The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism: Scholars Discuss Intellectual Origins and Turning Points

By H. Aram Veeser

The interviewees of this volume fall into three groups: the main players who brought about the rise of theory (Fish, Gallop, Spivak, Bhabha); a younger group of post-theorists (Bérubé, Dimock, Nealon, Warren); the anti-critique theorists (Felski); and new order theorists (Puchner, Wolfe). They discuss elemental questions, such as trying to grasp what was logic and what was rhetoric; trying to see down the road while fog and turmoil held visibility to arm’s length; and trying to pick legible meanings out of the cultural blanket of deafening noise. Theorists were not only good thinkers but also pioneers who were seeking profound transformations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785274398

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The Rebirth of American

Literary Theory and Criticism

The Rebirth of American

Literary Theory and Criticism

Scholars Discuss Intellectual Origins

and Turning Points

H. Aram Veeser

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © H. Aram Veeser 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

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owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946306

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-437-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-437-6 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an ebook.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The First Wave

1. Stanley Eugene Fish

2. Richard Allen Macksey

3. Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein-Graff

4. Vincent Barry Leitch

The Second Wave

5. Walter Benn Michaels

6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

7. Jane Gallop

8. Homi K. Bhabha

9. William John Thomas Mitchell

10. William Germano

11. Steven Mailloux

The Third Wave

12. Wai Chee Dimock

13. Rita Felski

14. Kenneth W. Warren

15. Cary Wolfe

16. Martin Puchner

17. Michael Bérubé

18. Jeffrey Nealon

Afterword by Heather Love

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to the friends and colleagues who read versions and challenged me to make this a better book: Carla Cappetti, Mikhal Dekel, Daniel Gustafson, Robert Higney, Monika Kaup, Andreas Killen, András Kiséry, John Mowitt, Václav Paris, Reena Parsons. I wish to thank Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, and Fredric Jameson for their interest in the project, and especially the anonymous referees who supplied Anthem with richly insightful reviews of the manuscript.

I am grateful once again to James Shapiro, who gave me the idea for this book and discussed it with me often. Cóilín Parsons and Tiffany Werth helped me to formulate the questions to ask the theorists. Christina Garidis read every stage of the project and provided unparalleled insight and encouragement, along with unique expertise in philosophy and psychoanalytic theory.

I wish to thank Anthem Press Theory series editor Jeffrey Di Leo for commissioning the project and conceiving it in its present published form. I wish to thank Anthem’s literature editor Megan Greiving for resolving every question and steering the book through all the stages leading to publication. I wish to thank Rob Tally and the American Book Review for publishing early versions of parts of the introduction. I wish to thank Keri Farnsworth Ruiz and symplokē for publishing earlier versions of the introduction. I wish to thank the directors of the ORCA fellowship program for support: Renata Miller, David Jeruzalmi, and Chris Li. ORCA funding enabled Jamie O’Reilly to fly 4,000 miles and interview Cary Wolfe. She was uniquely qualified to conduct the interview, and her outstanding contribution makes her a coauthor of this book. I wish to thank Jeffrey Williams for his incisive and detailed reactions to the evolving manuscript: his comments made it clear why he is the world’s authority on critical interviews. Above all, I wish to thank Cyrus Veeser for his acute editorial suggestions for the Introduction and for urging me to include the images.

INTRODUCTION

Image 1. Hostile to Theory

This book offers a series of interviews with important literary and cultural critics about the rise of Theory and its continuing uses now. Theory, arriving from Europe in the late 1960s, was met by overwhelming excitement, and then consumed and transformed by receptive American professors, who by the 1980s eagerly overthrew the Anglo-American approaches to literature that had long dominated the US academy. That overthrow replaced concepts like close readings, aesthetics, unity, beauty, and irony with subversive notions of deconstruction, essentialism, decentering, master discourse, binary opposition, antifoundationalism, undecidability, power, and subtext. Theory’s conquest of American higher education changed everything, from elite graduate programs in English literature to the readings and methods in thousands of composition classes forced upon first-year students in colleges around the country.

