“Without these strictures, without this inwardness, my boundaries feel uncertain, my walls porous.”[1]

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I’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about what it means to be porous. To be permeable, (un)bordered or (un)bounded, membranous. Stretched thin, like the mycelial webbing over an old mandarin. Like hyphae threading into soil, or sourdough under the windowpane test. To be porous is to be both corporeal – fleshy, material and present – but also entangled in networks of relation.[2] It requires embeddedness: being temporally and spatially planted, and attuned to the ethical possibilities created by ecological space.[3] Simultaneously, porosity is volatile. The porous body is immersed in and integrated into new environments: simultaneously whole, and “shot through with […] heterogenous others.”[4] This definition largely derives from posthumanist and ecocritical ontologies of multispecies togetherness, of climate grief, and of meaning-making across species borders.[5]

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These paradigms, however, do not always resonate with the way that I experience the porosity of my own body. I feel most porous in the little coastal town of Crescent Head, where my grandmother grew up. There, my borders become slippery. I am ‘shot through’ with the claggy sand that weaves along Killick Creek, the tea-tree runoff that stains its sputtering network of salt rivers. I melt into the “low scarred yellow”[6] – but not hideous – headland, as it rises into an escarpment. All developed, now. (But green in my dreams!) I have an uneasy understanding with the oysters that envelop the bridge to the beach, the cavern under my great-grandmother’s home-on-stilts, and the tree snakes that coil around her washing line. Writing this, I can smell Kempsey’s floodplains after January rains, the local carpark where I learned to make a right-hand turn, the acrid tang of gutted fish-by-the-beach, and a freshly rinsed yabby pump. All of these things are enfolded into my embodied experience and being.

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I would reject, though, any posthumanist tenet that requires me to prize a yabby’s existence as much as humanity. (Both because of my Christian worldview, and because material posthuman feminisms cannot adequately reckon with the value of life.) My appreciation for land is often aesthetic, rather than ethical, too – detached from the ongoing devastation of colonial violence. Porosity, then, must be more than another framework by which to critique the Anthropocene. Bodies are porous in ecological space, but they are also porous in perceptual experience. Just as literary texts are interstices of speculation and world-building, bodies in literature are liminal and transitional. They are thresholds to spaces that are imagined, remembered or transcendent. To read is to slip beyond reality, exploring impossible and improbable selves.

 

[1] Fiona Wright, “To Run Away from Home,” in The World Was Whole (Artarmon: Giramondo, 2018), 14.

[2] Rosi Braidotti, “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism,” in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 33.

[3] Rosi Braidotti, “A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities,” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no. 6 (2019): 34.

[4] Suzanne McCullagh, “Heterogenous Collectivity and the Capacity to Act: Conceptualising Nonhumans in Political Space,” in Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016), 151.

[5] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 58.

[6] Christina Stead, Seven Poor Men of Sydney [1934] (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2015), 16. 

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What are all those humanities students doing at the University of Sydney, with their rising HECS debt and their matcha lattes?

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We can think of any literary text as a performative utterance – an ‘outer-ance’ – by which speaking subjects disclose a world to receptive listeners.[1] Critics assume that such works are interstices of possibility: spaces in which the ‘texture’ and resonance of words overspill their literal, denotative meaning.[2] The discipline of English is particularly interested in the practice of reading; reading to listen, discover and speculate. We read with careful attention to these ‘excesses’ of signification,[3] assessing what they divulge about lived experience. This is a reflexive practice: undertaken to illuminate our own historicised subject positions, and those that are foreign to us by virtue of situatedness. Reading begins with observation, but evolves into participation – engaging aesthetically with literary worlds as a conduit to ethical engagement with the real world.[4]

 

If this function requires mimesis – reproduction of the real – then English, too, is interested in poiesis: making, synthesising, creating. We transform our private practices of reading into public practices of writing. This may operate at the level of fiction, where narratives are reframed and recontextualised in new compositions: restor(y)ed. More commonly, however, critics produce an analytical piece of writing, publishing ‘a reading’ of a text. Knowledge progresses in the discipline as readings accrete and are evaluated in turn.

