Week 6: Article Outline using Hayot

This week’s blogpost will use Hayot’s Uneven U schema to break down Leonard Neufeldt’s “Praetextus as Text: Editor-Critic Responses to Thoreau’s Journal” published by Johns Hopkins University Press in the Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 46, Number 4, Winter 1990, pp. 27-72 (Article). Neufeldt’s article collapses the distinction between editor and literary critic and argues for a reading of Thoreau’s Journal that integrates the history of textual editing practices—ones that make certain assumptions about the accessibility, readability, and authenticity of the Journal—into conventional literary criticism. Although I will most likely not be including the article in my seminar paper, it represents a new methodology to complicate literary criticism and theory as I understand it, and I hope to be able to use it in the future.

I will begin on the level of the paragraph and then work my way up to increasingly abstract units of Neufeldt’s argument. The first couple of paragraphs I will examine are located in the introduction section of the article, and so frames the argument that follows. Neufeldt has conveniently broken down his article into 6 different section, demarked by roman numerals I-V. The first section is an unmarked introduction. The bracketed numbers below are my additions:

[1] To give practitioners in the fields of textual editing, literary criticism, and theory separate and autonomous domains may be tactically expedient in protecting preserves of scholarship with their distinctive conventions, taxonomies, discourse, disciplinary status, professional associations, economic welfare, and so on, but one should not attribute ontological significance to such a marking and fencing of borders. [2] Although the focus of my attention in the final section is on the kinds of thinking and procedural operations germane to the production of the Princeton University Press Edition of Thoreau’s Journal, I am implicitly arguing a general position, and thus, by extension, questioning the borders we have tended to recognize between textual editing, literary criticism, and literary theory and some of the practical consequences of such professional insularity.

[1] Current speculations about literary theory, theory of language, theory of discourse, and historiography have threatened a number of models that formerly offered a satisfactory starting point, modus operandi, and conceptual focus for producing and critically discussing texts. [2] Developments in these fields have alerted us to the pluralistic possibilities, heterogeneous elements, and dispersive energies in literary works; our culturally derived and arbitrary, if useful, taxonomies (including generic classifications); and the nature of the rules by which we as institutional scholars conduct our descriptive and analytic business. [3] Whatever the case has been to our sense of order, status, and security, post-structural developments (principally deconstruction, cultural criticism, and new historicism) have encouraged textual editors and critics to examine their assumptions and to pay new or different kinds of attention to texts as well as to the editorial production of texts, without many of the reassuring supports of the serviceable models of the last four decades or, more precisely put, without their epistemological functions and ontological status (Neufeldt 28).

As you can see, one of the many challenges of reading Neufeldt is his long, sprawling sentences. For this reason, I have included 2 paragraphs to plot out the Uneven U instead of just 1. Sentence [1] establishes the argument that he wants to depart from—the idea that textual editing, literary criticism, and literary theory are autonomous domains as a matter of expediency—and introduces one of his central claims: that we have no good or self-evident reason to keep these domains separate. This sentence meets Hayot’s criteria for level 4, sentences that are “less general; oriented toward a problem; pulls ideas together” (Hayot 60). We can see that the first sentences orients us toward the problem of autonomous critical domains, but is too specific to be classified a level 5 (e.g. it lists specific problems, taxonomies, discourses, etc.) Sentence [2], however, does fall under the level 5 category, which is characterized as “abstract, general; oriented toward a solution or a conclusion” (60). In [2] Neufeldt uses the claim that he makes in [1] as a “solution” to his broader project of not only reading the Princeton Edition of Thoreau’s Journal but also breaking down divisions between critical practices. Therefore, we may observe a level 4 to level 5 movement within the paragraph that may not best illustrate Hayot’s Uneven U schema but nevertheless conforms to its model.

