I appreciated what Jan Goldstein says about having the tools of both Foucault and Habermas in his theoretical tool bag: “I am not after all treating either as a total theory capable of illuminating everything but treating both as local theories with specific competences” (Jan Goldstein 38). The discussion last week in the anthropology course I am taking delved into this issue, particularly concerning the theories of creolization and ethnogenesis. Some people argued that while creolization does connect back to the originally negative connotations of the word “creole,” it is a theory that works for specific areas in specific time periods, especially in the study of those people who were labeled and lived their lives labeled as “creoles.” As the academic world becomes more and more critically and theoretically dense, with more interdisciplinary work common, it seems to be that this is the type of approach that we would want to have in our own studies. We should understand that there is not a “unified field theory” for work in the humanities and the social sciences. Multiple theories abound, some relevant for certain areas and time periods, some relevant for very different circumstances. That is not to say that we cannot take post-colonial concepts about the “other” to Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative. Though the theory came out of one place and time period, we can see other places and times where and when the concepts illuminate interesting aspects about the work.
This would be the reason I found Goldstein’s dismissal of literary studies so condescending and inaccurate:
I went into intellectual and cultural history after having concentrated primarily in English literature in college precisely because I wanted to encounter that external resistance, because I felt that, cheered on by approving literature professors, I had become too adroit as an analyst of texts and could bend a text into saying almost anything. I needed recourse to factors outside the text in order to supply more stringent rules for the game, to serve as a check on my pyrotechnical and, I suspected, increasingly solipsistic feats of reading (40).
Perhaps this reflects the time period (perhaps pre-New Historicists area) in which Goldstein was studying literature and literary theory, or reflects the fact that he never moved beyond an undergraduate level of discussing and analyzing literary texts as he moved on to history instead. As a literature PhD student, I can tell you, you cannot say anything you want about the text. It has to work in some way, in connection to the writer, the time period, the literary movement, the subject of the text, and/or the actual words of the text. Here Goldstein is speaking of the same philosopher that literary scholars read and use all of the time, Foucault. It makes me want to either sigh or scream, because however lightly Goldstein meant this statement, it reflects what many people, academics and non-academics believe about literary analysis. Yes, there is a subjective element, but most of us use the same philosophers and critics that historians, anthropologists, social scientists, and others use in their work. Personally, as an academic, I am a strict practitioner of close reading. If I cannot prove whatever my theory is with what the text actually says, then I should not try to prove it as it does not work. There is nothing more annoying to me, as an academic, than reading an analysis of a literary work that has no analysis of any part of the actual text. Foucault is wonderful, Foucault is applicable in many contexts, but if the actual text does not work with Foucault, then I need to look to somewhere else in my analysis.
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