Do I Know You? Ordinary language, postcritique, and how authors enter our lives

Abstract

The central question of this thesis is: How does the way we come to know an author resemble the way we come to know a person socially? I argue that the experience of reading shares emotional ground with our social lives and that literary studies need to pay attention to affective attachments readers experience that resemble those they might have with the people in their lives. To make this argument, I examine a variety of essayistic writing that features a prominent authorial personal voice. By ‘personal voice,’ I mean the object with which the reader forms an attachment as they come to believe in the author figure, envisioning the kind of person who would have written the words they are reading, and shaped by any additional knowledge they have of the author. The methodology of this project is particularly indebted to the fields of ordinary language philosophy and postcritique. My vision of ordinary language philosophy as it applies to literary studies is shaped primarily by the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Toril Moi. This way of thinking opens a path for understanding texts as experiences that reward attention to details and particulars, rather than as representations from which one can generalise. (One might speak of friendship in the same way.) In the field of postcritique, Rita Felski’s work in particular shows how attending to modes of interpretation other than demystification can provide fresh ways of talking about literature’s potency. This thesis is also significantly influenced by the work of Sianne Ngai, Lauren Berlant, Alexander Nehamas, Heather Love, Leo Bersani, Adam Phillips, and John Frow, each of whom model ways of describing the aesthetic, affective, and political conditions that influence intimacy and artistic experience. In order to build an understanding of the social contours of the reader-author relation, I examine writing by, among others, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, Maggie Nelson, Ben Lerner, Kevin Young, and Janet Malcolm. Each of these authors is interested in charisma, trust, and their relationship with the reader. I read their work in order to think through why a reader might say that they know―or are getting to know―an author, or claim that an author knows them. What is it about authorial presence that permits this claim to intimacy? What is the difference between being in a writer’s presence, and being in the presence of a friend? Why does an essay’s argument feel more or less convincing or credible depending on who seems to be making it? Each chapter is dedicated to a particular feature of reading that shapes the reader’s picture of the author. The first, ‘Belief,’ examines how a reader can come to believe in an author as a person. The second, ‘Friendliness,’ investigates the affect and aesthetic of friendliness that can manifest in a writer’s work. The third, ‘Persuasion,’ undertakes a close reading of a persuasive essay to examine how an author might use rhetorical devices to ingratiate themselves with their reader. The fourth, ‘Knowingness,’ argues that tracing a demeanour of authorial knowingness can reveal how an author’s personal voice might facilitate a reader-author relationship, for better or worse. The final chapter, ‘Identification,’ studies how a reader’s relating to or identifying with an author constitutes an intimacy that resembles the intimacy of social experience.