Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
"Tell me your theory," he wrote, "and I'll tell you in advance what you'll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven't read." Disgusted with the scene, he refused to teach graduate students for a few semesters. He now supports the ALSC, adding that "for the association to truly make its mark, which you understand I hope they do, they would need to gather in many more scholars and critics."
Two years ago, Michael Berubi was still in fighting mode. An ardent defender of cultural theory, he wrote a scathingly sarcastic response in the Chronicle of Higher Education to Frank Kermode's review of "Literature Lost," an attack on cultural studies written by ALSC co-founder John Ellis. In his piece, Berubi threw up his arms that yet another prominent critic was turning against his profession. He felt the same way about the ALSC -- at first.
"My initial reaction when they formed," Berubi says, "was that this was the revenge of the emeriti. These folks were all near retirement, and the way they phrased it was that the profession had been entirely politicized and no one talked about literature as literature anymore.
"Now I think that charge has a grain of truth to it," he says. "I was initially quite sanguine about what cultural studies would mean, and then it largely became an enterprise in which people could argue that bowling was actually much more counterhegemonic than people had imagined -- you know, finding subversion in every kind of mundane cultural form."
ALSC member Marjorie Perloff, a Stanford professor who teaches political avant-garde poetry and uses theory liberally, nevertheless believes "the kinds of things that go on today are completely untheoretical, just completely uninteresting. I was just reading that they're thinking of hiring someone here on 'wound culture.' And they say, 'Ours is a wound culture where people like to watch the spectacle of others' misery.' That's new? That was new in the 18th century? Would you call that theory?"
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Theory or not, it's just the latest turn in a cyclical progression no different from the ebb and flow of movements in art or politics. Ever since Oxford professor Edward Freeman insisted in 1887 that an autonomous literature department would degenerate into "mere chatter about Shelley," critical factions have wrangled over what makes literature worthy of a dissertation. Is it the examination of linguistic tropes, the study of cultural and historical influences or the application of the critic's own theories? Early on came the old historicists and symbolists, who were attacked in the '20s by the formalists and their pseudo-scientific methodology. The Marxists again prioritized history, and still later the New Critics reintroduced close text-based reading -- to be followed by the structuralists, the post-structuralists, the deconstructionists, the Marxists again, the new historicists and now the predominant strain of theorists who focus on political issues like race, class, gender and sexual orientation.
ALSC members know all this, and their theoretical baggage varies from critic to critic. Some members hope to swing the pendulum back to New Criticism. Many others want to avoid the pendulum entirely by using theory only where appropriate -- an approach that, at the conference, resulted in a delicate, sometimes comic balancing act. A paper given by an older Oxford don, Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, on Goethe's love of the Greeks was followed by the younger Michael Valdez Moses' (rather political) critique of magical realism as the nostalgic yearning of a globalized, rationalist bourgeoisie for extinguished local myths. The next day another graying authority gave a painfully close reading of the full Spanish title of "Don Quixote."
Members at the conference occasionally grew restless with paper topics on the same old thing. When Tom Bertonneau, the new executive director, lectured on the inherent superiority of the written to the spoken word, critics lined up at the mike to challenge his rigid value judgments. "I prefer sharp distinctions and rigorous schemes and you prefer mitigation," was all he could say to one questioner. But maybe they just preferred debate to dogma.
The most visible gap at the ALSC is based on differing intellectual legacies. The ALSC's more innovative critics -- people like Perloff -- joined because they were tired of platitudes propagated by the postmodern true believers. But they're equally reluctant to swallow older orthodoxies. Perloff wrote one of the journal's most convincing essays -- a tightly reasoned refutation of Homi Bhabha's charge that Goethe had an overly simplistic view of nationhood. But she didn't come to the conference, because she didn't think it had anything to offer her.
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