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Methodologically, how does this work? Literary criticism moves from ‘close reading’ to broader thematic hermeneutics – framed by Elaine Auyoung as a “pursuit of coherence”[5] in attending to the ways that elements of a text coalesce into a whole. In close reading, the ‘data’ manipulated by critics could be (nebulously) defined as the formal features of a written work – broadening in scope from individual sounds/phonemes, to words, clusters of images and phrases, and text-spanning structures. Critics may also examine intertextual relationships, paratextual content, the materiality of a text, and contextual background pertaining to a work’s production and reception.

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The real diversity in English research arises with the choice of theoretical framework intended to ‘close the hermeneutic circle’[6] as critics formulate their theses. Formalist criticism is concerned with the peculiarities of ‘defamiliarised’[7] language, employing rhetorical analysis to make transcendental claims about the human condition. It presupposes, however, an ‘ideal reader’ placed to decode authorial intention.[8] Paradigms such as structuralism and reader-response theory have emerged in response to this impossibility – the former seeking to locate (and fortify) the semiotic conventions underlying narrative archetypes, and the latter prioritising readers’ personal engagement with literature. Deconstruction, by contrast, foregrounds the radical contingency of language to destabilise oppressive social structures.[9] Notions of productive ‘troubling’ similarly characterise psychoanalytic approaches, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, political and Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, and queer theory – amongst other frameworks. Each paradigm is epistemologically valuable, but deeply patterns the type of knowledge that is produced by literary studies. A formalist studying T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ may examine caesura as a window into human anxiety, while a new historicist may trace in Eliot’s poetics the banality of high modernism.[10] The psychoanalyst might grapple with Prufrock’s repressed eroticism, and the poststructuralist with his slide into linguistic incoherence. The configuration of any hermeneutic reading is dependent on the questions posed by the critic.

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As a discipline, English has therefore been criticised for its relativism, where all readings appear legitimate, and novelty supersedes plausibility.[11] Reading is declining within the general population,[12] and academics remain divided on basic disciplinary principles. What, for example, makes a text ‘literary’? Canonisation is an insufficient justification, but alternative value-judgements are inherently transitive.[13] In fact, if English is subjective, why publish criticism at all? Thankfully, these questions are not insurmountable. Our subjective literary interests are constitutive of disciplinary knowledge, rather than barriers to academic inquiry – as Terry Eagleton notes.[14] Hence, students of English are urged to adopt a posture of ‘postcritical’ humility:[15] resisting slippage into pre-emptive, reactionary politics and a paranoid “fetishisation of the hidden and the deep”[16] signifier. Instead, knowledge should emerge inductively from reading as critics identify the moral claims exerted upon them by texts.[17] This requires self-awareness, but provides fertile ground for genuinely truthful engagements with literature – such that our discipline retains ‘epistemic virtue’ precisely because of its capacity to support pluralities of meaning.[18]

 

[1] Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 198 and 203.

[2] Terry Eagleton, “Introduction: What Is Literature?” in Literary Theory (United States: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 2.

[3] See Saussurean semiotics.

[4] Joshua Landy, “Philosophy to the Rescue,” Philosophy and Literature 31, no. 2 (2007): 416-17.

[5] Elaine Auyoung, “What We Mean by Reading,” New Literary History 51, no. 1 (2020): 95.

[6] A Heideggerian term.

[7] Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2017), 62.

[8] Cleanth Brooks, “The Formalist Critics,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 66.

[9] Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 585-607.

[10] Ralf Hertel and Peter Hühn, English Poetry in Context: From the 16th to the 21st Century (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2022), 237 and 279.

[11] Auyoung, “What We Mean by Reading,” 94.

[12] Malcolm Knox, “Grown-ups are giving up books. Should we pay them to read?,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 November, 2023 5.00am AEST, Culture, https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/grown-ups-are-giving-up-books-should-we-pay-them-to-read-20231109-p5eit4.html.

[13] Eagleton, “Introduction: What Is Literature?”, 10.

[14] Eagleton, “Introduction: What Is Literature?”, 12.

[15] Moi, Revolution, 209.

[16] Moi, Revolution, 179.

[17] Moi, Revolution, 205.

[18] Jonathan Kramnick, “Criticism and Truth,” Critical Inquiry 47, no. 2 (2021): 239-40.

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