For the practitioners in this volume, first encounters with theory were both disorienting and liberating. Stanley Fish, stumbling upon Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida fortuitously by renting an apartment in Paris, experienced it as a heady combination of intellectual excitement and adventure which could not help but have an erotic component to it. Vincent Leitch early on felt the impact of theory first as a crisis entailing a loss of faith and then as a conversion. Jane Gallop completely fell in love with theory’s edginess […] lack of piety […] difficulty. The magic words of Jacque Derrida’s Structure, Sign, and Play convinced W. J. T. Mitchell that the rules of this game were being rewritten. […] It was really a moment of joy […] but also anxiety. As a second-year grad student, Jeffrey Nealon took a seminar with Derrida: It was just, boom, boom, boom; this is how it works. It was incredible. The first time Steven Mailloux heard Gayatri Spivak talk about deconstruction, he felt the excitement in the room, the feeling that you were participating in some kind of revolution in thought.

While interviews with critics and theorists have become an established genre, published interviews are almost always one-offs, whereas all of the scholars interviewed here knew that they were participants in a group endeavor. They answer the same questions about theory’s rise and its most interesting events, its relevance now, and their personal encounters with theory. The interviews elicited a tapestry of answers to key questions: Is theory still relevant? What is all this about the end of critique? Have theorists really developed a new modesty? More urgently, can theory advance quests for equality, can academia be reformed, can critics live up to their political convictions? The interview format makes these ideas accessible and invites comparison.

The collection demonstrates that theory is far from the monolith some imagine. The scholars are drawn from three generations: the silent, the boomer, and the X generation. (Perhaps millennials will be interviewed for Volume II.) The early adopters of theory (Fish, Macksey, Graff, Leitch) come first, followed by a second wave of post-theorists and new historicists (Michaels, Spivak, Gallop, Bhabha, Mitchell, Germano, Mailloux), and then come the final seven of the volume, who are laying the groundwork for new developments (Dimock, Felski, Warren, Wolfe, Puchner, Bérubé, Nealon). While the early advocates of theory are, on the surface, less diverse than the generations that followed them, they express an amazing range of positions and have lived very divergent lives.

The first question is, what is theory? According to one of those interviewed here, theory begins with the confrontations among the ancient sophists, Plato, and Aristotle (Leitch, 60). To another, theory begins at home: "My mother gave me my first lesson in semiotics: the significance of the arbitrary signifier, the sound of the letter or the sign will not easily surrender its autonomy to the sequential ‘good sense’ of the sentence (Bhabha, 98). To yet another, theory is a set of debates (Michaels, 72). But also, Theory allows you to see what’s already there (Germano, x). Theory proliferates just as root systems are connected by mycorrhizal fungi (Wolfe, 189), and It will either spread virally or rhizomatically. Yes, the invasive plant theory of literary analysis (Germano, 126). But theory hasn’t just grow’d, like Topsy. It is willed and conceived, has to produce novelty (Wolfe, 190) and is disturbing: it would create discomforts of certain kinds and often startled the horses" (Germano, 127).

Over the span of the collection, some general trends emerge. Theory goes from power and celebrity to modesty and collectivity—it evolves from a roaring meat grinder into a hamburger helper. It came to prominence as a machine for interpreting literary texts. At that time, literary study was itself unified and well defined: (1) the project was interpretation, and (2) the objects were […] of fairly high-culture value (Nealon, 231). I can confirm that view: in 1972 the theory of Marxist George Lukács equipped me to grind out papers and exams for all five of my undergraduate courses—and, even for the first time, to make the dean’s list. Others deployed theory the same way: I adopted […] the Fish–Iser model […] along with Jonathan Culler’s structuralist poetics, and that framework eventually became the center of my dissertation (Mailloux, 135).

