Glenn Deer

Glenn Deer is sort of the oddball on my thesis committee, but judging from this book he is a very erudite man with broad knowledge that he applies to a laudably political analysis of how we control each other with words, and--in this volume--how a selection of Canadian postmodern authors represent it--and he makes the key point that rhetoric is not something to be applied to oratory or whatever only (we know this) but imbricated in our understanding of what literary criticism is. I've only read three of the six books discussed (The Double Hook, Beautiful Losers, and The Handmaid's Tale, but I'm really on board with his advancing of the Barthesian authorial death--we can't interact with the author, but we can interact with his ghostly presence, as left by the way he presents his characters and narrators rhetorically, and the way they present themselves. It makes his starting place, together with Gerald Graff's observation that "the real avant-garde is" now "advanced capitalism, with its built-in need to destroy all vestiges of tradition ... all continuous and stable forms of reality in order to stimulate higher levels of consumption."


In the Atwood book this leads us to a really sensitive understanding of Offred as trying to put one over on us, as fascinated by the manipulations of power even as she presents herself as an ingenue, and of Atwood as maybe possibly putting one over on herself in that regard, leading to this funny split between condemnation of and fascination with power and its abuse.

In the Cohen (which I really need to read again soon), it leads us to another split--the scary double bind of the postmodern rebel, whose heroic models are gelded and useless and who therefore is torn between a personal (in Cohen's book, sexual) rebellion that serves the logic of power (in that ol' Foucauldian sense) or a submission, a sexualized passivity. 'I's tentative approaches to the mystery of Catherine Tekakwitha; F.'s manipulations; Edith's Virgin Mary shit--all doomed graspings at agency in a world where only the most distended paths seem possible, and then fail too in the end. "['I'] deliberately mocks his intellectual vocation and is given to anti-literary impulses ... he is weary, yet he longs for an identity, any identity, for he is so desperate that he has given up on discriminating between principles and ideology. In fact, he has given up fixed belief for the excitement of ever-changing random actions. But the price he pays for this excitement is a profound existential loneliness and fear. And it is this fear that transforms his discourse into a supplication and prayer for divine inspiration--to be possessed by external power, to be a slave is the consummation wished for."


That reading of 'I' is as powerful and clear as air. And Deer's loose use of "rhetoric" as a keyword--basically, the ways we take positions relative to each other through words"--is sort of the core of character-based literary analysis as far as I can see, and always had been--I just never thought to name it "rhetoric". Goes way beyond anaphora, anyway.… (plus d'informations)