The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism

H. Aram Veeser

Description

 This book is the first collection of unified interviews with the great figures of the golden age of American celebrity literary and cultural critics. While many of these celebrity critics have been interviewed elsewhere, this collection is different. The 18 critics interviewed here are all asked the same questions, whereas usually interviews are one-offs, each one unique and incomparable. By contrast this collection shows that theorists, when commenting on the same issues, actually range widely and express a remarkable diversity of opinions.

The book also presents a vivid portrayal of the ways in which literary theory affected the lives of these individuals. All 18 people interviewed lived what might be called, without exaggeration, a life of theory. Their work and lives were jostled by seismic dislocations. New criticism was overwhelmed by postmodernism, deconstruction reigned and then succumbed to new historicism and the politics and criticism of identity. Race and gender burgeoned as fundamental topics. Critics and scholars experiences these ruptures differently and reacted in different ways. This book of interviews offers 18 exemplary instances. Instead of the unity they are often assumed to have, these figures reveal how incredibly diverse they actually were.

Finally, the collection offers a coherent summation of this richly turbulent and intellectually powerful era. The introduction to the volume and the brilliant afterword by Professor Heather Love offer cogent assessment of this remarkably varied era of American intellectual life. They make sense of a disruptive and puzzling past. The book includes 23 illustrations highlighting some of the key points and themes.

Intro: H. Aram Veeser; Chapter 1: Walter Benn Michaels; Chapter 2: Richard Macksey; Chapter 3: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Chapter 4: Stanley Fish; Chapter 5: Homi Bhabha; Chapter 6: Jane Gallop; Chapter 7: W.J.T. Mitchell; Chapter 8: Rita Felski; Chapter 9: Steven Mailloux; Chapter 10: William P. Germano; Chapter 11: Vincent Leitch; Chapter 12: Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein; Chapter 13: Jeffrey Nealon; Chapter 14: Martin Puchner; Chapter 15: Michael Bérubé; Chapter 16: Ken Warren; Chapter 17: Cary Wolfe; Chapter 18: Michael Warner; Chapter 19: Wai Chee Dimock; Afterword: Judith Butler; Index.

Sujets

• Modern history
• General officer
• Literary criticism
• Literary theory
• General
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 27 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785274398
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

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
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
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
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
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