By around 1989 it dawned on critics that theory machines were now just recycling the same old clichés from 20 years ago (Nealon, 225). You read a theoretical work that speaks powerfully to you. You use the vocabulary and you apply it, and you stop thinking yourself (Puchner, 203). As theory’s interpretations became tiresome, so also did theory’s former celebrity culture. My generation of theorists, if you act like a stuck-up, self-important person, it’s actually just a sign of how uncool you are. That’s a big generational change from Stanley [Fish]’s generation (Wolfe, 192). Predictability was the kiss of death. Once you decide that binary oppositions canceling themselves out can be found in any of the texts […] it just becomes a matter of demonstrating that endlessly (Nealon, 223).

In response, theory transformed itself by rejecting the meat-grinder model. A project called critique took center stage. "You can always demystify everything; you can always say Moby-Dick is exactly the opposite of what it appears to be. You know, New Historicists get a lot of mileage out of doing this (Dimock, 34). And even now, the majority of people in literary studies are concerned with disrupting and being transgressive and undermining" (Felski, 60). But critique is weakening. It started to come apart around the time of Bruno Latour’s article Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? (2003). Jeffrey Williams announced with some prescience (in the Chronicle of Higher Education) that a new modesty had come over theory. Today, after more than 2,500 years, theory is by several measures insanely and strangely popular—a global brand. But theory "is positioned presently as an essential secondary specialty. […] [with hiring] […] reverted back to the modern standard matrix of period-nation-genre" (Leitch, 63). Theory has settled down in its sidekick, secondary role.

One sees a new modesty in these interviews. Great figures like Derrida started to view their successors (like Cary Wolfe) as instruments in networks of distribution: Cary can disseminate the significance of my [Derrida’s] work in systems theory, Luhmannian sociology, theoretical biology, animal behavior, etc. (Wolfe, 191). Wolfe himself sees no shame in curating theory’s achievements. Curatorial work can be creative, the reinvention of the past, trying to excavate and make visible the genealogy of the work done by early theory, work that needs to be brought back into the contemporary conversation (Wolfe, 192–93). But curation also holds a whiff of cremation. Indeed, the present collection of interviews can be read as an inquest for deceased theory (Love, 239).

Yet there’s always a way to recycle it, says PMLA editor Wai Chee Dimock. Catastrophe does happen, but something comes after it (Dimock, 152). Many recommend this ecology of recycling theory. So I think the next big thing is, What do we do with all of this consolidated material that has accumulated over the last 40 years, if we sift through it? (Bérubé, 217). Artist Frank Stella is an ecological role model: the cheapest industrial material[s are] made into major artworks (Dimock, 152). Another modest possibility is theory-as-barometer, a leading indicator of changes (Nealon, 229). Theory can measure why an Oedipal Hamlet (Freudian) gives way to a political Hamlet (New Historicist), a binary Hamlet (deconstructive), and, today, a gender-rich Hamlet. More modestly still, theory can be a home remedy for undergraduate historical amnesia (Nealon, 229), or even a lowly carpet knife that gets you out of the boxes that disciplinarity and specialization in a field trap you into (Wolfe, 188). The ultimate humility is theory as dentifrice. It’s like fluoride; […] We have fewer cavities because of it (Germano, 128). These are modest goals, but salubrious ones, and welcome shifts away from the critical culture of celebrity.

Gender politics may encourage the new modesty. Early adopters of theory were determined to show that we weren’t soft, that we were experts (Dimock, 156). This gendered language seems creepy today. The rebellious airs of early theory now sound overblown and naïve. Suddenly the entire language of liberation looks something that is very compatible with the terms of entrepreneurial innovation (Warren, 178). No longer a meat grinder on steroids, theory is now rather like jig-saw puzzle pieces whose component-parts ‘join together’ (Bhabha, 105). Weak Theory (yes, a new rubric) should be more of an unfurnished loft than a piece of machinery; You can’t engineer complexity. You have to create a space in which complexity can happen (Wolfe, 189). Theory is localized or weak when it moves to a new place: Hybridity explains decoloniality better for Kolkata than for Lagos (Dimock). Theory keeps trying but often failing to catch the developing postcolonial canon. A House for Mr. Biswas kept freeing itself from the various conceptual models I tried to impose on it (Bhabha, 100). The fiction itself tends to think the new thoughts.

