書評

BOOK REVIEW: Rita Felski. Uses of Literature.

Theory, in literary and cultural studies, has lost its shine: something like it is everywhere now but so much of it is stale. Many, like me, got their introduction to “high theory” by reading Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences:” Reading it meant parsing every word for meaning. The article is as much a well wrought urn (or perhaps a slightly overwrought one) as any poem that Cleanth Brooks analyzed; reading the article required Brooks’s close-reading skills except that truth there never became beauty, or beauty truth. It was the dizzying negative that Derrida’s article allowed one to experience, something the Romantics knew about, that certain philosophers had expounded, but that the New Critics had abolished and that now became available again as a sort of scholar’s heroin just around the time, the late 1960s, that Lou Reed sang about the heroin that was beginning to flood the streets of American cities. But the high of “Heroin” in the Velvet Underground song has to be purchased for $26 in utterly mundane fashion in“I’m Waiting for My Man,” a warning of how close the mundane is to the sublime. And then there is Berlin, the 1973 Lou Reed album in which drugs and prostitution bring Jim and Caroline down.