The English Graduate Student’s Usage Guide to Lit-Crit Lexitudity

As the seminar-paper-writing time of year has arrived, I thought it might be nice to offer help to any of you who do what I do, only not as well as I do it. (otherwise why would I be offering help?) To that end, allow me and the professors who can't wait to read my papers present . . .

The English Graduate Student’s Usage Guide to Lit-Crit Lexitudity*

*remember, when it comes to the vocabulary of literary criticism, the hottest words are always on their way out and it’s ever more difficult to gauge what’s on its way in, so it’s always a safe cop-out to just invent words, use them repeatedly in the same paper, and rest comfortably on the knowledge that none of the more popular lit-crit neologisms are in the dictionary either, so no one will ever be sure you’re the one who made it up.

always already

A phrase from Zizek, who extrapolates political theory from Lacan, whom nobody understands and especially not those who study him professionally, and believe me, Lacan needs professional study preferably in a soft room and a tight-fighting jacket, always already comes down to us with the full privilege of its theoretical progenitors, meaning that it can be used however you want. It’s available for practically any verb phrase, but is best deployed in sentences which have already some notion of temporality.* For instance, “J. Alfred Prufrock always already eats his peach” lacks a certain semansion,** while “J. Alfred Prufrock had always already eaten or failed to eat his peach before the reader has conceived him, indeed, before Eliot gave birth to him in the first place – and Eliot had always already given birth to him as far as Franklin Roosevelt was concerned” makes good use of this versatile phrsae.

**note the subtle intrusion of a longer Latinate word with more morphemes where a one-syllable Anglo word could have sufficed; also, if this were an actual paper, I would have said 'chrono'-something or other. Greek trumps Latin.

**see note to introduction

construct, n.

A construct is what we call an idea, a thesis, or an argument just before we explain why it is false, ill-founded, unsupported by the text, contextually naive, and probably voted for Bush twice.

construct, v.

When attempting to make an argument that, for all logical purposes, makes about as much sense as a suspension bridge built out of corned beef, it is important to insist that the text itself “constructs” the argument, a move which owes much to the excessive use of the passive voice in the Regan administration. For instance, one might say that “the threatened socialities of enjoyment in Moby Dick construct not just a necessary third category of gender, but a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh as well.”

An important aspect of this usage is that it guarantees the next generation of graduate students something to write about (see construct, n. and deconstruct).

deconstruct

A text must not be interpreted as it appears to have been intended or with the meaning it seems to evidently bear; otherwise, there would be a limited number of interpretations to be written, and millions of literary critics would be in Greenland, so to speak.* Therefore, although it is out of vogue for critics to refer to themselves as deconstructing a text, it is absolutely essential to make occasional note of the text deconstructing itself, and the more off-the-cuff, nonessential, and unsupported this observation, the better.

Thus, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer displays modes of death and dreaming which deconstruct the realization of absolute consciousness” is a good sentence, but one we’d expect to see followed with some sort of evidence for this claim, which would force the writer to dwell for far too long on a catch-word that’s just so last MLA. Far superior is a sentence like “In her self-reflective, but unrealized, enjoyment of life/death liminality, Buffy the Vampire Slayer serves as an Everywoman, her status as the Real having always already deconstructed, who paradoxically is, or stands for, human life, while remaining unable to live.”

*a clever reference to the novel and film The Princess Bride – “Unemployed? In GREENLAND?” – which does double duty as an embedded moment of humor and as a dividing point between critics who are hip, trendy, and/or cool, and critics who missed the pop culture movement.

exploded binary

A popular tactic for procrastinated graduate essays in the last twenty years is to locate an obvious binary, such as male/female or word/ink-smudge, and explode it, either by “demonstrating” that everything in the text previously thought to be either a word or a stray pen mark is, in fact, both of these things and neither of them,* or by using dynamite. Popular binaries for explosion include: male/female; child/adult; author/audience; queer/straight; life/death; aristocratic/proliteriate; Christian/pagan; true/false; feminist/snorting chauvinist man-bitch**; Republican/Marxist; French/lucid.

*As an interesting metaglossarific note, both/neither would make a good explosive binary for an essay on the text of this post.

**Of course by this I mean a female dog. Lent ends next week; after that, I might mean something different.

pleasure

This is the word we use when we want to assert that a text which is clearly not about sex is, in fact, about sex.

problematize

This rising star derives its popularity from its ability to both mean what it appears to mean – “to add problems to” – and to simultaneously mean nothing at all. Problematize is essentially your all-purpose rejection of the status quo, of the previous, the past, the already thought-up, the last decade of essays on the topic, and the not-you. It’s a spring/summer 2006 essential.

Because this word is at the top of the lit-crit trendsetters vocab sheet, then it’s still important to use it to mean what it appears to mean when using it in the actual content of a paper. Entire papers can, and should, be built up around a text’s problematization of a construct, or in other words, the earth-shattering suggestion that a construct (see construct, n., above) is more complicated than it appears. Meanwhile, in the second usage above, problematize means something slightly less specific than “X bears some relationship to Y which I don’t care to discuss in detail because that sounds like work and this paper is due in thirty-seven minutes. Aaagghkk! Thirty-six minutes!”

Thus, for instance, “A close reading of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women problematizes the late medieval notion of male chastity” might serve as either a thesis statement or a filler-sentence – or, if your professor is particularly overworked, both. Meanwhile, the template phrase “the ways in which X problematizes Q” can add bulk to almost every paragraph: “the ways in which Beowulf problematizes notions of community”; “the ways in which Troilus probelmatizes Troy”; “the ways in which sales tax problematizes Wendy’s 99c jr. bacon cheeseburgers”; etc. etc.

reposition, resituate, reorient

These are thesis-statement words; spatial metaphors are very in at present. One clearly cannot settle for a straightforward thesis such as “A reading of Austen’s Persuasion done while high on crack and superglue demonstrates that all of the characters are lesbians, including the men, who are cross-dressed,” and not just because it indicates illegal behavior and global stupidity on the part of the essay’s author. Instead, one should write, “In resituating the relationships in Austen’s Persausion with regard to sexuality and identity, and in repositioning ourselves vis-a-vis the narrative of love, loss, and knowledge of the Other, we find that the repressed will always return, and that all the characters are lesbians, including the men, who are cross-dressed.”


↔