Beyond identity politics: Aesthetic formalism among adolescents

To analyze the socially situated nature of response to literary texts, I interviewed a large sample of racially and socioeconomically diverse girls about their narrations of growing up female and about stories they find meaningful, because psychologists claim that this social group inhabits a crucial and problematic site of subjectivity and socialization. I discovered that formal rather than sociological elements take precedence in the girls' accounts of experiencing literature. As girls deny identifying with those female characters presumed to represent female experience, my dissertation questions the value of regarding the literary text as the social construction and political representation of identity. Thus I critique the assumptions of identity politics critics such as Judith Fetterley, Jonathon Culler, Judith Butler, Patrocinio Schweickart, Annette Kolodny, Nancy Chodorow, Barbara Christian, Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Toni Morrison, Rachel Brownstein, Dale Bauer, Richard Brodhead, Nancy Armstrong, D. A. Miller, Jane Tompkins, Cathy Davidson, and Nina Baym. I critique the influence of narrative theorists Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan on the current incarnation of literary scholarship. Because the girls separate art from life, their fullest identification takes place at the level of literary form.; Chapter one explores the girls' articulations of an omniscient presence they establish "in" the literary text. Girls construct the literary text as both an aesthetic object, separate from life and from them, and a world. Forging a relationship with the spectator that the text presupposes, they bifurcate themselves into a "seeing and imagining" agent "in" the text and differentiate this formal self from the self that exists in life. Chapter two analyzes the rhetoric of alienation girls voice when they discuss the texts that represent complex female characters and female social worlds. Texts that represent girls and women conflict with girls' desire for pure aesthetic experience. Chapter three scrutinizes the means by which readers identify the formal elements of texts and trace those formal elements to generic literary traditions. Thus the girls place themselves within a tradition of readership and of authorship based upon their accruing literary experience. Chapter four argues that the verisimilar text poses problems of form for these readers, because the verisimilar text veils its generic traditions. Thus girls work very hard to trace generic elements and unpack narrative structure. Chapters five and six show that girls approach narratives from life in a completely different manner, role-playing characters and understanding characters as vicarious self-experience.