Can theory take at least some political credit for the increase of women in the Norton Anthology of Global Literature? Sadly, it cannot, in the Norton editor’s opinion. The changes certainly had to do with different waves of feminism. But was it feminist theory specifically? That may not be the case. The better question would be, what is the role of theory in feminism, in multiculturalism?" (Puchner, 202–3). The current resistance to critique began with the refusal to see people outside of the academy as shrouded in some kind of unknowing discourse or ideology that eyes of theorists must somehow diagnose (Felski, 162). Gayatri Spivak has complained for decades against middle-class radicals who blithely talk down to benighted subalterns. At long last, theory has stopped man-splaining.

The old graph of theory assigned formalism the vertical axis and historicism the horizontal. Today, that is like calling the world flat. Where on that old map could you conceivably plot queer pet memoirs, farm animal fictions, and a range of posthumanist topics: planetary change, panpsychism, biopolitics, biopoetics, deep time, sacrifice zones, and post-Anthropocene and post-Plantationacene stories? We now have affect theory, object-oriented ontology, new materialism, speculative realism, Anthropocene studies, transgender theory, literature of disability, weak theory, posthumanist feminism, Afrofuturism, and much more. Vincent Leitch’s Theory Map (included below) replaces the old X and Y axes with 12 nodes and 94 satellites. Everything is up for debate. What Was African American Literature? (the title of Kenneth Warren’s book) questions the very existence of its own contents.

Theory is just beginning. In 1990 animal studies hadn’t even been invented yet! (Wolfe, 186). Lacanian psychoanalytics have brought theory to psychotherapy. Membership in the Millerite École de la Cause Freudienne and the Centre de Formation et de Recherches Psychoanalytiques has tripled, and the former École Freudienne de Paris (EFP) is spawning another 14 associations. All the literary theory journals that mushroomed between 1971 and 1978 flourish today.

Why? The reason is plain. Because theory still delivers a chain of revolutionary shocks, coups, and emergence stories that, we think, tell us something about radicalism and daring.

One thing theory does is it makes you a badass.

I’ve just seen it in my own students—it’s incredibly empowering. It also gets you out of the boxes that disciplinarity and specialization in a field trap you into. And that’s empowering. (Wolfe, 188)

How can it be that theory still delivers a jolt? In retrospect, it sounds ridiculous because in the ’90s, deconstruction had been around for at least two decades and was quite established. But there was still something rebellious about it (Puchner, 200–201). According to the editor of a prominent theory quarterly, theory’s rightful home is a perpetual state of crisis (Mitchell, 114). Why are people so set on having crises? Theory. What happened to Great Books after 1966. Theory! Why do I keep asking myself if theory is over now? Theory!

Many theorists came from other fields: French, the sciences, philosophy, physics. I was a mathematician for the first three years (Mitchell, 116). Did they switch because, as one theorist told a lawyer friend (Bérubé, 209), we read more fun things, you run the world? If so they have a strange notion of what’s fun. Adopting theory meant changing from dilettante to committed, productive scholar, from cheerful person to sober critic, according Vincent Leitch, editor of the monumental Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (56). The world’s leading Milton scholar had never encountered theory, but then he moved into theory for the challenge of mastering materials that were difficult and not familiar to many of his peers. The theorist who wrote Professing Literature had no wish to profess literature. He chose instead to write about the ways in which literature had been taught. He rarely offered to analyze literary texts themselves. I’m not really a lover of page-turners in literature, said another professor, Jeffrey Nealon (225–26). Rather, he said, "my cathexes were theoretical. Like, What’s going on here? What’s happening in The Waste Land (1922)? How does this work? How does this fit together? Jane Gallop felt much the same way. I have never been a big close reader of literary texts. Theory liberated me," Gallop (90) said.

