I’ve been reading Derrida for a forthcoming publication, so I’m just thinking out loud here. I invite other readers to join with me. Nothing I’m writing here attempts to engage the published scholarship on these topics.
Comments on Writing and Difference:
For being an atheist, he writes a lot about God.
His engagement with negative theology is needed and valid within the context of his argument in Writing and Difference. But it’s defective because he relies too much on Meister Eckhart (perhaps exclusively?), who was a thirteenth/fourteenth century Dominican monk. Eckhart was a German Catholic. His Catholic identity pressured him to pull back from the strongest expression of negative theology, which sounds heretical to Catholic ears. Derrida should have relied on Russian or Greek sources, but I don’t know what was available to him in French or German translation in the late 50s/early 60s. If he had, I think that would have led to a much more productive discussion of negative theology in Writing and Difference.
He’s a great close reader. He seems most interested in deconstructing the works that are most interesting and valuable to him. He doesn’t call it “deconstruction” in WD, though the word may appear there once. He uses the word deconstitution.
Since the chapters of WD are brought together from previously published articles, I’d like to list these chapters, along with his chapters in Of Grammatology and in Speech and Phenomena, all of which were published in 1967, in the order in which they were originally written, and then read them in that order, not in the book chapter order. I’d also like to list the pre-reading needed for each chapter. Order of publication in English doesn’t at all mirror order of publication in French.
Rock and Romanticism: scholarship with a soundtrack. Yes, I have two anthologies with the main title Rock and Romanticism. The first was published early February 2018 by Lexington Books, and was focused on Blake and Wordsworth and, very generally, the genre of classic rock.
This second book is Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming late May 2018) and is focused just where the title implies: on the gothic or “dark Romanticism” as it is sometimes called and on its musical counterparts in rock. The first book states a thesis about the relationship between rock and roll and Romanticism. This book restates that thesis and then extends it to different genres of music and literature.
This page provides chapter descriptions and a lot more. If you liked the first book, you’ll like this one too: those interested in one really need to get both. If you’re drawn to this project, please consider requesting that your libraries order it. A more formal description of the project follows.
Because I’ve recently published two edited anthologies with the same top title, I’ve created this video explaining the origin of these books and the differences between the two:
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The edited anthology Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) is now available for preorder on the publisher’s website and will ship in late May 2018. I’m providing information here for potential readers, reviewers, and college and university librarians who may be interested in this book. If you wish to review this anthology for your publication, please contact James Rovira at jamesrovira@gmail.com with your name, credentials, and the name of the publication for which you wish to review this work.
But I’d like to provide a bit of personal history before I get into details about the book: my introduction to English Romanticism (my first way in to the vast labyrinth that is “Romanticism”) occurred in two stages. First, through the song “William Blake” on the Daniel Amos album Vox Humana (1984). That song made me run to the local B. Dalton Booksellers (remember those?) to pick up a copy of The Viking Portable William Blake.
Next, when my undergraduate English Romantics professor at Rollins College, Dr. Roy Starling, wanted to explain to his students what the publication of Lyrical Ballads meant to the 1790s, he compared it to this moment in rock history, the moment when Bob Dylan the folk singer plugged in and went electric:
And that was how I first understood Romanticism as a literary phenomenon. Thank you, Dr. Starling. In both cases, my way in to Romanticism was rock music from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms explores the relationships among the musical genres of post-punk, goth, and metal and seventeenth- to nineteenth-century American and European Romanticisms in their literary, artistic, and musical expressions. It argues that these contemporary forms of music are not only influenced by but are an expression of Romanticism continuous with their seventeenth- through nineteenth-century influences. Figures such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Friedrich, Schlegel, Beethoven, and Hoffman are brought alongside the musical and visual aesthetics of the Rolling Stones, the New Romantics, the Pretenders, Joy Division, Nick Cave, Tom Verlaine, emo, Eminem, My Dying Bride, and Norwegian black metal to explore the ways that Romanticism continues into the present in its many varying forms and expressions. Book details:
Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms ~James Rovira, ed. ~ Hardcover ISBN 978-3-319-72687-8 ~eBook ISBN 978-3-319-72688-5 ~ DOI10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5 ~ pp. 330 ~ hardcover: $109.00 (£80.00); ebook: $84.99 (£63.99). This collection is part of the series Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, P. Lumsden and M. Katz Montiel, editors.
