Saturday, May 17, 2008
At the fifth annual conference of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, the old guard looks for the the Young Turks to take up their bookish battle cry.
Nov 17, 1999 | A decade ago, in an academic climate polarized by the culture wars, the idea of a politically neutral English professor seemed ludicrous. "English," once the erudite pursuit of literature's deeper meanings, had become a battleground where the natives -- mostly left-leaning theorists -- tried to defend their intellectual turf from fire-breathing traditional outsiders. Well-fed students at Stanford and other ivory towers angrily preached the dangers of the "canon" while conservatives conveniently forgot that the American canon hadn't existed before World War I.
But in 1993, a small band of senior literature professors declared themselves conscientious objectors. Their central mission was "to uphold broad conceptions of literature, rather than the narrow, highly politicized ones often encountered today." Their new organization, the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, was determined to remain apolitical; though funded in part by the conservative Bradley Foundation, its founders critiqued academic radicalism while refusing to sink to political rhetoric.
The ALSC's fifth annual conference in October at the New York Marriott Hotel was cautiously celebratory. They've navigated the maelstroms of the culture wars with their dignity intact, while earning curiosity -- and even respect -- from such entrenched political theorists as Michael Berubi and Edward Said. Now all they need is a sense of direction.
Today there are 2,350 members, with about a dozen new converts a month -- including retired professors, graduate students, old-school New Critics, postcolonial specialists, visionaries, pragmatists, conservatives, old farts and Young Turks. The ALSC just hired its first executive director and, six months ago, launched a new journal, "Literary Imagination," which incorporates the works of many nations and eras into a lively -- though safe -- blend of criticism and creative work. Professors in history and art history have recently followed their lead, launching analogous groups in their own departments.
The ALSC's growing popularity reflects a thaw in political relations -- one that goes right to the top. Postcolonial pioneer Edward Said is the current president of the Modern Language Association -- the 30,000 member literary "|bergroup" and the nation's primary clearinghouse of jobs in literature. With its sprawling annual conventions and leftist political bent, it has also been the target of many an ALSC polemic.
But Said, the firebrand who once derided the "rather empty standpoint of 'humanistic' scholarship" now places himself squarely in the humanist camp. "If you turn the classroom into a kind of substitute for political action," he told me, "then you're corrupting the whole system."
As the job market in literature tightens and multidisciplinary courses proliferate, more professors have been saying to cultural critics not, "You're wrong," but, "You've gone too far." One of the defining moments in this turnaround came in 1996, when erstwhile postmodernist and Duke University stalwart Frank Lentricchia confessed in the journal Lingua Franca that his fellow political theorists had become "mechanics."
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