Abstract
This chapter aims to provide an overview of Rorty’s complex relation to literary theory. In particular, it aims to clarify why Rorty is often perceived as an important figure in literary theory despite the fact that he was highly critical of that field and wanted to distance himself from it. I do that by considering the broadest range of Rorty’s writings on literary theory and situating them in the context of Rorty’s more general theoretical views as well as his intellectual and institutional biography.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that Rorty was critical of the authoritarian strain in philosophy as early as the 1970s; he began to refer to it with the term “authoritarianism” much later, in the 2000s (Rorty 2006b).
- 2.
Needless to say, despite his worries, two of Rorty’s doctoral students, Robert Brandom and Barry Allen, eventually became prominent philosophers of an analytic persuasion.
- 3.
This is basically the gist of Rorty’s often misunderstood position on “strong misreading,” a notion he takes from Harold Bloom and makes much of in his classic essay “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism.” In that text, Rorty famously advocates for an attitude where “The critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. He makes the text refer to whatever is relevant to that purpose. He does it by imposing a vocabulary – a ‘grid’, in Foucault’s terminology – on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens. The model here is not the curious collector of clever gadgets taking them apart to see what makes them work and carefully ignoring any extrinsic end they may have, but the psychoanalyst blithely interpreting a dream or a joke as a symptom of homicidal” (Rorty 1982b, p. 151). Many interpreters understood this passage as an advocacy for a certain form of reading (basically, an unconstrained, creative kind of reading) against other forms of reading (intentionalist, structuralist, and so on). But all this passage says is that there are as many legitimate forms of reading as there are legitimate purposes of dealing with texts, and that neither authors nor texts have the final authority as to which such purposes are legitimate and which are not. Importantly, for Rorty, those legitimate goals do include establishing how a text represents its author’s intention or determining the text’s linguistic structure. (Note that Rorty does not say that the author’s intention in writing a text is not a legitimate concern for a critic, but rather that it should not constrain the critic in choosing whether she should be concerned with the author’s intention or with something else.) His point is merely that neither of these purposes should be seen as more fundamental than others. Importantly, too, neither does Rorty advocate here for an anything goes, creative kind of reading, despite the fact that the talk about the critic beating the text into a certain shape might suggest otherwise. According to Rorty, however free the critic is to choose a grid she will then impose on the text (be it intentionalist, historical, psychoanalytic, and so on), once that grid has been chosen, she is not free to say whatever she wants, being constrained by the grid instead.
- 4.
Parts of this paper were written during my research stay at the The Ruhr-University Bochum in 2018. I would like to thank the university for its support and my host there, Sebastian Berg, for his hospitality. I would also like to thank Martin Müller and David Wall for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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Recommended Literature for Further Reading
Fabbri, Lorenzo. 2008. The domestication of Derrida: Rorty, pragmatism and deconstruction. Translated by Vuslat Demirkoparan and Ari Lee Laskin. Continuum studies in continental philosophy. London/New York: Continuum. This book provides a useful background for understanding Rorty’s relation to Derrida’s thought and poststructuralist theory in general.
Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. 1985. Against theory: Literary studies and the new pragmatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. A volume that documents one of the most exciting and important episodes in the theory wars of the 1980s, a debate sparkled by Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp’s, essay “Against Theory.” Aside from that essay and Rorty’s reply, the volume includes Michaels and Knapps’ reply to Rorty’s reply, as well as a host of papers by important theorists of the time, pragmatist and not, including Stanley Fish, Steven Mailloux, and E.D. Hirsch Jr. Crucial for understanding the main stakes of the theory wars and the intellectual climate in which Rorty wrote on theory. It has to be stressed, though, that the quality of its arguments makes it definitely of more than merely historical importance.
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Malecki, W.P. (2023). Rorty and Literary Theory. In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_31
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