Chapters are listed below. Many and profuse thanks M. Katz Montiel for being a great series editor (he made every chapter better), to Palgrave Macmillan’s editorial team, and to Dr. Mark McCutcheon (see the Nick Cave chapter description) for his work assembling these playlists. After the Preface and Introduction, songs are arranged in the order in which they appear in the chapter.
I’ve created iTunes playlists for each chapter that are linked within chapter descriptions. Also check out the iTunes Master Playlist for this anthology that combines all available songs (over 200) and the Spotify Master Playlist.
Preface and Introduction: “Theorizing Rock/Historicizing Romanticism” James Rovira. Check out his iTunes profile.
Chapter summary
James Rovira’s Preface (pp. vii-ix) and Introduction (pp. 1-25) to Rock and Romanticism describe the origins of this project, the difficulty in defining the term “Romanticism” in reference to British literature from Byron to the present, how Sayre and Löwy’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity helps address these problems in a way supportive of this project, and the links between rock and Romanticism as they have surfaced in scholarship and other writing since the 1960s. His discussion then continues into an examination of the relationship between Gothic and Romantic literature, which leads to the claim that John Milton was not just a source of inspiration for English Romantic poets but was himself the first English Romantic poet (thus, “seventeenth- through nineteenth-century” Romanticisms referenced above rather than just “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century”). After that, Rovira provides chapter summaries. Within these chapter summaries, he engages some of the issues related to the female Gothic as they arise in chapter discussions.
Music (this playlist excludes mention of artists or songs discussed in other chapters)
“Empathy for the Devil: The Origins of Mick Jagger’s Devil in John Milton’s London” (pp. 27-44) by Evan LaBuzetta, Ph.D., Cambridge University. Independent scholar, founder of Writling Language Consultants.
Chapter summary
Evan LaBuzetta’s “Empathy for the Devil: The Origins of Mick Jagger’s Devil in John Milton’s London” analyzes the political discourse and outlines the discursive practices that influenced John Milton in his development of the character of Satan in Paradise Lost. Milton’s Satan was reinterpreted by the Romantics and later appropriated by Mick Jagger in “Sympathy for the Devil.” According to LaBuzetta, the rise of personal interpretation of Scripture in an era of vicious conflict led various combatants in the English Civil Wars to identify their domestic opponents with Satan. In pamphlets, writers could insist on their opponents’ Satanic origins regardless of outward appearance—because Satan can transform himself into an “angel of light”—while at the same time positing their own demonization as a sign of the righteousness of their cause. Through the English Civil Wars, rebellion against civil authority came to be seen as different than rebellion against God, establishing a “paradox of individual authority” by the time of Milton’s writing. Once God is dethroned as a “self-justifying principle,” a writer like Shelley could thrill to the active, virile, self-confident aspects of Satan’s character and declare that Milton’s Satan is far preferable to Milton’s God. Milton anthropomorphized Satan, and later readers came to see him in personal, non-religious terms: as a heroic individual striving against a tyrannical, self-imposing force, one with whom readers or rock fans could empathize.
“‘Bliss was it in that shirt to be alive’: Connecting Romanticism and New Romanticism Through Dress” (pp. 45-59) by Emily Bernhard Jackson, Lecturer, University of Exeter.
