Modern School Research Seminar: Lydia Davis and the Grammar of Resistance

Chair: James Williams
 

The (very) short story writer Lydia Davis has always been difficult to categorise. On awarding Davis the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 Christopher Ricks tried a few labels on for size: ‘miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables, texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations’. Davis's place in post-1945 American literary canon is even more ambiguous, claimed variously as a minimalist short story writer and a LANGUAGE poet. Davis's self-mythologizing only accentuates her idiosyncrasy: as she asserts in an interview with Larry McCaffrey in 1996, 'I simply did not read my contemporaries'. This paper will reassess Davis's relationship with the dominant literary movements and institutions of post-45 American literature by exploring her distinctive interest in grammar. Paying close attention to Davis's grammar reveals both her ambivalent resistance to the masculinist postmodernism of her close contemporaries - namely Paul Auster's 'City of Glass' - and to feminist literary experimentalism. Through Davis's example, the paper also reconsiders the marginalised role of grammar in the canon of literary theory, asking what might it mean to recentre grammar as a principle for literary analysis.