Instead of replicating the same kind of close reading that I did above, I’ll pull back a bit and look at the relation between the two paragraphs. If the first paragraph introduces the problem of separating the domains of editing, theory, and criticism, and begins to question the justification of the separation, the second paragraph attempts to explain the reasons that lead Neufeldt to question in the first place. He points to theoretical developments in the field that have destabilized the models of literary criticism maintaining the autonomy between the domains. Then, he pivots to the possibilities that that destabilization has enabled. Between the 2 paragraphs, Neufeldt has moved toward a more concrete, evidentiary level, perhaps a 3. This would probably situate the first paragraph as a level 4. And sure enough the next paragraph begins to specify which models of literary criticism have become destabilized—“the autonomous aesthetics” of Baumgarten, the transcendental organcism of Coleridge, the textual metaphysics of New Criticism, etc (Neufeldt 28-29)—but that have been nonetheless influential to the production of the Princeton Edition of Thoreau’s Journal.

The downward sweep of the Uneven U cuts into the “I” section as Neufeldt begins to elucidate the textual problems that Thoreau’s Journal has presented to the above models of literary criticism—“loose manuscript pages; page fragments; cannibalized notebooks; intact notebooks; non-authorially tipped-in pages of authorial material that may or may not have been composed as Journal…” (29). Perhaps we may classify this as a level 2 or even 1 unit of argument. Neufeldt’s argument then tracks up when he poses a question related to the fragmentary nature of Thoreau’s Journal: “What kind of text have literary scholars, acting as editors, made of the Journal” (30)? This question functions as a means to pivot toward his level 5 claim that closes the Uneven U on this scale of the argument. He answers his questions at the end of the “I” section:

I suggest that the various editions of the Journal also present us with evidence of the editor-scholar’s need to live coherently, to impose definitions of nature, the nature of a literary work, and the nature of mimesis on the process of editing and, through that editorial process, on the specific work before her or him—a process that determines not only textual changes, alterations, and emendations but also decisions over the format of the edited text, and the provision of particular kinds of introductions, editorial tables, and index (32).

If we pull back once more the introduction and the first section of the article constitute a downward move toward the second section which specifies the history of the Journal’s principal editors and charts out each imposition and theoretical assumption that these editors have brought to the Journal. Neufeldt’s argument begins to track up in Section III when he singles out Horwarth, an editor who turned the conventional view of the Journal on its head and began to emphasize its singular organic “design.” In Section IV, Neufeldt introduces a critique of Horwarth in the form of another, more recent Journal editor, Cameron, who disputes the Journal’s organic unity and shifts the debate toward the “textuality” of the Journal. Cameron argues that the Journal “textualizes” the ”incompatible claims” (48) that Thoreau makes about his “habitual ways of engaging his world” (48). It is in the very confusion and interstices of those claims that Thoreau is most successful in representing his ways of engaging Nature and the world. By focusing on the textuality of the Journal, Cameron builds a bridge between literary criticism that theorizes on what constitutes text and editing practices of the Journal which makes decisions about what to include in editions of the Journal.

Although Neufeldt critiques Cameron’s assumptions about the textuality of the Journal in Section V (the final section) and ultimately finds her editorial practice and literary criticism of the Journal to be inadequate, he nonetheless uses Cameron as a means to reorient the argument back towards his project of collapsing distinctions between theory, criticism, and editing. This brings up back to Hayot's level 5. In his conclusion, he discusses possible ways forward from Cameron’s shortcomings and lists their advantages and obstacles. He provides no definitive answers but ultimately advocates that an editor edit the Journal “nervously” in such a way that respects the fact that a text will never be “definitive—that is, above culture and time” (66).

I don’t know if I have successfully modelled my “outline” of Neufeldt’s article after Hayot’s Uneven U, but let this stand as a good-faith attempt. I might have bit off more than I could chew (the article is nearly 50 pages long) for the blog post. In any case, I plan on using Hayot’s schema to outline the scholarly articles that I come across in the future. In practicing this exercise, I hope to internalize the Uneven U in order to quickly organize the argument that an article constructs.