Chapter summary
Skipping ahead about ten years after the Stones expressed sympathy for the devil, Emily Bernhard-Jackson’s “The Semiotics of the Ruffled Shirt: Connecting Romanticism and New Romanticism” shifts focus from linguistic content to visual surfaces in her comparison of the New Romantics of the early 1980s to English Romantics such as Byron. Rejecting the assumption that the New Romantics were glib and apolitical, she asserts their carefully managed, glittering surfaces were acts of subversion within Thatcher’s England, and these rock stars’ androgyny and even specific fashion choices—such as the ruffled shirt—carefully and not just coincidentally parallel second generation English Romantics such as Byron. Fluidity of sexual identity served the purpose of resisting full industrialization during 1980s’ England in a way parallel to the poets’ resistance of incipient industrialism in Romantic England, making dandyism and glitter statements against the brutal grayness of the working-class employment described by Löwy and Sayre, a very observable “mechanized conquest of the environment” under industrialization.
This chapter invites readers to compare George Henry Harlow’s 1814 engraving of Byron to one of Adam Ant’s publicity stills for Prince Charming. See the images page for this chapter.
“‘Crying Like a Woman ‘Cause I’m Mad Like a Man’: Chrissie Hynde, Gender, and Romantic Irony” (pp. 61-82) by Sherry R. Truffin, Associate Professor of English, Campbell University.
Chapter summary
Sherry Truffin’s “‘Crying Like a Woman ‘Cause I’m Mad Like a Man’: Chrissie Hynde, Gender, and Romantic Irony” focuses on Chrissie Hynde as the frontwoman for the Pretenders. Truffin considers in Hynde’s lyrics, autobiography, and other resources the ways in which Hynde negotiated her rare position as a female lead singer and rhythm guitarist for an otherwise male rock band. Drawing from Löwy and Sayre, Truffin observes how Hynde resorts to Romantic irony as defined by Schlegel and Anne Mellor to negotiate tensions between the influences of the relatively undeveloped Akron, OH of her early childhood and the industrial city that Akron later became. Truffin also explores how Hynde negotiates her conflicting views of her own female identity by adopting masculine, feminine, and androgynous identities in turns. These tensions ultimately cause Gothic sensibilities to surface in many of Hynde’s songs as her female identity is expressed through Gothic tropes and situations: she suffers violent abuse from men, refuses to complain about that treatment or accept victim status, and then uses that refusal as a means of asserting her own agency.
“A Northern ‘Ode on Melancholy’?—The Music of Joy Division” (pp. 83-100) by Caroline Langhorst, Ph.D Candidate, University of Mainz.
Chapter summary
Further complicating sexual identity, the female, and the Gothic is Caroline Langhorst’s “A Northern ‘Ode on Melancholy’?—The Music of Joy Division.” Her essay inverts the legacy of female Gothic by shifting its focus to the death of a beautiful man. It engages Joy Division’s Ian Curtis as a Romantic figure who follows the Gothic pattern of the dead, young artist, a familiar pattern established by Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Identifying industrial Manchester as the context for Joy Division’s music, Langhorst finds in it the sense of alienation and isolation Löwy and Sayre describe as the inevitable outcome of the industrialized subject. Byron and Keats are especially important as predecessors of Ian Curtis. Curtis, Byron, and Keats share in common a cult of personality inextricably bound up with their early deaths which, afterwards, came to define the reception of these artists’ creative production. Parallels with Keats are also extended to an emphasis on the necessity of suffering.
“‘Little crimeworn histories’: Nick Cave and the Roots-Raves-Rehab Story of Rock Stardom” (pp. 101-120) by Mark McCutcheon, Professor of Literary Studies, Athabasca University. Check out his blog.
Chapter summary
Mark A. McCutcheon shifts the locus of suffering to substance abuse in “‘Little crimeworn histories’: Nick Cave and the Roots-Raves-Rehab Story of Rock Stardom.” McCutcheon examines the commodification of the Romantic tropes of drug use and of the self-destructive artist using Nick Cave as a case study. The art/commerce opposition established within Romantic texts to emphasize the authenticity of the poet/artist has, according to McCutcheon, become a part of the commerce of the music industry in the form of a Roots-Rave-Rehab narrative that governs discourse about artists’ drug use and recovery. In other words, Romantic tropes have been appropriated to serve capitalist ends. McCutcheon’s chapter considers how Nick Cave both exploits and resists this appropriation using a number of strategies, including an exploitation and modification of the traditional Gothic/Romantic trope of the dead woman.
“Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations” (pp. 121-143) by Len von Morzé, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Chapter summary
Capitalizing on the anxieties and ambivalence surrounding the figure of Napoleon, Len von Morzé’s “Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations” explores Verlaine’s use of repetition in his appropriation of Napoleon’s Waterloo as well as Romantic-era texts in order to create contexts for his own work. Von Morzé describes how Verlaine “enframes” the past within his music to legitimate it, thus guiding his self-narrative. Comparing Verlaine to his one-time lover, collaborator, and peer Patti Smith for contrastive purposes, von Morzé emphasizes that Verlaine saw in his Romantic predecessors an “elective affinity” with the Romantics rather than the stronger sense of reenactment Smith had during this period. Ultimately, von Morzé draws out compelling parallels between the two waves of English Romanticism and the two waves of punk rock, positioning Verlaine in a space between poetry and rock because he “could not fully embrace the commercial aspects of mass culture.”
“Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein” (pp. 145-161) by Samuel Lyndon Gladden, Associate Dean of the School of Human Sciences and Humanities and Professor of Literature, University of Houston, Clear Lake.
Chapter summary
Samuel Gladden shifts focus to monstrosity in “Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein.” He compares Bowie’s and Morrissey’s appropriations of the figure of Frankenstein’s Creature to explore their differing responses to isolation and loneliness. In Gladden’s account, Bowie focuses on the discardedness of the Creature as he adopts and discards personae just as Frankenstein abandoned his Creature. Bowie ultimately gathers up many of his previous personae in the song and video “Blackstar,” particularly his first personae, Major Tom, who allows Bowie to revisit the trope of being in an alien environment in anticipation of his own impending death. Morrissey, on the other hand, focuses his attention on the Frankensteinian themes of hybridity or bricolage in “November Spawned a Monster,” emphasizing that Morrissey adopted as his own the hybridity or bricolage associated with the Creature through a variety of personae with disabilities, all of them set within an “idealized past.” The disfigurements of the subject described by Löwy and Sayre, therefore, assume material form in Morrissey’s various personae.
“Tales of the Female Lover: the Poetics of Desire in To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire?” (pp. 163-181) by Catherine Girodet, Ph.D. candidate Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier, and faculty, English Department, Universitie De Creteil.
Chapter summary
Returning to the female Gothic, Catherine Girodet’s “Tales of the Female Lover: the Poetics of Desire on To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire?” begins with the groundwork laid down by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony and then continued by Abrams and Henderson and others in her exploration of dark Romantic themes in the music of P.J. Harvey. Girodet is particularly interested in the agonies of romantic love as formulated in Harvey’s third and fourth albums, which represent a change in musical direction for Harvey and her first forays into Romanticism. She also explores the implications of Harvey’s music for our consideration of the relationship between the Gothic and the Romantic and how in Harvey’s music the agony of love serves as a conduit to the sublime.
“Emocosms: Mind-Forg’d Realities in Emo(tional) Rock Music” (pp. 183-197) by Eike Träger, Ph.D. candidate, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany.
Chapter summary
Romantic artists at times exploit dark moods for artistic purposes. Eike Träger’s “The World Is Mine: Pathetic Fallacy and Mind-Forg’d Realities in Emo(tional) Rock Music” identifies the pathetic fallacy and heterocosm as two points of affinity between English Romanticism and emo music. Relying on Sayre’s and Löwy’s “Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity,” Träger sees in emo “a Weltschmerz that literally creates a cosmos of pain in lyrical form” in the music of bands such as The Danburrys, the Deftones, AFI, and La Dispute. Setting up and then dismantling Ruskin’s theory of art as means of explaining emo music, he ultimately argues that emo bands are aligned with “resigned” Romanticism in Sayre’s and Löwy’s taxonomy: emo music is a form of Romanticism in its emphasis on affect and the individual, but because it is distinctly apolitical, it differs from both first and second generation English Romantics.
