The Limits of Literary Criticism and a Textile Poetics of Entanglement

Always eager to explore…

Aren’t we so tired of hearing this word in academic writing?

Shall I say ‘observe’? Or ‘investigate’?

Even worse…

I’ll begin again.

I have always been eager to trace the geographies of where the ‘literary’ could be found, with a particular attention to those places where it was not supposed to be found.

Wordily, but let me move on for now.

Now that I look back at how my research has led me to my next book, A Textile Poetics of Entanglement, I ask myself why I should be comfortable with saying the above. Is that not the same as saying that I, as a literary critic, am going to see ‘literary’ everywhere I deem worth looking?

In trying to answer this moral dilemma, I will talk about my study on textile poetics, which looks at intermedial works that involve both the language of poetry and that of textile, from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present day.

 

Up to this point, everything seems rather good. But…

I then move on to say that this study develops what I term a Textile Poetics of Entanglement which, in a nutshell, helps us renew our understanding of what lyric poetry can be considered to be today. In the process of doing so, I also claim that the works I look at are ‘textile poems’, which exhibit that kind of entanglement that supersedes any kind of hierarchical binary between the media involved.

Here, the trouble begins.

In wanting to protect a non-hierarchical division between poetry and textile, I find myself unable to find a language that can be aligned with this intention: saying ‘textile poems’ inevitably highlight the primary position of poems to which ‘textile’ is an adjective. If I were to say, ‘poetic textile’, attention would be on that work as a ‘textile’ before being a ‘poem’. What to do?

My temporary solution is rather humble: to write this blog post. In here, with the language allowed and welcomed in this genre, I feel comfortable to both defend and denounce my work on ‘textile poems’, while also highlighting the broader challenges of engaging with intermedial works and interdisciplinary research.

Similar to other situations, we are asked to position ourselves and position our work accordingly. In the monograph this research will be published: I will write as a literary critic. In fact, the book is to be published in a series dedicated to Lyric Theory: where ‘textile’ cannot help but be an adjective to the noun ‘lyric’. My looking at those intermedial objects at the centre of my study cannot be ‘neutral’ in any way, but charged with the implicit absent-present agendas of any literary critic: literature. This is particularly problematic in the context of textile arts, craft, and theories, which are characterised by bringing together people scattered throughout a wide range of disciplines and professions as part of a shared, for the most part, intention of not ‘disciplining’ scholarship on textiles. This scattered nature of scholarship around textiles makes it more easily approachable, or appropriable, by scholars in other disciplines such as literary studies, who, regardless of their most noble intention, will hardly, or at least this is my case, be able to put forward an interdisciplinary approach and terminology that showcases the ‘intra-action’ of the entanglement of media and disciplines involved in their study.

Scholarship on intermediality benefits from a sophisticated theoretical apparatus by now, while interdisciplinarity has become self-evident except by those institutions that seem to have just discovered the term. If as a doctoral student I was told to my surprise that looking at intermedial works involving visual arts and texts did not require any different toolkit, approach, terminology than those already in use in literary studies, I know that today this would not be repeated. And yet, I still find myself uneasy defending my work and presenting it as not as the result of my literary imprinting that I cannot that easily remove while walking around, be this while reading an advert on the tube to work or walking through an exhibition.

What service am I doing to these works then?

I am reading them.

Reading, observing, critically of course, is never a neutral act of criticism. This is the lesson I could learn while looking at these works, in the company of other scholars, artists, designers, artisans, and activists outside literary studies but within and across textiles.

What service am I doing to literary criticism then?

I am raising questions on how we can do it directly and with more respect towards our cross-disciplinary interlocutors who have probably looked at the works that we now look at for a very long time.  It is almost never true that we are filling a gap or looking at something that was never looked at before. And this is why Interdisciplinary Italy is a precious resource: it exists to foster that kind of collaboration, conversations, where every discipline within Italian Studies can enrich one another.