Theory pursues serious goals. Some goals involve the reformation of language and perception. Others involve the reformation of politics. Five of the gains for language immediately stand out. First, theory makes us better readers. It brings out the true ambiguity of words. It demonstrates the deep tension between logic and rhetoric. For example, the phrase, What’s the difference? Is it a question or a statement?

Second, theory has reminded us about unseen truths. Once you see Don Quixote as a disability novel, or Nella Larsen’s Passing as a book about closeted identity, you cannot unsee those facts. Queer theory specializes in the un- or dimly seen. Since Homer, literary insight has stemmed in part from blindness. It’s like the Stendhal novel. He’s at the Battle of Waterloo but he only sees what’s going on right around him (Gallop, 89). In his introduction to Michel Serres’s The Parasite (xiii), Cary Wolfe explains: blindness inescapably accompanies vision.

Third, Theory has transformed the teaching of writing. Texts claim to tell one story but in the process generate another story they can’t quite contain. Thus, theory tells us, nothing is simply itself. If you write, John had one egg, you had better add the metacommentary, I mean that John’s refrigerator contained one egg, not that John ate an egg. Students should put both levels in their papers, the statement and the metastatement: thank you, theory!

Who would have imagined this? Theory has unquestionably changed our teaching of writing for the better.

Fourth, theory has taken sexuality out of the closet, indeed has shown that the closet idea is not an exclusively queer dilemma. Passing and the glass closet of African-American gays operating on the down-low mark just one of the intersections of race and gender theory. The closet, originally a term for the concealment of one’s sexual identity, goes far beyond queer theory: hiding, giving out half-truths, lying by omission, attacking others just like you, disavowels of all kinds, sweep across the face of cultural production.

Fifth, theory promotes reparations and recyclings. Second chances in life are like revisions in writing. Life and writing both come down to fixing things and asking for help. We cannot build anything on our own, affirms Wai Chee Dimock (154). Our intense practice of peer review and rewriting proves that There really is something special about us, something we’re doing right (Dimock, 149). Theoretical models, wrote Eve Sedgwick, have helped me make sense of the world so far (Sedgwick, Tendencies, 13). They helped her, most of all, to cope as she died from cancer.

Theory’s work on language incited the backlash of bad prose contests. Theory’s political work inspired books like Tenured Radicals and right-wing hit lists of professors who needed to be fired. Theory’s inflammatory rhetoric sparked secondary debates on the nature and limits of polemic, the language of violence, and the whole question of civility (Mitchell, 114–15). Professors were incensed by the those who can’t do, teach cliché. Many wanted to feel that engaging with smart and compelling literary work and writing about that work was not merely just doing something we liked, but also it was engaging with the structures of inequality and injustice—making a meaningful, positive intervention (Warren, 173). The majority of theorists held that no discursive act could escape its potential implication within […] the persistence of forms of domination (Warren, 174). Special issues of theory journals equated literary analysis and political work. Critical Inquiry put out special issues like Elizabeth Abel’s Writing and Sexual Difference, Henry Louis Gates’s Race, Writing, and Difference, and The Politics of Interpretation. The journal’s editor, W.J.T. Mitchell, was determined to combine ‘the interpretation of politics, and the politics of interpretation’: a dialectical reversal of field (Mitchell, 119). Edward Said was a regular presence in Critical Inquiry. Said pronounced in 1978 that good criticism was impossible unless the critic joined a liberation movement.

But in what sense was and is theory liberatory? Serious class-struggle leftism came to an abrupt halt once we helped make identity central to the question of theory … a total disaster (Michaels, 69). The focus on race and gender identity marginalized discussions of class: The simplest way to put it is just the complete replacement of the problem of exploitation by the problem of discrimination (Michaels, 69). The focus on race and gender identity marginalized discussions of class: the problem of discrimination replaced the problem of exploitation (Michaels, 69). American theorists liked this non-Marxist insistence upon seeing literature as participatory in the social without simply seeing it as the demonstration of a particular class arrangement (Germano, 127). This shift away from class politics was fundamental to theory, and it helps to explain how adjunctification happened.

