I always think it is difficult to do a self-reflection, as it forces one to take a step back from the comfortable position of the observer and redirect the spotlight to oneself. While I initially felt a strong aversion to this exam question, why should my personal attitudes matter for a grade, upon closer reflection, I increasingly realized how crucial this skill is. Many contemporary theorists insert themselves into their texts by means of personal anecdotes and show how they arrive at their conclusions through their embodied experiences, backgrounds and biases. In light of this, I try to become a better and more transparent theorist by examining my personal journey with the course LIT3002 and follow Cornel West’s invitation to explore “what happens when you begin to call into question your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions” (00:10 – 00:17).

Even though I was quite exposed to various theoretical approaches from before, I can definitely say that I both added new instruments to my toolbox and enhanced the already stored ones. For example, during my studies I engaged quite a lot with (Post-)Structuralism, Formalism and New Criticism. Does it not sound incredibly seductive when a Viktor Shklovsky proclaims to have cracked the code of literary language, or when in turn Roland Barthes boldly declares the “death of the Author” (521)? By rereading these texts, I gained a deeper understanding, was reminded of what made me like them in the first place, but was eventually made aware of their shortcomings too.

During the course, I could also expand on critical approaches that I was familiar with but lacked an in-depth engagement. For example, I stumbled upon Althusser before, yet I could never comprehend why exactly “[i]deology has a material existence” (770), or in Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson draws on Walter Benjamin’s notion of “homogeneous empty time” (742), however, the whole concept remained a big question mark to me. Also outside academia, I heard of concepts like heteronormativity, but only after reading “Sex in Public” by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner did I conceptually grasp why the notion matters.

What I realized when approaching these new texts is that my fascination for structuralist thought tainted my reading. For example, in “Mapping the Margins” Kimberle Crenshaw says that categories like race are constructed “in a linguistic economy of difference” (1296). For me, this immediately echoed Ferdinand de Saussure’s “difference without positive terms” (848). As with signs in language, also categories that structure society only exist because of their difference. Going forward to Toni Morrison’s text “Playing in the Dark,” I recognized that she also falls back on a system of difference when she asks whether “the major and championed characteristics of our national literature […] are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding Africanist presence” (1164). When reading these and other texts on the pensum, my particular theoretical glasses therefore highlighted certain aspects and helped me understand them better.

However, over the semester I also realized that with every particular lens, another object automatically moves out of focus. While Structuralism can be great to find connections, and New Criticism for strictly textual analyses, these approaches are inapt when it comes to context. This was illustrated most strikingly to me when discussing postcolonial theory. Initially, I could not fathom how Ánde Somby’s short talk made it onto the syllabus next to all the other academic heavyweights. Only after the discussion in class did it dawn on me why we, students in Norway, must engage with him. If we only read scholars like Said, Spivak or Bhabha, we would participate in the same kind of hegemonic thinking that disavows local ways of doing things. Context is a fatal blind spot for more formalistic approaches, and as a reader or writer, I will remember not to ignore the situatedness of a text in favor of overarching narratives. Having more time, I would love to engage more with the idea of local practice and how it can be applied to literary studies.

Another weakness of mine, I learned, is my low tolerance for ambiguity. In my analysis of Gertrud Stein’s poem, for example, I could only content myself when I concluded that she consciously employs a language that evades clear meaning to make a larger point; I made the ambiguity itself serve a definite meaning. Similarly, when visiting Kunsthall, I could only appreciate the exhibits once the curator Carl Faurby explained the artists’ thoughts behind them. However, while it is certainly exhausting and sometimes even counterproductive to attribute meaning to everything, I think it can also have some benefits, as it made me study certain works more intensively until I was satisfied with an explanation.

At last, the course also opened a new layer of theoretical tools which I did not even know existed. Most appealing was probably the insight from Sarah Ahmed’s text “Feminist Killjoys” that my emotional response to something has its own raison d’être, and formal academic discourse is not the only valid way to do theory. Further, I had little exposure to archive studies, digital and public humanities, or critical pedagogy. While I doubt that reading a single essay is enough to incorporate these tools into my toolbox, in general, the course provided me with a blueprint into which I can incorporate more theories, texts and perspectives.

I used to imagine that all ideas I encountered are stored in my head like in a library. As the librarian, it is not my job to recite works by heart, but I know where to find them if the need arises. However, I realized that there is a confining shortcoming to this metaphor: the interconnectedness of the different texts is unaccounted for. Therefore, I would like to complement this image in a somewhat academic fashion by what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe as the rhizome (7). Instead of being neatly ordered according to the Dewey Decimal System, there are no arbitrary hierarchies, no beginnings and endings, and all texts and ideas can be connected to one another. This is my understanding of theory, and this semester helped me understand that. Words: 1’015