ABSTRACT
Foucault and literature. It seems an obvious enough conjecture-after all nowhere in Foucault’s writings do literary texts and examples completely fall out of sight, and for a short period they form its core. In broad terms, one can classify his remarks and essays on literature under four headings: first, the literary theory that underpins Madness and Civilization, the book on Roussel and the essays on transgression; second, the literary history that lies embedded in those transgressive essays; third, his description of the uses to which literary realism was put in the production of the docile society, and, last, a not very fully developed description of literary criticism both as a particular manipulation of the author effect and as a mode of modern power. Yet Foucault rarely deals with literature itself as a category or an institution. For good reasons: in both his archaeological and genealogical work he is sceptical about the continuity, specificity and abstraction implied by a topos like the “institution of literature.” In this chapter, I want to comment on two post-Foucauldian books, both of which share-and elaborate on-Foucault’s scepticism: they are Ian Hunter’s Culture and Government (1988) and Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (1987). Most of all, I want to usé Hunter’s and Greenblatt’s work to begin to show what a genealogy of literature might look like. But I also use it to explore the possibilities, and limits, of a mode of analysis that does not presuppose concepts like “representation” and “mimesis.” For, as Foucault’s career helps demonstrate, if it is becoming harder to accept the value and autonomy of literature today, this is largely a result of its central strut-representation-being so strongly contested not just analytically but politically. This is not to say, however, that representation can be avoided as an analytic category.