“‘I possess your soul, your mind, your heart, and your body’: External and Internal Gothic Hauntings in Eminem’s Relapse” (pp. 199-213) by Christopher Stampone, Ph.D., Southern Methodist University.
Chapter summary
Christopher Stampone’s “‘I possess your soul, your mind, your heart, and your body’: External and Internal Gothic Hauntings in Eminem’s Relapse” focuses on Eminem’s pivotal albums Relapse (2009) and its follow-up, Relapse: Refill (2010), as instances of contemporary Romantic Gothic. Defining these albums as attacks on American consumer culture, Stampone employs Sayre and Löwy to describe the features of that attack, much of which takes the form of resigned Romanticism, so that resignation can be a form of resistance. Stampone also describes how Eminem’s alter egos, such as Slim Shady, represent his drug-ridden self, one that is implicated in capitalist-consumer culture but for which Eminem now takes responsibility. Overall, Eminem’s Relapse albums hold up a mirror to modern US consumerism in which “all become monsters whose identities are constructed by what they consume.”
“‘The Female Is Such Exquisite Hell’: The Romantic Agony of My Dying Bride” (pp. 215-233) by Matthew J. Heilman, Ph.D., Duquesne University.
Chapter summary
Matthew Heilman’s “‘The Female Is Such Exquisite Hell’: The Romantic Agony of My Dying Bride” engages Poe’s emphasis on the “death of the beautiful woman” to evaluate My Dying Bride’s work as instances of feminist Romanticism. Through artist interviews and song analysis, Heilman explores central tropes of dark Romanticism—the dead or dying woman and the femme fatale—in both My Dying Bride’s lyrics and in the poetry of Poe, Keats, Baudelaire, and Swinburne to argue that My Dying Bride’s lyrics exploit nineteenth-century dark Romantic tropes of the woman to deconstruct them.
“Ashes Against the Grain: Black Metal and the Grim Rebirth of Romanticism” (pp. 235-257) by Julian Knox, Assistant Professor of English, Georgia College.
Chapter summary
This collection ends with Julian Knox’s “Ashes Against the Grain: Black Metal and the Grim Rebirth of Romanticism.” The genre of rock called “heavy metal” is often said to have begun in the 1970s with the bands Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, but heavy metal has since branched out into a variety of subgenres, including thrash, death, doom, and even folk metal, which blends regional folk music and traditional instrumentation with heavy metal. Knox argues that one of these subgenres, black metal, self-consciously draws from and then exceeds, sometime ironically, Gothic and dark Romantic literary tropes to promulgate an aesthetic of death and decay that one black metal musician called “Werewolf Romanticism.” Knox explores bands such as Burzum, Mayhem, Xasthur, and Varathron and their uses of Romantic-era literature and painting by figures such as Shelley, Blake, Byron, Novalis, Goëthe, and Freidrich to define Romantic rejection of the pastoral—which was seen by figures such as Novalis and Hoffmann as capitulation to power structures—as a form of inwardness or psychologizing. These figures explore Plato’s cave as the skull of the mind, the collective voices of the dead, to assert or affirm their individuality against capitalism.
Music
Note: many passing references to music, literature, and artworks are excluded from this list. If a specific song was not available, or if an album was mentioned but not a specific song, representative examples were taken for the iTunes playlist.
I recently came across social media discussion about difficult academic writing, and what struck me as I was reading the usual complaints was one particular instance of zero sum thinking about academic writing. It works like this:
Either. . . “I am too dumb to understand this writing,”
Or. . . “This writing is very bad.”
I think this zero sum thinking is the dominant on-off switch governing reading comprehension for too many of us: all writing should be written at the reader’s level, with that specific reader as the intended audience, so if a reader fails to comprehend, it’s either the author’s or the reader’s fault.