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was the first great work of cultural studies back when cultural studies still had a political edge. So what went wrong with cultural studies, why did it get so diffuse and shapeless and depoliticized? (Bérubé, 213), theorists ask, now that what passes for cultural studies is close readings of Cheers. Stuart Hall begged never to have to read another appreciation of The Sopranos. Tell us about pirates, or about shipping, or the Black Atlantic (Nealon, quoted in Bérubé, 214). Cultural studies subverted little except for the preeminence of literature: culture is conveyed by words and images, sights and sounds, the entire fabric of media (Mitchell, 149).

If politicized cultural studies and ideology critique are gone, can theory any longer claim that it has real social impact? Stanley Fish bluntly replies, No, theory is just a job (Fish, 19). But with precarity and distance learning, is literature professor even a job any more? I asked all these theorists if they felt responsible for transforming academia into a gig economy. The interviews produce a range of answers. I think it would be sentimental to think we caused it. But we were for sure symptoms of what did cause it, said one candid interviewee, and we haven’t done enough to address it […] we could make a difference. At UIC minimum adjunct salaries for a 3/3 load have doubled to $55,000 since we organized our union (Michaels, 76). Getting tenure lines for adjuncts or raising adjunct salaries have been resounding failures. Theory’s relationship to politics has been and is still unsatisfactory.

Literature for its part has kept a wary eye on theory. In literary representations of professors, one sees the same progression described in this volume. Philosophy professor Teddy, a character in Harold Pinter’s play, The Homecoming (1957), prefigures the High Theory intellectual. He teaches in Arizona but decides to visit his cockney brothers and father. Asked about his own writing, Teddy sarcastically tells his brother, Lenny: you couldn’t begin to understand my critical works. That smugness has mostly vanished by the time we get to another fictional Theorist nearer to our own time, Leonard Bankhead in Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, The Marriage Plot (2011). I’m finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so problematized, he confesses. Declining self assurance could not be more vivid. The shift from condescension to shyness models the 50-year career of literary and cultural theory.

Many critics now feel that their prodigious machinery had become too efficient, too well-oiled, too powerful. One of them, Professor Nealon, summed it up: interpretation sort of died by triumphing in a weird way. The theorists in this volume almost all disavow any quest for a Next Big Thing. They favor what Professor Dimock calls weak theory, and that others call theory as a hub, theory as curatorial sifting, theory as a sidekick that is riding shotgun alongside the driving centrality of culture, even theory as parasitically clinging to a meaty host such as a national literary tradition or a historical period. J. Hillis Miller predicted this retreat from egregious power when, long ago, he wrote The Critic as Host. Harold Bloom’s well-known Anxiety of Influence also showed that parasitic relations were the really generative and exciting bases of all literary achievement. Weak Theory has very cleverly stepped away from its more oppressive forms of mastery. Its secondary, helping role is anything but commanding. But the new modesty signals no contraction of effort or loss of ambition. Indeed it promises to unify critics’ intellectual and political lives. The ensuing interviews suggest the promise and scope of literary theory today.

Image 2. Somebody should just back up

The First Wave

Chapter 1

STANLEY EUGENE FISH

Born: 1938.

Education: University of Pennsylvania, BA, 1959; Yale University, MA, PhD 1962.

Fish was an early adopter of advanced literary theory. Before his earliest exposure to theory, in Paris in 1967, he had already established his position as a scholar (Renaissance literature and especially John Milton studies). He began teaching theory, and writing theoretically, by 1970; he was a founder of the School of Criticism and Theory. His interventions included reader response theory, new pragmatism and critical legal studies. Also influential were his combative defenses of theory and his attacks on interdisciplinarity, multiculturalism, and critique, otherwise known as suspicious reading. He was professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1962–74); Johns Hopkins University (1974–85); Duke University (professor of English and professor of law (1986–98)); Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; and Florida International University. He is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Publications

John Skelton’s Poetry (1965), Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967), Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972), The Living Temple: George Herbert and