt, as having no purchase on the facticity of the world, the model of materialist cultural criticism is just as regularly unmasked as, at base, rhetorically constructed and thus guilty of concealing its own formalist dimensions. This "disturbance," as I've described it, tends to be acted out as a debilitating dialectic: caught between formalism and materialism, literary criticism is left without any ground to stand on. Yet this peculiar bipolarity within literary criticism is intimately linked to the strange status of literature itself. Language becomes recognizably literary at the moment it assumes a rhetorical or formal dimension rather than serving as the invisible conduit of mimetic representation. Whence, evidently, the allure of formalism for literary criticism: form would seem to be exactly what demarcates the literary from the nonliterary, what defines the exclusive territory of literature. Yet formalism, as has been widely and persuasively argued, tends to turn literature into precisely the kind of artifact that means little in relation to the world and tends to obscure the worldly relations that inform the text and its production. Indeed, in the field of Cultural Studies--a field whose defining gesture is political engagement--"formalist" is a term whose meaning often comes to approximate "apolitical." "Formalist," fashioned as opprobium, speaks chidingly of hermeticism or more acerbically of the insidious erasures enacted by universalism. (Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, "Fear of Formalism: Kant, Twain, and Cultural Studies in American Literature," Diacritics Vol 27 Issue 4, 1998)

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