What amazes me is that this thinking doesn’t consider any middle ground. Maybe the work we’re reading is written above our reading comprehension, and we just need to educate ourselves to comprehend it? I constantly tell my students that no, they’re not dumb if they have a hard time understanding some of the reading the first time around. I tell them that doing the reading increases their ability to read even more difficult texts in the future as it teaches them different ways of thinking. I encourage them to do the hard work of understanding difficult texts because it increases their future reading comprehension.
That’s been my experience, anyway. I purchased Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology on November 23rd, 1996 at the Books-A-Million on International Drive in Orlando (I know because the receipt is still stuck in the book). The first time I read it through, I started writing a list of works discussed at some length in the back of the book, as you see in the image above, because I hadn’t read them yet. At one point I stopped reading Derrida, went back and read this list of works, and then revisited Derrida’s very dense text with a much higher reading comprehension. Was it still hard? Yes, but not incomprehensible. It was only incomprehensible when I hadn’t done the reading.
I think the zero sum thinking I just described proceeds from the idea that everything should be written for the same audience, and I think it plagues humanities scholarship particularly — very few people complain that scholarship in physics, chemistry, or medical science are written above their heads. I’m not sure why people think that professional discourse about the humanities has to be written at the ninth grade level to make it readable to a general audience, but I don’t think this is a fair expectation. When we limit writing this way, we limit the range of ideas we can express and the sophistication of our thought. AP style does not need to govern everything written.
I think that more humanities scholars should indeed be public intellectuals, and that they should write works accessible to a general audience (and learn AP style), but I don’t think they should be limited to doing only this kind of work. Specialized language is important and can perform a useful purpose. It allows us to advance our thinking more quickly, serving as a shorthand for a dense array of conceptual moves. It positions our approach within recognizable theoretical assumptions — people know where we’re coming from by our language. Difficulty also allows us to defamiliarize our writing to our readers. This use of difficulty originates in the early twentieth century and requires readers to do some work to understand what we’ve written. That way, they can approach our ideas on their own terms, with their own nuance and emphases, rather than allowing readers to use their pre-existing ideas only as fill-in for the author’s own, rather than as a bridge to new ideas.
So when others very commonly say, “It doesn’t have to be this hard to understand,” I think the validity of this complaint depends first upon the work the reader did to understand the text. I think there are two kinds of people who say this. First, people who have read the difficult text, worked through it, understood it, and then realized it didn’t need to be this hard. Most of us who read humanities scholarship have had the experience of doing this work to arrive at a very simple argument. The use of jargon in these cases was only a veneer of sophistication spread over conceptually thin thinking. But there are also people who say this, quote examples of overly difficult sentences, and just reveal that they’re reading on a level below the text’s. If you think the word “pastiche” is complex jargon, pick up a dictionary before you complain about the author.
This criticism is harder to address because it is sometimes true (I won’t say often — that’s lazy quantifying). I can say that I’ve worked through Derrida, understand him much better than I did when I first read him, and see why he needs to be so difficult as well as the benefit of doing this work. Part of the difficulty of his writing proceeds from his desire to get us to think differently: he writes in a way that defamiliarizes his readers with our usual reading practices so that we can think about reading differently. Robert Brandom, similarly, was very difficult for me on a first read, but doing the work to understand him was a rewarding experience.
I would say, then, that yes, they do need to be that hard. The difficulty serves a purpose, and it should be allowed to do so.
What amazes me is that this thinking doesn’t consider any middle ground. Maybe the work we’re reading is written above our reading comprehension, and we just need to educate ourselves to comprehend it? I constantly tell my students that no, they’re not dumb if they have a hard time understanding some of the reading the first time around. I tell them that doing the reading increases their ability to read even more difficult texts in the future as it teaches them different ways of thinking. I encourage them to do the hard work of understanding difficult texts because it increases their future reading comprehension.
James Rovira 